For the last several days, I’ve been stuck in the middle of a battle.
Yes, okay, yes, the d*mn cat took the automated kibble dispenser (which exists so he doesn’t get too much at once) apart. And yes, if I find the person who gave him a cat-ready multi-tool whoever it was is going to be laughing out of the other side of his face.
But that’s not the battle I’m talking about.
This is the big, final battle of No Man’s Land. And unfortunately I’m in the middle of another battle with bureaucracy in real life, which means my time for dealing with the battle has been limited.
Which brings us to….
I hate writing battle scenes. Not because of the blood or the fight, or the intensity. That part is good.
I hate it because they’re hard to write.
I’ve been in some massive fights (not battles, no) but I’m a berserker, so my memory of things is…. not quite none, but weird and distorted. Like, I’ll remember things in a series of disconnected images and from an intensely personal point of view, which means I have no idea what’s happening around me.
Mind you, particularly in first person, it is the best to have a highly personal POV, but you still need to know what’s happening in the rest of the battle, so your character needs to see highly targeted things so we get a sense of what’s happening in the rest.
Honestly I floundered for years until I figured out how to make it make sense before I write it. What taught me to do it was comics writing.
Take my current battle: my character is in a run to get a baby — Kitten — from a dangerous situation and take him back to the house. At the same time, and around him, people are fighting for their lives, or for the possession of … well, an orphanage.
So here’s a preview of some of the script:
1- Skip, running across the backyard, while zapper fire breaks on his shield.
2- he passes Edmund, stabbing at a Draghal who is diving at him to stab him.
3- to his left, Horse nomads come out of the stable, riding horses. Glar is grinning maniacally.
3- Skip’s shield is breaking, the surface receiving stabbings. Fissures open, as he reaches the bigger shield.
4 – He signals he wants Kitten.
5 – people within the shield are upset at the distraction, but they give him Kitten.
6- As he’s running back, shield breaks.
7 – Skip is protecting Kitten while attempting to draw his zapper. Fumbling.
8 – Edmund lounges in his direction.
9- Edmund’s opponent stabs Edmund in the back.
10 – The big power battle breaks, as Eerlen cannot hold the shield, and starts towards Skip.
11 – Draghal commander gets hold of Eerlen.
12 – Jyrrayr on horseback gets between Skip and Draghal commander who has just shot at Skip.
You get the point. You imagine each of the actions as what you could draw in a square. This gives you enough of a background. It takes forever, but it stops the temptation to go “And then he killed the bad guy and they all win. Yay.”
Give it a try and see if it improves the stone cold b*tch of writing a battle. And remember, people are looking for fun and entertaining battles. So, improbable acts of heroism, funny slips and bits of bad luck, all make good stories.
Go try it out.
Mad Genius Club 
23 responses to “And Then The Battle Happened”
I’ve written battles, but I’ve used multiple points of view. Even then, it’s tricky to slip in and show the rest of the activity when someone is fighting for his life.
In the Vixen War Bride series I’ve noticed that the author uses an omniscient narrator. That must help a lot.
Bernard Cornwell is a master of it in the Sharpe series.
I’m stuck in a first person POV and a third close-in. I realized when outlining I need to change POV right after that last beat.
And then the battle happened — is pretty much where I am. Yes, I suck at that. Thanks for the ideas.
Now I want to lounge at somebody. I just have to figure out how to get away with it.
lunge. Shut up. It’s an outline, and OMG I was tired last night when I wrote this out.
😀
I knew what you were intending, but the phrase you inadvertently coined is just so fun to play with. It’s better than the fidget clicker that mysteriously disappeared from my keychain.
I have been so incredibly out of it these last two weeks while dealing with trying to make younger kid’s Portuguese wedding happen…..
Back when I was writing battle scenes as opposed to raids and fights, I had to map out who was where, who moved first, and so on. It helped that I was stealing from history, so I had basic terrain and elements that I built from/riffed off of. But I’m lazy.
I have recently written, not one, but two battles.
In neither case did the point-of-view character actually fight. Both, however, were responsible for massive morale collapses on the other side.
I wrote a space battle switching between 5 different viewpoints. I think it came out pretty good.
I also have a hand-to-hand fight scene that concentrates on just the main character. Still needs some work.
Hyper-attention to the moments definitely rings as realistic. What I have a problem with in the above narrative description is POV. No single involved POV can see (or care about in the moment) all of that, unless they were wandering around invisible in a protective bubble. Now it’s good (as a reader) to omnisciently know what happened, but that’s not a story.
Comics allow you to be that omniscient reader in that way — YOU are the POV character being granted that view and all the time in the world you need to enjoy it from panel to panel. But a written narrative POV character is tangled up in his emotions & reactions to the immediacy of it all, and can only perceive so much of it in the moment.
What I do in written prose is sink into the fragmented perceptions of a single POV (or perhaps a series of them), and then afterwards the survivors or bystanders recount (or just remember internally) some of the simultaneous details, for the benefit of the readers (and other characters). The reader may still acquire the full picture, as in a comic, but it comes through the characters experiencing it, not the omniscient view. The comic character grimacing and saying “ouch” is not the same as the written character dreading the destruction he anticipates.
LOL. He is wandering around in a protective bubble. Not invisible. The see it’s the people he passes.
In “Free Passage” the entire story turns on the way the character who ducks for cover at the first sign of it is the only one noticing something.
Which brings me to the not actually unrelated question of best and most believable ways for someone to accidentally shatter a glass casserole through differential heating and not knowing how to cook?
I kind of wanted something involving making cookies going horribly wrong, but I’m not entirely sure trying to bake cookies in a glass casserole would actually do that?
I suppose they could preheat the casserole in the oven then drop chilled cookie dough in top of it?
Um… I can tell you had someone absent minded can do it.
If you’ve been cooking something on the stovetop, and you tend to use the stovetop as a trivet, you’re only a single step away from setting your casserole dish on a hot burner.
For extra points, have them hear the “tic” of the overheating Pyrex, realize what’s happening, and pull it off the heat to save it, so the now unsupported weight of the food stresses the differentially bottom, and the whole thing shatters in something very much like an explosion. (It also shatters cubicly. So the flying shards aren’t that dangerous, beyond the sharp corners and being super hot. Also, I’m pretty sure the anime artist who started using the effect of cubic debris in rendering explosions did this once.)
Interesting. Undo wonder if an oven rack would have enough thermal mass to do that if you put a casserole on one preheated to 450?
I do want to find some way to be a mishap involving baking cookies, just because the tonal contrast would be so huge.
Hmm. How about the casserole being preheated to 450, and then cold brownie batter being poured into it? Person picks up the casserole to put it back into the oven, and BLOOIE! (Added advantage of being FAR messier…)
I… can’t see that happening.
Either you’re an experienced baker who knows the batter goes into the pan cold, or you’re an inexperienced baker following a recipe that says “preheat oven to 350 F. Prepare batter and pour into greased and floured pan” which order of operations effectively precludes hot pan anything.
“Baker’s Secret.”
Assuming that all people will RTFD and FTFD is a recipe for disaster… At least in my experience.
I have a difficult time reading books with long, drawn out battles because I’m impatient when it comes to fast-paced scenes. I run more- make it exhilarating, describe fighting with weapons correctly, throw in some gruesome deaths, and then get to the climax before I die of an adjective overdose. This means, of course, that when I’m writing my own battle scenes, my impatience leads me to skip past all the good bits. I have to rein myself in and slow down in order to fill in the important details. Outlines help me stay on track, so long as I stick to them.
That’s why I tend to skip the battle entirely. And people complain….
A short “battle” scene from current WIP:
On the road from Valhalla to Hvergelmir, things were less restful than in the sacred spring. At a wide spot in the lane, bordered by split rail fences of the fields on either side, a small fight was taking place between a gaggle of armed men and a spider as big as a Harley Davidson motorcycle. Several of the combatants had been dragged back against the fence to either side, they were regenerating their lower portions from having been shot in the posterior region by the spider’s railgun. She was making a game of disabling them, then mocking them.
The spider was experiencing positive emotion metrics just then, her attempts at simulating humor were uproariously funny. Approaching three on the George McIntyre Rubber Crutch Scale. Zero being ‘stone face’, five out of five was ‘die laughing.’ She was slaying out there.
“Stand aside, revolting bug!” roared the Einherjar in front of her, brandishing a sword.
“I do beg your pardon good sir,” she replied, making a coy, wide-eyed face and a cute little dip with her eight legs. The result was both attractive and utterly terrifying. “I regret to repeat that the road is closed by order of my big, beautiful railgun today. Travel to the sacred spring Hvergelmir will resume momentarily, I’m sure.”
After the terrifying display of fluttering eyelashes from the spider, the Einherjar felt he had no choice but to attack. The other men would call him a coward, even though he could see their bowels were freezing from the sight of it. The thought of them taunting him in the tavern later restored his courage, and he swung at the monstrous spider with a mighty battle cry.
The spider casually moved her legs aside from the sweep of his sword, allowing it to skim within inches without hitting anything. “So slow, good sir,” she snickered. “You move as gracefully as a pregnant cow.” She was using period-correct insults, so the warriors would know they were being mocked.
“HAVE AT THEE!!!” he roared and commenced a flurry of blows, seeking to hit the spider by the sheer number of swings.
And failing, because her reflexes and mental processes ran so fast. She could predict the blade’s path and accelerate her limbs to avoid it, effortlessly. She added some K-pop dance moves to pile insult upon injury, making little heart shapes with her forelegs as the warrior flailed at her.
After an extended frenzy of maddened sword strokes, fruitlessly attacking her far longer than a human could have, the Einherjar finally ran out of breath and stepped back, puffing like a bellows.
“How sad,” she simpered at him. “So much effort, but not a single mark on me. Is it my turn yet?” She made an innocent, questioning expression, idly extending cutting blades from her four front limbs to scratch delicately at her furry back. “Or should I shoot you in the backside like the rest of these gentlemen?”
“NO!” chorused her previous victims, involuntarily putting protective hands on their wounded posteriors. The railgun was extremely effective.
Looking at the half-dozen felled men, some of whom he knew were tougher than he was, the Einherjar decided that bluster might serve where force had not. “What is the meaning of this affront, monster?!” he shouted at her between panting breaths. “How dare you stand in the King’s road like this?!”
“Thus far I have seen no reason not to,” said the spider, given the designation SAGC-409 by George, in honor of the Chevrolet 409 big-block engine of the 1960s. “It isn’t as if you boys have made me leave. Or even take a step back, honestly. Are you really Einherjar, or is this a training exercise for wannabees?”
“We are the King’s men!” shouted one of the wounded, propped up by a fence post. “We are the chosen of the Valkyrja, to fight in Ragnarök!”
“Yeah right,” scoffed 409. “You losers were what was left on the battlefield after Freyja took all the good ones to Fólkvangr.” She minced over to him, fearlessly striding in among the warriors as if they were a flock of chickens, to poke him on his leather breastplate with a stabby cutting blade. “I asked you nicely to wait, but you tried to chop me instead. This is what you get.”
FWIW, this strikes me as helpful advice, so thanks for sharing. Good hunting of bureaucratic scalps to you, and congrats to the young people.