Recently I had to remove people from my plane of existence. Well, not my plane exactly, but one I am currently creating, and their universe is rather near and dear to my heart. I like them well enough to endure them, but not well enough to make them the stars of their own novellas, short stories, or (let's be honest) their own character descriptions.
I started with a list of possible starship crew positions and tried to cut it down to the bare minimum. I had about twenty positions. I combined a few, and still had fifteen crew members. I decided this was workable enough, although I had read warnings that a ship requiring that many crew members would be pretty large, but I justified it as necessary for shift changes to work. Then I tried writing character descriptions. Yikes.
I had a few ideas about several different characters, and they were relatively easy descriptions to write. Then it got harder...much harder. Some had huge holes in their stories. I added a character because the concept was more interesting than any of my existing characters. At this point, I took some time and watched a few episodes of one of my favorite "creative compost" sources. I definitely had way too many characters. I looked at my character list and cut out everyone who did not have a good story line, moved some jobs around, and combined story lines that would work together.
Now I have 10 characters. It's still too many, but it means everyone gets a bigger cabin.
**On Wednesday, August 15th, blogger Peter Andrews of "How To Write Fast" fame will be here as a guest blogger!**
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