by GGK on Jul.04, 2010, under Guy Gavriel Kay
An entertaining comment to yesterday’s post from ‘George’ who makes a good deal of sense as to why Argentina got thumped (a style of ‘go out and play beautifully’ collided with a rare combo of youthful legs/speed and discipline).
George, as another sports fan, references the chariot races in the Sarantium books. As a note that might interest, I have always said that the second race (in Lord of Emperors) was one of the hardest scenes I’ve ever written in any book. The problem was this: I knew I needed a second race, in the second book, chariot racing was too central to my presentation of Sarantium, but I also knew the first race had ‘worked’, had been a scene that did things I wanted it to. (Action revealing character is a key for me.) So my growing apprehension as I approached the point where I’d have to do another race was how to top the first one, or at the very least equal it. The sense of let-down that would follow from a weaker, shallower race scene would deeply undermine the second novel … or so I felt. The solution (I won’t give it away) only came to me very, very close to the point where the scene began.
As for that larger issue - using the action scenes to do and be more than just action scenes … I’ve taken that as a talismanic element of my approach to fiction from the start. If I were to name a scene in a book that sets the bar as high as it gets, it would be the rooftop race in Queen’s Play by the incomparable Dorothy Dunnett. It is an aspect of writing that is utterly critical to those of us working to develop character and texture while still keeping the story moving with some verve.
Related posts:
- A genuinely enjoyable morning at Beijing Normal University, where my Chinese publishers (SFW) organized a session of scholarly papers, critics and writers responding to my work in Chinese, and then a ‘response’ from the author (me) with a very hard-working translator at my elbow the whole way. The meeting...
- I had a really nice reading and conversation event last night at “The Bookworm” here in Beijing. One of the interesting aspects of doing book-related appearances in other countries is to see what doesn’t change among readers - and what does. So, one woman asked why Under Heaven isn’t...
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