"The trouble is, suspense involves a bit of fear. You're scared
something bad will happen to a character you care about. That's how it
works. If the hero is completely unassailable there's no tension:
they'll win, so why get interested? You already know what's going to
happen. Conversely, if the scene is going to have any dramatic tension,
there has to be a chance the hero will suffer, will lose, will fail." Kit Whitfield, from her blog
Blog hopping this morning, I came across Kit Whitfield's post on, basically, some of the reasons why Transformers 2 is considered to suck, big time. [Before we go on to the main topic, let me just say that, although I gave it an immediate "too long and boring despite the noise and explosions and things morphing all over the goddamn place" I didn't hate it; it was just dull and dumb with confusing scene cuts. Not engaging. Brain candy of the glitteriest and most unfulfilling sort...but I didn't hate it.]
However, Ms. Whitfield expresses one reason Transformers 2 was dull and hard to grasp: The action director broke the 180 degree rule, which basically states when you make a scene cut, you need to maintain continuity so as not to confuse the viewer, for example "if a vehicle leaves the right side of the frame in one shot, it should
enter from the left side of the frame in the next shot. Leaving from
the right and entering from the right will create a ...sense of
disorientation."
Or, more clearly, "The 180° rule is a basic guideline in film making that states
that two characters (or other elements) in the same scene should always
have the same left/right relationship to each other. If the camera
passes over the imaginary axis connecting the two subjects, it is
called crossing the line. The new shot, from the opposite side, is known as a reverse angle." (From Wiki, link above.)
How this applies to writing.
Ms. Whitfield's post got me to thinking about action scenes and about emotional hooks. I read Lilith Saintcrow's new book, Strange Angels last night, and although a few spots made my eyes cross (descriptions in the character's style were sometimes convoluted to the point of meaninglessness) it was a gripping read that had me staying up until I finished the book...because I was hooked emotionally. I cared about the characters, and I also wanted to know what happened next. So both suspense and emotional hook accomplished.
Now, the reader has to care about the outcome of all the crises your characters face. If s/he doesn't, you will lose their interest. These mini-crises build up to the major crisis, and the main character has to come out of these early crises to get to the big climactic crisis. The important thing out of all these moments building to the climax is that the reader has to have serious doubt that your character can actually reach her goal, that the character really could lose or die or fail. And, sometime, your character does experience a set back, so you have to ensure that if that does happen, readers believe your character can overcome this new obstacle, too, and keep slogging forward.
It's not straightforward always, but the emotions you create in a reader are. They must care about your characters, must want them to win.
And this applies to fight scenes, or action scenes in books as well.
In Ms.Saintcrow's book Strange Angels, there were a number of fight scenes. I found them really well crafted and very clear as to what was occurring. Here and there i think they got a bit overlong and a touch too descriptive about things like sounds (and I say this because I stopped to notice during the fight scenes, which did pull me from the reading a teensy bit) but the actions were very clear and the emotional drama was high. It flat worked for me as a reader.
And after reading Kit Whitfield's post on Transformers, I realised something about how movie structure and book story structure overlap. It's not quite the 180 degree rule, but it is something worth considering, and which I think Lilith Saintcrow used to good effect: Keeping the focus of the pov character written so it stayed in focus yet keeping her also feeling and worrying about her compadres in the middle of a fight.
That sounds rather simplistic and obvious, but I can think of other fight scenes where the character's emotions weren't engaged (e.g. not blended in with the writing) and where others were involved but the pov character doesn't feel for them.
So maybe this is s bit of hair splitting, but like the quote at the top of this post, it occurs to me that if you don't fully engage the readers' emotions your story won't grab them as much...but that can't happen if your character doesn't care herself. You need to write them so they care, and that has to be a strong, clear thread throughout the story you write. It doesn't have to be overt, but it needs to be there...at least for me.
What do you think?
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