Fight hard
This week, I’ve been struggling with a particular AB post. It’s not a huge spoiler if I let slip that Faith’s group winds up in a fight in the next week – and damn, I had forgotten how hard it is to write fight scenes. Or to write them well, anyway.
I’ve written lots of fight scenes before – the online RP gave me plenty of practice in that, but that was quite different. That was a blow-by-blow, much slower, and pretty much worked itself out as we went along. This is different. For starters, it’s first-person, and that took me a while to get my head around and to be able to fit myself in behind Faith’s eyes. She’s a lot of things, but an experienced fighter isn’t one of them. I know that being in that situation for the first time is surprising and strange, but it’s hard to draw on that and make it sound convincing at the same time.
I rewrote the scene three times – as in, went back to the beginning and started all over again – before I was at all happy with how it came out. I started off with dialogue between the two groups, and that just went on and on way too much, so I wound up cutting it out. Once I had decided to lean on the rush and emotion of it rather than the actual ‘and then he did this and she did that’, it came much easier.
When I was reworking it for the third time, I thought to myself, ‘Y’know, sex(y) scenes are way easier to write than violence.’ Pondering that again, it’s probably because I don’t write biological porn – cut out the mechanical parts and stick to the atmosphere of the scene, and it’s much easier for everyone involved. Or easier to get the ‘feel’ and authenticity of the scene. I guess it’s the same with violence. I just needed to get my head around into the right place before I could even start it.
I haven’t looked at that scene in a couple of days, but today is my time to sit down and edit/schedule up the next week of posts. So I’m about to go through and see how it looks again. Hopefully I won’t have to rewrite the damn thing again – if nothing else, I really don’t have the time. I’m not sure how it’s going to come out, or if it works properly.
The good news is that AB is still teaching me things. Things are going to be violent at times in this broken world of Faith’s, so with any luck I’ll get better at handling these kinds of scenes. Maybe I should experiment with different methods, though that’s hard to do without spoiling her voice. Something worth thinking about, though. The point of the blog is to stretch my writing and explore things.
Also, I need to look up details on scurvy. Hmm. I’m so mean.
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