Giant Armors Blog

This chapter felt risky.

A lot of fantasy adventure stories avoid the subject of main characters getting hurt. Oh, folks might get cuts or bruises, and characters are often put in great danger. But injury is either minimal or ignored.

But in this chapter, Adam’s hurt. Badly hurt. Nearly dead.

Why did I do this to him? Because this illustrates danger. This is what happens in war. I felt it would be false to put these characters in grave danger, and have them escape with a few minor bumps every time.

This chapter’s also risky in that Tom finally speaks up against Brask. This is weird from two perspectives. Adult readers seem to wonder why Tom didn’t do this earlier. I suspect that kids will be surprised that he speaks up this strongly.

Adults forget that kids have very little power in their lives. Kids can complain, but ultimately they have to do what grown-ups tell them to do. And here, Tom totally puts his foot down. It honestly felt a bit unnatural to me, though it had to happen for the story to work.

At least, I hope it works. Do you think I went too far here?

This was meant to be the first major battle of the book. Tom’s gone out in his Armor before, of course, but this is the first battle in which the Trych completely overwhelm him.

There are three big pitfalls to watch out for when writing about action: describing too much (every little detail), not describing enough (resulting in muddied action where you don’t know who’s doing what), and walking the line so carefully in the middle that the action becomes drab and boring. Worse, sometimes you have to increase detail in one area, and back off on detail in another.

As a result, I tend to re-write action sequences the most.

But this sequence I’m happy with. It’s tense, and a lot happens. Which is good for just about any scene.