Is doing this okay?

[Ivonia]

Hi folks,

I'm getting further into my novel now, and as I write it, a question came up.

My story has a large scale war occurring right now (it's a sci-fi/fantasy, and takes place in space and on different planets). The thing is, I want to focus mostly on the hero, his friends, and the major bad guys. However, I also want to include things so that readers can hopefully get a better sense of the size of the war as a whole (and yes, there's a reason for the fighting, it's not just there for the sake of having a war. It may not be too believable, but this is where the "fantasy" part comes in :D )

Anyway, what I wanted to do was have the hero see/hear reports of fighting going on in other places that he's not at physically, and having him hear about the aftermath of those battles (for instance, the bad guys basically nuke an entire planet since the good guys are putting up so much resistance, basically killing anyone still on the surface. A buddy of his was also on the planet at the time, which is why he even cares about it, aside from all those innocent people dying). By doing this, I'm hoping to not only add more depth to the hero (because learning how cruel the bad guys are will hopefully make the hero/readers hate them more), but also give readers more sense of the scope of the war going on (and yeah, the good guys are more or less getting their butts kicked right now, with no major victories for their side until the end).

Is it alright to do this? I know I should start small, but I've been brewing these ideas for a long time now, and I figure it's now or never for telling an epic tale. I know its risky, but I also feel that people will probably enjoy reading it.

[James D Macdonald]

The master question is: Does it work?

Try. See how it goes. Remember: No one but you sees anything other than your final draft.

[preyer]

this reminded of that movie 'starship troopers' for some reason. i think my main concern would be if i was effectively conveying the horror and scope of the war through news stories someone is watching. if you're not going to take your reader to the front lines, or put them directly in the aftermath, i'd want to know if what my goal was was being accomplished. i know, for example, watching the vietnam war on t.v. every night brought that home, but that's a different medium: i'd say you'd really have to sell it hard for it to be effective to read. if you're trying to challenge yourself, i'd say you've done it, heh heh.

i'd slightly disagree with mac in the sense that only you will see anything til the final draft. if you're not sure how things are going, maybe it's a good idea to have a beta reader along for some of the rough spots to make sure you're on the right track. i can only be entertained with the gimmick of being shown the war a slice at a time (it's a good building block), but at some point i'd want to go there, and i wouldn't want to wait to page 200 to do it. so, it sounds like the trick here is going to be picking that time when the reader is there and not behind a t.v. screen. after all, this doesn't exactly sound like some person's in-depth emotional thing, it sounds pretty action oriented, eh? with an ensemble cast?

it really doesn't sound as if it'll be much of a problem. you'll know when that point should happen.

[mr mistook]

It seems pretty reasonable to have a guy in battle getting reports from other fronts. Even if he's not one of the superior officers, it makes sense that troop gossip would spread any news pretty quickly.

The problem I see is that, if the enemy nuked an entire planet to quash the rebellion, then what's stopping them from nuking your hero and his army on their planet?

[preyer]

the parameters are vague, too. is the hero the protagonist, or just labeled 'hero' for convenience? what makes him the hero? how are you planning on adding depth to him by having him read the newspaper? how long has this war been going on? 'nuking' seems rather an extreme first step in war: if that's the enemy's strategy, there's not much point in having gigantic armies, is there? well, i guess for occupation-- but what's left to occupy if everything is ashes? lol.

[HConn]

You've gotten some good advice, so I'm not going to repeat it.

I will say this: You don't need to run your ideas past an Internet message board before implementing them.

Be bold. Take risks. Take control of your work.

Ask yourself if you've seen this particular device in another story, and if not, why not? Maybe it's been done to death. Maybe it needs doing. Maybe it's a mistake.

Whatever the case, you should make your own mistakes. Take your own chances. Asking "Is doing this okay?" is ceding control of your work to a bunch of strangers on a message board. Don't do that. Be bold.

[katdad]

Your idea is perfectly okay.

I recommend one book that covers a large scale conflict. It's Gordon Dickson's "Dorsai" (sometimes found under the title "The Genetic General").

"Dorsai" is a true SF classic (some think masterpiece), not only a very entertaining novel, but will provide you with good ideas regarding how to cover a major war. In fact, in one part of the book, the brother of the protagonist is killed in a distant battle, and some of the story hinges on how the news is dealt with.

[Writing Again]

I'm thinking: Would the movie, Casablanca, be less understandable if I knew nothing else of the war?

How much of the big picture does one really need to know?

War always comes down to one or a few people trying to survive. What they understand of the big picture is usually very little and often inaccurate.

You are in the middle of a war, not only of guns bur of propaganda. The other side is lying and your side is trying to confuse the enemy. You can't believe anything you hear and not all of what you see.

About all you can hope to do is to spot the enemy before they spot you, and whether you kill them or run away, the best you can hope for is to live through the day.

[preyer]

i don't buy the comparison with 'casablanca' as being appropriate here, but i understand what you're saying. were it a war we're all familiar with, that would be one thing.

but the book is entertainment. from that standpoint, i expect to be taken to the action. as i understood it, it's rather pulpy-- all the more reason to get the blood flowing quick and plentiful. if i want introspection, i'll re-read 'johnny got his gun.' if i want something fast and full of action, should i look elsewhere than your book?

[Redwriter]

I haven't been in an intergalactic war recently; but it would seem to me that knowing what was happening on the other fronts, even if they were a parsec or two away, would be fairly critical to all participants concerned. I would imagine also that if a civilization had the capability of waging intergalactic war, they would also have the technology to have devised some sort of central information collection, processing and distribution system to keep all its disparate horde in communication, sort of like CNN on election night, without the speculation, rash predictions and botox.

Good luck

Spitfire

[Writing Again]

they would also have the technology to have devised some sort of central information collection, processing and distribution system to keep all its disparate horde in communication, sort of like CNN on election night, without the speculation, rash

You are such an optimist: I expect things will get worse, not better.

[ChunkyC]

Ivonia -- Uncle Jim said it in a nutshell: Does it work?

I got the feeling that you're worried about the focus of the story becoming the war and not the people. I may be totally wrong. Anyway, I think your idea of making the war personal for your hero is a good one. If you get across a sense of the scope of the conflict at the same time, all the better. What really matters then is how you put this across; does the hero see it on the newsfeeds, or does his sarge pull him aside and give him the horrible news of his brother's death as it came down the military pipeline, before he sees it filtered through the civilian news? No matter how you do it, so long as your hero is at the centre of the scene, your readers should be drawn in to the emotional impact this news has on him.

[Writing Again]

I once wrote, and I think sold, a short story about a war in space. The ship itself was protected by a force field... The gunners had to exit the ship and fire on the enemy from an exposed position outside the ship's field.

A couple of gunners fell in love between attacks, got married, and left the hatches to go fight, hoping they would both live through it so they could come back and have a "honeymoon" before another attack.

Nothing in the story ever mentioned who, what, where, or why they were fighting.

[Ivonia]

Thanks for the ton of info!

Yeah, I do have a plan for what's going to happen. I just wanted to see if this has been done before, and if it has, how good it was executed.

Here's what I had planned out so far. The enemy forces seem almost as if they're looking for something the good guys have, and when they don't find it, they kill everyone via the planetary bombing.

When this happens, the good guys begin to evacuate civilians from the colonized planets, in an attempt to save their lives.

Soon they find out they won't have enough ships to evacuate all the civilians, and some will be forced to stay behind. The hero's girlfriend, who was visiting him on that planet, hears about this, and then volunteers to stay behind (previously, the evacuation was just an excuse so I could make this vital scene occur, but the "nuking" thing fills that void perfectly).

The hero is forced to make a tough decision, force his girlfriend to board a ship and flee with him (he's a fighter pilot assigned to one of the fleets protecting the civilian ships, so he has to go with them regardless), or let her stay behind and possibly get killed by the enemy.

After they leave the planet, the hero's fleet and their allies receive a distress call from a friendly fleet requesting help. Now their forced again to make another tough decision, ignore the call, and attempt to flee the battle, or try and assist them to stop the enemy ships.

The catch here is that they've "cornered" one of the enemy's "superships", a really massive ship that's capable of bombarding a planet (aka it's the ship that nukes the planets). It's really tough to take down, as that one ship could take on an entire fleet of twelve battleships on its own, but they're constantly forced to make these tough decisions (this ship is also responsible for the hero's sister's death earlier, which is also a driving force that makes him join).

Btw, forcing my characters to do these hard things is good right? No matter what they decide, the results don't look terribly good, and the hero is forced to do things he would rather not do, but does them because he wants to protect innocent people.

I have been developing a storyline that will hopefully be entertaining as well as deep, with some hopefully cool plot twists (although they occur in later books, since I couldn't possibly fit this all into one book without making it very long).

The war, although important, is not the main focus. However, I'm trying to make it so that readers will have something enjoyable to read (nothing like watching two forces go at it and blow each other up lol), and if they want to delve deeper into the storyline, I want to provide that as well. As readers go into the story, they will discover more reasons as to why events are happening all around them (and I don't think its' as cheesy as the prequel Star Wars are). I hope I can pull it off.

[ChunkyC]

Sounds intriguing. I definitely think it's good to give your characters tough decisions to make, ones where there's no clear perfect choice. Good luck with it.

[katdad]

Reading thru these postings and your comments gave me some things to think about...

One problem with SF and Fantasy is that writers may forget that these characters are human beings. They may have their characters do unreasonable things or behave in unrealistic ways, because, after all, "It's only SF."

This is a mistake, of course. In creating an SF story, realize that the people are "real" and will therefore behave in ways that real people do.

I recommend this: Think about your story as though it was a WW-II story. Imagine that your characters are historic Americans or Brits or Germans or Japanese, and "test" your story that way. Then if it makes sense in a realistic way, you're okay with the SF setting.

Hope this makes sense.

[Pthom]

Think about your story as though it was a WW-II story. Imagine that your characters are historic Americans or Brits or Germans or Japanese, and "test" your story that way. Then if it makes sense in a realistic way, you're okay with the SF setting.I think that works fine as long as the story you're telling isn't very far in the future. One problem with it, however, is that people do change. I was about to respond to this by saying, "But the Romans or Greeks are lots different..." Meaning the wars they fought. But in some schemes, they are recent history--what, a couple of thousand years or so? We think pretty much the same way they did. I think there may even be some diaries from soldiers, describing the little guy's impression of war. Certainly there are written accounts of the reasons the wars were fought in the first place. Prior to that, things get a bit hazy, but I guess it isn't too much of a stretch to say that of any war we know of on Earth, they were fought by what amounts to "modern" human beings.

Now, Virginia ...

What if ... (don't you just love that question?) ... What if the story is about humans all right, fighting the war in space or on another planet, but that the events take place not a couple of thousand years hence ... but 30,000 years from now? I think a very good case can be made that those humans would behave in ways that to us would seem very strange indeed. Problem is, of course, that to them, their behaviour would be ordinary, expected, so to show that requires a way of telling a story that is NOT along the lines of WWII or the Peloponesian Wars, or the Huns or any other wars we know about.

Can you suspend disbelief in the reader doing so? That is the challenge, eh?

[Writing Again]

People who read already accept things about their fellow humans and other cultures that literally require a suspension of disbelief for people in our society.

We know about the Japanese samurai, which is fairly recent, yet we find it hard to accept that people would walk into a battle knowing their opponent was so skilled that they were going to be decapitated. Our society says, "What is losing face compared to losing your life?"

We find it hard to comprehend a society that marries 12 and 14 year old girls off to older men -- Yet it was done in the United States on a regular basis at the turn of the last century. In fact my grandmother contended that is why they did not have unwanted teenage pregnancies -- by the time the girls were "ripe" (her words) they were married and probably pregnant by their husbands.

I think people who read science fiction and fantasy, and fantasy in particular, are interested in cultures that think differently--The writer's problem is to make that culture consistent within itself.

[Flawed Creation]

Ivonia, please go read Mercedes Lackey's Black Gryphon.

virtually the entire book is about a war. virtually the entire book takes place in a one sides camp, far from the front.


there are regular reports on how the war is going.

it opens with the Black Gryphon on a mission, which ends unfavorably.

then we see the camp, and the Gryphons friends, mostly healers and Kestra'Charn (psychiatrists), wondering whteher he's died. he comes back. the majority of the book consists of goings on in the camp, among the wounded gryphons like the protagonist, the healers, cooks, wizards, and so on. there are a few brief scenes of action on the fronts, but the focus is on the developing romances and rivalries among the soldiers.