Merilsell wrote...
soignee wrote...
Aaaaaaaaand so on. It's hard to juggle so many voices and it not sound condescending to the reader, but at the same time not confuse them. I'm still not sure if I need that many people speaking, but it's how it is in my head and I write it so. What do you all think, when is too many people in a scene too many?
I'm still learning, I'm just a fanficcing hack. =/
Same here. I'm currently in the Deep Roads with seven people and I'm really glad when I'm able to focus on only three or four people doing...stuff. But then again I seize a lot of my dialogue for character/relationship development, which means it involves a lot of body language and so on. .I try to reduce the he/she said things to a needed minimum but mostly end up describing it in another way. Sigh. Wordy is my middle name, it seems.
I really try and avoid having conversations that involve more than three or four people. And if it's more than that I'll usually have one as a mostly-silent observer. I just think it's rare for that many people to be involved in a single discussion unless it's, say, a meeting (in which case it isn't really discussion, per se, it's more a series of short speeches.)
I honestly can't think of any time I've had an actual conversation with half a dozen people at once- it seems like any group that large will naturally break into smaller subgroups where the conversations might overlap, but it isn't one unified discussion. Especially since most of my conversations are set either while everyone is walking- and walking that clustered together would just end with someone on their ass, or around the fire- in which case you end up with some people too far away to hear other people, etc.
Plus, if you have more than two or three you need to start using proper names instead of generic pronouns and it gets a bit clunky. In something using all game characters you can get away with more since everyone has a clear idea of what they look like, and use physical clues. IE instead of 'leliana said' to distinguish her from another woman, you can aways use 'she said, tucking a strand of red hair behind her ear,' or 'came the response, her golden eyes flashing in anger' or whatever. Since we all know Leliana has red hair and Morrigan has gold eyes, that works. But, the game itself is a visual medium.
I've got a ton of original characters in AOA, though, and probably more than a dozen who might get major time. And while I know exactly what they all look and sound like and how old they are, I can't expect any reader to remember Tobias is a blonde because I made an oblique reference to it it once like thirty chapters ago. So, that sort of thing wouldn't really work.
There's also the option of having one character call the other by name in conversation. Maggie does that a lot. But it's actually kind of a quirk with her, sort of an exaggerated reaction to how dehumanizing she found it when some of the templars would just call her "mage." (Although now that I say that, I'm thinking I might have taken out the bit where that got explained... Oh well.)
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