Writing scenes with lots of characters

[shadowscast]

Just a little musing about my writing process, after finishing writing my first Umbrella Academy fic.

This won't be spoilery for The Umbrella Academy, beyond what you'd get from a Season 1 trailer. Also not spoilery for my fic! But I'll cut anyway, just in case.

The Umbrella Academy is an ensemble show. There are at least six main characters (depending on how you count). And in my fic, I had a lot of scenes where they were all present and interacting, along with one or two extra characters at any given time!

Each time I embarked upon one of those scenes, it was a little intimidating. That's a lot of characters to keep track of! I really had to think about how to keep the reader aware of who was in the room and what they were up to, without getting too bogged down.

But then I discovered that writing conversations with seven or eight characters involved was fun and easy! Very often all I had to do was think of what I wanted the next line to be, and then search through the characters for who'd be the most likely to say it. The scene would practically write itself! (Except sometimes I'd realize that Klaus would be the only one who might say the line, but that he couldn't because he was currently high/sedated/unconscious. Because Klaus. Oh well!)

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

This made me think back to Buffy since it also has a large cast of characters. But it occurs to me that most of your stories only involved a subset of that characters and not always all at once either. Whereas the point of your UA story was exactly to get them all together and talking.

[shadowscast]

But it occurs to me that most of your stories only involved a subset of that characters and not always all at once either.

Yes, true. But actually I think the two biggest exceptions to that trend are also my two most recent Buffyverse works: in Thanksgiving with the Burkles, 2019 (from 2019) pretty much the whole point of the story was getting all of the surviving BtVS and AtS alumni together for Thanksgiving dinner, and in Gently Down The Stream (from 2014—my second-most-recent Buffyverse work, because there was a long gap!) I also had quite a few scenes where somewhere between 7 to 10 characters sat down together to try to figure stuff out.

So maybe the conclusion is that I've been getting more interested in ensemble stories as time goes on?

My Once A Thief stories could never have that many characters, because there aren't that many characters in the 'verse!

[avrelia]

it's interesting. I usually have no problem get characters to talk in my head, and even in a large group I know who says what - but what is more complicated for me is to let my readers know that, and what is going on when they are talking, to set the scene.

[shadowscast]

but what is more complicated for me is to let my readers know that, and what is going on when they are talking, to set the scene

Right, it's that balance—giving enough details so that the reader has a sense of the physical context of the conversation (not just a bunch of characters floating in blank space*), while not bogging down the pace of the conversation.

(* Of course in many of our favourite fandoms, the characters could potentially be floating in blank space on occasion!)