Genius On Hold

I am a series of disconnects. In many respects, actually.  But it rarely manifests itself anywhere more clearly than in what I read, watch, and write. I gravitate toward books, movies, and cartoons with some sense of action and adventure, even as I gloss over fight scenes in books and focus on stage choreography in movies and blocking in cartoons. My favorite games may have an action/adventure feel to them, but they tend to be puzzle or rhythm games. I participated in LARPs for a while, until I eventually left the field because hitting someone with a well-padded boffer sword and pretending to maim or kill them was just too traumtic. I even studied martial arts at one point because I think it’s a beautiful form of movement, but I fell apart every time Sensei tried to engage me in sparring.

So, it’s pretty fair to say that while I love action-based adventures, I’m not much of a fighter.

But because I’m drawn toward action/adventure stories and action/adventure-friendly genres, I knew I’d eventually have to write fight scenes in my own stories. Before I’d realized why I was hating LARPing, I wrote my first NaNovel, an adventure parody that featured the following fight scene (I had forgotten about this little gem, my actual first fight scene written seven years ago):

A rustle in the vegetation behind him startled him. By the time he was on his feet and turned around, four large men had surrounded him. He recognized one of them from the Stewarts’ country manor, and could only assume the other three were also in the Brotherhood’s employ.

The one he recognized spoke gruffly, “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

John held his arms out to the side.

“Where is Miss Williams?”

“Not here,” John offered bluntly. He grunted slightly as a pistol butt quickly connected with his cheek.

“Where is she?”

Unable to stop himself, John’s eyes went to the obelisk, wishing he could warn Alex and allow her some time to conceal herself.

The pistol barrel was poked into his chest. He understood and turned slowly. He was going to be forced to march them right up to where his injured companion was waiting. Again, the pistol was pushed against his spine.

“You know, gentlemen. I’m far more cooperative when I’m not being threatened.”

Robbins laughed, a sound that could ruin a soufflé. “Yes, but you might decide to do something foolish, like run away or perhaps call out to Miss Williams.”

There was no denying that logic, but he couldn’t let these thugs reach the obelisk. Alex wouldn’t stand a chance in her current condition. As they approached the stairs, John stole a quick look at his watch. It was five minutes to one. If he could stall them long enough, Alex would be able to check the shadow and vanish into the temple’s shadows.

The first order of business would be to remove the pistol from the equation. The pistol was driven into his back like a cattle prod when they reached the base of the stairs.

“No funny stuff,” Robbins reminded him.

No funny stuff, indeed. Let’s see how funny you think this is. John suddenly drove the blade of his foot at Robbins’ knee, sending the giant man to the ground. The other three got over their shock at seeing their leader howling in pain and advanced on the man. John had no delusions of being able to take on all three at once. He ran to the far side of the staircase, drawing the nearest thug with him. A well-placed series of punches had this thug backing off, grasping his broken ribs as he fought for breath. The next nearest thug took one look at his two downed comrades and slowly started backing off.

John was feeling pretty confident, “If you don’t wish to end up like your friends, then you’ll stay back!” He walked over and picked up Robbins’ gun, using it to keep the thugs even further back. When he was sufficiently convinced they wouldn’t follow him, he turned and ran toward Alex.

A few paragraphs later, John fights off another goon just as vaguely.

I was proud of myself. I didn’t trust myself to write a fight scene, and I managed to get out something I wouldn’t read right past and that vaguely resembled a fight scene. But I came to realize that I’m not a big fan of fighting, and I moved on to different conflict-resolution methods.

A few years later, I started creating New Glory, opening with a short story about an assassin wrestling with an attack of conscience as a pair of reporters started piecing together what had happened. I deliberately started a story involving an assassin, not the most peaceful of occupations. And I was so entranced with the world that I started focusing more of my writing practice on building his world.

And that led to creating a group of monasteries, each focused on a different discipline, including the martial arts. It didn’t make sense to me to create a dystopian society that didn’t have some form of defensive arts, and so I created a group of warriors. I research the various warrior monk tropes, and how these tropes have played out historically. I even listened to episodes from my favorite podcast on various ways to approach fight scenes (especially if you aren’t a fighter yourself).

Really, I spent more time stalling out in research than I did in writing and editing, and given that it took me the better part of two months to write “Tiger Strike”, that’s saying something. But every time I sat down to work on the next fight scene, I had a meltdown. The obvious solution would have been to change the story so only one fight scene was necessary. But to me that seemed cowardly. I was introducing the warrior monks, and I really like my idea for how I wanted to introduce them. So, I pushed onward, painful fight scene by painful fight scene.

But I can now say I’ve survived writing fight scenes. I don’t know that I’ll make much effort to fold more of them into my storyworld, but I have learned that the professionals write fight scenes without resorting to the blow-by-blow and the resulting gore. There are emotions and senses involved in a fight, and it’s perfectly acceptable to build a fight scene around them. We’ll see how this plays out as I continue to work with New Glory.

I don’t know about you, but I’m concerned with a growing trend. The one where writers seem to think that having a deeper understanding of the English language is an editor’s issue, not their own.

Part of it can be blamed on txtspeak and on the dropping reading level of most television shows and movies. But part of it is just flat out laziness. And really, at the end of the day, shouldn’t writers be the ones who know how to craft meaningful sentences that show off the beauty of the language? Isn’t that essentially our job? Any book on lyrical writing or close reading will tell you so. So will the profiles of many writers, published traditionally or otherwise, where the writer claims that a love affair with the language led to a life of rhyme.

I want to be kidding, but I actually stopped writing anything outside of blog posts for the better part of three years because I don’t hear a rhythm when I read, even I’m narrating. I don’t have a love affair with the language or words. I don’t have a favorite word. I have favorite stories and characters. I can tell you when I really like a technique someone has employed. But I have nothing more for language than a healthy respect for its construction.

In reading some of the writing these writers produced, I found their passion was little more than lip service and that they were unable to find an editor (or perhaps just at following directions wrapped up in suggestions).

There are a lot of elements that have to be considered when writing. It’s all well and good to say, “Well, I’m just going to write how I write and have an editor or a friend who has better grammar skills than me fix it up for me.” But if you aren’t interested in manipulating the words and the mechanics of the language to weave your tale, why are you sitting at the loom…errr…keyboard?

In fact, it’s often noted that the best selling books tend to be the ones who can marry words and mechanics in a deft dance that isn’t entirely concocted by some editor.

My point is, the front line in the war to preserve and thoughtfully progress the development of language should be a primary concern for those for whom it is a daily tool. Graphic designers throw a fit when Adobe rearranges tools on them. Web designers hate arguments over scripting and markup languages. Writers should protest when grammar is abused and abandoned.

If we don’t, who will? (A great question stolen from Authoress)

Let’s open with this disclaimer: While I have written novel manuscripts, I have never attempted any sort of serial story. (It’s on my to-do list.) But I’ve read and watched quite a few. Some of them have reached an end, planned or forced. Some of them have just died out for a variety of reasons.

About a month or so ago, I was reading Bakuman 16, which centers around a character who has decided to end his manga because he feels it’s time to end the story. He doesn’t like working on it any more, but it’s at the peak of its popularity. The publishing company, of course, doesn’t want to lose its star attraction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle faced a similar backlash from Strand readers when he decided he was no longer interested in writing about Sherlock Holmes and killed him off.

But then you have a series like Yu-Gi-Oh  (I know I’m dating myself here) Kazuki Takahashi went in knowing that the story would have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And in true “good writer” form, he kept reminding readers (or viewers for those who only saw the anime or its dub) what the intended destination was.  When the dub ended in the United States, people (many of whom had spent the previous few years complaining about how 4Kids had butchered the translation) whined about the story just ending when it was so popular. It didn’t matter that the story was clearly finished (or that it had been finished in Japan for two years by that point).

Unless you’re Matt Groening, all good things must come to an end. For those of you who do create serial stories, how do you decide to end your series? Do you take the Syd Field approach and start off knowing where you’re headed? Do you play it by ear until you find a good stopping point? Do you just walk away altogether when you no longer feel you’re doing it any justice or have just grown to hate the story and the characters?

Writers of shorter forms (like articles and short stories) have long expressed the idea that you can always rework a piece to fit into different criteria so you can get more mileage from it, and they may be on to something. When you look at a creative work and think about how it would better reach a new audience, you’re forced to really take a look at both the piece and the audience more deeply, and in looking more deeply, you will often find new ideas to explore or to combine with other relevant ideas.

It’s an authentic way to enrich and extend your body of work.

Scriptwriters and novelists have enjoyed a similar opportunity to revisit and explore their stories by adapting them to the other format. Scriptwriters (or those entrusted with novelizing their scripts) use the novel format to more thoroughly explore character and setting backstories. They can address story threads that might have ended up on a cutting room floor, giving a little “director’s cut” moment to the novel. (One of my favorite examples of this is the novelization of the movie Labyrinth, which went into Sarah’s mother leaving the picture and the real impact of that on Sarah.)

Novelists, in watching their stories take on a visual life, can let the descriptions fade into the look of the movie, while focusing on bringing out more within the story. Jodi Meadows did a great job of exploring how this worked out for The Hunger Games. She’s right. There really is just so much you don’t need to verbally spell out in a movie, so much you can accomplish in a more relevant way.

Whether it’s by revisiting and reworking a piece or by adapting it to a different medium, there are ways to dig deeper into your work to produce something new and interesting. But don’t forget to work on original pieces, too, because eventually the current story will be wrung out.