>>23523570There's a number of ways to do it but one way that I find satisfying is creating a gradient. Chapters establish bonds between characters who then establish bonds with new characters and so on and so forth. The gradient keeps moving forwards with old characters fading into the background as new ones come up and new ones fading away as old ones come back.
You can use a set order to create a flow that makes it easy for the reader to understand what is happening (as well as giving the written world as sense of scale - not everyone knows each other but everyone knows a guy who knows a guy) and in doing so you can occasionally toss a wrench into that order to create contrast or climaxes.
Alternatively you can write in a web form, following strands from nexus to nexus, but this can become confusing - especially early on when the reader has no idea how large the web actually is. This style is more for certain genres I'd say (say, crime or drama.)
