Karen Azinger's Blog: The Silk & Steel Saga - Posts Tagged "nemisis"

Great epic fantasy is so much more than just swords and sorcery. To engage a wide range of readers, I set out to write a fantasy that included love, sex, and epic battles. I've already discussed love and sex scenes in past posts, but this 'tidbit' about writing battles grew long, so I am breaking it into three parts, each with a key writing tip. To be honest, the challenge of writing battles scared me. Epic fantasy, almost by definition, includes sweeping battles, casts of thousands clashing with swords and shields, a struggle for life and glory. The Silk & Steel Saga is no exception. A sophisticated tale of Light versus Dark, my saga brims with a legion of battles. Writing battles was a task I needed to succeed at. Failure was not an option. Movies make battles seem deceptively easy to portray, a cast of hundreds multiplied and enhanced by CGI, and music, always music, to lead the viewers' emotions, prodding the audience to triumph or despair. Books have no music, nothing but words, making battles so much harder to convey. The trouble with writing battles is that in real life they're chaos unleashed, hack and slash, stroke and parry, kill or be killed. Hack and slash gets boring real fast, and 'boring' is the death of books, yet in epic fantasy, battles tend to be crucial to the climax. So how do you write a battle scene and keep from descending into pure hack and slash? Part of the solution lies in the character's perspective. Put a character on the castle ramparts and they can see the bigger picture, they understand the ebb and flow, the how and why, the grand strategy. This makes the battle more intellectually engaging, but protected by a castle battlement the risk to the character is diminished, so the tension is lower. To raise the tension, you can place your character in the midst of battle, but then the chaos of hack and slash tends to dominate...unless the character meets their ultimate nemesis. In LOTR, when Eowyn faces the Nazgul witch-king in the battle for Gondor, all the chaos falls away. The battle becomes a duel and the tension goes ballistic as everything focuses on two key combatants. In The Silk & Steel Saga, I used this "dueling" technique for one battle in The Skeleton King and two in The Battle Immortal, but this technique can only be used a few times (there are only so many nemesis pairs in a book). So think about your characters' perspective when writing battle scenes and save a clash between your nemesis pairs for your ultimate climax battles.