NOTE: You can now buy the revised and expanded version of this blog series as an ebook, in both epub and mobi formats.

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

I may have a big soft spot in my heart for the fight scenes in R.A. Salvatore’s Dark Elf series, which describe the mechanics of each combat in loving, blow-by-blow detail, but as I said at the start of this blogging, you don’t actually need to do that in order to write a good fight. Even if you do, you’re unlikely to detail every single move of anything but the shortest clash: you’ll pick key moments to focus on. The same is true of the less mechanical approach. But then the question becomes, which parts deserve focus?

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NOTE: You can now buy the revised and expanded version of this blog series as an ebook, in both epub and mobi formats.

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

This is something I should have touched on before, but it only occurred to me now: what about speech in a fight scene?

In reality, it doesn’t work very well. Have you ever tried to talk while running? Now imagine that in addition to being out of breath, every second or so you encounter a jarring, unexpected impact that threatens to break you off mid-sentence. And remember that you aren’t running — a nice, repetitive activity that requires only a fraction of your attention — instead you’re making split-second decisions the whole time, and distraction could be fatal. Speech is luxury you mostly can’t afford.

Which isn’t to say you can’t have any.

NOTE: You can now buy the revised and expanded version of this blog series as an ebook, in both epub and mobi formats.

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

Step up one level from the nouns and verbs you’re going to be using over and over and overandoverandover again in your fight scenes, and it’s time to consider how you’re going to string them together into sentences.

There are two main schools of thought on this, and I’m going to give you the one I disagree with first.

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NOTE: You can now buy the revised and expanded version of this blog series as an ebook, in both epub and mobi formats.

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

One of these days, I will actually finish this series of posts. 🙂 Today, we come one step closer to that goal!

Fight scenes, oddly enough, have certain technical challenges in common with sex scenes. Namely, both of them are primarily concerned with describing physical movement, and in the course of so doing, they have to refer to certain objects and actions again and again and again and again. And if you try to get too creative in the avoidance of repetition, you very rapidly slide down into the abyss of purple prose.

So how do you get around this?

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

I’ve said before that you don’t actually have to give a blow-by-blow description of your fight in order to write a good scene, and in fact you often don’t want to. Going into detail slows the action down and risks confusing a reader who can’t visualize the movement very well.

But sometimes, at key moments, it can be good to describe specific moves. The sequence that leads to somebody being killed or disarmed or knocked to the ground can be worth focusing on — a brief snapshot that shows a character’s desperation, competence, etc. So let’s talk for a moment about how you can work that out, even if you don’t have a lot of training.

Warning: it involves looking like a complete weirdo. 🙂

Kids: try this at home!

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

One thing you may not know, if all your experience of fights comes from reading books and watching movies: they are short.

The SCA fencing practice I used to attend would sometimes stage melees, where everybody would get divided up into groups and set against each other en masse. One time they arranged two tables with a gap in between, and declared the gap to be a doorway, that one group (consisting of about five people) was defending. The goal of the other group (equal in numbers) was to get past them to the back wall.

From start to finish, how long do you think it took?

Less than twenty seconds.

(And that’s counting the time the attackers spent advancing, before they closed with their opponents.)

Fighting is kind of like being a soccer/football goalie guarding against a penalty kick. Do you leap left or right? There are physical clues that will tell you which way to go, but you have only a fraction of a second in which to spot and analyze them, before you have to choose. Left or right? If you’re good, your odds of choosing correctly are better than 50% . . . but sooner or later, they’ll slip one past you.

Sooner or later, a decisive blow will get past somebody’s defense. And it’s probably going to be sooner.

There are times when you want to replicate this in your story. Near the beginning of The Bourne Identity (film, not book), Jason Bourne takes down a pair of cops in less time than it took me to type this sentence. Because the usual convention of fiction is that combat lasts a long time, the effect of a quick takedown is to say, this guy is really badass. Mind you, in prose, the duration of the actual moment and the length of its description aren’t correlated much at all; you could gloss over a knock-down drag-out match in half a sentence, or spend a whole paragraph detailing the three lightning-fast moves that lay the opponent out. But if you want badass points, make it short. (There’s a non-combat-related bit in The Ringed Castle, one of the later books in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, where she spends maybe two or three sentences telling us that what with one thing and another, a handful of characters got themselves from England to Russia. Her not telling us how they managed that — in the sixteenth century, when that journey was not what you’d call easy — makes them seem 300% more awesome than if she’d spent a chapter on it.)

But it’s a convention of fiction that important, set-piece fights can last a really long time. Fair enough; our purpose is to be dramatic, not realistic. So how do you make a fight scene long, without boring the reader?

The answer lies within!

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

So, I’ve blathered on at length about how to imagine a fight scene for a story: who’s fighting, and why, and where, and with what, and how they’re doing it, and so on.

How do you get that onto the page?

Point of view seems a useful place to begin this discussion. It’s generally already been decided by the time you get to the scene; if the whole book has been in third person limited from the protagonist’s perspective, you’re unlikely to hop to first just for the fight. (You could do it, as some kind of avant-garde trick — but 99.9% of the time, you won’t.) So, what are you working with: first, second (unlikely), or third? Third limited or omniscient? If limited, then whose third are we in?

For a story with only one pov, again, that’s probably already been decided. But if you have multiple viewpoint characters, and more than one of them is present for the fight, you have a choice to make.

The best answer may not be what you assume.

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

After a delay of much longer duration than expected, I finally have for you a follow-up post on the topic of where to set the combat, which will function as our segue into craft-related aspects of writing fight scenes.

If the layout and contents of the environment are important to the scene — as they should be — then you need to have a very clear grasp on their relative positions. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll communicate that information effectively to the reader, but believe me: if you don’t have that clear grasp, your odds of communicating the necessary information go way down.

To that end, I suggest making a map.

It doesn’t have to be fancy. Mine, in fact, are hideous. Let me show you, with three examples from Warrior (the novel formerly known as Doppelganger):

Nobody ever has to see them but you. Unless, of course, you decide to write a series of posts on the topic of fights, and use your own work as a demonstration.