Marie Brennan's Blog, page 244

two good causes

The Carl Brandon Society is fundraising for the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, which helps send writers of color to the Clarion workshops. It's a prize drawing; you can purchase tickets for the chance to win an e-reader (one of two Nooks, one of two Kobos, or an Alex eReader). This goes through midnight Eastern on November 22nd, so you've got just a few days left to enter.

Also, Pat Rothfuss is again running his Worldbuilders event, raising money for Heifer International. Among the items on offer are a whole lot of signed books, including a pair of In Ashes Lie and A Star Shall Fall, signed by yours truly. There are so many prizes, though, that Pat's still in the process of posting them all; check out that first link for a list, and for information on how to participate.

Writing Fight Scenes: my philosophy

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

So you're working on a story, and there comes a point where it really ought to have a fight scene. But you're sitting there thinking, "I'm not a martial artist! I'm not an SCA member! I have no idea how to fight!" Or maybe you're thinking, "Fight scenes are so boring. I'd rather just skip over this and get back to the actual story." Or something else that makes you dread writing that scene, rather than looking forward to it with anticipation.

Don't worry, dear reader. I'm from the Internet, and I'm here to help. <g>

To the first group, I say: the details of how to fight are possibly the least important component of a fight scene. The important components are the same ones you're already grappling with in the rest of your writing, namely, description, pacing, characterization, and all that good stuff.

To the second group, I say: it's only boring if the author does it wrong.


So in prose, a good fight scene is not one that leaves you with a complete mental image of every attack and block. It's one that conveys story. And, just like a conversation or an investigation or a sex scene (the latter of which shares many technical challenges with combat), it should ideally be doing more than one thing at once.

Fights are often there for plot reasons: kill the bad guy. Get past the guards. Etc. That's fine, but not enough. Personally, I love fight scenes because they can do so much on a character level. This is violence; it's one of the most fundamental things hard-wired into our brains, alongside food and sex. What a character is and is not willing to do, when it comes down to fists or swords or guns, can reveal or change or confirm some fairly profound things about her personality. It can even play into or against the themes of a story, especially when you think about the way societies around the world have built philosophical frameworks around the control and deployment of violence. And, of course, there's the artistic side; fight scenes can be just as much about good writing -- description and so on -- as anything else in the story.

If the scene isn't doing anything terribly important on any of those fronts, then it doesn't deserve much attention on the page. Drop in a sentence or two to say it happened, and get on with the actual story. Or figure out why this fight matters, and make it earn its place in the story.

In the SF Novelists post I used to launch this series, I talked about working on a production of Troilus and Cressida, staging a fight between the hero and his enemy Diomedes. That fight revealed ugly things about both of the participants: Diomedes was the kind of untrustworthy bastard who would cheat (pull a knife) the moment he started losing, and Troilus was the kind of violent bastard who would enjoy beating a man to death. This didn't mean as much in Diomedes' case; he's Troilus' enemy, therefore the villain, therefore expected to act in an underhanded manner. But Troilus? He was supposed to be the hero. Except this is Troilus and Cressida, the play without a moral center, in which everybody is some flavor of bastard. Sending him dark-side fed into the overall message of the play. Had Troilus come close to the edge, but then decided not to kill Diomedes, it would have been a different kind of pivotal moment: one in which he chose to reject the self-serving amorality of those around him, and hold himself to a better standard. And that's different yet from the Doctor (of Doctor Who) forgoing the chance to kill someone; in the Doctor's case, it's a confirmation of what we already know about him as a person. But all three of those are dramatic moments, because they force the character to a crisis point, one with non-trivial stakes riding on its outcome.

Even when the matter isn't life-or-death, violent actions can be very telling. Holly McClane decking the reporter at the end of Die Hard is part and parcel of that entire story: her part, her husband's, the reporter's, and everything that's gone on in that (very violent) movie. Alanna (of Tamora Pierce's novels) sparring against her old friends after they know she's a woman highlights all the weird tensions that surround her position as a lady knight. The few seconds Sam and Dean Winchester spend fighting each other in the pilot episode of Supernatural tell us that these guys know what they're doing, know each other's moves very well, and have a bit of sibling rivalry going on. You could try to convey all that with dialogue, but the fight's more efficient.
So. If your scene is important enough to merit actual time in the novel (or on the screen or whatever), then there's something important going on in it, that has less to do with strikes and blocks, and more to do with the progress of the story. You can get surprisingly far by focusing on the latter, instead of the former, though we'll talk in due course about how to do both.

In the meanwhile, stay tuned for the next post, in which I will discuss the most important question to answer for any fight scene. Until then . . . .

Writing Fight Scenes: Introduction

This month's SF Novelists post is a bit different, because it's the launching point for a series I'll be doing over here on LJ for the next indeterminate amount of time.

At Sirens this past month, I did a workshop on writing fight scenes, and promised those who weren't able to attend that I'd be posting the material online. That begins today, and will be continuing for a while. Check out the aforementioned post for sort of an anecdote-cum-mission statement, then head behind the cut for a bit more about me and why I'm interested in this subject, plus an outline of how I'm going to approach this.


It probably goes back to seeing The Princess Bride at the tender age of six. Inigo Montoya was always my favorite character; I pretty much don't remember a time when I didn't want to learn fencing, and it's also his fault I studied Spanish. For years the only "fencing" I knew was what my friends and I figured out with wooden dowel rods, but in high school my local rec center offered a free class, and me and several of those friends started taking it. The instructor attempted to teach us FIE style, but we wouldn't stay linear for love or money, nor would we leave our off-hands out of it, so finally he said "screw it" and began teaching us period rapier-and-dagger styles instead. (Which is what most of us wanted anyway.) He also taught us the basics of stage combat: how to slap and punch and kick someone without actually doing them harm.

This all fed into a pre-existing fondness I had for fight scenes, both in books and in movies. As a teenager, I was a big R. A. Salvatore fan, with all those lovingly-detailed duels, and also a fan of action movies. Learning to fence, and learning to do stage combat, got me thinking about what makes such a scene cool. And, as detailed in my SF Novelists post, I made use of it when I got to college. Getting down into the practical guts of fight choreography fed back into my writing, especially the doppelganger novels (the first of which I wrote while in college), and it's informed my thinking ever since.

So that's where I'm coming from: my background in the topic is as a writer, a fight choreographer, and a fan. Because of that, I'll be drawing from a wide range of examples as I write this series, including my own novels, plays I worked on, and books and movies that illustrate my points. Examples go better when you the audience are familiar with them, though, so here are a few key ones I'll be bringing up more than once:


The Princess Bride. I mentioned imprinting on it, right? The duel between Inigo and the Man in Black atop the Cliffs of Insanity is a very useful example for fight scene structure; I may also reference the fight with Fezzik, and Inigo's confrontation with Count Rugen. If you have for some reason never seen this movie, drop everything and go watch it now, you poor, deprived soul. :-)
The Game of Kings, by Dorothy Dunnett. It contains the single best third-person omniscient fight scene I have ever read in a book. Hands down. It is also a fantastic book, one I'm loathe to spoil for people, but as it makes a very good illustrative example for how to do a fight scene on the page, I'll probably be referencing it during this sequence. I highly recommend the series. Her prose is a little opaque -- she tends to write around things, and you have to read between the lines to see what she isn't saying -- but it's absolutely worth the effort.
My own first novel, findable either as Doppelganger (the old title) or as Warrior (the new title). I include this because, as the author, I know what I was trying to do, and why I used certain techniques to do it; I can go "behind the scenes" in a way that isn't possible with the previous two sources.

What I'll do, in all likelihood, is divide this series into three rough stages. The first will be theoretical in nature, talking about the role a fight plays in the story. The second will be about the structure of the fight itself: practicalities of deciding what happens, and how. The third will be about getting the fight onto the page: craft-level issues of what to say about the combat. Each of those stages will probably have multiple posts. We may or may not have a running "sample scene" that gets developed during the course of the series; I did that for the workshop, and may repeat it here.

I'm not sure how long the entire series will take -- how many posts, and how often they will happen. Two a week sounds like a good thing to aim for, but we'll see how that fares through the holidays. Anyway, I'll group them all under a tag, so you can find the whole set easily if you want.

You are welcome at any point to ask questions, offer examples, correct me where I'm wrong, or hash out any scenes you're working on yourself. I'm more than happy to give any help I can.

for those who haven't seen it

I was mentioning James Frey's latest atrocity to a few friends last night, and promised I would point them at the details, so here they are, by way of Scalzi's blog.

Holy abusive contracts, Batman. It appears that Frey's crass, opportunistic exploitation knows neither bounds nor shame. I can only hope the public outcry will go far enough to scare people away from signing up to be his factory drones -- but sadly, I doubt it will.

don we now our gay apparel

So, I signed up for Yuletide.

In a few years, I have gone from "what's this 'Yuletide' thing so-and-so posted about?" to "wtf, half my friends list is talking about this 'Yuletide' thing" to "now I'm the one posting about Yuletide." If you're like a me a few years ago, and have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a quick rundown: it's a fanfic gift exchange, where participants list types of stories they'd really like to get (source, characters, and some non-binding suggestions as to the nature of the story) and types of stories they'd be willing to write. Everybody gets matched up, and on Christmas Day the stories go live, anonymously; on New Years' Day the authors are revealed.

What makes this interesting to me is that Yuletide is specifically intended to be for "rare" fandoms -- sources for which there isn't a lot of fanfic already out there. In other words, not your Harry Potters and so on. Some participants take this notion of rarity and run with it, clear off the edge of the map: the list of nominated fandoms includes things like, oh, Plato's Dialogues. Or the song "Devil Went Down to Georgia." Or Polynesian mythology. There is a section for twelfth-century historical figures; also ones for 13th-14th, 14th-15th, the 15th century itself, 16th-17th, and the Reformation. Reading the list sends me cycling through bafflement and squee: "I've never heard of that" alternating with "I'm not the only person who's seen K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces!"

I signed up because on the shuttle back from Sirens, I mentioned the Nightmare Before Christmas/Hogfather crossover fic I'm convinced the world really needs, and rachelmanija told me I should sign up for Yuletide and ask somebody to write it for me. I'd never really considered participating before then, because calling my involvement with the fanfic scene "minimal" would probably be overstating the case -- but in a world where Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads can be listed as a fandom, why the hell not?

Aside from being curious to see what I receive, it's going to be an interesting exercise from a writing standpoint. I haven't often written to a prompt of any kind, and in this instance, I have very little notion what I'll be asked to write. It isn't completely an open field; I control what I've offered, in terms of fandoms and characters, and this year they added a functionality for additional tags, though that last one isn't binding. The only requirement is that I produce a minimum of one thousand words about X people in Y setting. The recipient may ask for a particular kind of story, but I'm not obligated to produce it. I'll probably try, though; the point is to make the reader happy, and that means giving them what they're looking for, if I can. So this may be an enlightening challenge for me, depending on what my assignment turns out to be.

I have more to say on that front, actually, but we're supposed to keep mum about what we've offered to write, so it will have to wait until Yuletide is over.

Anyway, lately my brain has been craving playtime with stories that cannot possibly be construed as any form of work. This fits the bill pretty well. I'm very curious to see what I'll be assigned to write . . . .

why I love gaming

In the midst of summarizing tonight's session to kurayami_hime , I typed the sentence "And then they went and burned down San Quentin Prison."*

Gaming, my friends, lends itself to gonzo behavior I would never put into a novel. (Other writers might; I'm just not that sort.) Torching San Quentin ain't no jet-ski down an elevator shaft, but it amused me anyway. Random destruction of public property for the win! Guess that historical preservation thing won't be happening after all . . . .



*Before one of the players corrects me: the xiuhcoatl was the one that actually burned down the prison. But it was the PCs' fault that happened, so.

TV Gift: Pushing Daisies

I don't often get into sitcoms. (Or comedy movies, but that's a separate matter.) Within the last six months, I tried two -- Arrested Development and Better Off Ted -- and both were funny, very cleverly written, certainly good examples of the genre . . .

. . . and I just didn't care.

I would watch an episode, and enjoy it while I was watching, but when it ended I felt absolutely no impetus to go on. I didn't crave more. I didn't feel any curiosity as to what happened next -- well, sitcoms are often highly episodic in their structure, and I've made no secret of the fact that I adore a good arc-plot. For me to get hooked on a show whose purpose is primarily comedic, I need something more.

Apparently that "something more" is "dead bodies."

A friend gave us the first season of Pushing Daisies, and my friends, I have found my comedy show. Not my drama-with-funny-bits -- those, I have plenty of -- an honest-to-god sitcom about a pie-maker who raises people from the dead (and then puts them back . . . most of the time). His two companions are a private detective who uses him to question murder victims, and a childhood sweetheart he raised and then didn't put back. Who he can't ever touch, because if he does she'll kick the bucket again, this time permanently.

It turns out I really can be bought that easily, by a fantasy component and a bit of gallows humour. Because most of what this show does, is also done by other shows; there's silly names, implausible characters (the agoraphobic sister aunts who used to do synchronized swimming as the Darling Mermaid Darlings), plot twists out of left field, etc. All the stuff I don't care about it when other shows do it. But throw in a few dead bodies, some drugged pies, and the matter-of-fact way in which Emerson and Chuck exploit Ned's ability, and suddenly all that other stuff stops bouncing off my brain and starts sticking.

I still don't adore it with the heat of a thousand adoring suns -- well, not yet, anyway; we're only four episodes in. My taste runs too much to the drama-tastic end of the spectrum for that, probably. But I suspect I'll want to buy the second season, and that's a remarkable achievement in itself.

(Confidential to akashiver -- if memory serves, you were trying to push this show on me ages ago. I can only say two things: you were right, and mea culpa for not listening sooner.)

Once upon a time in the West . . . .

I mentioned early this year that I was running a Scion game set on the American frontier. Well, it recently occurred to me that the players have gotten far enough into the story, and uncovered enough of the metaplot, that I can now divulge publicly what the game's about.

To follow this, you need to know three things:

1) Scion is a game about playing the half-mortal children of gods in the modern world, starting out as "heroes" and ascending in power and fame to become demigods and (if you survive) eventually gods in their own right.

2) The underlying enemies in this scenario are the Titans, the parents of the gods themselves. They're truly impersonal, elemental powers: the "body" of the Greater Titan of Fire, for example, is more or less equivalent to the D&D Elemental Plane of Fire. However, Greater Titans can manifest more concretely as avatars, which are god-like beings reflecting a particular aspect of their concept. Prometheus, for example, is an avatar of the Greater Titan of Fire; so is Kagu-tsuchi, but they embody different things. The Titans aren't precisely evil, but they're not friendly to the world, and their influence usually isn't a good thing.

3) One of the Scion books included material for how you could do a WWII-era game. In this, they proposed that Columbia (of the U.S.), Britannia (of the U.K.), and Marianne (of France) were all sisters, daughters of Athena sent out as an experiment in governance. It also proposed a Yankee pantheon, made up largely of tall-tale figures (Paul Bunyan, John Henry, etc), headed by Columbia and Uncle Sam.

So here's what I did with those three things . . . .

The core of the idea is this: that Columbia and Uncle Sam were corrupted by an avatar of the Greater Titan of Hunger, which came to be known as Manifest Destiny.

Backing up a bit: at some point in Ye Olden Mythic Times, a group of Scions of native North American gods battled and imprisoned an avatar of Hunger. (The books generally provide each pantheon with a Titan that is their particular enemy, though the avatars are drawn from throughout world mythology. Hunger was my invention, as North America isn't among the areas covered by game materials.) This avatar was all about conquering and assimilating one's neighbors, so good riddance, eh?

Fast-forward to the sixteenth century or so, and the history kniedzw and I started working out before I got this idea. Athena has a daughter who becomes Britannia (ascending to demigoddess-hood during the course of the English Civil War, before veering off from democracy to become a goddess of empire a little later). She then has a daughter who becomes Columbia, and Marianne is the youngest. Britannia leaves the Greek pantheon to take over what's left of the native English gods, with her mother's blessing, but Columbia's more fractious; she rebels against her older sister's control and starts a revolution. With the help of Marianne and a Scion of Britannia -- a fellow by the name of George Washington -- she makes it stick, and creates the United States of America. During the course of that, she also somehow breaks her ties to Athena, and ascends to become the first deity of a new pantheon.

As part of a deal with Marianne, the U.S. gets the Louisiana Purchase, and send out the Lewis and Clark expedition from the Mississippi River Valley. (They soon acquire a young Shoshone Scion to help them, a woman named Sacagawea.) The progress of this expedition creates a disturbance in the river valley, and Columbia and George Washington realize there's something of great power buried down there. They want to find out what it is, because Britannia's still pissed, and there's still a strong chance the U.S. and/or its gods won't manage to survive. In 1811 and 1812 they make a series of four attempts to retrieve that source of power, causing powerful earthquakes, and finally free it --

Only to discover, too late, that what they have freed is the avatar of Hunger.

It corrupts the two of them, feeding the colonial aspirations of the United States until, in time, that drive becomes all-consuming. The War of 1812 starts almost immediately afterward, which sparks George Washington to ascend as Uncle Sam, and in its aftermath westward expansion gets properly underway. During the 1840s, the nascent American pantheon acquires something very dangerous: a chac mool that allows them to draw power from any soldier who dies in the name of the United States of America. This comes in very handy when the Civil War begins -- driven, on the Southern side, by a pair of demigods known as Dixie and Johnny Reb.

Columbia and Uncle Sam strike a deal with various Scions of the Loa, led by John Henry, to capture the Southern demigods, promising membership in the American pantheon in exchange. But they renege on that promise not long after the end of the war, sacrificing John Henry at Promontory Summit, so that the Trans-Continental Railroad becomes a mystical binding holding the United States together. (He basically is the Golden Spike.)

So it's 1875 and American colonialism is charging full steam ahead, to the detriment of pretty much all marginalized groups. The big event of the game's first act was a summit meeting at the Seven Cities of Gold, drawing together representatives from those groups -- Indian, Mexican, black, etc -- to discuss possible alliances against the threat. (Under the leadership of Sacagawea herself. Thank you to whoever it was that told me about the legend of her surviving until 1884.)

There are so many other things chucked in here, too. The Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo Fire, the Port Huron Fire, and the Great Michigan Fire were caused by the American Eagle battling and killing Gaasyendietha. The rise of "hoodlums" -- anti-Chinese gangs in San Francisco -- was driven partly by a behind-the-scenes attempt to prevent the Celestial Bureaucracy from getting a foothold on American soil. Ulysses S. Grant's difficult presidency, his attempt to pass something like a Civil Rights Act and the resultant backlash from Congress, has partly to do with the opposition of Columbia and Uncle Sam to the plan. I'm running on an "as above, so below" principle: events are both historical and mythic, such that the corruption among the gods influences mortal doings, but mortal doings also feed back into the Overworld.

I'm also bending my usual rule for historical fiction, which is that I don't want to take history away from the real, ordinary people who made it happen. Scions, even at hero-level, are movers and shakers; that means I'm saying a lot of major figures were actually half-divine. Emperor Norton is a son of Britannia, who claimed the title in an attempt to win his mother's approval. Allan Pinkerton, of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, is a Scion of Forseti, and was helping Columbia and Uncle Sam gack "undesirables" until the PCs explained to him that his bosses might be Titan-corrupted. Zorro is a Scion of Huitzilopochtli, and a major enemy for one of the PCs.

But the fun thing about that is, I get to dig up fascinating people from American history, and figure out how to mythologize them. Given that the general tenor of the game is "subaltern populations against the hegemony," I'm especially learning a lot about minority figures: Chinese in San Francisco, Hispanics in the Southwest, blacks in the South and elsewhere. (Harriet Tubman as a daughter of Papa Legba was a fun connection to make.) Most especially I'm learning about Native American topics, because I've been strict about requiring myself to be specific. Ely Parker isn't just "an Indian Scion;" he's a Seneca and a son of Ayenwatha. I kind of understand why Scion's writers didn't attempt to address native North America -- it's complex, unevenly documented, and politically/culturally sensitive -- but I can't tell a mythic story about American colonialism without including that aspect, so I'm doing my best, and learning boatloads in the process.

(For the curious, I took as my jumping-off point a fan-created document for Native American gods, under the name of "the Manitou." As suggested there, I'm treating different culture areas -- the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, etc -- as semi-distinct pantheons, but saying that necessity has led to a degree of alliance and connection between them. The major effect of this is there's just one pantheon-specific Purview to worry about, which I took from the fan document; also, there's a base set of Virtues, which gets modified for the different regions. I'm mostly doing my own work to stat Purviews and such for individual gods, though.)
Yeah, I know, I'm a masochist for doing this. (Surprise!) Even if I limit myself mostly to Wikipedia-level research, it's still a lot of work, especially since the game is ranging all over the U.S.; the NPCs are kind of getting out of control. (Someday I will run a game that stays in one place and one time period. Someday. And it will be glorious.) But there's a deep pleasure in figuring out how to render real history through a mythic lens, especially since I'm learning so much in doing it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to figuring out how Zorro can make problems for my husband's PC. :-)

Words: On Sayin' It Rong

There's a conversation I have occasionally with fellow reader-geeks, about the words you know perfectly well from books, but almost never hear in conversation. The words you think you know how to say . . . until one day you're forty-one and find out that all this time, you've been doing it wrong.

My personal go-to example for this is "chasm." I was in my twenties before I discovered that ch is not pronounced as in "chair," but rather as in "chord." How was I supposed to know? It's not as if that word gets used in everyday speech. "Debacle" is another one; like many people, I spent a long time putting the accent on the first syllable (DEB-ack-el) rather than the second (deh-BAH-kel). My sixth-grade teacher nearly cracked up when, during the health unit, I asked a question about kah-PILL-aries, rather than KAH-pill-aries -- capillaries.* I don't think I was ever in the pronounce-the-b camp for "subtle," but I know a lot of people who were.

I correct myself when I can, of course -- but the problem isn't doing the correction; it's knowing that you need to in the first place. To learn that you're pronouncing something wrong, you generally have to hear the correct pronunciation in use, but of course we have these problems to begin with because the words so rarely get spoken. (Plus, when you hear it, you shouldn't assume the other guy has it wrong; you have to second-guess yourself, and figure out who's right. Sometimes it will be you. Sometimes it won't.) You can't just ask, "what words am I pronouncing wrong?" You don't know. And unless a friend of yours keeps a list of words they've heard you mangle, nobody else is likely to have the answer ready.

But the tough ones are often widely shared, and so I throw the doors open to the internet and ask:

What words did you pronounce wrong for a long time? How were you saying them, and when did you find out your mistake?

Because it's entirely possible that if you post a comment to the effect of, "oh yeah, I said vuh-HEM-ment for ages, until my wife pointed out it's VEE-a-ment," somebody else will read this and think, wait, THAT'S how you pronounce "vehement"? So I am furthermore declaring this a Shame-Free Zone; nobody should feel embarrassed for admitting past or present errors. It's a common failing of readers, that we have big vocabularies we maybe don't use right in speech. Whenever I have this conversation in person, people bond over it -- knowing they aren't the only ones to have made those mistakes. Share your stories, admit your blunders, and maybe you can save somebody else from the same fate.




*Though I'm checking all of these in the OED as I list them, and now I discover that accenting the second syllable is a valid alternative, though not the preferred one.

Heh.

Last night -- fairly late, West Coast time -- I noticed that Wikipedia's article of the day was on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

Later that same night, I noticed the OED's word of the day was "gunpowder."

Huh, I thought, that's a funny coincide -- oh.

Yeah, you'd think (having written a Gunpowder Plot story and all), I would remember Guy Fawkes Day. I can't even blame it on me being in California, and therefore it still being November 4th when those things showed up; it still hasn't registered on me that oh yeah, it's November already.

Jeebus -- where did 2010 go?

Anyway, it's apparently also Diwali, so I hope my friends in many parts of the world are having fun lighting things on fire and making them go boom. (So long as none of those things are, say, the Houses of Parliament.)