Crowds vs. Councils

It’s here! The Dark Lord’s Daughter is officially out. I’m excited and anxious and hopeful and lots of other things, which will probably last a couple of weeks until I have some idea how it’s doing.

Meantime, I have a blog post to give you. This week I decided to talk about the difference between crowd scenes and council scenes, because I’ve run across a couple of people who make problems for themselves by confusing the two.

The way I separate them in my head, a crowd scene is one that has a lot of people present, but most of them are not going to have real dialog. Occasionally, one will say, “How much are the pears?” or “Your tuba is flat” or yell some slogans, or murmur something indecipherable to some other person, depending on why the crowd is there (marketplace, concert/marching band, loud political rally, any group where people don’t want to be caught gossiping/plotting), but what they say is mostly generic overheard-in-a-crowd stuff that probably isn’t part of an actual conversation with any of the main characters. In short, crowd scenes are crowds of spear-carriers or walk-ons, with maybe a couple of minor characters so that it doesn’t seem as if everybody else is just wallpaper.

“Council scene” is my shorthand for any scene that has more than about five characters in it who all need to talk to one another. They don’t always involve an official council, or even a conference; sometimes, they’re a tea party or a Thanksgiving dinner with the entire contentious extended family, or a classroom full of kids, or just all sixteen of the major characters showing up at the same place and time to cause problems for each other. The key is that they are all characters with speaking parts that are important to each other, to the protagonist, and to various aspects of plots and subplots.

In a crowd scene, the important thing is remembering that the action is taking place in a crowd, which should affect how the main character(s) behave in the scene and what they talk about. (Planning a kidnapping while eating in a crowded restaurant where the people at all the surrounding tables can overhear you is not a smart move.) The characters who are at the center of the scene are usually aware that there are a lot of people around, but the reader only knows if the writer mentions it.

For a crowd scene, the writer doesn’t need to map out the movements, dialog, and personality of the twenty or forty or two hundred people who are milling around or sitting in the bleachers. The crowd is made up of a bunch of individuals, but they are individuals who are not important to this particular story. They’re movable parts of the setting. “Crowd” is a collective noun; it encompasses a bunch of people, who, yes, are individuals, but when they’re in a crowd, they’re just part of the crowd.

And as with setting, the most important things about the crowd are 1) what kinds of things would people in this kind of crowd be doing—shopping, mumbling job interview responses under their breath, tuning instruments, chanting slogans and waving signs—and which of those things would the POV character notice and have a minor reaction to that would remind readers that all those people are there; 2) what makes this crowd different from the ones the reader might expect to see in a similar situation; 3) what makes the crowd different from ones the viewpoint character expects to see (i.e., what “odd things” does the POV notice); and 4) what minor details in dress, actions, or unimportant overheard dialog would give the reader a better idea of what the world or culture(s) are like.

“Council scenes” are more complicated, because what everyone says and does is plot-and-character-relevant. If you have more than about five people, a conversation in which each person takes a turn saying something, one after another, is not going to read naturally, and is really only realistic if there are rules in place that require everyone to take turns, in order. Trying to follow the natural flow of dialog often, in my experience, ends up with a couple of characters doing all the talking and everyone else fading into the background, until suddenly someone else speaks up and the beta readers all go “where did he come from?” There’s also the matter of where everyone is, whether they’re seated or standing or hiding behind a bookshelf, and whether they move around, if there’s enough room.

The trick to doing a council scene is making sure that every character does enough that the reader remembers who’s present. I usually have to do it in layers—I write the conversation without worrying about who says what when, and then I go back through it to make sure that nobody has disappeared into the background while everyone else is talking. If the vanishing characters have nothing to say except for that one critical line, I try to at least have them react to what the others are saying, so that the reader remembers they’re there. If they don’t say or do anything, I try to cut them out of the scene, or mention that they spent the whole discussion quietly reading a book in the corner.

The other thing that works for me is splitting up a massive conversation into a bunch of mini-conversations and reactions. George and Michal each have a line complaining about the tickets; Maria rolls her eyes at them; Janet tells Maria to behave and they snark at each other for another two lines; Reg tries to get the conversation back on track by asking George a question, which Michal jumps in to answer; Janet corrects Michal and they have two lines of snark; and so on. It’s a bit chaotic, but the more characters I have in a scene, the more useful I find the technique. I just have to check every so often to make sure nobody has disappeared.