How many characters do you need for a novel?

I get asked this question quite often and I often respond: as many as you need which generally upsets the person asking the question. However, it is a true answer, but you must have a protagonist and an antagonist. You will have important characters who aren’t the protagonist or the antagonist and then you will have minor characters. All other characters are less important and the protagonist and the antagonist because your plot will revolve around these two major characters.

What is a protagonist?

The protagonist is your hero. The protagonist can be either male or female. But they must be a male or female with a desperate problem, a compelling need or a passionate (and I’m not referring to sex here) desire or there is no plot.

An antagonist is the person who is trying to prevent your hero from solving the problem, resolving the need, or accomplishing the passionate desire. The antagonist can be called the villain or the bad guy or girl.

Since these two characters are so important your reader must be able to identify with them.

How do you craft characters that your reader will identify with?

Most writers ask this question at one time or another during their writing career. Sometimes a character will appear in your mind, fully grown, but this doesn’t happen very often. A writer has to imagine the character and then fill in his or her characteristics. It’s like seeing a person through frosted glass. You know they are there, but you don’t know what they look like. As I look at my character, vague and unformed, I decide if the character is male or female. That’s the first big step. Generally woman will write about a woman protagonist and a man will focus on a man. Why? Because we know how our own sex thinks and feels. Often when a man writes about a woman, she becomes a man with breasts or she ends up being subservient and nearly ignored by the man in her life. When a woman writes about a man, he is either too masculine to be real or a wimp. Occasionally, one can write about the opposite sex and make them life-like and realistic but I haven’t see it happen very often and I’ve read thousands of books.

When I was working on Suzette Bishop who is the protagonist in my Suzette Bishop Mystery series I decided that I wanted my character to be an orphan who was searching for her biological parents. I didn’t know what she looked like, how old she was or what her occupation would be. I just knew that she was an orphan. I like to use my novels to teach or enlighten without the reader knowing that’s what’s happening. Both of my children are adopted and I understand their need to find their biological parents so I wanted to help my readers understand how an adopted child feels.

Once I had decided that, I needed a name. I tend to use family names and one of my favorites is Bishop. So now I had a last name and a desire. Then the name Suzette just popped into my head. Suzette Bishop. I liked that combination. Now that I had a character with a name and a desire, a compelling need, I needed a personality.

In one writing conference that I attended, the speaker said that we should ask our character questions to understand their personality. This didn’t work for me. It actually took me over a month to develop her personality and this came about as I began to write her back story.

What is a Back Story?

A back story is what happens to the character before they show up in your novel. My protagonists always have a longer back story than any of my other characters including my antagonist. My supporting characters may only have a paragraph of back story and minor characters—the walk-ons in the novel may only have a brief description—maybe one or two words.

Suzette’s parents were killed in a fiery car crash when she was six months old. She was found forty feet away from the inferno after the fire was out. Because the fire was so hot, nothing was left to identify her even though her picture was on the front page of most newspapers, no one claimed her. She lived in a series of foster homes until she was adopted at age 13. There is a lot more on her back story but you get the idea.

The back story doesn’t appear in the story unless it’s a series like mine and I intentionally include clues to her life and what is going to happen as she works through each mystery. It’s one of the things my readers like about my novels. They have identified with Suzette and what to know more about her.

What is an Antagonist?

The antagonist is the villain or the bad guy. He or she is the one who is trying to keep the protagonist from achieving his or her goal. The antagonist is the person who makes the book into a page turner.

We’ll talk more about the antagonist, supporting characters and minor characters in my next blog.

Thought for today:

Thomas Edison said about his research on the electric light bulb, “I have not failed 1,200 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 1,200 ways would not work. When I have eliminated those ways that will not work, I will find a way that will work.”

Writers need the same persistence that Edison showed in his search for the electric light bulb.

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