I have now reached 147,000 words, and I've just started the first sentences of the climactic
battle in my latest novel. It has taken me three years to get to this point in
this particular manuscript. But now the headaches really begin.
In a fight scene like this, time slows down and things get
very complex. The writer has to follow the actions of the character and the
antagonist, their reactions to each other’s actions, and yet also maintain
enough sense of the world around them so the reader can put the action into
context. And this is if you only have two combatants.
There are a lot of decisions to make on how as a writer you
are going to approach such a scene.
First of all, you need to decide what point of view the
scene will be witnessed from. A third person omniscient POV of the battle will
be very different than a first person or limited third person. I prefer to sit
down into the characters head to witness the battle, as this brings the reader
right down into the action. The challenge to this is that the reader gets no
more information than the character has, and in certain types of battles that
can be limited, fragmentary, and confusing.
One possible solution to this I have found is the presence
of a witness character whose perspective I can jump into, to give the reader a
little needed oversight of the situation. In Dead Stop I did this by having
Rachel witness the beginning of Harley and Marisa’s run for the mechanic’s shop
from the roof. This still gives a
believably limited POV but from a perspective that can give the reader a wider
view of the “battlefield”. But also remember that a character brings their own "color" to the scene they witness as well. I originally planned to have Deke witness that run, before deciding that Rachel provided the better filter for that scene.
Another solution is two have multiple combatants and switch
between POVs during the battle. This has to be done with extreme care to avoid
confusing the reader. I have found that you should always stay in the same POV,
and not change unless you’re starting a new sub-chapter that is clearly separated
from the previous. In Dead Stop, I even labeled the sub-chapters with the name
of the character the POV was being experienced from. I just don’t think you can
be too careful in that regard. I’m not sure if I will do the same with this
novel, but it is under consideration.
So POV is a big issue.
The other is the mechanics of the battle itself. Sometimes
as a writer you have a vague idea of a battle only to have the scene you had
envisioned fall apart when you actually start writing it. It turns out that
when you go into the step by step process of following the battle, you discover
the scene you had envisioned was never really thought out and actually wouldn’t
work. For instance, once you get into following the step by step actions and
decisions a character makes, you realize he would never put himself in the
position necessary for the scene you imagined to function. Then you have this
conflict of character integrity vs this awesome scene you imagined. And this
can happen multiple times in just one scene.
This is actually what I’m dealing with at the moment, and
the way I decided to handle it is to outline the scene itself. Since I'm dealing with more than ten different combatants in four different factions, I can see no other way to do it. This should
hopefully allow me to encounter the problems with the scene ahead of time, and
tweak them before simply writing that far and realizing I’ll need to back up and
throw out several pages of writing so I can go in a different direction. I hate it when that happens. I bet other
writers hate it when that happens.
Annnnd there are now less than two weeks left until the kiddos are
home for the summer and my writing time evaporates. That’s another deadline I wonder
how many writers out there contend with.
Oh well, on with the big showdown…I hope!
