The news of late has had me thinking it may be time to brush the boundaries of cultural commentary, so for those of you uninterested in even mild political discussion, this may be a good time to go shopping for cheap champagne.
There are few more dangerous pursuits on the part of a creator than updating something old and beloved to account for a changing era.
Enter the twin giants of Marvel and DC in the world of comics, who have this year come under fire for several choices made which bring minority actors and characters into new light.
While both movements are small and fairly polarized, they've led to a shockwave of milder, overlooked squeamishness in a far wider arc. Even outside of the extremes of racism and other prejudice, audiences generally dislike it when you change anything about an empire they love.
Change is inevitable. We, as a people, are constantly evolving, while much of our art remains frozen in time. While that may never injure the works of Picasso, we've already seen it have a large impact on the unspoken implications of men like JRR Tolkien. While it can take years to happen, there is always a chance that someone, some day, will create a new iteration of the old standby, taking it in a direction the original writer (and his or her adoring fans) never expected.
I bring this to light here for two reasons: there is a wealth of good to be found in releasing an updated version of an older work, and, if you are yourself successful enough, you should be prepared for the sincerest form of flattery.
Giving new life to an old work is a wonderful way for a new writer to get started, or for a seasoned writer to test their chops. As an example: try penning a new version of Oliver Twist using modern-day South Korea as your landscape. The same themes exist today that did centuries ago. Adjusting the setting helps to draw today's eyes in the right direction.
Shifting time and place is one of many ways to update an old beloved classic. Take the landmark success of the play "Wicked," telling the story of Oz from the very positive perspective of the "wicked" witch of the west. Take Seth Grahame-Smith's parody series starting with "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," a delicious spin on Jane Austen's largely unattainable original.
Pearl Harbor, for whatever you make think of the acting, was one of the first World War II films to show the leaders of Japan in a positive light, forced into a no-win situation and taking what they felt was the best option to protect their people. While it's not based on a specific work, I think you'll agree that World War II as a story has been done before, at least once or twice.
If you're looking for inspiration, for a solid backbone on which to place a clever twist or a cultural treasure to help leverage a very pressing modern-day need, using an old story as the basis for new life can be a wonderful place to start. Be careful of how you borrow, of course, but do not rule out the idea just because you feel it's not wholly original. Drawing on a known entity as your baseline to shatter or update pregenerated notions can oftentimes have an even greater impact that an entirely original work.
While it hinges entirely on your purpose, I believe that boldness is the blood of the artist, a word here meaning 'anyone who creates something not real to help show us what we are, what we dream, or what we can be.' To be different, to be remembered, to have an impact on the cultural consciousness requires courage and tenacity of mind.
For that reason, expect others to branch out into new and unexpected areas with your work, as well. If you're a supporter of the Creative Commons model (and if you're not, you may want to consider it), this is all but a given for anything of yours that becomes popular, even if it's just on "that there Internet." So be prepared to see someone else take even your own work in a new direction.
Returning to my opening mention, I want to be clear on one point: I do not mean to compare casting an African American as a Norse god to rewriting Sense and Sensibility as a nautical epic. Frankly, I'm of the opinion that if the man can act, it's entirely moot what color his skin is. The inclusion of Nightrunner is slightly more valid as a creative direction only because of the oft-overlooked political situation in France today.
The overreaction of bigots was not the point I was hoping to draw attention to. I merely hoped to use the ensuing large-scale squirming of those less organized entities as a warning towards anyone hoping to update a beloved classic. While Austen's works in the modern day are a fairly safe bet for anyone who ever snored their way through high school English class, you may be surprised by what people truly love (and will riot to protect).
Although if anyone yells at you for tearing apart the work of James Joyce, their own judgment may be in question.
The masters who penned the classics we adore did so because they wanted to share a story. Whether for entertainment, the hope of change, or just the desperate need we all have to shout from the proverbial hilltop, their voices echo in our hearts and minds many years after they first hit print.
Adding your own take on that historic yell should only ever be seen as a way to help bring the classics we love into a modern reckoning so that that echo may resound forever. So as we brace to face the new year, let the past help us reflect on what we were, understand where we are and predict where we are going.
And let it do so with zombies.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Friday, December 24, 2010
Creep Must Flow
Creep is a subject that's been on my mind for a number of years, but never more so than it has been these past few weeks.
To be clear, "creep" is the habit of a work to grow, and grow, and grow, like a mold behind the sheet rock of your mind. What starts as a simple half-novella balloons, one scene at a time, into a Jordan-esque gargantua before you even realize what's happening.
Creep is wonderful, and it is awful, and it is painful and beautiful and puzzling all at once. Those of us who write with our feet moving are by far the most susceptible, though I imagine it catches the odd whole-draft writer often enough when they're not looking. You begin to see small changes, little edits, new lines you want to give your characters the excuse to say, and you update your outline accordingly.
It's just one little wafer-thin piece. What harm could it do?
Each little vignette, each new minor addition is benign in its own right, but together they form a veritable Destructor of new content that can throw off any predictions you might have had about when the work will be complete, to say nothing of the half-dozen tweaks you'll no doubt think up in the window of your newly extended deadline.
Creep likes to attack in the wee hours, in that delicate space between sleeping and waking when fantasy reigns supreme and magic mingles with mystery inside our minds. It preys upon the unsuspecting scrap paper and moonlight scribbles of the author's bedside. It lurks in the dark corners of every serendipitous discourse that startles the stagnant embers of creativity. Creep craves the chaotic collisions of a caffeinated cranium.
Crazy, right?
Creep can be a beautiful thing. It's through creep that we are reminded of the life of a work, the life of a world. Creep exists because we are never finished. No scene is ever complete. Rather, scenes are confined by soft borders; thin cellophane screens that no more hold them back than a reed halts a summer storm.
Naturally, we have to stop somewhere. Every draft chooses the lines where the scene ends, where the experiment stops, where the worth runs out; but those lines are no more set in the immalleable memory of the collective consciousness than the borders of a Russian sub-state.
...Too soon?
Creep means that there is always more to be added, there is always something more we crave about a world, a character, a scene, a moment in fictional time that must be seen, shared and savored before we can call ourselves complete.
Limitless possibilities: wonderful to ponder, aggravating to execute.
The Order, once a 230-page poser-paperback flapping in the wind has now crept across 390 total pages, with what looks to be almost 200 pages still to come before even the core arc of the story will reach its full. The creative mold has overtaken my mind entirely at this point, branching into entirely new evolutionary strains resistant to any and all attempts to remove them safely from the brain.
Suffice it to say, creep is very close to my heart, having traveled southbound from the cerebellum. For those similarly afflicted, consider writing in stages:
To be clear, "creep" is the habit of a work to grow, and grow, and grow, like a mold behind the sheet rock of your mind. What starts as a simple half-novella balloons, one scene at a time, into a Jordan-esque gargantua before you even realize what's happening.
Creep is wonderful, and it is awful, and it is painful and beautiful and puzzling all at once. Those of us who write with our feet moving are by far the most susceptible, though I imagine it catches the odd whole-draft writer often enough when they're not looking. You begin to see small changes, little edits, new lines you want to give your characters the excuse to say, and you update your outline accordingly.
It's just one little wafer-thin piece. What harm could it do?
Each little vignette, each new minor addition is benign in its own right, but together they form a veritable Destructor of new content that can throw off any predictions you might have had about when the work will be complete, to say nothing of the half-dozen tweaks you'll no doubt think up in the window of your newly extended deadline.
Creep likes to attack in the wee hours, in that delicate space between sleeping and waking when fantasy reigns supreme and magic mingles with mystery inside our minds. It preys upon the unsuspecting scrap paper and moonlight scribbles of the author's bedside. It lurks in the dark corners of every serendipitous discourse that startles the stagnant embers of creativity. Creep craves the chaotic collisions of a caffeinated cranium.
Crazy, right?
Creep can be a beautiful thing. It's through creep that we are reminded of the life of a work, the life of a world. Creep exists because we are never finished. No scene is ever complete. Rather, scenes are confined by soft borders; thin cellophane screens that no more hold them back than a reed halts a summer storm.
Naturally, we have to stop somewhere. Every draft chooses the lines where the scene ends, where the experiment stops, where the worth runs out; but those lines are no more set in the immalleable memory of the collective consciousness than the borders of a Russian sub-state.
...Too soon?
Creep means that there is always more to be added, there is always something more we crave about a world, a character, a scene, a moment in fictional time that must be seen, shared and savored before we can call ourselves complete.
Limitless possibilities: wonderful to ponder, aggravating to execute.
The Order, once a 230-page poser-paperback flapping in the wind has now crept across 390 total pages, with what looks to be almost 200 pages still to come before even the core arc of the story will reach its full. The creative mold has overtaken my mind entirely at this point, branching into entirely new evolutionary strains resistant to any and all attempts to remove them safely from the brain.
Suffice it to say, creep is very close to my heart, having traveled southbound from the cerebellum. For those similarly afflicted, consider writing in stages:
- Stage one: Core scenes only. Write only what you need to survive. Record any ideas for additional scenes in brief, store for later use.
- Stage two: Pen added scenes ad hoc, individually. Modular. Insert into core plotline and note the page numbers before and after.
- Stage three: Re-read complete draft with added scenes added in. Remove any that feel awkward or out of place. Store the rejects somewhere safe, just in case. Potentially insert into future works with similar situations, characters or settings.
- Stage four: Pie. Get you some.
Friday, December 17, 2010
9 to 5 to 9 - Writing With a Day Job
Writing would be so much easier to get done if it weren't for that pesky need to eat.
If you're like nearly any burgeoning writer, you know that a few half-edited short stories don't exactly pay the bills. And by "don't exactly" I mean "ahaha, HAHA, haaa, No." Meaning, in short, that a large portion of us work a large portion of each day for a large portion of the week on something other than writing. When you consider the number of hours that go into a full-length novel, trying to squeeze it in between a workday and anything remotely resembling a social life becomes an experiment in non-Euclidian geometry.
Mind you, there are folks out there who make quite a good living writing, and not just the novelists. Pieces of periodicals may not pay through the nose, but when your target is about 2000 words, the sky's the limit. That said, until you've honed your writing ethic and sharpened your wit on the grindstone of failed experiments, it's difficult to guarantee yourself a reliable paycheck unless you happen to strike gold right out of the box.
Professional writing is honestly a lot like professional sports that way: for every success story you see, there are tens of thousands of hopefuls who have gone wanting. Even many who eventually succeed in the craft started their work while employed full-time as something entirely different. Personally, I find it a lot easier to write when I'm not being interrupted every few minutes by a stomach crying out for a meal that consists of more than Japanese noodles.
The trouble is that work so often leaves you little room left to get any actual writing done. It's rare that a job provides you with the space and tools to write; rarer still that it provide you with the time. Waiting until your shift is up means cramming writing time in between the commute, a meal, and the time you need to be in bed so you can wake up tomorrow and do it all again.
It's a little like working while still in school: you have two things you need to do every day, and you have to keep at them both to be successful and sustained. Work is the thing that lets you keep paying to go to school, so given the choice, work always wins. But sometimes it's worth it to risk coming in a few minutes late after spending an extra hour or two the night before preparing for your final.
School is the thing that gets you to bigger and brighter things one day. Work is the thing that keeps you fed in the here-and-now. It's the same way when it comes to writing.
If you're working, writing, and in school, god bless you, and what the hell are you doing wasting time online? There's work to be done!
Time isn't the only limiting factor: even a job that doesn't force you to work after hours can leave you exhausted half the time, or distracted enough with ongoing projects not to be able to focus on that next scene you have to sort out. Add to this that you may, occasionally, want to talk to or even see other people, and your writing time has dried up to a pittance before it even began.
Often, the trick is to find a job that will either let you write during the day, or one that makes up for the difference in worth. Working in customer service won't exactly give you hours of time for writing, but the number of colorful personalities you'll encounter form a ready mosaic to draw your character quirks from later, and there is a certain sense of justice in carving to stone the rank displeasure of those you least like dealing with, laid bare for generations to enjoy.
Even jobs that won't let you write on the clock (because, let's face it, you shouldn't. Sure, it beats stealing office supplies, but the fact remains: you were hired to do a job, and it should take precedence over that one fight scene that's been giving you so much trouble all week) will often allow you enough time at lunch to get in a page or two.
Eating alone rarely requires an hour's time. Bring the food back to your desk or take a steno pad somewhere quiet and rattle off half a scene. Do it every day for a month and you have about 15-20 thousand words without ever picking up a pen after hours. That roughly equates to two novels a year. On your lunch hour.
If you get vacation time, use it to take a writing day now and then. Since your writing follows your schedule, you can take a day off in the middle of the season when everyone else is staying in the office because it's "just another week." One good solid 9-to-5 day of writing can be the miracle that saves your deadline. Don't be afraid to take a day when you need it. If all goes well, one day you'll be in the habit of 8-hour writing days like these all year long.
In the meantime, don't quit your day job.
If you're like nearly any burgeoning writer, you know that a few half-edited short stories don't exactly pay the bills. And by "don't exactly" I mean "ahaha, HAHA, haaa, No." Meaning, in short, that a large portion of us work a large portion of each day for a large portion of the week on something other than writing. When you consider the number of hours that go into a full-length novel, trying to squeeze it in between a workday and anything remotely resembling a social life becomes an experiment in non-Euclidian geometry.
Mind you, there are folks out there who make quite a good living writing, and not just the novelists. Pieces of periodicals may not pay through the nose, but when your target is about 2000 words, the sky's the limit. That said, until you've honed your writing ethic and sharpened your wit on the grindstone of failed experiments, it's difficult to guarantee yourself a reliable paycheck unless you happen to strike gold right out of the box.
Professional writing is honestly a lot like professional sports that way: for every success story you see, there are tens of thousands of hopefuls who have gone wanting. Even many who eventually succeed in the craft started their work while employed full-time as something entirely different. Personally, I find it a lot easier to write when I'm not being interrupted every few minutes by a stomach crying out for a meal that consists of more than Japanese noodles.
The trouble is that work so often leaves you little room left to get any actual writing done. It's rare that a job provides you with the space and tools to write; rarer still that it provide you with the time. Waiting until your shift is up means cramming writing time in between the commute, a meal, and the time you need to be in bed so you can wake up tomorrow and do it all again.
It's a little like working while still in school: you have two things you need to do every day, and you have to keep at them both to be successful and sustained. Work is the thing that lets you keep paying to go to school, so given the choice, work always wins. But sometimes it's worth it to risk coming in a few minutes late after spending an extra hour or two the night before preparing for your final.
School is the thing that gets you to bigger and brighter things one day. Work is the thing that keeps you fed in the here-and-now. It's the same way when it comes to writing.
If you're working, writing, and in school, god bless you, and what the hell are you doing wasting time online? There's work to be done!
Time isn't the only limiting factor: even a job that doesn't force you to work after hours can leave you exhausted half the time, or distracted enough with ongoing projects not to be able to focus on that next scene you have to sort out. Add to this that you may, occasionally, want to talk to or even see other people, and your writing time has dried up to a pittance before it even began.
Often, the trick is to find a job that will either let you write during the day, or one that makes up for the difference in worth. Working in customer service won't exactly give you hours of time for writing, but the number of colorful personalities you'll encounter form a ready mosaic to draw your character quirks from later, and there is a certain sense of justice in carving to stone the rank displeasure of those you least like dealing with, laid bare for generations to enjoy.
Even jobs that won't let you write on the clock (because, let's face it, you shouldn't. Sure, it beats stealing office supplies, but the fact remains: you were hired to do a job, and it should take precedence over that one fight scene that's been giving you so much trouble all week) will often allow you enough time at lunch to get in a page or two.
Eating alone rarely requires an hour's time. Bring the food back to your desk or take a steno pad somewhere quiet and rattle off half a scene. Do it every day for a month and you have about 15-20 thousand words without ever picking up a pen after hours. That roughly equates to two novels a year. On your lunch hour.
If you get vacation time, use it to take a writing day now and then. Since your writing follows your schedule, you can take a day off in the middle of the season when everyone else is staying in the office because it's "just another week." One good solid 9-to-5 day of writing can be the miracle that saves your deadline. Don't be afraid to take a day when you need it. If all goes well, one day you'll be in the habit of 8-hour writing days like these all year long.
In the meantime, don't quit your day job.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Action Items
If there's one thing movies may always hold over books, it's that action scenes are usually much harder to write than they are to simply...do.
It doesn't help that the words share a common meaning. Actors acting out an action scene are often limited only by the expense of wire-fighting equipment and swiftly changing camera angles. When all you have to work with is words, it's easy to find yourself desperately searching for a key grip somewhere in the wings.
It only takes a handful of muscles to punch someone in the jaw. By contrast, it takes entirely too much precision to describe the punch, the jaw, and the flight of the poor bastard on the receiving end as he ricochets off the bar, spills two drinks and finally crashes, chin-first, into a nearby table, upsetting a polite game of poker played by some rather nice gentlemen who are happy to join in the scuffle now that their wagers have all been sent skyward.
Case in point.
Writing action scenes isn't always necessary: plenty of beloved books don't have a single one. However, even books that don't center on action may need at least a scene or two to evoke the desired blood-pumping pace in their readers before the end.
Action scenes appear in places you might not even expect: romantic comedies often involve a sprint to the finish as the one lover realizes their mistake and must race to catch the other before their plane/train/taxi/burro carries them out of reach. Political thrillers often rely on brief, potent moments of action to signify the very real threat of otherwise very cerebral notions. Action isn't just the cotton candy of a writer's repertoire, it's a genuine tool that can trigger the emotions you as a writer desire to create.
Action doesn't just mean fight scenes, either. Any sort of fast-paced, low-dialogue sequence wherein your characters are pressed for time or survival gets at the same nerve as any barroom brawl. Between your main character's moment of epiphany and the final peak of triumph is a long road best taken at a heady pace. Endangering the character or the people they care about along the way is also a great way to get your readers clawing at the pages between the two.
But the actual mechanics of writing action can be tricky to master. It's difficult to know just how much detail to include and what points to gloss over. If you stray too poetic, the reader can get lost as to who's doing what, but err on the bulky side and you may overburden or even bore the reader with the minutia; the exact opposite effect of what you're hoping for.
The first step is to put the movies and the comic books aside. "Biff," "Pow" and "Crash" really only work in the DC world and Adam West's private laser tag arena. You're going to have to think about how things react to fill in all the pieces at the edge of the room.
Look back at the example above: a man throws a punch. His opponent slams into a bar, bounces off, into a table, which in turn sends chips flying and angers three men. They, in turn, may stand up in reaction, knocking their chairs to the floor in the path of a fleeing waiter. It's a lot to account for, and you want to have it all clear in your head before you start typing.
Naturally, the danger becomes too much detail. With a whole room to describe, how can you keep the reader focused on the action at the center? Remember to obey the rule of Chekhov's guns: if you describe something in the room, make sure it matters.
When the man's chin hits the table, the wagers are described as flying, not the cards. The wagers only matter because it gives a reason why the men at the table are now getting into the fray themselves. If they were all just sitting around eating bar peanuts, the men and what's on the table start to matter a lot less.
Pare down anything that doesn't have an impact on the scene or immediately add to the worth of the impact at hand. Hitting a table at full force with your chin is a lot more painful to think about than landing on your shoulder. If the injury becomes important later (e.g. the main character has a vocal audition in the morning), all the better, but sometimes it's worth it just for the 'oof' sound your readers will be making.
When your core action at the center is where all the detail lies, it may be time to start grouping smaller actions into broader terms. Think of it like a watercolor: keep your hands moving in quick, broad strokes and the picture will become clear on its own. If you stop to focus in on the details, you risk muddying the waters and losing the overall image.
The bigger danger with action scenes is repetition. The average fight involves ten to twelve attempted haymakers, a word for which there are only so many synonyms. A chase scene is a lot of harrowing turns and fruit stands when you get right down to details. You have to use the landscape to keep things interesting. There's a reason so many chase scenes are filmed in southern California...
When the foreground gets boring, keep the background interesting. Move your foot race to the rooftops and you can add skylights and clotheslines to your scenery. Make your fights mobile, and bring everything in the room into the fray. Chekhov's guns can also be Chekhov's beer bottles, end-tables, vases, framed pictures and common housecats.
Another thing to watch for when writing action is purely grammatical. There are two styles that consume many writers in their early days: sentences that end too soon, and sentences that never seem to end at all. Action tends to throw both styles into their respective death-blossom modes. Short sentences become microscopic tidbits containing only the bare minimum structure required to keep calling themselves sentences, while my fellow clause-monsters and I begin dipping deep into the comma reserves.
Whatever your style is naturally, when you get to an action scene, compare it back to some of your less action-packed writing. Once you're a few paragraphs in, start counting the number of words between periods. If it's spiked or dropped suddenly, you may want to look into carving up or gluing together the descriptive bits you're working with.
Lastly, dialogue. Dialogue can be a wonderful way to break up the monotony of even a creative action scene if it starts to go on too long, or if you want to add a humorous element to an otherwise frightening ordeal. There are a number of good examples when it comes to splicing commentary into moments of high action, but there are far more and far louder bad examples out there drowning them out.
Dialogue in the middle of an action sequence always risks straying into the campy variety. Crossing the Ian Fleming line into outright parody is disturbingly close to where many writers start, but adding "Guess he lost his head" to the end of a scene of outright gore is a habit best left to the one man who could get away with a villain named Pussy Galore.
Even without the awful puns, a lot of mid-action dialogue will come off as clunky and awkward unless it's handled carefully. Anyone who's watched even one anime has likely run across the worst of it. characters who spend as much (or more) time bantering, threatening and generally wasting time than actually doing anything of interest to the audience.
The best method is to keep it quick. A short line, even if it doesn't add anything to the meat of the scene, can be just the right dash of spice. A line as simple as "That worked?!" in the midst of fixing the engines to get yourselves to safety can be all you need to turn the corner in the middle of a serious scene. It helps to think of it less as a dialogue between characters and more as a character addressing the scene itself. When the gun that keeps jamming is the other person in the conversation, it can keep you from going on too long talking and forgetting to unjam the damn thing and get back to firing.
If you need the characters to have a real heart-to-heart in the middle of their duel, consider giving them a moment to actually pause. Cover in the middle of a fight is a great solution. Gunmen duck out of sight when they pause to reload, sword fighters can lose track of each other in the scuffle over uneven terrain or in a heavily shadowed arena. Once the forces stop fighting and catch their breath, it's a great time for a short chat before they launch at each other again to finish things once and for all.
Feeling breathless? Don't sweat it: action scenes in print aren't all that different from action scenes in the movies. Start with what you know and what you've seen, keep the strokes wide and broad so that you don't risk getting too scientific and, as always, find someone to read it when you're done. In the same room, preferably, so you can see whether they're checking the clock or leaving claw marks in the cover.
If you're able to get someone to read the scene under scrutiny, count the number of times they look away from the page for anything other than a smoke alarm going off. Each time their attention drifts to anything but your words, that's one more read-through of the scene to search for what you can improve. If you catch them rolling their eyes or groaning, it's possible you've crossed the Fleming line by mistake.
Shocking, that.
It doesn't help that the words share a common meaning. Actors acting out an action scene are often limited only by the expense of wire-fighting equipment and swiftly changing camera angles. When all you have to work with is words, it's easy to find yourself desperately searching for a key grip somewhere in the wings.
It only takes a handful of muscles to punch someone in the jaw. By contrast, it takes entirely too much precision to describe the punch, the jaw, and the flight of the poor bastard on the receiving end as he ricochets off the bar, spills two drinks and finally crashes, chin-first, into a nearby table, upsetting a polite game of poker played by some rather nice gentlemen who are happy to join in the scuffle now that their wagers have all been sent skyward.
Case in point.
Writing action scenes isn't always necessary: plenty of beloved books don't have a single one. However, even books that don't center on action may need at least a scene or two to evoke the desired blood-pumping pace in their readers before the end.
Action scenes appear in places you might not even expect: romantic comedies often involve a sprint to the finish as the one lover realizes their mistake and must race to catch the other before their plane/train/taxi/burro carries them out of reach. Political thrillers often rely on brief, potent moments of action to signify the very real threat of otherwise very cerebral notions. Action isn't just the cotton candy of a writer's repertoire, it's a genuine tool that can trigger the emotions you as a writer desire to create.
Action doesn't just mean fight scenes, either. Any sort of fast-paced, low-dialogue sequence wherein your characters are pressed for time or survival gets at the same nerve as any barroom brawl. Between your main character's moment of epiphany and the final peak of triumph is a long road best taken at a heady pace. Endangering the character or the people they care about along the way is also a great way to get your readers clawing at the pages between the two.
But the actual mechanics of writing action can be tricky to master. It's difficult to know just how much detail to include and what points to gloss over. If you stray too poetic, the reader can get lost as to who's doing what, but err on the bulky side and you may overburden or even bore the reader with the minutia; the exact opposite effect of what you're hoping for.
The first step is to put the movies and the comic books aside. "Biff," "Pow" and "Crash" really only work in the DC world and Adam West's private laser tag arena. You're going to have to think about how things react to fill in all the pieces at the edge of the room.
Look back at the example above: a man throws a punch. His opponent slams into a bar, bounces off, into a table, which in turn sends chips flying and angers three men. They, in turn, may stand up in reaction, knocking their chairs to the floor in the path of a fleeing waiter. It's a lot to account for, and you want to have it all clear in your head before you start typing.
Naturally, the danger becomes too much detail. With a whole room to describe, how can you keep the reader focused on the action at the center? Remember to obey the rule of Chekhov's guns: if you describe something in the room, make sure it matters.
When the man's chin hits the table, the wagers are described as flying, not the cards. The wagers only matter because it gives a reason why the men at the table are now getting into the fray themselves. If they were all just sitting around eating bar peanuts, the men and what's on the table start to matter a lot less.
Pare down anything that doesn't have an impact on the scene or immediately add to the worth of the impact at hand. Hitting a table at full force with your chin is a lot more painful to think about than landing on your shoulder. If the injury becomes important later (e.g. the main character has a vocal audition in the morning), all the better, but sometimes it's worth it just for the 'oof' sound your readers will be making.
When your core action at the center is where all the detail lies, it may be time to start grouping smaller actions into broader terms. Think of it like a watercolor: keep your hands moving in quick, broad strokes and the picture will become clear on its own. If you stop to focus in on the details, you risk muddying the waters and losing the overall image.
The bigger danger with action scenes is repetition. The average fight involves ten to twelve attempted haymakers, a word for which there are only so many synonyms. A chase scene is a lot of harrowing turns and fruit stands when you get right down to details. You have to use the landscape to keep things interesting. There's a reason so many chase scenes are filmed in southern California...
When the foreground gets boring, keep the background interesting. Move your foot race to the rooftops and you can add skylights and clotheslines to your scenery. Make your fights mobile, and bring everything in the room into the fray. Chekhov's guns can also be Chekhov's beer bottles, end-tables, vases, framed pictures and common housecats.
Another thing to watch for when writing action is purely grammatical. There are two styles that consume many writers in their early days: sentences that end too soon, and sentences that never seem to end at all. Action tends to throw both styles into their respective death-blossom modes. Short sentences become microscopic tidbits containing only the bare minimum structure required to keep calling themselves sentences, while my fellow clause-monsters and I begin dipping deep into the comma reserves.
Whatever your style is naturally, when you get to an action scene, compare it back to some of your less action-packed writing. Once you're a few paragraphs in, start counting the number of words between periods. If it's spiked or dropped suddenly, you may want to look into carving up or gluing together the descriptive bits you're working with.
Lastly, dialogue. Dialogue can be a wonderful way to break up the monotony of even a creative action scene if it starts to go on too long, or if you want to add a humorous element to an otherwise frightening ordeal. There are a number of good examples when it comes to splicing commentary into moments of high action, but there are far more and far louder bad examples out there drowning them out.
Dialogue in the middle of an action sequence always risks straying into the campy variety. Crossing the Ian Fleming line into outright parody is disturbingly close to where many writers start, but adding "Guess he lost his head" to the end of a scene of outright gore is a habit best left to the one man who could get away with a villain named Pussy Galore.
Even without the awful puns, a lot of mid-action dialogue will come off as clunky and awkward unless it's handled carefully. Anyone who's watched even one anime has likely run across the worst of it. characters who spend as much (or more) time bantering, threatening and generally wasting time than actually doing anything of interest to the audience.
The best method is to keep it quick. A short line, even if it doesn't add anything to the meat of the scene, can be just the right dash of spice. A line as simple as "That worked?!" in the midst of fixing the engines to get yourselves to safety can be all you need to turn the corner in the middle of a serious scene. It helps to think of it less as a dialogue between characters and more as a character addressing the scene itself. When the gun that keeps jamming is the other person in the conversation, it can keep you from going on too long talking and forgetting to unjam the damn thing and get back to firing.
If you need the characters to have a real heart-to-heart in the middle of their duel, consider giving them a moment to actually pause. Cover in the middle of a fight is a great solution. Gunmen duck out of sight when they pause to reload, sword fighters can lose track of each other in the scuffle over uneven terrain or in a heavily shadowed arena. Once the forces stop fighting and catch their breath, it's a great time for a short chat before they launch at each other again to finish things once and for all.
Feeling breathless? Don't sweat it: action scenes in print aren't all that different from action scenes in the movies. Start with what you know and what you've seen, keep the strokes wide and broad so that you don't risk getting too scientific and, as always, find someone to read it when you're done. In the same room, preferably, so you can see whether they're checking the clock or leaving claw marks in the cover.
If you're able to get someone to read the scene under scrutiny, count the number of times they look away from the page for anything other than a smoke alarm going off. Each time their attention drifts to anything but your words, that's one more read-through of the scene to search for what you can improve. If you catch them rolling their eyes or groaning, it's possible you've crossed the Fleming line by mistake.
Shocking, that.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Death of an Age (Snippet)
"Do you really think the world is ending?" Sira asked, staring out at the receding fog drawing away from all corners of what was once the tainted plain.
Captain Chang adjusted his armor over the missing stump that had been his arm, chuckling to himself at the look of it. "Ending?" he laughed, clapping the younger soldier on the back hard enough to make him stagger forward. "Son, the world is just now getting started..." He seemed about to say more, but a racking cough interceded. Sira reached out a hand in aid, but the captain merely swatted it away, bent double to let the fit see itself out.
Sira sighed, placing a hand idly on the man's back as he gazed back out on the world beyond the wall. A great victory had been won today, there was no denying that, and while he felt like a puppet in a larger play, he had at least been given the chance to sit upon the same stage with the true players behind this great shift.
But, as was so often true here on the wall, the victory had come with a price. Much of the world had been rent asunder in the battle for dominance. What remained was so scarred and scored it hardly resembled its former self. Mankind had won its freedom from one enemy, but scarcity was quickly drawing the battle lines on an entirely new conflict.
Chang coughed out the last of his fit and righted himself again, still standing a good foot shorter and about a foot wider than his comrade from the small township nearby. He set his remaining hand on his hip, nodding to himself as he looked out on the retreating mists. The war was over; a war that started long before his grandfather joined the fight; a war that ended now under his watch. The swelling pride he couldn't help but feel was kept tempered in part by years of cautious optimism. He had told the men often what dangers lay in hope. Even so, there was no denying that for the first time in his surprisingly long years, Captain Chang felt at ease.
"Well, I suppose we'd better go help with the graves," he said, marching off with a bounce in his step. Sira raised an eyebrow, still growing accustomed to Chang's peculiar ways. Twenty-seven years on the wall, he reminded himself, were likely to have some manner of effect on the brain. The man's casual love for the macabre had become a legend all their own. Still, Sira knew there was greater leader on this unforgiving vigil than the short, round man now skipping down the tower steps, muttering to himself about what he would do now that the demons were "running like pigs from thunder."
Another sigh passed the young man's lips as he returned his eyes to the field now laid plain by the vanishing fog. The land was weak and barren, in need of much tending, but the disease, at last, was gone. All that remained now was for the resolve of good men to outlast their penchant to imitate the very demons their efforts had helped to banish.
With a deep breath of clean, rich air, the soldier straightened up and marched off in the wake of the older captain to lend a hand or two to their dark-but-necessary efforts. It seemed only fitting that the land be propped up on the backs of the young men and women who had died to see it made free. He could only pray their spirits would safeguard the newcomers to this broken plain the way their bodies had guarded the wall of the old.
What remained of the world was far from lost, he told himself, rounding the crumbling planks of the tower steps. He only hoped that, before his feet reached the bottom, perhaps he would start believing it.
Captain Chang adjusted his armor over the missing stump that had been his arm, chuckling to himself at the look of it. "Ending?" he laughed, clapping the younger soldier on the back hard enough to make him stagger forward. "Son, the world is just now getting started..." He seemed about to say more, but a racking cough interceded. Sira reached out a hand in aid, but the captain merely swatted it away, bent double to let the fit see itself out.
Sira sighed, placing a hand idly on the man's back as he gazed back out on the world beyond the wall. A great victory had been won today, there was no denying that, and while he felt like a puppet in a larger play, he had at least been given the chance to sit upon the same stage with the true players behind this great shift.
But, as was so often true here on the wall, the victory had come with a price. Much of the world had been rent asunder in the battle for dominance. What remained was so scarred and scored it hardly resembled its former self. Mankind had won its freedom from one enemy, but scarcity was quickly drawing the battle lines on an entirely new conflict.
Chang coughed out the last of his fit and righted himself again, still standing a good foot shorter and about a foot wider than his comrade from the small township nearby. He set his remaining hand on his hip, nodding to himself as he looked out on the retreating mists. The war was over; a war that started long before his grandfather joined the fight; a war that ended now under his watch. The swelling pride he couldn't help but feel was kept tempered in part by years of cautious optimism. He had told the men often what dangers lay in hope. Even so, there was no denying that for the first time in his surprisingly long years, Captain Chang felt at ease.
"Well, I suppose we'd better go help with the graves," he said, marching off with a bounce in his step. Sira raised an eyebrow, still growing accustomed to Chang's peculiar ways. Twenty-seven years on the wall, he reminded himself, were likely to have some manner of effect on the brain. The man's casual love for the macabre had become a legend all their own. Still, Sira knew there was greater leader on this unforgiving vigil than the short, round man now skipping down the tower steps, muttering to himself about what he would do now that the demons were "running like pigs from thunder."
Another sigh passed the young man's lips as he returned his eyes to the field now laid plain by the vanishing fog. The land was weak and barren, in need of much tending, but the disease, at last, was gone. All that remained now was for the resolve of good men to outlast their penchant to imitate the very demons their efforts had helped to banish.
With a deep breath of clean, rich air, the soldier straightened up and marched off in the wake of the older captain to lend a hand or two to their dark-but-necessary efforts. It seemed only fitting that the land be propped up on the backs of the young men and women who had died to see it made free. He could only pray their spirits would safeguard the newcomers to this broken plain the way their bodies had guarded the wall of the old.
What remained of the world was far from lost, he told himself, rounding the crumbling planks of the tower steps. He only hoped that, before his feet reached the bottom, perhaps he would start believing it.
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