Alright. Fight scenes and romance. Writing in red, very appropriately. Let's talk about fight scenes first. [writing noises] [Class laughs] Look how cute I'm being. Ah, it's an R rated film, most of you don't recognize that. [Class laughs] It was a book too! Student: First rule of Fight Club. Brandon: Yes, don't talk about fight scenes. Yeah it's probably my terrible writing. (inaudible comment) Yeah, talk, T-A-L-K So, fight scenes. Easy way to remember this thing I'm going to talk about is don't talk about fight scenes. Show us the fight scene, okay? I'll write that in a more writer-thing. Remember to show! Now we've got a problem we're approaching in writing action sequences in a book. And that is our culture's now saturated with visual media, and visual media is really good at action sequences. Really, really good. For example, you can have an action sequence in a show, a movie, that is basically twenty minutes of Jackie Chan kicking people. Or occasionally throwing a hammer at them, right? Or whatever happens to be around. You can watch that, and it's not everyone's cup of tea, but that works in the genre that it's created for. You can have an ending of a film that is basically a fifteen-twenty minute fight sequence, that's one sixth of the time you've got. What would happen if you wrote in a book one sixth of your book being that fight sequence? [Class laughs] Student: It'd be a short book Student: [Inaudible] Brandon: Well it'd be this, yeah go Student: And then he kicked again Brandon: And he kicked again, and then he kicked him in a different, cooler way, And then he kicked him with his other foot and dust flew off, and then the problem you're gonna run into is: In a film, blow-by-blow is fun. In a book, blow-by-blow is NOT as fun. I put the "as" in there because there are caveats to this. There are people who really do enjoy a lot of blow-by-blow. It's not the general book you're going to read, but they do exist. There is an audience for them. However, just a blow-by-blow I'm gonna say is always not fun, a dressed up blow-by-blow can be for the right audience But for most of the books you're gonna be writing, the blow-by-blow is almost irrelevant. Do we have any fight skippers in the class? Only one of you! Okay. (Question in back) They skip the fight scenes. Read, flip, see who lives, then continue on with the story. How many . . . two of you, three of you, it's usually women. I've got several in my writing group. There are people who will just say "I just flip and see who lived, and then I keep going." They literally skip all the fight scenes. So . . . (inaudible question) Yes, all that work. There are also a lot of people who read the last page And won't read the book until they've read the last page. My wife's assistant is one of these and it drives me crazy. She has to look and see, and if she doesn't like the ending, then she won't read the book Even if it's like the last in the series, so she can pretend that ending didn't happen. So . . . what's that? Student: So just write her own? Brandon: Yeah, write her own ending So (writing noises) first thing that I want you to approach in writing your fight sequences is to make sure you're being clear. Now this is going to push you toward doing more of a blow-by-blow initially. That's okay as you're working on these. The biggest mistake I find is people not being really clear with what's happening because the relevant information for this fight sequence is really: who got hurt, who didn't get hurt, who lived. That's what people want to know. And if we can't follow with very clear language what's going on, we're gonna be in trouble. So this has to inform all the other stuff we're going to talk about. I'm gonna talk about how to make it more exciting and more interesting, but you gotta remember the fight sequence, the action sequence, is the place where you want to show the most, you want to be the most concrete, And you want to stay away . . . you bring down your metaphoric language several notches Bring up your level of concreteness, getting rid of to-be verbs, getting rid of passive voice, getting rid of all of these things The redundancy that make writing slow. You want to be short, brief and clear And then you can go about--hey Mark, how you doing. There's a chair right here if you want to grab it. There might be another desk open. There's one back there if you'd rather desk it. So, first be clear. Once you've got the clarity thing down and you're making sure you're blocking So under clarity, let's put A, B and C A) Who is where, B) concrete, and C) . . . I had it. Something I said that was really meaningful. (inaudible question) What's that? Who is where, be very concrete, and . . . get metaphors down. And that includes killing passive voice and things. We haven't talked a lot about blocking. So let me do an aside about blocking. Blocking is the phrase we use, it's a stage term, who is where and letting us remember where everyone is. This is really important for a fight sequence. Now it's doesn't necessarily mean that we want a step-by-step of what everyone's doing. However, if you burst into a room with two companions, we want to know where to stick those companions in our head while the main character goes about what they're doing. So, John rushed off to the side toward the guys with machine guns, and Mary ducked behind cover and threw a grenade That's enough to let us know, okay, he's going this way, she's going that way, we can forget about them for a little while for the sake of clarity And focus on our main character and go from there. So, who is where, give us a good setup, and I would say from there go to one character. I don't even know what my numbers are. So we're going to go one character, and follow them through the fight sequence. If you're having trouble with the fight sequence. Start there, and then have them give little updates once in a while Where, what's happened with Mary throwing her grenades, what's happened with him, "A quick glance told him that John was engaged in furious sword fighting, cutting bullets from the air with his magical katana, the flash of light was like a strobe." We've got him, we've got one sentence, we know what John is doing over there, he's going to be chopping bullets out of the air while we're doing whatever. One sentence here and there letting us know what other people are doing, while we stick with this one character at the beginning. Now that's not the way you have to do it forever, but if you're having trouble with fight sequences, one of the big things I see people do is number one, they instinctively know that a blow-by-blow isn't fun, so they don't want to do a lot of this And they let themselves get lax at where people are going and it becomes "It was a scene of chaos and destruction." "There was pounding in the air, there was shaking of the ground, there was screaming from, there was there was there was, there was there was there was," Finally a sentence about our main character, "The main character dropped to his knees and held his hands over his ears!" "There was there was there was," and then trying to get this big feel for an epic battle, and they'll get into all the different battles that are happening kinda forgetting about our main character and finally getting to them and doing what they're doing And this creates a very confusing sense in the reader where they're like, what is the purpose and point in this scene, who am I following? And usually a fight sequence can be narrowed down to one character better. Not to say you don't want that chaotic feeling, but you want the character feeling chaos, feeling like they're in the midst of a battle You don't want the reader feeling confused. Confused character good, confused reader bad. That same scene would be done, that scene I described, they could film it in Saving Private Ryan and make it awesome. In a book that would be very difficult to do. You would want to just start with the main character, Which they eventually do in Saving Private Ryan, and follow that main character through so that we keep our focus for this action sequence. Subtitles by the Amara.org community
"In a fight scene, confused character: good; confused reader: bad."
I wish all teachers had the ability to distil their advice so perfectly.
Brandon is an amazing author and human being, passion for writing brims out of him.
He is my second favourite author due to the simplicity of his prose, with so little he communicates so much. First one is Sir Terry Pratchett.
You guys know that Brandon has dozens and dozens of lectures up on youtube, right? Write About Dragons has one series and Camerapanda has another
Plus he does a podcast called Writing Excuses
Some great advice I found once:
Wish I could watch the video at work, his and Jim butcher's writing classes are always very relevant and directly contributed to me making it past a few difficult hurdles during my first book. Anyone able to summarize?
Love that he still teaches creative writing. He’s an amazing author
I like that he never completely eliminates something as a possibility, he never says, "Never, ever do this or that."
One fight scene spanning 20 pages is bad... hmm... and then there is Battle Royale. Guess there's always an exception 😉
I enjoy his lectures but not his actual works of fiction.