: Re: What makes a siege story/plot interesting? I will have to write a story arc where the main characters will be trapped in a town during a siege. What are the key points I should address /

@Sims2267584

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You have a lot to talk about, in theory. A city under siege could last for months, sometimes a year, without reinforcements (by the way, wikipedia has a nice list of sieges here, both real and fictional).

So, sieges are relatively slow and can have relatively low action (compared to field battles). But you, as a writer, have the possibility of skipping all the "boring" parts: you can portray the anxiety and the tension of the besieged city without letting it drag out indefinetly in your story. In other words, you can describe how your city men becomes tired and exhausted, without exhausting your audience with boredom.

You can do this by interleaving the events of the siege (eg. the attackers trying to get over the wall again, a disease spreading, food supplies being re-rationed) with events relevant to your character arcs (a former nobleman getting impoverished, members of the rioutous city guard becoming local heroes ... depending on who your characters are).

If nothing relevant happens for a long period of time you can show it. The key here that if you have interesting characters, they will be fun to read even in a scene where they are clearly bored. If, on the next day of that scene, nothing new happens and you don't know what to write, you can always skip forward to the next week.

This said, you have a lot of potential sources to draw from, and a lot of theme to cover:

The external front. Meaning anything related to the attackers: the fight scenes, the siege engine, the sorties, the military and tactics, the ultimatums, the peace talks (eventually) and in general the realm your town is rebelling against.
The internal front. Everything from the town politics to how the townsfolks are holding out. People can react violently in times of great stress, and your town will act as a miniaturized nation, with limited supplies and manpower. The rebellion will have to hold the morale up to keep the siege on. Guards must be trained, and when they die, someone must fill their shoes. Stict laws must be enforced to ensure safety - watchers must not slack on the walls in case the enemy tries to sneak in at night.
The utmost-internal front. Talking about a siege doesn't keep you from talking about your characters. Their stories are still important and relevant to the reader, wether you have a single MC or a whole cast, or you consider - as some books do - the whole townsfolk your protagonist.

It's up to you to decide where to focus more, as it's up to you to decide what kind of story you want to tell. Maybe it's about the atrocities of war or the strain that the siege puts on common people. It could even be on how the siege, a ferocious and scary warfare event, slowly turns into routine for the people involved.

The italian novelist Dino Buzzati wrote an entire book (The Tartar Steppe) about a soldier dispatched to a far out fortress, waiting forever an invasion that doesn't come. Your book may also be, as well, a long treatise about routine, boredom, and the feeling of exhausting one's life away.

But coming back to your question, I hope I showed you how there's a lot of interesting stuff to be written in your setting.

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