Lessons from All the Ms: What to Do with So Many Characters

I have discovered in reading the first few pages of books by M authors that despite a wide range of writing styles and topics and tones (there truly is something out there for everyone!), specific writing choices consistently cause problems. 

One of those problems is too many characters. 

I recently read (in March 2025) an "M" author book in which so many characters were thrown at my head at once, I immediately lost interest. 

So...how does one produce a book with a "cast of thousands" without overwhelming the reader? Fiction, after all, to a large extent, is about investment in the individual. If I want to read about large groups of people doing stuff, I'll read the encyclopedia. 

I suggest two methods characterize the writers who manage to successfully present a complex story with multiple characters: 

1. Stick to a single POV. 

The single POV explains the great success of Cherryh's Foreigner Series. It is an exceedingly complex series with multiple political "sides" occupied by strong personalities. Yet Cherryh has managed to keep all personalities distinct. To a huge extent, the non-confusing nature of the story (despite overlapping political/social/scientific worlds) is due to the third-person limited voice of Bren Cameron (main character) and Cajeiri (heir apparent to the main political body). Because we, the audience, see everything through their eyes, the things they see make a great deal of sense.

2. Avoid the "in-joke."

In my "M" reading, the book I encountered that turned me off was a mystery in which the author wanted to mention every single character in a previously established English village. It reminded me of romances in which the authors wants to bring back every single couple from previous books, sometimes in a single chapter. 

I understand the impulse: writers fall in love with characters and want to give them cameos. And this approach can be quite successful with established readers, who enjoy the cameos.

But a cameo is a cameo, not a plot.  

Hollywood's Murder on the Orient Express (1974) versus Death on the Nile (1978) is a good example. Murder on the Orient Express is, quite frankly, a series of cameos. But they have a purpose. The actors play their classic roles with such skill, several were nominated for their performances. The mystery, not the cameos, runs the movie.

Death on the Nile (1978), however, is about the cameos BEING cameos. Ha ha ha. Isn't it sooo clever to see THAT star acting so over-the-top? (Granted, Ustinov is rather like that anyway; he does far better in the TV movies.)

In one romance series, the need to bring back so many characters resulted in the main characters utterly changing personalities. I have mentioned elsewhere that one of the few reasons I'll give up on an author isn't politics or bad writing but, rather, the betrayal of a character. In this particular case, I thoroughly adored the Jon-Donovan novels up to the last book in which suddenly the mature intelligent main characters who exhibited nuanced reactions to the world started throwing around clever put-downs about all the people they didn't like. The book wasn't a story; it was a series of Tweets. 

Pulling in characters for the sake of showing them off often, unfortunately, results in characters being a series of Tweets.

Fiction truly ultimately is about investing in individual people. (Which is why fiction simply for itself is such a threat to totalitarian states and mindsets.)