On Novel Writing III

After roughly a week of not touching my book because I’ve been too busy with other concerns, I’m pleased with the scene that I just composed. Rather than advance the narrative from where I stopped, I instead got inspired to go back to insert one of the passages that I’d planned to add during revision. I’m happy with the sequence because it adds significantly more characterization to two characters and allowed me to insert two instances of significant foreshadowing: lines that I think are subtle enough to not stand out upon first reading but will be evident and significant upon a second read-through. I’ve been a bit stuck on advancing the narrative for a week, though. I’m at the beginning of a fight scene. I have individual elements of the battle in mind, but I don’t have a good, visual sense of the connective transitions between moments. To provide analogy, I know that the fight will include an uppercut, a choke hold, and a suplex, but I don’t know exactly how the characters will get from one move to the next. If I was composing a conventional fight, I could rely on impressionism and focus on kinetic tone rather than physical details. But this is an anime-style battle with extensive supernatural powers, and I think that such a scene requires a more detailed, visual description to be effective. Now, I’m not trying to literally detail out every punch and kick, but I do want to create a strong, clear literal narration. So I’ve largely been letting the manuscript sit idle while I allow scenarios to percolate in my mind in hopes that sudden inspiration will strike me. Such inspiration did occur to me, but it was about the passage I formerly mentioned, not about the fight scene that I’m hoping to finish writing. I was actually nearly inspired by the very nicely choreographed duel between Leonmichelli and Nanami in Dog Days’ episode 10, which I watched recently, but despite nice, creative ideas in that anime fight, the characters’ characteristics and abilities are too unlike the characters and scenario I’m writing for the anime to provide anything substantially useful to my composition.