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.
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.