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]

Sounds like quite an intimidating trilogy to pick up, but I do enjoy great world-building, so that's already a plus in my book. 200 pages for the hook to set is a bit of a stretch for how long I'm usually willing to give something a chance, but being that it's a thousand pages total, I guess I can sort of understand why.

I actually don't normally do much multiple POVs either, and when I do, it's a maximum of two. It's just the current fic I'm writing makes it a bit difficult to do that because the cast is huge and the story I'm trying to tell is so involved in such a way that I do need to cover a fairly wide ground. Quite frustrating!

Thanks for the input - definitely stuff I should keep in mind. I agree with a lot of what you say in terms of POV-changes and the effect it has on the story. The trick now, I guess, is to make it work somehow!

[dhae_knight_1]

It is intimidating, but it has some of the most memorable settings of any books I've ever read.

If I hadn't been so sick with stress at the time, and a good friend hadn't borrowed them, driven for an hour to drop them off, litterally at my door, and then driven home again, I wouldn't have read them either. But when you can read, eat and sleep, reading becomes somewhat more important, and your patience with long hooks stretch. Usually I'll give a book 50 pages. 100 on the outside to set the hook. Mostly, they don't need quite that long, though. :-)

BTW, another multiple POV is Game of Thrones, but although I love the world and the characters, I can't really get into it. For some reason his POV-changes feels like cheating. Maybe because there are multiple POV's from people in the same places? I don't know why, all I do know is that the TV-series feels much more natural, and the only difference I can think of is that I don't get into the heads of quite so many characters.