Battle scenes are HARD

I’m in the middle of revising a major battle scene right now.  This is supposed to be one of the more important climaxes of the book, adding a lot more tension and emotion as the novel approaches the main climax.

Let me just say, writing a good battle scene is tough.  The first version of this one…yeah, it sucked.  Hardcore sucked.  I’m cutting whole sections at a time–five hundred words, eight hundred words–and completely rewriting them from the ground up.  I’m not sad to see these sections go, either–they were BAD.

I think the most difficult thing is to keep the pacing up without confusing the reader.  For that reason, I reconceptualized most of the action here and made it simpler.  I also repeated several times the main point of tension–basically, will we get out of here before reinforcements come and kick our trash?  I hate it when a fight scene is so confusing that the tension just leaks out.  I don’t want that to happen here.

At the same time, I’m trying to filter everything through the viewpoint character.  Too often, I’ll read an action scene that’s just a blow-by-blow of the physical action.  That gets boring REALLY fast.  Without character, you have no stakes.  I want the stakes to be high from the very onset.

Still, it’s hard.  I don’t know if I’m succeeding yet.  I probably won’t until I distance myself from what I’ve written tonight and take a good, hard look at it.

Since I can’t do that until the third revision, I’m not going to worry about it.  Better to write it out now and move on than to try so hard to get everything perfect that I can’t see the story for the words.

On the plus side, I’ve been listening to a LOT of Star Wars battle music while writing this.  That’s always fun!