mishadventuresofcastiel-blog

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It’s always sunny in supernatural

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December 07: Sam and Jack

Professor Sam and student Jack prompted by @unforth-ninawaters~

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Writers Block

Any tips for writers block? I have some SPN fics I need to work on but writers block is killing me. 

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How do you write a fight scene without becoming repetitive? I feel like it just sounds like "she did this then this then this." Thanks so much!

I watch her as she fights. Her left leg flies through the air – a roundhouse – rolling into a spin. She misses, but I guess she’s supposed to. Her foot lands and launches her into a jump. Up she goes again, just as fast. The other leg pumps, high knee gaining altitude. The jumping leg tucks. Her body rolls midair, momentum carrying her sideways. She kicks. A tornado kick, they call it. The top of her foot slams into Rodrigo’s head, burying in his temple. Didn’t move back far enough, I guess.

His head, it snaps sideways like a ball knocked off a tee. Skull off the spine. His eyes roll back, and he slumps. Whole body limp. Legs just give out beneath him. He clatters to the sidewalk; wrist rolling off the curb.

She lands, making the full turn and spins back around. Her eyes are on his body. One foot on his chest. I don’t know if he’s alive. I don’t know if she cares. Nah, she’s looking over her shoulder. Looking at me.

The truth twists my gut. I should’ve started running a long time ago.

The first key to writing a good fight scene is to tell a story. The second key is having a grasp of combat rules and technique. The third is to describe what happens when someone gets hit. The fourth is to remember physics. Then, roll it all together. And remember: be entertaining.

If you find yourself in the “and then” trap, it’s because you don’t have a firm grasp of what exactly it is your writing. “He punched” then “She blocked” then “a kick” only gets you so far.

You’ve got to get a sense for shape and feeling, and a sense of motion. Take a page from the comic artist’s playbook and make a static image feel like it’s moving. Try to remember that violence is active. Unless your character is working with a very specific sort of soft style, they’re attacks are going to come with force. So, you’ve got to make your sentences feel like your hitting something or someone.

“Ahhh!” Mary yelled, and slammed her fist into the pine’s trunk. A sickening crack followed, then a whimper not long after.

Angie winced. “Feel better?”

Shaking out her hand, Mary bit her lip. Blood dripped from her knuckles, uninjured fingers gripping her wrist. She sniffed, loudly. “I…” she paused, “…no.”

“You break your hand?”

“I think so. Yeah.”

“Good,” Angie said. “Think twice next time before challenging a tree.”

Let your characters own their mistakes. If they hit something stupid in anger, like a wall or a tree then let them have consequences.Injury is part of combat. In the same way, “I should be running now” is. When the small consequences of physical activity invade the page, they bring reality with them.

People don’t just slug back and forth unless they don’t know how to fight, or their only exposure to combat is mostly movies or bloodsport like boxing. Either way, when one character hits another there are consequences. It doesn’t matter if they blocked it or even deflected it, some part of the force is going to be transitioned into them and some rebounds back at the person who attacked.

Your character is going to get hurt, and it’ll be painful. Whether that’s just a couple of bruises, a broken bone, or their life depends on how the fight goes.

However, this is fantasy. It is all happening inside our heads. Our characters are never in danger unless we say they are. They’ll never be hurt unless we allow it. A thousand ghost punches can be thrown and mean absolutely, utterly nothing at all to the state of the character. This is why it is all important to internalize the risks involved.

The writer is in charge of bringing a dose of reality into their fictional world. It is much easier to sell an idea which on some level mimics human behavior and human reactions. The ghost feels physical because we’ve seen it happen on television or relate to it happening to us when we get injured.

You’ve got five senses, use them. You know what it feels like to get injured. To be bruised. To fall down. To be out of breath. Use that.

Here’s something to take with you: when we fight, every technique brings us closer together. Unless it specifically knocks someone back. You need specific distances to be able to use certain techniques. There’s the kicking zone, the punching zone, and the grappling zone. It’s the order of operation, the inevitable fight progression. Eventually, two combatants will transition through all three zones and end up on the ground.

So, keep the zones in mind. If you go, “she punched, and then threw a roundhouse kick” that’s wrong unless you explain more. Why? Because if the character is close enough to throw a punch, then they’re too close to throw most kicks. The roundhouse will just slap a knee or a thigh against the other character’s ribs, and probably get caught. If you go, “she punched, rammed an uppercut into his stomach, and seized him by the back of the head”, then that’s right. You feel the fighters getting progressively closer together, which is how its supposed to work.

Use action verbs, and change them up. Rolled, rotated, spun, punched, kicked, slammed, rammed, jammed, whipped, cracked, etc.

You’ve got to sell it. You need to remember a human’s bodily limits, and place artificial ones. You need to keep track of injuries, every injury comes with a cost. Make sure they aren’t just trading blows forever.

I’ve seen advice that says fights all by themselves aren’t interesting. I challenge that assertion. If you’re good at writing action, then the sequence itself is compelling. You know when you are because it feels real. Your reader will tune out if it isn’t connecting, and the fight scene is a make or break for selling your fantasy. It is difficult to write or create engaging, well choreographed violence that a reader can easily follow and imagine happening.

-Michi

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No really.

Taking the bullet out does nothing to help the person, and if your characters are in the field instead of a hospital, may actually cause more harm than good.

Imagine for a moment that you (for reasons unknown to all) decided to turn your sink on wide open, pick up a handgun, and shoot the pipes under your sink.

Maybe it hit the drain pipe, which would be bad, since all the water coming through the faucet is now dribbling out all over the floor. But even worse would be if it hit the water intake pipe, right? In that case, water under high pressure would be spraying everywhere!

Two bad options if you for some reason shoot your sink:

The vascular system of the human body is essentially one big set of pipes. The drain pipe? Those would be veins—under low pressure, but still very bad to leak from. The water intake pipe? Those would be the arteries—under high pressure and VERY dangerous to puncture.

But back to the sink example. Say you shot the pipes and hit the drain pipe (vein). Now there’s water pouring out onto the floor. Your roommate says “Quick! Wrap your hand around the pipe to hold the water in!” (“Put pressure on the wound!”) And you do! Water is still slipping out from under your hand, but it’s leaking a lot less than before! Right now, you COULD find some duct tape (bandages) and secure the pipe further so you don’t have to keep holding it.

Instead, however, you say to your roommate: “Hold on! I’ve got to find the bullet!” You let go of the pipe (stop putting pressure on the wound) to dig around in the cabinet (body) for the bullet. Seconds, maybe even minutes pass, and that pipe is freely gushing out water the whole time. 

Finally, you find it! You pry the bullet out of the wood, hold it up to your roommate, and drop it in a little metal dish with a ‘clink’.

“Job well done,” you tell yourself. “We’re out of the woods now.”

Except that, you know, the pipe is still damaged and gushing water out onto the floor, and the bullet wasn’t actually doing anything harmful inside the cabinet. Also, while you were rummaging around for little Houdini, you weren’t putting pressure on the pipe, so that sink (patient) lost a whole lot of water (blood) that it didn’t need to. Can you imagine how much more it would have been if you’d hit the water intake pipe (artery) instead?

I know what you’re thinking. “But in movies—!!” And I know. But here’s the thing: Hollywood? It’s a bouquet of lies. I’m sorry. I really am.

In fact, even that distinctly bullet-shaped thing you usually see pulled out of people in movies may not always be true. Many times the bullet mushrooms out or becomes malformed. Depending on what that bullet ran into (like bone) it might have even broken into a dozen pieces. Try digging those out of your protagonist!

Now sometimes, but not always, doctors WILL remove the bullet (or fragments of bullet). For example, if they’ve already got the patient in surgery, and AFTER they’ve already repaired any veins, arteries, and organs to the best of their ability. Or if the patient doesn’t need surgery (if it didn’t hit anything major and is just lodged in the muscle or fat) but doctors notice that the bullet or fragment is likely to cause damage if left inside the patient. 

More often than not, however, the bullet isn’t doing anything actively damaging while inside the patient, or the removal of the bullet would be more dangerous than leaving it where it is. This is why most bullets don’t get removed at all. 

This is true if your characters are at a hospital, but ESPECIALLY if this is a field job. If trained physicians with all the tools at their disposal, blood transfusions, and a sterile environment most likely won’t take the bullet out, then Dave McSide-Character should DEFINITELY not be sticking his filthy, 5-straight-chapters-of-parkour fingers or his I-just-stabbed-a-guy-but-I-wiped-the-blood-off-on-my-pants knife inside the protagonist to fish around for some bullet that isn’t even causing harm. The recommended way to deal with a gunshot wound in the field? Pack it with gauze (or yes, even a filthy we’ve-been-on-the-run-for-two-weeks-in-the-same-clothes t-shirt if that’s all you have. Wound infection is a different post) and keep constant pressure on it.

Remember: stopping the leak in the sink is the most important thing. Not rummaging around in the cabinet for the bullet. Taking it out does literally nothing.

Two perfectly realistic reasons why you might have a character take the bullet out:

Now, sometimes, depending on the characters or the world you’re writing in, this might be different. In some instances, you might want to write the lead-scavenger-hunt scene in!

The first reason is if they just don’t know

And that’s really important when writing realistically. Not everyone is a professional in emergency wound care. Most people get all their knowledge of emergency medicine from Grey’s Anatomy and House M.D.

If your character has any medical training? Probably don’t do it

If your character has any military or police training? Some know, some don’t, so writing it either way is believable. It’s a toss-up, but they DO have more experience with gunshot wounds (either personally, witnessed, or in training videos and word of mouth)

If your character is a 17-year-old art student who saw blood for the very first time two chapters ago? Well now that character might just try digging for the bullet

And hey, maybe they’re like “I’m gonna get the bullet out!” but another character (the one who was shot, another character in the room, maybe even a 911 operator) steps in and says “No, no, no! Just put pressure on it!”

But regardless, injured characters in movies are always suddenly on the mend after the bullet is taken out. The vitals start to rise, they aren’t gasping for breath, their hand closes firmly around the love-interest’s hand, etc. And this doesn’t happen. Regardless of what your character does, the rules of biology are still in play.

In the end, though, that bullet’s just minding its own business in there. The #1 priority is fixing the damage it caused on the way in.

The second reason is if the bullet is special

This is more for the SciFi/Fantasy writers.

If your character is a werewolf and was just shot by a silver bullet which is stopping their healing process and is slowly killing them? Yeah, take it out

If the bullet is actually some sort of tiny robot designed to burrow into their organs one by one? Yeah, take it out.

If the bullet had a spell or curse placed on it? Yeah, take it out.

If they need to get transported up to the med bay, but the bullet would cause some kind of issue with the transporters? Yeah, take it out.

But in all of these examples, the bullet has to be inherently dangerous. For normal humans with normal bullets, its just a hunk of lead. 

Hope this helped some of you action writers out there!

Good luck and good writing!

Disclaimer: In the event that you or someone you know has been shot, the best thing to do for them is call for an ambulance and follow the instructions provided by the operator. This post is intended to give accurate writing advice to authors and script writers, but I am not a medical professional. While I do believe that the research that I’ve done on this topic is factually accurate, it should not be taken as actual medical advice.

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Cut the Clutter. Sound Legit.

Trimming your writing has the benefit of getting your point across to readers without using stuffy sentences and filler phrases. Those are the training wheels of beginning writers, but seasoned professionals can pick them out easily. 

One such weakness to cut from your writing so it sounds more professional is the word “give.” Here are some examples taken from my own writing.

Example 1:

Original - She gives me an appraising look as I enter the room.

Revision - She appraises me as I enter the room. 

Example 2:

Original - She gives a long tired sigh, but smiles at the end of it.

Revision - Her tired sigh ends with a smile.

The meaning stays the same, but less time is needed to read and understand the sentence when that awkward “give” is taken out. Unfortunately for me, both of these examples came from the same scene, making a scene that should last only a few seconds take longer than that to read through.

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so I left my iPhone charger with @auzarfree yesterday and my phone is slowly dying.... argh

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Mods are asleep post forbidden tits

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Sir that’s my emotional support unrealistic romantic daydream

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Supernatural Ships ♥

Valentine’s Day is approaching, so here are ships for you to enjoy! I couldn’t put all suggested ships into the photo set, but I hope you find something that you like! ♥

Available as Stickers on RedBubble!

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Sam: Good morning guys

Gabriel *randomly*: What if mayonnaise came in a can?

Dean: That would suck because you can’t microwave metal

Sam:

Sam: Good morning to everyone except these two

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spn episodes as clickbait articles.

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so how are the 🐜s gonna react when sheith kisses in s8

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WAIT TILL I HIT CHU WITH THAT DDU DDU DU

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only girl mosquitoes drink blood

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carpe diem - seize the day

carpe noctem - seize the night

carpe natem - seize the ass