There were a number of things that struck me in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (which I only got around to reading just last month — yeah, I’m behind the curve), but that line had particular resonance. It’s Peeta, Katniss’ fellow tribute, talking to their mentor Haymitch — and the topic is Katniss.

The effect she can have.

The narrative tells us (and shows us) repeatedly that Katniss is not conventionally likeable. She can’t relax for the camera or play nice in the ways girls are expected to. But when Katniss is allowed to be herself . . . .

How many of you have played Dragon Age 2? (This isn’t as much of a non sequitur as it sounds like.) For those who haven’t: the game has an unusual structure, stretching across a decade of in-story time, its segments framed by the narration (or rather, interrogation) of your protagonist’s companion Varric. He’s being interrogated because your character, Hawke, has played a pivotal role in a major conflict — and because Hawke is, as he puts it, “the one person who can help you put it back together.”

Varric’s narration is surprisingly effective. The things he says throughout are shaped by the decisions you make during gameplay — which makes it feel like those decisions really do matter — and then sometimes he slips in allusions to events you haven’t seen yet. (His interrogator says accusingly that Hawke knew what was going to happen, and Varric denies it: “None of us knew. If we had . . . she never would have let [X happen].”) It took me a while, though, to figure out that there was something else going on in my reaction — something beyond appreciation of the clever structural game the writers were playing.

She.

Hawke can be a male or a female character. You pick which one you want at the start of the game, and the conversations (and certain events) are adjusted to suit. Bioware does this in most, maybe all, of their games, and while some people object that the changes aren’t enough — that the female Commander Shepherd or Grey Warden or Hawke is just the male character with a different voice actor and image — I love it, and Varric’s narration made me realize why:

Because it allows you to experience the novelty of a woman being the most important damn person in the world.

Everybody in the frame story of Dragon Age 2 talks about Hawke in the kind of terms used for an epic fantasy hero: a person at the crux of pivotal events, the one whose decisions made or broke the world around them, the only person who can fix it all afterward. In the Mass Effect series, Commander Shepherd is a galactic hero, feared or honored by a dozen alien species. When you play those games, your enemies will go to any lengths to defeat you, and your companions will die to protect you. And if you chose to play as a woman, you hear all the dialogue that’s normally reserved for male heroes . . . but it’s she and her and my god that sounds weird.

And awesome.

. . . and, thanks to the part of me that has internalized sexism, a little embarassing. It feels Mary Sue-ish, having people speak in such monumental terms about this woman. About any woman. I’m used to hearing men referred to that way; dozens of epic fantasy novels and action movies have accustomed me to the notion that a male character can inspire such loyalty in their followers, or scare a room full of people just by walking in. It’s okay, according to that bit of my subconscious, for guys to have that kind of power fantasy. But women should be more realistic.

Screw that, sez the rest of my brain. I have every right to indulge in that kind of dream, via a surrogate of my own gender. And I have every right to want more stories that give it to me.

Which brings me back to Katniss. She is not, as far as I’m concerned, a Mary Sue. She’s a flawed person whose virtues and strengths shine through like fire. We believe in that when it’s the effect he has; the difference is that this time it’s she. It’s the girl, not the boy, who has the internal and external resilience to survive the Hunger Games, who inspires allies and sponsors to devote themselves to helping her.

It shouldn’t feel like a novelty, reading about a female character of that sort. But it still does — and until that changes, it’s going to continue to have an effect on me.

I’ve done a little googling. There are several lists in Wikipedia (List of Female Action Heroes, Women Warriors in History), and a lot of Top Ten Kickass Heroine lists from many, many bloggers. Except for historical examples, almost all the women listed are from the last fifty years, (the last thirty, really), especially the top ten lists. But what about farther back? Would the Molly Pitchers qualify? Or the women who fought in the American Civil war dressed as men? Or the women who served in the various 18th century European navies? Or female pirates?  Or any of a number of non-Western examples about which I’m obviously pretty ignorant?

For that matter, does Joan of Arc qualify as a KH? I think so, because I think being a successful general is about as kickass as it gets. But, according to the accounts I’ve read, Joan didn’t do a whole lot of asskicking. Mostly she just exhorted the usual mob of belligerent men – there is no historical record of her actually fighting. Do you have to actually fight to be a KH?

And what about goddesses? Is Artemis kickass because she’s so smart? (Again, do you have to actually, physically kick ass to qualify?)

So you see, I have a lot of questions. I don’t really have any answers, though, as usual, I do have lots of opinions. Which are, of course, highly subjective. What’s not subjective, though, is the first time I realized there was such a thing as a KH. (I’m old enough to have seen the idea of the KH go from absurdity to cliché.) It wasn’t Batgirl, or Wonder Woman (though she did come close), or Wasp, or Sue Storm, or any of the other early ‘60s comic heroines where I first came close to the concept. It wasn’t Meg in A Wrinkle in Time – I’ve always thought Meg was pretty meh. And it wasn’t Queen Elizabeth I, either. (What did I know, I was twelve.)

It was Emma Peel, in the spring of 1966, when The Avengers first came to American TV.

Who was your first Kickass Heroine? Who is your favorite?

But last month, I branched out a little bit.  I published my first novella, Capitol Magic.

This wasn’t my first short fiction.  I have published two — count ‘em, two — short stories.  (Staying true to form, I expanded one of those into Darkbeast, the novel that will be out, as by Morgan Keyes, in late August.)

So, why did this leopard change her spots?

Quite frankly — I wanted to help readers find my novels.  Capitol Magic is set in Washington, D.C., a version of our nation’s capitol where magic actually works.  I laid the groundwork for this version of my hometown in the Jane Madison Series, my novels about a librarian who finds out that she’s a witch.  I built further on those foundations in Fright Court, a novel about lawyers, vampires, and cupcakes.

So, it seemed completely reasonable to bring together witchy Jane and vampire-ish (but not a vampire!) Sarah in Capitol Magic.  I could have written a full-length novel.  I could have relied on supporting characters, and sub-plots, and sprawling tales of midnight derring-do.

But, instead, I wanted to focus on characters, on the quirky lives of two specific women.  But they have a lot of quirks.  There were a lot of details to fit into the story, so that readers would recognize Jane and Sarah.  There were too many bits and pieces to fold into a short story.

And so the answer became clear:  a novella!  25,000 words to flesh out a story, to set up an actual plot, to let the heroines shine in their unique ways.  Perfect!

So far, Capitol Magic seems to be finding its audience.  It has enjoyed various slots in the relevant Top 100 list on Amazon since the day it was issued.  Some readers have come to the novella through their love of the Jane Madison Series; others have approached from the vampire side of the fence.

Years ago, conventional wisdom for breaking into speculative fiction was “write short work, find your audience, then write a novel.”  That wisdom has been broken for a long time (in my not quite humble opinion).  There just aren’t enough venues for good short fiction, and those that exist don’t pay anything approaching a professional rate.  By the time I was coming up, I wasn’t deemed a freak for avoiding the short fiction ladder.  I’m amused, though, that I’ve “broken into” short fiction at this relatively late date in my writing career.

So?  How about you?  If you’re a writer, do you write short and long?  If you’re a reader, do you read at multiple lengths?  Why?  Or why not?

1. Fight scenes should serve some purpose within the story besides just being loud. Have a definite purpose in mind, and make sure the scene fulfills it. (Of course, serving multiple purposes is usually better than serving just one.)
2. Fight scenes should be convincing within the context of the story…and specific details are more convincing than generalities that haven’t been well thought out.

In other words, fight scenes can’t just be tossed off. We have to resist the influence of Hollywood, where fight scenes are the domains of fight choreographers rather than writers. (I get the impression that many scripts just say, “They fight; the hero wins.” All other aspects of the fight are handled by non-writers: the director, stunt coordinators, etc.)

In prose, the writer has to do all the thinking, all the planning, and all the envisioning. If a writer is slapdash on any of these points, the readers will know. As Elizabeth Moon said in the last post’s comments, this includes dealing honestly with the fight’s aftermath: the physical, psychological, social, and legal consequences of hurting someone else or being hurt yourself. Again, we have to resist the influence of Hollywood, where heroes routinely get into one fight after another without being injured or thrown into jail.

Pacing is Done with Wordspace

Having stressed that the content of a fight is primary, I want to set that aside and look at delivery: specifically the pacing. As always, it’s ludicrous to claim that content and delivery are separable—the words you use determine the content, and vice versa. On the other hand, this series of posts is about the skills of fiction-writing. The ability to pace a scene well is a learnable skill that can be improved, so let’s focus on that for a while.

Pacing is achieved through what I call wordspace. In crudest terms, this means the number of words (or the space on a page) that you devote to describing an action. The more words you use to describe the action, the more time elapses as the reader reads them, and the longer the action occupies the reader’s mind. You can speed up an action by using fewer words, or slow one down by using more.

Wordspace is the verbal equivalent of decreasing or increasing the film speed of a camera to achieve effects like jittery acceleration or slow-mo. (I introduced the idea of wordspace in a previous post.)

In the context of fight scenes, wordspace determines the fight’s pacing. This means that you have to pay attention to it—you can’t just describe actions “naïvely”.

What do I mean by that? Let’s take an example that we’ve all seen in movies. An assassin sneaks up behind a guard and whips a rope around the guard’s throat. The guard struggles, maybe bashing the assassin against nearby walls and furniture, but not making too much noise. The assassin hangs on and eventually the guard succumbs…but in his last second of life, the guard manages to kick over a table, sending the table’s contents crashing to the floor with a huge clatter and alerting other people that bad things are happening.

(Yes, it’s a cliché, but cut me some slack. It’s just an example.)

So how do you actually write this scene? One way would be to envision it from some point of view (e.g. the assassin’s) and then merely describe each action as clearly and accurately as you can. I call this the naïve approach, because it doesn’t take into account the effects of wordspace.

The problem is that a complex action will take more words to describe than a simple one. The complex action will therefore receive more wordsapce and will loom larger in the reader’s mind: it will seem more important than simple actions, and will seem as if it literally takes more time to happen. This may diminish the impact of the scene if it unbalances the pacing.

In our assassin/guard example, sneaking up behind the guard is pretty simple—it’s just slow quiet walking—but it undoubtedly takes longer than the actual struggle. For the sake of pacing, you usually want to drag out the description of the sneaking so that it reflects the actual time that the action takes. (As a bonus, this builds up suspense as the reader waits to see if the assassin succeeds.)

So how do you do this? You add more words to extend the time that the reader spends reading the action. I don’t mean that you put in empty padding; you put in meaningful padding—padding that adds to the reader’s experience, while also giving more wordspace and thus better pacing. Something like this:

The assassin peeked around the corner. A guard stood several paces away, crouched over a cell-phone that he’d propped on a Chippendale table (1778, from the collection of George Wyndham, third Earl of Egremont). The assassin grimaced to see this lout texting away atop one of the finest pieces in the museum. If the man’s filthy little phone scratched that priceless antique…well, he deserved what was coming.

The assassin opened his coat and examined his weaponry: taser…dagger…silk rope. He withdrew the rope—he refused to use the dagger for fear of spraying blood on the table, and he wanted to conserve the taser’s batteries in case they were needed later. Besides, the oaf should be killed, not just stunned, for his callous indifference to the treasures surrounding him.

Rope in hand, the assassin crept forward. Past an ornate cuckoo clock (ca. 1760, maker unknown, Black Forest region, from the collection of Father Franz Steyrer). Past two paintings by Watteau (a good one and a bad one, both dated 1710, both sold to the Duc du Roche who’d had terrible taste in art but excellent luck at buying work from artists on the verge of becoming famous). Past a lovely little harpsichord that some gullible curator claimed had once been played by Bach (C.P.E., not J.S.). So many fine pieces on display, and this fool of a guard was likely sexting some trollop.

On a Chippendale table. The nerve.

The assassin slipped his cord around the fool’s throat and twisted with righteous ferocity.

This is a lot of words compared to, “The assassin sneaked up on the guard and strangled him.” However, the words aren’t empty padding. For one thing, they portray the assassin’s personality and his apparent expertise in the field of antiques. [1]. For another, they set the scene for the ensuing fight: you’ll recall that the guard is going to thrash around (bashing the assassin into all those lovely antiques) and eventually the table gets kicked over. I’ve set all that up while the assassin is sneaking, so it’s already done by the time the action gets more intense. Finally, I’ve given the guard a little humanity—he’s not just a faceless nobody whose death has no weight.

(When the fight is over and the man is dead, I’m inclined to have the assassin pick up the phone and see that the guard has written “Daddy hopes you’re feeling better. I’ll be home real soon and bring you a”. Is that too much? Depends on the story.)

The point is that I expanded the simple action of sneaking in order to give it more prominence in the reader’s mind. By comparison, the actual fight should probably be short and punchy…although I might draw out the “thrashing” part, with the guard being considerably bigger and stronger than the assassin, and smashing through the museum exhibits like a dying bull in a china shop. The details would depend on the overall tone of the story—gratuitous destruction of antiques is pretty flippant, and wouldn’t fit into a serious piece. It would also depend on the role of the scene within the story; even serious pieces sometimes need a touch of black humor for comic relief.

Reactions

One last note before I end: the summer I was a student at Clarion West, Roger Zelazny recommended to the class that we write fights as one-third action and two-thirds reaction. For every sentence describing what the characters were doing, he suggested we put in two sentences describing how the characters felt about it.

Don’t take this as a hard-and-fast formula, but it can be a helpful rubric if you think one of your fight scenes is falling flat. Fighting is a primal experience, stirring up wild emotions, desperate thoughts, and psychological baggage. Fights reveal who a character is beneath all the niceties. Mostly, you’ll be concentrating on how your viewpoint character is affected, but you can show other characters’ reactions as well. In many cases, it’s the feelings that make a fight memorable—the exact sequence of punches, gunshots, sword stabs and parries won’t stick in the reader’s mind as strongly as the emotional impact of the fight.

Done Now

This posting has taken up all the wordspace it can handle, so it’s time for me to turn the soapbox over to commenters again. Next time, I don’t know what I’ll talk about. Are we ready to take a crack at the skill of writing dialogue? Check back in a month.

[1] Yes, of course I just stole a lot of these details from Wikipedia. I don’t feel guilty about that; this is just an off-the-cuff example in a blog post. However, if I were writing a real story in which I portrayed a character as an expert in eighteenth century arts and crafts, I’d have to do a heck of a lot more research. Thinking you can get away with superficial knowledge is a recipe for disaster. ↩

Now some people will point out that since my characters are products of my imagination, they don’t really do anything. I do this to myself and then I blame my characters. It may happen in my subconscious, I might not be aware of making a decision to change course with my narrative, but the fact remains that on some level, these are all my decisions.

To which I say, “Yes, but . . .”

Because sometimes my characters will assert themselves in other ways. Take, for example, a character from my first series, the LonTobyn Chronicle. The character’s name is Orris, and I initially intended him as a foil for my protagonist and a diversion of sorts for my reader. I wanted him to be dislikable and somewhat suspicious, so that readers of my first book would mistake him for the real villain. (Oh, oops. Um, spoiler alert . . .) But a funny thing happened along the way. I kept on doing terrible things to Orris — I hurt him, I killed his magical familiar, I made him the object of other characters’ unwarranted suspicions, I threw obstacle after obstacle in his path, and he kept coming back stronger than before.
He surprised me so many times that I finally realized that I actually liked him; I certainly respected him. I wanted to know more about him, about what made him so strong and resourceful. I began to delve into his backstory.

Before I knew it, I was making him the focus of more and more chapters. By the time I was finished with that first book, I had decided to make him the lead character in book two. Now again, you can tell me that something in my subconscious made me do this. Orris didn’t — couldn’t! — do anything without my approval. Yeah, okay. Maybe. But the fact remains, whether on their own or in the dark, primal recesses of our minds, our characters sometimes take us and themselves in directions we didn’t intend.

Don’t believe me? Think for a moment about Spike from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. Spike started out as a villain, a more-powerful-than-the-usual-vamp challenge for Buffy, a foil for Angel, a colorful bad guy. But over the course of the series he became so very much more. By the end he was a regular on the show, a hero, albeit a flawed one. And while I would never, ever, ever cast doubt on the genius of Joss Whedon, I find it very hard to believe that Joss knew in season one or two (whenever it was he first introduced Spike) that he could have foreseen where that character would wind up. I think it’s far more likely that Joss fell in love with the character and thus found ways to keep bringing Spike back and to give him a larger and larger role in the Buffy storyline.

I think this happens a lot. I have friends who have started series about one character only to have a secondary character assert him or herself in such a way as to practically demand a larger role, or even a spin-off. In my upcoming book, Thieftaker (due out from Tor Books in July, under the name D.B. Jackson), I mention in passing a conjurer with whom my lead character once did battle. It’s a tiny moment in the book — literally a single paragraph out of a 100,000 word book. But then I went back and wrote a short story about that encounter — it’s called “A Spell of Vengeance,” and it will be published at Tor.Com later this spring. And I loved the character so much that I now plan to bring him back as the antagonist for an entire novel (or more?) as I continue my Thieftaker Chronicles.

So my questions for you today: First off, have you ever had this happen with one of your own characters? Is there a secondary character for whom you originally had limited plans who later became far more important to your work than you had expected? And second, can you think of other examples like Spike — characters in beloved franchises who seem to have grown far beyond the original intent of their creators?

“It’s a fantasy,” I explained.

Some background. The Stoneways is a flat world without horizontal edges (at least as far as the people living there are concerned). It’s about ten miles thick, with humans living normally on the top, and dwarves living normally in their own way on the bottom. Gravity is consistent throughout the world, i.e. it pulls in only one direction – down. If anyone lets go of the bottom of the world, they fall.

Scientifically, then, I didn’t need to have a super dense layer of neutronium, handwavium, or whatever, in the center of my ten mile thick slab of stone in order for gravity to work. My questioner hadn’t quite understood that (he’d thought the Dwarves were walking around on the bottom of the world like Aussies (alas, I have failed at basic exposition)), but once he realized the difference, he wanted to know how far it was before someone who fell off the bottom of the world would hit bottom.

“There is no bottom,” I said.

“But there has to be! How else can there be gravity?”

“I dunno. It’s fantasy, not SF.”

This seemed a very hard concept for this reader to grasp. But really, once you posit magic, how real can a subcreation be? SF writers like Larry Niven or Karl Schroeder might have to explain the structure of their worlds with the laws of physics, but not me. Or any other fantasy writer. Which means, at least when we’re setting up worlds, that fantasy writers can pretty much do whatever we want. Our worlds can exist as air bubbles within a universe of water (Leiber), as peninsulas connected to the continent of Heaven (Lewis), or reflect different skies depending on whichever god is worshipped there (Bear).

We don’t have to justify it. We can just make it up.

It’s fantasy, dammit. Not SF.

No doubt other popular titles will soon be finding their way into movie form.  James Dashner’s The Maze Runner seems a likely candidate (and, in fact, an IMDB search turns up a listing for a Maze Runner project already in development).  And I can imagine several other titles making their way to the screen sometime soon, including Paolo Bacigalupi’s brilliant novel The Windup Girl.  I should add, for the record, that if any Hollywood producers are interested in turning any (all?) of my books into films, they should feel welcome to contact my agent.  Really.  Feel free.

So one question I would love to throw out to readers is this:  What other fantasy and science fiction projects would you like to see adapted to the silver screen in the near future?

Beyond that, though, I find myself wondering if the growing trend toward making films out of popular fantasy and SF novels is going to have an impact on the way books in the genre are crafted.  I don’t have an agenda here; I really don’t know what I think about this.  But I am curious.  I know that my current project, Thieftaker (written under the pseudonym D. B. Jackson, and due to be released in July) is probably more suited to adaptation than anything I’ve written before. Why?  A couple of reasons:  First, it’s a historical fantasy, set in our world, unlike my previous work which had been alternate world fantasy.  Second, while there are to be multiple volumes, each book stands on its own and has a satisfying ending.  Third, and this strikes me as most important, the books are relatively short compared to my past work.  For the record, this was not a conscious choice on my part, or an attempt to write a book that might attract movie producers.  Not at all.  I wrote the book I wanted to write, as I always do.  But I did wind up with a book that would work well in movie form.

Now, I realize that not all of these factors are necessary for books to be attractive to Hollywood producers.  The LOTR movies proved that alternate-world fantasies could work as feature films.  The Harry Potter movies suggest that novel length doesn’t have to be a problem for movie-makers (though I would argue that the longer books in the series didn’t translate as well to movies until the producers finally decided to split book 7 into two films).  And the Game of Thrones series proves that television may serve as a work-around for books that are too long to be made into films.

But I also think it bears mentioning that The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner (and Ender’s Game as well) are perfect for adaptation because they are somewhat shorter novels than, say, the novels of Robert Jordan, which have not yet been made into movies, despite their vast popularity.  And I would add that with urban fantasy and young adult books becoming such powerful forces in the speculative fiction marketplace, shorter novels set in (some version of) our world are becoming more prevalent.  I believe it likely that the growing popularity of urban fantasy and YA will show up more and more in cinema as well as books.  Again, these novels are shorter, they often have contemporary, real-world settings, and they tend to be written as stand-alones in serial form.  Each book has a beginning, a middle, and a satisfying ending; the movie versions would have the same.

In short, it seems to me that the market trends in fantasy and SF literature make it likely that the current boom in fantasy and SF movies will continue and expand.  And I wonder at what point one trend begins to influence the other.  As more YA novels enjoy success and find their way into movie form, will more and more authors be drawn to the YA market?  And is it possible that the popularity of urban fantasy will translate to the screen, and then, in turn, draw more writers to UF?  It seems possible to me, even likely.  What do you think?

So this weekend, as you sit and watch the story of Katniss Everdeen come to life on the screen, consider which of your current favorite books you’d most like to see as a movie.  It may well be that you’ll be seeing trailers for them sometime soon.

Of course, the term “fight scene” can apply to most scenes—as I said in the post on scene design, almost every scene should depict someone attempting to achieve a goal in the face of opposition. But for the purposes of this post, let’s concentrate on scenes with a high degree of physical action. Thus a chase scene would qualify as a “fight”, as would a hide-and-seek scene between a thief and a guard, even if such scenes never reach the point of actual combat. On the other hand, a purely verbal argument might colloquially be called a fight, but for this post, we’ll take it off the table.

Clarity vs. Chaos

I have never (thank the gods!) been in a genuine fight, but I’ve trained in Kung Fu for more than eighteen years, so I’ve certainly had a taste of people trying to whack me. I can assure you that when fists start flying, odd things happen to your view of the world. Some things seem very clear; others are a blur of confusion; almost everything else simply doesn’t exist for the duration of the bout.

Attempting to recreate this state of mind in verbal form is very difficult. Making it comprehensible to a reader is even worse.

So most writers don’t try. Even authors who write memorable edge-of-your-seat fight scenes don’t try to capture the truth of being in combat. Instead, they sacrifice authentic personal experience in favor of a less immediate viewpoint that’s more intelligible. In other words, writers give you a representation of the fight rather than an attempted reproduction of the viewpoint character’s actual experience [1].

This tradeoff between representation and reproduction bedevils all prose fiction, since we’re using a controlled linear medium to convey the uncontrolled non-linear experiences of life. But the disjunction is particularly acute in fight scenes, where fast and furious action unwinds at a much slower pace, dictated by the time required to describe what’s going on. (In the time required to say, “I punched him,” I can throw at least three punches and a kick.)

So the first question in writing a fight scene is where you want to come down on the spectrum between chaos and clarity, reproduction and representation. How much do you want to simulate the tunnel vision and incoherence of an actual fight? How far are you going to step back to a viewpoint that can see at least some of the bigger picture?

Different writers make different decisions on these questions. Some aim for a sense of the chaos of battle. Others spell things out with great carefulness, making sure that the reader has a much clearer understanding of what’s happening than would be possible for anyone who was actually there. Still others (Jim Butcher, I’m looking at you) have their characters say how chaotic combat is, then give beautifully clear descriptions of every little detail.

Realism vs. the Buckled Swash

So far, I’ve only been talking about presentation, not content—your approach to narrating action, not what the action is. When it comes to what actually happens during a fight, you arrive at another fundamental question: what kind of fight do you want to describe? Realistic down-and-dirty? Fun swashbuckling? Million-bullet gun fu? Ugly gut-wound bloodshed?

In a way, this question should answer itself, based on the rest of the story. If you’re writing a lighthearted romp, your fights should have a similar tone [2]. If your story is more grim and gritty, your fights should be in keeping with that ambiance.

After all, there’s a vital point to remember: Your story doesn’t go on hiatus when the fighting begins. Fights can and should advance all the story’s elements, including plot, characterization, and theme.

For example, fights should be characterization: the way a character fights can’t help but be an intense expression of that character’s personality. It reveals who that character is when he or she is under pressure—when he or she doesn’t have the leisure to present a social persona. Or (depending on the nature of your story), a fight might reveal just how deep a social persona goes; in the fights of The Three Musketeers for example, the musketeers maintain their insouciance through thick and thin, thereby showing their superiority to Richelieu’s grim-faced guards and other less genteel enemies [3].

Fight Choreography

The actual moves of a battle must therefore reflect the characters—not just their fighting skills, but their temperaments. Consider Character A whacking Character B with a blunt instrument; here are several examples.

She aimed for the sweet spot just behind the man’s ear, where good solid contact would guarantee a knockout without too much chance of death. She swung: good solid contact. Yes.

He lashed out desperately, hoping to hit something, anything. He heard a crunch and felt the jolt of contact in his hand. The shock made him lose his grip on the weapon; it fell from his stinging fingers.

She brought the club down with all her strength, keeping her eyes on his face so she could see his reaction. It disappointed her: no gape of surprise that she’d actually beaten him, no sign of shame or humiliation. His expression just went slack. She hit him another fifteen times, but nothing changed. (Except the blood.)

All three of these examples have the same physical action (more or less), but the emotional content is completely different. Different characters fight differently, even when they do similar things.

For me, the internal personal content is paramount in making a fight scene come alive. However, the external action is obviously important too: we all love ingenious tactics and unexpected maneuvers, especially of the “Wow, I should have seen that coming” type. (I snarked at Jim Butcher earlier, but he writes great fight scenes that always have lovely surprises. Read and learn from the master.)

Some writers go so far as to gather their friends to play out fight scenes, making it possible to choreograph more realistic battles. (Beer might also be involved.) I’m wary of this—it means pinning your ability to write on the availability of other people—but it’s unquestionably important to have a clear vision of where your combatants are, how they’re standing, and so on. Acting out the fight on your own can clarify the action and help you avoid faux-pas. It can also give you ideas for what might happen next when you’re initially planning things out.

Not Done Yet

As in any battle, no plan ever survives contact with the enemy. When I originally began writing this post, I intended to talk a lot about pacing a fight scene…but I’ve gone on long enough, so I’ll leave pacing for next time. Until then, I’ll ask you readers for input: who writes good fight scenes, and why do you think they work?

[1] I have to tip my hat in the direction of Samuel R. Delany‘s Tales of Nevèrÿon in which a character barely escapes being eaten by a sea monster. She runs back to her village and tries to gasp out what happened, but she’s too agitated for people to understand her. As she gradually calms down, she becomes able to express herself more clearly, whereupon her listeners are flabbergasted by her adventure and ask her to repeat the story. More and more people show up to hear the tale, and she tells it over and over. She realizes that each time through, it becomes a better, more enthralling story, but less and less like the actual experience. It’s not that she’s falsifying the details, but she’s structuring them…and the original experience wasn’t structured at all. ↩

[2] Of course it’s possible to write something whose entire premise is “Lighthearted Romp Goes Bad”. Countless horror movies start with carefree teens happily partying, then suddenly the action shifts into gory violence. But if you’re writing something like that, you do it knowingly: you know that your tone is going to shift from Macarenas to machetes, so you don’t have to ask too many questions about what your fights should look like. ↩

[3] One elegantly effective gimmick is that “The Gloves Are Finally Off” moment when a cheerfully upbeat fighter finally gets serious. The first example to come to mind is Errol Flynn as Robin Hood. For most of the movie, he fights with a twinkle in his eye, like a charming host just having fun with his opponents…but in the climactic sword duel with Basil Rathbone, the twinkle is gone, replaced by grim determination. ↩

Both of these patterns are particularly a thing for TV shows, comic books, and novel series, where fans have lots of time to speculate in between installments, but they can apply to anything where the reader or viewer is looking ahead to where the story might be going. So my question is, which is better: to be kripked or jossed?

(Spoiler alert: the answer is “neither.”)

On the surface of it, you might think it’s better to be proven wrong. After all, we disdain stories that are “too predictable;” if you can see where it’s going, then why bother reading on? But sometimes the pleasure of a story isn’t in being surprised by what happens, but in seeing how it comes about. (Romance is frequently like this. The reader knows from early on who the hero and heroine are, and is reading to experience the process of them getting together.) And in the cases where the “what” isn’t obvious, it’s very satisfying to see that your suspicions are correct.

Conversely, while it’s easy to upset audience expectations, doing it well is another matter. Sure, your cozy, Agatha Christie-style murder mystery can end with the shocking revelation that Aliens Did It — but unless you have done a very good job of seeding hints that there are aliens in the story, your readers are probably going to throw the book across the room. (And if you do seed those hints, some of your readers will pick up on it, and now we’re back around to them being kripked.) Lots of X-Files-style shows have foundered on audience annoyance that the eventual explanation for the weirdness fails to satisfy. There’s a fine balance between being too obvious, and not obvious enough.

My personal preference is for what I’ve called third-order answers. A lot of mysteries have an obvious culprit, and then a character who is, if you know your narrative conventions, the obvious alternative to the obvious culprit. I like mysteries that go one step further. It’s not the snooty noble, nor the snooty noble’s manservant, but the snooty noble’s manservant’s wife, because she’s angry about the way their lord treats her husband, and wants to see him blamed for something that isn’t his fault. The virtue of a third-order answer is that if you don’t want to dig into the story, you can be pleasantly surprised by the plot twist; but if you feel like engaging the analytical side of your brain, there’s a reward for your effort.

I also love it when a story answers my questions right when I think them up. This happened a lot with Supernatural, actually: a friend (call her K) introduced me and another writer-friend (call her S) to the show, and commented more than once that it was good she’d watched all the eps before she saw them with us — because S and I sat there with our writer-brains on, asking questions and making predictions. But we did that, not because the story was bad, but because it was surprisingly solid: time and time again, just as S and I said, “why don’t the characters ever do [this thing]?” — lo and behold, the characters did [that thing]. Kripke did a very good job of thinking through his foundations and consequences, and so when we correctly guessed where things were going, it was because we had paid attention to the clues, or asked ourselves what would be thematically appropriate.

And yet, I do love a good plot twist. The best ones, for my money, are the twists you see coming half a second before the reveal: just long enough to have the OH MY GOD reaction before it happens. That’s another hard balance to strike; too soon and it loses half its punch, too late and the audience goes “huh?” Then you have to spend five minutes explaining your twist, and lose all the punch.

Which do you prefer? Are you the sort of reader who dissects everything as you go, or do you prefer to turn off the analysis and let yourself be surprised? And who has done either of these routes well or badly?

Are RPGs bad for writing? That’s probably what I’d say if you put a gun to my head and demanded an answer. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against RPGs, or any kind of gaming for that matter. I love games, and have been playing since the ‘60s. But I’m also pretty sure that I’d have done a lot less reading and a lot more gaming if I were twelve today instead of forty-five years ago.

That’s not the crux of my bias, however. The real reason is that I think the act of gaming is diametrically opposed to the act of writing. RPGs, by definition, are a group pursuit. Writing, with some exceptions, is just the opposite. In RPGs there can’t be any red shirts. Everyone has to participate equally. But novels have to be more focused. In a novel everyone, even the protagonists, is an NPC.

And gaming, because it is a group pursuit, can be much more open-ended. One of the great things about gaming is you can go wherever you want. The DM may smack you down, but you can still at least try to go off the edge of the map.

You can’t do that in a book. The author defines everything in a book, and is only going to let you have the adventure he wants you to have. Stories, even if written by Robert Jordan, are not as open-ended as gaming is.

Personally, I prefer the immersive, focused narrative of a book when I’m reading. As I prefer the more open-ended pleasures of gaming when I’m gaming. I think most readers used to feel the same way, but in the last decade or so, more and more readers have started reading more open-ended books. The works of Jordan and GRRM have been hugely popular, despite the fact that both seem to be more content with the process of their characters’ lives than the culmination of their stories. You get it in television as well, in shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica, where the shows’ endings were almost beside the point.

Which is why I can’t make up my mind. There’s a different kind of writing out there, which is a good thing, because more choices are always a good thing (except for parents with two year olds). I may miss the focused plotting of the genre I grew up with, but now there are other aspects of storytelling to enjoy as well.

What do you think?