Pace Yourself, Connor: Or, Cross-Novelistic Similarities (and fight scenes)

Using a bit of crude math off the top of my head, I discovered a curious thing today. I have been working on Faceless for approximately three months (I began it not long after the first of the year). It is almost fifty pages long.

The writing of Kiriana took me just a little under two years. It is approximately four hundred pages long.

The ghost of John Saxon spurring me on, I did a little calculating. Multiply three months (Faceless) by eight, and you get 24 months, or two years (Kiriana). Multiply fifty pages (Faceless) by eight, and you get 400 (Kiriana!).

I guess just a hair over sixteen pages a month about does it for me. :D Not that I wouldn't mind writing faster...now that I know this, it's a statistic just waiting to be beat, don't you think? I mean, come on, twenty pages a month? Not really beyond my grasp if I set myself to it.

I have had in mind for a little while now a fight scene (Faceless-related) that I would guess most of Hollywood would not like. Without revealing too much, here's why: I want this scene to emulate physical realities pretty closely. You see, at least to my fairly limited and theoretical knowledge of combat, even movies like The Dark Knight and The Bourne Ultimatum that profess to be "gritty" and "realistic" and "bone-crunching" don't really show you what a fight between even trained professionals would probably look like. First of all, to my knowledge, most punches don't sound like thwump-thwump-thwump, whizz, ker-thwack! Not only do most filmmakers add in punch-noises, which probably aren't really punch-noises, they also add in whizzing air, as if every punch were supersonic or something. Well, maybe in the Matrix they're supposed to be. You free your mind and suddenly Mach 3 kicks are within your capabilities. Not to mention having your back break concrete walls, instead of the other way around. But anyway. It's charming and all to have the hero be punched in the face, shot in the stomach, kneed in the groin, speared in the foot, gored in the shoulder, thrown from a cliff, and have his head repeatedly concussed against a brick wall, and then spit out the old tooth, wipe his mouth, get a determined expression, and somehow destroy the villain with ONE kick. But in real life even the toughest hero would probably just sink down and bleed to death. And then the "minor" punches--like the kind that would break my rib or yours--just make the hero take a step back, which is probably necessary anyway to maintain the choreographed beat of the fight.

I'm not averse to these kind of fights on all levels. In fact they're pretty interesting to watch, though at some point they can all begin to look alike (as the chorus goes haia-ho, haia-ho, hai-a! in the background). Also, I'm writing a book, not making a movie. Even so, I have taken a fancy to wondering what would happen if an actual person in the real world, say, had a bottle smashed over his head or got kicked really hard in the stomach by a chap who knew his way around fighting. I've gotten it into my head, for one reason or another, that fighting is hard, and usually makes you sweat, and bleed, and tire out quickly. That it can take eight or more shots to kill someone, and that this actually applies to villains as well as heroes. That, in a situation of more or less equal training and conditioning, a man will probably beat a woman in a straight fight. That the participants of a fight aren't thinking about being cool, but about not waking up in a morgue the next morning.

Keanu Reeves, Angelina Jolie, and Wesley Snipes will probably faint in horror if they ever read it, but that's okay. I'll just direct them to Kiriana, which does have a level of super-combat in it.
:-D



For what it's worth, I actually enjoy this scene. But it's also ridiculously unrealistic, and includes things like stopping a falchion with one's bare hands. ;-)

Oh, and at the end of the week I will be trotting off to Texico to visit the bro, which rhymes, at least sometimes. :D I am very much looking forward to it, and would appreciate your prayers for a bonny, convivial, turbulence-free flight.