“Some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time”
Did you ever see the moment when individual people poured into a city street, channelled by houses and parked cars and city intersections, tributaries flowing in from side streets, fallling into step with other people and joining in, then suddenly changing, re-forming, giving voice to something that has a thousand hearts but no conscious mind, the metamorphosis of a handful of people into a crowd… and then into a mob?
I have. It’s frightening. Human beings who lose their humanity and turn into a multi-headed hydra monster capable of most anything, with human conscience silenced and hidden away and even the memory of things done under such hypnotic mass action often blurred and changed and twisted and buried afterwards. People who turn into nothing more than a voice, a roar, a fury, a release of chaos and a desire to burn and destroy and find something, somebody, to be a target for their anger.
Mobs – the blurred beast of many faces, the roar of a thousand throats that changes from a human voice, a human shout, to the thunder of a wounded lion-god about to exact its vengeance for its spilled blood.
I’ve looked at crowds that way.
Did you ever find yourself at a crowded picnic on, say, the Fourth of July, or a packed crowd on New Year’s Eve somewhere like Times Square or Trafalgar Square, or part of a jubilant heaving mass of people at a victory parade throwing confetti at heroes and ready to kiss a stranger walking by out of sheer overflow of joy? At Obama’s election night rally in Chicago?
The kind of gathering where two people who do not know one another might catch each other’s eye and nod and smile, and hug for no reason, and squeal with joy and sheer enjoyment at some spectacle or at the prospect of some person’s advancement or victory, and share something that is a visceral happiness, something wordless and yet utterly and instantly communicated by a quick grin, or a thumbs-up, or the waving of a flag?
I’ve looked at crowds that way.
Did you ever watch a realistic movie depiction of a battlefield? The kind where people scream and clash and fall and are trampled in the mud and the blood – the ring of steel on steel, the stench of powder and the smell of human sweat, human blood, human fear? The utter chaos of the melee, or the complete waste of charging from trenches into the mouth of enemy machine guns? The scream of dying horses? The hiss of arrows, or the whine of bullets flying past? The panicked rout of the side which is losing?
I’ve looked at crowds that way.
Have you ever looked at a crowd through the eyes of a single character in a story – sometimes not seeing the crowd at all, just seeing the reaction on a single person’s face to something that he is watching? Can anyone remember the expression on the face of Dr Zhivago as he watches the slaughter of the protesters in the square from his balcony, appalled, helpless, unable to do anything at all but bear witness…?
Because that is what you are, as the writer. The one who bears witness.
It was Stalin who said that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. This is true, and there is no way that you as a writer can adequately convey the magnitude of a massacre, or of a genocide. But somewhere in those million deaths which are a statistic there are a handful of characters whose deaths are your tragedy, and they exemplify your statistic, they make your statistic horrible in a way that you could never do if you simply tried to go global in your description.
We are individuals. We connect to individuals. Newbie actors or public speakers are often told that to combat stage fright they should find a single friendly face in an audience and speak as though addressing that person alone. We seek out other individuals whose stories we can share – stories that are part of some greater whole, but which are easier to grasp, to understand, to hear, to mourn, to condemn or to reward. The key to writing a main protagonist’s interaction with any kind of crowd is picking a few key players in that crowd and making the entire crowd matter because THESE people matter.
It’s the trick of concentrating on some of the people, all of the time – when you aren’t talking about all of the people some of the time.
Even that mob of which I spoke, the single-minded avatar of destruction which flows like lava and is just as unstoppable – even that has individual components. Your protagonist might be caught up in the mob or watching them from the safety of a second-floor window but even while understanding the immensity of this new monster which is many-people-at-once there will be a face here, a rolling eye there, a raised fist somewhere else, that will catch the eye – that will exemplify, bring into clarity and focus, the things that the mob stands for, has gathered for.
Often it’s a few exchanged words that will help. Not necessarily with a full-fledged or even named secondary character. Just somebody – somebody in a crowd, someone whose voice, for just a moment, is heard saying something individual and focused, something that the protagonist might hear, be listening for, or may nearly miss because of all the other things going on but which is utterly important anyway.
If it were possible to take a photo with both a fish-eye lens and a telephoto lens at once, this might be what you are aiming for with a protagonist interacting with groups or crowds. You take a fish-eye photo, giving the big picture, giving the global overview, giving a sense of numbers and of mood and of the chaos inherent in any gathering of human beings – and yet you are also looking straight through that wide angle shot and seeing an individual face here and there, focusing on a twist of the lip, a gleam in the eye, a gesture of the hand, the way the light falls on an upturned face, the sound of a single word.
Have you ever looked at the crowds that surround your protagonist? They are many. They are one. It doesn’t matter whose the single voice is when you need one from out of the mutltitude. Just make sure there IS one.
Watch out for the POV. You cannot know the thoughts of a thousand people. Your protagonist can never quite completely comprehend the things that swirl around him or her out in the world. Part of the story you are telling consists of the misapprehensions and misunderstandings between human beings – and the more of them there are, the more misunderstandings are possible, even probable. But you cannot speak with a thousand voices at once – because then you pass from misunderstanding to incoherence.
Think of it in terms of the song (paraphrased):
“I’ve looked at crowds from both sides now
from pain and joy
and still somehow
it’s crowds’ individuals I recall
I really don’t know why
At all…”
