This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the Helping Writers Podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode,

How to Structure Stories with Multiple Main Characters.

One of the most common questions I'm asked is how to structure stories with multiple main characters.

If you have two or more characters who are equally important to the story and receive equal POV time, how should you balance

them when structuring your novel?

At its core, story structure is a simple equation.

One primary actor, the protagonist, moves forward toward a goal through a series of obstacles

that ultimately demand personal transformation of some kind.

Any discussion of structure reveals that plot is necessarily intertwined with character

art.

Indeed, many basic explanations of plot points are in fact less about external forces working

upon the characters and more about how the character is changing from the inside out. Usually these discussions emphasize the protagonist as a singular entity within the story.

And usually this is precisely because the protagonist's character arc is so closely linked to the story's external plot structure.

The single protagonist, in alignment with the plot structure produces elegantly powerful stories.

If we consider the story form as a map of psychological transformation, then it makes sense that it is often at its most

thematically powerful when it is most streamlined and simple. And yet many stories

choose to follow multiple main characters for many different reasons.

For one thing, this complexity more closely mirrors our real life experiences.

But, too, some stories are more about the panorama

than the personal transformation and they require more than one character's

perspective in order to give readers all the necessary information.

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