Jeepers. Deena, that's brilliant.

Anyone got any suggestions for how to improve my skills in writing action?

Dialogue I'm good at. Introspective narration, where I turn my viewpoint character loose and let him/her tell the story? Easy-peasy. Action is tougher. And the more removed the action is from my personal experience, and/or the harder it is to intersperse with dialogue or introspection, the harder it gets.

Any ideas? So far I've thought of analyzing action portions of my favorite books and pulling out my DVD collection and watching to see what kind of visual details most draw my eye.

Jeepers, Susan, I don't know, because I'm one of those certifiable freaks, a process-free writer. But I have found that putting myself briefly into the fictional shoes of the different characters and emotionally experiencing said action for a few seconds is a damned sight more effective for me than trying to just describe it as the Invisible Overlord of the book.

Not always comfortable, mind you, but effective. You wrote a drabble a while back, in which your heroine shot a French soldier and mangled it, leaving him alive and in agony. If you expand that scene and wear her muddied dress, what is she feeling as she sees him approaching, when she lifts the gun she was never trained to use, when the recoil knocks her back, when she hears him scream and fall?

We know that when her companion comes up and finishes the job, she falls down retching. But if you're in her shoes, what do you experience?

I guess it's a form of channeling.

Christ, Deena . . .

Thanks Susan and Deb. Working on being able to write like that all the time.

My most effective writing occurs when I channel a character as Deb describes.

eta: heh. I like that response from you, Connie.

Channeling a character - this can't be stressed enough - is not always pleasant. I had major trouble finishing Eyes in the Fire - the last eighty pages were so tough (my three main characters, well, it wasn't a happy ending), I went and lay on a beach in Hawaii because I'd start shaking every time I tried to write it. I came home and did it, but you can't just sit at a remove and play God: a book written with the emotions of the characters are, to my mind, the only ones worth reading. And that means breaking down a wall that aint always easy or pleasant to break down.

It's one of the reasons I almost never reread "clever" books. Oh, look, I can see the author, jerking the characters around rather than actually investing herself or himself in their lives, their feelings, their triumphs, their failures. No thanks.

Interestingly, the actiony drabbles I've written haven't been hard to write, and I think they've been pretty good. I think it's because they're so short that all I'm doing is jumping into the head of the character and describing their impressions. But when it's an actual scene and I have to do at least some set-up work just to show where everyone is and what they're doing, it turns all wooden and awkward on me.

Susan, awkward how? Is it a kind of impatience - a "shit, I don't want to bother with all this stuff, I just want to get right to it" deal?

Channeling a character - this can't be stressed enough - is not always pleasant.

Very true. It took me a long time a couple of years ago to realize the reason I was stressed and depressed was because of what I was doing to the main character in a fic in another fandom. I was trying to imagine what it would take to batter a personality to the point of surrender to another person's power--and not in a pleasant way, either. The character's despair kept leaching over. I never did finish the story, dammit.

Deena, that's a hard drabble to read for me. They had to resuscitate Hubby three times a few years ago. Miscalculation of anesthesia. Our hospital's policy is not to go for a fourth try. If my mind ran that way, I probably could have gotten a nice malpractice settlement out of them.

Susan, awkward how? Is it a kind of impatience - a "shit, I don't want to bother with all this stuff, I just want to get right to it" deal?

That, and my writing itself seems to loose all its polish and nuance. E.g., this week I've been drafting a scene from Jack's POV where he's part of the escort to a wagon convoy of wounded who are going to Lisbon so they can be shipped back to England, and they're surprised and captured by a larger French force that was scouting in the area. The key aspects of the scene are as follows:

1. Jack's commanding officer isn't competent to quickly organize a defense. Jack is.

2. Since I need to get the officer off the stage without actually killing him, I've got him on a nervous horse who runs away. But now that I think about it, having him severely wounded would work just as well and be more plausible, so I think I'll rewrite it that way.

3. There are two ladies in the convoy--Anna and an older officer's wife who's travelling with her wounded son. The other woman gets killed, because I need her offstage. Anna (who has decided that given the choice of being angry or freaking out, she'll take anger), once the shooting is over, gives the French commanding officer a piece of her mind in her best English schoolgirl French.

Those are the key pieces of the scene, and if I could get by with writing just that, I think I'd be fine. But I need to describe the terrain and how many French soldiers there are, and what the British do in their attempts to drive them off, and it reads terribly, like a report I might've written in middle school or something.

t ETA--off to take a shower. Back later.