Crowd Management

When your story comes with a troop/gaggle/parliament/school/pride...

Photo by Carissa Weiser on Unsplash

We have so many wonderful words for groups of animals: what is the noun for a gaggle of human-animals?? (Post below!)

In Chuck Palahniuk’s book about writing, he brings up the idea of building a plot around a “club.” (His contribution to this: Fight Club.) There is appeal to this idea. We are all looking for community—or possibly for answers on how to live with community.

Recently, for my book club, we read The Confession Club, by Elizabeth Berg, about a group of women who meet to share confessions, minor and otherwise. While Berg made some effort to delineate one character from another, it was interesting to meet with the group and listen to the confusion over which character said and did what. In spite of Berg’s efforts, some few characters were rather slippery and indifferent to taking hold in our minds!

It’s a challenge to evoke a group of people, or to set a novel or story within a community. It’s as much an issue in writing for young people as adults, and maybe more so, as children tend to spend so many hours of their daily lives in sizable groups: school class-rooms, camp, clubs, sports teams, and more.