Lilith Saintcrow

Before we get started on Friday’s writing post, a small bit of book pimpage: Rachel Caine’s Gale Force has just been released! Go Rachel! *cheers, pumps fist*

And now, for zee fussing and zee fighting. That’s right, this week my subject is…combat scenes. I get a lot of people asking me about writing them. What advice I can give is probably not very helpful, since I don’t know any more about them than the next writer. But here, let’s give it a whack.

Heh.

Have you ever been punched? Really punched by someone who intends to do you harm? I’m not saying you should go out and pick a fight, but the number one trouble I see with so-so combat scenes is that they don’t hurt enough. You can tell the author has never been held down, or sucker-punched, or survived the explosion of chaos that is a barfight. Getting hit hurts, and characters who can take a lot of punishment need to acknowledge that hurt. (This is right up with the disappearing bruises and wounds–if your character heals fast, there needs to be some tradeoff, and there needs to be a REASON for them to heal quickly.)

I’m not saying you should go out and get yourself hit in the face. A little bit of self-defense training might help, if you get padding put on and have your instructor belt you a bit. But you have to get it through your head that getting hit is serious business. It hurts like hell, especially if someone means it. A combat scene isn’t a happy cupcake party where people drink tea. It’s serious business.

The next order of business is weapons. Have you ever held a sword, listened to the sound it makes as it clears the sheath? Ever fired a gun? If you live in the US, there’s ranges everywhere where you can get elementary lessons in gun safety and learn what it’s like to fire one.

I grew up with weapons around the house, and my grandfather gave me the best three rules of dealing with firearms:

1. Always treat a gun as if it’s loaded.
2. Do not point a gun at anything you don’t fully intend to kill.
3. See #1. See #1. And see #1 again.

Firing a gun at the range and getting some gun safety training will give any combat scene new seriousness and depth. One really doesn’t appreciate the fact that these things are made only for killing until one sees them in action.

My husband has been practicing kendo for over three decades, so we do have katanas around the house. I took a dress-metal katana out into the field behind our house once, while it was still a field full of haystacks and not an apartment complex. A few minutes of hacking at a haystack with just a dress-metal blade gave me a healthy respect for just what a length of killing metal can do.

In case you haven’t noticed, I do advocate healthy research. If you don’t want to get bloody (which, mind you, shows intelligence), you should still try to get someone to check your work. It’s like a virgin writing sex scenes–sometimes you really should get someone, erm, experienced to check it over for you. There’s a certain amount of body-knowledge necessary to write about these things, I think. Note that I am not saying you should go out and pick fights or get shot at. There’s suffering for your art, and then there’s being an idiot. I advocate the former within (tongue-in-cheek) reason and the latter (seriously) not at all.

But that’s not really what we’re here for, is it. Let’s take a look at the mechanics of writing a combat scene. It’s time for a Bulleted List.

* Pay attention to pacing. Longer sentences/clauses slow a Reader down. Shorter sentences/clauses speed the Reader up. Run-ons can be use to speed a Reader up, but only if used with caution and care. (You have no idea how many run-ons my editors have killed.)

In the zero draft this doesn’t matter quite so much, but when you revise to a first draft you need to be consciously thinking of how quickly you want the Reader to go through the combat scene. If there’s a Plot Point, you need to slow down just a tad, if this is meant as pure action, be sure to cut any unnecessary weight. This is, like so many things in writing, a balancing act, it gets easier with practice.

* Watch your adjectives. We don’t have a lot of words for either pain or pleasure in the English language (compared to some others), so adjectives are our best friends–and worst enemies too. Simile and metaphor (mostly the former) are in the same boat as adjective. In draft zero, I tend to be very lean; first draft I have to add all three; second draft I have to go through and step on the head of any overly-repeated adjective, simile, metaphor. The beta reader also has to fumigate for them. Ah, well, that’s what writing is about–finding le mot juste instead of just le mot whatever.

* Does this action DO anything? Yeah, fight scenes are cool. I could write ‘em all day. But the are in the end just SCENES, and must obey the same law as other SCENES–i.e., moving the story along. Think about what the fight is meant to convey. Is it meant to underscore the hero/ine living in a dangerous world? How does it move the plot along? Does it give characterization in showing how character/s react to disaster? A combat scene must pull several pounds of weight at once within the story arc, or it’s just dead tissue. Pretty dead tissue, and dead tissue you may be attached to, but dead nonetheless and bound to start stinking unless excised.

Ugh. I just grossed myself out there.

* Seduction, Act, Crisis, Release. Yes, combat scenes are like sex scenes, mini-arcs within the greater arc of the story. They must leave the Reader feeling satisfied–unless you consciously wish the Reader to be unsatisfied for greater dramatic tension, something you should handle with care. IF your characters have a good enough relationship with the Reader, THEN you might be able to pull off the, ahem, coitus or combatus interruptus. If they don’t, the Reader will be left feeling…unsatisfied. And that can cause all types of problems.

The fight scene needs to initiate, build, explode, and release tension. If you don’t know whether your fight scene does, deconstruct it on a big sheet of paper. Draw the arc, and then mark each part of the fight scene according to where it goes on the arc. You may find the scene is lopsided–and now you know where to fix it.

* Movies! Great fight scenes in movies are a writer’s friend. Go ahead and watch Kill Bill; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; the Matrix trilogy; old kung-fu movies; Jet Li movies; anything you like. Notice the “stylized” and implied violence in older movies, look for “realistic” fight scenes, think about the stylization of current movie fight scenes. Learning to think about angle, composition, and running time of a stage or movie fight will help you put a combat scene on paper.

Of course, there is the risk of your combat scenes becoming sanitized, since movie fights tend to be overwhelmingly surreal and unreal. Which is why the next thing is so important.

* Bloody ‘em up. This is not a tea party. This is a fight. Someone is at risk of getting hurt or killed. There’s got to be a damn good reason for the fight, but if there isn’t, there needs to be a damn good reason why the character gets entangled in it. And nobody gets out of a fight unscathed. There is ALWAYS a cost, whether it’s sore muscles, split skin over knuckles, or a gunshot wound. Get used to thinking about the cost of physical, violent activity. It hurts to get into a fight, it hurts in a fight (though when adrenaline is pumping you don’t feel it) and it really, really fricking hurts the morning after a fight. People get hurt. They get bruised, cut–a head wound bleeds a lot and is messy, a punch to the gut hurts and steals all your air, getting hit in the eye stings like hell and then your eye starts puffing closed, cutting down on your vision.

It ain’t fun. A fight without cost is like a magical system without cost–something to be abhorred in fiction. This doesn’t mean there can’t be macabre humor in a fight, or that funny things can’t happen. But a fight without bloodshed really doesn’t happen in the real world.

* A little realism goes a long way. Yes, it’s fiction. Yes, there are times when you want to break real-world rules to accomplish a particular goal in fiction. Be careful what rules you break, what reasons you give for breaking them, and make sure you know the real-world rules before you break them.

* Sensory acuity. You notice the damndest things in a fight. Part of the adrenaline jolt is hyper-acuity–the world looks very, very strange. Stop the action in your head–think of it like a still-scene in a movie. Put it on pause and really take a look at what’s going on. Where is the fight taking place? You should be able to pan around the scene in your head, back it up, look closer, pan out. A little bit of practice in visualization will go a long, long way for you here. Most writers are very good at visualization. If you’re not–if you’re not seeing the fight scene in your head–don’t worry. This is a skill that can, to a large degree, be learned. (But that’s another blog post.) Think of it like the movie to your book, and just practice seeing it in your head.

* This makes you tired. The number-one response to combat is wanting to go sleep. (After, of course, one works through the adrenaline and the adrenaline crash. After a fight, people want to: run; do a play by play; get laid; and sleep.) After soldiers make it through a battle they want to lie down and rest. The sleep makes everything dreamlike, which can be a psychological saving/distancing mechanism. I’ve seen this after streetfights and barfights too, and experienced it. Even after that horrid car crash I was in three Decembers ago–I got home, folded laundry (while still on the adrenaline kick) and then collapsed in bed. When I woke up, I ached in places I didn’t even know I had, a familiar feeling from a lot of my misspent youth.

* Pick every word with care. It takes a small amount of time to read a great combat scene. It takes ten to a hundred times as long to write one. A great deal of work goes into something that will pull the Reader along in a short time. You need to pick through it with a fine-tooth comb, get rid of passivity (watch those helping verbs!) and “that”s, look for dead weight anywhere. Lean and mean is the way to do a fight scene–you can always, always add more later if your editor or beta needs you to. Easier to add than to trim, my dears.

Last but not least, I keep saying it until I’m blue in the face, make it dangerous. Bloody your characters. If the plot is worth them getting in a fight over, it’s worth getting hurt over. Beat them up. Make them work for it. Unless there is risk and cost, the Reader’s heart will not leap into the Reader’s mouth with fear for your fair hero/ine. That heart-in-mouth is what you want. Don’t hesitate to put your character in harm’s way. That’s what great story is about. Or at least, what great combat scenes are about.

Go forth and bloody up some characters, dear Fellow Writer.

Over and out.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Neato Keano, Writing (About). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.