C Programmers Help !

[anvir]

Alright, here's the beef. I'm basically writing a program for a PIC18 microcontroller. There's just one problem, my main asm file, it compiles C into assembly and then turns it into bytecode, is too big to be loaded into memory. So I'm getting compiler errors telling me the section is too long. It's not a very high end microcontroller, but I'm still pretty surprised I hit its limit so fast.
My program has a copious amount of char arrays, size 17. I did some removal of the parts of the program concerning the char arrays. I then declared them before the main method. It didn't compile. When I removed them, it compiled.
I was thinking of splitting up some of the methods into another file. How do I do that ? How do I access said external methods from the class file containing the main method.
Alternatively, a simple way to fix this would be to tell me a way to store some char arrays in another file. I would also need to know how to access them using the main method file.
I was schooled in Java, so I'm not sure how to go about doing this in C. Normally I would make a constructor for an object in that external file. Make that keep all the arrays. Then use dot operators to access the variables I want from the new object.
I'm quite sure I surpassed the maximum size for one such C file. The microcontroller will definitely accept more C files, it has 2 MBs of program space.