La Petite Guerre · 5:47pm Mar 21st, 2023
With today's "Fusion," I've written yet another war or war-adjacent story. As I've said in the past, war stories in the New Column are usually terrible. With this blog, I'm going to go under the hood a little and try to deconstruct why New Column war stories are such shit, and how I try to do better. I have two hypotheses to discuss here:
- A tight, limited point of view works best
- Prose must not try to emulate visual media, and must instead play to its own strengths
Hypothesis One: A tight, limited point of view works best
I recall, when "Game of Thrones" was first hitting TV (2011-ish?), I read the first book in the series. It wasn't spectacular enough that I read any later books in the cycle, and I never watched the show, but I remember one particularly excellent bit in the book. One character—might have been the dwarf, I don't remember—got wrangled into a battle.
That battle was possibly the best fight scene I've ever read in my life, because of how confusing, how limited, and how foggy-of-war it was. The reader only learned what the character could see, hear, taste, feel, know. The perspective was unbelievably tight third person, and it went deep into the character's psyche.
That's literally the only thing I remember from Game of Thrones, but boy howdy did it stick with me!
(This leads to a point that could be a different blog: the most important thing a writer can do is to read other people's good writing. So much of the New Column's illiterate bullshit is clearly written by people who watched TV and played video games and then tried to write prose, never having read a professionally edited novel in their life. The giveaway of these people is their poor punctuation around dialogue and dialogue tags. And it's not like good books have to cost money.)
The New Column, and heck, even lots of professional fiction, tries to be like Tom Clancy or David Weber and show all the big, broad strokes of the entire war. You are not Tom Clancy. I am not Tom Clancy. Tom Clancy could write "Dance of the Vampires" in head-hopping mostly omniscient narrator-in-the-sky and make it work. We can't. So what can we mere mortals do?
I've tried, with a few of my stories, to write about war—either the actual fighting, or about characters caught in a war if not directly in battle—and I have found that the Game of Thrones scene is an excellent example to follow.
My "Redheart's War" was deliberately—premeditatedly—with malice aforethought—written as first-person private first class in order to force myself to keep the perspective tight. Redheart's battles are by design confusing, disjointed, and claustrophobic. Redheart wasn't a general, watching from a distant hilltop as the formations maneuvered. Nnnnnope, she was down in the mud and blood and piss and vomit staunching bleeding and patching sucking chest wounds. She had no idea what was going on outside her direct field of vision. I wrote the combat in "The Ponies in the Caves'' the same way, and doubled-down on the confusion, because the perspective was Rarity, hardly a trained soldier, not even a trained reservist, but rather a civilian dragged into the fray.
"Luna's Daughters" (particularly Chapter 3) and "With Her Majesty's Coast Guard" hop viewpoints, having more than a single point-of-view character, but I did try to keep them tight third-person within each action scene. For instance, in "Coast Guard," I felt the scene where Officer Cadet Red Sky is in the bilge was nicely claustrophobic, both literally and figuratively. Even more so because Red Sky has no idea what's going on elsewhere aboard the derelict, other than news runners bring him. Similarly, Admiral Glider is on the deck of the Coast Guard cutter, trying to infer how the rescue is going by watching the deck of the derelict through sheets of rain and the glare of flares and lightning. I was proud of the confusion and fog of war rescue that "Coast Guard" carried. Giving the reader an omniscient view of the whole situation would have weakened the story, made it worse.
Even in "A Night in Tartarus," which is a psychological horror story, not a war story, Minuette encounters a situation she doesn't understand (nighttime in Tartarus), and the reader only knows what she can see, hear, smell, feel.
Which leads to my "Ms. Midshipmare Dash" and my new "Fusion," both crossovers with Honor Harrington and set during a galactic war. "Ms. Midshipmare Dash" involves a relativistic space battle, fought between hundreds of millions of tons of starships, but I kept the perspective tightly in Dash's head. The reader only knows what she knows, what she sees on her repeater plots and comes over the combat chatter on her headset as the helmsmare of a single light attack craft (think 'space PT boat').
Today's "Fusion" shows us the aftermath of a boarding action, once again staying tight inside Dash's perspective. She only slowly learns what happened, and I do my best to avoid David Weber-style infodumps (bless his heart for giving us Honor Harrington, but the man needs a pack of editors).
Let me circle back to my Hypothesis One, "A tight, limited point of view works best:" I think the best way to write a war fic—or any action scene—is to pay careful attention to the perspective of the narration. The best way to write an action or a close-aftermath scene is a tight third-person-limited or a first-person perspective, where the reader can only know what the character knows, can only see what the character sees, and can only smell what the character smells. This leads, if you write well, to the reader feeling what the character feels. Which then leads us to...
Hypothesis Two: Prose must not try to emulate visual media, and must instead play to its own strengths
If you've accomplished the tight perspective, you're already 90% of the way here.
One reason New Column stories that try to be action-packed tend to suck salty Wookie balls is that the "writers" (I use the word loosely) have watched anime and played Call of Duty and then try to replicate what makes those cool using prose. As an example, something recently bounced into the New Column with this in its description page: "Crossover.... Anime attacks are mentioned in this story." The story immediately Derpy 404'd into the void, thank goodness.
Here's a secret: prose is different from anime, TV, or video games.
Michael Bay can make exploding robots cool because the big screen is the proper medium for shit blowing up. No matter how good a writer is, shit blowing up in prose won't be as cool as Michael Bay blowing shit up at the movie theater. This is a fact, and you can not write explosions as well as Michael Bay explodes shit.
Same thing with choreographed martial arts. Anime fights, an Equilibrium gun kata, Matrix bullet time—don't try to emulate them in prose. They are inherently visual and attempts to render them as prose are doomed.
When writing a story, you have one tool that video games and movie directors don't have: you can make the reader feel the viewpoint character's emotions.
The is an excerpt from one of my personally favorite bits in "Redheart's War," and I think it illustrates my two hypotheses here. We're deep in Redheart's perspective as the fog of war swirls around her and she buckles down to her job:
A cannonball smashed through Lieutenant Armor's shield spell. A flash like lightning dazzled my eyes and I covered my ears. I blinked and shook my head, cleared the dazzle, and heard new cries of Medic up! The cannonball had clipped one of our pegasi, Cosmic Plume, on her foreleg. She fell from the rigging to the deck and I sprinted to her.
She bit onto her other forehoof, fighting not to scream. I grabbed her tail in my teeth and dragged her portside, toward cover, leaving a trail of blood behind her on the wooden deck.
"You're all right," I shouted into her ears. "I've got this!"
Her leg was smashed, bone and gore mixed with flesh and hair. I dug into my pack, grabbed a tourniquet, and cinched it tight, just above the knee.
"Gonna lose my leg?" she said.
I refused to look into her eyes or answer her question.
"This hurts, Doc."
What else was going on? Where was the pirate ship? Where were Following Winds and the two airships? Who else was wounded, who else was dead?
I had no idea.
My entire world was the few inches in front of my face, focused entirely on treating Cosmic. I got the tourniquet arranged just right. Her foreleg was a bloody mess, simply smashed, with no cut to close or laceration to disinfect. Amputation for sure. No way the surgeons could try to salvage it. I grabbed an ampoule of painkiller and jammed it into her thigh.
Her eyes widened and she passed out.
She'll live, I told myself, not sure if I believed it.
The grapples caught and the two ships jerked, bumped, and then smashed into each other, our starboard beam to their port beam.
At the rails, Celestia's Own met with the pirates.
What happened? How long did the scrap on the top decks of those two ships last?
I don't know. I saw only fragments, and I've never pieced together the whole. With my pounding heart and rasping breath, my sense of time was entirely skewed, destroyed. It felt like a decade. I once tried to read the Battalion's official history of the battle, but it just made me sick and I went to the bathroom and threw up and returned the book to the library. (It really annoyed Twilight that she had spent three weeks getting that book for me via interlibrary loan, and that I kept it less than two hours.)
What I do remember: the sounds of spells and swords and pikes hitting flesh. Bones snapping. The stench of burning wood, burning tar, burning sails, burning hair and meat, and spilled brains and blood.
I hunkered over Cosmic, guarding the unconscious trooper, and waited for the next cry of Medic up!
We're feeling Redheart's emotions as confusion and chaos engulf her. Personally, I think this works much better than if I had tried to choreograph a martial arts anime fight in prose.
I think a corollary to this Hypothesis Two is: tension is often more impactful than action. Leaving a character stewing in building, unrelieved tension can leave the reader more tense, more in tune with the character, than a pure beat-em-up action scene. Alfred Hitchcock explained this far better than I ever could; read his explanation.
Another example from "Coast Guard" that I think illustrates my point; here, Red Sky, an underage officer-cadet, recently orphaned and therefore the new Baron of MacIntosh Hills, has the conn of a short-crewed ship sailing into the teeth of a hurricane as they sortie to rescue a grounded passenger liner. He's terrified out of his mind, but knows what duty requires:
Steady on their new course, wind strong off the starboard stern, the Dawn's Light fought up one wave after another.
Red Sky's heart pounded and his stomach churned. Tears welled in his eyes, hidden by the rain and spray. He had meant every word he said to Full Larder, but a hot ingot of fear seemed stuck deep in his guts. Knowing what duty required didn't make the storm any less dangerous.
He stood at his station and fought to keep the appearance of fear hidden, so that he could play the roles of Officer of the Crown and Peer of the Realm that carried so little truth, but were so vital for the crew to see.
Both of those passages are tight points of view, deep in the characters' head, and let us feel the emotions. They're terrified, they're surging with adrenaline, and they know what duty requires.
My overarching point, then, is that when writing prose: don't try to emulate Michael Bay or anime. Use the tools you have to maximum advantage, by giving the reader a feel for the character's sensory inputs, and then dig deep into the character's emotions.
Recapitulation
The most important advantage prose has over other media is that we can dig into the character's head, into the character's emotions, into what the character feels at the tip of the spear where battle is joined—use that advantage mercilessly, and don't try to compete with the visual media on their home turf of "big kewl explosions LEL," because you can't. When writing prose, your single advantage is getting into the character's head. Use this advantage.
iirc, in the last novel by him I read, Tom Clancy wrote (at least mostly) fairly close third person, but switching pov among multiple people. And this works! Or at least it was good enough for his audience.
Edited to add: In that Clancy book, some of the third person viewpoint material showed us characters obtaining and dealing with information, and interacting with each other to try to make the preparations, maneuvers, and battle actions come out as victories instead of defeats, and that gave us a degree of higher level or even close-to-omniscient view when they and we put the pieces together in our heads. Skillful use of close third person povs can give us a lot.
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He's better than many, but well known for an example.
Anyway, thanks for another good essay about how to write!
Edited to add: That sounds way more generic than your blog post deserves.
Thanks for talking about how you wrote war fiction that isn't mediocre crap! 💩
If only more people would take your advice, we could see some better stories.
A sure sign of an illiterate moron or someone whose only contact with reading was Fallout Equestria: the first chapter resembles a game opening narration or, may Allah forgive me for uttering these words, anime opening, sometimes complete with a song (another topic to consider: Tolkien could insert poetry and songs in his books; none of this pitiful band of horsefuckers is Tolkien). Also, the sweet taste of 9 mm, semi-auto, laser-sights gun porn for sweaty teenage gamers.
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All worthy of their own blogs, indeed.
This makes so much sense. I've wondered sometimes about the absolutely deranged formatting choices some on here make, especially when it comes to dialogue.
I would go farther, and say that only tight 3rd, and 1st person with strong unreliable narration are suitable for war stories. If you're reading a war story in first person, you're being told that story. By a person. And every vet I've met who has opened up was either telling a no-shit story, was shining me on, or had opened a vein and was bleeding onto the page, as they say.
I sort of prefer the no-shit stories, to be honest.
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That's an interesting point, actually.
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Most audiences do. Academia, and professional critics by extension, prefer the bleeding. Anybody who expects academia to look at this site is delusional, so your proverbial (or literal!) Harvard English degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
(Yes, that parenthetical was directed at a specific writer who most people doubt ever finished elementary school. My interpretation is funnier and James Joyce exists)
One of the things I so love about these stories is that "crossover between MLP and Honor Harrington" sounds objectively like it could be one of the stupidest ideas on Earth, but you manage to turn it into the exact opposite.
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Thank you.
I think the trick is writing it as one-shot discrete stories about individual events important in the character's life, rather than spanning the galaxy.