[REVIEW] End of Month Reviews #45 - September 2007 [spoilers]

Martin Phipps martinphipps2 at yahoo.com
Sun Dec 9 19:01:18 PST 2007


On Dec 10, 9:20 am, Tom Russell <milos_par... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Dec 9, 4:36 pm, Martin Phipps <martinphip... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > I've found that when I've tried to force myself to write in a more
> > pedantic manner that I might please some people and yet I, personally,
> > agree with Saxon that this then makes my writing "mundane" so I'll
> > stick to the snappy dialogue thank you very much.  It's the one thing
> > that I like to think I am good at. :)
>
> I think the trick, then, is to play to your strengths and minimize
> your weaknesses.  That is, if one isn't good at description or
> "atmospheric" prose, cut out anything that would require those things
> in order to work.  Otherwise, you have one of two things going on:
> either you get mundane sort of narrative writing, or you have a scene
> that needs that kind of writing, doesn't have it, and is the weaker
> for it.  So the best thing is to cut out the kind of scenes and plot
> devices that would require those things to really work.
>
> Or, to possibly explain it better, if someone's not good at action
> scenes, it's best to write stories in which the action scenes don't
> happen or are resolved in an off-hand manner.  If one just skips over
> them, it sticks out just as badly as a poorly-written action scene.
> (I hope all that made sense.)

Well, I've tried to avoid action scenes in Superfreaks simply because
I didn't want the focus to shift away from the actual detectives.
Both you and saxon have criticized me when I've done stories that only
had the detectives on the sidelines.  But when I have done action
scenes for Superfreaks I think they've gone pretty well, the exception
being the scene with the Zon clones where there was just too much
going on at once.  (It was supposed to be a Matrix Reloaded homage
but, as Lalo said, what looks good in film may sound dull when read
out loud.)  I thought the action sequence with Fusion fighting the
Extreme clones, passing through the portal, killing the Super Soldier
and then facing Extreme himself was probably one of the best action
sequences I've written, probably the only action sequence I've ever
written that didn't have characters simply pairing off against each
other and talking all the way through the fight.  I couldn't
understand what it was you didn't like about that scene: it made a lot
of sense for the detectives to get involved after the fact because
there were actual bodies to examine.

Martin



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