At Jane Friedman’s blog: Moving Characters Around in Your Story Space: Improve Your Choreography Skills
And OMG have I mentioned I’m doing a series of chapters where almost everyone is in the same location? Wow, do I remember why I sent everyone off in different directions in the first place. SO MANY CHRACTERS. And everyone who is in a scene HAS TO ACTUALLY BE THERE. Talk about choreography! I just hate crowd scenes! Maybe for my next project I will write a whole novel where only one character is on screen for 90% of the novel. Oh, yes, and of course this one too.
I always admire that when someone pulls off a just-one-character novel, but the fact is, right now I’m thinking that having just one character in a novel would be SO MUCH EASIER.
Anyway:
What do they do? Where are they and why? Which direction are they looking? Where do they move to? How big is the space?
When you start thinking about those things, it’s easy to tear your hair out about how many ways you can say “looking” or “walking.” But the words themselves are often secondary. What matters is the picture you paint in the reader’s mind so they can be in that space with your characters without distractions. They don’t have to see it exactly as you do, they just have to see it enough for it to make sense.
And a character’s movements and gestures in that space similarly must convey enough without becoming too detailed. At the same time, to create that magical sensation, your characters (or you, in memoir) have to bring their whole selves to the spaces they inhabit and occupy them realistically.
That result depends on making good decisions about what to leave out as much as what to put in. It’s a delicate balance that can be hard to achieve.
Yes to all this. Then the linked post presents a scene and revises the scene, looking for the happy medium where the characters are in the space and readers can see them there well enough, but without describing every flower on the wallpaper or whatever.
For a crowd scene in particular, I constantly have to
–Check to see if specific characters have disappeared and if so, keep them in the scene.
–Make sure the characters occupy space relative to each other and relative to their surroundings.
–Not let reader notice that any of the above is difficult.
AARGH yeah, well, at least the epilogue of Silver Circle, though crowded, will be fine. Even though a lot of the epilogue will take place in a crowded venue, the epilogue will nevertheless consist of, basically, a series of vignettes, each with just two or at most a few
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I reduced a council-type scene from seven characters to five by giving lines from Characters #6 and #7 to others, and they even fit them better! But of course they were sitting around a table so the only choreography was when someone stood up and banged on the table to make their point.
And yes, “not let reader notice that any of the above is difficult” is essential.
I think some of my favorite scenes are ‘choreography’- mostly bc you are so great at describing nature and animals. You make the horses seem so lifelike, and that in turn makes the scene seem so real, at least in Ryo’s world.
Irina, argh, crowd scenes make me want to just shoot half the characters right there simply to thin them out!
Alison, I always kinda wanted to own horses. I never have and never will, but they’re as real to me as the human characters!
Character choreography is the WORST. Sometimes I envy screenwriters and playwrights because they can get away with 95% dialogue and a few lines for setting-the-scene (INT: NIGHT, Seedy bar, with a few aging barflies slumped over their beers). Add in the occasional instruction like “He puts a pint on the bar.” and you’re gold.
That’s one thing Jennifer Crusie used to manage brilliantly in her solo novels. The big scene in Faking It feels like clowns spilling out of a tiny car, there are so many people in one place at one time, but she juggles all the different voices without dropping a single one.
Evelyn, I totally agree. I think Crusie is about the best I have ever seen when it comes to handling crowd scenes.
In large gatherings people tend to break up into smaller groups, with individuals moving from group to group. Parties, balls, funerals, receptions, all follow the same basic dynamic. So everyone is in the same space, but there is a built-in mechanic to make the interactions manageable. On reflection, it’s not all that common to have large groups of people where many people are simultaneously interacting. Councils or board meetings or things like that leap to mind. But I think there is a human tendency to break into smaller groups.
Allan, I agree, and I have one council scene which is especially difficult. But besides that, if you have a lot of people doing something or going somewhere, then the reader has to be able to tell they’re there at the beginning, there during whatever action occurs, and still there at the end of the scene. This is really annoying.
That’s a great point. The gathering can be divided into smaller groups, but you, the author, must still set the context for POVs moving between the groups, and that can be … a lot.