Writing Fight/Battle Scenes: Accuracy or Entertainment?

gothicangel · Jun 11, 2012

I was reading an interview with Manda Scott, and came across this comment:

MCS: Battle is savage. I’m really not keen on the “Boy’s Own’ versions of history (and women write them as often as men) the hero sweeps out his sword and decapitates his enemy, cuts a swathe through the dirty natives and races off to find his woman. Life isn’t like that. Death isn’t like that. Battle isn’t like that. It helps, probably, that I spent a decade or so as part of a re-enactment group and fought most weekends when I wasn’t on call. Like rock climbing (which I did when I wasn’t fighting), battle feels entirely real and entirely dangerous. There may be a small part of my awareness that tells me that I’m not going to fall to my death (probably, if the equipment holds) if I let go of this ledge, or that the man opposite me with the axe is not going to bludgeon my brains out (probably, if he doesn’t go into battle rage, which is all too real, and if he’s practiced enough to know how to pull his shots) if I don’t kill him first…. But the other 99% of my awareness is absolutely convinced that I have to cling to the ledge and I have to kill the screaming Viking/legionary/knight who is coming for me with his dane axe/gladius/broadsword.

SO I know the mechanics, I know the terror, I know what it is to stand in a shield wall and have to hold it against the bersekers and I know what it is to be bare sark (more or less) and to be trying to break the wall. I’ve been in battle rage and I’ve been on the wrong end of battle rage; my helmet has the dents to prove it. I’ve had an arrow in the eye (it was a blunt, for which I am immensely lucky) and I’ve had concussion. I’ve had bruises that took weeks to fade, but I’ve never – yet- broken anything. Battle is hard and grim and difficult and terrifying – and absolutely life-affirmingly wonderful. And the key is: if you think you can win, you probably can… right up to the point where you meet someone else whose belief is the same as, or greater than, yours. Then you find out who has trained the harder, who can think the faster, who has the gods, the sun, the ground, the light, on his or her side.

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/interview-with-manda-scott-by-louise.html

So I started to think. Now I've been at many a re-enactment event. And what battle really seems to me is the victor is the guy who can bludgeon his opponent the fastest. That's what real battles are about. But my contention is, in fiction that would would not come across as entertaining. I love a good bit of 'boys-own' sword-play, mixed with the real life jeopardy of a blade almost getting you. And that's what we do, it's artifice, a hybrid of entertainment and realism.

If I were to write an historically accurate Roman battle, I can guarantee the majority of the readers would give up. I know I would, because it's not entertaining unless you are a military-fan. I know I get bored because the Romans where so bloody good at it, and I'm only really interested in the stories of when they lost.

And after all [even those who are re-enactors] just playing at soldiers? I know I am. I have great respect for Christian Cameron has had a career in the military and he truly knows the jeopardy of battle, while the rest of us just try to imagine it, and that is what shines through his writing.

So I say, entertainment first mixed with realism. But I don't think I would ever lay claim to be writing 'realistic battle scenes,' but I hope they are entertaining and thrilling.

Dave Hardy · Jun 11, 2012

I find a lot of adventure fiction begins just AFTER the big battle. Preferably with the hero's side having been slaughtered to a man (except the hero). That way he has to be on his own, trying to solve the problem of the plot.

DianeL · Jun 11, 2012

In a way, the question isn't so much "realism versus entertainment" as it is "what propels the story?" Since, to my mind, storytelling is indeed at its core meant to be entertainment, no, I don't write my own battle scenes with a hawk's eye to every last precision detail, but then I don't write ANY scene that way. Writing the coronation, I studied ancient rites, but to replicate one to each moment's detail would not only be not-entertaining, it would be pointless. Likewise the marriage ceremony, the attendance of labor and birth, the finest points of architecture, costume, law, etc.

Research is supposed to be an iceberg. If you use 100% of what you learn in your research, you are no longer telling a story nor entertaining. 10% should show - as little as possible. World building isn't supposed to be done to the micron, whether that's a battle blow-by-blow or the detail of a child's funerary gifts.

My novel at one point began with a great setpiece battle, King Clovis' first foray onto any field. It was a great scene - but one of my loyal readers said to me, "this book doesn't begin until he's king." I deleted 60 pages with a song in my heart - the feedback was dead on, and no matter how good the scene was on its own terms, it didn't propel the story. It had to go.

Another battle scene is that in which Clovis finds victory on a grueling battlefield, when he is losing through most of the engagement. The turning point comes with a prayer. So this scene's content is necessarily focused on something beyond the gritty details of ax and injury.

Every scene has to accomplish something, to move the story. The battles have to go from point A to point B, and whatever the thrust is between these points will inform the tone and depth of detail.

gothicangel · Jun 12, 2012

I think I need to re-phrase.

What I was attempting to get at, was how far can we take realism in writing fight/battle scenes? To me it will always be artifice, there will always be a separation between the realties of being in a battle, and the necessity of entertaining [maybe that's the wrong word] the reader. I do agree with Diane about story and character, and that this should come first.

I also think Scott's argument about doing re-enactments, allows her to know what battle feels like. It gives her an idea of what battle must be like, but unless she was serving on the frontline in Afghanistan or Iraq, she can't 100% put herself in that position.

I've seen re-enactments, they are fast and more about battering the opponent than skill. And what I want when I read is a battle with a little skill, a little boys-own unsheathing of a sword [no pun.]

As I said before, all we are is playing at soldiers. To think otherwise is disingenious to say the least.

mayqueen · Jun 12, 2012

Interesting. I think you have to walk a fine line between accuracy and entertainment. I roll my eyes and stop reading books with those boys-own scenes in them. Not interesting to me at all and not accurate. But I also roll my eyes and skim over books (I'm looking at you, Bernard Cornwell) that go on and on about the terror, the camaraderie, the strategy, the whatever of the battle.

It comes down to that truism of writing: show, don't tell. I want to follow a character into a battle scene and realize that character is scared, is trying to survive, is using whatever period weapon or tactic in whatever period appropriate way, without being spoon-fed.

While I appreciate what re-enactments can do, I'm with gothicangel on the realism piece of it. I used to attend Civil War re-enactments and I research a lot of Anglo-Saxon/Viking living history groups to get the mechanics of my battle scenes technically correct. But I have never actually fought for my life, and I have no idea what that's like. And I'm skeptical that the most authentic re-enactment could never give me that.

That said, I think the most successful ones I've read are ones where I am actually convinced I don't know who is going to win and who is going to lose, even if it is a famous battle I know about.

Flicka · Jun 12, 2012

I never thought of it that way. I mean, no, I never fought in a battle. But then I never starved, killed or gave birth either. I'm winging it when I'm writing about those things as much as I'm winging being in a battle. And why would realistic accounts be boring? I have read lots and lots of accounts by real life soldiers from a variety of conflicts. They're rarely boring. I've found find plenty of examples of heroics and crazy stunts in real accounts as well, as well as shocking sang froid so I don't at all think a little of that is necessarily unrealistic. To me, personally, reading the stories by people who've been there just seems a better way of gaining insight into what it's like than putting on a helmet and (pardon) playing war.

Anyway, I have to say the approach, focus and general take on fighting are very different between the accounts of different individuals, but one thing that I've noted as is how 'normal' fighting seems to turn into for most of the veterans. Is there a term such as 'battle ennui'? Some surely seem to be suffering from it.

Me, I'm mostly fascinated by the stories behind the battles - the foraging, the marching, the women and children plundering the dead bodies after battle... Somehow horrid is more horrid when it's coupled with the mundane for me.

Dave Hardy · Jun 12, 2012

I don't think accuracy is incompatible with good writing and drama. That is I don't THINK so, as I never was in a battle.

There's hack-n-slash drama, which has been around since the Iliad or earlier. I like a good shoot-'em-up. But it's not the only way to write.

Take a look at The Taking of Montfaucon by James M. Cain. It's just about a courier trying to get to HQ across a battlefield. Cain served as a courier in WWI and the story is believed to be roughly autobiographical. So you can ask how much is Cain fictionalizing and how much is him simply telling it as he remembered.

You could ask how true The Red Badge of Courage is. Apparently Ambrose Bierce didn't think much of it. BTW, read A Son of the Gods or Chicamaugua, and think on just how much Bierce saw and remembered to put in his fiction. It's not light entertainment, but it's damned compelling.

To go back to shoot-'em-ups, I do think there's a risk to the John Wayne/Green Berets/Sands of Iwo Jima type of story. I love those movies, and I love America, but that ain't war and I wouldn't ever claim they were accurate. It's just a different thing.

I do think the thriller/shoot-'em-up works better on an individual level. I believe readers quickly get bored without a strong individual center, the mass death may reinforce the peril and tension, but it has to come back to that person.

I think that need for an individual center to relate to is true in more serious fiction, and in memoirs. I've read the Marquis de Segur's account of Borodino where thousands are mowed down in seconds. And I've read Nadezhda Durova's account, which is basically how she rode all over delivering messages. Durova sticks with me more, though it's nowhere near as violent an account as Segur's. But Jakob Walter's account of the retreat from Moscow is the most harrowing of all I've read, and his story is just his singular view of events.

As a random thought, I do think to write about war or battles, you need to study your era. But you also need to look at other eras. Whether it's Ammianus Marcelinus, Ambrose Bierce, or Richard Tregaskis they all have something to say.

DianeL · Jun 12, 2012

It may not be fair for me to even respond here; though I've written my share of battle scenes now, I still pretty much hate them. For me, as crucial as a battle scene can be, dramatically speaking they *usually* boil down to a literary football match, the only real tension being "who wins" - yes, even with all the action, peril, and incident on the virtual field. This is a personal prejudice, and I know it, so I probably should not have responded at all.

That said, Flicka puts VERY well those things that actually do create tension for me - it's those things perhaps not directly resulting from a sword's blade or bomb blast which seem to have the most weight in a scene, often as not. So accuracy on the mainstage goes hand in hand with the accuracy of, say, the medicine being practiced in a tent at the rear, or the agricultural aftermath of a battle (the description of how rich soil may be even a generation after an exceptionally mortal engagement - because of all the corpses which fell there, is an enormously unsettling, and yet even hopeful, fact).

Accuracy in the mechanics is hugely important, and no small part of my own hatred for battle scenes is the amount of work I had to put into my own, resenting it like a student on a hard assignment the whole time. There's no reason correctness should be antithetical to entertainment, certainly (and it does shut up those guitarists at the back of the bar, which can be important with historical fiction). But not *everything* that's correct is entertaining; I guess the best way to balance how much detail really serves the story is to have good readers, whom you trust, to read it. Multiple readers. Brutal ones.

Cutting the battle is probably as hard as writing it is!

Eddyz Aquila · Jun 27, 2012

Battle scenes are actually quite tough to write, if you want to do them by the "textbook" and hook your reader right up until he wants to rip the pages for not having more.

On a more serious note, if you're a military buff and you know all of the details, selecting those said details and dripping them where it's necessary can make really good action scenes. Make them well, and even the most uninterested person when it comes to the military will be definitely enjoying the battle part.

Jamesaritchie · Jun 28, 2012

I don't buy your hypothesis for a second. Entertaining is how well you can write, and this has nothing at all to do with being inaccurate. The best battle scenes are ALWAYS historically accurate, and a good writer can, and does, make a battle scene both entertaining and accurate.

If you lack the personal experience, then you don't just make it up the way you want it to be, you use the experience of those who have actually gone through it, whether it's that of a contemporary soldier, or the historical accounts of ancient warriors.

You want me to throw your book against the wall, write purely for entertainment, but without getting the facts right. Battle is a hell of a lot more than who can bludgeon the other person the fastest, and the detail of how it really is makes anything entertaining, if you're a good writer.

Research is a good writer's friend, and knowing how to make something both entertaining and accurate is a big part of a good writer's job.

Eddyz Aquila · Jun 28, 2012

Agreed with what James has said above. If you do your research well and you write it well, for sure the reader will be interested/hooked on the battle scene.

donroc · Jun 28, 2012

I placed my historical MC in Rocamora at the Battle of Nordlingen, 1634, whether he was or not, and added a fictional painting of it by Velazquez, later destroyed in an historical fire. The experience helped his character to evolve.

gothicangel · Jun 29, 2012

Jamesaritchie said:
I don't buy your hypothesis for a second. Entertaining is how well you can write, and this has nothing at all to do with being inaccurate. The best battle scenes are ALWAYS historically accurate, and a good writer can, and does, make a battle scene both entertaining and accurate.

If you lack the personal experience, then you don't just make it up the way you want it to be, you use the experience of those who have actually gone through it, whether it's that of a contemporary soldier, or the historical accounts of ancient warriors.

You want me to throw your book against the wall, write purely for entertainment, but without getting the facts right. Battle is a hell of a lot more than who can bludgeon the other person the fastest, and the detail of how it really is makes anything entertaining, if you're a good writer.

Research is a good writer's friend, and knowing how to make something both entertaining and accurate is a big part of a good writer's job.

Erm, my thesis wasn't anything to do with historical accuracy. It was actually about vermisilitude, and how close those of us who haven't been in a military role can expect to create 'realism.'

My favourite writer of battle scenes is Christian Cameron. I don't believe it is a coincidence that he is an ex-military man, and ex-military intelligence officer.

As I've said already, I think claiming that I'm doing anything else but playing soldiers, would be a dis-service.

gothicangel · Jun 29, 2012

DianeL said:
It may not be fair for me to even respond here; though I've written my share of battle scenes now, I still pretty much hate them. For me, as crucial as a battle scene can be, dramatically speaking they *usually* boil down to a literary football match, the only real tension being "who wins" - yes, even with all the action, peril, and incident on the virtual field. This is a personal prejudice, and I know it, so I probably should not have responded at all.

That said, Flicka puts VERY well those things that actually do create tension for me - it's those things perhaps not directly resulting from a sword's blade or bomb blast which seem to have the most weight in a scene, often as not. So accuracy on the mainstage goes hand in hand with the accuracy of, say, the medicine being practiced in a tent at the rear, or the agricultural aftermath of a battle (the description of how rich soil may be even a generation after an exceptionally mortal engagement - because of all the corpses which fell there, is an enormously unsettling, and yet even hopeful, fact).

Accuracy in the mechanics is hugely important, and no small part of my own hatred for battle scenes is the amount of work I had to put into my own, resenting it like a student on a hard assignment the whole time. There's no reason correctness should be antithetical to entertainment, certainly (and it does shut up those guitarists at the back of the bar, which can be important with historical fiction). But not *everything* that's correct is entertaining; I guess the best way to balance how much detail really serves the story is to have good readers, whom you trust, to read it. Multiple readers. Brutal ones.

Cutting the battle is probably as hard as writing it is!

Great post, thanks.

DianeL · Jun 29, 2012

gothicangel said:
Great post, thanks.

Thank *you*, gothicangel!

Radzeer · Jul 21, 2012

I think accuracy is required, maybe not absolute accuracy but a reasonable one. Think about those Hollywood movies that fail miserably on such accounts (typically those about the medieval era or antiquity using unfitting weapons or tactics). If the reader can sense that battles did not happen that way, the writer will lose credibility on other things too.

gothicangel · Jul 25, 2012

Radzeer said:
I think accuracy is required, maybe not absolute accuracy but a reasonable one. Think about those Hollywood movies that fail miserably on such accounts (typically those about the medieval era or antiquity using unfitting weapons or tactics). If the reader can sense that battles did not happen that way, the writer will lose credibility on other things too.

Ah, yes. My favourite being the opening sequence of Gladiator, with the Roman army fighting hand-to-hand combat.

I've just written a scene where my MC makes to stab an opponent. I though it was move appropriate for him to angle the knife like a soldier in battle, so upward angle intended to gut the enemy.

Raula · Jul 25, 2012

For me personally, I have to really love a character to follow them into battle. For example (and I seem to be using GoT a lot lately as my examples, but oh well...), I skim read the first half of the Blackwater Bay in Clash of Kings because it was from Davos' perspective, but I was gripped in the second half because it was from Tyrion's. I really had come to love that little character by the end of the book and I genuinely felt his pain in that battle as a result.

I agree with Dave about it's the 'what comes after' that is so interesting. Battles are lovely moments to let off steam in the middle of storylines, but I am far more interested in its build up and consequences. Nobody ever decides to go to war for boring reasons.

Maxx · Aug 1, 2012

donroc said:
I placed my historical MC in Rocamora at the Battle of Nordlingen, 1634, whether he was or not, and added a fictional painting of it by Velazquez, later destroyed in an historical fire. The experience helped his character to evolve.

Nice. Nordlingen is a good pick. Not a generic, set-piece text-book battle but a nightmarish mess. Just about any detail you could add would have to be accurate (the steep slopes, the entrenchments, the two Ferdinands, the long and successful stand by the Spanish infantry ( the feared "Tercios Viejos" to quote Wikipedia) against the crucial Swedish attack.
And the Rubens with its jaded-looking river god motioning allegorically at the scene.

Maxx · Aug 1, 2012

Jamesaritchie said:
I don't buy your hypothesis for a second. Entertaining is how well you can write, and this has nothing at all to do with being inaccurate. The best battle scenes are ALWAYS historically accurate, and a good writer can, and does, make a battle scene both entertaining and accurate.

This is not always considered to be the case, at least by people who really were in battles. One supposes if you were in enough battles they began to look pretty dull. The notorious Serbelloni always thought nothing in a battle was as interesting as a good cup of hot chocolate and moreover, for example, there is a generally reliable memoire by an Austrian regimental commander that fabricates a council of war involving Lucchese, Daun and the Prince of Lorraine before the Battle of Leuthen that proports to explain how things could have gone so horribly wrong as they did, though it never happened. And of course, ancient historians and their emulators always fabricated rhetorical moments for their heros. The only really plausible one I can think of involves Ceasar rallying his men with obcene gestures with a pickle.

Maxx · Aug 1, 2012

gothicangel said:
My favourite writer of battle scenes is Christian Cameron. I don't believe it is a coincidence that he is an ex-military man, and ex-military intelligence officer.

As I've said already, I think claiming that I'm doing anything else but playing soldiers, would be a dis-service.

I haven't read Cameron, though he looks promising. My standard for battles remains O'Brian whose qualifications for battle-prose might be no more than that he drove an ambulance in the London blitz and married a (as his second wife) woman whose first husband was a world-famous divource lawyer.

gothicangel · Aug 1, 2012

Maxx said:
I haven't read Cameron, though he looks promising. My standard for battles remains O'Brian whose qualifications for battle-prose might be no more than that he drove an ambulance in the London blitz and married a (as his second wife) woman whose first husband was a world-famous divource lawyer.

Interesting, I will take a look at O'Brian.

*My grandfather was a firefighter during the war in Newcastle, so I know a lot of stories like that.

ishtar'sgate · Aug 2, 2012

I don't think a battle scene needs to have blow-by-blow accuracy. I'm with you, it needs to be entertaining and if you're dealing with historical battles there is usually much more to them than the simple gore of one man bludgeoning or running through another no matter how skifully.

I wrote about the battle of Crecy in my novel and concentrated more on the big picture. For instance, how mounted French knights had pressed in too hard on the Italian archers in front of them so that when the archers tried to back up out of range of the English longbows, the French thought the Italians were being cowards and trampled them and began to charge in a completely disorganized mess. I also used an interesting character, the blind king of Bohemia, who'd had himself tied to two other knights so they could ride with him into battle. All three died on the field.

You don't need to know a lot about exactly how men used their weapons or engaged one another if that's not what interests you most. Some people like to write and read about it and some don't.

Maxx · Aug 3, 2012

ishtar'sgate said:
I don't think a battle scene needs to have blow-by-blow accuracy.

Another problem is that you can be completely accurate and totally unbelievable. For example, apparently (as at Agincourt), an un-armored man with a big hammer who is well-rested can slaughter exhausted men in armor. Unbelievable but true.

Another: the muzzle velocity of a gunpowder-powered smoothbore musket is 50% greater than the muzzle velocity of a gunpowder rifled musket but the rifled musket is much more accurate.

And there are plenty of even less believable things that are totally accurate.

Susan Lanigan · Apr 20, 2013

I've had to write a few battle scenes due to the time period I've been working in.

I've always had to make notes. Pages and pages of them. Often as long or longer than the scene itself. The events are the bass line, then there is the sole tenor of one person in the midst of the fight, then add a few more vocals, then the soprano and alto of the great emotions roused by the battle itself.

Victory and defeat are less important when the outcome of a historical battle is uncertain. Unless they are plot-relevant who won or lost isn't that big a deal, really.

Writing Fight/Battle Scenes: Accuracy or Entertainment?

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