Burnt Tongue: The Autocrat of Action
Examining Emil Ottoman's "Balthazar: The King of Killers"
For the Literary Theory series:
Some time ago I wrote a piece and called it Putting the Zing in Your Long Action. It was about writing cumulative sentences in the manner of Hemingway and as championed by Brooks Landan. It was popular and drove several subscriptions. No one complained, but I realized rather late that people might have been expecting something different from that title.
So now, I’m writing about action.
But first, you have a story to read: Balthazar: The King of Killers.
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Now let’s cut to the action.
“Bal closes his eyes and places the pawns on the board. Visualization, tradecraft, part of the art. Hallway around the corner, left to right, A, B, C. four yards to the locked door, four yards to the adjoining room. Break it down into feet, divide it by 2, call those spaces 1 through 12.”
Emil Ottoman
Did you read the story? Seriously that’s a prerequisite, and reading it is a class in its own right.
I think Emil Ottoman called this a 0 draft, meaning it’s not polished, but he’s sharing the fruits of his labor with us all the same. That means we’ll have our points here and there that might trouble us. There are parts of the opening sentence I still don’t understand, but I didn’t send you to read the story to talk about the opening. It’s the action which draws us here, and that’s where Emil achieved something I called:
The Proustian John Wick
Excluding the preamble of murmurs, the introduction to the battle comes through an elevator ride that’s made interesting in its old fashioned style and in the character of the operator. The theme of time is touched upon as well, but the story officially begins as Belthazaar steps out into the hall:
A neuron fires, and time dilates so he can remember one minute 14 years ago.
I take from this piece five suggestions, which I’m just going to give you up front because I’ve skimmed too many articles looking for the points being made. Hmmm. Bullet points. That seems appropriate:
Suggestion number one: don’t feel rushed. Narrative time and story time are not the same.
Suggestion number two: define the objective and the obstacles in the way.
Suggestion number three: let us feel the villain and the stakes.
Suggestion number four: the details of the action are less important than how those moments feel.
Suggestion number five: action is an expression of character, tone, and setting.
See what other essays I have to offer:
“A half second dreamtime before time happens all at once.”
I’ve given you my intended structure—now I suppose I’m free to toss it out and write this any way I choose.
An Action Autopsy
Our characters are Balthazaar, Vlad (our dude in distress), our villain Bosch and his henchmen. We pause before the upcoming action to have a moment between Bal and Vlad whose chess discussion relates thematically to the upcoming action.
…chess is not a game of strategy, but memorization and pattern recognition. My friend, there is no looking six moves ahead, there are patterns that change with every move leading to more patterns, you memorize, you see the pattern, you make your move on reflex.
We see the connection between the men and a debt Bal owes. Vlad isn’t so much teaching him about chess as he is about violence. Bal is thinking six moves ahead when what he needs to do is recognize the patterns and act. We’re given so much here, in understanding the action, the character, and his relationship with the one under threat.
I’m not sure what I think of the choice to hold back the revelation that Vlad is the one who needs saving, but those uncertain choices in a 0 draft aren’t why we’re here.
Emil holds on to that slowed time as he describes Bal and gets into his head.
Bal’s attitude toward killing is tied to Vlad discussing the art (or lack thereof) in chess:
The work and craft transcends to art once a perfection of style and precision is attained by the practitioner.
And all of this happens in the time it takes Bal to step out of the elevator and into the hallway, and his killing of the guards at the elevator is the first real action.
Balthazar flips a Benchmade Infidel out his coat sleeve, the spring loaded blade sliding from the handle into place as it enters his grip, an extension of himself. His weight shifts right foot heavy, arm an extension of his shoulder, viper fast, and the infidel cuts every bit of the right side guard’s throat from near his spine forward. Can’t even gargle on the way down. Before the dead man’s knees hit ground Balthazar’s weight has shifted to his left foot, pushing off with his right. Black Nitrile hand over startled mouth, ten stab wounds and a finale up through neck, blade popping out of throat on the inside. Hand over mouth, knife in place, he eases the man down to the ground slow like.
No noise. Any noise, and this is blown.
The light thump on the carpet of the other man dropping reads as background.
The details here are precise and intentional, but the accumulative importance isn’t that you know exactly what Bal did and how these men died. The significance is Bal’s mastery. The feeling is surgical, calm, and swift. The feeling is death as art, which is the character’s intent.
“Could have taken the stairs. Stairs don’t prove a point.
“Taking the stairs would have been artless.”
More cinematic slow-motion description introduces the first of the guns and ties that gun back to Vlad. We mustn’t forget Vlad.
Emil moves us into Bal’s assessment of his environment, which reveals as much about the character as it does the length and width of the hallways.
“Three men down the hall, Balthazar at a sprint, blue dot sight, thwip, thwip, the farthest two men’s brains splatter the dirty wallpaper pointillist red.”
From there, Emil takes us through the violence like chess played by an artist, but the important work has already been done. We’ve slowed time down to understand the situation and experience the first few kills. The narrative can speed up now without losing us.
And then for the climactic showdown, the action itself slows down. The reader has a chance to re-orient herself and to wonder how Bal will get out of this one—hopefully with Vlad still alive.
don’t feel rushed. Narrative time and story time are not the same.
define the objective and the obstacles in the way.
let us feel the villain and the stakes.
the details of the action are less important than how those moments feel.
action is an expression of character, tone, and setting.
One of the techniques Emil uses in this second half is the splitting of asides between bits of action, as if the narrator’s been interrupted by the speed of the action. It allows for more insight with shorter, more punctuated interruptions to action.
And these interruptions hide the fact that action isn’t inherently interesting. We love everything around the action—the suspense, the horror, or the absolute coolness (depending on the character and the tone)—but punching and shooting gets old really quick.
A standard piece of advice with an action scene is to structure it with three acts. Emil weighs that first act heavy because that’s where much of the anticipation and uncertainty lies. Once we get a feeling for how untouchable this guy is, some of the suspense will be lost, but Emil keeps that a purely hypothetical problem by moving us quickly through a chess-structured second act that’s peppered with a killer’s insights.
The third acts upsets this certainty by having Bal reach the end of his ability to see patterns and react. He kills his way to the door, and that’s where everything becomes a greater uncertainty. The suspense returns.
I want a little something more from that climax than is currently there—a point that pays off Vlad saying Bal plays chess (read: kills) like an artist, perhaps. Bosch is set up as Bal’s opposite, and we see that in his role as Vlad’s butcher. Somewhere in there is a point I’ve either missed or hasn’t yet been expressed because this is a 0 draft, or maybe that’s just a me thing. I don’t know. Roald Dahl would be satisfied with that ending.
But that’s not why we’re here.
The Author’s Side
Let’s talk with
, himself, and see what he has to say about this masterwork of action:Love it. Excellent breakdown work. And... creepy good insights into how I actually DO work my action sequences....
There's more context to the chess game, Vlad is the pattern recognition machine because he's the professional soldier, Balthazar is already the artist way back then, (the age of these characters is all very indeterminate because the hotel is a very strange place indeed.) Vlad plays chess as a pure professional does, Balthazar is the artist in both instances, the reason he can't beat Vlad in chess is because he's always trying the more artful move. Vlad is just playing to win. But Balthazar is playing to play. The concept of thinking of the final hallway as a chess board, that's creative. Vlad would have done what a warfighter does. He would have either committed to the hallway from a full turn and started popping everyone, or (It's established earlier) He would toss a grenade around the corner, he's a pragmatist and literal warfighter, Balthazar is the king of killers because he is the top assassin AND Van Gogh at the same time.
Bosch IS Balthazar's literal opposite. You got that right. If you read ALL the WIP fragments on my Substack, you'll know the terrain. They're all right there, nobody has read them, and then I just posted king of killers because I wanted to show some good action.
I could have just as well used one of the Lost and Founds.
Actually, there's one of the Lost and Founds that shows how Vlad works as opposed to Balthazar. (There's a lot up to King of killers, which is technically wip 6) Lot of toss off sentences of Vlad casually turning people's heads inside out at close range while following his wife, (because that action is supposed to be boring, for him it's just a Tuesday) who is out of her mind on cocaine, being haunted by one of the ghosts in the hotel, and also sort of a witch. (Also, a scene where Xenia, his wife, beats a whore, one of three sisters, to death with the blunt end of a Stoli bottle because she is insulted by the whore. I'm the reason there's a moratorium on killing stock characters in the Hotel, because I killed one in like, my third story, in the most brutal manner possible. By having her head pounded into the lobby carpet by an angry six foot tall Chechen killer high on a quarter ounce of blow.) (A LOT of these WIPS will receive MAJOR overhauls in light of everything that got published in the hotel last year.) Xenia's lobby assault uses a different framing device, I put it on a clock, the clock is David Bowie performing Moonage Daydream live in Santa Monica 1971, I wrote the scene to the song, restarting the song every time I wanted there to be a break. If you start the song when it says in the story, and read at a medium pace, the end of the song lines up relatively well with the end of the action sequence.
—Emil Ottoman
— Thaddeus Thomas
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god writing the Lobby Assault (Wip 4? maybe?) Was fun. Xenia is the prototypical madwoman.
I'm so mad at how good this '0' draft is, and it is even stronger in the context of the serials preceding it