Fight Club: The Fog of War

John Sandford, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the "Prey" series, made a comment that amused me. The climax of Winter Prey, the fifth in the series, takes place during a Minnesota/Wisconsin blizzard. He received complaints that everything was confusing, and that it was hard to tell what exactly was going on. He responded that was the point! Maybe people who have only wintered in Texas or Florida don't know this, but during a blizzard, especially that far north, you can probably see about five or ten feet in front of you. Everything else is white, assuming the wind is kind enough to let you open your eyes to see anything at all.

But Sandford makes the interesting point that if a scene is supposed to be confusing to the characters, then maybe it should be confusing to the reader as well. And fights and battles, as mentioned last post, are chaotic and messy affairs. People's perceptions and memories are often murky at best after traumatic events, including combat. There's plenty of psych research about that.

So there's the question of whether or not you want to inflict confusion upon your readers, as well as your characters. From the advice I've read about writing action scenes, clear descriptions of what was going on was emphasized, which is a good rule for writing in general. But with clear (and perhaps long) descriptions of the action, do we lose out on the chaos of the action? Do we lose out on energy?

My first book, perhaps not my best written one, doesn't choose clarity. It chooses speed. In the action scenes, contrary to my usual style, I use short sentences and short words, chopping down my sentences into mere phrases. I had hoped that this made everything seem more exciting to the reader, but I'm not certain.

Of course, you could also argue that writing this way is the 'shaky cam' of the written word. And 'shaky cam' is terrible. Indisputably. In my experience, directors use the shaky cam when they can't do fight scenes otherwise. It ruins what might otherwise be cool fight scenes. And you can't even call it realistic, since it's artificially created chaos; unless you're suffering from repeated blows to your head, your vision is never as shaky as the awful camerawork of shaky cam.

So what I wonder is whether or not the compressed, hasty writing serves to make the action more exciting, whether or not it takes the reader into the action, or removes it (by making him ask what the hell is going on).

In my later books, I mostly abandoned that style of writing. My justification was that while the protagonist of my earlier books lived a basically comfortable middle class life, my later protagonists were a little more hardened and used to danger. And for the fantasy book I wrote, I often needed to explain how the magic worked; guns, fists, and swords require no explanation.

I'd be interested in hearing anyone else's thoughts on this.