I need a little help writing these type of scenes. In your opinion, what is the best way to show a character training to get stronger? It seems every time I attempt to do anything similar to a training scene, it drags out and just becomes pretty boring. But if we don't add these training scenes, how can an author explain the protagonists mysterious increase in strength? I know my question is worded a little weird, but I hope you understand what I am trying to convey. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

 

Training? This is Harry Potter... not Naruto or some other manga... it's a school, so learning...

Rowling has it like this:

It has it summarized fairly shortly that they had been learning it... another scene to look at from the books would be the D.A. lessons...

Also, this fic is good-

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6913210/1/The_Duellist

-and it has a good way of Harry learning in my opinion...

 

Don't describe the entire training, sometimes just skip over it, emphasis some points. Those you can describe all you want, and insert a little filler between them so it won't become repetitive. The fic Summer of Change has some great training scenes if I remember right, but don't do PoT.

 

Don't spare more than a few paragraphs on it. It works much better when you actually have Harry implementing the new spells he learned, instead of learning about them, and maybe explaining it in retrospect (if it's not a cookie-cutter curse. Show, not tell, afterall). It makes sense to have Harry learning a spell you actually want him to use later on, right? So with that in mind it's easier to cut down on filler.

Or, if you do actually want to have a training scene, you better not make it the main focus, and include some good character interactions, development, and dialogue, to not make it a chore.

 

This is incredibly important. Listing a lot of spells that he's learning is mind-numbing, telling us that he's reading book after book one topic at a time is no solution either.

I always preferred if an author glossed over most of the training while only mentioning Harry's main focus on the side. The important thing is to get the reader as interested in magic as Harry is. Pick a single brand of magic and make it interesting, maybe have him try something stupid and/or experiment around. Or maybe this training finally opens canon-Harry's eyes as to what he's missing out on.

Reading a training section needs to be incredibly engaging simply because every second story has something similar.

And coming up with something new is even harder: Stories in which Harry is a healer or illusionist are quite rare because successfully integrating this into the plot is troublesome on a whole new level.

 

The "do nots", as I understand them.

-The Laundry List: Defined as an expository section that lists a very, very long number of skills that your character learns in x days.
How do you spot it: A half-page block, with no formatting, that amounts to a list of skills.
Why this is bad: Because it's not only lazy writing, it's fucking boring as hell to read.

-Massive Training Arcs: Defined as a long, detailed story arc whose central conflict revolves around whether or not your character can learn Skills X,Y, and Z.
How to Spot it: One of the more difficult to spot errors, you need to look for plot devices that force the character to drop social activity or if the only settings the character visits are called 'training rooms', 'training fields', 'dojos', 'libraries', and such. Also, look at what the MacGuffins are. Often you'll see 'unbeatable techniques' and 'invincible' pop up a lot. Journeys to find teachers/mentors are likely offenders.
Why it is bad: This is the fan fiction equivalent of filler. That's why it so very often sucks. It also tends to fold lots of other problems within itself. When it's readable, this is usually because it was grafted onto another, more interesting plot.

-The Time Dilation Chamber: Defined as a room in which time is manipulated to give the Characters more time to train than humanly possible. This also extends to using devices that produce similar effects for the purpose of training.
How do you spot it: A room or device that manipulates time, and the characters are using it to train.
Why it is bad: Because it doesn't really work as a plot device. It may have been clever the first few times, but it has been beaten into the ground by generations of writers. It also cheapens your characters' positive traits, by saying "Duh, yeah, the only reason X can beat the evil Y is because they had like 500 years to train."


-The Ass Pull: Defined as when a character pulls a new and life-saving skill out of their ass, when they've not even been shown to have an inclination in that direction in the first place.
How do you spot it: This can easily be confused with other, more relevant and enjoyable plot devices. This is reserved for when a character spontaneously pulls something so retardedly powerful out of thin air that it makes you go "What the shit on a shit sandwich!" and 'x' the window.
Why it is bad: Lazy, lazy writing.

-The Restraint: Defined as a device or room that somehow limits the characters' power to enable training 'beyond their limits'.
How to Spot it: Look for the words any of the words: Gravity, Power, Energy, Limiter, Seal, and Chamber, to be used in conjunction with one another.
Why it is bad: It's a basic logical fallacy- If you get stronger by lifting weights a lot, if you lift really heavy weights constantly as training you must get stronger! No. When dealing with magic, the term 'nuclear self-combustion' comes to mind. When dealing with straight up physical stuff, did you hear about the guy managed to explode his biceps brachii?

-The Reach-around: Defined as when the Character has some sort of trick or technique to make training impossibly fast. It also applies when a character is given a shortcut by a mentor.
How to spot it: Generally look for demi-god level tricks, learned in time spans of Hours or Days. It's often included in Massive Training Arcs.
Why it is bad: Lazy writing again. It shows that the author can't be fucked to think of a better idea.

-The Abe Lincoln: Defined as when a character monologues for quite some time about the pros and cons of a skill/technique/weapon/student.
How to spot it: Look for giant speeches inserted into the story when they just find a new super effective technique, or during a fight scene.
Why it is bad: This breaks one of the most effective rules of storytelling: SHOW, DON'T TELL.

-The Rusty Trombone: Defined as when the character finds the most perfect technique/mentor/student/weapon ever, hidden in plain sight. Other people overlook this diamond in the rough mostly because it was hidden behind a book case or looks like any other busboy.
How to spot it: "It just fell into my hand!" "It turns out that years ago he was a..." "It was under the bed."
Why it is bad: It's trite. It cheapens the characters' struggle to actually face their nemesis or save their kingdom. It's pure, random chance taken to the most ridiculous extreme. It's also an enabler to many other pieces of failure, like the Reach-Around and The Abe Lincoln.

-The Amazonian Tripod: Defined as a bizarre Amazonian sex act that is performed with a hermaphrodite and a midget who pees on your face.
How do you spot it: Hey, wait a minute...

 

One thing I always see in fanfiction is that authors like to make the entirety of Harry's training into one long block, he trains over the summer does nothing else and comes out ultra powerful, awesome, etc. It is more effective to have Harry training in a many short segments, with plot relevant action sequences in between, than one long monologue.

Another common problem with fanfic training is how solitary and unpractical it is. Training in these stories has Harry reading a book, practicing a spell, and somehow knowing how to effectively use it in a fight. There are two issues with this type of training, it is boring and unrealistic. Training is a lot more interesting when Harry is interacting with someone, whether this is a mentor, fellow trainee, or a group of trainees. Obviously you then need to create interesting training partners. I also find it amusing how many of these stories insult Hermione with the whole book knowledge complaint, and then have Harry basically learn everything he knows from simply reading books.

 

I did a short bit of it in one of my longer stories. I find training montages to be boring as shit, generally, so I managed by showing a few selected episodes, spaced well apart, to give a flavor of what's going down and letting the bulk happen in the background. In those scenes, I tried to have something more than just training happening--developing the characters, making plot relevant stuff happen, etc.

Don't let your characters get anything easily. Seriously. Learning complicated stuff is supposed to be a struggle and it should seem like one in terms of the toll paid by the characters as they put themselves through what they must. Remember that brains suffer fatigue when learning new things and when you push too hard, you hit the point of diminishing returns. The more single-mindedly the drive to get better, the higher the emotional cost. In real life, I once studied non-stop for five weeks for my written quals in grad school; I've never been so burned out and utterly sick of a subject I loved. And I was 22 at the time. There's no way Harry at 15 can train 16 hours a day for six months straight and stay remotely sane.

I thought Summer of Change was over the top with the plus-ups. "Ooh, he just wills it to be so." "Ooh, he has such awesome power, orders of magnitude above the rest of us." "Ooh, he'd never even heard thought about wandless magic before, then learned eight spells, no props, and Bob's your uncle." "Ooh, he didn't know it was impossible, so he did it." And it's one of the better Rocky!Harry tales out there. It's better, in my opinion, to tell a human story of sacrifice and employ a cliche like a Time Turner than to go so far over the top.

 

Was that a crack at PoA, Pers?

 

More of a slam on the unimaginative writing of Dagger and Rose than anything.

 

Everything Pers said is pretty great advice. Especially, the spacing it apart. I think another thing to keep in mind is not to call it training unless it's involved with some military or the Aurors. When I read training, it makes me cringe. Learning, preparing, studying, practicing are activities better associated with students.

On top of making him struggle, put snippets in there about how he thought he had it in practice, but in the middle of a fight it fizzles for some reason. That shows that he is still fallible even in learning something new.

Another layer of realism to add would be the training taking a toll on him, by not just describing him having a headache or how he gets tired, but show in dialogue, briefly, him saying something he normally wouldn't when tired. Example, when I've got a headache, I get pretty curt with people. When tired, I don't like holding long conversations.

 

Great! Thanks for all the advice. I think I have a pretty good idea on how I should approach this now.