Last week, I wrote on conflict, and how its necessary to drive a story. Now, you can write amazing stories where conflict is resolved in the courtroom, in conversations and arguments, or even in the operating room.
Sadly, I am not a lawyer, I’m a merely decent debator and I can write what I know about surgery on the back of a postage stamp.
In most stories, however, especially in speculative and adventure fiction, many of not most conflicts are going to come down to one method of resolution: a fight. There’s a shootout at high noon, a sword duel, fisticuffs, or an epic space battle. Someone wins, someone is defeated, likely wounded, possibly killed.
Most of us, however, have no more been in, say, an epic space battle, than in the operating room. A little bit of research can help make up for that. Unless you’re very much changing the rules for your story, by and large space combat is going to be run by Sir Isaac Newton. Many various ways a human can break another human or introduce them to sharp bits of metal have been studied and invented over the years.
I myself am a dabbler in martial arts, fencing, and more than a little bit of rocket science. All of these, at various times, have come into play my writing combat.
But what happens when you’re writing, as I am for several of my stories, duels between mages, or superhuman mystic warriors? Or that aforementioned epic space battle where you have changed the rules of physics with some form of phlebitonium?
Well… that last sentence on the space battle gives it away. In the regions where you step outside human experience and can no longer rely on research… you’re creating the rules, as part of your world. Hopefully, by the time you get to a fight, you do know the rules of whatever is different.
If you’re writing the rules of engagement, then the engagement follows what you think to happen. Be consistent, be clear… but make it what you see in your mind and don’t worry too much about correctness – we’re into the region where no one can you what is wrong, because no one else really knows what the rules are.
Obviously, if you can do research, do it. I speak as an informationophile who can’t know enough, really, so research is no real burden to me. Research if you can, fudge it a bit where necessary (a few of the right words can go a long way) and when you step outside what you can research… remember that you’re the one writing the rules in this fictional world.
Glynn Stewart
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