Ask me anything! Mixed fandom blog with a few random things. Fandoms found here include Blue Exorcist (dominant), Berserk (my new baby), Some Naruto, a bit of Black Butler, Yu Yu Hakusho, and several others. name on Ao3 is same as my blog name.
Here are a handful of tips on how to write intriguing and strong *no pun intended* fight scenes!
1. Give your character a meaning behind their actions. Are they fighting to survive? Are they the aggressor or the victim? Are they defending someone they love or hunting down someone who hurt them? Makes sure the audience knows why this action scene is important to your character. Unimportant and nonmeaningful actions can be boring!
2. Short sentences. Generally speaking, longer more detailed scenes slow the pace of your novel down. This is because the reader has to take more time to read and absorb all the details. Quicker, brief sentences make the pace move faster because there is less for the audience to read. Most fighting happens quickly and instinctively— without too much thought or anticipation. When things are happening fast, we have less time to take in details.
🏃♀️ Fast-paced with minimal details: "He punched me in the cheek, my back molars ripping open my fleshy skin. By the time the next punch came, I was already choking on a mouthful of blood."
🐌 Too many details/thoughts that slow down the action: "His large fist hurled towards me with insane speed. I could hardly believe it. He punched my cheek so hard that my sharp, back molars ripped open my fleshy skin. It hurt so bad, but I couldn't stop the next punch from coming. Blood filled my mouth, the irony taste causing me to choke and for my face to wilt."
3. Use all five senses. When adrenaline is pumping, the body can become hyperaware! Touch and sight are the senses that most people focus on... but don't forget about smell, hearing and, taste. Does your protagonist hear dogs approaching? Do they taste the blood from their busted lip?
4. Don't' slow down the pace by adding too much detail. Try to keep an ebb and flow in your action scene. When the action is happening, keep the details quick and short— no one has time to think about their next move when in the heat of danger. However, you can balance the scene out by giving your character a chance to breathe and think and observe
5. Research/study. Watch famous fight scenes in movies or anime to see what is realistic and what is exaggerated. Pay attention to the pacing or what keeps you on edge. When does the character get a chance to think or come up with a plan? What makes this action scene so enthralling?
6. Consider what is at stake. Stakes always make a scene more tense. What does your character have to lose and how does this affect their mental state? Does it aid in their energy, or does it distract them from the fight?
7. Develop characters/the plot. Consider how this action scene will either further your character in the plot or set them back. Does this scene give them a lasting injury that follows them throughout the story, or do they lose an ally that they desperately loved? How does this affect them moving forward?
I don’t know which author needs to hear this right now but even if you never update your wip i would never regret reading it a time of joy is never wasted
I feel like a good shorthand for a lot of economics arguments is "if you want people to work minimum wage jobs in your city, you need to allow minimum wage apartments for them to live in."
"These jobs are just for teenagers on the weekends." Okay, so you'll use minimum wage services only on the weekends and after school. No McDonald's or Starbucks on your lunch break.
"They can get a roommate." For a one bedroom? A roommate for a one bedroom? Or a studio? Do you have a roommate to get a middle-wage apartment for your middle-wage job? No? Why should they?
"They can live farther from city center and just commute." Are there ways for them to commute that don't equate to that rent? Living in an outer borough might work in NYC, where public transport is a flat rate, but a city in Texas requires a car. Does the money saved in rent equal the money spent on the car loan, the insurance, the gas? Remember, if you want people to take the bus or a bike, the bus needs to be reliable and the bike lanes survivable.
If you want minimum wage workers to be around for you to rely on, then those minimum wage workers need a place to stay.
You either raise the minimum wage, or you drop the rent. There's only so long you can keep rents high and wages low before your workforce leaves for cheaper pastures.
"Nobody wants to work anymore" doesn't hold water if the reason nobody applies is because the commute is impossible at the wage you provide.
If you're lamenting the fact that you used to be able to shoot through a 500-page novel in like a day when you were in middle school and now you can't, it's worth bearing in mind that a big part of that is because when you were in middle school, your reading comprehension sucked. Yes, mental health and the stresses of adult life can definitely be factors, but it's also the case that reading is typically more effortful as an adult because you've learned to Ponder The Implications. The material isn't just skimming over the surface of your brain anymore, and some of the spoons you used to spend on maximising your daily page count are now spent on actually thinking about what you're reading!
One of the funniest failures of US school system is the fact they are legally obligated to teach us all the states but they never actually show how big Alaska is like I have actually had teachers tell me that Texas is the biggest state. We have all just convinced ourselves that Alaska is that small shrunken down thing on most US maps and the people that know it's the largest state can almost never accurately describe how large it is.
We have no idea what exactly the life cycle of an eel is. All of them breed in the ocean, even freshwater ones, but we don’t know exactly where they mate or release their eggs, only that the eggs are microscopic and drift out to open sea, where they hatch into, not baby fish, but larvae, which are not much more complex than a planaria.
We only know these spineless larva are baby eels from dna testing.
We have absolutely no idea how they turn from something that barely has organs into an eel, especially since their dna is very cryptic in fact and doesn’t actually code for some of the things an eel needs, like a skeleton. (Even a cartilaginous one). We don’t know where that DNA comes from. We don’t know what actual baby eels that are eels look like really because no one’s ever seen one that wasn’t either a larva or a juvenile.
What’s more, freshwater eels are catamural like salmon but in reverse, going from ocean to freshwater then back to the ocean to breed. Except they don’t die doing this. American freshwater eels can live for 30 years doing this year upon year.
Also all true eels are poisonous. One tablespoon of blood from a freshwater eel can kill you. Fortunately the toxin is mostly in their blood, so if they’re cleaned and drained properly they can be eaten. (Freshwater eels only. Morays store the toxins in their meat as well and are toxic to consume in quantities)
You need to still be very careful though, as freshwater eels have such a high iron content you can poison yourself eating them.
The more you know
I love animals that are, like, the opposite of cryptids: we know for a fact they exist and have a clear idea of what they look like because we have photographs and individual specimens, but we haven’t the faintest idea where they’re coming from - they just keep showing up out of nowhere, and the locations of their actual population centres are a complete mystery.
reading an author's note on "potentially disturbing content" like "promising!" only to then get to "I hope this is primarily a joyous, escapist adventure"
uh oh
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