As the title says, I am having trouble describing a group standing around 3/4ths of a rectangle. This is what I have written The students stood along the sides and far side of the stage, creating a wide U-shape facing the door.
I am sort of imaging something like this:
Is there a better way to phrase/describe this?
Leave out the bits that don’t add anything. If it’s already established that the stage is rectangular, there is no need to mention the ‘U’ shape as that is inevitable if the are lining the edges of the stage.
The students arranged themselves around three edges of the stage, facing the door.
You could add information about what manner they did this in
With an eerie, silent smoothness the students took their places around three sides of the stage, facing the door, moving like slowly waltzing somnambulists.
I can think of some better ways to phrase this. One idea might be: "The students stood on all but one edge of the stage in a U-shape so that all of them could face the door." You could also say: "The students stood in a U-shape, lined up on all the stage's edges except for the outer edge, all the students facing the door."
A good way to do descriptions like these is by making sure that you separate different details with commas so that it's not all one confusing block. It is also important to add word variety to your descriptions because it also helps differentiate details.
One note I will make about your original idea for phrasing is that saying "the students stood along the sides and far side of the stage" is confusing. The far side counts as one of the sides, right? That's why in my descriptions I used the word "edge." It's easier to describe the different edges of a stage than different sides of a rectangle because the word "sides" can be confusing in certain contexts (when you talk about the sides of a stage, I immediately think left and right, not left, right, front, and back).
I would go with something like "the students surrounded the stage, forming one long wall of bodies", or "with the precision of a military drill, the students took their places on the rim of the stage. The deviation from one student to the next could not be measured for lack of a unit small enough; so there they stood, noiseless and alert and unsettling in their complete uniformity."
I think it's a mistake to focus too heavily on the geometry of the setup, by which I mean the fact that three and not four edges of the stage have students on them. I for one think such writing exhibits more "tell" than "show"; if such details are truly important to the story, then it shouldn't be too hard to show them via characters' actions. Perhaps somebody on the stage feels creeped out by these students (understandable really), and in casting their gaze about for any sign of relief, their eyes alight on the only gap in the fleshwall...
It probably won't help you directly when writing in English, but I'll just mention that you'll find this very easy to express this in Hebrew (maybe for a future translation). The Hebrew letter ח (Chet), which has this exact shape, is very commonly used to denote this popular formation for standing at attention in the military or during a ceremony. In Israel, pretty much anyone would understand the short sentence "לעמוד בח", translated as "Stand in [the shape of] Chet".
How about:
The students encircled the stage on all sides except one, leaving a noticeable gap in the perimeter closest to the door.
