SURVEY QUESTION: MOVES!

[Sans]

One of the things I ended up noticing after giving the Move System some thought is the idea of time specifications feeling, in the essence of the actual writing process, rather arbitrary, and never really having much bearing as to the actual events of a fight.

As an example, let's say I have a beam move or something (call it Iron Man Beams or some such) that I can shoot in the span of one second. Fair enough. So, what exactly would count as a second in writing terms? That sort of thing not only varies from writer to writer, but from story to story, paragraph to paragraph, sometimes even sentence to sentence. A second in real time can be anything in the writing world, where the author has complete and total control over how long something lasts.

To give you an example as to what I mean, let's say your guy is heavily injured and on the ground and my guy, who has said Iron Man Beams, is shooting at you. As the beam is hurtling towards your guy, you decided to write a long internal monologue about various things because you're like me and like having your characters get introspective all the time. In that span of a second, you have written about your character's horrifically tragic backstory, all their motivations, and their current feelings on the subject of death, and only by the time you've reached the next paragraph (with the one you currently just wrote being about 600 of the normally 800 word count) has the blast actually landed on the character.

Can one even say that lasted more than one second? I mean, I'm sure realistically one cannot actually go through that in one second, but again, this is primarily fiction. And the authors are in primary control of the happenings in their fictional craft. One of those things is the passage and flow of time. I cannot tell you how many writers (myself included) have written about how "time slowed down/sped up" because adrenaline or some such. How time is perceived depends so heavily on who is writing at the time that it seems a bit unneeded to ask for time requirements for the traveling of projectiles or how fast/slow someone swings a saber. Because if you're like me, your writing gets wordy, and fight scenes that realistically would only last about 30 seconds can last entire chapters because you're too busy getting introspective, and so much can happen in those few seconds because you're delving deep into the mind.