Choosing Your Battles

You get me two days in a row …

The other day I was writing a car chase scene with shots fired.

Now, I cannot begin to tell you how many times this very thing has happened to my husband and myself. There we are minding our own business when suddenly someone starts trying to run us off the road or fires bullets at us. I, of course, take the fully loaded revolver from the glove box and shoot back as the DH steers. Or I unlock the shotgun under the seat, rest it against the door frame and BLAST.

Okay, so it's never happened and yet here I am writing about it. Since it has never happened to me or anyone else I know (except, perhaps, Becky--maybe this is where she gets her loathing of all things icky, scary or violent!) where am I supposed to get the images that feed my eager little fingers? Yep, movies and television.

So, after I write the scene--which feels a little light weight to me--I make my way downstairs to cook dinner and actually stand for awhile (Yay!) and while puttering around, I turn on the television. They are running M*A*S*H reruns right now and I like them. The one that happened to be on that night was one where some of the characters make their way to the front. The FRONT, as in the line where the good guys and the bad guys do their best to blow each other up.

On the way back from the FRONT, bombs start falling around their Jeep. They dodge this explosion and that one until they leave the Jeep and take cover in a handy bunker.

A light bulb came on in my pea sized brain. I HAD AN EPIPHANY!

I turned to my husband and said, "So, which film better depicts the accuracy of a battle, Saving Private Ryan or MASH." He looks at me like I'm nuts and says, "Saving Private Ryan, of course." And I said, "Exactly. And it just dawned on me that I am writing MASH."

I know I'm not really writing MASH. What I'm trying to say is that I am depicting a gunfight or battle my characters are engaged in a sort of short-hand type manner. I am appealing to my audience who have grown up in the same culture I have grown up in, to call upon the images they have unwittingly stowed in their minds (just as I have) to follow my car chase and fill in some of the blanks because I am writing romance, i.e., I am writing about the characters, not the step by step dynamics of a car chase.

Currently, I am reading a police procedural series. The characters in this series investigate crime in a very methodical manner I imagine my police officer son would recognize. I like it, but I am more interested in why this character did this, why that characters said that, and are those two every going to realize they are meant for each other than I am the trajectory of every bullet.

There are many decisions to be made while writing and making poor choices throws the reader out of the book. If you are writing about horses and mention them chewing their cuds, almost any reader is going to throw your book against a wall and shout, "That's a cow, you moron!" You need to get the details right, but you also need to advance your story in a compelling way. That's one of many balancing acts we perform.

I think some of writing these kinds of scenes is instinct. We "see" the battle, for instance, in our head. We press down on the accelerator pedal. We hear the tires spinning. We see jouncing headlights as the car in pursuit hits a bumpy spot. We feel the heavy gun in our hand and the anxiety and fear that pushes its way up our throat. We imagine all this and report it as well as we can.

Or we come across a body. How many bodies have my characters found during the course of the past umpteen books? Many. How many have I found? Zip. I've seen dead people, but only those than died peacefully or once, in a bizarre visit to the morgue with my soon to be newspaper reporter daughter-in-law, those that died less peacefully but had already been cleaned up and sanitized. Of course, like millions of Americans, I am no stranger to violent death courtesy of film. So, again, I have images. And again, I choose which images to use with each incident.

And it changes from time to time depending on how important the character is to the plot, how important the means of death is, from whose perspective I use (a former cop is going to see things differently than a small child or an old lady and that goes back to individual perspective, a subject that fascinates me.)

Whether you write romantic suspense, mystery or straight romance, historicals, paranormal or YA, you are making heavy-weight decisions about what you show a dozen times a book, maybe a dozen times a page. And you are deciding at what level you are going to take realism. I guess I'm finally growing a little more comfortable with the fact that it's okay to use your imagination and depart from literal truth or from reporting every detail in order to make your action scenes come to life, trusting that your reader will travel with you and maybe even fill in a few of the blanks.

What decisions do you struggle with? Is it always instinct that guides your choices about how to best "shoot" a scene (like a film director might set up camera angles, wait for the right light, call in hair and make-up to make sure everyone in the scene is just right?) Any hints? Any troubles? And like me, do some of you who have been doing this for awhile find that it gets more complicated as time passes? And is that because we are willing to entertain more options or because we're getting (saying it ain't so) dumber?

I'm on the fence with that last one!