Vehicular Engagement

[Wanara009]

Well, I hit another bump on my project as I try to write a fight scene... of sort.

How do you write an engagement between vessels (i.e. A dogfight, a naval engagement, a tank/elephant battle, etc) well? Incidentally, how do you write a engagement between two opposing army?

I understand that in a good way to write mano-a-mano fight scene is quick and concise, focusing on the blow-to-blow exchange and adding details only when necessary because you want to keep the quickness of pace.

However, a vessels like a ship has a lot of action that happen before it could launch an attack (e.g.: reload cannons, turning to bear, etc) and people tend to notice it because it's something bigger and easily caught by the eye (unlike in a one-on-one where details usually meant things like how the feet is placed or how the combatant put his hand on the hilt of his sword, which most untrained eyes could miss) so is it okay to add details on these 'sub-actions'?

They're also lot slower than a one-to-one fight (the fight I'm currently writing took ~45 minutes to resolve) so can you really afford to bog down the pace on these kind of scene? Like adding quick conversation pieces like a captain shouting orders and crewmen reporting damages/enemy position/etc.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Chilari]

That depends on your point of view.

If you've got a close focus on one character, tell the scene from the point of view of that character - what they do and see, what's important to them. So if your character is a ship's captain in 1810 he'll be giving the orders and watching what the other ship is doing. If he's a common sailor he might be on the lines hauling a sail round to allow the ship to change direction, or otherwise down in the cannon deck loading and firing. If he's a marine he'll be on the deck or in the rigging taking potshots at the enemy captain or preparing to board. Focus on what that character is doing, feeling and seeing, and allow that you can't show everything and that there are some elements of the battle that are going on unseen.

If you want a more general picture, say for the sake of continuing my ship example, you could have an observer on the shore or on a nearby ship watching. Then you see the big movements. You hear the boom of the broadside as the cannon are fired, see in the other ship where the wood splinters or a mast comes falling down, see sails flapping free and lines are broken by the passage of the cannon balls. You see the ships sail past one another, or come alongside to board, or seek to flee. You might see the frantic activity on the deck as sailors rush this way and that trying to secure damaged sails, or marines form up ready to board or clamber into the rigging to shoot down on the enemy deck, or the injured and dead are carried below. This is from the perspective of a disconnected observer, someone without the ability to change what's happening, but the perspective the be able to show overall what's going on.

The third option is as the head-hopper, the third person omniscient narrator who can jump from one part of the battle to the next. This can give you both the big picture of the distant observer and the more personal urgency of the individual character. It gives the reader a better overview of what's happening both in terms, as with my example, of the way the ships manouver around one another and which is more successful, and the below decks stuff, the cloud of gun smoke and the fear of having your leg - or head - blown off in the enemy's next broadside. But there's a drawback to the headhopper. It has the potential to quickly become piecemeal, erratic, confusing. Too many heads to hop and the reader can't keep up and the impact is diluted by the constant high tension, high activity of it all. There's also the danger of the scene dragging on too long because you're describing basically every part of the battle sometimes from more than one point of view if the same broadside impacts upon two different POV characters in different ways.

There is a fourth option: the reaction. Skip the battle entirely, and have the first mate report casualties to the captain, who then congratulates the first mate and asks him to command the captured vessel as they travel in convoy back to port. Meanwhile below decks the surgeon pulls a sheet up over the face of one of his patients he was unable to save, and the cabin boy rocks back and forth, hugging his knees and wishing he could scrub the vision of seeing a man obliterated by a cannon ball from his memory. There's still the potential for showing the emotions and chaos of the situation through how people react to it, without actually having a blow by blow account, and quickly establishing the outcome of a battle that in the grand scheme of things isn't especially important to the plot - or at least, not as much as the outcome of it is. This isn't a technique you can use, for example, in the big climactic battle at the end, but would be suitable for one in the first half of the story, for example to establish a shift in power - there's presumably a new first mate on my ship if I've sent the old one to command the captured vessel, and he's not going to be the same as the old one - or demonstrate how the experience changes the character - perhaps my cabin boy in this example becomes a staunch pacifist, or at next landfall runs away.

My general attitude to battles is to keep it short and focused. I don't want to read a blow-by-blow account. For a start that can make it seem all too ordered if done badly, and it can make the account long, tedious and impersonal. So I don't write it like that either. I write it from one point of view, or sometimes two if I can't get the important bits into one, and focus on what is felt - fear, adrenaline, desire to defeat and opponent or protect an ally, the necessary repetition of loading the cannon and firing over and over again and trying not to see anything that you wouldn't want to, because only by cleaning, loading, stepping back, firing, cleaning, loading, and so on can you help those who are injured and maybe prevent injury to yourself by taking out the enemy before he takes you out. So I focus on the experiences of one or two individuals, and leave the flow of the battle or the big picture stuff to what they find out later, maybe from overhearing the captain mentioning to his first mate that it was a close one at one point but the lads pulled through and by god, didn't we thrash those frogs, eh?

I need to read the next Patrick O'Brian book.

 

[CupofJoe]

I need to read the next Patrick O'Brian book.

I would suggest one or two books by Alexander Kent too. He covers the same sort of period, a bit earlier maybe...
They are 30-40 years old and might be a bit staid by modern standards but I remember the ship actions as being thrilling.

 

[wordwalker]

Chilari definitely broke it down well.

I'd say it's all about priorities, especially pacing. The more you want the whole military picture, the closer you stay to the captain's decision-making and maybe other perspectives to capture their consequences. Or you can follow one (or many) jack tars trying to do one job while everything else is blowing up around them, or anything in between those.

Like any scene, you decide how detailed you want to get, and what choices and consequences are the pivots for the plot/mood and for revealing the characters. Does the captain have a plan everyone thinks is crazy? Are men knocked overboard and have to be abandoned?