Action? Figures!

One of my favourite bits of writing fantasy is the action scenes. I rarely bother to plan them in advance, as I find they're more fun, and more fluid, if I just make things up as I go along—one sword-fighting scene in The Alchemist of Souls was described as "Big fight!" in my outline! However occasionally I want to write something that involves more than a single pair of combatants, and it's at that point I have to plan the logistics a bit more carefully. Writers have various techniques for doing this, but one I'm trying out during the writing of The Merchant of Dreams is to use Playmobil figures. They're a handy size, come with lots of different weapons - and of course they're fun to collect!

Note: After taking photos of the various stages of the fight scene, I realised they were potentially massive spoilers for the ending of the book, so for the purpose of this blog I mocked up a generic fight scene as an illustration, using the same figures for my protagonists and some random pirates. Also, apologies for the slighly blurry photos - these were taken with a digital camera, before I got my new iPhone.

The setting for this scene is a square in Venice, hence the cardboard "palazzo" in the background and the terracotta "well" in the centre. In the above photo we see a nice street-level view of all the separate combats, and having chosen the figures carefully (and swapped hair, hats, etc around as needed) it's easy to tell who's who. However it can be hard to get an accurate idea of distance from this angle, so you might want to take a top-down photo as well:

Now we can see exactly who is fighting whom, lines of fire, that kind of thing, so this kind of shot is great for logistical planning.

Finally, you can use close-up shots to get an "over-the-shoulder" perspective from a single character's viewpoint:

Not only is this rather cute, it can give you ideas for the next move in the combat. That pirate in the red bandana is looking like a good candidate for a head shot!

That's really all there is to it - I moved the characters through the combat, taking photos at each stage, then when I came to write the scene, I used the photos as reference material. I didn't always stick exactly to the original plan, and I dare say it may change again in the next draft, but it gets the creative juices flowing :)