Today we are reminded that authors must work carefully through their action sequences, or risk alienating readers with physical impossibilities.
What I gleaned about the story: Bound to a pole, Korik is forced to watch as the High Priest makes ready to sacrifice his wife and daughter to the Kraken. If only his bonds would break! And then his bonds break.
Find this book on Amazon.
Note: Awesome cover. It leaves absolutely no question about what’s in the tin. And it’s beautifully done as well.
Technical Note: At 9 MB, the book file is bloated and taking up way too much space on my ereader. Worse, the author is paying about 9 times as much in download fees as she needs to. No novel should be more than 1 MB unless it’s packed to the rafters with embedded fonts and high resolution images.
Analysis: In the second paragraph, we get: The High Priest Paren, heedless of the screams, bound their arms and legs together and lay them neatly on the slab of stone jutting up from the ocean. The story is being told in past tense, so this action is happening as we watch. But after describing the consequences of what a sacrifice entails, we immediately get: The high priest laid a bejeweled hand on Korik’s arm…
So now I’m confused. Korik is tied to a pole where he is being forced to watch the sacrifice. Is the priest over at the altar binding the victims, or his he standing with Korik? Could he possibly be patting Korik on the arm while binding the victims? My spider senses tell me that the binding actually happened earlier and should have been reported in past perfect. But there’s insufficient information in the text to distinguish between the two, so I’m just going to call it what it is: a confusing detail.
Analysis: Our hero strains at his bonds until they snap. That sentence then continues with: and his fist slammed through the air, barely missing the high priest.
Slammed? Slamming is a motion that ends with a violent impact. You slam a door, or slam your hand onto the table. But Korik missed the priest, so there was no impact at all. And hence, there could be no slamming. The impossible imagery here ripped me entirely out of the scene.
Analysis: Korik swung the pike about, forcing the guards back a step and before swinging the pike back around to cut loose his other arm.
Okay, so let’s walk through the imagery as it unfolded in my head. A pike is a long weapon, with perhaps a sharpened point or spear-head at the tip. Korik’s one arm is free and the other is still tied to the pole. So if he’s swinging the pike to keep the guards at bay, he must be holding the shaft near the end, in order to keep them at a decent distance. But then he swings it around to cut himself free? Hold on, a pike is on the order of ten feet long. That’s what makes it not a spear. So how does this maneuver work? If he’s holding a ten-foot pole that has a blade at the far end, he can only cut things that are ten feet away from him. Once again we have a physical impossibility in the scene mechanics.
Authors need to remember that it isn’t sufficient for action scenes just to sound cool. They also have to make sense, physically. If you’re not sure, you might try acting them out with friends, or dolls or something, to be sure everything works, and then paying careful attention to make sure that those moves you worked out are what you actually describe in your prose.
With the first WTF, what’s preventing the stone slab from being fairly close to Korik’s binding pole? It’s not an immersion breaker for me—though the appearance of all the acolytes and guards when they were needed (they weren’t mentioned at all before Korik broke free) was more than jarring enough.
On the point of the pike, I’d argue that he wouldn’t necessarily have to be grabbing it by the end to achieve his goal of forcing back the guards. As you said, it’s a long weapon, so grabbing it at its center would still provide plenty of length of convincing the guards to step back. However, I’d question why his other hand didn’t just slip free in the first place; he was bound to one pole, not two separate poles spaced apart, and it’d make little sense for the priest and his acolytes to use several unconnected strips of leather to bind him when they could all be tied together for added strength (meaning they’d all break together, too). But it’s all futile, as the third WTF probably would’ve come anyway from the additional “and” in the line. =P
In the post-game analysis, we can often find ways to quibble the point in one direction or another, but remember that what I put in these reports is, by and large, a report of what was going through my mind as I read the story. Readers react to the situation they think they are seeing in the moment, not the truer situation that is only revealed to them an hour later after deeper study.
Correct. He is tied to a pole (which I envisioned as a cross, arms speed, but failed to state that) in an upright position. He could only grab the pike, sticking out of the sand as it were, mid-shaft. Perhaps it wasn’t stated plainly in the text.
However I’ve made no secret about the fact that I struggle with the action scenes more than any other part. They sometimes take me weeks or months to write because they aren’t my natural element. My writing isn’t really about the action, it’s about the people.
On the other hand, this action scene (and specifically the end of it) is what garnered me the most readers so… I’m just going to continue improving and learning from my mistakes. It’s the only thing I can do, right?