Violence: A Writer's Guide

by Rory Miller

  -Violent people have lives beyond their violence

  Chapter 5: Good Guys and Violence

  Professional Good Guys

  Some good guys get involved in violence as professionals. Police, soldiers, bouncers, maybe private investigators, bodyguards.

  Except for those glorious rookie months where they know lots of facts and understand almost nothing, professionals do not think or feel about violence like citizens do.

  Professionals approach violence differently. First and foremost, it is not some separate mysterious thing that only happens in a world turned upside down. Violence is natural. Force is a form of communication- for a good guy the most emphatic way possible of saying “No” “Stop!” or “I am not going to let that happen.” (For bad guys force is usually just a way to say “Gimme!”) Force works regardless of language barrier or altered states of consciousness or how dedicated the bad guy is. Sometimes it takes more force than others, but with enough force the behavior stops.

  Professionals use force to stop or prevent behaviors. Amateurs use force to establish dominance quite often. That’s important and leads to one of the questions an author must answer before a fight scene:

  Assuming the character knows anything about fighting, he needs a damn good reason to go hands-on. In almost every action movie there is an early scene to establish how bad-assed the protagonist is. He walks into an armed robbery about to go down and clears out the whole gang or breaks up a street fight and uses his mad martial arts skillz to take out a gang. It’s probably exciting for the audience. From professionals watching you get muffled gags and mutterings like, “Fuckin’ wannabe.”

  In almost all of those scenes, the protagonist could leave. He could apologize. He could stay out of the situation and call for police or, if he is an officer, back-up. The only reason not to do these things is an ego so grotesque coupled with intelligence so low that there is no chance the guy would have survived being a rookie.

  Get this—fighting is dangerous. Pros know this. All moderately intelligent people know this. It is much safer if you do it from ambush. It is much safer if you have friends, especially well-armed and trained friends.

  Fighting also has consequences. Your protagonist beats up six gang-bangers who are hassling an elderly lady. Congratulations. He now has six people who will support each other’s story that he attacked them from ambush while they were trying to calm him down. He couldn’t have beaten six if they were fighting, so they must have been the peacekeepers. The protagonist will be lucky not to face criminal charges. Even if he does, he will face, and lose, a civil court case that will take all of his money and possessions and garnish his wages for life.

  And if he is a cop, he will lose his badge and be labeled dirty, because any good cop would have known better and would have called for back-up. The very fact that he didn’t make the call, in real life, would be a sure sign that he was acting criminally.

  Wait! There’s more! He needs an even better reason to go face to face. Remember the ambushes and resources thing? You do not only need to explain why the protagonist was fighting, but why he was fighting like an idiot. Like an amateur. Like a character in a bad novel.

  Pros spend a lot of energy and attention on averting violence.

  The primary skill is an ability to see violence coming. They need to be able to read terrain, read the dynamic and read people.

  Reading Terrain

  In any given area there are positions of power. Corners of the room limit the number of directions you can be approached, and hence the number of directions you need to watch. Hence the cliché of action adventure heroes not sitting with their backs to doors, trying for the corner table (it’s sometimes fun to watch cops go out to lunch together). --also, always notice the people who occupy the positions of power in a room.

  There’s more, though. There are places in a given room where you have advantages in visibility- you don’t need to be facing the room if there’s a mirror above the bar. If the sun is setting behind you, you will see the shadows of anyone trying to approach from the rear. Almost all elevators have a handrail that is shiny enough you can see the reflection of anyone trying to hide to the side of the door.

  Your protagonist will also look for freedom of action for himself, “funnels of death” and escape routes.

  It’s not enough to be sitting in the corner if your weapon hand is pressed up against the wall. Being pinned in a corner is no advantage. Fights, especially gunfights, are very mobile affairs. What are the three critical skills for small unit operations? Move, shoot and communicate. Movement is critical.

  The “funnel of death” is any small space that a person must come through, like a door or a hallway. It is easy to concentrate firepower in such a small area and the longer you are in one, the more likely you are to be killed. Violence professionals rarely stop in the doorway to scan a room. They scan what they can from outside and then step in quickly and get to one side of the door.

  Scanning for escape routes also becomes habit. Things don’t always go well. Good guys don’t always win. If you have a plan, you can usually get out. If you don’t, you will be cut down while you are trying to think of a plan.

  Homework: Start cataloging, from this moment forward, the positions of power in each area you are in. Pay special attention to shadows and reflective surfaces. Start looking for escape routes and alternate ways into buildings and rooms. Be creative- can you break a window or cut through drywall to escape?

  Reading Dynamics

  People are social animals and violence is usually a social thing. An experienced protagonist can often read the people around him as a group and see danger signs well in advance. It’s a good habit for writers, too.

  Look at the flow of movement. People give more room to things that scare them and many people are remarkably intuitive. On public transportation or in any crowded area, who gets more personal space than others? Is it a crowd of regulars who know the local players? Or is it a group of strangers working on instinct?

  The clothing- is it the norm for people to have untucked shirts or collared shirts with open fronts worn loose over t-shirts? Then the signal is that being armed is normal here.

  See a group of guys with short hair, maybe goatees, wearing almost no accessories beyond a watch and a wedding ring, with loose jackets or fannypacks across their bellies? That’s a group of cops.

  See two guys standing close and looking over each other’s shoulders as they talk? Probably extremely fit and with primarily greenish-black tats? That’s a pair of cons who haven’t been out long enough for their addictions to destroy the bodies they built on the weight pile in the yard.

  Homework: Next time you are in a crowd, practice looking at things from different magnifications. Find a high place and look at the crowd like it was water-- where does it go, what does it avoid. Then look at small groups that you can identify-- how does a family move through a mall? How does a group of teenagers hanging out interact or ignore the people around them? Skip looking at an individual for now, instead just look at hands, just look at eyes and just look at shoes. Personally, I look at pockets and count clip-on knives, but that’s me.

  Reading People

  There is an old police saying, “The eyes may be the window to the soul, but people kill you with their hands.” Always watch the hands. Your pro will get very nervous if he can’t see someone’s hands, especially someone who ‘pinged’ his ‘radar’.

  Pros tend to recognize other pros, good or bad. They scan a room the same way, often dress similarly (movement and weapon concealment are very important) position themselves the same way. People who have trained to fight move slightly differently than others (though sometimes dancers move very similarly they rarely watch the world the same way.) We call this ‘pinging the radar’.

  A story from Northern Iraq:

  The first time I saw him, my initial reaction was to label him as an extreme danger, probably an assassin. This is a place where that word isn't bandi
ed about. I mean it very literally. It took me almost two days to be sure that he was part of our security detail. ‘Slim’ is insanely alert, moves silently, rarely talks. There is a museum dedicated to the atrocities that Saddam Hussein perpetrated against Slim’s hometown. He has been fighting for a very long time.

  Things are quieter now-- he makes his living as a bodyguard--but what kept him alive for so long, the zanshen, is very close to the surface.

  Slim and I pinged each other’s radar pretty good that first day. I read him as a professional killer and he read me as something, too. He attached himself to me after that and we watched each other with wary respect (at least on my end).

  The general invites us to dinner. He has fought for a long time, too. Now we dine and drink eighteen-year-old scotch in a fine restaurant. The food is wonderful. A woman sings Kurdish songs in a dialect that no one at our table understands. Everyone is armed. The general’s PSD is at the table behind us, ours is at the table near the door. Slim is with ours.

  I am at relatively high alert throughout the dinner. The general is possibly the highest-value target in the region. The things that make it secure can seem like a set-up aimed at us. I don’t drink much and sit so that my weapon is cleared for a draw. The general keeps piling food on my plate.

  Things relax a bit when the general excuses himself and leaves. Not right away. Loyalties here can be Byzantine and probably all of us entertain the possibility that the host leaving early from a meeting place and time of his choice could potentially be a very bad thing. We disperse around the room and stay watchful. Then most relax a bit.

  Mike tries to take a picture of Slim and fails. He curses his luck.

  “Mike,” I say, “You can’t take a picture of a really good bodyguard.” He and Slim both nod in agreement and the flash goes off in the camera held in my right hand, way away from my body, “But I can.” The picture is pretty good, Slim in profile. Were crosshairs drawn on it they would meet just behind his eyes.

  Slim is not happy, but he nods approval. I have somehow just confirmed his assessment of me, whatever that was.

  Later I see that Slim has his back to me and I slip the camera out of my pouch, planning to drift around a pillar…as soon as the thought is formed he snaps around, staring at me. He could sense me go into the hunter’s mind.

  That’s the point of this story, really. There are things that happen to your senses on the pointy end of the spear. You become something a little different than your garden-variety human. Things that people who have never experienced them either gasp with shiny eyes and think magic or discount as bullshit. But it’s there, and sometimes you can only share it with others who have gone even deeper.

  Pros will watch how people move; how they dress; whether they are nervous; what they watch; what they try to hide (hands, emotions…). Most people will show adrenaline indicators before they escalate to violence. A pro will not-- he will show specific self-calming behaviors, such as consciously controlling breathing (autogenic or ‘warrior breathing’- slow in to a count of four, hold to a count of four, exhale to a count of four); subtly stretch, especially the neck and spine; or check details of weapons and equipment.

  Except for an extreme pro who has consciously trained against it, both pros and amateurs, when armed, have a tendency to subconsciously touch their weapons when tensions go up even slightly. Possibly just making sure they haven’t shifted.

  Common adrenaline indicators:

  -Changes in coloration (flush or pallor)

  -Breathing (rapid and shallow)

  -Thirst (frequent drinking or licking lips)

  -Gross Motor Activity (GMA) pacing, flexing, swinging arms

  -Loss of Fine Motor Activity (FMA) shaking, dropping small items

  -Unfocused gaze (“Thousand Yard Stare”)

  -Repetitive, rhythmic or ritual behavior- tapping, humming a specific song.

  Violence professionals are rarely the “lone wolf” type. Most can operate solo and many prefer to, but they still work and live in social networks.

  Professionals require a logistical support network. In modern times, they need to get weapons and ammunition and SBA (Soft Body Armor) from somebody. They don’t make their own food and clothing, communications equipment, or transportation. Someone supplied all of that. Someone taught them to use it. Someone keeps the technology current and keeps the batteries charged.

  Intelligence networks are just as critical. You can’t know all the details of all the underworld strata in every city of the world. There is a common tattoo among American criminals- three dots on the web of the thumb that has a very definite meaning. It stands for “mi vida loca” “my crazy life.” I saw the same tattoo on the Iran/Iraq border. It took me almost two months to find out what it meant there. (Sorry, can't share that.)

  Getting entry into criminal circles in unfamiliar places is hard. These guys are paranoid and don’t really care if they use a little too much violence or kill the wrong guy. It is also hard to stay unknown in the places you are familiar with.

  Your protagonist gets information from somewhere. Often the people who gather information have the more dangerous and challenging job. When the Mission: Impossible team read their little dossiers to find out that the smuggling family had two brothers who were rivals or that Crime Boss X’s wife had a drinking problem… someone found that out. Your kick-ass tactical operator is helpless, literally working blind, if he doesn’t have good intel from the guy on the ground. And being a good operator and a good intel guy are both full time jobs and require very different training and with a few exceptions, very different personalities.

  Operators and Intel

  There are different kinds of operators, of course, but one of the big differences is that operators (trigger pullers) need to be able to ‘other’ people quickly and thoroughly. They think about position and tactical advantage. Unless they are working to control it, a lot of people feel a vague disquiet in their presence, like they are being hunted.

  People who gather intel need to be people persons and the best I've met are extraordinarily friendly and out-going, without ever actually volunteering information themselves. There has to be a coldness as well, but hidden. One colleague described the job of a Hostage Negotiator (usually called a crisis negotiator today): "You have to be able to make friends in a few minutes with some really nasty people and sometimes some really troubled people. Some of these kids have real problems and you need to be able to care and to reach them. And then you need to be able to talk them into coming closer to the window so that someone can shoot your new friend in the head. And you need to be okay with that."

  Most trigger pullers have trouble shooting someone they have come to know. That's one of the reasons that snipers (snipers are not the same as sharp shooters or 'target interdiction specialists' I'm talking specifically about people who go out hunting for specific high-value targets) have such a reputation for being different. They study their kills before they shoot. Most people who study the kills couldn't shoot. I don't know if most snipers would feel comfortable talking and making friends and still shoot. I doubt if many would have the skill to do both.

  Tactical operators also are obsessed with maintaining control, knowing the options and planning for their own safety. Undercover work is dangerous as hell and a lot of the basic safety precautions are out the window. Back up can't be in sight and in deep cover may not be close. Armor will give you away and weapons might...

  An experienced professional also has a social network. That social network is what keeps him sane. Dealing with violence has some serious emotional repercussions. Some are immediate and obvious: you see a head split open and watch and smell the brains drip out, you lose the ability to keep death an abstraction. You know someone who took a bullet in the face, someone who was as good as you or better--well trained and equipped and smart and cautious, just unlucky—and you realize how much you existence depends, each second, on luck.

  You risk your life to save a li
fe and you look at the person you saved—probably a drug addicted loser with a long history of violent felonies just as bad as the person you saved him from—and you have to question why. Is it just a job? Is it the right thing to do? Duty? Paycheck? Or habit? It is what you know how to do and most people can’t and it needs to be done…

  Less immediate and obvious is the double-edged sword of simultaneously trying to live a normal life. The first edge of that sword is that it is easy for a professional to forget that he works with extremes. If you spend 80% of your waking hours with dangerous, bad people it is easy to start to believe that 80% of the world is bad and dangerous. It’s stressful not only because you spend too much time in a state of hypervigilance (adrenaline-fueled, jumpy alertness) but you also feel that the people you care about are in constant danger, and they seem unable to see it.

  That’s the second edge of the sword. People without a professional’s experience are both incredibly naïve and ill-informed about even the most basic aspects of violence… yet they are very sure about right and wrong and swift to judge. They believe that they know more than they do. Talking about violence with non-professionals is as rewarding, illuminating and accurate as talking with first-graders about sex.

  A lot has been written about the divorce rate among cops and soldiers and emergency services personnel. It’s something of a cliché. Here’s the deal- even a lot of professionals don’t deal with the stresses of the job well. If they are drowning, it will come out in their families. If they try to keep stuff inside, to protect their families by silence (“there is some stuff in my head that no one else needs to know”), the strain will come out in the family.

  And if the family can’t handle it, if they need to deny the reality of what the professional deals with every day, that will come out in divorce as well.