How To Write Magical Words: A Writer's Companion

by Unknown

  3. Variety

  If you have more than one large battle in a book you should seek ways to make each one distinctive. That might be achieved simply if the characters involved are different, but if it’s the same characters each time, even the same enemy, you need other ways to make the conflict unique and memorable. There are lots of ways to do this that have nothing to do with forms of combat. Battles feel differently according to the kind of weather in which they are fought, if it’s day or night, or what the terrain is. A pitched battle in open fields is very different from the assault or defense of a fortress, or the holding of a mountain pass. The nature of the troops involved, fantastic beasts, magic, or other distinctive means of fighting can all stamp a battle in ways that make it different from the others you’ve written. In the LOTR examples I’m working with, Pelennor is a classic plains conflict while Helm’s Deep is a defensive siege. Factor in those battles I consider skirmishes, and you’ll see what I mean: the Nazgul assault on Weathertop, the fight in the mines (which is dominated by the Balrog), and the attack of the Uruk Hai by the great river, are all radically different.

  4. Combat rules/style

  Just as there’s lots you can learn about hand-to-hand combat, there’s also research to be done on large-scale fighting. There aren’t rules, exactly, but there are principles that are generally held to be true, which can be studied: why it’s good to fight from high ground, for example, or where to deploy different kinds of troops. It is simplistic, perhaps, but most troop-types have strengths and weaknesses depending on who they are fighting. Cavalry, for instance, can be fast, powerful, and intimidating in a charge against infantry, but they are vulnerable to pole-arms (spears etc.). Those spearmen are, in turn, vulnerable to armored swordsmen. Archers can be lethal at range but are quickly decimated by troops who get in close. Roman legionaries had particular shield configurations designed for self-protection, while the Macedonians used phalanxes with oversized spears, and the Carthaginians used massed war elephants to break up enemy formations. And so on. All tactics had their strengths and weaknesses, and what worked well against one opponent was disastrous against another. Break through the Macedonian phalanx and the soldiers with their long pike-like spears are powerless against short-swords. Force the elephants back on their own troops and you destroy the attacker. The basics can be learned quickly through research, and a fun way to practice the principles of battle is by playing some RPG games (like Warhammer) and computer games such as Medieval Total War II. These aren’t always accurate, but they are a good starting point. Changing the nature of the conflict in terms of troop types also helps maintain a sense of variety.

  5. Size

  My books tend to deal with armies of hundreds, a few thousand at most. I like this scale because I feel like my core characters can still play a significant part without disappearing, and that their experience can be written as representative. I admire the skill of authors who can handle tens of thousands without getting generalized or tedious, but I’m not sure I’m ready for that (and have been disappointed reading some old-fashioned high fantasy that doesn’t do it well).

  6. Perspective

  Because of the kinds of books I write (the Will Hawthorne books are first person), I stay in the head of a single character throughout a battle. This creates particular challenges in terms of both maintaining interest and showing what’s going on. If you can cut between different points of view you get both more variety and a fuller perspective on the action. The advantage of a single perspective (especially a first person one), is that it’s easier to keep character uppermost: the account becomes less a tactical depiction and more a single participant’s experience. That can be exciting and terrible in useful ways.

  7. Should I stay or should I go?

  Contrary to most heroic accounts of battles in film, few armies fought to the death unless they were given no choice. A twenty-five percent loss of forces was generally more than enough to precipitate a rout, which is very different from a retreat or tactical withdrawal. How long your soldiers stick around in a losing fight will depend on why they are there in the first place, and that’s something you have to address when you draw up the social, cultural, and economic rules of your world. Are they professional soldiers fighting for a cause they believe in, or are they mercenaries? Are they conscripted peasants or are they trained knights ideologically invested in the code of battle even if they are only fulfilling feudal obligation? Unless you are working in the realm of absolute good and absolute evil (I’m not), you need to think hard about what factors influence how hard your troops fight and when they decide they’ve done more than enough to keep honor or payment intact.

  §§§

  David J. Fortier

  A.J., wonderful macro considerations that I wish more authors would recognize. I’ve read my fair share of heroic fiction and it grates on my nerves when authors don’t pay attention to at least the simplest of tactical concepts or armor considerations. I’m not asking for it to be completely historical, just that the story adheres to some sense of reality.

  What strikes me most in all you’ve written here was the last part. The fighting-unto-death heroic scenario is oft overplayed. If a unit of troops were self-sacrificing for the greater good, such as at Thermopylae, I can see them staying until the end, but otherwise it would be a rare occurrence. Most troops would fight as long as they think they can win, even if that margin of victory is slight.

  I’m curious as to how you’re battle scenes are done in first person. I’ve just written a skirmish (200 vs. 100 soldiers) and found it tough. My scene is terribly up-close and personal, but the grand scope is lost. The overall sense of what happen needs to be discovered when my character comes down from his berserker rage.

  A.J. Hartley

  NGD, glad you found it useful. You’re right about it being hard to get a sense of the overall battle from a first person perspective. For me it helps that my character is anything but a berserker, and is therefore fairly cool-headed, if only because he’s gauging when to run away. When there are lulls in the combat, of course, he can get information from others about what’s going on (or what is rumored to be going on) elsewhere.

  The Editor Can Fix That . . .

  Misty Massey

  A student came in yesterday and asked me to take a look at a book he’s writing. Generally speaking, I’ve adopted the very wise policy of many of my fellows, and stopped looking at the work of hopefuls. There are liability problems, not to mention I just don’t have the time to spend fixing someone else’s manuscript when mine isn’t finished. But I felt a certain responsibility toward the student, so I agreed to give it a look.

  He’d handwritten six pages in pencil on notebook paper. It was full of telling instead of showing, it was lacking in the kind of detail that might catch a reader’s interest, and he changed verb tenses with every sentence. I could tell that he wanted to make it better, so I carefully, cautiously pointed out ways I thought he could improve his work. He seemed to accept my suggestions, until we reached the grammar. "Doesn’t the editor fix that?" he asked.

  Uh . . . no.

  Your editor will read your work and tell you what doesn’t fit. She will answer your questions, help you come up with titles, laugh with you over your crazy book trailer (or maybe that was just me!) She will send you jpegs of your cover sketches and squeal with you over them. She will remind you when your deadlines are looming, pass along the tear-sheets of good reviews and reassure you that the ugly ones don’t define you and your work. But she will not write one word of your book.

  One of the things expected of published people is a grasp of the fundamentals of grammar. Telling a story in the written medium requires that the writer be able to communicate clearly to all readers of the language in which he’s writing. This is one of those times when you must know the rules before you can break them. One or two accidental mistakes in a manuscript are okay. We all muff things now and then. If you, the writer, can’t see that you’re writing
a sentence in past tense, followed by one in present, and then a third in past imperfect, then back to past again . . . you’re not ready for the market.

  Granted I’ve only worked with one editor, so there could be editors out there who will do all that work for you. But I’d venture to say they are few and far between. It’s still better to get it right the first time, so that your editor can busy herself with all the fun stuff I mentioned before. Wouldn’t you rather keep your editor happy?

  §§§

  David B. Coe

  My editor does many things to my manuscript (and I’m in the middle of going through his edits on a manuscript right now) including dealing with meta-issues like plot, character, pacing, etc. He’s also good at finding certain mannerisms that I’ll pick up in the course of writing a book (I know that other authors have this problem at times as well)—little phrases that I’ll repeat or fall back on when nothing else comes to mind. And yes, at times he’ll find syntactic stuff that I miss or ignore.

  That said, you’re right. I try to clean up my manuscripts as much as possible before sending them in, not only because I want to keep my editor happy, but because I can find the mechanical stuff myself. What I need from my editor is insight. I need him to help me make this book as good as it can be. If he’s constantly dealing with grammar and the like, he can’t delve into the larger issues, and he can’t help me as much as I want and need him to.

  Harry Markov

  I know that the writer has to have a pretty good control over grammar, but what happens, when there are mistakes infrequent or so that show that the writer has skills, but lacks in a certain field of grammar? I’m curious to know whether the writer gets totally dismissed from the business or is helped by agent and so on to prosper in that field.

  Faith Hunter

  I have problems with loose and lose and loss. I know a writer with problems with your and you’re, and its and it’s. One of those brain fart things.

  An editor and/or agent is always willing to help with them, but only after one has developed a relationship with said VIP. Rule of thumb? Your first five pages have to be grammatically perfect. Perfect! If you have baited and hooked your VIP by the first five, then they will usually be willing to assist with detail stuff, and even much bigger stuff. Or at least that has been my experience.

  Misty Massey

  Harry, it’s like Faith said. Once you’re in, you can make a few boo-boos and the world won’t end. But if you do make those mistakes, your editor will send you the pages and let you fix them.

  A good critique group (or a good beta reader) can help with making those first five pages perfect.

  Developing Your Internal Editor

  David B. Coe

  How do we edit our own work?

  I often tell aspiring writers to share their work with friends or family members so that they can get feedback on their writing. Ideally, we want beta readers who we trust will tell us the truth about our books or stories, someone who will be brutally honest without being cruel. As professionals, we have editors who work through our manuscripts with us, and I’ve often said that you can tell when a writer gets so successful that he or she stops accepting editorial direction. His/her books become bloated, long-winded, and far less compelling. When it comes right down to it, we all need external editors, people who can look at our writing from a fresh perspective and tell us what works and what doesn’t.

  I would argue, though, that we writers also need to develop an internal editor. We need to learn to correct our own mistakes, to recognize when our stories are breaking down and why. Self-editing isn’t an easy skill to develop. It can take years; for some writers it never fully happens. But if you can teach yourself to edit your own books and stories—if you can learn to read them with a critical eye and anticipate the problems that a professional editor might find—you give yourself a better chance of impressing an editor or agent with your work.

  So how do we identify the weaknesses in our own writing? How do we overcome that proximity to our work that makes it hard to spot typos, much less significant flaws in character development or plot or voice? One easy trick is to put work away for a time. Finish a story or book and put it away for four or six or eight weeks. When you go back to read it again, you’ll find that you see the story with fresh eyes, and that weaknesses you hadn’t spotted before appear with discomforting clarity. The problem with this approach is that we often don’t have the luxury of so much time. Either we have deadlines we have to meet (submission deadlines, assignment deadlines if you’re a student) or we simply don’t want to take the time out from our current writing project. This is what we’re working on now, and we don’t want to put a six week hold on our work. (I understand these concerns quite well; but I will add here that I ALWAYS put my work away for a time after finishing it, because this simple approach to self-editing works enormously well for me.)

  If putting work away for a time isn’t an option, I would suggest a couple of other approaches, both of which I use with some success. One is to choose a specific reader—someone whose tastes I know quite well—and try to put myself in that person’s mind as I read through my work. In other words, I imagine that I am my editor at Tor or my agent or my wife or my high school writing teacher, and I read the story as I expect they would. Sounds hokey, I know. But it works. I can hear my wife or my agent in my head reacting to passages, both ones they would like and ones they wouldn’t. More to the point, this exercise imposes that much-needed distance on my reading of the story. I’m no longer looking at it as the writer; I’m actually searching for flaws, for phrases and plot points that these people I know and trust would tell me don’t work. It’s a role-playing game of sorts. And that, ultimately, is what self-editing has to be.

  If that approach doesn’t work, try this one, which involves a bit more work on your part, but will probably offer the greatest chance of success. Go back and read an older piece—a story or a novel, or even part of a novel—that you haven’t looked at in some time. The distance that we are seeking with all these approaches to self-editing should be there with this work. The flaws should be fairly obvious. Keep notes as you read through it. Jot down all the mistakes you can identify: character problems, plotting issues, mannerisms in your prose that are distracting. All of it. Every ugly quirk of your writing. Then go back to the new piece that you need to edit, and read it through with the flaws of the older work fresh in your mind. Chances are you’ll be pleased to see progress in your work. You’ll probably notice that you’ve corrected many of the mistakes you made in the older piece. You’re a more experienced writer now; your work is better. Chances are you’ll also see many of the old problems popping up again. But armed with the insight you’ve gained from reading the older work, you’ll find them easier to correct in the new piece.

  With time and practice you can teach yourself to be your own first editor. It took me several years and several completed novels to get there. And it wasn’t just the act of writing the novels that taught me. It was also going through the editorial process with my editor at Tor. Revising my work gradually taught me to recognize the flaws in my writing, and to anticipate problems so that now I can actually do some self-editing as I write. Over time you can teach yourself to do this as well. And until then, perhaps these exercises will help you develop your internal editor.

  §§§

  David J. Fortier

  I like the idea of reading an old piece and then going back to the new one with notes in hand. I’ll have to try that out.

  It has been suggested to me for line edits to read the book backward starting with the last line or paragraph. This way your brain can’t get into the flow of the prose. I’ve never tried this, but its popular idea thrown around at the OWW yahoo group.

  Reading to myself aloud works to a degree, but I still find I skip over a few missing words. Recently, I’ve started using a text-to-speech software to read the story to me. It takes some getting used to Mr. Roboto’s voice, but it’s very help
ful. Not only is it easy to hear missing and misspelled words, but I also notice how often unique places and names are used since they aren’t recognized by the software and they’re spelled out.

  David B. Coe

  I’ve tried the reading backwards thing, and it just doesn’t work for me. Or maybe it’s just so dreadfully boring that I can’t get myself to do it with a 100,000 word manuscript. I do find that reading a piece aloud helps a lot. And I like to print out my work rather than editing on the screen. Seeing the work in a new physical format helps me with that distancing process.