Breaking the Ice: Max Gladstone talks getting to know his characters, and introducing them to each other

Max Gladstone on writing The Witch Who Came In From The Cold

Panic strips us.

Chase scenes in cinema highlight the comparative advantage of film: its ability to capture motion through space, depicting second-by-second, edge-of-your-seat emergency, with dramatic stakes that can be parsed with the naked eye the way most fight scenes really can’t. The chase scenes in Tony Jaa and Jackie Chan movies are real winners in this regard — fugues, in the sense of “running away from stuff,” highlighting the performers’ emotional clarity and physical abilities. In each shot, we ask ourselves, how can this person get out of this situation? Jaa’s answer: with agile ferocity. Chan’s: with flailing, seat-of-the-pants charm that almost makes the viewer forget how impossible his moves actually are. And, of course, both contrast with another personal favorite, the chase in the beginning of the Craig Casino Royale, in which Bond answers every obstacle by bulldozing through it (sometimes literally).

Prose can’t offer the same sort of second-by-second conscious thrill at objects’ motion through space, but it does highlight the choice-making process. Chases force characters to decide under time pressure. Do I follow the mark onto the bus? Do I listen to my partner, or enter that abandoned building? Characters reveal themselves, and conflict, under pressure, in a way they don’t even in a fight scene — since so much of the decision-making process, in a fight, for most people, is unconscious. A chase gives people time to show who they are.

This was a perfectly timed chase for many reasons. (Thanks, season outline!) We see the characters’ strengths at play — both their raw tradecraft, and their magical abilities. We sense the limits and power of magic: Andula’s elemental makes her vulnerable, while Gabe learns his hitchhiker can be more than a nuisance. But by making Our Heroes stretch themselves to their limit, we got to see them at their least guarded so far — and it’s no mean trick, trying to get inside the emotional walls of a spy!

That’s the part that really grabbed me, as a writer. Our characters spend so much time bottled up that it was a joy to show them taxed, and letting their guard down in recovery. I loved writing Tanya drunk on magic after the affair on the bridge — I had as much fun writing that page, writing her thrill, as I did writing anything else this season. Nadia’s morning routine, similarly, offers an intimate view on a very closed-down character. And of course there’s Josh, making his play and letting his own mask slip. And Gabe and Tanya meeting face to face, after stalking one another through the streets of Prague.

The challenge, so to speak, is what all these people will do once they’ve seen each other naked.

Originally published at blog.serialbox.com on February 12, 2016.