![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardYou know, I think I might be able to solve my POV problem in the fic-that-shall-not-be-named by changing my tactics. Literally, since I'm writing a battle scene. I think I might be able to kill two birds with one stone, since I have a sinking feeling that the tactics I was planning to use aren't actually suited for a pre-gunpowder battle. But if I switch to pre-gunpowder naval tactics (i.e. ship-to-ship), I think that will also (partially) solve my POV problem, since that will allow me to take my emphasis off the big picture and by extension not have to have multiple POVs in order to accurately portray the battle.
Now, there are several different ways to write battles, depending on what you're comfortable with and what kind of story you want to tell. My favorite pro action writers, S.M. Stirling and Bernard Cornwell, both tend to write battles in a similar manner -- short cuts between POVs, which gives the reader a fairly broad survey of the action on the battlefield. This is good for several reasons. First, there's a lot of stuff happening on a battlefield, and a single character can't be in all those places at once. For example, you might have your archers over here, and your cavalry down there making the charge, and the pikemen holding the line, and your reserve here in this corner, and your ambush lurking in this wood. If you have multiple characters, you can have a fairly decent view of all these places more or less at once. This works especially well if you have, say, a sneak attack, either from your side or the enemy's side. I'll take an S.M. Stirling example here, from Dies the Fire: our main POV character, Mike Havel, is off with the main Bearkiller force chasing raiders across the wild plains of Idaho. Meanwhile, at the exact same time, Duke Iron Rod (the raider lord -- actually, "raider" is a bad term to use here, but work with me) is making a sneak attack on the Bearkiller camp. We know it happens at the same time because as Havel is on the plains he sees the balloon rising from the camp, and turns around quickly to go back and take care of business. Now, Stirling could have kept to a strict POV here -- he could have just stayed in Havel's POV and had him see the balloon rising, but that doesn't quite have the same punch as having the beginning of the camp sequence from the traitor's POV to give the audience the flavor for what's going on before Stirling goes back to Havel's POV.
Another, perhaps more familiar example, comes in Scott Lynch's book Red Seas Under Red Skies, during the battle between the Poison Orchid and the Dread Sovereign, where Lynch switches merrily between the POVs of Locke Lamora, Zamira Drakasha, Jean Tannin, and Jaffrim Rodanov. Three of the characters are on the same side, while the fourth isn't, which allows him to know something that the others don't know. So when he sets loose the valcona, there's less exposition required. Lynch is really good at portraying chaos, which a battle is, and which is a lot easier to do with multiple POVs who maybe aren't interacting than with a single POV who has a great deal of focus.
Bernard Cornwell does the same thing, although he's less married to staying firmly in a POV character's head for any given scene (aside from a few specific books -- the Saxon Chronicles for one, since those are first person and thus a POV switch is really really obvious). In the Sharpe books, he tends to do the thing where you'll be in one character's head for a few paragraphs, then another's, and then maybe you'll pop out to do a third person omniscient. Since he keeps up that style throughout the entirety of the book, it works. I just read his book The Fort, which is a glorious case of writing a book to write a battle (or a really really failed battle, to be more specific), and while he never goes omniscient there, he does have a handful of POVs that he cycles through according to his need in any given scene. (Does he want a commander's POV? McLean or Wadsworth, depending on whether we're going British or American. Boots on the ground? Moore or Welch, or Wadsworth, depending where in the scene it is. And so on.)
So that's one way to write a battle, and probably the best way if you want a big picture. Another way to do it is to stick closely in one POV, which will only give you one view of the battle. Not necessarily a bad thing; in some cases I think it depends on the scale of a fight. If you happen to be writing a major conflict, especially one with a lot of complicated things happening at once, multiple POVs may be the way to go. But you can keep it in one character's head if you want; that will give you a blinkered view of the action, since that character is only seeing what they're involved in, with one exception. That exception depends on who your POV character happens to be. If your POV character happens to be the commander, then they're going to know, in theory, what's going on where, or at least what should be going on where. If they happen to be at some high point up out of the fighting, then they have a good view of what's going on and can describe it. (Mercedes Lackey uses this technique in Exile's Honor, where you have Alberich up out of the way of the battle with Selenay, looking down at the battlefield. At least until the battle shows up to them, and then it becomes blinkered again.) They don't even have to be the commander, just an observer -- think of Catelyn Stark at the Battle of the Whispering Wood in A Game of Thrones. Of course, the flaw with that example is that Catelyn has no idea what's actually going on, and thus Martin gets out of writing a detailed description of the actual battle.
George R.R. Martin, with his tight third person POVs, is a good example of the merits and flaws of this approach. In A Game of Thrones, he uses the blinkered technique with Tyrion. You only see what Tyrion sees, not the confused mess of everything else happening on the field. It gives you boots on the ground; it's a bit more personal in some ways. It also gives the author the benefit of not having to figure out what the hell is happening elsewhere on the battlefield; the only thing he or she has to focus on is what's happening right here to this one character. Everyone else can get off scot-free. But the flip side is it's much harder to give the impression of the scale of the battle if you're not POV-hopping or in an observing position. Martin does this a little in the scene immediately preceding the battle itself, because he has Tyrion looking at Lord Tywin's army drawn up before the fighting actually starts. That sort of thing says, "Look at the scale of the fighters involved. Imagine what it will be like in the actual conflict."
The third approach is my least favorite -- a fade to black. And you thought that only happened in sex scenes. I like it when authors write action, so I don't have many examples of this one on the scale of an actual battle, just individual fight scenes. In the climactic fight scene in Twilight, Meyer knocks out her POV character, so the audience doesn't see the actual fight. (Which I suppose is less a fade to black and more of a knock to the head abrupt blackness.) A less infuriating example is to write all the way up to the actual battle, end scene, and begin the next scene after the battle. The AGOT Catelyn example I used above is probably a better example of this, since it goes off the battle, breezes rather lightly over it (she can hear it, but not see it) and then gives the aftermath. Another Dany chapter in AGOT does something similar -- not the build-up, but just the aftermath. (This is the scene where she rescues Mirri Maz Duur; giving these examples is less helpful when there aren't numbered chapters!) Fade-to-blacks work when the author isn't that comfortable writing action, especially if they're more concerned with the results of the battle than with the battle itself -- the Catelyn chapter gives us the Jaime Lannister conundrum that continues to haunt the series all the way into A Storm of Swords, while the Dany chapter gives us Drogo's (fatal) wound.
There's a fourth method, which is less about actually writing action -- this is the exposition wagon, where you have one character telling another what happened, rather than writing the action or the aftermath itself. This generally occurs when there was no POV character present at the battle -- I'm going to go for another AGOT example here, mostly because I have the book beside me. Martin doesn't give us the Battle of the Red Fork on screen, so to say; the audience hears about it at the same time as the POV character (Tyrion, in this case) from a courier. This works well if you (a) don't have a POV character at the battle or (b) the POV character you would have (I believe it would have been Catelyn) isn't familiar with the troops, tactics, geography, etc. -- in this specific scene, we get a description of Riverrun's defenses, which will be important later on in the series. Hearing about it from the Lannisters also tells us how Robb Stark's actions are affecting his enemies, rather than merely what he's doing.
To sum up, four different methods of writing battles:
1. Short cuts between multiple POVs in the same battle. (S.M. Stirling, Bernard Cornwell, Scott Lynch, Tamora Pierce)
2. Blinkered -- single POV, either directly in the battle or as an observer. (Bernard Cornwell, Mercedes Lackey, George R.R. Martin, Tamora Pierce)
3. Fade to black -- single POV, build up and/or aftermath, but no actual fight sequences. (George R.R. Martin, Stephenie Meyer, Tamora Pierce)
4. Exposition wagon -- description of the battle after it happens, usually from a non-POV character. (George R.R. Martin)
None of these are wrong, and all of them have their place depending on what the author's purposes are. There are obviously more cases in literature than the ones I've brought up here. One thing that should also be considered is what the POV situation in the rest of your book is like -- a sudden POV switch in order to do short cuts when previously you've had long tight third person is really bizarre and off-putting to the reader. I'm thinking of the Song of the Lioness books here -- the majority of the quartet is in Alanna's head, so when Pierce switches to a different POV for one reason or another it's a bit like getting kicked in the face. (One thing I appreciate about her later books is that she got much better about staying in a single POV for the majority of the book, although she falters in Lady Knight, where she needs to have things happening on screen that Kel won't be there to see. Although that's not a battle sequence, of course.) In Lioness Rampant it's slightly less bizarre than In the Hand of the Goddess (where all the battle sequences take place off-screen, except Jon deciding to rescue Alanna, where apparently we need a POV) because she has more scenes with non-Alanna POVs, but in the ending battle in the palace she starts doing short cuts again because she wants to show everything all at once. I think in Bernard Cornwell's book Agincourt, the entire book is in Nick Hook's POV except for one scene near the end, where he abruptly switches to Melisande's POV to show something happening when Nick isn't there. So it's important to be aware of how the rest of your story is written, because any abrupt changes of POV (especially in a fraught situation like a battle sequence) will throw off your audience.
(This also translates to film, in a slightly different way because you're not necessarily limited to only seeing scenes where the character is. One of my few major flaws with the first season of Rome is that they could not, for the life of them, film a good battle sequence. Like that confused blur at -- was it Dyrrhachium? The blur that ends in Caesar dropping into a chair and going, "I can't have another victory like that!" (I am paraphrasing.) I would much rather they have done a fade to black or an exposition show than whatever that was, because that threw me out of the show than nothing else did.)
Now, onto my own fic.
The first 8K of my story is all in one POV, Osumare Seaworth's POV to be exact. At one point I played with having multiple POVs in the story, but decided that wasn't going to work, so I went merrily along my way until I ran headfirst into the battle sequence. This is a battle on a rather massive scale and it's also a naval battle. A Narnian naval battle, so it includes things like aerial strikes by griffins and sea monsters lurking in the depths, and naturally a sneak attack. So I would like to do short cuts, but the problem is that, as I said above, the first 8K of the story is all in one POV. (And since it's a work in progress, I, yes, could have gone back and rewrote various scenes to be in different POVs, but I really didn't want to.) I got as far as writing one scene in another POV before I decided that no, I really wasn't comfortable with that; switching POVs that far into the story was violating the implicit contract with the audience. But I wouldn't be able to write my battle on the scale I wanted if I didn't do short cuts. Commander or not, my POV character is going to be in the midst of the action, not hanging back somewhere where he can describe what's happening. (Although, interestingly, he does this in another action sequence in the same story, but it wouldn't work here, for reasons that will become apparent in the story.)
I think I'm going to have to change the tactics. I've been dubious for a few days now about whether Age of Sail naval tactics are actually going to work in a pre-gunpowder world, and I really think they're not going to work the way I want them to when I don't have cannon. So what, you may be saying. Well -- given that this is a naval battle -- this means that I can stop worrying about having to tell the grand plan, because it will no longer be a battle of fleet-on-fleet exchanging broadsides, it means it will be a battle of ship-to-ship boarding and ramming and all the fun things. It's going to have to be blinkered by necessity. I can still have my aerial attacks and my sea monsters and my sneak attacks -- when they affect my POV character. (Except for the other sneak attack, which is going to have to go to exposition wagon, alas. On the other hand, I think that might work better -- it will, um, probably actually involve less exposition. Although I shall miss having a Fiorenza Paolucci POV.)
I have no idea if this would translate to a land battle, as I know a lot more about tactics on land than I do on sea, and there's not really an equivalent. (And let's be honest, I'm more familiar with pre-gunpowder tactics than I am with post-gunpowder tactics when it comes to land fighting, which is not the case with naval action.) Anyway, I think this should solve my POV problem, although I am of course sad to lose the 1.5K of short cuts I'd written.
Now, there are several different ways to write battles, depending on what you're comfortable with and what kind of story you want to tell. My favorite pro action writers, S.M. Stirling and Bernard Cornwell, both tend to write battles in a similar manner -- short cuts between POVs, which gives the reader a fairly broad survey of the action on the battlefield. This is good for several reasons. First, there's a lot of stuff happening on a battlefield, and a single character can't be in all those places at once. For example, you might have your archers over here, and your cavalry down there making the charge, and the pikemen holding the line, and your reserve here in this corner, and your ambush lurking in this wood. If you have multiple characters, you can have a fairly decent view of all these places more or less at once. This works especially well if you have, say, a sneak attack, either from your side or the enemy's side. I'll take an S.M. Stirling example here, from Dies the Fire: our main POV character, Mike Havel, is off with the main Bearkiller force chasing raiders across the wild plains of Idaho. Meanwhile, at the exact same time, Duke Iron Rod (the raider lord -- actually, "raider" is a bad term to use here, but work with me) is making a sneak attack on the Bearkiller camp. We know it happens at the same time because as Havel is on the plains he sees the balloon rising from the camp, and turns around quickly to go back and take care of business. Now, Stirling could have kept to a strict POV here -- he could have just stayed in Havel's POV and had him see the balloon rising, but that doesn't quite have the same punch as having the beginning of the camp sequence from the traitor's POV to give the audience the flavor for what's going on before Stirling goes back to Havel's POV.
Another, perhaps more familiar example, comes in Scott Lynch's book Red Seas Under Red Skies, during the battle between the Poison Orchid and the Dread Sovereign, where Lynch switches merrily between the POVs of Locke Lamora, Zamira Drakasha, Jean Tannin, and Jaffrim Rodanov. Three of the characters are on the same side, while the fourth isn't, which allows him to know something that the others don't know. So when he sets loose the valcona, there's less exposition required. Lynch is really good at portraying chaos, which a battle is, and which is a lot easier to do with multiple POVs who maybe aren't interacting than with a single POV who has a great deal of focus.
Bernard Cornwell does the same thing, although he's less married to staying firmly in a POV character's head for any given scene (aside from a few specific books -- the Saxon Chronicles for one, since those are first person and thus a POV switch is really really obvious). In the Sharpe books, he tends to do the thing where you'll be in one character's head for a few paragraphs, then another's, and then maybe you'll pop out to do a third person omniscient. Since he keeps up that style throughout the entirety of the book, it works. I just read his book The Fort, which is a glorious case of writing a book to write a battle (or a really really failed battle, to be more specific), and while he never goes omniscient there, he does have a handful of POVs that he cycles through according to his need in any given scene. (Does he want a commander's POV? McLean or Wadsworth, depending on whether we're going British or American. Boots on the ground? Moore or Welch, or Wadsworth, depending where in the scene it is. And so on.)
So that's one way to write a battle, and probably the best way if you want a big picture. Another way to do it is to stick closely in one POV, which will only give you one view of the battle. Not necessarily a bad thing; in some cases I think it depends on the scale of a fight. If you happen to be writing a major conflict, especially one with a lot of complicated things happening at once, multiple POVs may be the way to go. But you can keep it in one character's head if you want; that will give you a blinkered view of the action, since that character is only seeing what they're involved in, with one exception. That exception depends on who your POV character happens to be. If your POV character happens to be the commander, then they're going to know, in theory, what's going on where, or at least what should be going on where. If they happen to be at some high point up out of the fighting, then they have a good view of what's going on and can describe it. (Mercedes Lackey uses this technique in Exile's Honor, where you have Alberich up out of the way of the battle with Selenay, looking down at the battlefield. At least until the battle shows up to them, and then it becomes blinkered again.) They don't even have to be the commander, just an observer -- think of Catelyn Stark at the Battle of the Whispering Wood in A Game of Thrones. Of course, the flaw with that example is that Catelyn has no idea what's actually going on, and thus Martin gets out of writing a detailed description of the actual battle.
George R.R. Martin, with his tight third person POVs, is a good example of the merits and flaws of this approach. In A Game of Thrones, he uses the blinkered technique with Tyrion. You only see what Tyrion sees, not the confused mess of everything else happening on the field. It gives you boots on the ground; it's a bit more personal in some ways. It also gives the author the benefit of not having to figure out what the hell is happening elsewhere on the battlefield; the only thing he or she has to focus on is what's happening right here to this one character. Everyone else can get off scot-free. But the flip side is it's much harder to give the impression of the scale of the battle if you're not POV-hopping or in an observing position. Martin does this a little in the scene immediately preceding the battle itself, because he has Tyrion looking at Lord Tywin's army drawn up before the fighting actually starts. That sort of thing says, "Look at the scale of the fighters involved. Imagine what it will be like in the actual conflict."
The third approach is my least favorite -- a fade to black. And you thought that only happened in sex scenes. I like it when authors write action, so I don't have many examples of this one on the scale of an actual battle, just individual fight scenes. In the climactic fight scene in Twilight, Meyer knocks out her POV character, so the audience doesn't see the actual fight. (Which I suppose is less a fade to black and more of a knock to the head abrupt blackness.) A less infuriating example is to write all the way up to the actual battle, end scene, and begin the next scene after the battle. The AGOT Catelyn example I used above is probably a better example of this, since it goes off the battle, breezes rather lightly over it (she can hear it, but not see it) and then gives the aftermath. Another Dany chapter in AGOT does something similar -- not the build-up, but just the aftermath. (This is the scene where she rescues Mirri Maz Duur; giving these examples is less helpful when there aren't numbered chapters!) Fade-to-blacks work when the author isn't that comfortable writing action, especially if they're more concerned with the results of the battle than with the battle itself -- the Catelyn chapter gives us the Jaime Lannister conundrum that continues to haunt the series all the way into A Storm of Swords, while the Dany chapter gives us Drogo's (fatal) wound.
There's a fourth method, which is less about actually writing action -- this is the exposition wagon, where you have one character telling another what happened, rather than writing the action or the aftermath itself. This generally occurs when there was no POV character present at the battle -- I'm going to go for another AGOT example here, mostly because I have the book beside me. Martin doesn't give us the Battle of the Red Fork on screen, so to say; the audience hears about it at the same time as the POV character (Tyrion, in this case) from a courier. This works well if you (a) don't have a POV character at the battle or (b) the POV character you would have (I believe it would have been Catelyn) isn't familiar with the troops, tactics, geography, etc. -- in this specific scene, we get a description of Riverrun's defenses, which will be important later on in the series. Hearing about it from the Lannisters also tells us how Robb Stark's actions are affecting his enemies, rather than merely what he's doing.
To sum up, four different methods of writing battles:
1. Short cuts between multiple POVs in the same battle. (S.M. Stirling, Bernard Cornwell, Scott Lynch, Tamora Pierce)
2. Blinkered -- single POV, either directly in the battle or as an observer. (Bernard Cornwell, Mercedes Lackey, George R.R. Martin, Tamora Pierce)
3. Fade to black -- single POV, build up and/or aftermath, but no actual fight sequences. (George R.R. Martin, Stephenie Meyer, Tamora Pierce)
4. Exposition wagon -- description of the battle after it happens, usually from a non-POV character. (George R.R. Martin)
None of these are wrong, and all of them have their place depending on what the author's purposes are. There are obviously more cases in literature than the ones I've brought up here. One thing that should also be considered is what the POV situation in the rest of your book is like -- a sudden POV switch in order to do short cuts when previously you've had long tight third person is really bizarre and off-putting to the reader. I'm thinking of the Song of the Lioness books here -- the majority of the quartet is in Alanna's head, so when Pierce switches to a different POV for one reason or another it's a bit like getting kicked in the face. (One thing I appreciate about her later books is that she got much better about staying in a single POV for the majority of the book, although she falters in Lady Knight, where she needs to have things happening on screen that Kel won't be there to see. Although that's not a battle sequence, of course.) In Lioness Rampant it's slightly less bizarre than In the Hand of the Goddess (where all the battle sequences take place off-screen, except Jon deciding to rescue Alanna, where apparently we need a POV) because she has more scenes with non-Alanna POVs, but in the ending battle in the palace she starts doing short cuts again because she wants to show everything all at once. I think in Bernard Cornwell's book Agincourt, the entire book is in Nick Hook's POV except for one scene near the end, where he abruptly switches to Melisande's POV to show something happening when Nick isn't there. So it's important to be aware of how the rest of your story is written, because any abrupt changes of POV (especially in a fraught situation like a battle sequence) will throw off your audience.
(This also translates to film, in a slightly different way because you're not necessarily limited to only seeing scenes where the character is. One of my few major flaws with the first season of Rome is that they could not, for the life of them, film a good battle sequence. Like that confused blur at -- was it Dyrrhachium? The blur that ends in Caesar dropping into a chair and going, "I can't have another victory like that!" (I am paraphrasing.) I would much rather they have done a fade to black or an exposition show than whatever that was, because that threw me out of the show than nothing else did.)
Now, onto my own fic.
The first 8K of my story is all in one POV, Osumare Seaworth's POV to be exact. At one point I played with having multiple POVs in the story, but decided that wasn't going to work, so I went merrily along my way until I ran headfirst into the battle sequence. This is a battle on a rather massive scale and it's also a naval battle. A Narnian naval battle, so it includes things like aerial strikes by griffins and sea monsters lurking in the depths, and naturally a sneak attack. So I would like to do short cuts, but the problem is that, as I said above, the first 8K of the story is all in one POV. (And since it's a work in progress, I, yes, could have gone back and rewrote various scenes to be in different POVs, but I really didn't want to.) I got as far as writing one scene in another POV before I decided that no, I really wasn't comfortable with that; switching POVs that far into the story was violating the implicit contract with the audience. But I wouldn't be able to write my battle on the scale I wanted if I didn't do short cuts. Commander or not, my POV character is going to be in the midst of the action, not hanging back somewhere where he can describe what's happening. (Although, interestingly, he does this in another action sequence in the same story, but it wouldn't work here, for reasons that will become apparent in the story.)
I think I'm going to have to change the tactics. I've been dubious for a few days now about whether Age of Sail naval tactics are actually going to work in a pre-gunpowder world, and I really think they're not going to work the way I want them to when I don't have cannon. So what, you may be saying. Well -- given that this is a naval battle -- this means that I can stop worrying about having to tell the grand plan, because it will no longer be a battle of fleet-on-fleet exchanging broadsides, it means it will be a battle of ship-to-ship boarding and ramming and all the fun things. It's going to have to be blinkered by necessity. I can still have my aerial attacks and my sea monsters and my sneak attacks -- when they affect my POV character. (Except for the other sneak attack, which is going to have to go to exposition wagon, alas. On the other hand, I think that might work better -- it will, um, probably actually involve less exposition. Although I shall miss having a Fiorenza Paolucci POV.)
I have no idea if this would translate to a land battle, as I know a lot more about tactics on land than I do on sea, and there's not really an equivalent. (And let's be honest, I'm more familiar with pre-gunpowder tactics than I am with post-gunpowder tactics when it comes to land fighting, which is not the case with naval action.) Anyway, I think this should solve my POV problem, although I am of course sad to lose the 1.5K of short cuts I'd written.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-31 08:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-01 02:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-31 09:36 pm (UTC)In short, I remain jealous of your action-writing abilities.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-31 10:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-31 10:23 pm (UTC)*The British Isles? Not Isles anymore.
**This number is completely random.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-31 10:45 pm (UTC)What would be really awesome would be if we could work with something like
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-31 10:57 pm (UTC)little_details and similar comms and forums would definitely be a good place to recruit people to populate the wiki/find questions that have already been answered and only need to be moved over (although I'm not sure how that would work out from a legal point of view, so maybe just the recruitment).
I don't know, normally I like tags and would say "Delicious!", but somehow it just doesn't feel right for this kind of thing; YMMV, of course. I wish that everywhere with tags had Delicious's tag cross-referencing ability (seriously, they're supposed to be tags, not folders), but it's as rare as toesocks for snakes.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-01 02:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-01 02:43 am (UTC)But I don't know; a lot of the verses I write in, either magic is mandatory (and magic makes it a whole different game, or at least should...like in that transformation-battle in that one fairy tale), or there are other things that I get the feeling should weird the tactics. Like in Stargate, or anything with some form of teleportation. It's hard enough to figure out when it's just two unarmed guys, you know?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-01 05:33 am (UTC)I don't know. I've had the, "But military history is boring!" thing thrown at me a lot, and it always bewilders me, because that's the one thing I've always understood and always liked. Up until pretty recently I actually hated political history -- the one class I've taken that bored me so silly I had to drop it was a class on the Russian Revolution, which just...no. I could not handle it at all, I was bored out of my mind and falling asleep, which was unfortunate, as it was a seminar. I've started getting into political history now, but that's because, um, most of the time I find it hilarious.
Re: magic. You will notice that I do not tend to write action with magic in. *laughs* I used to write Star Wars (PT) fic, where it's all, "lightsaber, punching, blaster, Force, lightsaber, mindtrick!" Fun times, man, fun times.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-01 06:18 am (UTC)Also, I don't think I've had many history teachers who explained military history with logic to any great degree, other than the "logic" of why wars started. I assume that things get more explainy as you start taking the upper-level classes, but...papers. Do not want.
Actually, I'm pretty sure I do have fandoms...somewhere...where magic/craziness doesn't play a large part of any battle scenes there might be (if only because...um...*pokes gigantic stack of fandoms she plays around with*), but for the most part? The tamest one is Highlander, and I like to write crazy "the characters have changed all the rules through their awesomeness" fic. Battle scenes would kind of have to be crazy to work. I don't know. Maybe step 1 is learning how to write a good *scene* with more than 2 characters in it? Since that seems to be important for writing a good battle scene with more than 2 characters in it. Writing skills: I will learn them eventually, or kill somebody trying (practical experience, yay!...crap, now I've been reminded of Character Who Voluntarily Went to Maximum Security Prison).
Um, I think I'm probably starting to not make sense, so sleep time now.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-01 06:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-01 12:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-01 09:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-01 11:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-31 10:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-31 10:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-01 03:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-01 05:34 am (UTC)