Category Archives: writing

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The Hobbit movie

I went to the Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies with my family today. In spite of all of the bad things I heard about it, the largest complaint being the 40+ minute battle of 5 armies, I enjoyed it. In fact, I think that the battle was done really pretty well, considering more than half the movie was centered around that one event. The question, I suppose, is what did I like about it? First off, I’m looking at the movie as a story in the same way I think about a novel. What I liked was that the action was broken up by other less intense events, yes some of that was contrived and thoroughly unnecessary from the standpoint of plot (Every scene containing Alfred the assistant to the master of Lake Town could have been removed with no impact to the story), however those breaks in the action were essential for the story-telling part. They kept the intensity in check to prevent the viewer from getting burned out on all the action. (This seems to have been Alfred’s sole purpose in the movie)

I am a firm believer that if you’ve got a long action sequence in any story there needs to be a break from whatever that action was – really this applies to any sort of intense situation in a story. Your characters, and reader,, need a bit of a breather. A moment where things aren’t really okay, but everyone can stop and take a breath before the action/intensity begins to rise again. I’ve read some books where this is not done well (in my opinion) and I found them difficult to enjoy. It seems to me that some critics might bang-on about those breaks in the action as unnecessary diversions, however you’ve got to keep the audience from becoming burned out. The audience is, after all, a huge part of the story-telling experience. The barrel escape scene from the last hobbit movie is a great example of action that hasn’t been broken well enough. I think it really mucked-up the story-telling. It was long, and didn’t contain any breaks from the action. The director’s attempt to do this was though humor, and that can work, but it felt out of place in the context. By the end of that barrel scene, I had become soured story overall because the scene had just seemed to become absurd after a while. If it had been shorter, or at least broken up better, I likely wouldn’t have had formed that opinion.

I feel like the book that sticks out in my mind as having tackled this nearly perfectly was Jurassic Park. There were parts so intense that I had to put the book down for a few minutes, but the next chapter almost always started with a minute to catch your breath before the action began intensifying again. It made the book gripping to the end without burning me out, as so often happens for me when the characters can’t stop long enough to take a breath.

I think my point here is that if you break up your intense action properly, you really can get away with a lot, and I think make your action much more intense, without experiencing audience burnout. Anyhow, this is how I prefer to read, and that’s my two cents.

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The strong female character

In the chapter I’m banging through right now, I’m just past the part where I’ve introduced a female character, the first of any consequence for the story. She is by far my favorite character. Not so much because of the role she plays, although it’s important, but because she was the first character I’d ever written who simply jumped off the page and told ME who she was. In fact, the plot of my whole story totally sucked until she walked into my main character’s dreams and tries to kill him. (I generally think this sort of description of how characters are created as total flowery bullshit, I usually think about it as a long intense process. However, this really happened. My wife wrote a couple of pages about this woman before she was introduced into the story, and this is what happened when I let the character loose in the events of my story.)

I am fighting hard against the cliche of the type of woman one might think of with bad fantasy. Her favored garb consists of drab cloaks and armor that conceal her nature. (yes she’s still beautiful, but it’s not the first impression of the main character, it will take time for him to see it) She is the body-guard, and not the other way around. She is not the totally indestructible warrior princess either. Yes, she’s very good, and very mouthy about it, but she’s as susceptible to a misstep as any man. I’d describe her relationship with the main character as similar that of Brienne of Tarth and Jamie Lannister from Game of Thrones, though in my story I would say my female is both Jamie and Brienne in one person (I look forward to the day where a reader might read far enough in to argue the point). Also, my female character is much more like to equal my male lead than the Brienne/Jamie situation. In a male-dominated society of my story (Yes, so typical of high fantasy, why not get rid of that – I did consider it. My wife, however, suggested it would be a difficult thing for an amateur such as myself to pull off without sounding patronizing.), having equal females shouldn’t really happen, but I can’t help myself in this case. The character is so strong, she knocks past all of those barriers and demands they stay down. What I hope is that the strategy of allowing her to take charge as she has done so far makes for a believable, engaging and cohesive world, and not a disjointed, confused mess.

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Daydreaming in the dark

A big part of my creative writing process involves my hour-long commute. It’s long, totally dark for half the year, and very quiet. I neither live or work in a place where transit is an option, and so those hours hours are spent behind the wheel. Over the past couple of years I have not had to go in as often, and so it’s just down to a few days a week. Sometimes I listen to audio books, other times I spend the time in quiet. (Unless it’s one of those white-knuckle driving days).

In those quiet times, on the road in the dark, is when I’ve dreamed up some of the most important elements of my story. Even this morning, I was thinking about the piece I’m working through now. All of the questions about it running through my head – Is the action plausible? Interesting? Is the magic consistent? If it went this way instead of that, what would happen? Do I like it better that way? What would the woman say? Would there be any enemy creatures? and so on… I can’t say I came to any sort of conclusions today, but I think I’m a lot closer than I was. Sometimes that hour of quiet really can be more productive than an entire day at a coffee shop (my go-to writing place).