Fight! Part I: What Freeze/Fight/Flight Feels Like

In Marie Brennan’s ongoing series on writing fight scenes, she mentions that her experience comes from martial arts and fight choreography. I thought that it might make a nice companion piece if I wrote a bit about how I approach fight scenes, since my experience comes from getting in actual fights. And from avoiding fights. And being in life-threatening situations that aren’t violent (car crashes, fires, etc.) I’m also going to pull from my experience talking to other people who have been in violent situations, but since there are confidentiality issues, I’ll either use generalities or change any identifying details.

A fight doesn’t begin with an exchange of blows, or even with the realization that violence is imminent. It begins with the past experience that the characters have with violence and the mindset that gave them.

Some people who’ve experienced a lot of violence decide that they’re going to die regardless, and get a “fuck it” attitude, take crazy and self-destructive risks, and, often enough, die young. Others decide that they’re going to survive. I’m going to focus on the latter mindset, since that’s my own and so I know much more about it. The ones who identify as survivors may also take what seem to be crazy and self-destructive risks, but they see it differently. They’re always calculating the odds, but the odds seem different to them than they do to people who have led comparatively safe lives.

A couple times I’ve gotten away from people who were trying to harm me by fleeing to an area too dangerous for them to follow me into – a thorn grove, a busy street, a field with unmarked wells. Which seems the more abstract and unlikely danger, another person who hasn’t actually done anything to you yet, or a well you can’t see from the ground, where someone your age recently fell in and drowned? A person who hasn’t ever had their life threatened would probably be more afraid of the well. An abused child would probably be more afraid of the other people. I had already gone into that field, found the well, and memorized its location specifically so I’d have a place to run to where no one would follow.

People who often don’t feel safe will seek out places, people, and situations which may also be dangerous, but in a way which seems more manageable. They may not actually be manageable – a gang, a parched wilderness full of dangerous wildlife, the abuser you know - but they’re familiar dangers which they’ve successfully faced before, and so feel comfortable. Survivor-types may not seek out objectively safe environments because, emotionally or intellectually, they don’t believe that there is any such thing. Better the devil you know than the supposed haven that you’re quite certain holds its own and unfamiliar perils. This is where the fight begins, with the baggage the characters bring to it.

The next step is the realization of danger. This is where the fight/flight/freeze reflex kicks in. These aren’t mutually exclusive, and you can cycle through all three. (My opinion is that everyone starts with “freeze,” but may stay in it only briefly.) Fight doesn’t necessarily literally mean “fight” – it really means “take action/go toward the danger.” Flight is “run/escape the danger.”

Depending on what sort of background they have, violence may seem comfortably familiar or a total shock. A character who is familiar with violence can still be caught off-guard (PTSD is a mental illness, not a super-power), but even if the moment of attack itself comes as a total shock, the concept of being attacked won’t. Those characters are likely to spend less time freezing in disbelief – though they may still freeze briefly.

Characters who are inexperienced and untrained may freeze indefinitely, caught in a loop of thought like, “He’s pointing a gun at me. He’s pointing a gun at me. He’s pointing a gun at me…” They may go into a dissociative state in which they feel as if the event isn’t really happening. I used to think that people chanting, “This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. This isn’t real,” was a movie thing, but no, people actually sometimes do that. They may still be stuck in that state for literally hours after the event. They may fixate on a single detail of the scene, such as the barrel of the gun (which may seem huge) and may literally be unable to see anything else, or to recall much else afterward.

Fixating on details can happen to anyone, but, again, more experienced people will tend to have a broader sense of what’s going on. They may still lose track of large portions of the scene. I have had my hearing shut off completely – I can see people’s lips moving, but I don’t hear what they’re saying. What that feels like is that the thoughts inside my head are so loud that they’re drowning everything else out.

I have found that my inner experience of danger is essentially the same regardless of the incident – whether three men have just stepped out of a dark alley and surrounded me, or whether the engine of my car has just burst into flames.

Step one is realization: the car is on fire. I’m being mugged. That’s a freeze reaction in the sense that I don’t move, but I’ve never had it last long enough to feel a physical sensation of being unable to move. That can happen, though, and when it does, it’s completely out of the person’s control. I think the purpose of freezing, though it doesn’t always work that way, is to give you a moment to take in what’s going on and decide what to do about it, and prevent you from leaping into stupid, counterproductive action.

Step two is the decision to take action. This can be very nearly simultaneous with the action itself, and feel like a reflex. Or it can take a moment. It can take a very, very long-seeming moment. For my sample walk-through of what this feels like, I’m going to use a dangerous incident that wasn’t a fight, because it’s my sharpest memory of the moment of decision. But it was very similar to what I’ve felt when people were threatening me, right before they struck or I did. Also, everyone has experienced some level of freeze/fight/flight, so hopefully this will demonstrate that you can extrapolate your own experience into quite different fictional situations.

( In which there is a car on fire )

That is what freeze-fight-flight feels like to me. Please share any of your own experiences that you’re comfortable sharing in comments.

Part II: Actual fighting!

I read this while I was at horse camp, where I found it on the shelf and picked it up because I had enjoyed some of Friesner’s comic fantasy when I was in high school. (She is probably best-known for the “Chicks in Chained Mail” series.) This was not comic. I read it in mounting amazement, recounted plot points to a fascinated coraa (coraa: “And then they ate her?” Me: “No, the cannibals show up later.”), and then promptly forgot about it entirely until it came up in conversation recently.

It is a feminist dystopia, which is a genre which has thankfully become less popular of late, but was relatively common up to about fifteen years ago. I’m not saying that it’s a bad genre. Many examples are good. But they are nearly universally awesomely depressing, often with addition Cement Truck depressingness slapped on to an already inherently depressing set-up, and if you read too many of them in a row, you will get the impression that the future is wall-to-wall rape, broken up by cannibalism, oppressive religion, slavery, and sex with horses.

(Before I go any further, I have to note that the book with horse bestiality is not only one of the well-written ones, but is, remarkably, not awesomely depressing. (Though it’s the second in a series of four, and the first one is.) The society of hard-riding lesbian clones for whom sex with horses is necessary to make the parthenogenesis work is surprisingly functional, and the characters even sometimes have fun. But it’s impossible to have a discussion about feminist dystopias without someone saying, “And then there’s the horse cock book!”

Those books are by Suzy McKee Charnas, and if you can get past the slavery and the horse sex, they are actually quite good. The third and fourth books are about rebuilding society, which is an unusual topic and one I like quite a bit.

The Slave and The Free: Books 1 and 2 of 'The Holdfast Chronicles': 'Walk to the End of the World' and 'Motherlines'

The Furies (The Holdfast Chronicles, Book 3)

The Conqueror's Child (The Holdfast Chronicles, Book 4))

I also read I Who Have Never Known Men, in which women are locked up for no reason, then an apocalypse happens and kills all the men, and then everyone mopes around until the heroine, the last woman on earth, ironically gets cancer of the uterus that she never used, having never known men, and commits suicide, and, of course, The Handmaid's Tale (Everyman's Library). Sheri Tepper practically made a career out of writing feminist dystopias.

I read all these because at that time it was more-or-less possible to read all the sf that was published that year or at least was available where I was, and I did. They did not make me feel like the future was anything to look forward to.

On to Esther “Chicks in Chainmail” Friesner’s cannibal apocalypse rape gang book!

The Psalms of Herod

( Spoilers contain rape, sacred blowjobs, rape, mutant women, rape, lost legs, rape, cannibalism, and rape, and an annual rape festival. And rape. )

These books were part of a fictional rape trend, especially in fantasy. If a female character had a dark secret, it would inevitably turn out to be rape. Even today, especially in TV and movies, a female character’s dark secret is typically rape. (If it isn’t, it’s probably child abuse or a Secret Baby.)

Why all the rape? In some novels, it's a lazy shortcut to trauma: what else bad could possibly happen to a woman other than something sexual? In a few, it's pure exploitation. But in the feminist dystopias, and in many other books, the thought behind seemed neither lazy nor sleazy. These writers are clearly deeply concerned about sexism. The ultimate expression of sexism is rape, so if you're writing a book about sexism... The problem, or one of the problems, is that while the intent of the books individuallly is to say that rape is bad, considered as a group, if practically every fantasy you read with a heroine has her getting raped, what tends to come across was that rape is inevitable.

I eventually made the conscious decision that my female characters’ dark secrets would not be rape, just so there would be some island of sexual safety in the middle of the sea of fictional rape. In my efforts to avoid it, I have resorted to everything from “my sister was killed in an accident and I blame myself” to “I killed someone in a fit of rage when we were both kids and I will never forgive myself” to “I became a cannibal to save my life (and I blame myself.)” I especially like giving female characters trauma which didn’t occur because they were female. Which is not to say that I’ll never write about rape ever. But probably not till I run out of other dark secrets.

On the other hand, Robin McKinley’s Deerskin is one of my favorite books of all time. So is Lois McMaster Bujold’s Mirror Dance (Miles Vorkosigan Adventures). I am a hard sell on fictional depictions of rape, but a soft sell on fictional depictions of trauma and healing. I’m less bothered by rape when that’s a large part of what the character’s journey is about than when it’s just lurking in the background or is a large part of what the setting is about.

One person’s deeply felt exploration of trauma and recovery is another person’s trashy exploitation, of course. But there is a place for rape in fiction so long as it exists in real life. That being said, I am rather relieved that I haven't read much written after about 1995 in which the apocalypse inevitably results in state-sanctioned rape, state-mandated rape, rape festivals, or roving rape gangs.

While writing a book review recently, I went off on a lengthy tangent about vomit in literature before deciding that it had little to do with that particular book, which was not a major offender, but with the sheer volume of vomit I’ve encountered in recent fiction.

I am not squeamish in real life – I’ve assisted at surgeries, I’ve seen crime scenes and corpses and revolting tropical infections, I have a pair of barfing cats – but, seriously? Authors! Why all the vomit? This is like a couple years ago, when every single new piece of media I picked up contained surprise incest. I feel like every single thing I’ve picked up recently contained surprise vomit. I liked the incest better.

It’s not that I object to fictional puking per se, though I would prefer that it not be described in detail. If a book has a bulimic character, or a seasick character, or a very drunk character, or a character with a vomit-causing illness, or a character who habitually vomits from anxiety, I expect and do not object to vomiting. I also don’t object when it’s relevant to the story (or funny).

However, it’s much more frequent for characters to vomit from pain every time they get hurt. Since I read a lot of action-heavy stories, characters in them naturally often get hurt, so there is a lot of pain and so a lot of vomit. I notice this both in published and fan fiction.

I get where this is coming from. Severe pain often causes nausea, and serious physical trauma definitely can result in vomiting. So there’s clearly some attempt at realism going on.

(Vomit, like piss, may also function as a signifier for "uncompromising gritty realism." But that's a whole 'nother rant which I won't get into here. Short form: more gross does not equal more realistic; "realistic" is extremely subjective.)

However, nausea does not invariably result in vomiting, and neither does injury. I have often been injured but have never thrown up as a result. I have been in severe pain quite a few times, once to the point where I was unable to hold a pen or walk unassisted. But I did not throw up. Just saying!

I didn’t pass out either. Never have. At times like those, if I am capable of analytic thought at all, I darkly suspect that fainting from pain alone, while definitely a real phenomenon, is also a form of wish-fulfillment. (And an easy way to make a transition to the next scene. I am guilty of this myself. Though more because I like the trope You Can Barely Stand. (Link goes to TV Tropes. Do not click unless you want to lose the next three hours of your life.))

I suspect that the basis for this is that acute pain, like other intense sensations (such as orgasm) is difficult to describe. So how do you quickly and easily let readers know that your hero is in that much pain? Have them vomit!

I sympathize. Really. I too find pain hard to describe. But vomit as shorthand for “hurts that much” is seriously over-done. I wish writers would figure out alternate ways of indicating how much it hurts. (Sadly, written fiction cannot resort to the very accurate pain scale – note that the link contains completely justified vomiting, and is also hilarious.)

While the physical sensation of pain is hard to remember, which I’m sure is also part of the problem, one can recall the events and sensations which surrounded the pain and use those for inspiration.

For instance, in the case I mentioned above (an ear infection which had started to eat into the bone), there were normal activities I couldn’t perform or had a lot of trouble performing: I had to be steered into the ER by a friend because I couldn’t walk without help. I couldn’t hold a pen or read the form they gave me to fill out. I could answer questions, but it took a lot of concentration to be able to understand what people were saying. I know this was from the pain itself rather than from other results of the infection, because I do all of those things within minutes of getting a shot of painkiller.

There were things I let slide or didn’t even notice that I normally would have been on top of: I didn’t ask the doctor what was in the injection he gave me. I had a heat pack that I had been holding to my ear during the drive which I only later discovered had burned me.

There are other people’s reactions, if anyone else is around: After I got a shot of whatever it was, I remember listening in on a conversation between two medical guys which had nothing to do with me, and giggling at something one of them said. He glanced at me and said, “Feeling better, huh? That’s the good stuff, all right.”

There is how invested you are in concealing the pain or carrying on despite it. Most action heroes are extremely invested, possibly except when they’re alone with trusted loved ones. But not all of them! I recently re-read Turner’s The Thief, which is an excellent, smart, and funny portrayal of a hero who is not at all concerned with hiding his pain and discomfort.

There are things you do to try to ease the pain. There are your attempts to distract yourself. There’s the attention you have to pay to individual movements if you’re trying to do anything. There are aftereffects. There are the things you do and notice when the pain goes away. In short, there are a whole array of actions and moments which are potentially individual and interesting, and will convey just how much your character hurts… without vomit. Or at least in addition to vomit.

My favorite writer for describing physical pain and everything around it is Dick Francis, who knew all about it. (He’s also very good with emotional pain.) If I feel procrastinatory motivated, I may pull some of his descriptions later for analysis.

The floor is open for discussions of pain, puking, and problems of description.

I have been thinking about swearing in fiction, especially sf and fantasy. Sooner or later, if I'm writing something of sufficient length, I have to decide on how much to swear, and how to swear.

- If you curse a lot, it tends to give the story a air of grittiness, which is fine... except that most of what I write isn't all that gritty. It's really more to do with tropes in fiction than reality - I swear a lot in real life, and I live a very quiet and genteel existence by fictional standards. But if I open a book and it sounds like an episode of The Sopranos, it does give me a sense of what sort of story the book is going to tell.

- If you don't curse at all, generally it's unnoticeable that you aren't cursing.

- If you only curse a little, each instance is noticeable and jarring, which can provide useful effects.

- BUT, some characters are not in-character if they don't swear.

And then there's the whole problem of non-realistic or even historical settings.

The problem with swearing is that it both conveys meaning and a jolt of emotion - anger, shock, fear, pain, the intent to shock or intimidate, or the sense that this is a character for whom or milieu in which swearing is casual.

(Meaning: it wouldn't be bad to call someone a cocksucker if there wasn't the idea floating around that sucking cock is bad and/or gay, and that being gay is bad.)

In non-contemporary settings, it can be incredibly tough to get across both meaning and emotion, because for readers, the emotion is tied very closely into the actual words they're familiar with.

Deadwood used completely anachronistic modern cursing because the real historical curses (which were mostly based on blasphemy, IIRC) "made the characters sound like Yosemite Sam." So they went for a completely non-realistic mode of speech which they felt more accurately reflected the shock of grittiness that the historical "dod-gasted" (or whatever) would have conveyed at the time. I'm not sure that was the only possible choice, but I think it was a perfectly reasonable one.

BSG's "frack" was probably the best sf TV curse, because it sounds so similar to "fuck" that it ends up invisibly conveying its intended meaning. If it had been a novel, they probably would have just said "fuck."

Invented sf curse words tend to not work for me at all in novels, as I generally wonder why the hell they didn't just use real ones and be done with it. Especially if they have no inherent meaning, but are just sounds like "Grod!" or "Vulp!" Those are guaranteed, at least to me, to both pull me out of the story by making me register just how contrived they are, and to sound silly.

On the other hand, words with meaning can convey a lot about a culture: "Shards!" actually did say something about Pernese culture. What it didn't do was convey the impact of a real curse. To me, those always tend to sound a bit quaint.

Thoughts? Arguments? %#%^%!!?

Here's the call for submissions. It's from Zubaan Books, an Indian publisher, and will be edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh.

Sounds promising! I know some people on my f-list are extremely familiar with the source (you know who you are); consider writing a story. You have until June 1.

Sestina tends to have a scary ring to it, and I imagine many fall back with a look of fright at the mere sound of the word. We all have, it's all right.

While looking up the rules for a sestina, I stumbled upon a marvelous set of essays on poetry, written by Vince Gotera for an introductory poetry-writing college class.

When I was growing up in San Francisco in the late Sixties, the everyday talk of my friends and me often transpired in black slang (now called African American Vernacular English by linguists). We would say, for example, "My lady be stylin." Roughly translated, this means something like "My girlfriend consistently dresses in an attractive and fashionable style."

Perhaps this sentence in black English may remind you of an often-quoted sentence, "The style is the man himself" (Comte de Buffon). Or it may not.

-From Style.

I’ve been collecting books for a book drive, and began a bunch of them to see if there was anything I wanted to read before turning them in. I tend to think of the first page or so as a writer's audition: grab me sufficiently with the sixty-second monologue, and I'll at least give you a chapter-long callback.

That was why I read Frozen Fire, which had a killer beginning that it completely failed to live up to. It also got me thinking about beginnings. Especially when I came across this one, from Sarah Miller’s Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn:

Like most girls, I want a lot. Fame and fortune. Equal rights. Shoes no one else has.

Two lines, and I already dislike it. It’s making boring generalizations rather than using interesting specifics (“I want fame and fortune” rather than, say, “I want to make the Olympic rifle team”), it’s making stereotypical generalizations about women, it’s making clichéd stereotypical generalizations about women (we’re all obsessed with shoes), the narrator (and probably the author) clearly thinks she’s witty but I don’t, and the book appears to be chick lit – a genre I dislike. It continues:

But I’d trade all that in for the Perfect Guy.

Of course! Most girls would trade fame, fortune, and the right to vote for a man! Book, meet wall.

I continued reading for a few more pages to see if that was really representative. Then I flipped to the end. As far as I could tell, it was completely representative.

Many of us who read also write. Sometimes the reader/writer identities are in accord, and sometimes not. Where I often see them split is over the question of how much of a book one needs to sample before deciding that one doesn’t like it enough to continue. Readers (and editors) frequently feel that as little as one paragraph, or in some cases one line may be sufficient. Writers (even if they’re also readers or editors) tend to feel that certain books (one’s own) can only be judged by finishing the entire thing. And possibly re-reading it. Maybe twice.

One can only accurately judge the entirety of a work by experiencing it in entirety, of course. But one can judge a part as a part, and often the parts reflect the whole. It’s rare enough, in my experience, for the parts to not be representative of the whole that I can name off the top of my head a list of books which regularly come with advisories to persevere past the beginning as later parts are sufficiently better and/or more comprehensible to make reading the beginning worthwhile, like Fuyumi Ono’s Sea of Shadows (the last quarter of the book makes the depressing slog of the first three-fourths worthwhile) or Dorothy Dunnett’s A Game of Kings (it starts making sense about 150 pages in).

(Manga and anime seem much more likely than single-volume novels to redeem themselves after slow or uncharacteristic starts. Since I think that has to do with the serialized form, I won’t get into that in this post.)

Authors often tie themselves in knots over the tendency of readers to make snap judgments based on beginnings. One unfortunate result is the plethora of books which begin with random action sequences that we don’t care about because we have no idea who the characters are, then do a 100-page “how the heroine ended up dangling from a burning helicopter” flashback. This is clichéd and doesn’t grab my attention. If the book is marketed as a thriller, readers know the action will begin at some point, so a non-actiony start, provided it’s otherwise interesting, is fine. Really. Likewise, urban fantasies need not begin with a magical prologue before introducing the heroine in mundane surroundings. Without exception, such prologues could have been cut without harming the book.

Writers often freak out over the thought of readers disliking the plot and characters in the beginnings of their books. This is because character change/growth and plot development/surprises are a big part of why many of us read, and so are the things which are most likely to be different at the beginning than they are by the end. Hence the fear that readers will put down a novel which begins with a boy being bullied by his adoptive family, and never learn that it’s really about a boy discovering that he’s a wizard and attending magic school.

I think most readers have more patience than that. Generally, they know the genre of the book when they pick it up, and will give it a little time before demanding helicopter chases or vampires.

What beginnings really demonstrate, and what they’re really judged by, is voice and authorial competence and choices. By voice I mean tone, style, prose quality, and sometimes dialogue quality—the gestalt of the way the words are chosen and put together. If I hate the voice at the beginning, I’ll probably hate it all the way through. In fact, I can’t think of a single example of a book in which the voice changes so radically from the beginning that it changed my mind about the book by the end. (Again, I’m not talking about manga or anime, in which I have had that happen. There's also an obvious exception for epistolatory novels or other instances of books with more than one and radically different narrators.) The tone (mood) may change, but that’s just one part of a much more complex quality. For instance, the tone of Lord of the Rings is much lighter at the beginning than the end, but it’s recognizably still the same voice.

A few books with particularly vivid voices are Orson Scott Card’s Seventh Son, Kushiel’s Dart, Little Brother, Lud-in-the-Mist, The Knife of Never Letting Go, and pretty much anything by Terry Pratchett. With all those books, you may or may not like the voice, but you’ll know whether or not you do from the very first paragraph.

By authorial competence and choices, I mean things like, “Can this author write a sentence that doesn’t make my eyes glaze over? Does this author have teenagers speaking like fifty-year-olds? Am I tripping over grammatical errors or clunky phrasings? Is there anything that makes me question whether the author has written a book I want to read?”

For an example of the latter (another book drive book, Deborah Lynn Jacobs’ Powers), the hero has diarrhea the first time we meet him. You’ve got to be a hell of a writer to pull that off, and preferably writing a comedy rather than a sexually charged psychological thriller about power plays between two psychics. Psychic kids! I wanted to read that book. But I couldn’t get past the diarrhea. (Okay, really I did. I got far enough to not be inspired to continue. But the diarrhea did make me instantly doubt my compatibility with the book.)

In an example of an authorial choice that didn’t make me stop reading but probably had that effect on some readers, Bones of Faerie opens with the murder of an infant. I think it’s safe to say that Janni knew some readers would stop right there, and that she was willing to lose those readers for the sake of writing the story she wanted to tell. Which is fine. Every book isn’t for every reader.

The flip side of “the readers will trust that the vampires will turn up eventually” is that while readers do trust in genre, what they don’t trust if they’re reading you for the first time is you. If the point of the sexist opening, for instance, was to set up some subversive feminism later, too late! I already hurled the book across the room. My feeling is that if you want to set up something in order to undermine it later, that thing should either not be actively offensive or off-putting as is, or else should be placed later, when you’ve already demonstrated, say, that the narrator is unreliable, or otherwise already established some reader-author trust.

So if any authors are taking notes regarding beginnings, my suggestion would be to worry more about voice and less about action and the establishment of genre. And also to avoid diarrhea. As in the real world, the relationship will go better if you don’t encounter it until you’re already thoroughly acquainted with and fond of the person emitting it.

I recently created a kind of Luddite prompt generator consisting of slips of paper in a box.

My first one: "An elegy for nine ghost rats."

I'm not sure that one's for me, so if anyone wants it, help yourself.

A community, blamerachel, has been created to support those brave and crazy folks determined to make the deadline (in two weeks) to submit to Sword and Sorceress 24. Ha ha ha!

Join us, join us! Especially if you've been jonesing for Yuletide.

Permanent panic level: BEARS.

I want to submit something to Sword and Sorceress 24. "Stories should be the type generally referred to as "sword and sorcery" and must have a strong female protagonist whom the reader will care about." http://mzbworks.home.att.net/s24.htm

Give me a prompt! Prompts can be anything from a word to a mood to a title to "in the style of P. C. Hodgell" to whatever, just not a detailed plot description.