This particularly caught my eye: "physical movement and choreography . . . set pieces with lots of characters and action. . . ." A scene in Conrad, a ship foundering at sea; no matter how often I read those pages, I cdnt visualize how the ship lay in the water, how crewmen were moving inside the partly submerged craft. And lots of characters in motion simultaneously within an extensive rugged landscape, how to convey that in words. How to distinguish many characters during a banquet, for example, without resorting to Dickens's "one exaggerated trait per person" (although I love Dickens). I wish that, for the last 50 years, I'd kept notes on passages in which authors succeeded in those really difficult tasks; wd make for a good anthology.
I can't say as I need to picture a ship foundering at sea myself, but yes, once you start looking for it, it's everywhere, some places done well, others badly (as I like to say, most writers can't be good at everything). As for anthology, I'm guessing George Saunders, Matt Bell, and other substackers could/have pulled together a few examples of these sorts of things.
This particularly caught my eye: "physical movement and choreography . . . set pieces with lots of characters and action. . . ." A scene in Conrad, a ship foundering at sea; no matter how often I read those pages, I cdnt visualize how the ship lay in the water, how crewmen were moving inside the partly submerged craft. And lots of characters in motion simultaneously within an extensive rugged landscape, how to convey that in words. How to distinguish many characters during a banquet, for example, without resorting to Dickens's "one exaggerated trait per person" (although I love Dickens). I wish that, for the last 50 years, I'd kept notes on passages in which authors succeeded in those really difficult tasks; wd make for a good anthology.
I can't say as I need to picture a ship foundering at sea myself, but yes, once you start looking for it, it's everywhere, some places done well, others badly (as I like to say, most writers can't be good at everything). As for anthology, I'm guessing George Saunders, Matt Bell, and other substackers could/have pulled together a few examples of these sorts of things.