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thanateA couple weeks back ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fwilde posted to her real blog about footnotes, and using The Princess Bride as a mental model for fiction submissions, and we had a mini-conversation about how she actually prefers the movie for once, and I didn't quite get to the bit about how the movie is great, but the book would be more awesome for that last fight scene alone, where you're seeing all of Inigo's ghosts yelling at him and it works. (I love the playing with language & footnote bits, too, but that one scene is on my list of top fictional moments ever.)
Last week, part of Steve Brust's lecture (he's pronounced like "Bruce" with a bit of a T stuck on the end, by the way-- I've just about adjusted to this after mentally whacking myself in the head for the last week) included his theory that what sells a fight scene is point of view. A good fight scene will get you inside the head of the character, and you'll have not only the fight but the emotional effects of it, and what the fighter sees, etc. The trained fighter can deconstruct blow-by-blow afterwards; the untrained fighter will lose it all as it goes past; the horribly out of practice but once trained fighter (um, me) will feel desperate & flaily & not be able to deconstruct a thing, but will probably come out with a lot of the right moves by non-conscious memory. Even when you're trained, your field awareness drops sharply when you start adding in strong emotions like, say, fear of getting killed.
It wasn't until last night that these two thoughts collided in my brain and pointed out that they were connected. Therefollowed a slightly odd conversation in which I had to keep remindinggrauwulf that I was talking about writing, not movies. I suspect there is a small subset of people who could find "then fighter A parried in tierce" level descriptions thrilling, and possibly at least one or two of them are reading this journal (dante_di_pietro...) but mostly the writer is pushing against that barrier between the terminology and the visuals that only the trained fighters have broken down. Even if you're not being technical about your language, there's still a fairly small subset of the language's descriptive toolbox that gets pulled out for fight scenes, which makes it far too easy for them to end up sounding slightly stilted. (For instance, alecaustin started off his VP submission manuscript with a lovely fight scene, and by the second time through I wanted to start crossing everything out and saying "no, I've seen this phrase somewhere before!" which is really unuseful as feedback, since I could do the same thing with *most* fantasy-world fight scenes. It's just that there are only so many ways to describe the actions.)
At any rate, I could *probably* go on about this all day, and that would also be a waste of my time. There's editing to do, and some actual errands to run and things, as well. I should make a list.
Xposty from dreamwidth, but yes, I'm still here.
fwilde posted to her real blog about footnotes, and using The Princess Bride as a mental model for fiction submissions, and we had a mini-conversation about how she actually prefers the movie for once, and I didn't quite get to the bit about how the movie is great, but the book would be more awesome for that last fight scene alone, where you're seeing all of Inigo's ghosts yelling at him and it works. (I love the playing with language & footnote bits, too, but that one scene is on my list of top fictional moments ever.)Last week, part of Steve Brust's lecture (he's pronounced like "Bruce" with a bit of a T stuck on the end, by the way-- I've just about adjusted to this after mentally whacking myself in the head for the last week) included his theory that what sells a fight scene is point of view. A good fight scene will get you inside the head of the character, and you'll have not only the fight but the emotional effects of it, and what the fighter sees, etc. The trained fighter can deconstruct blow-by-blow afterwards; the untrained fighter will lose it all as it goes past; the horribly out of practice but once trained fighter (um, me) will feel desperate & flaily & not be able to deconstruct a thing, but will probably come out with a lot of the right moves by non-conscious memory. Even when you're trained, your field awareness drops sharply when you start adding in strong emotions like, say, fear of getting killed.
It wasn't until last night that these two thoughts collided in my brain and pointed out that they were connected. Therefollowed a slightly odd conversation in which I had to keep reminding
grauwulf that I was talking about writing, not movies. I suspect there is a small subset of people who could find "then fighter A parried in tierce" level descriptions thrilling, and possibly at least one or two of them are reading this journal (dante_di_pietro...) but mostly the writer is pushing against that barrier between the terminology and the visuals that only the trained fighters have broken down. Even if you're not being technical about your language, there's still a fairly small subset of the language's descriptive toolbox that gets pulled out for fight scenes, which makes it far too easy for them to end up sounding slightly stilted. (For instance, alecaustin started off his VP submission manuscript with a lovely fight scene, and by the second time through I wanted to start crossing everything out and saying "no, I've seen this phrase somewhere before!" which is really unuseful as feedback, since I could do the same thing with *most* fantasy-world fight scenes. It's just that there are only so many ways to describe the actions.) At any rate, I could *probably* go on about this all day, and that would also be a waste of my time. There's editing to do, and some actual errands to run and things, as well. I should make a list.
Xposty from dreamwidth, but yes, I'm still here.