Dramatis Personae?

[pinata]

I was told during the last couple of story segments I posted here that due to the number of characters in my series The Sex Star it's difficult to follow the action sometimes. Add to that the fact that first crippling writer's block and then a whole slew of RL issues have kept me from updating with new chapters for about a year, and I imagine people have really lost track now. So I was thinking about doing a Dramatis Personae to make things easier to keep up with, but here's my dilemma: There are about 50 named characters, so if I include it in a chapter it'll take up the whole first page and you'll have to skip to Page 2 to get to the story (and probably to Page 3 to get to the first sex scene, since there's a lot of plot to sort out before the next orgy). So, is it permissible to release a Dramatis Personae by itself as an individual submission? Or does that break some kind of rule?

[NoJo]

Yes, it's fine to include a dramatis personae. I daresay you made one for yourself when writing the thing.

[PennLady]

It doesn't break any rule that I know of. The only possible problem I see is that since it's not a story, per se, it could get rejected. I would explain in the notes field when you submit what you are doing. If that doesn't work, you could try to attach it to the first posted chapter and submit it as an edit. Just a thought.

[sr71plt]

I have contemplated that problem too. Best I could come up with was to put a very brief note on top of the story saying a character list could be found at the end of the first chapter, and then put it there. It threatens to kill the story to put it up front.

[NaokoSmith]

You could make a blog with the characters on it. I know a good blog where the writer doesn't just say: My stories are the greatest but writes up some of the historical background of her characters which she researched. That worked well, and serves as a sort of online discreet advert for her stories too.

You could list the blog in your profile and tell the readers in an introductory blurb that it exists if they would like to go there.

[pinata]

Wow, those are some good suggestions. Thanks, that really helped a lot... I'm gonna take these under advisement and use at least one of them once I've decided which one I like the best.

Wow, that last sentence got grammatically awkward.

[mynameisben]

Originally Posted by pinata

Wow, those are some good suggestions. Thanks, that really helped a lot... I'm gonna take these under advisement and use at least one of them once I've decided which one I like the best.

Wow, that last sentence got grammatically awkward.

Perhaps that last sentence suffered from having too many characters in it.

[sr71plt]

If you put it elsewhere on the Internet, don't try putting a URL in your story submission. That's not permitted.

[pinata]

@mynameisben: That was a good one. LOL.

@sr71plt: Thanks, I did not know that and am glad I didn't make that mistake yet (and now, thanks to you, won't in the future either).

[mynameisben]

[quote=pinata;43414619]@mynameisben: That was a good one. LOL.

Thank you. I try to be helpful wherever I can.

[bashfullyshameless]

I'm sincerely considering it. "Too many characters" is a relatively common critique in my larger pieces.

Partly, it's because I do a lot of action/adventure stuff, and I find it MUCH easier to give all the random goons and minions names to help a reader follow fights and chases and such. The problem is, some readers try harder to keep track of who is who than they need, and I'm starting to think it might help if they have a primer at the beginning of a story.

Guy Gavriel Kay tends to do a great job of this in his books. He'll arrange names by family or faction and leave it at that, though sometimes he lists a given person's title or position if appropriate.

I'm just not sure how to do this elegantly in an e-book (or Literotica posting) format.

[i_would]

Fifty characters! Wow... that'd simply put me off from reading such a story. Or I'd drop it halfway.

I have trouble when there are more than like ten major characters to keep track of. Some stories that I've read her used like eight characters, where the pov switched from one to the other every few paragraphs. That was terrible. Too many characters that gained the lead, too many switches between them, impossible to keep track of who was with who and where they were in relation to the others making the story a huge mess.

I really wonder what kind of story you have to need that many characters, who are apparently all important enough to need to be kept track of. So that they are more than just the waitress of the restaurant the lead characters visit regularly, the concierge at the entrance of the condo, etc. In which case you could simply refer to them as "May, the waitress" and "Rick, the concierge" as simple and unobstructive reminder for your readers the moment they reappear.

Now back on keeping track of characters. First of all my stories have just a few lead characters, and whatever the story chronicles revolves around this lead. They encounter other persons of course, 1-2 dozen or so depending on the story. I keep a dramatis personae in a separate file, where I type notes on the characters (name, physical appearance as described, some other important bits that appeared in the story). And when that character appears again, I'll just reintroduce them:

"Hello!" She looked around, and saw a tall blonde guy. She stopped in her tracks, her heart beating faster. That was the guy she ran into in the grocery shop the other day. The memories came back. But what was his name again?

You can do similar things in your conversation, by directly referring to past events where the character was involved in:

"Hello!"
She looked around, and saw the tall blond guy smiling at her.
"Hi, Pierre. Nice meeting you again. And thanks again for helping me out with that box of oranges yesterday."
"Don't mention it. I've been a scout leader myself, I know how it is to do shopping for fifty hungry kids."

I think you'll have to do something like that anyway, with fifty characters. To have a somewhat coherent story it's hard to deal with more than say ten characters a Literotica page (3500-3600 words), so by the time you've had all fifty you're five pages further and no way an average reader can really remember all those names, and who they are.

Soap operas on TV also usually have only about a dozen characters at one time, even though they may have hundreds over their running time, with characters coming and going all the time. Otherwise it's impossible for their audience to keep track.

[sr71plt]

There reportedly are over 300 characters in War and Peace.

[CWatson]

I hate to be the negative nancy here, but having read some of the first chapter of your story, I've already figured out another source of your problems: the characters aren't very distinct. They have names and no other features, except for Katie's (temporary) maidenhood. (And hair color, but that doesn't count in a non-visual medium.) With that in mind, it's no wonder nobody can tell Summer and Brandy apart. Why should they be able to?--the two of them aren't actually different.

The thing about written fiction is that it can't depend on an actor's charisma or appearance. The only thing that makes characters stand out from each other is their personalities. It's also what makes the story work at all. If The Reader doesn't care about the characters, s/he doesn't care about the story. And if the characters don't have personality, The Reader can't care about the characters: there's nothing there to care about.

For good or ill, you have also chosen to write science-fiction, which makes the business of crafting character even harder. It limits your ability to use actions to define traits. Actions are always contextual, and when the rules are different, actions can have different meanings. If a woman here on Earth fires a gun at someone without bothering to learn how it works or what it shoots, we think she's an idiot. But in science-fiction she might be a technopath who can alter the inner workings of the gun with her mind, or have telekinetic powers to prevent the projectile from harming anyone, or be in a holographic simulation where it's safe to be unsafe with firearms because nobody's going to get hurt anyway.

So yes, all these options would work--dramatis personae, blogs, supplemental pages, etc. But they are stopgaps. If you want to avoid having this problem on your next story, give the characters character. When Brandy is so different than Summer that nobody could ever possibly mix them up, you don't need a cast list.