How to manage a cast of thousands (no, really!)

I am that breed of writer who needs to know what is going on at all times, like a director of a film with a cast of thousands. The current project is, (like The Secret War), a bit of an epic, and like most epics the cast list is oh so long. When I go into writing a first draft I’m always armed with a piece of paper to jot down the names of the main characters, the supporting roles and those characters I foresee appearing later in the book; and this current project is no different. I began The Burning Sands of Time with a cast list of around twenty main and supporting characters. Yet, as I reach the final chapter and epilogue, I’ve discovered this list has swelled to around seventy. Quite a few characters then.
The only explanation I can find for this is:

The Aliens effect

So what is the “Aliens” effect? Well, it’s based on the film by James Cameron, and to some degree the novelisation by Alan Dean Foster. For the uninitiated (and how could you be? Aliens is a fantastic film – by far, Cameron’s best, and not simply a war/sci-fi/horror/action film at all…) it follows a company of marines in the future who discover the fate of a colony of terra-formers on another planet. A planet that happens to be infested by very resilient aliens. Kinda like giant cockroaches from Hell. Anyway, these marines each have their own names, and probably, motivations, yet only half of them have any real screen-time. Despite that, their absence would have been sorely felt as these characters are “shreddies”. Not pieces of hard bran than takes eons to go soft in a bowl of milk, but characters that are built up in the background before being picked off one by one, usually by some nasty horror.
The “shreddy” is a tool to suggest the main characters is in much peril, while prompting an emotional response from the viewer or reader who are investing their time and feelings into a character who, sometimes unexpectedly, meets a sticky end.

Aliens has its “shreddies”, and the novelisation by Alan Dean Foster manages to develop the “shreddy” into a rounded character not glimpsed briefly as in the film, but offered a “life”. And that’s what I’ve discovered with writing The Burning Sands of Time. But instead of a dozen or so “living shreddies”, the epic nature of the book has delivered around fifty potential characters all doomed to die (often spectacularly), with individual motivations, mannerisms and fates, and so the character list has fallen off the page.

Shreddies and the economy of words

Some writers might argue this is too many, and I suppose it’s because I am sentimental that there are high numbers of “shreddies” in my new book, but I have an excuse…
In the new book, we are following a company of forty monks of the Church through an adventure that is pretty “perilous”. They have to contend with rampaging Egyptian militias, vampyres, dehydration and finally a sect of warrior guardians called the Rassis, who really kick-arse. And like the camaraderie of fighting in a war, or any struggle for that matter, I have become attached to each monk along that journey; I know all their names; their character traits etc. I also know that most will undoubtedly die before the end of the book, and each time one falls I feel their loss.
And that’s not a bad thing, because if I can convey that feeling to the reader, then they’ll feel it too. It does mean that tragedy strikes almost every chapter, sometimes on an individual scale, sometimes on a terrible scale as in the penultimate battle in chapter 23, yet again knowing these forty monks as well as I do, means they’re not killed on a whim, but fall because they were fated to. And they do so with everyone watching.
In other words, they will not be forgotten which I suppose is a point of the book: the idea of sacrifice for a greater cause and what that means.

The only stumbling point with indulging so much time with my much-loved “shreddies” is that there is still a cast of thousands around them who share similar fates, especially during the climatic battle-scenes, and as a writer you don’t want to short-change the “extras” of your story by ignoring their plight. Sometimes conflicts on this scale can be enormous once you throw in the struggles of the main characters, supporting characters, “shreddies” and the extras. And a battle that should have been 4,000 words, becomes a battle that’s 10,000 words, and so on…

So now I’m in that struggle with the “economy of words”, a struggle where I’m not sure who will win…

(…Well, eventually I hope the reader will win and that they aren’t short-changed by any editing that has to be done – I’d rather trim the story with a scalpel than hack at it with a butcher’s cleaver!
After all, when you’re writing a battle scene where hundreds are fighting and dying, every one of them has the right to a good death, don’t they?)