J.B. Garner's Blog, page 56

Into the Action: The Art of King of Street Kombat II

Having just finished reviewing the latest action sequence in my current writing project, I decided today’s Into the Action should take a look at the art of writing fight scenes in a novel.  Now, obviously, this won’t be a huge topic of interest for all of my followers but, as someone whose own writing delves into this regularly, I’d be doing authors like me a disservice if I didn’t take some time to look at it.    Deciding how to go about writing scenes involving direct physical conflict is not something to take lightly, as it can determine a lot about the flow, pacing, and message of your works.

The first thing I want to emphasize in this article is the need to ensure that combat is not trivialized when it is written about.  I don’t mean in terms of writing style exactly or space set aside for it.  What I mean is that any scene with physical violence should have repercussions.  As with any other kind of action, violent action should never be added simply to be there.  It should have meaning, it should either advance the plot or provide important characterization, and it should have after effects appropriate to the violence.  It can be tempting, at times, to take a modern action movie approach to an action scene with characters walking through a hail of bullets and gunning down mooks without blinking an eye.  In certain styles of writing, this can be appropriate and even necessary, but those should be rarities, not the norm.

The point of that screed really comes down to the idea that violence, like any other plot point, should have weight and dramatic heft to it.  Even sports combat has dangers and stakes and, if used, should be held in the same serious regard.  Boxing and MMA are painful and dangerous activites.  Even the purely for-entertainment matches in televised professional wrestling carry high physical costs.  I’m not advocating bending the rules if your works are more cinematic in nature.  Just don’t forget them entirely.

Now, with that in mind, how much or how little detail should you put into a fight scene?  Well, that’s really an a question without any one answer.  The obvious consideration is that the more detail you put into a fight scene, the more important you make that scene.  It’s like any other type of scene you could write: the length and detail should be somehow connected to the scene’s importance in the plot and characterization.  No matter how well written it might be, the reader doesn’t want to see an extremely detailed one-on-one fight with, say, a faceless minion of your main villain.  No matter your inclination, don’t be afraid to be brief with combat when necessary.

Something that goes hand in hand with detail is clarity.  In fact, there can be a struggle at times between these two things.  Going into greater detail in a fight scene can sometimes lead to description that is intricate enough to lead to confusion among the average reader.  Make sure to carefully read over your fight sequences to ensure they retain a clear flow of action regardless of what details you include.  If you don’t think you can adequately describe a sequence of maneuvers, don’t try.  Rethink either that part of the fight scene or try to simplify it to the essence of the action.

For example, if I write a sequence of two combatants engaging in a series of technical holds and counter-holds, citing very specific martial arts techniques, that ends with one throwing the other, I could look up and detail each of those maneuvers, but it would probably lose any reader who didn’t have extensive knowledge of the martial arts in question.  Instead, I could simplify it by concentrating on broad motions or simply stating something like ‘Emi and Rogers came together, each trying to find an advantage in their grapple.  Hold met counter-hold and throw met with reversal until, finally, Emi got a solid grip on Roger’s lapels and hurled him over her shoulder onto the concrete floor.’

I understand this article may seem a little jumpy in focus and perhaps rambling, so let me try to summarize the basic points to be this:

Length and detail of your fight scenes should match the importance of the fight to the plot or characterization.
All fight scenes, no matter the importance, must have a clear flow of action and be understandable by your target audience of readers.
When in doubt, let clarity trump detail in all situations

Questions?  Comments?  Input?  Suggestions?  Add them below!

Weekend Update: Just a quick one!

Some quick updates for the weekend!

I’m just about at the halfway point of writing for Incorruptible.  It’s been a wild ride and I hope I finish out this first trilogy in a way everyone will enjoy.
Felipe informs me that the first Kickstarter reward poster will be done very soon.  I’ll be fulfilling those rewards and then, after a little bit of time, I’ll start having those posters available for purchase.
I have been busy this weekend, but there will be a Starving Review next week.
Lastly, I’ll be out of town the week after next, from the 26th to the 31st.  New articles will be sparse, but I should get a few in.  I’ll be spending most of that time, though, spending time with my mother and sister who I haven’t seen in, oh, 18?  20? years.

Genre fiction vs. Literary fiction – Can’t we all get along?

jbgarner58:

I first saw this reblogged on Christine Plouvier’s blog (http://irishfirebrands.wordpress.com/) and upon reading, I had to reblog is as well. I’ve touched on this in the past, but it can never be talked about enough!

Originally posted on Ibukun Taiwo:

I’m pissed right now. Really really pissed.

If you read what I just read, you’re be pissed too. See for yourself:

“How does [the writer] seemingly climb into our heads—and not even “our heads” but “my head,” because it feels so personal, so specific—without actually knowing us or our circumstances, and from that vantage point proceed to unfold a narrative that we are certain was written only with us, only with me in mind? I don’t know how it is done. It isn’t taught in any school, not even in the schools of writing. But here’s my guess: the writer takes us into her confidence, but does it without appearing to do so. This invitation into the writer’s thoughts is there in all works that really get under the reader’s skin….

Now, if you are reading a romance novel or a thriller, all of this is irrelevant. There are…

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Politics and Culture: How can intelligent men turn into Gamergate-addled bastards?

You don’t need to be any kind of genius to know that I am a fairly liberal-minded feminist.  My few political posts and my most recent reblogging of coverage of the recent Gamergate idiocy should tell you that.  I wasn’t intending to write much original thought on that pile of crazy, but as an avid video game player in my free time and reading so much hatred and misinformation coming out of the mouth of men that seemed otherwise to be intelligent individuals, I found myself wondering about it so much I had to put it into an article.

How can men who have to be intelligent, who are obviously in-tune to some degree to the flow of information on the internet and in the world, be so easily duped into believing proven lies and, on top of that, to back up a movement that was founded on hatred of women?  What has made them so devoid of common sense to throw themselves behind a movement that is on the wrong side of the march of progress and history?

Almost half of the world’s video game players are women and that number continues to rise.  Do these men think that their supposedly beloved past-time will survive if they alienate half of the income their game designers rely on?  It defies logic on so many levels, then it continues to stomp on logic until it’s a bleeding, broken mess.  After that, the movement then proceeds to ambush morality for a second round of beatdown.

My first thought is that we are seeing a classic reactionary conservative (not meaning that in a political party sense, though they could be related, looking at overall Republican Party platforms in regards to women) action.  Quite often, when an entrenched group of people who enjoy privilege find that their culture and society are progressing past them, threatening their place in that culture, that group rebels and throws up every possible roadblock, no matter the logic or morality involved.  Most often, this is to do nothing else other than to silence their opposition through fear and intimidation.  They know, deep down, they are wrong, but continue to thrash like babies forced to take a bath, trying to stall the inevitable.

My other idea is that, for the rank-and-file of Gamergate, they are simply too trusting of what their fellow ‘gamer buddies’ say and think themselves ‘too smart’ to get duped.   Instead of actually looking into the issue through the majority of the world’s viewpoint, they instead ensconce themselves into the echo chamber of their friends, having the false storylines of the Gamergate movement reinforced in their minds to the point they see all outside information to the contrary as obvious falsehoods.  Here, too, their conception of their own intelligence is part of their stubbornness … to admit that they bought into GG’s lies and upheld them would be to also admit they were both intellectually and morally too lazy to question what they were fed.

So, there it is.  Those are my thoughts on it.  All I can ask is for those people who have fallen onto the side of Gamergate to wake up, stop supporting a misogynist, hate-filled cause that has made multiple terrorist threats, and, if you REALLY care about ethics in journalism, direct your ire and scrutiny on the oft-lamented connection between major gaming review sites and AAA developers.  If you decide not to do that and, instead, want to continue to whine, thrash, cry, and commit FELONIES, go for it.  The day will come when you’ll find yourself sincerely regretting your pride and foolishness.

Writing is a Bad Habit: As You Know, We Talk About Writing Here

Exposition and world-building can be difficult things to work with as an author.  You, the creator, have all of these ideas, fascinating characters, and magnificent vistas locked in your brain and you want so desperately to share them with your reader.  In today’s Writing is a Bad Habit, we take a look at some pitfalls you can run into as you lay out characterization, world-building, and exposition.

The problem with laying out a world for the reader to discover is balancing the need to explain facts about the world and how it works with the overall pacing and dramatic tension.  The biggest mistakes that we as writers tend to make in regards to this almost all relate back to this core balance.  Most often, we tend to shove that balance off into the side of explanation over pacing, leading to sections of the book that read more like textbooks than entertaining works of fiction.

One of the most common of these mistakes is commonly called the ‘As You Know’ trope (AYK for short).  It takes the simple form of one character informing another character of certain facts and information which the other character *already knows*.  This info dump almost always begins with the exact words of ‘As you know …’, hence the trope’s name.  While I have seen this happen in normal human dialogue from time to time, it’s not very common.  More importantly, it is a very transparent attempt to make a large block of ‘telling’ look like it is ‘showing’ instead.  It rarely works and it isn’t uncommon for a reader to want to skip past what they know is going to be pages of incoming blah.  AYK is a mistake for the reason that ‘telling’ is a mistake: it takes the reader out of their immersion and sets them up with a textbook.

Another mistake common in exposition is the Informed Attribute.  I’ve touched on this in a few other articles about characters and characterization, but it is also tied into exposition as well.  It is, again, the simple act of having a character *tell* another character about a personality trait, skill, or some other quality of a third character without actual characterization to confirm or deny the ‘tell’.  That last part is important, because while it may be a little annoying for a character to repeat something that is obvious by the characterization, it’s far far worse when the character’s actions do not match what they are told to the reader to be.  Informed Attributes are usually used by a writer to attempt to make the reader attach certain attributes to the character without taking the time to show them, which usually works horribly.

Probably the ur-mistake of exposition is the straight-up, old-fashioned Info Dump.  Most often done directly by the author himself in a third person piece, though occasionally dressed up by coming out of the mouth of another character, this is as it sounds: a straight, no-interaction, no-action-period block of information being dropped on the reader.  It is usually hidden behind a wise teacher or native or some other mouthpiece giving all this information to the protagonist, but sometimes it’s just …. there.  It is the ultimate expression of ‘telling, not showing’.

When you look at these, you might wonder for a moment why this matters so much?  After all, if the reader doesn’t have the right information to process the plot and the world the characters inhabit, doesn’t that mean they will be lost?

Of course.  But there are ways to interject exposition while remaining the pacing of the plot and through ‘showing, not telling’.  Oh, sure, there will always be bits of telling here and there, but it has to be handled in a natural, realistic fashion.  More importantly, though, you want most of your characterization and world-building to be shown through the interactions of the characters in their world.  Let context, dialogue, and description paint the pictures.  Give your readers the due credit of not needing everything spoon-fed to them.  If you do your best to follow this path, the few times you DO need to tell them things directly are far more likely to be forgiven.

The threats that shut down Anita Sarkeesian’s talk come from someone who seems to be deeply steeped in the misogynstic Men’s Rights subculture

jbgarner58:

I know you may or may not appreciate these interruptions to the general writing theme of this blog, but some things are far too important to not spread the word about.

Originally posted on we hunted the mammoth:

The threats directed at Anita Sarkeesian are intended to silence women’s voices

Reading through the luridly threatening email that forced Anita Sarkeesian to cancel her talk at Utah State University, originally scheduled for today, I found myself wondering, a bit dumbfounded: just where does this kind of hate come from?

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself again and again in recent days as I contemplate the ongoing fiasco that is GamerGate. How on earth have all these people gotten so angry, so worked up, so willing to dox and harass and threaten women (and some of their male allies) over video games?

How exactly does someone reach a point where it makes sense to them to threaten – and perhaps even to seriously plan – a “Montreal-style Massacre” because they don’t like a few videos pointing out sexism in video games?

Even after years spent tracking and trying…

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Starving Review: Hybrid (The Evolution Trilogy Book 1) by Vanessa Wester

Hybrid by Vanessa Wester (Amazon, Smashwords)

As I hoped for some more book sales to fill my pantry, I was fortunate enough to get a new book to chow down on instead.  That’s right, it’s time for another Starving Review!

This week’s main course is Hybrid, the first book in a paranormal romance series, The Evolution Trilogy.  What you say?  The guy who writes superhero and wrestling fiction picking up a romance book?  To that I say, ‘Broaden your minds!  The Tale of the Tape had a huge romance sub-plot!  Plus I was starving!’.  As per my standards, I will do my best to make this review as spoiler-free as possible and to see this in the light of a fan of the genre in question.

Let’s start off by saying this: On a technical level, the writing is quite good.  The pacing, character development, and depth of story are well ahead of many of Hybrid‘s brothers and sisters in the paranormal romance genre.  On a personal relationship level, there are fewer contrivances and those that do come up fit into the well-worn tropes of the romance genre … in other words, they are things that the readers will want to see.  The inevitable romantic entanglements and love dodecahedrons fit together much more naturally than most books of this kind.

In fact, talking about the genre tropes, at first blush, Hybrid seems to be a standard, if better written, book of the type, very paint-by-numbers.  However, at about the quarter way mark, Ms. Wester eschews the paint brush and brings in an industrial car painting robot, setting it on ‘CRAZY’ mode.  That may sound bad.  It’s not.  In fact, it’s almost glorious in the insanity it reaps!

You see, Hybrid goes off the rails not in the sense of the personal relationships and characterizations, which remain solid, but in a very Silver Age comic book/1950s atomic horror kind of way.  As the paranormal species that is core to the book is introduced and explained, the book takes glee as it smashes basic conventions and sets up the world these beings live in and how they operate.  I can’t really go into details without major spoilers, but simply let me say that I, as a comic book fan, really loved the general crazy involved.  It is a good kind of crazy and one that, for a genre that generally has more angst that sense, delights in that as much as the interpersonal conflicts.

Another point where Hybrid bucks the usual paranormal romance formula is in the rather expansive range of characters and points of view it dances over, adding to the narrative depth.  Add on to that the fact that the main PoV character for large sections of the book is the male lead and you get another turn off the over-trod path of the first person, female lead formula.  Refreshing.

Now, Hybrid isn’t without flaws.  Sometimes the over-the-top elements become too much even for a lover of such things to take seriously.  One incident in particular involving a mass mental manipulation (that should be vague enough to dodge the Spoiler Police) really made me pause and the later explanation of it did nothing to make it better.  There is little action, which while not a requirement in this genre can add to it, and the overall dramatic and romantic tension is uneven at times.  There is a fair amount of world-building that goes on in this book and, while Wester does a fairly good job at weaving it in with the actual story, there is a bit on info-dumping and a few cringe-worthy scenes of ‘As You Know‘ exposition.  Final flaw: the sudden climax and twist to set up the next book comes out of nowhere at the last minute, though the epilogue sweeps in and salvages part of it with a clever bit of follow-up on foreshadowing early in the book.

Let’s bring it all together then.

Hybrid is a solid paranormal romance and a good start for it’s series of books.  There are some intriguing surprises and Vanessa Wester wisely is not afraid to blaze off of the over-used pathways other writers in this genre have tread, bringing about a gleeful insanity to the whole thing.  It’s not perfect, but it stands above the majority of this genre that I’ve read.  If you enjoy this genre, definitely give this a read.  If you don’t, you may still want to give it a shot.  The first book is free, after all.

FINAL VERDICT: **** (Vanilla on the outside, crazy mix of flavors on the inside)

Anita Sarkeesian Cancels Talk at Utah State After Receiving Threat of Another “Montreal Massacre.”

jbgarner58:

Holy crap, what the hell is wrong with these people?

Don’t just read this and nod and mumble about how horrible it is. Reblog it, spread it, Tweet it. Expose this vile behavior for the cowardice and ignorance it is!

Originally posted on we hunted the mammoth:

Utah State University has just announced that Anita Sarkeesian has canceled a talk she was scheduled to give at the school tomorrow after receiving a threat of a “Montreal Massacre-style attack” by someone promising ““the deadliest school shooting in American history” if the cultural critic was allowed to speak.

Here’s the official announcement:

Anita Sarkeesian has canceled her scheduled speech for tomorrow following a discussion with Utah State University police regarding an email threat that was sent to Utah State University. During the discussion, Sarkeesian asked if weapons will be permitted at the speaking venue. Sarkeesian was informed that, in accordance with the State of Utah law regarding the carrying of firearms, if a person has a valid concealed firearm permit and is carrying a weapon, they are permitted to have it at the venue.

Emphasis added. That’s right: the school received threats from someone promising to shoot…

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Sneak Peek: Character studies from The Push Chronicles

For those of you who followed the Take 2 Kickstarter, the push goal after we made our main goal was to allow for the design and printing of art posters for both The Push Chronicles and Three Seconds to Legend.  Felipe de Barros was up for the challenge and has been hard at work!

Felipe wanted the chance to draw more of the cast of both series and include them in the posters, so I’m proud to show some of his character studies as a nice sneak peek at the coming posters.  The first round is a Kickstarter exclusive, but I’ll be putting them up for sale through an outlet I have yet to determine after they have received theirs.  Now, without further ado, studies for Extinguisher and Medusa from The Push Chronicles:

#GamerGate activist: Media coverage of death threats against Brianna Wu means “they’re now taking us seriously.”

jbgarner58:

These guys are sick. Spread the word and do what you can to fight against this thing.

Originally posted on we hunted the mammoth:

Click to enlarge

The screencap above shows a discussion on the still-active #burgersandfries IRC channel about the media coverage of the recent death threats directed at indie game devveloper Brianna Wu.

Apparently any publicity is good publicity, even if your “movement” is getting media attention for being the likely source of death threats against a female developer.

Before some stray GamerGater comes by to inist that this guy “isn’t really a #GamerGater because that’s on IRC,” this seems to be the guy’s Twitter account. As you can see, @Thidran regularly Tweets and retweets comments using the #GamerGate tag or the abbreviation GG; he’s also obsessed with Zoe Quinn. BUT IT’S NOT ABOUT HER WE’VE ALL MOVED PAST THAT.

H/T — r/GamerGhazi for the screencap.

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