posted
I'm a new writer and new to these boards as well...so on that note how about a discussion?
I find that although I love to describe things and create stories I have a hard time when it comes to any sort of action. Sometimes, just coming up with the action is hard. (IE: Whether I should have a character stumble upon a group of bandits or have the character be ambushed by same-said bandits.) Other times, the action hook is easy but describing what takes place during and after is difficult. Whatever I attempt to hash out takes me days or weeks and I still feel as if it's disjointed. Has anyone else felt this way before? Where you know how you want the battle to go but you can't seem to get it out of your head and on paper?
So far I've found one thing that helps (sort of). I jet down to the nearest hobby shop and grab a couple pewter figurines that somewhat remotely represent the characters in question. I then sit my husband down and lay out the battle step by step for him while both he and I take notes. I then use those notes, plus my memories of how I described the battle to him, to write my story. It always needs a couple rounds of fine tuning before it's good enough to move on but at least it's something.
And besides...it's a great excuse to indulge in my figure painting hobby
posted
Have you read Tad Williams insanely long fantasy trilogy, MEMORY, SORROW, AND THORN? He did an excellent job with the battle scenes, not so much because he described them in detail, but because he described them from one viewpoint character. Thus, the action wasn't as important as what the viewpoint character was seeing and feeling. Next time try to write it that way and see if it saves time.
Posts: 68 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
Even when you use a system to lay out the action, you still need to do all the work of writing it. I should post my X-Com story around here somewhere...I'm too lazy. If enough people want to read it, I'll post it on my website.
Anyway, I wrote the story exactly from an X-Com mission I played for the specific purpose of taking notes and writing it as a story. But of course, despite my best efforts, it doesn't look terribly different from something I might have just made up out of my head.
Because for all of the actual prose...that was the exact case, I still had to make it up out of my head.
But models are fun. I wish I was married to a woman who like little models. Do you use mostly fantasy type or do you have a lot of Sci-Fi models?
posted
I have a similar problem. I'm great at understanding, and creating fleshed out characters, at describing emotions, and creating an interesting story, but I have the hardest time writing any scene of action. I visualize most sequences of my stories as if I was watching a movie, so it's not that I don't see the details. I just can't seem to write it down.
Posts: 36 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
I have difficulty writing action scenes too, but I have learned a couple of things. First of all, when the action level goes up in a story you should use shorter paragraphs and shorter sentences to move the scene along.
Quck. Snappy.
Lots of white space helps the reader flow through the fast pace of the action scenes.
The other thing I've learned is that point of view is very important in action scenes. You are probably not writing an omniscient third person story, very few people do anymore. So think about your point of view character in the battle. Leave it to the movie producers to fill in the details when you sell the movie rights.
For example, if I've got a fighter pilot in the middle of a space battle, he is only vaguely aware of the fact that there's a grand battle going on around him and hundreds of his fellow pilots are dying. Mostly, he's aware of the two enemy fighters on his tail. He tries to shake them. He fires his weapons. He breathes a sigh of relief as his buddy comes at him, radioing in to ask if he needs some help.
Action scenes have goals, or they should. In my opinion, action scenes written for the sake of action are silly and useless. You've spent pages building me up to this moment, but not just so I could watch a bloody battle from the sky. I want to know how our hero(ine) fairs. I want to know how they learn and grow from the experience, I want to know about the confrontation with the bad guy. If you have to, go ahead and put in that silly thing where the hero looks like he's going to lose until right at the end when the bad guy insults his family and all of a sudden he finds new strength. (I actually hate that but it seems really popular.)
posted
Great ideas! Here's another question that sparked while I was reading your replies...
How would it affect the reader to only see things from the characters point of view. For example: The soldier who rises to greatness later in the story is marching into battle now. He's in the midst of the ranks and can't see what's going on except whatever is right in front of him.
Would it be appropriate to switch from the hero's point of view to, say, the enemies point of view during a battle? Or would that just add confusion?
Edit: I do mostly fantasy figurines because I'm a D&D player. The only sci-fi stuff I've ever done was a set of the main characters in Star Wars for my cousin as a b-day present.
[This message has been edited by RillSoji (edited February 12, 2004).]
quote:Would it be appropriate to switch from the hero's point of view to, say, the enemies point of view during a battle? Or would that just add confusion?
It depends on the needs of your story. Personally, I love writing POV changes. To avoid confusion, always use a page break between your POV changes. Just center a "#" on the line inbetween the paragraphs when you make the switch. Don't do it every paragraph either. Each POV section should be significant and have a purpose.
[This message has been edited by Nexus Capacitor (edited February 12, 2004).]
posted
Nexus Capacitor is correct--you can change point of views in a battle. He also provided the standards way for doing this.
One thing to keep in mind is this: the more the readers knows, the more suspenseful will your story be. If we see the hero walking down a path, but we don't know his enemies have an ambush ready for him, what's going to keep us reading? But if we see the hero walking down the path and then you change POV and we see his enemies preparing to ambush him, we'll keep reading because of the potential for conflict. This, I think, is what Nexus Capacitor meant by making each POV change significant.
So in your battle scene, write from your hero's viewpoint. And then, from his enemies viewpoint, show us how they are preparing to take him down. Then go back to the hero who unknowingly is walking into the enemies trap.
Just remember, in fiction, good dramatic action does not come from a lot of movement. A bunch of characters running around in a battle doesn't mean you have dramatic action. Dramatic action is the process of the unknown becoming known, the hero making a discovery, the hero forced to make a decision, and then the hero acting on that decision.
Consider: A married woman is drinking a cup of coffee. This is movement; nothing too interesting here. Now consider: A married woman is drinking a cup of coffee and she finds lipstick on her cup that isn't her shade. That is dramatic action; we're interested because there is conflict.
So in your battle scenes, make sure you have dramatic action, not just a bunch of movement. Make sure unknown things are being presented to the reader that have the potential for conflict. Make sure your hero discovers these things, which in turn forces him to make a decision and act.
Try going back and reading those battle scenes you really loved, and I would suspect there's more dramatic action than mere movement.
Kolona, I've been called away from my computer for a few days, so it'll take a while. I'm sure I do have that story though.
As far as using multiple POVs to create dramatic irony, I would only do that where you're already using multiple POVs in the rest of the story. Don't write only from the POV of the hero, then start switching around in the middle of a battle. Also, remember that uncertainty is inherent in each POV, the hero doesn't blithely walk into a trap (well, not a heroic hero, anyway), he wonders if there is a trap, but he doesn't know. In that case, the reader is left in suspense. Then the thing that looks like a trap turns out to be okay, at which hero and reader breathe a sigh of relief...at which point the real trap is sprung on both
posted
Ah, X-Com. The teny-tiny versions of the alien ships always cracked me up -- the graphics were a lot of fun in that game.
Posts: 652 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
Why aren't there more games like X-Com? I'm sure there are, I'm just too cheap to buy $5,000 worth of new games on the off chance of finding one or two that are actually any fun.
While I'm griping, why do all FPS games now use that idiotic convention of showing the weapon offset to the right like that? And please, why can't we have more realistic damage models so that a serious wound actually impairs a player/NPC and so I don't have to carry so much ammo? And you know what I would really like? I'd like to actually have legs and maybe even a torso next time I buy a new game...perhaps have real hands too that can/must be used for such things as climbing ladders and opening locked doors (off course, with real legs I could kick open unlocked doors--that would be cool).
I'm glad that sniper rifles are becoming more common at any rate. It's not like I think that the game industry does everything wrong.
But now I'm just leading us all astray...no wait.
My real point is that computer game models of action can often be quite lacking in certain necessary components of realism. I find that when I'm writing an action scene, I depend heavily on using some broad historical warfare knowledge base combined with actual experience with the type of terrain and weapons employed in the action I'm writing. Sometimes you have to extrapolate (for instance, the difference between an M-16--with its light weight, high cyclic rate, and modest recoil--and an M-60--which is much heavier with a lower cyclic but more recoil--can give you some idea of what a Gatling gun would be like even though you can't afford to try one for real). But the less you're making up out of whole cloth, the better. At least, that's what I think.
posted
Yes, X-Com is one of the greatest games of all time. An unappreciated classic, still today it's a better play than most games on the market are.
Everyone here should get a copy of it and play it with the music up to gain a greater understanding of tension and suspense. When you land in the middle of night to sweep up a alien terror attack, and the damn bug things run up to you and turn your favorite solider into a drone--hard to describe.
posted
RillSoji, There is a book in the ELEMENTS OF FICTION WRITING series called: CONFLICT ACTION AND SUSPENSE by William Noble. I haven't gotten to it yet, but I have read some of the others in that series and they have been helpful. I just ordered it yesterday and intend to read it soon. Maybe somebody out there has read this one?
Posts: 471 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
I always use plenty of electro-flares and arm a guy with inciendiary ammo. If I don't feel up to a night fight, I just leave a crash site alone till morning (I still remember the first time one of my guys got zombified--I was trying to use a medi-pack on him when he busted open, ).
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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quote:So in your battle scene, write from your hero's viewpoint. And then, from his enemies viewpoint, show us how they are preparing to take him down.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you wouldn't do this if the rest of the book was from the hero's viewpoint, limited third person, would you? Or is this standard in military/battle books? To go into multiple third just for battles would seem contrived.
I won't pretend I know exactly what X-Com is, Survivor, but Combat seemed like an efficient, self-contained battle scene. Not my type of reading, but an interesting angle, trying to textually depict a video game. Would this be considered a form of graphic novelization?
[This message has been edited by Kolona (edited February 17, 2004).]
quote:Correct me if I'm wrong, but you wouldn't do this if the rest of the book was from the hero's viewpoint, limited third person, would you? Or is this standard in military/battle books? To go into multiple third just for battles would seem contrived.
You are correct.
In a book I am writing it is fairly action intensive and the POV shifts frequently, it is not a story that could be told adequately from a fixed point.
Is there a term for this and are there techniques I should keep in mind. I know that it is important for each segment [broken up by ellipses (* * *)] for me to stay rigidly in the selected point of view, and I do, however, other than that is there something I should know?
posted
Because I'm not under the impression that you're a gamer, I'll forgive you for not knowing what X-Com is. But oh my...
Anyway, I wrote Combat during a creative slump which coincided with my turn to submit a piece for workshopping. I wasn't considering it as marketable fiction (none of my work is, if it comes to that). I was just trying to save myself the effort of thinking up an action sequence. One thing that experienced X-Com players might have noticed is that I modded my Skyranger TM. I'm just saying....
From a narrative standpoint, Combat does seem to suffer because of the fact that I didn't plot out the action myself, nor did I select from several missions to find one that would make a good write-up. There was this one mission...from when I was a real newbie and didn't know anything. I got the whole squad killed (and it was just the initial 8 man starter squad too) except one guy, who was running around, expending all the ammo in weapon after weapon, running back to strip weapons from his dead teammates, running back to the Skyranger TM...I think eventually he either got killed too...but that would have made a much more interesting write-up.
Combat comes across more as a, "Hey, it turns out that the aliens are wusses!" kind of theme.
Now I think I'm contradicting what I said earlier. Looking at the story, and remembering why I chose to do an X-Com story at the time, I realize that removing the effort of plotting out my own action made a tremendous difference...perhaps not all good. For one thing, I'd have to change the story elements to make it marketable (not a huge concern, all things considered). More importantly, the story didn't end up having any point (well, aliens are nancyboys).
On the other hand, it seriously did break me out of a writer's block that was threatening to leave me unclothed (metaphorically) in front of about six other amateur writers.
So maybe there's something to using models to 'play out' the action, particularly if you're the one playing it out rather than just playing a game (one thing I can already tell would be a bad idea...writing up a story based on somebody else's game...hoo-boy, "Xander flung himself to the ground in terror, wondering what idiot had put Captain Dipwad in command of this mission... ).
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