How to Write Large Casts of Complex Characters in Adventure Fiction: Full Guide and 7 Step Process

How to Write Large Casts of Complex Characters

To write large casts of complex characters with their own personalities and inter-dynamics are a staple of the action-adventure genre. But writing a large cast of characters well can be scary, to say the least. There are a lot of balls that need to be kept in the air at all times, and for many authors, it can feel super overwhelming.

In this article, we will explore the critical elements of writing a large cast of characters in adventure fiction, including how to overcome some of the most common challenges and how to craft interesting dynamics between all your great characters to keep readers engaged and loving it.

Not only do you need to keep all of these characters straight, but with so many personalities to juggle, it can be easy to lose track of the small pieces of who's doing what, where, and when.

This is where outlining comes in. By developing each character's backstory, motivations, and personality traits, you can create a cast of characters that feel distinct and memorable.

But by incorporating these elements into a strong and thorough outline that dictates when, where, and how each component of all your characters will be revealed to the reader, you will have a much easier time.

And structuring your story to allow each personality to shine can help keep readers engaged and invested in them and the plot.

Creating a Large Cast of Characters

When it comes to writing adventure fiction, creating a large cast of characters can effectively add depth and complexity to your story. However, managing many characters can be a challenge.

So, here are some tips for creating a large cast of characters that will keep your readers invested in your story.

Character Traits and Backstories

One of the most important aspects of creating a large cast of characters is ensuring each is distinct and memorable.

But you must also justify your load of characters to the reader by making sure each one does these 2 things:

1. They are essential, included in the story because they are integral to the plot and not just needlessly thrown in without affecting anything that happens.

2. They are distinct. Each of your characters stands out as an individual. Their dialogue does not sound too similar to other characters; they have a personality and are appealing in their own unique way.

Each character with any real impact (so not the nameless/faceless bellboy) should have all the markings of a well-developed character. Meaning they have a backstory, a personality, wants and goals, likes and dislikes, etc.

Think of things like:

• Physical appearance: What does the character look like? Do they have any distinguishing features, such as scars or tattoos?

• Personality: What are the character's strengths and weaknesses? What motivates them?

• Backstory: What events in the character's past have shaped who they are today?

By creating detailed character traits and backstories, you can ensure that each character is unique and contributes to the overall story.

I'm not going to go into how to develop characters anymore in this post; if you want to learn more about how to develop great write-ready characters, I wrote a complete guide here.

Protagonists and Antagonists

When creating a large cast of characters, it is crucial to have clear protagonists and antagonists. Protagonists are the main characters who drive the story forward, while antagonists are the characters who oppose them.

That doesn't mean they all need to choose a side between White Hat and Black Hat. But that does mean that you need to thoroughly plan out who is in who's way and who helps who at what time.

Okay, so let me explain:

When you have a large cast of characters, what makes it work or fail, is not just how well-characterized they all are but how complex the interactions are between them. Lots of characters mean lots of opportunities for dynamic interactions and a ton of conflict.

When you are outlining your story, you need to also be outlining these interactions. Most importantly, you are finding potential interactions between characters that will create the most conflict.

Every character is a protagonist in their own story. Just like in real life, the world revolves around them. So your POV protagonist is the antagonist to your antagonist. Does that make sense?

What I mean to say is that when your character has a goal, regardless of if they are your POV character or a sidekick, an antagonist to them is someone who gets in the way of their goal: the obstacle maker.

Every one of your characters may be a help to one and a hindrance to another. And what's more, that may be dynamic. At one point, they support another character, and in the next moment, they may become an antagonistic force to them.

This is where your conflict lies.

So here are some things you should consider when outlining the various interactions between your characters:

• Who can you pair together (by having them interact) to create the most significant level of contrast? Who is the farthest in personality from each other? Those characters together will create more conflict than characters who are similar in personality and beliefs.

• What characters seem the best fit together? How can you create a twist, surprise, or emotional impact by breaking that bond somehow?

• How does the web of characters in your story connect? Remember that for a character to count, he or she needs to be important enough to move the story in some critical way. Physically map out your character's connections and see if there are any outliers that only interact with one other character. Can you bring them into the fold and make them more important, or can they be cut entirely?

Main Characters and Supporting Characters

In addition to deciding what ways your characters will interact and create conflict with each other, you must also decide which characters will be primary characters and which will play supporting roles.

Not all characters can take center stage. You're going to have to decide who is the most essential protagonist(s) and who is the most essential antagonist(s). Then every other character in your book will have to serve one or more of these important characters.

I talk a lot about this in the developing write-ready characters post mentioned above, but I will summarize it quickly here.

Supporting characters need to not only serve the plot but serve the protagonist in his or her transformation through the book, whether that is external or internal.

Good supporting characters must do one or more of these things:

• Complement or enhance the main character(s)—like supporting them in the literal sense, giving them hard truths, or acting as role models.

• Contact the main characters, act as foils to them, or challenge their way of being.

• Serve as catalysts for a change that needs to take place in your main character. Whether a negative catalyst (murdered their spouse) or positive (asks them to get milk).

• Have subplots and mini-story arcs that weave through the main character's arcs.

Balancing Character Attention

When you have a large cast of characters, it's essential to balance their screen time. You don't want to focus too much on one character and neglect the others. Each character must have a unique role in the story. Determine from the get-go why they are there, what they want, and the single primary obstacle to this goal.

The main question that comes up when writers ask how to incorporate many characters into their novel is:

"How many POVs can I have?"

And the answer to this is never straightforward because it really depends on your story, your audience, your skill, and your writing style. However, a good rule of thumb is to keep it to as few POVs as you can get away with and still tell your story.

Let me explain this a little less vague.

Say you have ten characters, but there are no scenes in which five of those characters are alone. In editing, I would consider those orphan characters who really don't need their own POV. Because chances are one of the other POV characters is already in those scenes with them. So you can tell that part of the story from the perspective of the POV characters you already have.

But I understand that that can be tricky.

You can experiment with writing scenes from as many different perspectives as you want, but when it comes down to it, my advice is to think like an editor, and thinking like an editor almost always means: What can I cut?

Writing and Structuring Your Story to Artfully Include All These People

With a large cast of complex characters, it is important to focus on the structure of your story to ensure that it is engaging and easy to follow.

There is only one surefire way to do that without creating a ton of rewriting work for you. That is outlining. And in our case, extensive outlining.

Here is my step-by-step process for outlining and structuring your character-heavy adventure fiction story. Keep in mind that, in reality, it is not a clean 7-step process. You might do all 7 steps, come up with more ideas, refine your outline from step 1, and work your way back up. The creative mind isn't exactly a tamed animal.

Step 1: Get to Know Your Characters

First things first, which should be apparent from everything we've discussed so far, you need to get to know your characters. At this stage of the process, you are going to make a list of all the characters you have and divide these into categories.

You can choose whichever categories you like that make sense to you, but I advise starting with POV characters and non-POV characters.

You can make your categories as complex as you like, but I think it's a good idea just to keep it simple. Then you will fill out all the information you need for each.

Here are the things that you are going to need to understand about each of these characters:

1. Goals and motivations

2. Values and beliefs

3. Their main internal obstacles

4. Their main external obstacles

5. The gist of their backstory

6. Who they are at the beginning of the story

7. Who they will become by the end of the story

8. Relationships and interactions that they must have with other characters

9. Their strengths and flaws

10. The main most essential aspects of their personalities

11. Physical traits

12. And write down any research you will need to do or have done to make this character believable, relatable, and appealing.

Once you understand all of your characters on a profound level, you can move on to the next part of your outline, which is your story's history.

Step 2: Your Story's History

You've probably never heard of your story's history because I made it up. Still, when you're writing a very complex story with lots of characters, you will inevitably have an elaborate plot as well.

So the best way I have found to simplify this is not to start with your plot or story structure but to start with your story's history.

What the heck does this mean?

Well, what is history?

If you think about it, it is really just the bare facts about what happened at a certain point in time. When you're learning history, you learn about an event, when it took place, who was involved, and what were the events leading up to it.

So when you are writing your history for your story, you're going to do the same thing:

What is the main event that is happening in your story? If everything in your book actually happened, what would it be remembered by?

Chances are this is going to be your climax or maybe your midpoint. But this is a big moment that the entire world will remember.

And then, you will write the cause and effect events leading up to that situation. I want you to really simplify. This doesn't have to be a story in itself, just right in bullet points: this happens, which causes this to happen, which causes this to happen, which causes this person to do this thing, and on and on it goes.

Now, when you have lots of characters, I find that it's easiest to do a single history for each one, and I mean every single one. And really focus on the cause-and-effect aspect of it. Every single beat of your story's history must be preceded by a catalyst of some kind.

If your character sails across the ocean, they must have a reason for doing so, and that reason can't be "just because he wanted to." The reason has to be because something happened that either:

• Put the idea in his head.

• Made him want to run away.

• Forced him to get on a boat to save the damsel in distress, etc.

Writing a story history in this way does a few things:

1. It makes it so there are no coincidences in your story. Because at this stage, you will have ensured that all actions are caused by another action and so on.

2. It clears up all the plot holes in the story you might accidentally write.

3. It allows you to keep track of all the moving pieces (primarily characters) in a clean and transparent manner.

Step 3: Your Story's Plot Structure

So you know your characters intimately, and now you have a complete idea of everything that will happen in your story and what needs to happen to make your story believable. Here is where we turn that history into a plot.

Choose your plot structure, whether three-act, five-act, spiral, or whatever.

For simplicity, let's just say you choose the three-act structure. We know that in a three-act structure, there is an inciting event. There's a first plot point, midpoint, third plot point, climax, and resolution—in a nutshell.

Take your history and decide which point in that history best fits the inciting event, the midpoint, the yadda, yadda, yadda. Now even if, say, the moment in your story's history that best fits the midpoint is three-quarters of the way through your history, that doesn't matter.

Make it the midpoint anyway.

When you structure the rest of the story, perhaps that means you need to fit a 10-year span of time into the first half of the story and only two years into the second half of your story. There are creative ways to make your history fit the mold of your chosen structure.

And that is your job.

In this step, take everything you've made in your history and the characters you've developed and fit them into the plotting structure you choose in a way that will make your story as engaging, suspenseful, tense, and emotional as possible.

Step 4: The Big Ass List

Now you have your characters, your history, and have pieced it all together in an intricate and exciting plot. This is where you go back into the character work you did in step 1 and decide when, where, and how, or if you even will reveal all the specific details about your character in the plot.

For instance:

If, at your midpoint, your antagonist character makes a big reveal and turns the whole story upside down, what are the specific things that need to happen beforehand?

Likewise, you need to come up with as many details that will need to be revealed before your major plot points to properly preload, foreshadow, and develop the story.

Make a massive list of all these things, everything you can think of. Brainstorm until your brain hurts. Divide this list into categories, characters, plot points, whatever, and Mark beside each one when you want to reveal these things in the story. You should probably base this off of your plot structure.

Keep this list with you for the next step.

Step 5: Scene by Scene Breakdown

The scene-by-scene breakdown takes your overall plot structure and divides it into individual scenes. These are scenes that need to be shown in order to get to your major plot points.

Each scene should be like a stepping stone to the next, eventually leading to these big moments. This should be relatively easy to do because you have your histories before you, and everything is already cause-and-effect related in your plot.

Things you should be thinking about for each scene include:

• Are your character's goals apparent from the get-go?

• Do the characters come up against an obstacle to their goals in this scene?

• Are the goals and obstacles in this scene different from what came before? (If they are not sufficiently distinct in some way, your story is not moving.)

• What from your Big Ass List can you include in this scene?

• Does this scene have a cause-and-effect relationship with a previous scene?

• Does this scene sufficiently move the plot forward, or are you wasting time with it?

• Can this scene be combined with another scene to carry the story along more efficiently?

• Who is the POV character? Would it make more sense or move the story better if it were told from a different perspective?

Step 6: Character Scripts

Now that you've outlined all your scenes, we can get into my favorite and what I think is the most important part about getting your characters onto the page. I originally got this from Sol Stein's book Stein on Writing, a fantastic book that any editor and writer should be familiar with.

But he introduced me to the idea of characters having their own scripts, which he taught at the Actor's Studio in New York.

What I mean by "scripts" is that for every scene, your characters are given totally different ideas about what will happen or why they are there. You can imagine the mess this would make if it happened on stage.

In our case, this is a good thing because it creates conflict.

I can explain better with an example:

Say you have a scene with a husband and wife sitting down to dinner. Now pretend these characters are actors, and you have given them a general script.

The script you gave the wife says that this is going to be a lovely dinner with two people who love each other dearly, and at the end of the night, it ends with them snuggling together in bed.

However, you are a tricky little director, and the script you gave the husband character says that he is sitting down to dinner tonight to tell his wife that he wants a divorce—he fell out of love many years ago and has felt like he is living in a house with a ghost. The night will end when he goes to a hotel and drinks himself to sleep.

Then….ACTION!

To do this in your books, look at what characters (your actors) are in each scene. Decide now while you are still in the outlining stage what the script will be for each of those characters in each scene.

Your goal is to make those scripts as opposed to each other as possible. But they should still make sense based on the character's history and development; let's not make them all seem unhinged, shall we?

Step 7: Write

The only step left is to write these scenes that you have outlined. All the plotting and structuring work you have previously done will allow you to write an impactful story, hitting all the right beats at the right time without leaving plot holes.

The character work you have done will allow you to write characters that come off the page, and the scripts you have developed will create tension and immersive character dynamics.

Now there is, of course, a lot more to getting characters onto the page and communicating them effectively to the reader. To learn more in this area, take a look at my article on characterization here.

Final Words

Writing a large cast of complex characters in adventure fiction can be a challenging but rewarding experience. Following the advice and my 7 steps for writing large casts of characters, you can effectively manage your teeming call sheets and create a cohesive story with memorable people readers will love.

Remember to give each character a unique voice, backstory, and motivation to add depth and complexity to your story. Use character development exercises to flesh out your characters and ensure they feel like real people with their own hopes, dreams, and flaws.

It's essential to balance character development with plot progression. While focusing solely on your characters is tempting, remember that they must serve the story and drive the action forward. Use your large cast to create complex relationships and conflicts that add tension and excitement to your narrative.

It's not going to happen all in one shot.

You will need to go back and rewrite and revise your work. A large cast of characters can be challenging to manage, but with careful attention to detail and a willingness to make changes, you can create a compelling adventure story that will captivate your readers.

So get to it, will you? It's a long process; there is no time to waste.

Keep writing.

How do you write a complex and twisting action & adventure plot?

To write a complex plot for an action adventure story, first you will need to establish the central conflict, then strategically map out key plot points, develop purposeful subplots, craft surprising plot twists, and handle pacing and tension, and multiple perspectives if you need to. But this is only the beginning. Discover the secrets to writing a twisting and intricate action adventure plot here on The Writer's Cabin.

Next: Complex Action Plots