hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2548.txt

Episode: 2548
Title: HPR2548: Single Vs Multiple Characters
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2548/hpr2548.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 05:18:16

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This is HPR episode 2,548 entitled Single VS Multiple Character.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and in about 18 minutes long, and Karima Clean Flag.
The summary is Lost in Drunks looks at why Single or Multiple main characters are better
in stories.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Hello, this is Lost in Drunks and you'll have to forgive me for the sun quality I'm in
the car right now.
Today I'd like to talk to you about the concept of having one or multiple main characters
in storytelling.
Now most of what I'm about to say is going to focus on written works such as novels or
short stories, but it really can't apply to other types of storytelling, be they games
or movies or television or radio or different types of stories.
But for me, this is more easily illustrated using the written word.
Not that we have that in front of us at the moment, but you get what I mean.
Now then, I'll just state it right for the record.
In my opinion, there's only one real major advantage to having multiple main characters
in a story.
And that's to tell the same tale from different points of view.
That's not to be dismissed, that's not a small thing, that's actually a very cool technique.
But it's not perfect for every type of story.
Multiple main characters is probably best served by complicated stories.
Things that have multiple threads going on at the same time, stories that have extremely
complicated events that need to be seen from different points of view or they make no
sense.
Or as a deliberate blind, that is to say, you're using different points of view to give
you the illusion that you're seeing it all, just so the writer can hide something from
the reader to spring on them later.
It's a valid technique and it can be very, very effective if it's done right.
However, there are disadvantages to multiple main characters.
And it really doesn't matter if you're using first person that is to say, I did this and
I did that.
Or if you're using third person, Joe did this, Joe did that.
The advantage of having these characters is so that you can see what they're doing
and see how they're feeling and we can empathize with these multiple characters.
And the closer we are to them, the closer we are to their thoughts and their feelings,
the more we care about what's happening to them.
So if you have multiples and you're able to pull off that kind of connection, it really
can do quite a bit of good for you.
However, naturally, if you have one story, but multiple characters in the lead that you
keep jumping to, one to the other, you get far less time with each than you would if
you were using only one main character.
Sometimes that can be good if the main character is unpleasant or they might have one cool
aspect to them, but they're not necessarily super interesting or maybe the writer didn't
flesh them out all that well.
Then spending an awful lot of time with one character can, certainly in those types of circumstances,
it can be a disadvantage to spend that much time with someone who just really is either
unpleasant or uninteresting.
You can jump around in that case, in other words.
And this also does give you the advantage of focusing on your villain for a while.
Your villain who may not be the main character, certainly not the protagonist of your story,
but your villain or I should say antagonist if they're, if you have the kind of story
that has one.
You can spend time with them using a technique like this where you're focused on them for
a little while.
Now another big disadvantage and it's related to not having a lot of time to flesh out
the characters is that you can spend so much time jumping around that it's really hard
to get a cohesive story going on.
See in this case, having multiple characters that you're what they call head hopping from
one to the other, now it's beginning to impact your story.
Your plot becomes harder to follow, your story because it's no longer very linear, right?
Now story doesn't have to be linear, but taken as a whole, it has to make sense.
And if you have a certain character that responds to a particular type of situation or stimulus
in a certain way, and you have another that does the same thing only differently, throwing
events at them means that they're going to react to them differently.
Because they react to them, the reader finds out what's going on.
And these two characters, if they're not, if what they're doing doesn't complement each
other, that is to say one reveals one thing while the other reveals something else, perhaps
something that the other one couldn't have revealed.
If you don't do that specifically, there's absolutely no reason to do it, right, because
it's just going to be confusing.
Now again, this is my opinion and there's always exceptions, there's always going to be
people that can jump from character to character to character and keep it all straight.
But generally speaking, those are not very complex plots.
Usually they're pretty straightforward, which is not to say that's bad.
Straight forward is generally preferable, it's usually better.
Complicated plots can be sometimes complicated for no other reason than to be complicated.
That's poor reason to tell a story like that.
Really, it's just the author indulging themselves and there's simply no great advantage to the
story by being overly complicated in your construction of it.
However, you can get overly complicated by having too many characters tell the same story.
They can all be running off in different directions and trying to keep track of everybody.
Well, that's fine, but very often you are better served by giving that character an entire
chapter in their part of the story or better yet an entire segment of the book just for
their part of the story before you jump to somebody else.
Stories that hop from one character to character to character within the course of a chapter,
it can get so muddled you really honestly can't follow what's going on.
And in order to make that clear, then you have exposition, you have a character standing
around saying, well, wasn't that impressive when you did such and such and such and such.
It allowed me to do such and such.
In other words, you need someone to recap what just happened, right?
That's a complete waste of everybody's time and definitely the authors.
So head hopping, I am not generally a fan of it, but it really does depend on how it's
used.
J. R. R. Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings jumped around to a lot of different characters,
but he gave each one adequate time.
He didn't jump between characters in the middle of the action general.
We got large segments of the story and we spent a lot of time with these characters before
we went to somebody else.
In my opinion, that's the right way to do it and it works quite well that way.
When you're jumping from character to character within the course of a single chapter or
worse yet, a single scene, that's a mess.
It's almost never a good way to tell that particular story or that segment of the tale.
It's complicated for no reason and we rather than reveal different aspects of the story
so that we get a really rounded view of it and point a fact that muddles the story.
It often will muddle the story because we have different character reactions to the exact
same event.
It's a complicated thing.
It's also very popular now, but it's very complicated and I don't believe that most
writers do it well, frankly.
Good writers are often, you know, if that's the kind of story they like to tell and they
pull it off really well, they can make it look easy, but trust me, it's not.
It's very often a good choice to pick one character that you find interesting as a storyteller
as a writer.
One character that you find interesting and you just sort of stay with them.
We get to see the world through their eyes.
Their advantage of this technique is that you can allow the story to get a little more
complex.
Yet you can keep the story centered because the story can be really crazy around your
one character, but if your one character is the focus, they can be confused without
confusing the reader.
The reader might not know what's going on, but they don't have to be confused because
it is this character that's doing it for them.
They act as kind of a proxy.
So they can be confused or they can be certain or they can be funny, they can be all of the
things that you need, maybe multiple characters to do, but they end up being the one center
of the story.
Now we're getting into the concept of a single character.
In my opinion, the single character story, the single main character story is a lot easier
to write.
They're the kind that I focus on.
They're easier to write because you stick with one character.
It also allows the reader to grow attached to this one character.
The disadvantage, of course, is if this person isn't very interesting or very pleasant,
then no one wants to spend that much time with them.
So it's important to have a character that can express the entire range of emotion and
thought and introspection that you yourself as the writer, as the author, as the storyteller
wants to express.
So if you want your main character to be, say, someone with a learning disability or someone
with some sort of intellectual disability, and that's the main character, you're not
going to get necessarily the insight about the world around you that the storyteller
may require.
As a result, you can't tell that story from a first person point of view unless you
do an awful lot of saying things that the main characters clearly don't understand, but
that you know that the reader is going to pick up.
And that works sometimes, but if you do too much of that, it gets really constructed.
It gets really false after a time.
Flowers for Algernon is a beautiful, beautiful tale.
It's a short story and it got turned into a novel, which then got turned into a major
motion picture many years ago called Charlie starring Cliff Robertson.
It's a science fiction tale on the surface of it, but it's really more of a character
drama.
The short story, you're inside his head, you're inside Charlie's head.
And Charlie is slow, he's mentally disabled.
And he undergoes a process, a kind of a radical surgical process that increases his IQ like
a hundred or a thousandfold and he becomes a super genius over the course of the story.
And we see his arc as he becomes super intelligent like that.
And in the short story, we're not spending so much time when he is mentally disabled
to get too much of that wink and nod sort of thing from the author.
That is to say, someone is doing something that the, you know, maybe they're making fun
of Charlie and Charlie doesn't get it, but the reader does, right?
We're not getting, we're not spending that much time with all of that stuff.
As I recall in the novel, there was a lot more of that and it got tiresome.
So it's something that you have to be aware of.
You can't necessarily, when you're telling a tale, if it's a character that's unpleasant,
you have to distance yourself from them.
So say the main character is a hitman, they're a psycho, maybe they're psychopath.
If you're inside their head, that can be a long, unpleasant journey in a book where
you're inside the psychopath's head.
There have been a lot of modern books, especially told from that point of view.
I don't find them very pleasant.
They're not good reads and I don't necessarily think they're telling a very good story when
they're like that.
However, stories that take a step back that tell this tale in the third person, even though
he's the main character, you can get a lot more traction that way.
It flies a little bit better.
And the same goes with multiple characters, right?
If you have multiple character, main characters, if some of them are unpleasant, it's probably
a good idea not to be in their head so much.
That's just me, that's personal taste and I guess everybody is different.
And I'm the first to admit that I'm not necessarily a fan of every modern trend in storytelling.
However, focusing solely on singular characters, another great aspect of that is that the author
can lie to the reader.
That can be a big advantage, especially with a mystery story or a complex plot of some
sort.
You want to hold certain facts back so that the reader isn't expecting everything.
If you reveal too much, then obviously you're showing your hand and they'll, you know,
especially if it's trying to be a mystery, you will have shot yourself in the foot.
There is no mystery if you give it all away.
So sometimes it's good to lie to the reader.
Now you can do that with the character lying directly to them, especially if it's told
in first person, I did this, I did that.
And in fact, they didn't do any of those things and it can be revealed later that they
were lying about it or you can have the author lie to the character who in turn perpetuates
that lie to the reader and how does that work?
By simply not letting the main character know everything as they're going along, they
don't see it all.
They miss maybe very important facts that are either hidden or hidden in plain sight or
they just simply don't notice it.
They miss the super, super important fact and that, even if they're telling the story
first person, they can't reveal it to the reader just yet because they missed it themselves.
That's something that the author knows is going on, but the character does not.
The main character who is telling the tale doesn't know about it because of course these
things generally, if they're told in past tense, these things are being told in a linear
fashion and the character isn't going to reveal this piece of information yet, they found
out about it later even though when you think about it, they already know about it and
they could have told you up front, but they're telling a story, right?
It can be overly complicated telling stories like this and there's no reason to really
get into the fine detail of what the influence of having multiple characters versus a single
character on a particular plot.
I don't think so anyway because again, not only is it complicated, it is highly dependent
upon writing style and ultimately the story you're trying to tell.
And that is really what it's all about.
What story are you trying to tell?
If you are telling a classic sword and sorcery fantasy where you have a small group of heroes
who have to solve a quest, they have to perhaps gain a McGuffin before the evil bad guy gains
it and by doing so, they will either be able to use it to stop the bad guy or destroy it
thereby stopping the bad guy.
It's a story or a type of story that probably will never grow old.
I used certain sorcery fantasy but every genre can take advantage of that format, right?
What's the advantage of having multiple points of view in such a well-trodden storyline?
When you've gone down this path so many times and so many different types of stories,
why do we need 5, 6, 7, 10, 20 different people telling this same story?
Why are we seeing it through their eyes?
I don't personally think there's an advantage to that.
But again, it depends on the writer, it depends on the story.
We may be getting the same old, certain sorcery tale but maybe we're not.
Maybe it only appears that way and then at some point or other, this thing flips around
and it's nothing like we thought it was going to be.
And now having multiple points of view to plug in all the facts that we've learned along
the way, now it comes in handy.
But you see what I'm talking about, I'm talking about an element of complexity and surprise
that we're not getting if it's just a straight story being told by a bunch of people.
We don't need 15 voices to tell a single tale unless only those voices could tell that
story that way.
And again, it doesn't have to be first person, it could be third person but we're seeing
much of what's going on through their eyes, we know what they're thinking, we know what
they're seeing etc etc.
Anyway these were just some thoughts about one character versus multiple characters.
We're talking about main characters here and maybe some of the advantages and disadvantages.
This is a very breezy kind of random look at that concept and it's a complex one.
I hope that perhaps it give you food for thought and if so perhaps you'll throw a comment
on HPR under this episode or better yet create your own episode because you have opinions
and you have interests and we want to hear about them.
This has been Lost in Bronx, thank you for listening, take care.
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