So, the other day I was swapping emails with my erstwhile compadre Wayne when he asked: "Any tips on writing mass battles?" Well, this got me thinking about exactly how I put together the big set-piece battles in Men of Bronze and Memnon (and the ones I'll be working on soon in The Lion of Cairo), and . . . *poof* . . . a blog topic was born.

From Homer's tales of strife before the walls of Troy to Tolkien's Battle of Five Armies, if you're writing in a pre-industrial setting and you want to get the most bang for your dramatic buck, you're eventually going to have to deal with large groups of soldiers slugging it out for god and country. Solitary fight scenes are hard enough to write, but the level of difficulty soars when hundreds or thousands of combatants take the field. What formations are friend and foe using? What's the ground like? What limits are dictated by terrain? By weather and climate? By the soldiers' individual experience and training? What tactics are both sides employing? Is their intelligence accurate? Who the hell is leading this rabble? Nor are you spared these questions when writing about an historical battle -- if anything the difficulty trebles, as more often than not finding accurate historical accounts can be far more frustrating and time consuming than simply inventing it. So what do you do? Where do you begin?

Tip #1: Read. Read about real battles, past and present. Read soldiers' memoirs and make notes of what emotions they experienced during battle. It helps me if I make a list of possible sensory input: sounds, smells, sights, tastes, and even touch. Also try to find a book or two on the psychology of war (check the military history section of your local bookstore or library), on relevant weaponry and tactics, and on logistics -- I mean, how do you feed 30,000 men?

Tip #2: Plan. Make a map of your battlefield -- nothing fancy, just a rough sketch of where things are. Is it open field or is underbrush present? What impediments might there be (at Gettysburg, one of the reasons Pickett's Charge failed was the presence of a split-rail fence at the mid-point: it created a lethal bottleneck)? Is the landscape suitable for cavalry? For archers? What's the climate and weather like on the day of the battle? If you're making up a battle from scratch, perhaps for a fantasy story, I'd suggest modeling it after a similar one from history. In Memnon, for example, the Battle of Lake Manyas in Chapter Six was Marathon refought. Same tactics, same landscape.

Tip #3: Plan some more. Of course, the specifics of each battle will be dictated by story concerns -- a clash between barbarian tribes will differ entirely from a clash between two disciplined armies. But, in both instances, you as the writer will need to know what types of troops are present and where they're standing. Will they simply go toe-to-toe or will there be some maneuvering taking place? How will your generals communicate with their underlings? By trumpet? Drums? Flags? Will your generals lead from the front or from the rear? What happens immediately prior to the battle's beginning? Do you have priests who take omens (common among the Greeks)? Do they make offerings to the gods? Do champions meet for single-combat? Even if none of this makes it into your manuscript, it's good for you to know it beforehand -- it lends depth.

If you've made it this far, then you should have some understanding of your battlefield, its landscape, and your friend and foe's place upon it. Perhaps even a good, meaty list of experiences you'd like to weave into the narrative (Homer, for example, gave me quite a few ideas for 'death scenes' I wanted to try). Now, how do you fit these pieces together?

Tune in later this week for Part II . . .