Just a quick snippet tonight as I've not actually written any more words today, just gone over and over what I wrote for chapter five last night, still trying to make sense of it and where it's going.
I've never written a serious combat scene before, of someone getting truely fucked up, but I had to give it a go in chapter four at a very pivotal point. This is the opening paragraph to that scene.
"The Faster couldn't quite understand why his speech was slowing down until it was too late, and he heard this one coming. A wind-rush of compacted air pushed forward by a flat and accelerating surface, a fist, and then a second mighty crash into the temple opposite to where the first one had landed, impacting with his head before the kinetic wave of energy from the previous blow had fully escaped. The terminal force shooting a rebound shockwave of strength back in the opposite direction through his skull. Not quite knowing what to do and ravaged by instantaneous brute force his cranium seemed to collapse, spine compressing, his feet and legs shot clean out in front of him sending him to the ground at speed and squeezing his brain, compressing his eye socket and making its contents shoot clear out of his skull."
Comments, ideas, suggestions welcomed as always.
Today's Aspirer's Mark - This one might be a bit like teaching your grandmother how to suck eggs, but he's said he is writing less fiction than ever and in 2008 wants to remedy that, so with that in mind, we have Mike Atherton aka Sizemore from his blog, Sizemore.
As a professional writer and already published author I wouldn't say he's so much an aspiring novelist, but his blog is pretty ace and if he's planning on posting more about his fiction in the future I'm sure it'll be beneficial to those that read it. Hope he gets the urge to do so...You can also follow him on Twitter.
3 Comments
1 Eliza wrote:
I actually went and did martial arts for several months so that I could better understand combat. In general, fight are so fast that if it's from his point of view he'll only know that he's in pain. There will be no warning if he's not ready, and once you start combat unprepared you're already finished. The only way to win is to be fast and aggressive, and end it as soon as possible, because humans are actually very fragile creatures. And there's no way to think in a fight of what to do next.
The end of the fight paragraph is confusing and rather gross. People don't explode in a show of gore unless you put a gun to their head, and the back half blows off. Try getting a friend and choreographing the short fight between yourselves. It helps.
2 QueenMab07 wrote:
I also have to do quite a lot of thinking for combat scenes and usually find myself looking to the work of my favorite authors. But I have also done martial arts for years now, and though I'm no expert, I've done plenty of sparing in the school and in tournaments. You can control the fight, which means that you can think about what you're going to do next. And depending on how trained your character is, the body can take more damage than one thinks.
3 Richard Galbraith wrote:
Thanks for the comment QueenMab07. I think I'm in a slightly individual realm with this because of the science-fiction nature of the book and of the characters. The character getting torn apart in this scene is particularly frail, not even human in-particular, so that's why the body has such a violent reaction to it's beating. I wouldn't expect a normal humans head to have its eyeballs pop out.