StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I'm writing a battle scene at the moment, and I'm frequently amazed at how many of the scenes I can actually see physically in my mind in terms of film scenes to a certain soundtrack. Obviously the bits of music I associate with them then become the ones that I listen to whilst I actually write it rather than just plan it, but does anyone else get visualisations so clear that you find yourself reaching for a pencil to sketch out a story board on the off chance that you can do some sort of animation of it?

Surprisingly, the two scenes which are sticking in mind at the moment are the advancement of a wave of giant spider crabs from the ocean to the end bit of 'The Trio' from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The other scene is a sort of tribute to those aircraft shooter-scrollers, where the main character runs to an aircraft and launches in it, and in my mind, this all occurs to the synthesizer section from Supertramp's Fool's Overture.

Looking especially at the big saga writers here, how many of your big battles occur fully within your mind before they actually even make it to paper?

Every battle in Starcrossed including the Final One has been extemsively previsualized by me and there is a Starcrossed soundtrack on my Ipod. It gets contsantly updated as new soundtracks I like come out. Same with Twilight War - including the soundtrack idea. I tend to have a nice big chunk of my stories already in my head not just the battles and also music that goes with it. It helps when you eventually get to those parts of the story.

Indeed, I also visualise scenes from what I write, also to various tracks on my computer. It generally comes to mind when a certain track comes on. For example, whenever Information High by Yoko Kanno is playing this certain escape scene plays out in my head, and when Aquarius by Yoko Kanno and Hisaaki Hogari plays I imagine a certain scene during an opera performance of the song.

It is really useful, because it means I rarely forget important events I've got planned.

My problem is I can see what i want to write but i cant write it

Even more so, I'll have a piece of paper and a pencil on hand to draw rough schematics to keep track of what's where and keep an over all idea of whats going on for consistancies sake.

Yep. I see all the action in my head and try to use words to convey it to the reader.