And Then There Were 27

I'm on Lesson 12 of How To Revise Your Novel.  When I first went through my Polar Bear on the Loose manuscript, I came up with 52 characters. That was in Lesson 6.  Fast forward to Lesson 12 where I've gone through and redid my story based upon what I've learned I think it should be.  I'm relooking at those characters.

So many just made a brief appearance on the page -- or never appeared at all and were just mentioned.  Guess what?  Some of you already know the answer.  They aren't characters.  They're blinkies with human shape.  How cool is that?

As I'm redoing my character list for Lesson 12, I identified 15 blinkies, dropping my number of characters to 37.  As I continued through the list from Lesson 6, I'd already made notes about some characters uselessness.  They were simply too weak to live.  I rubbed out five more, dropping my total to 32. (This is fun!)

Finally, there were characters that could be "smooshed" together or merged.  They were fragmented and with enough therapy, I think we can eliminate five more characters by integrating them into characters with enough personality to remain in the story.  Which brings me to 27.

As I work through this lesson, I may still find a couple more blinkies and a couple more mergers. We'll see as I work through this a little more. These are tough economic times, right? Can't afford to have too many characters on the payroll -- especially if they aren't contributing.

Lesson 12 is huge.  I'll be working on it for several weeks, but it's an important step in the process.  It involves going through the characters, documenting each scene's purpose, and, I believe, marking up the manuscript some -- maybe even finally being able to "X" out whole sections that are nothing but dead weight to the story.  There's a lot of important steps here, and I'm trying to get them done right.