Fights are great for many things. They allow you to develop character by showing how a protagonist responds to danger. They bring people together, as bonds formed during a confrontation are likely to be strong. But forget all that waffle. Fights are great fun because people are thumping each other, often with large, heavy objects, and they positively eat words.
There are essnetially two sorts of fights in fiction. The first typie is the Motivated Fight. This is where the fight serves a useful plot function, say, a confrontation with a major antagonist, or where a major change takes place. Think of the fight with Orcs at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring. That was a motivated fight, with huge impact on the plot. After that scene, the fellowship was split, Merry and Pippin kidnapped by Orcs, Sam and Frodo on their way to Mordor, and Borimir dead. The story was changed forever by that fight.
Then there are Unmotivated Fights, where suddenly Orcs jump out of the bushes screaming blue murder, get hacked to pieces by the heroes for a thousand words, and then things carry on pretty much as before. This is the sort of fight I'm referring to. They are an excellent way to use up words. They are entertaining to write, if you have a taste for gore. And, yes, they can help you develop character and all that other stuff as well. But, most importantly, if you're stuck in a plot hole, a good bit of random violence might help you meet your word count, without advancing the plot at all.
Sounds cynical and cheap? You bet. But if you need some literary justification, noir writer Raymond Chandler remarked, "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." In the novel Red Harvest, the other great hardboiled writer, Dashiell Hammett titled a chapter 'The Seventeenth Murder.' You can't tell me all of the others were essential to the plot.
Some genres lend themselves to this sort of thing more than others. Fantasy stories can be very violent. Westerns can rack up body counts similar to small wars. War stories are almost required to have unmotivated violence. Hardboiled murder mysteries will keep the morticians in business for months. In other genres, however, you might have to try a bit harder. Psychological cruelty, arguments over nothing, petty family feuds that have been going on for years, all fall into this category. If the members of your fictitious family aren't the sort of people who'll beat each other with morningstars or shoot holes in each other, they might be the sort of people who view Christmas dinner as an opportunity to air grievances, quarrel and torment each other. Watch Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to see how far this sort of behaviour can go.
My private eye, Jack Callaghan, gets at least one gratuitous beating in each story. It helps keep him in his place, and it helps maintain my sympathy for him. Here is an example (1) of him getting a clobbering. It isn't necessay at all, as the people adminstering the beating are only supposed to be kidnapping him. I could have written "They jumped on me and a big gorilla twisted my arm while his small friend poked a gun in my ribs. They made me get in their car and we drove off someplace," but since I needed more words, I added in some fisticuffs and general nastiness.
1 - If the link doesn't work, try this URL: http://writehandpalm.blogspot.com/2007/11/jack-takes-hiding.html. Or check out the archive for November, 'Jack takes a hiding.'
No comments:
Post a Comment