Continuing the Q&A from teh fan page…

Cami

How did you learn to write such amazing fight scenes? Both with weapons and the hand to hand?

Faith

I have a brother and two nephews who are black belts, and my Hubs took street fighting (now called MMA) when he was young. I used to shoot. I call experts about how weapons function, and what options are available. I know how to research the functionality and methodology. And I never have a fight scene when someone walks off uninjured. But the reasons the scenes work is this:

I talked to people who have fought for their lives, discussed the memories they have and how their brains functioned during and after the fight. How their emotions ebbed and flowed through the fight and then after, as time passed. Fight time, physical movement time, and emotional time and memory time change and alter. People change inside after the fight. Then I applied all that to the characters.

This is called Point of View, or POV. I am inside one character’s head. And the reader knows what the character feels (or puts off feeling to keep herself and her friends alive). The reader experiences the fight firsthand. And then after. And she is no longer a linear thinker but an emotional thinker. This is called limbic memory.

And now researchers have discovered there are multiple forms of memory. The most common is working memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. This can be stated another way: working short-term, linear explicit declarative narrative, and sensory emotional limbic. The last set of three are my own composites from multiple researchers as it is more descriptive, works with people’s emotions and feelings, and even the feelings left over inside the body after trauma.

Faith