Anyone have any good advice on writing a big fantasy battle scene? I'm talking sword on sword, charge at each other, Lord of the Rings kind of action. I'm about to start writing my big battle scene and am hesitating. I need some inspiration, some advice, something to help me get writing. A big part of my hesitation is due to the fact that its not just human vs human battle. It's humans mounted on unicorns, hellhounds, big saber-toothed tiger type cats, big bears, and wolves. Then there's the aerial units- pegasus, hippogryphs, gryphons, etc. And all this against a bunch of big nasty demonic-type creatures. I don't want to go into too much detail bc it is the big end scene for my novel. Ugh, I'm finding this hard to put into words. TL-DR - Read any good fantasy battle scenes that you can recommend? Any great aerial battles between mythological creatures that you could point me towards? Any writers advice books regarding writing battle scenes? Any advice from any of you on how not to get overwhelmed and bogged down in the details of a big battle?
I feel like there is one in the second "Red Queens War" book but I don't remember offhand. I haven't read one in a while. Maybe it's an issue of really going deep and anchoring yourself to the POV of a character, rather than imagining the battle as one of those panoramic movie scenes. Battles can last a long time, so you can use telling sentences to skip forward as things happen, so long as they stay anchored in the characters thoughts, and get you back to moment to moment action.
Hello friend. While I don't remember any particular scene in a book to advise you, watch this video. Maybe will have the answers you are looking for.
I deleted my examples because what use it a first draft off the cuff example, but imagine the battle through the eyes of an archer standing in the middle of a battle formation after hearing the call to arms, getting out of his tent, and lining up with his flag. How much would he see? How much would he even know about the situation? Compare that to the King, sitting on his dragon, on his mountain, ordering flanking maneuvers twenty minutes in advance and watching the enemy battle formations like a football coach. It's a different scene.
Some hints: 1. Make some big decisions about what you are writing and what not first. - How realistic as a battle? - Where is your focus and how you shift it? (Individuals <=> operations <=> tactics <=> strategy, leadership vs. common soldiers...) - Writing style. 2. You can copy your strategic and tactical things from any chess game. Just change the pieces to units. 3. Pay attention to logistics before and during that battle. 4. Pay attention reconnaissance before and during battle. 5. Read Sun Tzu. 6. Read about motti tactics - also about it's weaknesses. 7. Read about maskirovka. 8. Watch Yuri Bezmenov and Philip Karber from Tubestan. 9. Think... Heavy artillery is the Ruler of the Battlefield. What and whom is/are artillery of that battle. 10. Holding the high ground is important. What is the high ground in that battle? 11. Air superiority is key to success. What is your air force? 12. 3:1 ratio. 13. Spies. How they use them. 14. Fog of war. 15. Use your troops the way they should be used. 16. They fight like they train. Pay attention to developing training methods before the battle if you want the fight to have any tension. And it is a way to foreshadow.
I've been in medieval battles with about 1000 people on both side. The POV of a combatant varies a lot depending on role and circumstance. If you're on the shield wall, you can see as much as anyone until the enemy comes close, and then you're down behind your shield, watching the back of your side's shields, doing what you have to to maintain the shield wall's integrity, and taking the occasional poke at an enemy target that becomes visible through a hole in the wall. If you're an archer, on the other hand, you see a lot all the time, but you're still mainly focused on what's going on inside your bow's range. Stuff happening far away you won't notice unless your area of the field isn't engaged.
@John Calligan -Thank you, some good food for thought. @LoaDyron -Good video, thanks for sharing. @Alan Aspie -Thank you, I've never heard of motti tactics, you've given me some good angles to consider here @XRD_author -This is a really helpful point of view, thank you very much
Just a thought - you are writing a completely fictional battle with flying creatures and magic - you are not bound to any standard of realism. Reading other stuff is a great idea, but you really don't have a duty to write a deeply authentic scene. Your job is to write something thrilling, so you may be better off picking some POVs and just taking a crack at it. If it isn't working you'll know it. You might surprise yourself.
To hear you describe in your original post, I was vividly reminded of the final battle in the 2005 film adaptation The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Probably you already know of it, but that has a good diversity of magical creatures there.
That exact scene actually occurred to me as I was writing this post. I need to go back and watch it again.
There's good reasons to talk about movies, but you need to figure out how to write a battle scene, not describe how a movie battle looks. If you get in that habit you'll only write weak descriptions of sights and sounds, not all the other stuff written material does better than film.
On the contrary, I like to 'play out' action scenes in novels - particularly battles - as though I am watching a film, and that also helps me visualise what is happening when it comes to writing my own action scenes. I do agree that you don't want things to become a stale beat for beat "he swung his sword at me, and I blocked with my shield" - but then again (I know this is going to sound contradictory), you have to be very clear. Plenty of action scenes I have skimmed over because I just can't visualise what is happening in my head. With all the magical beasts in play, there is plenty of scope to be imaginative. That will be your biggest asset when writing the actual action. There may be periods in between the fighting in which your MCs can step back and assess the situation, gauge the morale of the troops, etc - when they're in the thick of the battle, they have more pressing concerns, i.e., staying alive.
I know. I'm just thinking it might give me some inspiration, a jumping-off point, so to speak. A better visualization of the kind of battle I'm wanting to write will help me flesh out how I want mine to go.
Hope you're thinking small-scale and large. Having your POV character suddenly face-to-face in the middle of the chaos with a huge mythical beast they've never seen before but heard plenty of scary stories about (for example) could produce an emotional high point for the battle, and really drive home how different this battle is from a conventional medieval one in a visceral way that merely having the monsters on the battlefield could not. And emotions are what people read fiction for.
The problem with movies is that you aren't visualizing, you are simply receiving someone else's vision. But what I was really getting at is that a great visual description is always going to fail to be as good as an actual visual (like in a film). What writing does is let you tell the same tale of battle, but be able to tell it with details like the sweat of your horse, the feeling of a spear penetrating armor, the confusion of the lines and the painful thirst that always follows. Those are the things films can't show the way writing can, and why writing should leverage those things to make a product that is equal in richness to moving picture. Too often the battle or fight scenes I read on writing sites are attempts to tell a visual action scene through words, and they usually fail because the details that we can see in a movie simply take too long to describe in words - ruining the pace. So while the MC's acrobatics are very impressive in the author's head, the result on the page are slow and less than thrilling.
BTW, anyone serious about writing an on-the-field POV for a medieval-type battle, who's young enough to take a few bruises and fit enough to not have a heart attack on their way to the fridge, might want to join the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), put on some armor, get qualified, and go fight in a few of their "wars." Any adult can do it. You won't feel the terror of war, but you'll probably have some cool experiences that you can use. The "I'm not going to die so why not?" nature of SCA combat encourages people to do some pretty foolish things that, if they work, make for good stories. And the adrenaline rush you get when your unit charges into or receives a charge from another unit it totally real. You also might learn about unit tactics and camaraderie, but that depends on which unit you wind up fighting with. The best have those things, others don't. You may also meet people with extensive knowledge of medieval warfare, including technical stuff like how armor was made and used. If you don't know a vambrace from a grieve from a gorget, someone there can teach you. They SCA is all over the US and in some foreign countries too. In Texas the subgroup is The Kingdom of Ansteorra and it looks like they have some local wars in Aug. and Sept. It's not LARP: it's hard-hitting combat with serious armor and rattan weapons. Of course, like any group, the interpersonal politics range from okay to nasty, depending on where and at what level you play.
@XRD_author , I suspected that you participated in SCA from your previous post. (How many other opportunities to participate in a medieval battle are really out there, anyway? lol) I'll check out that Texas link, it does sound like a valuable experience (and tons of fun).
Decades ago, yes. My wife too. Problem was, everytime we fought each other sword-and-sheild, she'd win. I seem to have this physical and metaphorical habit of sticking my head out where people can hit it.
Small & mobile units against much bigger and better armed enemy breakthrough. And underdogs win. And it's realistic. Narrative possibilities...? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_(military)#Motti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Suomussalmi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Raate_Road Think about stronger enemy breaking through your lines with very heavy forces and trying to advance deep. Then you stop that heavy penetration. You kill its logistic connections. You kill it's radio communication. At winter you hit they field kitchens. You split their long and deep penetration to short sub pockets. You take care that your troops are invisible and they are not. And then you let it stew. It's both reactive and proactive tactics. You don't plan letting them getting through your lines. You don't want it to happen. When it happens, it's a nasty surprise to you. It's a huge risk. You have to react. You have to counter attack. Motti is kind of defensive counter attack. You stop them. You split them. You stew them. If they want to stay alive, they must break out from motti. And their only reasonable direction is getting back - without most of their heavy gear. You can't plan mottis beforehand. You don't know where and when they can break through your lines. But you must have plans what to do when that happens. And where ever that break through happens, you have already lost men, positions and gear. You must take your positions back. Then and only then you can isolate that motti. Isolation is the key.
Might be useful to research a few ancient battles in the real world as case studies. Some commonalities that you might find, depending on the elements of your world: Information flows slowly. A single commander will have trouble getting a complete picture of the entire battle. Different areas of the field will have very different prospects, with each area getting updates slowly about how the battle is going elsewhere. Terrain, weather, and time of day are very important. Battles start early in the morning and stop at night, before resuming the next day if they are not over by then. The winner is the army that controls the battlefield once the battle has ended. Actual fielded armies were measured in about the tens of thousands. This is large but far smaller scale than many modern battles. More people died on each side of the Battle of the Bulge than Alexander the Great's entire field army. When/if a general tried to make a dramatic speech, no one would be able to hear the entire speech because the line of battle was too long. War is hell
No direct advice on how to write the type of battle scene you want, but because I absolutely suck at battles scenes, and I mean I really suck at it, I've found ways around it rather than writing it! I don't want to advise you because I kid you not when I say I'm bad at battles. What I've done, rather, is focus on one character's fight. I've also taken to coming in mid-battle so things are already happening and then I take it to the one-to-one fight very quickly. To give an example of how I avoided my end-of-the-book climactic battle scene: note: my book has multiple POV characters, which is the only reason why this works 1. the siege started off-stage as another Event was happening 2. Scene of a siege fight 3. Scene of dialogue where plan A is made 4. Skip straight to the outcome of plan A 5. Skip to the outcome of the Event in #1 (it all affects the siege) 6. Follow-up from Event (includes some fighting) 7. Reaction to Plan A 8. Scene of a fight related to Event 9. Reaction to the series of events, further plans 10. Final confrontation - end when actual fight starts 11. Another character comes in and ends the Final confrontation Mind, this is 2.5 chapters' worth of events. About 10k's worth of words altogether. I'm not sure if any of this made any sense to you - but essentially what I've done is, I'm basically completely skipping over the actual fighting. Out of a sequence of 11 scenes, there are really only 3.5 fights (if you count the final confrontation, and one of which wasn't even on the battleground). I'm more or less giving an impression of what's happening with a spotlight on specific character reactions, dialogue, and one-to-one confrontations (all things I'm actually good at). Ok I frigging suck at explaining this. I mean, my book's being beta-read and I've had at least two readers tell me it's awesome, so it probably works No one's complained about it. I've just gone and colour-coded it so you can see how I've weaved things together, going back and forth - having multiple focuses actually is what allowed me to skip over the actual fighting without losing momentum. What I'm saying is, there are ways around it! This is your climax. It's just good book-writing strategy to stick to things you're good at writing ETA: I've just realised you could argue I did write a massive battle scene - only I've broken it down into multiple scenes pertaining to various different events within the same battle, rather than think of it as one MASSIVE monster of a scene where I must detail everything at once. Hmm... that wasn't why I wrote it the way I did but now I think about it, that might not be a bad approach!
Great points, and I'd also second looking to some real ancient battles for inspiration. Although you have your fantasy beasts, so you should factor how they affect the dynamics of the battle. For example, the Carthaginian deployment of elephants completely changed the nature of a standard battle in the Punic Wars, and for good reason, since they were often the decisive element. Rome had to completely change their battle tactics to adapt. They found that the squealing of pigs caused elephants to scare. So at a battle, they would bring forward their pigs, douse them with pithp, set them on fire and send them running into the enemy lines, causing the elephants to run amok amongst their own men. So given that for all the Romans knew, elephants came from a fantasy world, what tactics have your own peoples employed to specifically counter the threat posed by certain magical beasts? I would add that although modern battles might have fielded more combatants, the 'battles' usually took place over weeks or even months, and often involved several offenses and counteroffensives over a wider area. Ancient battles, e.g., Cannae, lasted only a single day or two, with more concentrated forces. Great point about communication though - only reserves would have any idea of the shape of the battle as a whole - in the line itself, it is impossible to be aware of what is happening around you. And that fact is the deciding factor of many battles, because panic can spread much more easily where communication is poor, and that panic turns into a rout. It only takes a very few handful of people to cause a rout. If you have two sides that are evenly matched, think of it as a big game of chicken. The first to bail almost certainly will lose the battle. Half a dozen men. If not addressed immediately, that might be all it takes. Half a dozen men fleeing causes a gap which leaves the flanks of his comrades vulnerable. To survive, they too, are also forced to give ground. If not countered and repaired immediately and decisively, even at this stage, the battle is almost already over. The men in the back lines will see their comrades fleeing - they think the battle is lost, and so also move to retreat. And before you know it, the whole army is running for the hills. That's where the lack of spatial awareness comes in. The army could be completely winning on the other flank. There might have been reinforcements on their way to relieve the burden. But the combatants on the front line don't know that.
