Choreography

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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