My main focus right now is Dragon Queen. I am currently writing Chapter 17, which involves a rather large action scene. I've got about 2K words describing a bloody conflict, but I'm only happy with about a fourth of it. And as I wrote, I was thinking: Maybe I'm just not cut out to write battle scenes. But then I think about Fury. There is a nice struggle at the end between Yalei and Fury, and I'm pretty happy with the way that turned out. It's dark and intense. But the main difference between the battle in that scene and in Dragon Queen is the old internal vs. external. Fury prevails through her mind and heart. The scene in Dragon Queen is a bunch of dragons chomping and clawing at each other. A lot different. And a lot harder to write. I think I'm going to have to pick up Christopher Paolini's books again and get a little bit of reference.
Right now, I'm slogging through it. I had to resist the urge to go back and edit it yesterday. Because it's not even finished yet. I kept repeating: Finish it first, then edit. Just get it down.
This struggle to write physical conflict has revealed to me something about my writing: I am more concerned with internal conflicts. I like it when a character has to wrestle with their flaws rather than grapple with an opponent. While there is a little bit of that in Dragon Queen, there should be more physical trials. Why? Well, because that's the point. It's a war. There needs to be bloodshed and gore and things getting parts of their body chopped off. Jade can't just sit there and muse about how awful it is and shouldn't she do something. That would be a major turn off.
It is also difficult, I am finding, to write a battle scene from the 1st person POV. I can only write about what she notices, which means that a lot of the action is not getting wrote down. And some of that out-of-sight action is important. Where I'm floundering at right now is where Jade is finally kicking some butt, but Tyar is also fighting with Darion in the background. Not sure how to make the reader aware of Tyar's struggle while not seeming to go out of POV. Something else to mull over.
