After my last
Kali-related post, Lanth made a comment that I liked enough to save and answer in separate post. I didn't mean to wait 3 weeks to do so, but like all good questions, this one is timeless. Or something like that.:
Do you find with your experience in Kali that it's changed your book-writing ('the fantasy novel') at all? Have you introduced characters who are experts at particular styles you use, or changed some of the characters slightly now that you've experienced it more (ie someone who only ever used staves becoming someone who uses staves and daggers and swords when forced to)? Are the general fights now more thought-out to be realistic rather than appearing and sounding cool on paper (although I know it's hard to write realistically and describe it without losing the audience).
And following from that last patenthesised interlude, have you found that your writing in these blogs about kali all the time has helped you in your ability to describe battles/fights, now that you've had plenty of practice at struggling to convey your actual real-life experiences on 'paper' for so long?:
I haven't mentioned the fantasy novel lately, but it's going well. I'm definitely more than half finished, and I've recently figured out how the conclusion is going to come about. I've known the conclusion (and the brief, surprising, sequel-setting epilogue) for like 3 years, since the early days of my plot planning, but I also had a long list (and it kept getting longer) of interesting scenes and character revelations and plot twists that had to fit somewhere in the last third of the novel. I just wasn't sure quite where they would all fit, or how they would all fit together. I have them all mapped out now, and while they aren't 100% set, they're at least 90% there.
I'd end up making changes from the 100% version anyway, if I had one. I always do as I write it and get better/new ideas for how to arrange things.
That aside, the questions were about, 1) how Kali has influenced my writing about combat, and 2) how my blog writing about Kali has helped (or not) my writing about combat.
As for #1, I've stolen a great amount of stuff directly from Kali and stuck it into the combat in my novel, to the point that if I don't stick my Kali teacher into the acknowledgements, she'd have as good a case at suing me for royalties as Tolkien's estate would have had with
Terry Brooks bestselling fan fic. Not every character does Kali, and it's never called Kali, and no one character's fighting is entirely in the Kali style, but the influence will be very clear to anyone who knows them both and reads the novel. Hell, anyone whose read a few of my blog posts on Kali and then read the novel would see it.
It's not a huge change from what I'd intended to do with combat in the novel, oddly enough. I'd always planned on the old Necromancer character being a sort of martial arts master, in terms of moving sinuously, dodging and turning aside hits rather than hacking away like a knight in shining armor, using guile and technique rather than brute strength, etc. If I hadn't started doing Kali (almost a year ago) I would have had to just be creative and invent his style as I wrote it, and it's actually damn convenient that I'm now practicing a style myself that's very much like what I envisioned Quinoss using long before I'd ever even heard of Kali.
As for #2... sort of. I've always known that combat is very difficult to write about in the blow by blow style. Physical choreography is just hard to describe, whether you're writing about wrestling, boxing, sword fighting, sexual positioning, dancing, or anything else. A common lexicon is a great help, but you can't assume people have that with martial arts or any type of combat, though that depends largely on your audience.
I can write in detail about exact moves and counters and techniques and footwork about Kali, and have it perfectly understood... by other Kali students. For a while I was trading long emails about class with a fellow student, and she understood just what I was saying, since she had shared the experience regularly. Yet that same email posted here, or sent to my mom, would have been greeted with incomprehension. It's the same in sports writing; anyone with a level of knowledge about baseball, or basketball, or whatever, can understand a quick game summary, or a description of a great move. Imagine trying to write about a crossover dribble move with a 360 spin that ended in an alleyoop dunk and have it be understood by someone who doesn't know anything about basketball, though?
That's pretty much were I'm writing from with my novel.
I can assume people know what swinging a sword means, and an uppercut, or a downward slash, or a stab, or a block with a shield, etc. But if I want to describe detailed movements, say a slash thats pulled through high, then swung around over the attacker's head to a leg cut on the opponent, which bounces over to the other side of the neck for the kill... I've already lost most of you. And I didn't even describe the hip and shoulder turns of the attacker to give his hits speed and power, his hand position on the sword to turn the blade from side to side, or anything about how the defender was positioned, how he blocked the first hit, why he was too slow to block the second, and so on.
So I don't bother with that style of writing, much though I might like to do so. I envision every fight scene in the novel in detail, act it out sometimes standing up and moving around the room to do so, playing both parts in the battle, etc. I've even had Malaya stand still or hold an arm up or something from time to time, so I could see just how the other character would react or move or dodge. Unfortunately, very little of that makes it into words. Doing so would make every fight scene painfully long on the page (and take so long to read that the excitement and speed of it was lost), would confuse most readers unless they read it several times, and would give them far more than they needed or wanted to know.
I have far more interest in that sort of thing than most people, based on my ongoing martial arts training and sparring, and I try to keep that in mind as I write, so I don't get carried away. It's not an article for a martial arts magazine; it's a fantasy novel, and while I put in enough of the move-by-move details to let the reader know what's happening, and to give them an idea why one guy is winning and the other guy/girl is losing, I try not to go overboard. That's the theory, anyway. How well it works will be judged by others. Malaya's enjoyed the fight scenes so far, but she likes fight scenes, and she knows as much or more than I do about Kali, so she would get it even if I had far less detail. I'm curious to see what my mom thinks (she and Malaya are the only 2 reading the novel as I write it) since she doesn't have any kali experience. Will mom be able to follow the action and movement and style? Will it interest her, or will she wonder why I'm once again writing about how one character is learning to move sideways and backwards and to cut rather than slapping with her sword?
That reminds me; this is more about question 1 than 2, but the way I'm putting in most of the Kali stuff is from the POV of the character who is learning it and seeing how useful it is. So she's basically standing in for the reader, describing what she's being taught and giving her opinion of it. In this way I'm able to write more about the theory and style, rather than just having some guys fight and writing how one of them moves, which would involve a lot of physical detail of the type I said I'm not using, for reasons elucidated above.
So my short answer to #2 would be that writing about Kali on the blog has had little effect on how I write about combat in the novel, and if anything the blogging has reminded me of why I don't do much play by play style fight discussion. Now when it comes time to work on the screenplay... that will be full of physical action and movement descriptions. All of which will be ruined by some eventual rewrite, long after I've taken the money and washed my hands of the entire thing due to their insistence that the entire thing be set in 2206 on Mars, and feature at least three cyborg laser battles. But hey,
I'll be in good company, at least.
