Determining Your Character's Fighting Style

     Action scenes can get boring very quickly if done wrong, particularly when all is uniform.  One way to keep things spicy, and add some realism while you're at it, is to vary the fighting styles of your characters.

     The form that a character studied is part of this--someone who studied Tai Chi in college is going to be very different from a small-time Krav Maga master and a scrapper from the streets with ten years under their belt.  Tai Chi prizes fluid movements and the practice of avoiding violence and redirecting energy, while Krav Maga focuses on brutal efficiency, completely neutralizing the threat as quickly as possible.  Someone who learned to fight on the streets, on the other hand, is probably going to fight dirty, and while they'll try to end a fight as fast as they can, they probably won't be as quick or efficient in their attempts.

     Take a look at your characters--what kind of fighting experience do they have?  Were they formally trained, or self-taught?  How they were trained is going to be a huge influence on how they approach real-world fights.

     This goes beyond just the range of the actual techniques--what kind of relationship did they have with their teacher?  If they disliked her, they may ignore her advice out of spite, but if they loved him and treasured his opinion they'll be more likely to do as he would've liked them to.

     Was their trainer a pacifist that taught these techniques only to stem the flow of violence, or were they the kind of bloodthirsty warmonger that encouraged their students to get their swords bloody whenever they got the chance?  Do they prize mercy or revenge?  And what did mercy mean to them?  Letting an enemy live, or dispatching them as quickly as possible?

     If your character is self-taught, how did they teach themselves?  Did they read books and look up internet tutorials?  If so, which ones?  Who did they see as their "mentor?"  What did they take away from the advice?

     Or did they learn solely through experience, throwing themselves into fistfights and sword duels with reckless abandon and learning by trial and error?  What fights taught them the most, and why?  Did they learn the most by winning or by losing?  (Hint: you usually learn more from losing and then figuring out where you went wrong)  How did these attempts, wins, and losses effect them?

     Also, consider your character's personality; are they aggressive or more passive?  Are they friendly or stand-offish?  Cowardly or brave?  Are they more likely to leap into battle head-first or slide into battle only when their back's against the wall and they have no other choice?

     A character that's head-strong and aggressive is more likely to strike first.  They'll always be on the offense and avoid defense whenever they can, trying to be the first to draw blood.  This can be advantageous, since history teaches us that the offensive side is almost always the triumphant one, but can also leave the offensive party open to counter-attacks they may not be expecting,

     On the other hand, a character that's more timid and less sure of their skill may depend almost completely on defensive tactics.  These characters are focused more on surviving than on winning, and it's a dangerous game they're playing, since without striking out there's almost no way to disarm or eliminate the enemy, though by luring the opponent into a state of false safety and confidence, Mr. Defensive may be able to land a killer gut-punch at a key moment that Mr. Offense doesn't expect.

     Most of the time, your characters are going to be a mish-mash of offensive and defensive, but based on training level and personality, decide which way your characters lean; very few are going to be exactly in the middle of the spectrum.

     Characters may even find creative juxtapositions of training and personality; in my current work-in-progress, Sará, a half-demon half-angel princess, was trained in swordplay mostly as a defensive measure, since it was never expected that she would really have to fight anyone.  But Sará is a haughty, aggressive eighteen-year-old, demanding authority and fear even when she looks like a dirty little ten-year-old human girl.  Her training is defense but her personality is offense, so she uses defensive tactics in an offensive manner, which leads to more diverse fight scenes.

     You can also ask yourself what your character's range of environmental awareness is--someone with tunnel-vision will be less easily distracted and more concentrated in their fury, but can be easily attacked from the rear.  Someone that's constantly on the lookout for what's going on around them, however, is more easily distracted, which can lead to more injuries and even death, but is also less likely to be fooled by an attack from their flanks and will be able to use the environment to their advantage, perhaps by luring the enemy off of cliffs or snaring them in bramble patches.


     Take out a few of your main characters and look them over.  Ask yourself some of the questions from above.  Now assign each a different style of fighting, and think--how often to they thrust or slash?  Do they punch more or kick more?  How does their height or weight affect the way they attack or defend?  Are they a statue when they fight, staying in one place, or are they constantly on the move?  Forward or backward or side-to-side, or do they dodge and weave like the famed and acclaimed Basil Staghare?

     Do they all have a different fighting style now?  It's okay if traits overlap, but chances are good that no two characters will ever fight exactly alike.

     Okay.  Now using those styles as a guideline, go back and edit your fight scene to reflect your character's style.  Doesn't that inject so much more life and variety?  Does it open up new passageways and opportunities?  Great!  Now do that with all your fight scenes--remembering of course that as your story progresses, your character's fighting style may change to reflect the trials they've weathered.



     If you have any of your own tips on how to assign a character's fighting style, or want to share how your characters fight, drop a comment in the section below!  I'd love to hear from you!

4 More Ways That Knitting Is Like Writing

bc obviously u didn't get enough the first time

1.  Surprise patterns

If you’re knitting with multiple colors, there will probably come a time where you mess up (it’s difficult to juggle multiple strings without a mistake or two), and sometimes it takes a while for you to figure it out.  Sometimes that results in surprise patterns, which can be surprisingly beautiful and make you decide to change the direction of your current project, or can be horrifyingly ugly and make you want to burn everything everywhere forever.

Writing a book is the same; in the course of writing your story, you’ll find things happening that you didn’t expect.  New plot complications will arrive, new side stories will unravel, new characters will reveal themselves from betwixt the luminous petaled asscheeks of a flower man; sometimes these little things will add up to make great new structures within your novel that you never expected and cherish all the more for it!  Other times it’ll take you down the windy road to tangent city, and you’ll need to take a bulldozer to the mountain pass.  

2.  You usually want a tight knit, sometimes tighter than others

When you knit a blanket or scarf or what-have-you, you want the knit to be tight, to keep the water or snow or just general elements out, to keep body-heat in, and to keep the thing from falling apart.  Sometimes the knit needs to be tighter than others, depending on what you’re making and for what kind of weather it was made for.  You wouldn’t want to be caught in a snowstorm with a summer t-shirt!  

Likewise, the weave of your story needs to be tight, to prevent plot from spilling out or characters being inappropriately exposed.  When you read a story, the flow should appear seamless, as if every last word is inextricable, and to remove a single one would be like removing a keystone from a jenga tower.  

Sometimes, depending on your genre and tone, the knit can be a little more breathable than others--to pull from television, no one asks why Bugs Bunny can pull a carrot from nowhere, or how Brian Griffin could possibly have a human son older than he is, because it’s just accepted that that’s how that world works; once the structure is set up, you can safely function within those parameters.

You also need to beware of going too tight, leaving yourself no leeway with which to make the next stitch.  You need to leave yourself room to breathe, or you’ll inevitably reach an impasse and have to go back.

3.  Pattern or no--everyone has a way to get the job done

Some people can only work with a pattern; some people absolutely CANNOT work with a pattern; and some people bounce between the two, or go half-and-half.  

But whether you start out with an outline, or just go by the seat of your pants, in knitting or writing, all that matters is that you get it done.  Whatever gets you there best, that’s the way you take the journey.  

4.  It may turn into something else, and that’s okay

Sometimes a scarf becomes a shirt; sometimes a dress becomes a blanket, or a blanket becomes a snuggie.

Sometimes you start out with a novel, and end up with a screenplay, or a podcast, or a musical, or a webcomic, or an experimental new artform that can’t quite be described.  

And that’s fine.  No, in fact, it’s better than fine, it’s GREAT!  Some of the best plot twists and turns come about organically, or else blindside you while you’re taking a nap, the same way that some of the best patterns you develop in your knitting could be the result of a screw-up; the failure of one project can be the success of another.

Follow new leads; let them take you where they want, and don’t be afraid to explore alternative routes.  Sometimes you need to take the mega super highway, but other times the scenic backroute, while longer, is just better.  Even if you do fall into a couple bear traps on the way.

Story or tapestry, you’ll be happy you took the risk.

3 Ways That Knitting Is Like Writing

Knitting is a wonderful hobby--it’s soothing, it keeps your hands busy (great for all those nail biters out there!), it can be done while most of your attention is affixed to something else--TV, or a conversation, or a game or something--and it’s creative.  I mean that literally, you are literally creating something fantastic out of nothing more than yarn and metal rods.  Plus, there’s all sorts of different stitches and patterns to try out.  

And knitting is also a bit like writing--the tools look similar, there are people who use patterns, people who don’t, and the mechanics and emotions that go into it can look really similar, when you get right down to it.

Here are three ways that knitting is like writing, and how seeing the connection can help you with your prose.

1.  Sometimes you need to unravel it

Over the course of a knitting session it sometimes becomes necessary to undo seconds, minutes, or even hours of your hard work in order to fix some dastardly mistake--a dropped stitch, a mix-up in the patterns, etc.  It’s frustrating, but every writer knows that feeling. It’s not as tangible as it is with knitting, you can’t just look and point out where it all went wrong, but we all know, deep in our souls, when Chapter Fifteen just won’t work, that something needs to be done--and sometimes what needs to be done is to trace back the problem and start over from the point that things went wrong.  

Unlike knitting, however, it’s important that you don’t discard your work so far--when unraveling a knitted something, you are by definition discarding everything done right with what’s been done wrong--to minimize your losses, you should copy and paste your “unraveled threads” in another document, which you can always reference later, much like you might take a picture of your knitting thus far so that you have a clear idea of where it was going before you noticed your errors.  

And like with knitting, sometimes it’s only a quick fix--maybe you need to rewrite a paragraph, not a big deal, we’ve all been through it, but maybe you start realizing in chapter fifteen that this character should have been introduced on page two, while this other one that’s been center stage since page one should never have been put to paper in the first place.  Plus the setting is all wrong, the mythos is too simple or too complicated, the plot is inconsistent, etc. etc. etc., in which case unraveling may not be enough.  Which brings us to...

2.  Sometimes you need to start over

Sometimes a knitting project goes awry.  Yo had this amazing idea in mind, but now you’re forty rows in and the string is tangled, the connections are weak, the pattern looks awful, the loops are too tight or too loose, and you realize all at once that your options amount to 1. abandoning the project immediately or 2. starting all over from the ground up.

In writing you have the same options--and yes, there are manuscripts you’ll want to abandon, and that’s okay, but the other option is a tad bit more interesting, so that will be our exploratory topic for now.

When things get too messy to unvravel the yarn, you’ll want to open a new word document (or notebook, depending on what it is you’re using) and start writing the story as you believe it should have been told in the first place.  

It’s daunting, I know, but sometimes it needs to be done--in order to be your best and produce your best work, you need to work your hardest and give this story the attention and time that it deserves.  If some irreparable evil has occurred, unless you go back to ground zero, you will never do it justice.  HOWEVER, many problems are nowhere near this severe, and

3.  You can always fix it in post

I find that knitting has a far wider appeal than many might think--almost every time I start knitting backstage during a play, I’m either beset by people who also knit, or asked to teach someone (or someones) to do the same, which I’m always happy to do.  

During Dream Barn’s production of Legally Blonde a couple years ago I taught two of my friends, Casey and Chris, to knit; Chris was a natural, and was knitting on his own in no time.  Casey was also very good--she had a nice, tight knit, and the few mistakes she made were the same ones that all beginners make; dropped stitches, knotted yarn, etc.  

But Casey was very nervous about her work--she would come to me, anxious and panicky, every time she screwed up.  I didn’t mind, I showed her that her mistakes were nothing to worry about, and showed her how she could just keep going and fix the little things in post, tie off the dropped stitches, cut, untangle, and reattach yarn, etc.  It wasn’t a big deal.

That neuroticism for perfectionism is something many writers (if not most all of them) share, and it’s understandable--what we write is a piece of our souls bared for the world to see, and we want them to see only the best of what we have to offer.

But how can we show them the best of what we have to offer if we spend so much time workshopping a single chapter that we have nothing to offer in the first place?  There will always be time to fix grammar, spelling, plotlines, characterization, etc. when you’ve finished actually getting the story onto the page.  

One of the great things about NaNoWriMo is that the speed at which you’re forced to write keeps you from going back to look, reference, and fix, fix, fix.  

You just have to take a deep breath, close your eyes, and plunge right in.  Your first draft will never be perfect anyway, no matter how hard you try; that’s why we edit.  

4 Things I Learned Digitalizing My Notebooks

So last year, as I was preparing to go off to college 3,000 miles from home, I undertook an effort to digitalize my notebook collection so that, should I require my notes while at school, I wouldn't have to lug a metric fuckton of paper cross-country, or *sticks nose in the air, places steepled hand on chest* send for them.

This meant that I was exposed, in a four-month period, to aaaaaallllll the writing I had done (read: kept) since late middle school. Also pictures I drew, but I didn't learn all that much from that. Some things I did learn are as follows:

1. Write down your scene ideas wRITE THEM DOWN

In digitalizing my collected notebooks, I came to find that there were A LOT of places where I obviously knew where I was going with something, but because I knew where it was headed, I didn’t bother to write it down because why would I and let me tell you, should I have ever!  I have no idea now where SO many of my stories were headed, huge plot points, entire scenes, choice juicy dialogue, all disappeared from the earth forever because I thought I’d remember those ideas in perpetuity. Or at least until I got to that point in the story.

Make sure you take lots of copious, fully-detailed notes, kids, especially if you’re about to move onto the next WIP.  

2. Don’t just toss things--you'll need it as soon as you do

RELATED:  Don’t throw out old ideas or notes until you’ve at least procured (and backed up) a digital copy.  You never know what you might need later.  Even if you think it’s trash, keep those old notes and scene corpses and half-started stories; you might be able to revive, reuse, or repurpose those bits and pieces later, and the minute you toss something is the minute you’ll have an AMAZING IDEA that requires that you have those pieces.  It’s a pain in the ass.

3. Too many dialogue tags muck things up

Dialogue tags are those little things like “said” and “insisted” and “proclaimed,” the parts of language that let you know someone is talking and how they’re doing it.  Most young writers start out wanting to use TONS, because you always want the audience to know how your character is saying what they're saying--are they yelling this line?  Whispering this other one?  Growling hissing demanding commanding interrupting?
 

And dialogue tags are great!  …  In moderation.  But it doesn’t take long before dialogue tags reach a point of diminishing returns.  They get in the way, start gumming up the works, slowly leaching all the fun out of the work and reducing the novel’s pace to a snail’s crawl.  

Most of the time, guys, said will do.  Said and Asked are the meat and greens of the meal, and the rest of the dialogue tags are spices.  You can use as many saids and askeds as you want, and it’ll be fine. A few more diverse dialogue tags are nice to keep things interesting and variegated, but if you use too many you’ll over-spice the dish and it’ll become unpalatable.

A good rule of thumb:  If the audience can tell from context how a character is speaking, use “said” or “asked.”  If they can’t, stick a spicy spicy dialogue tag in there for some flavor.

4. Make sure things are HAPPENING

I came across MANY points in my re-reading where chapters go by and just NOTHING is happening--it’s all just DESCRIPTION, and not even that interesting.  It makes my soul die a little.  But it’s okay, because I learn from my mistakes usually probably maybe. This time at least. Hopefully.

Don’t go too long without letting something important occur--conversations, action sequences, a montage of family activities, make something happen sooner rather than later, or you’ll lose the audience.  The audience who may just be future you, quietly shaking her head at present you's sad, boring tomfoolery.  

*waves nervously at future me*

5 Things I Learned Writing/Editing/Re-Reading My First-Ever "Novel"

1. A notebook of words does not a novel make

My first-ever “novel” was a 42 page book about a Mary Sue superhero getting powers and defeating a dragon.  In between all that, though, lots of bullshit happens that doesn’t have anything to do with the plot, and is mostly just 9-year-old wish fulfillment.  It was, more or less, a notebook full of vaguely connected words and ideas.

But that’s not what a novel is.  First of all, this 42-page story, at around 10,000 words, wouldn’t even qualify as a novella.  It would be more like a novelette at best; a novella is 18,000-40,000 words, and a novel is 40,000 words or more (though most publishing companies prefer that your wordcount be at least 60,000, and often nearer to 80,000, to consider publishing it as a novel).  

Not only is a wordcount required, but a novel has to have a cohesive plot, compelling characters that are more than self-indulgent caricatures of real-life people or cardboard cut-outs, and villains with realistic motives.  You could have a novel that was more anthological, too, as long as all the pieces were woven together to form an overarching narrative, but it still has to say something.  

A bunch of pieces smashed together isn’t a novel just because you want it to be.  Kaleidoscopes are pretty, but there’s a reason we don’t call them paintings.  

2. Tangents Must Go

As I mentioned above, my first “novel” had a TON of tangents.  There was a cringe-worthy sequence where my trio of main characters went off and discovered a new species of weasel that were rainbow colored just … because???  They could???

 

As I said, it was very self-indulgent.  

And it was painfully evident, re-reading it, that it did. not. work.  It didn’t matter, it was a dumb stand-in for conflict, it wasn’t interesting, and it contributed nothing to the plot, such as it was.  

Bottom line; tangents--by which I mean, tangents that contribute no value or actively detract from the audience’s understanding or enjoyment of a piece--have no place in your novel.  In your first draft, sure, stick in as many tangents as you want, they may turn out to have little pockets of information or entertainment you could later rework into something saleable, but when you go back to edit, cut that shit down.  Hack the jungle down to a garden and breathe deep the fruits of your labors.

Then choke, because you can’t breathe fruit.  Why were you trying to breathe fruit?  Who do you think you are, Fruit-Breathing Man?

3. Daydreaming isn’t the best way to write a book

Again; I was basically day-dreaming when nine-year-old-me wrote this.  And I should probably state, if it wasn’t clear already, that while I’m posting this for the education of all, this post is primarily a letter to kid me about what she could have done better.  

Namely, written a fucking BOOK instead of an IMAGINATIVE DIARY.

Little me had a lot of passion, but she was thin on the execution.  (Don’t worry, she’ll learn ;) )

4. Demonizing childhood bullies isn’t a recipe for a compelling villain

Honey, this is a lesson we all have to learn someday, and you’re learning it *checks watch* ten years ago.  You may have some unresolved issues with the kids that are bullying you right now, and demonizing them in writing can be cathartic, but if you want this book to be great, you need a better villain than a strawman.

Your villains have to be every bit as three dimensional as your protagonists; they need to have realistic reasons for having the goals they do; they need motivation, and even if their goal is to use a dragon to kill someone because they just don’t like her, they need to have a reason not to like her in the first place.  It doesn’t have to be the character’s fault (though it’s often more interesting a story if it is), but the villain needs to be able to see it that way.  

Every character is the protagonist of their own story; find the ways that your villains are the protagonists of theirs.

5. Paragraph usage

This is one thing that school never taught me, which I thank my eldest brother for.  One day, as I was typing away, he stopped behind me, reading over my shoulder, and gave me a piece of advice that forever changed the way I write.

“Include a new paragraph every time a new character speaks.”

And then he disappeared in a puff of dragon smoke and blood-orange incense, never to be seen again until dinner.  

It’s a very simple thing, so obvious a rule that schools don’t even bother telling you to do it (because they teach technical writing, so they don’t bother thinking about what the conventions of creative writing are until you’re already expected to know them all), so I see a lot of young writers making the same mistake.

So.  Every time a new character speaks; new paragraph.  It makes it so much easier to keep track of who’s saying what.  Trust me, you’ll love it.  And so will your readers. :)

6 Things I Learned Editing My Second Novel

1. Apostrophes

It was with the help of a friend of mine who served as my first editor that I learned the trick to apostrophes--another thing they don’t teach you in school.  

So here’s the trick; apostrophes can mean three things in modern English.  Most commonly known, they denote contractions--"He is" becomes "he’s," "they are" becomes "they’re," etc.  

Most commonly written (I assume), and least commonly understood (as I understand it), they’re used to show possession.  In the sentence, “That is Tommy’s house,” the ‘s on the word Tommy shows us that the house is his belonging.

Thirdly, apostrophes c’n be used to show th’t l’tters’re missin’, e’en when a word ain’t contracted!  It’s useful fer writin’ dialect, y’see.  

But never, NEVER, NEVER, is an apostrophe used on a plural s.  It may be used beside a plural s, as in, “the Joneses’ house,” but if there are two cats, you’d never write “the two cat’s.”  That is apostrophe abuse & the grammar police WILL find you, and they’ll take those two cats away from you FOREVER, so watch y’r back m’friend!

2. Fit the theme

I fucking love science, especially biology and quantum physics, but pretty much all science, science is amazing, shut up.  So when I was writing my second finished novel, The Koci, I dribbled in some science stuff because I was learning about fibrin and wound healing in bio and I was all like, “This is metal as FUUUUUUUUUUUCkkkkkkk.”  

And by “dribbled in” I mean I put in like one thing.  One paragraph, describing how, unbeknownst to the main character, his fibrin was at work healing his wounds while he slept.  To illustrate how ridiculous this was in hindsight, this was a story about people who shapeshifted into big cats living in closed-species societies that were pretty much constantly at war.  A species that hadn’t even reached a point where they could perform rudimentary autopsies.

Jeez, little Coates, get it together!

The point is, when you create a world, you need to keep things consistent with the time and theme; a teenager in the fourteen hundreds isn’t going to think about the atomic structure of the universe unless they’re a time traveler, and likewise, a modern doctor isn’t going to think about healing in holistic terms.  

You can pull off juxtaposed viewpoints and worldviews, especially if your theme has something to do with the differences or similarities between past and present, or societies which progress in different ways or at different rates--but in that case, you need to be consistent with your juxtapositions.  Don’t just throw shit in because it’s sick af; it has to fit the mood of your piece.

3. Conservation of detail

The law of conservation of detail essentially states that if it isn’t important, you don’t describe it, and that, relatedly, if it is described, it must carry some modicum of importance.  People don’t want to stick around for description of things they don’t care about if it serves no purpose.

This applies to events or even entire scenes or mini-arcs as well as descriptions, objects, or characters.  That sequence where those cat-people straight-up murder a pregnant catlady and rip her open to steal the babies inside her might be sick and twisted and very telling as to how that band of criminals operates and all, but if it has effect on the main character, it’s gotta go.  Same with that forbidden romance literally nobody but the two side characters involved in it know about, and the sequence where the main character goes for a long walk and describes the scenery in great detail for no good goddamn reason.

Detail is like a gas, and the right amount of any gas is required for the Earth to continue to function the way it does.  But when you get too much of any one gas, it throws off the natural balance and starts eating away at your story’s ozone.  Give a hoot gurl, don’t pollute ur fictional world.

4. No long character lists for no reason

WHEEEEEN i wrote The Koci, I knew every single catperson that was in The Army; I knew what their job was, I knew who they were related to, I knew what their secret activities were, I knew EVERYTHING about them all, and I. Had. A. LIST.

So for whatever reason (don’t lie Maggie, you know the reason, you thought you were being all cool ‘n’ shit) I decided it would be a great reason to have one of my characters fUCKIN LIST ALL HUNDRED AND FUCKIN TWELVE CATPEOPLE IN THE ARMY, replete with jobs and descriptions and relationships oh my god.

Yeah, in hindsight it’s pretty embarrassing.  This is another “conservation of detail” thing; it was an unnecessary infodump, and I’m glad my editor talked me out of it before I had the chance to embarrass myself.  

If you ever do feel the need to include a list of all your characters, make sure it’s necessary, and not just a huge pile of useless information.

5. Random events must immediately relevent

So for The Koci I had a plan for a future sequel that I planned to call The Strangers, which would be all about a few human survivors of a nuclear apocalypse floating to shore on the island that the Koci occupied.  As a foreshadowing type thing, I had a blast of light white out the sky and melt all the snow toward the end of the book, but because nothing else in the story plays into that event, it comes across as random and weird.

In fact, it makes no sense.  You might be able to pull something like this off in a second book of a series, since if people are invested enough to read the second they’ll probably stick around to find out what’s up in the third, but for a first novel, especially one where it’s all pretty self-contained, you’re going to want to skip that bit.  Save it for the next book, kemosabe.  

6. Fireflies are dead by the time winter comes you moron

My last scene had fireflies circling the main characters and then flying away.  But, as I said before, there was supposed to be snow on the ground; those fireflies would be deeeaaadddd.

Past me should have known better.