Hold on to something, because we're talking about THE CRAFT today. Oh BABY yes. Oh no.
When you're writing serialized fiction, in any medium, you have a lot of problems to solve, but the very first one is: who or what is this thing about, that will support an extended telling of the story, which will involve figuring out new exciting things about the world and cast constantly, while remaining manageable throughout? You need a cast, and a premise that can potentially expand-- in capitalist media you want it to expand so you sell a ton of seasons and make money and stay employed. If you're me, you just do it for the love of the game obviously.
About all of my publically available work it has been said frequently that there are too many characters. I frequently judge my readers harshly on this blog-- I don't do this because I hate all of you or something, I'm just a paranoid fatalist. So forgive me for judging you harshly again but you are absolutely thinking the story has too many characters. And you are right. It is frequently an incredible headache for me. So why do it then? Why not just make a story about a like tight five characters with enough room to grow them and have a few twists and keep it compact? Hell maybe this serialized shit is for the birds-- why not just make a novella about a two chicks running a flower shop and they fuck once and don't like it and become straight? Why not pitch it to a third string streaming platform? Start an LLC and secure fraudulent business loans and lines of credit and realize 20-30k is not a meaningful amount of fraud money to have earned?
There are a lot of different answers to this-- well, to the elemental question of "how big should my cast be" and not to the other ones.
I'm sure the showrunners on Star Trek had their reasons for their chosen casts for example. Same with House M.D. or whatever. It's an elemental question. My reason is that I write stories about the military, and when the military is exactly 5 guys who do everything, it's not only a bit ridiculous, I'd argue that it loses what makes the military a unique, and my perspective, an interesting setting-- sometimes in ways that I find just kinda ethically bitter to swallow as well. Because even in "capitalist" "individualistic" nations, the military is not an individualistic institution. It is a hierarchy where tens of thousands of people manage millions others, each highly specialized to carry out specific tasks. If you have 5 guys in a story, when you have an artillery gun in the shot, then one of your guys is "the artillery guy"-- but this isn't anything. Realistically none of your guys are the artillery guy. They have the artillery guy on the horn and he fires the artillery from off-screen-- if you're a real sicko like me, the artillery guys are all their own characters and they show up when artillery things happen and they aren't your five guys with submachine guns who are doing frontline heroics. This was the case in The Solstice War-- there was a crew of a 76.2mm gun who were all characters with several "speaking parts" and some "character development" (one became a nonbiney femboy for example-- that's something you won't see in the third season of your netflix show because it won't have one.) But also, you may be thinking-- none of this is real, who cares about realism anyway? Why be realistic *here*? Well-- we all pick where we *want to be* realistic but that's a whole other post. I choose this particular framing about this set of decisions because I feel like this kind of storytelling choice coincides really neatly with the societies we live in.
It is the narrative of the USA that any one of us, if we are empowered by love of country, being normative, having a dad who sells used cars, and not being too demanding-- once the extenuating circumstances fall into place, through our own effort we alone can possibly change our own conditions or even history itself. All it takes is you and your individual choices for which you alone are responsible. Only one of us-- one voice speaking above the din of a crowd, one vote to decide the election, one tide-turning superstar player who wins the big game, one guy who confronts the active shooter through his own individual, personal gun ownership, one guy who decides he's had enough and innovates a new app-based portable jerkoff device that is powered by advanced AI and the etherium blockchain to deliver and publically ledger the greatest suck and fuck you've ever experienced-- these narratives permeate the culture of the USA. Promoting individualism is convenient for the ruling class-- but goddamn is it also cheap to make individualistic narratives. One guy! That's all you need and you've got a movie, a book, show, etc. Stories about one guy, maybe two, are staple stuff, because they are tight and efficient and can punch above their weight class. We've all been known to enjoy things like this-- video games especially promote a lot of "solitary" moods, and we praise frequently the kind of stories that evoke the spectre of a human presence in the environment without any humans beings there at all.
When I was writing the Solstice War, I was invested in "what a socialist genre story is." I wanted to answer this question through not just the themes of the story but its structure, as best as I could. I am no longer really invested in this idea-- if I solved this and built 0.000000001% of communism through the effort I wouldn't even know I had done so, much less had any effect on any of you. However, it has become "what I do" and even more important, "the thing I like to do." I like having tons of characters-- it's convenient in its own way, even as it is also incredibly inconvenient. One of my long-standing ideas here is that I don't want to truncate too many people into the corpus of a "small main cast" that can do everything. I want to put some of the interdependence and community of the military in my stories, but not only that-- the interdependence and community between military and nonmilitary, between different peoples, between ardent believers in communism and the displaced "helpless" mass, etc. I want the cast to reflect that the world is huge and that people need each other, gravitate to each other, have even fleeting effects upon one another even when they aren't together. There are still decisions I make in every chapter about who gets the spotlight, who is the perspective on an event-- I'm not getting too experimental here with making a story where you're in *everyone's* head at once or anything like that. I enjoy playing with the restriction of having one POV character with limited information on a scene, someone who has to guess what other people might be thinking and feeling, and who can guess wrong. So there is always someone whose "perspective" we have but that someone is different, and frequently, people get perspectives who you might have doubted deserved any. And they might get one POV and never get that one again-- to me it is enough, structurally, to gesture at the existence of certain people without an intention to make the story *about them*. But it helps build the edifice that it isn't a Hero who is doing things, but that all sides need large amounts of human talents to accomplish their objectives. Logistics is communist *and* fascist-- we all have people backstage and we all have a friend with a truck. These things aren't value neutral-- we frequently see media portray the triumph of one hero over masses of the enemy, and in the context of the way the world is organized and what kind of prejudices and problems we are sinking under, I think it is worth giving more than zero thought to what this can mean. It is still compelling to watch, to play, and I'm not about to say it doesn't kick ass sometimes when the cool hero rocks hundreds of chumps-- but these are decisions to make about stories, and you ought to understand what you are doing. You can also always choose to do differently. And when you do one thing or the other, you are conveying something to the audience, and taking part in a culture and conversation even if you vehemently do not intend to.
Writing a ton of characters also allows me to shift focus between a lot of things that interest me. I do like to write about the military but more than that I like to write about *wars* and *wars* are not simply *about* the military. I can write about anything from a powerless and sad girl experiencing the effects of an oppressive system to a communist gamer chick with a huge dick who loves to be too friendly in the shower and the people above them and the people below them and the people around them. It allows for a multiplicity of tones that build on each other to hopefully tell a story that sums up into something special, and that is saying something to you about the world. I think that not only is the story poorer without the gigantic cast, it sends messages that are not only rote and boring but sort of odious-- it is possible for someone to not only get along without support systems and allies, but in fact the coolest and most badass people simply do. They are just that impressive. We've created a world that invites this worldview-- we're scared of each other, suspicious, turned against one another, and we have all these examples of solitary heroes who take it all upon themselves through their effort. We want to be them. We want to do mindfulness and self help and fitness and fix our own plumbing. I gotta take care of me before I take care of anyone else. I'm taking time out to work on me. It's convenient, it's cheap and it seems easy. We're steeped in this kind of messaging.
And yet, our fiction can be whatever we want. We have the ability to imagine inconvenient and complicated stuff that might not always be the most efficient vessel for good times. Yes a story with less characters is easier to tell-- in fact, it may even be "better" as it will tax both the reader and writer much less in the experience of it.
However it will not be as interesting to me-- probably all of my stories will bloat immensely with a ton of little people I'd very much like to tell you about. And that's okay. Probably.