Why Do I Find Reading Battle Scenes Boring?

gothicangel · Mar 17, 2012

I'm currently reading Christian Cameron's The Killer of Men. I love the book, the characters and he really brings Ancient Greece/Persia to life. But when I reach a battle scene, I am bored to tears.

So, is there any reason for this? I love a good fight scene. I'm planning a book on The Jewish Revolt, and don't want to fall into the same trap.

thothguard51 · Mar 17, 2012

Have not read Cameron's work so I can't comment on the style, but perhaps its because the battle scenes are more distant in the telling?

robjvargas · Mar 17, 2012

I have a feelings that battle scenes are too "broad" to tell in prose with any real detail. There is so much action that you have to either spend too long describing that detail, or you have to gloss it over to keep the story moving.

Battles (I guess) are a visual thing.

Nimram · Mar 17, 2012

I have no advice but I could tell how I do it. I don't know if it's right or wrong but for me it feels right.
I look at the scene as a exercise on zooming in and out. Kinda like a film. Zoom out(low detail) to move the battle and the action forward, zoom in to give detail and make it believable.
The right balance between these two will give me a good battle. Of course, I have to do it through POV.

SomethingOrOther · Mar 17, 2012

You could be reading a battle scene that lacks good subtext and a compelling emotional arc. It focuses too much on the mechanics of the battle, and not enough on the characters and their emotions. When events tend to convey important subtext, you'll find a battle compelling even if it doesn't have much actual shooting and stabbing and dodging and killing ~~and sexing~~.

Mr Flibble · Mar 17, 2012

Because the style of it just isn't your bag, baby.

Sometimes, that's all it is.

leahzero · Mar 17, 2012

SomethingOrOther said:
You could be reading a battle scene that lacks good subtext and a compelling emotional arc. It focuses too much on the mechanics of the battle, and not enough on the characters and their emotions. When events tend to convey important subtext, you'll find a battle compelling even if it doesn't have much actual shooting and stabbing and dodging and killing ~~and sexing~~.

This.

Action without emotion is boring. It's spectacle for spectacle's sake.

Question · Mar 17, 2012

SomethingOrOther said:
You could be reading a battle scene that lacks good subtext and a compelling emotional arc. It focuses too much on the mechanics of the battle, and not enough on the characters and their emotions. When events tend to convey important subtext, you'll find a battle compelling even if it doesn't have much actual shooting and stabbing and dodging and killing ~~and sexing~~.

Seconded. Or thirded, I guess xD

I've skimmed a lot of battles, and I love anything to do with fighting. I just prefer it when there are clear personal stakes. It adds to the intensity. With too much distance a battle will eventually begin to drag... like any other kind of prolonged description.

gothicangel · Mar 17, 2012

SomethingOrOther said:
You could be reading a battle scene that lacks good subtext and a compelling emotional arc. It focuses too much on the mechanics of the battle, and not enough on the characters and their emotions. When events tend to convey important subtext, you'll find a battle compelling even if it doesn't have much actual shooting and stabbing and dodging and killing ~~and sexing~~.

I think this could be this. And this:

Because the style of it just isn't your bag, baby.

Sometimes, that's all it is.

FOTSGreg · Mar 17, 2012

He may be telling it in a historical style, as if lifted from the pages of the Oxford Encyclopedia Of Military History so it does not connect with individual characters or the reader in any emotional way.

Going in to such a book, you have to know what to expect. Victor Davis Hanson is a wonderful historian, but I doubt he'd make a great novelist is talking about the Spartan/Athenian war in the same language he does in his book A War Like No Other. Now, AWLNO is a great book, but many historical novels try to tell the battle stories in the same sense which is often dry and overly technical.

gothicangel · Mar 18, 2012

FOTSGreg said:
Going in to such a book, you have to know what to expect. Victor Davis Hanson is a wonderful historian, but I doubt he'd make a great novelist is talking about the Spartan/Athenian war in the same language he does in his book A War Like No Other. Now, AWLNO is a great book, but many historical novels try to tell the battle stories in the same sense which is often dry and overly technical.

I think you are right. Looking at the author bio, he's a navy veteran and a military historian.

Shakesbear · Mar 18, 2012

I know it is not your era Gothicangel, but have you read An Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer? Her description of the Battle of Waterloo was used by the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in lectures and for a time it was required reading. I've read other descriptions and found them tedious. Her version was gripping and painted a very vivid picture. Heyer's meticulous research gave her writing the authority of an eye witness.

EngineerTiger · Mar 18, 2012

Part of the trouble is that some writers try to write strategically. That is, they try to describe the entire battle top to bottom, all sides. This can work very well in visual medium such as the films GETTYSBURG or THE LONGEST DAY (which made for some difficulty in following events since it was from the perspective of everybody).

However, in fiction, it is very difficult to pull it off and keep the reader engaged with the characters. For individual people, combat usually narrows down to a personal experience as in, that guy's shooting at me, I'd better shoot back or get killed. Say you have a character in whom your reader is invested. You set up the battle from his perspective but then gallop across the lines to see what the enemy is doing. In most cases, your character won't have a clue and won't really care except where it concerns him personally. A writer runs the risk of historical prescience too. We know how Gettysburg turned out. Lee, his generals, and the Union forces didn't know those three long days until Lee finally slipped back to Virginia in defeat. Most of our knowledge of battle comes after the fact. After it's won or lost, and has been analyzed from multiple points. Even then, some discussions go on for years. Scholars are still fighting about the value of the Battle of the Somme for the British in WWI.

Consequently, in writing battles for historical fiction, it is better to keep it tactical with regard to each section. Otherwise, you run the risk of information dumping and losing the reader.

elindsen · Mar 18, 2012

SomethingOrOther said:
You could be reading a battle scene that lacks good subtext and a compelling emotional arc. It focuses too much on the mechanics of the battle, and not enough on the characters and their emotions. When events tend to convey important subtext, you'll find a battle compelling even if it doesn't have much actual shooting and stabbing and dodging and killing ~~and sexing~~.

Fourth

Gordon · Mar 18, 2012

Just adding to what others have said, perhaps, but, as an example War and Peace historically describes the Napoleonic Wars in unbelievable acuracy, from a military standpoint - what happened, and why. But most reading the monster-sized novel want to get back to the characters and the romance and admit to skipping huge chunks of the novel, when the military details overwhelm the narrative. Anyway, I admit it...

dawinsor · Mar 18, 2012

I learned a lot about battle scenes from listening to the commentary on the extended edition DVD of "The Two Towers." Peter Jackson and his writers talk about how they never stayed away from their main characters for more than a few seconds at a stretch.

Solunar · Mar 18, 2012

I think another difficulty with battle scenes is that, as the reader, we know the main character isn't going to die. Maybe a way to induce tension in a scene is to focus on a side character nearby so there's the possibility of them dying instead. There has to be stakes involved during the battle itself so the reader won't be liable to skip-skip-skip pages. This is where build-up beforehand comes in.

PorterStarrByrd · Mar 18, 2012

I also wonder, knowing nothing of your personal habits, if all of the battle video games that are played might be numbing readers to even well written scenes.

Then there are a much smaller number of readers who have any real world military background.

Are writers writing for a bygone audience.

gothicangel · Mar 18, 2012

PorterStarrByrd said:
I also wonder, knowing nothing of your personal habits, if all of the battle video games that are played might be numbing readers to even well written scenes.

That is an interesting thought. I haven't played a computer game in years. I was reading an interview of an actor, talking about how audiences seem to now have low attention spans.

Thanks for the Heyer recommendation.

DeleyanLee · Mar 18, 2012

Generally anything that is just a listing of actions and reactions is boring as dried spit. It's very easy to get into that when writing something like a battle scene. There's no sense of character, any conflict/story arcs seem to disappear when there's lots of action and reaction going on. It's one of the things that I've noticed that both battle and sex scenes share--the author focuses so much on who's doing what that they forget all about the internals that's what makes the interaction real/interesting to the reader.

GFanthome · Mar 19, 2012

Not a fan of battle scenes myself.

RichardGarfinkle · Mar 19, 2012

This may sound weird, but I find that a lot of battle scenes are complete stops in the action of a book.

If the action is the change characters are undergoing then the battle itself becomes an event that will later on change a character (as they get through the consequences of having been through it), but the playing out of the battle is only the precursor to the change.

A good battle scene to my mind has change happening on a scale that is both personal and army and/or nation sized. The armies and the people fighting should all come across as characters so the fortunes of war become the changes in something that the reader can care about.

Devil Ledbetter · Mar 19, 2012

GFanthome said:
Not a fan of battle scenes myself.

I tend to tune them out in both books and movies. A part of that is my aversion to gore (even reading gore is hard for me) and a part of it is I'm much more interested in the outcome of the battle than the fighting itself.

I find long battle scenes in movies especially boring and often fall asleep through them.

Phaeal · Mar 19, 2012

Gordon said:
Just adding to what others have said, perhaps, but, as an example War and Peace historically describes the Napoleonic Wars in unbelievable acuracy, from a military standpoint - what happened, and why. But most reading the monster-sized novel want to get back to the characters and the romance and admit to skipping huge chunks of the novel, when the military details overwhelm the narrative. Anyway, I admit it...

When Tolstoy pulls way back and describes the battles (and politics) from a historian's POV, they can get tedious. But when he's describing them from the POV of Andrei or Nicolas or Pierre, pow.

EthanJones · Mar 19, 2012

I'm not familiar with that author. My experience when reading fighting scenes is that the set up should be clearly described, so that I can follow the action. Also, this is not the time to break up the fighting with flashbacks or inner thoughts of the characters, when arrows or bullets are flying. Long battle scenes can also tire the reader. A lot of needless blood and gore also turns me off.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Ethan

Why Do I Find Reading Battle Scenes Boring?

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