I'm planning to aim for an actual complete-in-fifty-thousand word novel. Not something that might expand to 65,000 on revising to be more inline with genre standards, or with an abridged third act when I suddenly realised I've only got 10K to go and need to wrap things up. But I'm also considering stretching myself this year and writing including more than 1 main character and 1-2 supporting characters. I'm wondering how feasible more characters are in a concise novel while giving each one the focus and development they deserve. Would a group of 5 friends plus supporting characters be too much to fit in?

i really like ensemble casts. the biggest i've tried to juggle is one of 12, (13 technically but one of them is MIA for most of the plot so i don't count them). a pitfall i hit with that large of an ensemble is that i ended up unintentionally focusing everything around my favorite of the group, and allowing the rest to fall by the wayside. i'm working on revisiting that project recently, and a way i'm trying to remedy that is by plotting out character relationship trees for that group. it's getting elaborate, but i think it's helping, because it's forcing me to think about the relationships between characters that Aren't my pet favorite, lol. (i fully admit he's my favorite lolllllll but i still want to give everyone else their time of day! especially since i want it to be an ensemble story.) i think a group of 5 is doable, but tough. i wish i had real advice lol, but i can keep you posted on how my group of 12/13 goes

I have over 20 named characters in my book so far. Also in the 70k+ range. I think it's important to make sure each character has a life and wants and needs. Even if they don't tell you that their hobby is knitting, YOU as the author needs to know it. These people aren't here just to uplift or drag down your MC.

Oh wow, 12? I know that's normal for epics, but it sounds impossible with just 50K. Mind you, I normally read cute romances and shorter fantasy novels, so I guess I'm just used to not having to remember a lot of names 😂

I think it depends on how many characters you're going to spend time with. Think about the crew of like, Lord of the Flies, we have a lot of characters, but we don't really see a lot of interaction too in depth. We don't know every boy's personal wants and dreams, we just know the vague idea of some of them. You can have a whole world, but how many matter to the message you want to say? What's the message and how many does it take to know at what depth? Is it an epic struggle between two characters? Is it a political drama between five nations? What's the goal? With five friends, usually there are two pairs of two who are besties and a supporting hanger-on from my personal experience, so five people named, sure, but two main well-known people and the vague ideas of three others. If that hanger-on is the drama of the story, we'd know them more in depth, if the hanger-on is the original bestie of one of the two mains, we'd know them more, if they just are an adopted orphan friend who happened to have the same interests, well, we're not really going to know them too well. You could do ten or twelve and just have five or six mains that were all friends before they got married and now their spouses are included. I guess to answer the question, 5 isn't too many, how you use them matters more than how many in my understanding.

I guess I don't consider them main characters unless I spend considerable time with them, but I'm sure everyone has a different understanding of what counts as 'main'. Like, characters that are only there for a chapter aren't really main to me, no matter how important their role is (or how much I love them 😜). I think I've settled on 3 viewpoint characters. One is more developed in my head than the others, so she may end up having the leading role, but I have an 'arc' planned for each one. There will also be a love interest for one of them that won't have a viewpoint, plus I think some sort of mentor character, and a old woman who tries to murder them all (who will, inevitably, be my favourite).

I totally agree with Alley, it depends on what your goal is, and not all characters within a tight-knit group share the same importance ... for example, my main characters are Harry and Severus - well, of course they are, otherwise it would not be a Harry Potter story - so, these two are the most important, and we know their dreams and deepest desires, their accomplishments and their dirty secrets ... after that circle there is a second one containing Hermione and Draco on Harry's side, and Hereweald and Minerva on Severus' side ... they belong to the circle of friends, and they deserve to have a POV once or twice, but it isn't important what Minerva's favorite dinner is ... then comes a third circle with some people in it, and perhaps even a fourth circle - and each circle loses some importance and thus some character building writing within the story ... it may look like 6 main characters, but four of them are just friends, and get less attention, those poor people ... :D ... while in the third or fourth circle, they might be described fairly well, but not with their dreams, desires and deepes character traits ... anything further down might only be known in name, hight, or in the color of their hair ...

I totally agree with Alley, it depends on what your goal is, and not all characters within a tight-knit group share the same importance ... for example, my main characters are Harry and Severus - well, of course they are, otherwise it would not be a Harry Potter story - so, these two are the most important, and we know their dreams and deepest desires, their accomplishments and their dirty secrets ... after that circle there is a second one containing Hermione and Draco on Harry's side, and Hereweald and Minerva on Severus' side ... they belong to the circle of friends, and they deserve to have a POV once or twice, but it isn't important what Minerva's favorite dinner is ... then comes a third circle with some people in it, and perhaps even a fourth circle - and each circle loses some importance and thus some character building writing within the story ... it may look like 6 main characters, but four of them are just friends, and get less attention, those poor people ... :D ... while in the third or fourth circle, they might be described fairly well, but not with their dreams, desires and deepes character traits ... anything further down might only be known in name, hight, or in the color of their hair ...

Bethany: Oh wow, 12? I know that's normal for epics, but it sounds impossible with just 50K. Mind you, I normally read cute romances and shorter fantasy novels, so I guess I'm just used to not having to remember a lot of names 😂 haha, yeah, it's a lot. this story's a weird outlier for me when it comes to main cast size. it follows a crew trapped on a spaceship, being toyed with by a vengeful alien intelligence of unknown origin that can create time loops, as well as it's underlings who can take control of people and infiltrate the crew. so they're stuck in a time loop being killed by their own fellow crewmates and then resurrected when the loop resets, over and over, until they find a way to escape. so i don't think it qualifies as an epic. in a way, maybe the packed cast can reflect the claustrophobic situation they're in? idk, i feel like i can stretch that to be likeeee, artsy or something. and yeah, i doubt i'd be able to fit this in 50k words. if i were to release this, honestly, i think it would work best serialized, either as a comic or a video series or something, or possibly an unfiction style multimedia thing. i could frame it like what the reader's seeing is the writing, video, logs, etc, the crew made as an "in case we die" file to send out for posterity, since they do do that in the story. Aleydreamer's point about friend group structure is really good, and i'm gonna be thinking of that now when i write characters who are friends. i think figuring out what the roles and dynamics within the friend group are would be a really fun character development exercise!

it follows a crew trapped on a spaceship That makes sense. When it's such a confined space, it would feel weird NOT focusing on all the characters. Actually I'd forgotten, I have attempted an ensemble cast before, a group of survivors rebuilding after a zombie apocalypse. Same kind of driving factor, I guess -- when the world is a lot smaller, you can't gloss over other characters as unimportant.