Dealing with large casts

[graychalk]

Hiya everyone! I'm still fairly new to this community, but I've really been enjoying how helpful and encouraging everyone is here. I thought I should come out of lurkdom a bit and say hello. :)

I'd also like to bring up a topic that I hope could get some kind of discussion going, because I've been batting this stuff in my brain for months and I keep going back and forth on the best way to approach this. So... without further rambling, how do you guys deal with writing large casts - especially ones where there are quite a few key characters that would be important enough to warrant their point of views too?

Do you tend to prefer switching between POVs by a break of some sort, or do you brave the omniscient POV and hope it doesn't turn into a mess of head-hopping? And if you do dedicated switches between POVs, when do you make your switches? Within the same scene or do you make it a point to only do it when it's a new scene? Or something else entirely?

I would really love any input on this - it's driving me a bit nuts because I can't seem to find an approach that fits for my fic. :(

Thanks all!

Comments

[graychalk]

Oh, ouch! I totally know where you're coming from. I've been guilty of this too, until I started obsessively paying attention to it.

Do you know why you do this though? I ask this because sometimes it's helpful to figure out why the need is there to head-hop. For example, is it because you think you need to express the feelings of all characters involved (and do you really need to)? And is there a better way to approach it? I've asked myself these questions time and time again, then forced myself to write it in such a way where I can still convey the emotion without head-hopping. Sometimes, the solution comes... other times, it obviously doesn't (like now). *wry grin*

[asecretchord]

Thanks for providing some much-needed food for thought.

I suspect I'm asking myself the wrong questions: instead of asking 'why is Hermione angry' and stepping inside her head to find the answer, I should ask 'what about the situation results in Hermione being angry' and then expressing that through dialogue (or other means). I really need to wean myself away from explaining every single thing each character does. *wry grin*

[musyc]

And "how is she demonstrating her anger". Is she drumming her fingers on the table, tapping her foot? Are her nostrils flared? Did she crumple up a parchment?

I use description, gesture, and action a LOT (possibly more than I should >.> ) so that the POV character can see the emotions of the others (and the readers can too). One of the most popular moments in a fic of mine is one line. Bellatrix has a hair necklace in "seven shades of Weasley red". Almost everyone comments on that line - I don't say they're dead, I don't say how she got the hair, I don't say anything else about it, but so many people tell me how much that creeped them out and set the scene.

Maybe as an experiment, you could try writing the same scene or sequence in a handful of different manners - describe it entirely through sight or hearing, or focus exclusively on body language, for example. Sometimes when something isn't working for me, I do a little exercise like that to find the pivot point to build the rest of it around.