Ask a writer!

In light of posting anything substantial (since I don't have anything bloggable right now), I'm opening up the forum to questions. Want to know something about me, my writing, my webcomic, or anything else about the craft?

Post 'em in your comments or email 'em to me if you're shy and I'll answer them to the best of my ability in my next post. Go ahead - pick my brain a little.

The Big Fight

I've been told I write very good fight sequences. Some people have real difficulties with this, so I thought that in light of telling you any news (since at the moment I have none to share), I'd talk a little bit about this.

What is a fight? Well, it's an expression of conflict, and conflict is the driving force behind all fiction. All books have it at some level. I'm choosing to talk about the writing of actual physical conflict. Arguments and internal conflicts I will leave for another day. Fights occur between a minimum of two characters. There are as many reasons to fight as there are grains of sand on a beach, but ultimately all fights boil down to a few basic themes:

1. The first form of physical conflict are when both characters are trying to achieve the same goal, but only one can actually win it. Think of Frodo and Gollum battling for the One Ring at the edge of the cliff in Mount Doom. One prize, two competitors.

2. The second type of fight is again related to goals. In this case, one character is trying to achieve a goal, and the other is trying to prevent the other. Think about Luke Skywalker trying to blow up the first Death Star in Star Wars while Darth Vader tries to stop him. Wait a minute, I hear you say. That's between spaceships - how is that a fight? Well, conflict can occur on very different scales in very different settings. What's the difference between the two dudes in They Live brawling over a pair of sunglasses and the epic space battles of E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series? Scale. The principle of conflict remains the same.

3. The third type of fight is pursuit. This is where the goal switches from an object or situation to one much more personal; one character wants the other character, who wants to escape. This is a common theme in most action movies. Most sequences throughout the Indiana Jones movies involve him trying to get away from his pursuers.

4. Finally, there are fights where both characters simply want to kill each other out of anger, hatred, or righteousness. The sole goal for each character is the end of their opponent. These are intensely personal conflicts, driven by powerful motivations. Think of the epic climactic battle between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Revenge of the Sith (a truly redeeming moment in an otherwise mediocre trilogy). Kenobi realizes Skywalker has turned to the Dark Side and therefore must be destroyed. Skywalker believes he has been betrayed by his closest friend and mentor. Both are driven by powerful emotions and we know only one can walk away.

All fights fall into these categories. But how do you write them? I tend to see fights like scenes from a movie. How would a director block and edit this scene? Think of movies you've seen that have great fights - notice how the camera moves and follows the action? This is the kind of thing I try to recreate when I write action scenes. I tend to write in close third-person narrative, where the "camera" would be focusing primarily on one character, and that has been a saving grace when I'm writing big epic battles. If you've read C.S. Lewis' The Horse and His Boy, there is a wonderful battle sequence where poor inexperienced Shasta is thrust into the front lines of a battle. From his perspective, the battle is a lot of noise and people and horses and oh yes, he's supposed to swing his sword, and then it's over. It's a lot of effort to pull back your narration and try to encompass an entire battle, and it can ultimately lose the reader and confuse you the writer so much you swear you'll never write again. If you have a large-scale conflict to include, try to shrink it down to a single perspective. I did this with the final battle in Just Cause, with some thirty superheroes fighting an army, but I told it from Mustang Sally's perspective. I didn't have to explain what happened all across the battlefield; only what affected her directly, what she could perceive.

Writing fights in first-person narration is difficult, because you have to stay entirely within the narrator's perspective. You have to really concentrate on the feelings, the emotions, the pain of the conflict, and doing so often bogs down an action scene terribly. Imagine if you were trying to write this scene from Star Wars as a first-person narrative:

I juke the ship left and right to confuse my pursuers, but I have no room to maneuver in this trench. The walls flash past me in a blur of gray and white. It reminds me of Beggar's Canyon back home. I wish I was back there instead of here. I'm so frightened right now. I'm out of my element. But this stick feels so natural in my hands, and this X-Wing is so much more maneuverable than my old T-16. A laser blast flashes past me, bringing me back to reality, and I realize I must now focus. My objective, the reactor port, approaches quickly. Suddenly my ship shudders and R2-D2 emits a shrill electronic scream through my helmet speakers. Sparks fly through the cockpit, each one a tiny star with a lifespan measured in microseconds. They burn themselves out joyously on my flight suit, leaving it speckled with black spots like a baby krayt dragon. The sharp smell of fried circuitry assails my nostrils, smoke makes my eyes water. The readout over my knees confirms my fear. "I've lost Artoo!" I shout aloud. I know I shouldn't feel such anguish over a droid, but this small, fearless machine has become my friend over these past few weeks. After the pain of losing Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, Ben, and even Biggs, how can I deal with the loss of one more friend? I shake my head...

I'm exaggerating here, but you can see how a first-person narrative really slows down what should be a fast-paced sequence of events. Likewise, trying to pull back and tell about a battle from an omniscient third-person narrative perspective could be equally as boring and unreadable because we're not close to any of the characters.

The TIE fighters pursue the fleeing X-Wing through the trench. A glancing laser blast impacts the astromech droid. Just then, the Millenium Falcon swoops in from out of the sun, shooting wildly into the close grouping of TIE fighters. One is destroyed immediately. The other two collide; one crashes into the trench wall while the other spins crazily off into space.

Do you really care what is happening here? No, because you're not close to any of the characters. It's like reading a news report.

When I write action sequences, I focus on what is happening to the people in the fight. I also try to keep sentences short and simple, without lots of extra clauses. Short sentences read quickly, and pacing is crucial in an action sequence. Make sure you don't focus solely on sights. Fights are often noisy. Smells are an area many writers (myself included) tend to ignore because when we write our fights like movies, we're not also watching Smell-O-Vision. Using an example from Star Wars again, I'd like to take a look at how I might write the lightsaber duel between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan, using the techniques I've described here.

Vader's lightsaber flashes red at Kenobi. He raises his own in defense and assumes the classic stance from his training many decades ago. The hiss of the energy blades echoes off the steel walls of the corridor. Vader drives forward, always the aggressive one. He swings from the left, then the right. Kenobi takes a step back, then another, and yet another. The Sith Lord pursues him relentlessly. Kenobi's blood pounds in his ears. The exertion wears on him. Sweat begins to stain his robes. The black apparition before him seems hardly alive, thrusting and lunging like a machine. Kenobi turns away attack after attack. He can't gain any advantage against his old student. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a blast door open, and beyond it sits the Millenium Falcon. He can sense young Luke and his friends beyond in the bay as they wait for an opening to get to the ship. Kenobi's heart grows heavy, because he knows he can no longer go with them. Stormtroopers race toward him from the bay. Vader presses the attack.

Kenobi knows he is going to die. But he can make his death worthwhile.

Obviously I've just kind of thrown this together, and this isn't really my best writing, but see how it splits the difference between a first-person narration and an omniscient third-person? We can sense how Kenobi is struggling in his fight, and that he is resigned to his fate. We're interested in what happens to him. Things which happen are within his perception, so we're not stuck slogging through the rest of the cast's thoughts, words, and deeds in this moment. I think it's paced pretty well.

Anyway, this is how I write action and fight scenes. Maybe it'll help you with your own too. Any questions?

Passive Aggressive

There is a problem with most writers. It is something that runs rampant through nearly everything we do. No matter how much we are writing, it is pervasive and insidious. It is even running all through this paragraph. It is the passive voice, and I hate it!

Defining the Passive Voice

I’ve chosen to write about it because it represents such a big problem in our work. I see it not only in my own projects, but in nearly every piece I am asked to edit or critique. First, a definition: What exactly is the passive voice? In any proper sentence you have a subject and a verb. At its simplest definition, passive voice uses verbs that don’t represent an action: am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being.

“What’s wrong with that? Everybody uses those all the time when we talk,” you ask.

Well, how we speak is not how we should write. Sure, we’ll all say “I am going to the store,” or “He is such a jerk,” and think nothing of it. But those statements make for poor, dull narrative.

Fixing it

Let’s look at an example. Here’s a simple sentence: There was a man who was running. Sounds comfortable and friendly, doesn’t it? – Like you’d start telling a story around a campfire with that sentence. But look at the subject and verb! There was. And then in the predicate, who was. That, my friends, is an incredibly passive sentence. Okay, let’s start by removing that execrable There was construction – something we all love to use when we write – and cut out that execrable who, leaving us with A man was running. Better, but still passive. Let’s change the operative verb from was to ran and get rid of that running altogether. By the way … words which end in –ing often indicate the presence of the passive voice. More on this later, but back to our sentence. We’ve turned There was a man who was running into A man ran. That’s a boring sentence, certainly, but it’s not passive. The subject, the man, actually did something besides simply exist. He ran. As writers, we must be aware of how we can reword sentences to make them exciting and interesting instead of passive. Obviously, we can take a simple sentence like that and make the man do something far more exciting. A man raced toward the fallen child. That would make me want to read more.

Ing-ing

I am guilty of overusing a specific kind of sentence construction; it is a sneaky way the passive voice gets onto the page. The construction looks like this: A man raced toward the fallen child, breathing heavily from the exertion. The sneaky part is in the second clause. The first part of the sentence is a nice, active clause, but look at that present participle breathing. What’s the subject of this sentence? The man. A man raced works as a subject-verb combination, but A man breathing heavily from the exertion doesn’t work. Even though it’s not actually in the sentence, a was is implied by the present participle. And that means passive voice. There are lots of ways to fix this. Change that breathing to breathed and alter the rest of the sentence to fit (A man raced toward the fallen child and breathed heavily from the exertion.) or divide it into two separate sentences (A man raced toward the fallen child. He breathed heavily from the exertion.). Either way works; it just depends upon your style. I would probably rework the second clause entirely into something a bit less stilted: A man raced toward the fallen child. His breath came in quick gasps as he ran.

Finding it

Sometimes it can be really astonishing just how much passive voice invades our work. We tend to gloss over the most common was-es and is-es when we read, and even when we edit. We’re so used to constructing sentences that use those state-of-being verbs when we speak, they don’t seem out of place in a written piece. I use the following technique in my own work, and certainly recommend you try it.

Use the Find and Replace function of your favorite word-processing program. If your favorite program doesn’t have a Find and Replace function, you might want to upgrade. What you’re going to do is find every was and replace it with was. In other words, you’ll change the formatting to a different color and bold. If you’re really worried, make it an even larger font size. Then go back through and do the same with am, is, are, were, be, been, being. Worried about those –ing words? You can find those too by finding and replacing ing(space) with ing. Now some words (doing, going) will be highlighted by this as well, but you don’t have to change them. If you have any other words you tend to overuse – that and there are both common problems I have – do that too.

Try not to be discouraged at the huge amount of red in your piece.

Instead, go through it a page at a time, and start fixing. Replace those passive verbs with exciting, active ones. I recommend you change the color back as you make fixes so you know what you’ve done and what you haven’t. When you’re done, you’ll have a much stronger piece – which means it will be more saleable and appealing to an editor.

So get out there and be aggressive in eliminating your passive voice, and keep on writing!

It's alive!

The all-new ianthealy.com is up and running. Come take a look, and tell all your friends (especially if they're agents or acquisitions editors...).

What is it that you want?

As I get busy coding the last page of my new website - seriously, I can't wait for you all to get to see it because it looks so freakin' good! - I'm struck by the idea of a Members-Only section of the site. Other authors have things like this. You have to register to join (but unlike p0rn, you don't have to pay to be a member), and members get access to all kinds of neat things which aren't on the author's main site. I'm trying to decide what sort of material to have on the Members Only page. Here are some of the ideas I'm considering; I'd like to know if any of you have further suggestions:

• Deleted/additional scenes
• Outtakes (I'd have to write these - LOL)
• A Forum
• Stories which won't be generally available on the main page

I've been away

It's been a crazy busy five days. I've neglected housework, obligations, my webcomic, my webpage, and to a lesser extent my wife and children, but I've spent almost every minute of the past five evenings on a complete copy-edit of Deep Six. Net result: I've eliminated as much passive voice and awkward wording as I can (and in the process cut out about two thousand words).

Tomorrow night I will print essentially a full ream of paper: the 341-page full manuscript for the agent who requested it, a 100-page excerpt for the editor who requested it, cover letters, synopses, marketing plan, and paragraph summaries of related works. Then I'll box everything up and mail it off Saturday morning. Not a bad transition: one week from third to fourth draft.

The rest of the weekend I will try to climb to the top of Mount Laundry, get another week or two of the webcomic done, and work on my website.

In other words, I will relax.

My karma ran over my dogma

I don't actually have a dogma to subscribe to, but I really like that phrase, and karma seems to have caught up with me after getting dumped on for months and months and months.

The Conference was spectacular. And it all culminated in the events of late Saturday afternoon.

My pitch session was with the senior acquisitions editor for Random House/Del Rey books. I planned to pitch Just Cause. I sat down with her and explained this was part of a series of books (because editors love to hear that you are more than a one-trick pony), then launched into my pitch.

After a minute, she stopped me and said that she'd already said no to two other books this year with the exact same plot as mine. My mouth clamped shut and I was thinking I had blown it. Then she said for me to tell her about another book in the series. I only have one other that is fully complete, so I figured I'd discuss Deep Six. I mentioned that it was a Top 100 Semifinalist in the ABNA contest, and she smiled and said she'd been a judge for it, but she hadn't read my particular book. So I explained the gist of the story and her eyes got big and she said (and these were her exact words) "That's the most interesting thing I've heard all weekend. Send me a hundred pages." And this is from a cynical, seen-it-all editor who never requests pages and when she does, never requests that many! And while I was trying to restart my heart, she asked me to tell her about some of the other books in the series, so I mentioned Light of Allah in three words: Muslim super hero. Same reaction from her - eyes wide, interested. She said she wanted me to include a paragraph on each of the other books in the series (which, for those of you keeping score include Just Cause, The Archmage, Enter the Jackrabbit, Light of Allah, Deep Six, and The Greatest Generation - and those are only the ones I've done some work on. There are others which I've only plotted).

I went downstairs to the bar to celebrate with my friends.

While I was down there, I saw the agent to whom I'd pitched Deep Six last year. She had requested a partial at the pitch, then a full, and then I never heard from her again. So I figured, whatthehell, I'm having a good afternoon, I'll push my luck, and I went to talk to her. She remembered me right away and remembered my project and when I explained what had happened her face fell. Apparently her assistant had quit some time ago and as a parting shot, shredded everything in the office. She'd never gotten to read my manuscript and since she operated on a paper system instead of email, she didn't even have a way to know I'd sent it.

She told me to send the full back to her. I mentioned the Top 100 in the contest and that the Random House editor had requested 100 pages, and her eyes got really wide and she said I needed to send it to her right away.

It gets better. She saw The Milkman on my nametag and asked me about it. I whispered (because you're not supposed to say this to agents) that it was my self-published book. She asked what it was about, so I told her. She said send it to her too, even though she probably couldn't sell it. I happened (yeah, like it was a coincidence) to have some copies in my car, so I told her I could give her one right then. I went and got it and signed it for her and she carried it around for the rest of the evening!

I may not have landed an agent. I may not have landed a publisher.

But I may have landed both.

Wish me luck!

Selling out

No, I haven't given in and put a link to Amazon back on my website.

But it's 2008 and I'm still trying to get a platform together, so I've now officially joined Facebook.

Stop by and say hi and if you want, I'll be your friend.