Pierce The Heavens With Your Prose!

I've been exercising my capability to write in the epic mode, recently, with varying amounts of success. My endeavors in this direction were prompted by the fanfic Shinji and Warhammer 40k, which chronicles the events of Neon Genesis Evangelion if Shinji had been...more confident, shall we say. It carries us through Shinji's adolescence all the way through the events of The End of Evangelion, and you realize that it has somehow become something undeniably epic when you realize that our hero is facing down an unstoppable Lovecraftian cybernetic monstrosity formed by twelve similarly unstoppable Lovecraftian cybernetic monstrosities that have combined, while piloting a giant cyborg that has had both its arms ripped off, his friends and Enemy Mine fighting alongside him as companions in battle, and you're wondering precisely how they're going to pull victory out of their ass this time. Also, the only people who have gone batshit insane are the bad guys. Which is rather a bit different for Evangelion.

Anyway, the fight scenes in this particular fic...the whole thing, really, when you come right down to it...are incredibly well done. The city that most of the story takes place in actually feels vibrant and functional, and wartime heroics somehow still manage to shine through the unavoidable carnage and debris. And I was hoping to capture that in the project that I'm currently working on. I might be succeeding, because the first honest-to-goodness battle scene that I've written in ages has already shown up and is currently occupying ten full pages of text.

I've basically learned that taking a cinematic approach to writing is Not a Bad Thing, regardless of what creative writing teachers will tell you. It's okay to split a reader's attention among three or four things going on at the same time, so long as those things are clearly delineated to avoid confusion with each other. A few paragraphs of action here, a few paragraphs of action in another location, let's check in on these characters over here, and so on and so forth. If pulled off properly, it gives a sort of sweeping effect to the proceedings, granting an impression of the bloody chaos befalling the characters without having to go into massive, explicit detail concerning the larger picture--though that is nice too, every once in a while.

Also, I've learned that just letting rip can be the best thing to do. I've been so concerned this past year with writing good fiction that I've not really had the presence of mind to write fun fiction. And to me, a story being fun is a lot more important than it being Literature. That was a difficult lesson to learn, and it's even more difficult to put into practice. But I'm getting there.

I would much rather entertain people than crank out yet another American Classic that will be ignored by prisoners of academia for the next three hundred years.

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"A hero strikes when least expected! The enemy of all that is good, the one who wants to destroy this world that is made of love! And peace! Will never escape from justice! Specially in the moment that he feels safe, he will know! There is nowhere to hide! The name for this! IS DYNAMIC ENTRY!"