Fights and funerals - the power of description and emotion

This week I've got to the end of my re-write of Genehunter, and I wanted a big set-piece fight in one of the chapters.  What I ended up with was two fights, one after the other.  The first fight involved four renegade  humans, a hostage, and three rescuers, so there were a lot of people to keep track of.

My problem is that fight scenes bore me silly.  I don't read the detail in other writers' scenes.  I skim-read until I get to the end.  I only want to know that the hero/heroine survives, and how badly they're hurt.  I don't really care how they survive, just that they do.

Which gives me a big problem writing my own scenes.  My tendency is to skip over the details, just like I do when I'm reading, but this time I forced myself to choreograph the fights.  I wanted the renegade humans to run away, but one by one. So I had to keep track of who was where, and who had left.  And I was describing them as strangers, through the eyes of my heroine, who didn't know their names.  

Three edits later I was finally satisfied with my two fight scenes, and moved on to the second challenge, an alien burial scene.  Having attended the real-life funeral of a friend's son this week, it had strange parallels with my fictional scene.  My friend's son was only 52 when he died, and Ahri, the Ur-Vai cat I was burying, was also young, and gone before his time.  He died in a freak accident, at the cats' equivalent of teenage.  He was intelligent, but misguided, and I wanted to express that sense of a needless loss.  I wanted the feelings we feel when someone talented is denied a full life to express those talents.

This required me to write an emotional scene where Ahri is taken home to his mother and buried by his tribe,  I decided the Ur-Vai needed a formal burial ritual much like ours, with solemnity, and speeches about the deceased's life.  The burial I envisaged was not so different from the real-life one I attended.  It gave an extra dimension to the Ur-Vai's culture.   It required me to tackle that issue of emotional depth, and I do have people crying in the scene.  But, as always, it's about getting the balance right.  

So it's been a week for tackling some of the things that challenge me most, along with supporting a good friend at a time of great challenge for her.  Hopefully I've done both successfully.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com