Writers are often told not to feature too many characters in their novels. You’ll find it hard to keep track of them all. Readers might get confused. How do you know who to root for?
So, it’s refreshing to hear from someone who sees there are benefits to having a large cast, even when many of them never take center stage. During an interview with Lit Hub, Kevin McIlvoy Butler (One Kind Favor) discusses the art of “dynamic crowding.”
“The novel has a lot of room in it for there to be this dynamic crowding—that is the crowding of primary, secondary, tertiary, supernumerary dramas; the crowding of individual characters on colliding paths; the crowding of relationships between characters; the crowding of the relationship between individual characters and individual settings,” he says. “And one of the great pleasures about writing the novel is that you have so much opportunity there to crowd the stage.”
Butler and host Mitzi Rapkin discuss examples of crowded casts and their uses and opportunities from Shakespeare and Eudora Welty.
