Transferring the Training Montage to Writing
I love the training montage scenes in movies and TV shows, all the clips stuck together with a great soundtrack? Yes please. But it can be hard to translate that into narrative form for stories, especially in the fantasy genre. Because we want to show all these training things yet how could we in an interesting way?
Well, remember that the purpose of training montages in movies is to do two things.
Convey the Passage of Time.
Show the Struggle and Overcoming of It by a Character.
The first is something that there’s lots of advice out there on how to do, so you can use that to convey how time passes between each major training section that shows the struggle and overcoming.
For the second part, it’s actually easier, I think, in some ways to show this because we can get into a character’s head in most cases. It’s just that for this purpose you need case studies while in a movie you’re looking at statistics. Yep, we saw them flop on that five times and get back up on the sixth. But in a book we need to see maybe three scenes of the full thing rather than glimpses of nine or so smaller incidences.
In particular, when thinking about fantasy writing and having either magic or magical beings/creatures, I think it’s a great time to really show case your characters learning more rules, subtly or overtly, and by extension your readers can feel like they’re truly experiencing the worldbuilding through the limitations and challenges that the characters have rather than it being told outright.
So, the basics (I use) for turning the training montage you visualize for your book’s TV show/movie into scenes for your book?
Choose a few key moments, gloss over the rest noted in the passage of time (or in memory mentions, etc.)
Make those moments struggles yet still progressions. Maybe they still win them all in some way but not everything is okay until perhaps that big battle. It could also be just they win each time but the toll it takes on them worsens until they have better strength to handle things. Who knows, this is entirely up to you.
Remember that it’s going to look longer because it’s all written out and you’ve been laboring over each scene for a lot longer than any reader is going to read it for.
So, in conclusion, in a novel, it’s not quite a training montage in the traditional sense we think about it, but it’s still pretty fun and cool to read (and write!).
