Chapter 13 is finally "done."

And by "done" I of course mean the first draft is done. There is certainly a point where realism and story-telling must part ways. A city siege, for example, is one of these points. In a genuine siege, there are few "points of interest" in the telling of the siege. You can find this quite easily by reading historical accounts of castle sieges. Mostly it's a lot of waiting out the people inside, a few key moments, and a LOT of repetitive action. When writing a siege, it's the repetitive action which gets the most bogged down. I had characters charging through a defended entrance, racing through twisted streets, and being attacked by soldiers on the rooftops. There are a few major points of interest and several minor ones to latch onto, but the majority of the battle is effectively written "he slashed this one" and "she hacked at this one" over and over again. As realistic as it is to basically be hacking and slashing for hours on end and a few points of interest like a building collapse or a new bonfire billowing, most of the description becomes very repetitive, and in story-telling that will bore the audience.

Part of what made chapter 13 so difficult to write (and eventually chapter 15 too) is picking out how long I can be "realistic" before it's repetitive, and how many points of interest in the battle I can latch onto before it seems to be dragged out. Since it's a battle, you want the stopping point to be the end of the battle, but for a siege, that's not actually the best place to do it (in my opinion). So there was a lot of picking and choosing of what should be included, what can be inferred, and how long do I keep this up before I lose the nature of the story to the reality of a siege?

I think I found a happy medium, and saved myself from going too long. I'll be concentrating instead on the final battle in Chapter 15 which should be much longer, more grueling to write, but also has the benefit of a lot of different things going on to keep the flow nicer. We shall see.

David Barentine
www.wotps.com