: Re: How do I write and describe a room full of panic? How do I write about a room full of panic? I have searched for the answer but all I get is how to write a panic attack. I am trying

@Karen856

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Part of it depends how "main" the main character is. If it was first person narration or third person which only follows the one character, it might be good to keep the description of the panic to a few odd sounds coming through the bathroom wall, and have the main character emerge and think "what happened here?".

If you already have other points of view, are any significant characters involved in the scene? Pace will be important in a scene like this, but it can also be used to show the significance of other characters. Action films have a way of doing this where the crowd is shown in short snaps of vision while the significant character moves through it all in slow motion.

This can also be done with the written word, using sentence length and structure, and by dropping into the viewpoint of the significant character. For example :

A woman was crying. A man sat on the floor, his head in his hands.
Jane looked for John in the sea of movement but couldn't find him, the
crowd coalescing into one and then separating into flickering moments
of confusion, anger and fear. A chair fell to the floor. A broken
champagne glass lay in a sudden puddle of stillness.

If you're going for a sense of chaos (which I'm guessing you are), switching between short concise clauses and longer sentences will add to this - and incongruous, small and apparently insignificant details are the things people remember from a chaotic scene. While pace is everything, a continuously rapid pace will seem less chaotic than one with variation and contrast.

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