Violence: A Writer's Guide

by Rory Miller

  Violence: A Writer's Guide

  Top

  Chapter 1: Establishing a Baseline

  Intro

  Chapter One: Establishing a Baseline

  Chapter Two: Context

  Chapter Three: Mechanics of a Physical ‘Fight’

  Chapter Four: Bad Guys and Violence

  Chapter Five: Good Guys and Violence

  Chapter Six: Gender Differences

  Chapter Seven: Survival Stress Response

  Chapter Eight: Unarmed

  Chapter Nine: Impact Weapons

  Chapter Ten: Edged Weapons

  Chapter Eleven: Firearms

  Chapter Twelve: Less-Lethal weapons

  Chapter Thirteen: Concealed Carry

  Chapter Fourteen: Mass Combat

  Chapter Fifteen: Violence in Other Places and Times

  Chapter Sixteen: A Final Rant

  Chapter Seventeen: Random Details

  Violence

  A Writer’s Guide

  by

  Rory Miller

  Published by Rory Miller at Smashwords

  Copyright 2010 Rory Miller

  http://chirontraining.com

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover design by Kamila Zeman Miller

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Intro

  Chapter One: Establishing a Baseline

  In which we do a quick check to see how different your worldview is from that of a force professional.

  Chapter Two: Context

  In which we discuss many of the elements that surround an act of violence.

  Chapter Three: Mechanics of a Physical ‘Fight’

  In which we discuss three stages of an assault, and some other details.

  Chapter Four: Bad Guys and Violence

  In which we reveal some of the thought processes of a violent criminal.

  Chapter Five: Good Guys and Violence

  An overview of cops, operators and even the OPIEC character.

  Chapter Six: Gender Differences

  In which we explore a little of how differently men and women fight.

  Chapter Seven: Survival Stress Response

  Wherein the reader is introduced to the effects of fear on mind and body.

  Chapter Eight: Unarmed

  A discussion of the nuances of mano a mano combat

  Chapter Nine: Impact Weapons

  The finer points of the notorious “blunt object”

  Chapter Ten: Edged Weapons

  Knives, swords, spears and axes

  Chapter Eleven: Firearms

  An overview of the great equalizer

  Chapter Twelve: Less-Lethal weapons

  Modern technology attempts to stop criminals without hurting them

  Chapter Thirteen: Concealed Carry

  “That is a gun in my pocket, but I am happy to see you.”

  Chapter Fourteen: Mass Combat

  Riots and war and pig piles! Oh my!

  Chapter Fifteen: Violence in Other Places and Times

  In which we attempt to shed the blinders of the modern age

  Chapter Sixteen: A Final Rant

  A short, emotional list of common mistakes in fiction and cinema

  Chapter Seventeen: Random Details

  A writer’s eye and voice are in the details. Here are a few.

  Intro

  I should explain myself, and also give an introduction to what you will get in this little book.

  My name is Rory Miller, but I’ve been called “Sarge” in a jail, “sensei” in a dojo and “abu Orion” in Baghdad. Rory is fine.

  I don’t write fiction. I do write fight scenes. I have written some of the most realistic fight scenes ever … because they have to stand up in court. Conflict is the core of drama and much of my adult life has centered around conflict. The good side is that I know a lot about real violence. One of the many downsides is that I know enough that most fiction is infuriating to read.

  What follows won’t teach writing techniques. If you are a good writer or at least learning to be a good writer, you know more about the nuances of plot and point of view and voice than I do.

  What I will try to do here is introduce you to the world of violence. To the parts that people don’t understand. The parts that books and movies get wrong. Not just the mechanics, but how people who live in a violent world think and feel about what they do and what they see done. The psychological, physical, and spiritual reality.

  Once upon a time, I was sitting on a panel, “Bashing Your Way Through: Writing Realistic Fight Scenes” at the Oregon Science Fiction Convention. The moderator, a very nice lady named Jayel Gibson, opened the panel by declaring, “NO ONE engages in violence except out of great fear, great anger, or great desperation.”

  “I do it for money,” I said.

  Jayel almost choked, but we became good friends.

  Chapter 1: Establishing a Baseline

  Violence in our culture is treated like a taboo or at least an aberration. Stylized violence is everywhere, but real information is rare and actively discouraged. In a lot of ways, most modern Americans and Europeans know as much about violence as they learned about sex in junior high school locker rooms.

  So here are some myths and platitudes and how professionals feel about them:

  “Violence never solved anything.” This platitude is so patently and obviously false that it takes some pretty special mental gymnastics to say it, much less believe it. The fact is that some things, especially dangerous things happening very fast, can ONLY be solved by violence. This adage frequently infuriates professionals because sometimes the problem they have solved with violence was their own survival or the survival of someone they loved. Survival is pretty hard to devalue.

  “Violence is the last resort of the ignorant” only shows the ignorance of the person stating it. It would be an ideal truth in a homogenous society of wealthy people with equal education. It is one of those ideas that only works if everyone involved chooses to believe it … and the first person to reject the idea will dominate, kill or enslave the others. It is especially funny because many people who deal professionally with violence are pretty well educated and worldly. To hear such a pronouncement from someone who chooses to be ignorant about violence … sigh. Maybe “Unthinking platitudes are the first refuge of the ignorant.”

  “Violence begets violence.” Sort of. But that’s kind of like saying “Sickness begets medicine.” Here’s the deal, and it’s one of the basic truths. Violence is dangerous and it hurts and there is no guaranteed win, but an act of force is the only thing that can stop an act of violence. If a crowbar is coming at your head, there is no form of negotiation that can help in time. If part of the other guy’s definition of a win is to enjoy you broken and begging, there is no win-win. You must understand that not only are there people who enjoy debasing others, they have been very common throughout history and they are still the norm in certain cultures.

  Because we live in a society where hunger is rare and there is a rule of law and invading armies or bandits stealing food and raping are unheard of, we forget that this level of violence was the norm for most of human history. Pockets of it exist in even the most affluent society. And it can erupt when things start to break down.

  Why do people use violence? Because
it works. Violence works. Characters may need tortured reasons and justifications for their depredations. Real criminals (and I’m talking low-level street hustlers, not some psychopathic super-criminal) don’t need rationalizations. It just works.

  The following hyperlink leads to a video can be hard to watch. It is a Russian video of a crack addict attacking a fifteen year-old girl for her purse. She died after some time in a coma:

  RUSSIAN MUGGING

  You can choose not to watch the mugging if you don’t want this sort of thing in your head. Many people don’t. But it may be harder for you to understand this book, and real violence, if you close your eyes to it.

  You may have worked your whole life to get your credit rating and savings. A crook can get your ATM card and your PIN with a few minutes of judicious beating. Don’t lose sight of this fact, not in your fiction and not in your real life: people use violence because it works … and the less people are prepared for it, the better it works. The more peaceful a group, the easier they are to victimize.

  What follows talks about levels of violence. You can apply it to your characters, but I want you to think of it in terms of your life. It’s important to understand the levels because people (including authors) can rarely imagine upwards. In other words, if you live at a low level of violence, the motivations and beliefs of someone who functions at a higher level may be completely alien to you.

  Most groups (offices, associations, gym classes, schools) are made up mostly of good people who avoid conflict. Nice people. They are the backbone of society and people generally seem to believe that this attitude is what humans should aspire to.

  Nice people are easy victims for manipulators. Manipulation is an extremely low level of violence, but it is violence. Gossip, subtle bullying, understated threats, chilling someone out and forming alliances are all types of coercion.

  Truly nice people don’t understand manipulators or really get “why people can be so mean.” Manipulators, on the other hand, see nothing wrong with what they do. They are just ‘getting things done’ and ‘aren’t hurting anybody’.

  The manipulator will walk all over nice people, until they run into someone assertive. The assertive person will be the one to stand up and say, “I know what you’re doing. Knock it off or I will stop you.” The assertive person sets boundaries and backs them up, usually not physically but by resorting to policy or not being afraid to talk to others and gather allies.

  Assertive people are rare because direct confrontation is discouraged in our society. Until you get used to it, being assertive can feel very uncomfortable… but assertive people, just like manipulators, don’t think they are doing anything wrong.

  Manipulators, on the other hand, think assertive people are bullies. Even if the manipulator is self-aware enough to grasp their own manipulation, they will say, “But I never got in anyone’s face. That assertive person is rude!” Even nice people will feel uncomfortable around an assertive person and consider her pushy or bossy.

  The aggressive person stops the assertive in her tracks. When someone barges into the office screaming threats and swearing, most assertive people crumble. The aggressive person, again, doesn’t see anything wrong. That was just self-expression. The assertive person (and the nice people and manipulators) feels the aggressive person was completely out of control.

  Take a break here and think about these levels. This is as far as most people have any real experience. Whatever level you are at is the one where you can reasonably talk about your own motivations and the level you are comfortable dealing with.

  Most (almost all) people are completely unprepared for the next level higher. The level each person is on is the one that they have justified. That level is good. The next level up is ‘bad’. People tend to define violence as the level above the level they are willing to use. The strategies for dealing with any given level do not work and often backfire when attempted on a higher level of conflict.

  This is important, because if you are trying to extrapolate the mindset of someone comfortable with high-level violence from your experience with a merely manipulative office bully you will miss a ton. It will not only read false, but it will read as (weak? Watered-down? Tenuous? Unconvincing? Shallow? Impotent? Trite?)

  Two more levels:

  The aggressive person may feel like a big boss, screaming and insulting and making everyone cower. When some one hauls off and slaps the aggressive person, the aggressor has no idea what to do. Assault trumps aggression. Sometimes assaultive is angry, sometimes it is cold. Emotional intensity matters less than the fact that an assaultive person is comfortable using physical violence as a tool. Again, the assaulter will feel completely justified (“She shouldn’t have made me angry” or “He had it coming”). The aggressive bully will feel violated and self-righteous (“I may be a little loud but I don’t go around hitting people!”)

  And, finally, the assaultive person, whether a barroom brawler or a wife beater, is completely unprepared when he crosses a woman who is willing to slit his throat. Murderous (again, cold or hot) is a completely different animal, an undiscovered country.

  Nice-Manipulative-Assertive-Aggressive-Assaultive-Murderous

  This model has a few implications for you. First and foremost, beware of extrapolating from your experience at low levels to high levels. Second, no matter how well your protagonist functions at one level it takes a special circumstance or motivation to get them to go a level higher, much less two… and even a professional will have no idea what to do there. Not just the physical mechanics, but the emotional and spiritual barriers. I had well over three hundred unarmed fights (unarmed on my end, anyway) with inmates before I ever shot someone. It was an entirely different feeling.

  It has some implications for your fiction. If your character spends a lot of time at the higher levels of this model, most of what happens at the lower levels seems petty. When you transition from a job where people are trying to kill you to a job where office politics are high drama, the politics aren’t that interesting. For people to whom the politics are everything, the professional strikes them as odd, maybe crazy.

  This can be compounded by the way the professional considers options from much higher on the violence hierarchy than have never occurred to others in the office: “If he’s such a bad boss, we could just kill him.” Sometimes it’s humorous, usually, but the undercurrent is there.

  In relationships, there are things that seem obvious to us, to violence professionals. When our spouses are complaining about the office gossip or a bad boss, we suggest being assertive: “Honey, get in his face and tell him to back off. He’ll back down.” It seems obvious to us… we don’t realize that we are asking a good person to jump two steps into behaviors they think are bad or aggressive. Hell, it might be two steps below where we would solve the problem…

  Direct and indirect violence rewards. Most people play at or study violence (martial arts) for indirect rewards. They want to be seen as tough, or feel less afraid or get the trophy. Professionals execute violence for a direct goal—to stop the threat or to subdue the victim.

  This is a profound difference in motivation, attitude and how professionals move and act. A professional does not fight you, doesn’t even think about fighting you. He takes you out.

  This is easier to see and teach in person than to write about and is most apparent in how weapons are used. A sword fighter may hear about an opponent who uses a combination: face thrust feint, disengage, slash at the extended knee (the coup de Jarnac, for anyone with a historical bent). A fencer, dueler or sword fighter’s reaction to hearing of this will be to come up with a counter combination, a cross body parry and drop to a low line parry, then riposte on a low line to the gut.

  This is dancer/game/amateur thinking. A professional’s first choice would be to take the person out using surprise before the duel; his second would be to use a superior weapon first—shoot the threat before he even begins his combination. Third choice would be to use equal
weapons first. The fourth is to disregard the combination and kill.

  The duelist is interested in winning. In maintaining honor. The professional is interested in killing, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Maintaining honor and winning are indirect goals. Killing is a direct goal. Working towards direct goals peels a lot of bullshit off of your tactics.

  It can take years to learn how to fight with a sword. If you have the right heart, the right mindset, learning to kill ruthlessly and efficiently with a sword takes about twenty minutes. If he or she has the right mindset, the killer will beat the fighter almost every time.

  Then, of course, when you find the killer with the discipline to train, you have a god of battle.

  To recap:

  -This is a lot to cover, but the big point of this is to try to establish a line between what you actually know about violence and what you have been told.

  -People use violence because it works

  -There are levels of violence and the level you are comfortable with does not read as violence to you

  -Going down levels is easy, going up levels is difficult

  -Violence has both direct and indirect goals

  -Professionals focus on the direct goals, amateurs on the indirect