Forum: Author Hangout

I would have thought the simplest way would be to describe them ie,

"Batman grabbed the thug with the baseball bat, punched his hand into the thugs chest, ripped out his lungs, pivoted and threw the mess towards the man with the cleaver. As the man with the cleaver fended off the lungs, Batman leaped to a thug holding a bike chain, kicked him so hard between his legs that a bloody testicle popped out of his mouth, which BAtman headed into a trash can. Keeping up the momentum and the remaining 4 thugs off guard, Batman grabbed the nuclear device and stuffed it up the arse of an effeminate scarred bloke in a dress, whilst he ripped out the tongue of the one wearing a Taylor Swift t-shirt..."

EDIT: If you need to include speech then use the description ie "Effeminate man screamed and called out for his mother, his father, and pet dog, 'Lassie! Save me from this non surgically inserted nuclear device' as a tongue whistled past his ear.

I just wrote a scene where our hero fights waves of monsters coming at him and he's leaving corpses in the doorway.

I set apart two, because they got more than a spear thrust or a draw cut, but the rest I just piled up as "The rat" over and over again. The reader knew there could be near infinite of them anyways.

But like Pixy's above, just giving each goon something of note - maybe a different weapon, maybe boots vs sneakers, is more than enough, especially if they aren't going to last the fight.

My question is how do you differentiate between multiple goons in your writing?

If you really need to, then the technique suggested by Pixy and Redsliver should be fine - just give each good an identifying feature - physical characteristic, clothing or weapon for example.

Gamelit type stories which involve the killing of lots of identikit baddies are often done without identifying each one unless they're particularly unwilling to die. Ka Hmnd writes stories which involve the protagonist 'dancing' through masses of baddies while slaughtering them - I think he does it quite well.

AJ

Sometimes I identify them by their direction ("The one coming at me from the right"). Or sometimes their size. Or sometimes what they're wearing (like "the man in the gray jacket) or the color of their hair. Sometimes it doesn't matter who the next one is (so you can write something like, "With the man squirming on the floor, clutching his balls, I turned to his friend and…" Which friend (assuming there are more than one)? If it doesn't matter, you can finish him off without identifying him and then maybe identify the last remaining friend).

You might like to read the latest chapter in Shinerdrinker's 'Mayhem' story. It badly needs an editor, but the chapter ends with the protagonist 'dancing' in melee mode through a bunch of about 50 goons, which IMO works pretty well.

AJ