Types of crowd scenes

Right from the start, I’ve tended to write stories that have lots of characters. Everybody seems to have their sisters and their cousins and their aunts…and children, parents, brothers, uncles, and grandparents and friends, all of whom have friends and family of their own. I also often have scenes that involve lots of people, ranging from ten or more people in a meeting or council to events like battles, feasts, large balls or parties, etc. that involve fifty to a hundred or more participants.

Inevitably, this leads to the question of how to deal with all those people and/or make sure that the reader doesn’t forget that there are a lot of people around. But  all those people aren’t there for the same story reasons. I break the differences down to three main types:

1. Places or events that are normally full of people who, as individuals, have little or nothing to do with the story

This covers things like a crowded marketplace, a concert, a parade, a battle, or a giant wedding—anywhere that the characters ought to be surrounded by people they mostly don’t know. The crowd is, essentially, part of the setting. The writer doesn’t need to know exactly how many people are around, who they are, why they’re present, what they’re doing, etc., because those people aren’t going to interact with the characters one-on-one in any story-significant way.

2. Events that require a lot of people who have to participate in or contribute to the scene, but only this once.

This would cover things like a council meeting, a large dinner party, or a jury trial where what’s happening requires ten or more people who have to give opinions, argue with each other and/or the main characters, ask the main character(s) questions, etc. This can get tricky, because the situation usually means that there are a lot of new characters that the reader has to be able to distinguish from each other during this scene, but doesn’t need to remember later on.

3. Events that require a large number of named secondary characters who are of ongoing story-importance, some of whom may already have subplots of their own in process.

This can be just about any kind of scene or event, from a local bar to a tea party to a college campus to a cruise ship, because the focus here is on the large number of story-important characters who are going to be active in the scene. For me, the threshold for calling it a crowd scene is having more than six or seven named characters who are all trying to interact at once.

Writing mass crowd scenes (the #1 sort) looks at first glance as if it’s going to be very difficult, because there are so very many people to keep track of. In actual fact, it’s usually not that bad, because the most important thing about all those people is that they are there. The main characters aren’t having a discussion in an empty white room, or a private duel out in the woods. There are lots of folks around who can see and hear whatever the main character is doing, if they want to pay attention.

So for this sort of scene, the writer needs to be aware of how the battle is going overall, or what kinds of songs or dances come next, but they don’t need to track the motives and specific movements of any individuals other than the main characters and anyone who interacts with them directly. The important thing isn’t that there are three slightly scuzzy-looking men who are looking for someone to mug; it’s that there are three people blocking the escape route when the protagonist has to run for it.

The thing I find difficult about the second sort of scene is deciding when I need to give the councilors or wedding guests or jurors names, even though they are never going to appear again. Conversations and action scenes start to read oddly if an unnamed character has too many lines or actions. Writing “the bald man said” or “the blonde woman leaped” works fine once or twice, but not six or seven times in the same scene. At some point, the bald man needs to become Lee and the blonde woman needs to be Lady Blanche, even if we’re never going to see them again…but naming a character is one of the ways to signal that someone is going to show up again later. So it’s a problem.

The hardest for me, though, is the third sort of scene, the one where there are seven or more already-named, story-important characters trying to talk to each other (or do things) all at the same time. The greater the number of characters who are trying to talk at once, the harder it is for the reader (and the writer!) to keep track of the conversations.

Six or seven characters all taking different actions usually isn’t as tough, because even if the actions overlap in time, they can be described sequentially without losing a sense that they are all happening at once. (George slipped and fell into the river. Ivan ran down the bank after him; Maria sprinted for the life-preserver; Jenny snatched up a long pole; Olaf looked around in confusion.) Conversations are more difficult to show as overlapping while still making sense, especially if there are multiple topics under discussion as well as multiple sub-groups talking at the same time.

What I normally do is to lean heavily on my viewpoint character. When I’m at a dinner party where each end of the table is talking about something different, I can’t listen to both ends at once. I pay attention to one conversation, and then I switch to the other and try to pick up what I missed. So that’s what my viewpoint character does. The bigger the crowd and the more simultaneous conversations are happening at once, the shorter the snippets of any one conversation that my POV can overhear before switching, unless one of the conversations becomes so important that everyone else in the room falls silent in order to listen.