Think tank: writing big battle scenes

[bluntblade]

So the interview with AD-B set me wondering about ways people avoid big battle sequences blurring into "this huge army fought another huge army and loads of people died, it was like the biggest fight ever I swear". We can all think of offenders within 40K and without.

 

So, I figured I'd set up a thread where we can pool ideas, devices and so on. So far I have:

- the dust from Betrayer is what started this train of thought, so let's start there. Give the fight some texture, make it smell, that sort of thing

- if you're focusing on an officer, keep the issue of communication in mind - best seen in Betrayer, especially on Armatura

- hold tight to the perspective of the lead character - things look bigger from the ground, eight?

- use the environment - think about where you're setting the battle, and have the surroundings influence how the fighting plays out, rather than it being window dressing. A good example from outside 40K is the Battle of the Blackwater in A Clash of Kings

[bluntblade]

One that I've been reminded of recently by some discussion around Istvaan V - remember that air power is a thing.

[simison]

Have you read the Codex Alera?

[bluntblade]

I have not. Link?

[Hydriatus]

Strangely something I make use of when writing big battles (not that it's come up in my posted works yet!) is snapshots of other stories - inspired heavily by a particular chapter in Stephen King's The Stand, which effectively conveyed a sense of scale when it came to devestation. Small segments following different characters, telling us just enough to let you see that each of these characters easily had their own story, and it's all crossing over in this point.

[bluntblade]

Strangely something I make use of when writing big battles (not that it's come up in my posted works yet!) is snapshots of other stories - inspired heavily by a particular chapter in Stephen King's The Stand, which effectively conveyed a sense of scale when it came to devestation. Small segments following different characters, telling us just enough to let you see that each of these characters easily had their own story, and it's all crossing over in this point.

That's a technique I've seen surprisingly little of, now I think about it. It could be done "in-camera", with characters informing the protagonist of what they're seeing.

[simison]

I have not. Link?

 

It's a series by Jim Butcher, writer of the Dresden Files. It's about a High Fantasy-equivalent of the Roman Empire and features quite a few battles involving legions. High-quality stuff that could definitely help with writing out major battles.

[bluntblade]

 

 

I have not. Link?

It's a series by Jim Butcher, writer of the Dresden Files. It's about a High Fantasy-equivalent of the Roman Empire and features quite a few battles involving legions. High-quality stuff that could definitely help with writing out major battles.

Sounds promising. Sadly my Kindle was nicked recently, but I'll nab that as soon as I replace it

[HeritorA]

 

 

I have not. Link?

It's a series by Jim Butcher, writer of the Dresden Files. It's about a High Fantasy-equivalent of the Roman Empire and features quite a few battles involving legions. High-quality stuff that could definitely help with writing out major battles.

Sounds promising. Sadly my Kindle was nicked recently, but I'll nab that as soon as I replace it

 

True  - some of them are truly vivid

[Cpt_Reaper]

I like to write combat scenes is a very simplistic manor first, then use that framework to build upon. Sort of like story-boarding for a movie.

 

Example of artillery shell landing:

Character pulls sword from defeated foe. Looks around for next target. Hears whine of artillery shell falling. Looks up and sees tracer trail. Leaps for safety. Explosion. Silence. Ears ring. Muffled sound returns. Debris falling. Men screaming. Looks around. Slow motion.

[paulJam]

i think the easiest method is to think of what movies do.

 

you don't have movie battles just playing out from blimp-level/orbital overview.

 

the grittiness comes from the camera sitting on the characters shoulder on the ground, seeing what they see.

 

occasionally you might have a wide shot to give a sense of how massive a battlefield is but without the character level input it's more or less just a tac map (and becomes a documentary).

 

saving private ryan (opening battle), we were soldiers (around the last quarter of the movie), platoon (final night battle), even the last samurai (last battles, though obviously a different/smaller scale).  also (i think it was) starwars ep3 the space ship battle at the start, the one over the planet had some good close/far.

Edited December 4, 2016 by paulJam

[simison]

I brought up the Codex Alera because it reminded me of one of the most dangerous foes to an army: battle fatigue. A man, even a veteran, can only fight for so long before his energy is spent. That's why reserves are so important, it allows rotation, changing tired units for fresh ones.

 

Obviously, space marines have higher energy reserves, but even they can't fight for an eternity. Just something to keep in mind.

[bluntblade]

Another thing that recently occurred to me: if all the Legion VIPs are the FOV, the battle feels quite small. In FotE, without it being specified that it's a small action, we have three or four of the DG's most senior commanders, plus Mortarion, all fighting in what seems to be quite a smal space. Emphasise the size of the environment and the battle being fought there.

 

Also, it's worth having officers delegate, and listen to info from their subordinates. Not every order needs to come from the commander, and it can help to sell the Astartes as a flexible force.

[bluntblade]

I brought up the Codex Alera because it reminded me of one of the most dangerous foes to an army: battle fatigue. A man, even a veteran, can only fight for so long before his energy is spent. That's why reserves are so important, it allows rotation, changing tired units for fresh ones.

 

Obviously, space marines have higher energy reserves, but even they can't fight for an eternity. Just something to keep in mind.

 

Only just saw this, but yeah, that rings true. Betrayer has Khârn howling because he's been running around with a hole in his side, Wrath of Iron sees a marine exert himself for so long and so much that he has blood sloshing around in his armour. All things a reader can readily imagine and cringe at, and both of these things that ram home just what nature of beings the characters are.

[Wargamer]

To me, battle scale can be best shown with multiple characters. The more protagonists who are fighting independently, the bigger the battle feels - but this only applies if we've established the protagonists are not together!

[Indefragable]

All writing is perspective.

 

If you want to make a battle feel big, then go small: focus on an individual's perspective.

 

If you want to make a battle feel small, then go big: focus on the chessboard and the scale of what's going on.

 

Human beings--even super-, trans-, post- ones--can only process so much at a time. So things like tactical displays, boards with little tiny figures being pushed around, etc... all function to make things smaller, easier to digest and process. That in turn makes us as human beings actually lose the sense of scale and enormity of what's going on.

 

"One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."

-Joseph Stalin

 

Some of the most vivid battle scenes I still remember come from The Lord of the Rings where things are being experience by the child-like hobbits. They can't necessarily process what's going on and just describe what their eyeballs encounter. At a certain point they can't comprehend just exactly what is going on and so we, the readers, shut-down a bit with them because while we may not understand complicated military plans and maneuvers, we can understand the very human act of shutting down in moments of abject chaos.

 

Watch this clip from The Longest Day:

 

 

Describe what you see.

 

Every battle is but a mosaic of a thousand little individual battles, from ambushing the first gatehouse, to crossing the street, to crossing the bridge, to attempting to assault the fortified bunker, to simply trying to survive the return fire.

 

Also, one of the gold standards of cinematic battles to me is still the naval part of the Battle of Endor from Return of the Jedi. Up to that point in the Star Wars universe, the audience had only encountered tie fighters in pairs and squads. Suddenly, the entire screen is filled with them. Rebel pilots speak for us: "there's too many of them!" Our experience mirrors that of the characters on screen. Only twice in the entire sequence are capital ships mentioned at all...yet every shot is filled with Star Destroyers and Rebel cruisers duking it out...but it's all the backdrop, part of the setting. We follow a handful of characters as they weave through this setting, eking out an existence like flies racing over an elephant's hide. That perspective, the narrow focus on the small is what allows us to comprehend just how big this thing around our characters actually is.

 

 

$0.02 put in the box.

Edited April 6, 2018 by Indefragable

[bluntblade]

I agree hugely with that; not forgetting the small scale in depicting the grand is so important. I mean, Tolkien did a marvellous job, but I doubt anyone here or writing for BL has his command of the English language. Though I would say there are things we can draw on from the evocative aspects of his writing. I've definitely ripped off the "hills of slain" around Minas Tirith. Comes back to John French's truism that you can never be too good at the mechanics of writing.

 

Wargamer, you've reminded me of what remains my enduring peeve with Flight of the Eisenstein. Three Great Company captains are fighting within sight of each other from the start, and I don't feel the scale of it any more than if it were one such officer and two regular captains under him. As a result the monolithic Fourteenth Legion feels really quite small, smaller than the strike force Torgaddon led down to Murder in Horus Rising.

[bluntblade]

It's been a while, but I've been pondering something that can really give weight to a battle scene or sequence, and the battles within it. Credit to Hello Future Me for this idea: when to kill off characters.

 

We're all familiar with how a character we know dying can have far more of an effect than entire cities being blown up. So character deaths can be deployed to really make major shifts in a battle hit home. In fact, quite a few BL authors do this in the course of an action scene: you see this with

Qin Xa and Jochi

in Path of Heaven and

Boreas and Sarduran

in Solar War.