Dynamic Characters (26 page)

NECESSITY: IS THIS VIOLENCE GRATUITOUS?

The big complaint about violence in storytelling of all kinds is that it is ''gratuitous.'' The complaint is often true. Writers of novels, TV shows and movies throw in fight scenes to ''keep things lively'' and ''increase tension.'' The results may be lively in that the audience follows the fight without falling asleep, but they're not necessarily involved. To feel genuinely involved with a fight scene, the reader needs more than flashy descriptions of attacks and counterattacks. Reader involvement comes from two things that happen well before the fight:
motivation
and
timing.

Motivation means that both opponents have been provided with a reason to fight. (The intertwining of plot and character, yet again.) And not just any reason. Something must be at stake that matters not only to the characters but to the reader. This requires careful preparation. We must have had dramatized for us what the protagonist cares about, why he cares about it and why this particular fight is necessary to gain or keep it. Otherwise, even the most spectacular kick-boxing will feel mechanical.

Consider, for example, a fight from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Conrad Richter's novel
The Sea of Grass.
This fight is very brief, but the reasons for it are as complicated as the nineteenth-century West that Richter evokes so well. Two small boys, brothers, are having a routine fistfight. They are egged on by idle grown men, one of whom calls out: ''I'm a-bettin' on the Chamberlain young 'un.'' But there is no Chamberlain young 'un. Both boys are sons of the protagonist Hal's uncle, the fiercely proud Colonel Brewton, and his mercurial wife Lutie, whom Hal has secretly loved for years. At the suggestion that Lutie has committed adultery—and with his uncle's political enemy—Hal loses it:

For a split fraction of a second as his meaning broke over me, I saw Lutie Brewton clear and beautiful as I had ever seen her in the life. And when the nester turned and grinned toward a sand-box, it was almost as if he had spat in her face. I was aware of the grave silence of the cowmen and of a curious wild hate sweeping over me like prairie fire. I had thought myself a medical student soon to go out in the world and save human lives. Now I found that the thin veneer of Eastern schools had cracked and I was only a savage young Brewton from an untamed sea of grass, moving through the little gate where customers' rifles and pistols stood or lay in their accustomed places on the back bar. I was aware of the cowmen backing out of range and of the bar-keeper ducking. And then I almost wanted to kill Dr. Reid, too, one of whose white hands had with surprising force suddenly thrown up my barrel so that oil from a brass hanging lamp started to pour on the walnut bar.

Brief action—but layers and layers of motivation. Hal acts violently, which is uncharacteristic for him, out of jealousy, anger, family pride, shame and unfulfilled longing. The fight is a truly dramatic moment— even though only one shot is fired, and nobody is injured, and the violence lasts only a few seconds.

Timing also counts. This fight has dramatic impact partly because it occurs four-fifths of the way through the book, after we've had plenty of time to get to know all the characters' values. Thus, an affront to those values has meaning for us. Contrast this with the fight-as-opening-scene ploy (fantasy is especially guilty of this), which so often fails because we don't know either side well enough to understand them. What is it they're fighting over? Who's supposed to be the good guy? Does it matter that the short guy got killed? Who cares?

Save your fight scenes until the story is well launched.

DETAIL: TELL ME MORE

In general, you should describe fight scenes in more detail than you think you need. Why is this?

Because the fight, as we've already established, must be important to the characters. That, plus the fact that it's full of action, gives it the character of a miniclimax. Something important is being decided, by physical force. And a climactic scene shouldn't be rushed, because in written storytelling, one way you give a scene importance is to spend enough words on it. Verbiage is a flag to the reader:
This counts.

So give us details. Don't write: ''I pushed her, and she fell, hit her head on the cement birdbath, and slumped unconscious,'' even if that's all that actually happened. Give us detail, external or internal. Describe how she looked going down: the surprised expression on her face, the slow-motion way she fell. Or describe how he felt as his palm connected with her cheek, his emotions as he realized what he did. Or describe in detail the reactions of everyone watching. Make the moment last.

In the above excerpt from
The Sea of Grass,
for instance, Richter draws out a single ineffective gunshot by dwelling on Hal's heightened awareness: of the moment, of the past, of his own reactions. Detail gives the fight its dramatic weight.

One exception to this: It's sometimes effective to use a single summary sentence of a crucial fight as the ending of a chapter. In that case, the lack of detail is balanced by the fact that whatever comes at a chapter's end automatically has climactic drama.

ACCURACY AND PLAUSIBILITY: GETTING IT RIGHT

In order for a fight scene to be successful, readers must believe it is actually happening to the characters. This is true of the entire story, of course, but often scenes of violence put a particular strain on the suspension of disbelief. This happens in two ways: wrong details, or superhuman reactions.

Accuracy
refers to correct details of weapons and fighting techniques. Many, many readers are knowledgeable about such things, and mistakes will bounce them right out of your story. What's more, they will write you about it, with great indignation. (This is especially true of gun aficionados.) So if you don't know the number of rounds in a Smith & Wesson Model 439 9mm, or the correct place to drive a knife into the chest, or how silent a revolver silencer actually is,
find out.
Ask an expert. Delve the Internet. Read a reference book. (Writer's Digest Books publishes the Howdunit series, which ably addresses these issues. Each book is written by a forensics expert.) However you get the information, get it right.

Plausibility,
a fuzzier area, refers to the effects of the fight on the fighters. It's fuzzier because people differ greatly in both their fighting ability and their capacity to absorb physical punishment and keep on fighting. Still, there is a limit, and unless you're writing satire, exceeding that limit will undercut the plausibility of your story. ''Oh, come on!'' the reader will exclaim. ''He's got a broken arm, two cracked ribs and a concussion, and he can still chase the villain across the catwalk after knocking off four of his henchmen? I don't think so!''

To avoid this reaction, you must convince us of your fighter's general strength, level of training, experience, toughness and/or desperation. The less expected these things are, the more explanation we need, either before or after the fight. If, for instance, a young FBI agent takes out two men, withstanding a few severe blows but no broken bones or internal damage, we'll accept this. If a hundred-pound, seventeen-year-old female baby-sitter does it, you will have to work much harder to convince us that she is able to do what you say she's doing.

Keep the injury level, fighting expertise and odds against the winner all plausible.

SURPRISE: OH MY GOD!

Surprise, perhaps surprisingly, is the least necessary element to a good fight scene. Many fights are not surprising, and shouldn't be. We know the characters well enough to know what they're capable of; we can see the physical conflict coming; we know what weapons are likely. We may even have a good idea who will win. For some types of fiction, that's fine. The point of the violence is not to surprise us, but to dramatize an inevitable confrontation settled in an inevitably direct way.

In other stories, however, the outcome is not inevitable, and the whole tone of the book has led us to expect a spectacular and breathless confrontation. This often involves unexpected weapons, complicated maneuvers, desperate cunning: real edge-of-the-seat stuff. To pull it off, you must surprise us with some novel way of winning the battle.

It may be novel weapons. Ian Fleming certainly contributed his share of deadly fountain pens and cigarette lighters in his James Bond series. But more likely, the surprise will be how an overmatched protagonist uses his wits to convert whatever is around him to a weapon, a plan of attack or an escape route.

Give this a lot of thought. You are competing with some very inventive writers here. Charles Sheffield, to take just one example, once made his desperate hero use an entire zoo to fight off the villain, in the thriller
My Brother's Keeper.
What is in the environment, or in your hero's head, that he can use to gain a fighting advantage? How can you surprise the reader with his attack, and still have it seem logical?

One way is to foreshadow the protagonist's special knowledge. Sheffield's hero's hobby was visiting zoos all around the world. If your character will surprise us by using live steam to win a fight, make him an engineer or maintenance man. If she will surprise us with her amateur cunning in planning a killing, make her a mathematician with a methodical, obsessive mind (Scott Turow did this in
Presumed Innocent).
Surprises are best when our first reaction (''Oh my God!'') is followed by uncritical acceptance (''But of course!'').

A FINAL WORD: THE WITTY FIGHT

For some writers, there is a great temptation to embellish fight scenes with wit. The protagonist hurls the bad guy, whose name is John Cunningham, in front of a rolling roadgrader, under which Cunningham is squashed flat. Our hero dusts off his hands and says, ''One more for the road, Jack!'' The problem with this sort of wisecrack is that it immediately converts the fight from a genuine plot event into a send-up of a plot event. It's not conflict; it's vaudeville.

You should resist this, if you want us to take both your character and your conflict seriously. Sometimes, however, you don't want that. The whole book may be a send-up of a genre, as Piers Anthony's Xanth books are a send-up of heroic fantasy. Or it may be that the book is serious, but the narrator/protagonist is incapable of taking macho fighting very seriously. In that case, writing a tongue-in-cheek description of a fight will convey that self-satire very nicely. Here is Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita,
fighting another middle-aged, out-of-shape man for possession of a gun improbably named Chum:

Fussily, busybodily, cunningly, he had risen again while he talked. I groped under the chest trying at the same time to

keep an eye on him. All of a sudden I noticed that he had noticed that I did not seem to have noticed Chum protruding from beneath the other corner of the chest. We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.

To make a fight look ridiculous, you can't do better than to begin declining the fighting verbs in the middle of the action.

If, however, you
don't
want your fight to appear ridiculous, refrain from both witty exposition and wisecracking dialogue.

Fights are exciting. When your characters' conflict explodes into violence, make it necessary, detailed, accurate, plausible and (perhaps) surprising. Readers will gladly pay for ringside tickets.

SUMMARY: CHARACTERS AND VIOLENCE

• Keep violence necessary to the plot and consistent with the characters.

• Write fight scenes in more detail than you think you need.

• Be accurate about weapons, martial techniques and bodily injuries.

• For flamboyant, action-oriented fiction, write flamboyant and surprising fight scenes.

• Put wisecracks in fight scenes only if you're willing to undermine the seriousness of both plot and character.

No man is an island. Neither is any story.

That sounds very poetic (at least, John Donne thought so), but in writing terms, what does it
mean?
It means that every story with more than one character in it is actually more than one story.
N
characters =
n
stories. This fact is well known to policemen, judges and parents of nine-year-olds. (''So what's
your
side of what happened between you and your brother?'') There are two (or more) versions of every story.