reeealy long battle scenes

I'm about up to my first full on battle chapter in my book, and the heroes are going to rescue a special ops guy while 4 or 5 companies (that's 200-250 people) go in and actually steal back the captured airstrip.

So that's going to be a few thousand words of fighting. Also two chapters after that an entire city is liberated and tens of thousands of guys go in, so I will have a lot of intensive and fully equipped battles going on.

Does anyone have any tips specifically for long and/or big battles? Or do only the same rules apply? I would hate to write two entire chapters in 'short, crisp sentences'. =(

If it's a good battle scene, I doubt anyone will care that much. Not all battle, after all, is direct combat; and not all direct combat is composed of continuous actual fighting.

true, but it's completely action packed, and going to be the two most intense large scale battles in the book, so any tips would be helpful. I don't want to have to completely wipe the battle sequences, I want to be able to salvage most of it; getting into the proper rythem for writing combat can be tricky for me sometimes. If I don't get into it right all my fighting is beige. But if I get it right, oh it is so sweet. Hopefully I'll be able to clean up the draft without *too* much total scrapping of the sequences.

Studying Tom Clancy's work may give you a better idea of how to pen such a scene. If nothing pops into your head, make an outline, or God help you, a script. For the most intense moments, you also want to capture the most minute details, like programming a computer dummy how to throw a punch. A good way to describe Overcrank, without being too Purple Prose-y.

It's also a good idea to switch between different characters' viewpoints as a way of giving more of an overview. Focus too much on one of them and you run the risk of not describing the battle at all, focus on too many and it gets confusing. What I've found to work - for larger-scale battles - is to spend most of the time describing it as if you were watching from a top-down perspective, but then mix it up every now and then by placing the narration right in the thick of it and, as Mad Man said, going into detail.

I personally also like to make it a bit varied and such, so that you aren't repeating yourself. One thing I dislike about military fiction is if the sentences are structured like:

"The sergeant moved up to cover. He took out a grenade. He threw the grenade. The grenade exploded. Some people died. Then he got over the cover and went to kill more people."

It's hard but try to keep it varied (unique things happening through the battle, even if something is meant to be repetitive, you make the illusion of repetition, you don't actually repeat anything) and try not to describe every little action. Conservation of detail still matters in battle scenes, so if you already described a guy throwing a grenade in great detail, don't do it again.

^ Depends on the issue. If the grenade goes off relatively harmlessly, quib about the spectacle in prose and move on. But if it has better details (like if it was actually lethal on that throw) by all means go into the details.

Battle scenes are incredibly boring if you adhere to the Law of Conservation of Detail too much. (Or worse, utilize Beige Prose.) Grenades going off left and right makes for good spectacle but terrible storywriting if the reader/audience doesn't know who the fuck is throwing them.

I disagree Tom, but it's all about execution. Talking about ridiculous explosive potential going off all around the battlefield makes for a great sense of confusion, which is what a lot of people would have when trying to look at a battle.

Then again, the most recent battle scenes I've done were for World War One, so...

This might be my opinion talking, but you don't actually want every last sentence in an action scene to be short just because — that just ruins the texture of the writing, and encourages punch/dodge type action. You may want to cut out flowery language, and might not want to go over one comma per sentence too often, but you don't want to change everything just because it's an action scene.

When there's fast movements, in the heat of the action, or when you need some good emphasis — those are the sort of things that really deserve some super-short, punchy sentences. When someone is between fights, has gained some distance from the enemy, and is taking sweeping glances over the battle field, you can let up a bit.

Another thing to take note of is what the character is thinking about and feeling, something that seems to get lost in a lot of fight scenes. Use it to break up some of the action — maybe they're thinking about strategy, or the way their heart pounds, or what one of their allies is doing, or their injuries, or how the opponent is currently outclassing them, or the panic as they cut things a bit too close on a dodge. Sometimes this happens in the middle of the fight and needs to be really short, sometimes outside of the fight with a little more room, but ether way they won't have much time to dwell on it — sprinkle it in there carefully.

For long battles specifically… well, you need to focus a lot more on the tension, I guess. You can't have everything at 100% for an entire scene, even if you do want it to be a whole lot tenser than the chapter before it. Thoughts can break up the fighting a little, along as the character getting some distance from direct fighting, but there's also the dynamics of the fight itself to think about. A fight that the character seems to be winning, and winning easily, is a lot less tense than one where he's loosing and on his last leg. Same if he sees this stuff happening to his allies around him. You probably want a mix of those things, to make sure the tensest/most dramatic/best parts of this fight are exciting without getting tiring, which is something you're probably going to have to play by ear and tweak in editing.

You also probably want the scene after this to be really low-key or introspective, to offset all the action going on before and after it.

Well Conservation of Detail to me is more about describing what is important to you for the reader to... "imagine" in his head. I also still stick to the concept of multiple-purpose writing, that is, every line you write is meant to do more than one thing. Plot development, scene imagination, character evolution and so on. The more purpose you can give, the better the story feels.

So say you want to have a guy have a cool grenade throwing scene. If it's just that, I read it, it might be cool and then I move on. But you could describe it along with just enough detail so I get a sense of the person, his feeling, his anxiety or something. You give a quick background to the confusion of the battlefield but you want the reader to focus on certain things happening.

The above example with the grenade is obviously texturally weird, but there's another issue—it reads like it's written from the perspective of some invisible observer with a deficit in creativity. Write it from the perspective of the soldier—give some detail about what they're thinking, some sensory information other than sight and sound, and don't give the reader information that they couldn't reasonably have.

In truth, that would be shockingly minimalist for remotely modern infantry combat. To see an enemy fall, to actually know that you have personally killed someone, is rare enough to make it a noteworthy event.

There are too many things going on, too much noise, you're trying to keep moving, keep your head down. In most novels it would simply be covered as someone throwing a grenade into a machinegun nest and the gun stops firing for good reason; they don't actually see or know more than that.

Well, it's also kind of jarringly narmy. "Some people died." Right. Thanks for telling me that. Hence what I meant about sounding like an invisible observer.

hmmm. well modernish in a way, unlike current wars this one is more drawn out and not a curb stomp.

some really good points so far, thank you. almost done with the chapter before the airstrip one.