One of the things I hate writing the most is what I refer to as “council scenes.”
These are the scenes that involve a bunch of characters who are trying to solve a problem (or series of problems) by talking them to death, rather than bashing something or setting it on fire. “Council scenes” are not necessarily actual council meetings; courts, interrogations, classes, tea parties, and mass panics can all count, as long as there are six or more characters all discussing something. Usually, I want the characters to come to a particular decision, make a specific discovery, or come up with some plot-relevant insight.
Frequently, half or more of the people present are characters who are showing up in the story for the first time, and who will never be seen again in this book. This means that I don’t already know what they’re like (and my main characters usually don’t, either), they probably won’t show up again in this story, and yet I have to make them up enough to give them distinct voices and personalities (i.e., they still have to be characters rather than cardboard cutouts mouthing the lines for Councilors #7 through 12).
This is a pain.
The most annoying thing, for me, about a crowd of characters who I don’t know, but am going to have to make up, is that I know from experience that at least one of them is going to be utterly fascinating, with the possibility of opening up fascinating new plot jungles and revealing hitherto unknown and unusually creative aspects of the world and culture … and that character is only going to be in the story for this one scene, so all those lovely, intriguing complications won’t be able to happen (at least in this story).
The second most annoying thing is trying to keep the conversation on track, so that it goes where I want it to go in this scene, instead of veering off on a series of irrelevant tangents for thirty pages. It is particularly tricky because, a) in my experience, any meeting involving more than three people (and many of them with only two) always goes off on a series of irrelevant tangents at some point, meaning that allowing some tangents is necessary if I want to keep things realistic, b) every so often, one of them turns out to be relevant, but I usually can’t predict which ones I’m going to want to keep or expand.
Making up a raft of new characters got a bit easier when I finally realized that they didn’t have to be well-rounded in any deep sense; they just had to sound as if they were for a couple of pages. I could have George grumble to Linda about “what that boy of yours did last night” without knowing anything more about what happened last night. George and Linda weren’t coming back next chapter; whatever Linda’s boy did, it’s part of her story (and, apparently, George’s). It isn’t relevant to my characters except insofar as it indicates that George and Linda know each other and have some kind of ongoing relationship (antagonistic, romantic, or merely as longsuffering neighbors would depend on how Linda responds to George’s comment).
The other thing that helped was deciding to handle the new characters “by the numbers.” If my characters have just arrived at court for the first time, how many people are present? How much does this society mix ages, classes, ethnicities, etc., and how do I reflect that in the mix of new characters? If the King’s Council consists of eight middle-aged human noblemen, I’m giving a very different picture from the one that contains elves, hobbits, dwarves, and humans in a mix of genders and professions, and nobody has opened their mouth to say anything yet.
Which brings me to the other part: chairing the meeting. My council scenes have never depended on Robert’s Rules of Order, but there is always a character who is, officially or unofficially, The Person In Charge. They’re the one whose job it is to be sensible and get things back on track when everybody else starts off on a tangent, just like in real life. Sometimes, they’re not actually in charge at all; they’re simply stubborn about repeatedly saying “I’m as interested in gossiping about what’s going on between Arwen and Aragorn as the next hobbit, but weren’t we supposed to be deciding what to do with this Ring?” If none of my current central characters has a suitable personality for that, I’ll assign the job to one of the newcomers who doesn’t have a personality yet.
Ultimately, though, I am the chairperson, responsible for getting this discussion to whatever end I want it to get to. As with a real life meeting, this frequently means being ruthless about cutting characters off when they start drifting, even if I’m interested in what they’re saying. It means not getting so wrapped up in writing clever dialogue that I lose track of where things are going. And it means the occasional (or frequent, depending on the characters) use of the delete key. Being ruthless about tangents is a superpower. (Though actually, what I do is cut them out of the main section and stick them in a “deleted bits” file, in case I turn out to need them later.)
“So, what happened in the council meeting?”
Well, it’s one approach! 😉
As you know, Pat, I’ve struggled with this. A lot.
Two things have helped me:
The first was the insight that not everybody needs to have the same amount of screentime. Not even when they’re all important characters for the story. It’s perfectly fine to have three main characters hash things out, with the other five saying a couple of things here and there, or for one character to steal the limelight for a while, then lean back and listen for the rest of the scene. My attempts to have everyone weigh in on every question was not productive.
The other point is that I am now mapping out council scenes. Eight people sit around a table? Who can my character see, whisper to, kick their shin or step on their foot? If they want to talk directly to the person three seats down, can they do that without leaning across their neighbour, and do they know them well enough to do that?
Suddenly even relatively static council scenes (nobody gets stabbed) become much more dynamic, and instead of shrugging and nodding, I now have much more specific stage directions.
I’m trying to remember any scene I’ve ever done that had six or more characters in it. Where character > mobile set dressing, that is. I made it to five once… it was a fight scene. Or, really two separate fight scenes going on at the same time in the same place.
This may be an advantage to my tendency to write loner characters. They may not have anyone to conveniently explain info to, but at least I don’t have to write six of them talking at once.
(The “deleted bits” file is a godsend, in so many ways.)
I also have never had to write anything resembling a council meeting. Most of my group scenes, because of the cultures they took place in, have involved one or two people of high rank (hereditary, ecclesiastical, or military) telling the rest of the assembly what was going on and what they were going to do about it.
I did write a rather contentious PTA meeting once, but Robert’s Rules of Order prevailed.
A work in progress has council meetings, but fortunately only with people who have already been introduced. (It’s a thick novel with several important subplots.)
I’ve mentioned before that my characters are often couples, so a meeting between three or four “characters” of them will often turn into a council meeting of six to eight people.
I don’t normally have problems with new, one-scene characters running off to open up plot and setting jungles. What I have big problems with is trying to keep the conversation on track instead of veering off on a series of irrelevant tangents. I don’t just have that problem with larger-group “council” scenes, but also in conversations with four or three or sometimes even just two people talking.
The idea of an informal chairperson makes me go “hmmm” since I haven’t been using it. The trouble is that none of my potential chairpeople have any sense of loyalty or duty to the Plot – they’ll cheerfully allow the conversation to get completely sidetracked, with it never coming back to the plot-relevant point.
I’d say it’s more important (at least for me) to have an informal – but known to the characters – agenda. (“What is this little ring, really? Is it really THE Ring? And if so, what should we do about it?”) My biggest problems arise when I want to have a casual, tangent-following conversation steered into just happening to produce plot-important information, bringing the previously-ignorant characters (and the reader) up to speed.
The people in the room may be talking about anything and everything, but the PoV character does not have to pay attention and report it. Sometimes, a compromise seems the best way forward:
“… ring. We should definitely go to Mordor–”
At that point, the discussion deteriorated into necessary provisions and how to best make one’s pack waterproof. Three of the elves hotly debated lembas recipes and when to mix in the milk until Gandalf intervened. “And so we should,” he said
I’m assuming that of the hour or so that a council scene will take at a minimum, most of what is said is irrelevant. Equally, I assume that if the writer reports it, it has some importance. There are times when I, as writer, need to know everything that happened, but in the next pass, I can decide what’s important enough to be carried forward.