Writing about them, that is.
In this last scene I wrote, I noticed a few things. That the fight takes place between two characters. That they each keep taking actions against the other person’s body. That I need to keep describing each of them in physical relation to each other.
And I realized, I’ve run into these writing challenges before. In writing sex scenes.
Full disclosure, I have written probably over 100,000 words of porn. Some of it fanfic, some of it original, some of it in collaborative works. This is a lot of sex scenes. This is a lot of her hand did this and his mouth did that. And there is a constant challenge in writing sex scenes. The scene cannot be either unintentionally funny, nor may it be boring.
Yes, what you do is you write the scene from a character’s point of view. You write through their needs and anxiety and wants. You give the details from a point of view, thus moving the plot and the characterization ahead. But this is tricky on a purely sentence-writing level. How many times can you say “Brandon moved blah blah blah. Crissy watched as he blah blah blah.” How often does one use the characters’ names? How often do you use pronouns? How often do you throw in other words or phrases? How often can you say “His powerful masculinity pressed against her” instead of “He lay on her”?
Okay, you don’t say that last thing, ever, except under very specific genre circumstances.
Making the text fresh and non-repetitive while not jarring the reader out of the scene with overly elaborate circumlocutions is really a balancing act.
I noticed all of these problems in the fight scene I just wrote. It makes sense, now that I think about it. But who knew?
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