How to Write an Action Scene

Happy Thursday everyone! I decided to work on a different post today and take a break from posting literally essential devices.

Today this post will be all about action scenes and how to write them.

Let's get to it!

4 Types of Fight Scenes

First we need to learn that there are various types of fighting styles or rather common fighting scenes that we see in the media and in writing.

Fight scenes can take on many iterations, but most fall into one of four categories:

The Challenges of Writing Action Sequences

The art of writing fight scenes involves two main challenges.

Remember the actual actions of fighting are quick and sudden movements and it is often best to portray that in your writing with quick, short sentences. Unless you feel the need to write lengthy sentences that is!

Tips on How to Write a Fight Scene

Things to Consider When Writing Action Scenes

There you have it! Something different from what I have been posting.

Like, reblog and follow if you find these helpful!

Writing Fight Scenes: The VIOLENT Method

okay, so because people have a hard time writing effective fight scenes, I'm going to walk everyone through the method that I use for everything from massive sci fi battles, to quick three-v-eight sword brawls to bar fights. The VIOLENT Method. (Because fun mnemonics)

Visceral: Make sure your audience feels it by keeping it grounded in injuries and pain. People get fuckin' hurt in fights, and no fight where people do not is going to feel real. Tying into this, people don't fight fair, and people don't fight pretty. Even people who are trained fighters will make mistakes in their technique in a real fight because adrenaline makes you worse, not better, even as it makes you faster/stronger. Also, in real fights people stomp on downed opponents, take shots at turned backs, people bleed, scream, etc., Also, really critically, people are exhausted after fights. Your characters should be wrung by the time it's over, even if it only lasted for a few minutes.

Immediate: Keep sentences short and punchy. No one is analyzing every step of the fight tactically while it's happening. If characters are thinking "Ah yes I will make him overextend and then pull his wrist in and throw him before stomping his head…" I know that the author of the scene has never been in an actual fight. Keep sentences short and punchy. "Draw in, grab, and throw."

Obnoxious: Tying into the above, fights can be disorienting. Don't overdo this, you need your reader to have an idea of what's going on, but don't underdo it either - things should be a bit chaotic. If it feels like the characters know everything that's going on around them, you're doing it wrong. Read what the following sections say about rhythm, but bear this in mind: once you get a rhythm going and keep it flowing for several paragraphs: break it with a short, hard paragraph and shift it in a way deliberately disorienting to the reader on purpose to drive in that things are unpredictable. In a fight, there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of confusion, and that should reflect enough in the narration to bring a sense of it to the reader - but again, don't overdo it to the point where the reader can't tell what's going on.

Liquid: Fights flow. There's a definitive rhythm and momentum to a fight. While the characters won't necessarily have a great idea of everything happening, they WILL have a sense of the momentum around them and the way the fight is making them move. Momentum and movement are going to be the key to writing an impactful fight scene and give the reader a sense of excitement, or, if you want to give a sense of a dragging, exhausting affair of attrition, do the opposite: grind the momentum to almost nil while two massive groups start sniping and grinding at each other with almost no movement.

Environment: Where's the fight happening? How is everyone moving? Describe the surrounding environment. This is the space a fight is happening in, whether a big open field, a forest grove, a small tight room where you can use the walls for leverage, a park where you can use benches for jumping points or to smash people's heads against, etc., matters in a fight, as does how everyone is using it. Heat, cold, visibility, all of these factor into a fight as well.

Narrator: Who is your narrator in the fight? A trained soldier? A trained fighter? Just some untrained schlub who has no idea what they're doing? These people have a different idea of how fighting works, and that matters. What a soldier notices, what a correspondent notices, what a martial artist notices, etc, are all differences. Keep an eye on how you present this.

Tactics: What does everyone want out of the fight? Is one side fighting to kill the other? Just to knock out? To capture? To take a location? Just to drive each other off? What are the rules of engagement? How trained are the combatants? What kind of discipline is everyone under, if any? Weapons? These all matter when you're asking questions, and you should research what effects all of these will have, but short version: fighting to kill is easier than fighting to capture, and its very rare, despite what the movies say, that any force will fight to the last man rather than retreat.

Setting Goals for Your Characters

Two things come to mind. First, it’s unlikely that you’re writing from both character’s perspectives simultaneously. Second, not every fight is going to be to the death.

When you’re writing a scene, it’s important to have clear goals for the participants. Violence is a way your characters attempt to exert their will on the world around them, it doesn’t simply occur for its own sake. (This isn’t a moral judgement; just that if your violence lacks motivation, it will come across as hollow. There are ways to leverage this, but, that’s a more complicated topic.) If you have two characters who want each other dead, then chances are someone’s not walking away. However, if you have characters with different goals, then any combat that occurs will be at cross purposes.

You don’t necessarily need to explain those goals to your audience. In fact, by default, your characters are unlikely to know their foe’s goals. That’s the biggest consideration in the other part of this question.

Your characters aren’t part of a psychic gestalt. They don’t automatically know what the other people around them are thinking, feeling, or planning. Even with an omniscient narrator, your characters won’t know their foes thoughts and plans, though the audience may be. With a limited narrator, you’re going to be writing the scene from the perspective of one of your characters, and, again, they won’t know what their foe is planning.

When both of your characters have the same background, it can provide an edge against one another. They’ve had the same training, and they’ll have learned the same strategies, tactics, and techniques. This means they have some ability to predict the other’s actions. They’ll be in a better position to predict their foe’s goals, and how what they’ll do to realize them.

If your characters have different backgrounds and skillsets, they won’t have that advantage; that’s the difference. They’ll have to guess at their foe’s methods, based on the information they have. They’re less likely to know what their foe wants, and they won’t know how their foe will go about achieving their goals.

So, how do you write two characters with different backgrounds in conflict? By remembering that they’re different people, and don’t know what the other person was trained to do.

-Starke

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Setting Goals for Your Characters was originally published on How to Fight Write.

I took some historical sword-fighting lessons to make the fights in my novel more realistic - here’s what I learned.

To make the fighting scenes in my low fantasy novel more realistic, I went to see a trainer for historical sword-fighting last week, both to barrage her with questions and to develop realistic choreographies for the fight scenes in the novel. Since I figured some of what she told me might be useful for you too, I put together a small list for you. Big thanks to Gladiatores Munich and Jeanne for making time! (Here are some more pictures if you’re interested.)

Caveat: I’m by no means a sword-fighting expert myself, so take these nuggets with a grain of salt – I might have misremembered or misinterpreted some of the things Jeanne told me. If I did, feel free to tell me.

1.) Weapon choices need to make sense

Let’s start with a truism: always ensure your character’s weapons make sense for a.) their profession, b.) their cultural background and c.) the environment they’re going to fight in. A farmer probably couldn’t afford a sword and might use a knife or threshing flail instead, and someone who doesn’t want to be noticed probably wouldn’t be milling about sporting a glaive or another large weapon. Also, soldiers native to a country with wide open plains would be more likely to carry long-range melee weapons such as spears or large swords, than those from a country consisting of mostly jungle or dense forests. The same applies to situations: if your character is going to be fighting in close quarters (even just a normal house), he’d get little value out of a spear or even a longsword, as there’d be no space to swing it effectively.

2.) Boldness often beats skill

In real swordfights, recklessness was often more important than technique. The fighter less afraid of getting injured would often push harder, allowing them to overpower even opponents with better technique.

3.) Even a skilled fighter rarely stands a chance when outnumbered

While a skilled (or lucky) fighter might win a two-versus-one, it’d be extremely unlikely for even a single master swordsman to win against superior numbers, even just three and if they’re below his skill level. The only way to plausibly pull this off would be to split the opponents up, perhaps by luring them into a confined space where you could take them on one by one. The moment you’re surrounded, you’re probably done for – because, unlike in Hollywood, they wouldn’t take turns attacking but come at you all at once.

4.) Dual-wielding was a thing

… at least in some cultures. I often heard people say that people using a weapon in each hand is an invention of fiction. And while my instructor confirmed that she knew of no European schools doing this—if they did, it’s not well-documented—she said it was a thing in other cultures. Example of this include the dual wakizashi in Japan or tomahawk and knife in North America. However, one of the biggest problems with the depiction of dual wielding in novels/movies/games are the “windmill”-type attacks where the fighter swings their weapons independently, hitting in succession rather than simultaneously. Normally you’d always try hitting with both weapons at once, as you’d otherwise lose your advantage.

5.) Longswords were amazing

Longswords might seem boring in comparison to other weapons, but they were incredibly effective, especially in combat situations outside the battlefield. The crossguard allowed for effective blocking of almost any kind of attack (well, maybe not an overhead strike of a Mordaxt, but still), the pommel was also used as a powerful “blunt” weapon of its own that could crack skulls. Though they were somewhat less effective against armored opponents, the long, two-handed hilt allowed for precise thrusts at uncovered body parts that made up for it.

6.)  “Zweihänder” were only used for very specific combat situations

Zweihänder—massive two-handed swords—were only used for specific purposes and usually not in one-on-one combat as is often seen in movies or games. One of these purposes was using their reach to break up enemy formations. In fact, one type of two-handed sword even owed its name to that purpose: Gassenhauer (German, Gasse = alley, Hauer = striker)—the fighters literally used it to strike “alleys” into an enemy formation with wide, powerful swings.

7.) It’s all about distance

While I was subconsciously aware of this, it might be helpful to remember that distance was an incredibly important element in fights. The moment your opponent got past your weapons ideal range, it was common to either switch to a different weapon or just drop your weapon and resort to punching/choking. A good example of this are spears or polearms—very powerful as long as you maintain a certain range between you and your opponent, but the moment they get too close, your weapon is practically useless. That’s also why combatants almost always brought a second weapon into battle to fall back one.

8.) Real fights rarely lasted over a minute

Another truism, but still useful to remember: real fights didn’t last long. Usually, they were over within less than a minute, sometimes only seconds – the moment your opponent landed a hit (or your weapon broke or you were disarmed), you were done for. This is especially true for combatants wearing no or only light armor.

9.) Stop the pirouettes

Unfortunately, the spinning around and pirouetting that makes many fight scenes so enjoyable to watch (or read) is completely asinine. Unless it’s a showfight, fighters would never expose their backs to their opponent or even turn their weapon away from them.

10.)  It still looks amazing

If your concern is that making your fight scenes realistic will make them less aesthetic, don’t worry. Apart from the fact that the blocks, swings and thrusts still look impressive when executed correctly, I personally felt that my fights get a lot more gripping and visceral if I respect the rules. To a certain extent, unrealistic and flashy combat is plot armor. If your characters can spin and somersault to their heart’s content and no one ever shoves a spear into their backs as they would have in real life, who survives and who doesn’t noticeably becomes arbitrary. If, on the other hand, even one slip-up can result in a combatant’s death, the stakes become palpable.

That’s about it! I hope this post is as helpful to some of you as the lessons were to me. Again, if anything I wrote here is bollocks, it’s probably my fault and not Jeanne’s.  I’ll try to post more stuff like this in the future.

Cheers,

Nicolas

Three things you must know for any fight scene

I’m back with more advice! On today’s episode: fights. How to write them? How to plan them?

I’m here to help! Wether your a plotter, a pantser or somewhere in between, here are three things you should establish before writing a fight scene.

1) Who wins?

It seems like fairly obvious advice, but when I was a much younger writer, time after time, I’d go into a fight scene with no plan regarding the outcome. Whenever I felt like the fight was over, I’d end it, and whoever came out on top was the winner, regardless of how it made sense in the narrative. 

Establishing a winner from the beginning allows you to build the fight up in a trajectory that makes sense. Once you know who wins, you can better choreograph the scene to keep readers guessing.

2) What are the stakes?

Once you know who wins, you must then decide what the stakes of the fight are. What happens if they lose? If they win? What is gained or lost? This can vary wildly, depending on what genre you’re in. Sci-fi and fantasy will commonly have world-ending stakes a la Avengers: Infinity War. Romance or contemporary stories are more on the ‘suspended from school’ end of the spectrum. 

Either way, you must know what the fight accomplishes for the characters — good or bad. Not only must you know, but you must make sure it’s known for the reader too. If we don’t understand why the characters are fighting, the fight will be confusing and there will be little to no emotional tie.

3) What are the characters’ fighting styles?

This is more secondary information, but I think it’s important for at least the author to know. Ask yourself: Do my characters have previous fighting experience? Do they prefer one style to the other?

A boxer will fight differently from a wrestler. MMA and Karate do not look the same. If your characters have experience in any discipline, put some time towards researching it so you accurately portray it. Even non-combat sports can impact how someone fights. 

If your characters have no fighting experience, they’re much more likely to be ‘scrappy.’ And no — someone with no combat background will not win against someone who does, unless they have untapped magic punching powers. Keep it realistic. 

Once you’ve established these three things, you’re well on your way to writing a powerful fight that hooks readers in!

I’d like to add (since I’ve been thinking about this a lot for my current WIP) whose perspective is the fight from? Will they know how fights work and therefore can describe an uppercut accurately, or do they have little experience with them? Does the fight seem slowed down, or can they not comprehend what’s going on at all? Always consider your POV!

Q&A: The (Limited) Implications of Left Hand Dominance in Combat

Somewhat. When we’re just talking about using the weapon in a vacuum, it doesn’t matter that much. Similarly, when you’re talking about a duel, where both combatants have a sword, and nothing off hand, it’s not a huge deal.

Being a lefty becomes important in combat in some specific situations.

If you have an off hand tool, such as a parrying dagger, things can get nasty. Parrying works by redirecting the attack away from your body, usually by pushing the attack out. When someone parries with an item in their right hand, they’ll push the attack to their right (their opponent’s left.) Normally, with two right handed users with parrying tools in their off hands, this will allow them to parry each other’s weapon. However, when a left handed user parries a right handed opponent, they will redirect their foe’s weapon arm across, blocking any potential parry.

Worth noting that this goes both ways, and that a combatant facing a foe with the same dominant hand can choose to parry with their primary weapon to strike with their parrying tool, if it can be used that way. (Not all parrying tools can be used to stab your opponent. This is especially true with some varieties of swordbreakers.) Also, if you are parrying with your weapon, to shank someone with your off-hand, you’re going to close the distance.

None of this should really come as a surprise to an experienced soldier. Fighting a left-handed user isn’t as common, but it’s not unheard of.

Also, worth knowing that some duelists will specifically train to fight with their off-hand. It’s intended for showing off. A sort of, “I’m so good, I don’t even need to use my dominant hand.” I’d say it’s not a good idea, except it does have applications, such as if you cannot use your dominant hand for whatever reason. So, it’s probably more accurate to say that it’s not practiced with a practical goal in mind, however it can be useful in rare situations.

Most real castle architecture was designed to favor a right handed, defender. I’m going to use a specific example here, but many spiral stairways are designed so a defender, fighting from an elevated position, will have more room on their right side, giving them more options from which to strike. A right handed attacker will be close to the stone, and have limited options for striking. However, a left handed attacker will be able to exploit some of those architectural designs during the assault. A lefty climbing up the stairs will be able to strike with their less restrained arm.

This can also be seen with some external stairways, where the defender’s right arm will be out over open space, and free to move, while a right handed assaulter will have their weapon arm pressed up against the stonework.

While it’s not relevant to specifically melee weapons, hand dominance can be a major factor with modern firearms, to the point that some guns simply cannot be used with the wrong hand. The big offender are the controls. Safeties, slide releases, and mag ejects, can be ambidextrous, but it’s common to see those designed for a right handed user. Most firearms will eject their shell casings out the right side of the gun. This can be especially awkward if you are left handed. Some rifles (especially bullpups) cannot be operated off-hand, as they will gleefully pelt the user with spent shellcasings. Some grip contours will be uncomfortable, or unusable, if you attempt to hold it with the wrong hand.

This leaves the user with some very specific options. Some firearms can be reconfigured for left-handed use. (This can sometimes be achieved through configuring the weapon itself, though in other cases, you’ll need to replace specific components.) You can simply cope, and adapt your grip. Or, you can learn to operate the weapon off-hand. In my case, my experience with operating rifles right handed is simply because modifying the offending rifles wasn’t an option.

Many left-handed shooters will learn to operate firearms right handed, simply out of necessity. But it’s always nice when you’ve got the option to use a gun with your preferred hand, but, for a lefty, it’s not always an option.

So, does your dominant hand have any importance? Yes, some, but in the vast majority of situations it’s not going to matter that much. Being left handed isn’t that exceptional or unusual. It can affect combat, but it’s not a major consideration.

-Starke

Q&A: The (Limited) Implications of Left Hand Dominance in Combat was originally published on How to Fight Write.

Writing Fight Scenes

Writing Fight Scenes

(by a writer and martial artist)

This is a rework of an older post of mine that I wanted to try and turn into some more general advice for writing fight scenes. First of all, I want to point out that wars and mass battle scenes are not going to be covered here. There’s an art to writing those which is very different to writing one-on-one fights and fights in general between small numbers of participants. Mass battles have to switch between smaller focusses and overall tides. If you want tips on how to do that, I can recommend the video by Henry on The Closer Look called ‘How to Waste a Climax’ which compares the mass battle scene in Avengers: Endgame to the Battle of Helms Deep in LotR’s Two Towers.

Firstly then, the sad truth is that, until I started studying martial arts ten years ago, I did not know how to watch a fight scene. I enjoyed them and could see what was happening in them, but I did not know I was missing something until I practised martial arts myself. This isn’t to say that you will never understand a fight scene until you go and do fighting yourself (though if you get the opportunity, even a very small number of classes will hugely change your perspective), it just means that there is a lot of work that one needs to put in to start to ‘read’ a fight sequence.

The second thing to note is that, in films and books, fights are very dictated by genre. Not every fight needs to be John Wick style action, not every fight needs to even be about the fight itself. Motivation in a fight sequence is something I’m going to come back to later, and is key to portraying a fight scene well. A lot of fight scenes don’t need to be written at all, and the first thing you should ask yourself as a writer is, would a fight scene actually serve a purpose here? If “they fought it out, and X eventually emerged victorious, sporting a bloody nose and a black eye” does the job just as well, then a fight scene in this context will probably be redundant. This post is going to focus on climactic fight scenes – fights that are going to be key climaxes in your story. You can apply lots of these ideas to smaller scuffles too, but please don’t go away thinking every time your bruiser character roughs someone up there needs to have been some kind of philosophical epiphany and hours of your own research taking place.

So, onto the fight itself. I’m going to be discussing unarmed combat (I am a karate-ka of 10 years experience), but many principles of unarmed combat also apply to weapons. We train kobudo (weapon styles) in karate sometimes, in order to improve our empty-hand techniques, since many of the moves are the same, and a weapon will help you place your hands more correctly or give you a feel of where the weight of your strike should be. This means many of the things I’ll say can also apply to armed combat. Obviously, this is not going to be useful advice for ranged weapons, either modern or ancient, but, depending on what genre you’re working with, those aren’t typically what we’d think of in a classic action fight scene anyway. The most important difference between weapons and empty-hand combat is that, unless your characters are using a blunt weapon, the fight is going to be lethal and over very quickly (think the duel from Kurosawa’s Sanjuro) . Actually, a big takeaway for fights in general is that they are much shorter than films lead you to believe. If your characters are experts, or especially if one is an expert and the other is not, your fight may be over in a matter of seconds. The most noticeable exceptions to this are fights where rules have deliberately been introduced to make fights non-lethal and to drag them out for longer, as in all spectator fights like wrestling, or other competitive martial arts. Fighting is very draining and uses all your body as well as making you constantly think. Three minutes, for example, is a long time to keep up a continuously fighting.

1.      Choosing a Fighting Style

What style of fighting is your character using? First of all, don’t panic if you don’t know anything about fighting styles. Unless your character is trained in a style, they will just be using a form of street brawling. The more someone gets into fights, the more likely they are to pick up a few good tips on this, but they are never going to be as adept as someone who’s had tutelage on how a body moves. Untrained fighting is a lot of wild haymakers/round punches - think drunks in the street on a Friday night (especially guys). This is still a ‘style’ of fighting, and thinking about your characters background and experience will help determine the kinds of moves and footage you might want to look up for reference.

If your character is trained in a fighting style and you have trouble choosing, here are some ideas for how to pick. Where are they from? Lots of countries have their own fighting styles, as well as higher representations of certain fighting styles from other countries. (Here is a list of martial arts by country). What kind of person is your character? Fighting styles are built to favour a person’s build, but also a modelled after ideologies. The founder of Aikido developed his style specifically to overcome aggressiveness and violence in oneself. The moves favour using the opponent’s weight against them, and typically the art focusses on locks and throws. By comparison, Krav Maga has its origins in anti-fascist self-defence in 1930s Czechoslovakia, where it was intended to be militarised, aggressive and efficient from the outset. What philosophy does your character take when it comes to martial arts? Are they looking to kill someone, keep fit, defend themselves or others, join an army or other militarised unit, compete in a tournament or Olympics? Any of these will help narrow down the kind of style your character might practice.

2.      Studying and References

To write a convincing fight scene, the best thing you can do is to study the way people fight. This can be time-consuming, and if you haven’t done it before, it can be hard to know what to look for. Youtube is your friend, because you can also slow footage down to half speed to see what people are doing (go to the Settings cog in the bottom right of a video – Playback Speed – 0.5). Find a martial artist practising your style of choice and look at how they move. The two key things to doing a fighting style justice in fiction are:

1. Know the overall feel of the style. Does it flow, is it compact, is it all about throwing, or weaving in and out of an opponent?

2. Look up a few signature moves that you can incorporate into your fight.

These two things together will mean that your character convincingly looks like they know how to fight and how to use their martial art of choice, even if you as a writer may have limited experience in fighting or that style yourself.

When you are first watching a fight, break down in your head what is going on. Focus on what each the limbs of the fighters are doing. Try a few out for yourself on your own (don’t be shy even if you’ve had no experience before). Sometimes thinking in 3D is really helpful for understanding how people move. Look out for how people punch. Is it a jab straight forward, or large round punch? Is it using a fist, or an open hand or the back of their hand? How is the opponent blocking it? Watch the way the opponent’s whole body moves with their blocking hand. And remember not just to look at the hands. Watching someone’s feet tells you a lot about how they are moving. Fights aren’t just punch block punch block. Try to think about the dynamism of the movement.

3.      Flow and Simplicity

Ok, so you’ve spent lots of time watching watching fights in slo-mo, you’re pumped to try out writing some of those cool moves. STOP. Before you start, throw all of the technical jargon and long precise descriptions of fancy moves out the window. Because today we’re not here are martial artists, but as writers. And the reason you had to slow down those videos because fights are FAST. Now you need to somehow convey the speed and energy of a fight, whilst also describing the complexity you’ve seen in fight footage. Simplicity is your friend. This is the one place you absolutely want to eradicate the frills in your writing. You want the reader to know what is going on in the simplest and easiest way possible. You want sentence to be short and snappy to convey beats of action. You want the scene to flow in natural way that captures the fluidity of a fight. This takes lots of re-reading, and jettisoning awkward language that will naturally be there first time round when you’re trying to choreograph the actual fight on paper.

Fighting in real life is actually really draining, and usually over pretty quickly. We’re talking minutes here. There’s never any time for talking unless you’ve got distance again between you and an opponent and you’re looking for an opening to come back in. Movie monologues during a fight are usually there for climactic purposes, but I’m sitting there a lot of the time wondering why the person not talking doesn’t just use this to their advantage and finish the other person off. Think about how you’re going to use storytelling in your fight sequence if you want the fight to seem realistic. Hint: it’s not with talking. More on this later.

Note: if you’re a martial artist, there can be a tendency to want to call moves by the names you would call them in your dojo or classroom. Don’t do this. It will alienate your readers and bore them/make them feel stupid. Most people don’t know what a mawashi geri is. Don’t make them go look it up. It will cut up the speed and coherence of reading your fight if they have to go google it. Find a way to describe the moves in English if that’s the language you’re writing in. Don’t rely on English technical names either, unless they are very obvious or have entered into colloquial English. Explain very clearly what your characters are doing, and don’t leave anything up to language that is exclusively used by practioners.

4.      Scene and Setting

Remember your characters are not fighting in a vacuum. The classic here is think Jackie Chan movies. Think about how everything around him has a place in his fights and makes them kind of quirky and endearing. Or think about how the setting can make scenes iconic. Luke and Vader’s fight in Empire would be fundamentally different if their fight scene hadn’t led to a place with a huge drop beneath them. How is your setting going to impact the fight? Does it distract your characters? Give them an advantage? And remember, unless your character has got a code, pride, or is being forced by circumstance to fight, a lot of people are going to try and run when they see a fight isn’t heading their way. Try to foreshadow obstacles and relevant scenery that will come into play in your fight scene. If you watch any Jackie Chan sequence, you’ll notice that the object that is about to be used in the fight, is introduce via camera angle a while earlier, so that the audience can see where the fight will go and follow it with satisfaction as their expectations are met. Try to think about how you as a writer can foreshadow the way in which your setting is about to be used, so that the introduction of outside elements feels natural in a fight.

5.      Showing Character and Motivation

Okay, on to the fun part. The number one reason to show a fight scene is not plot, or some sick action, but to tell your reader something about who those characters are as people. Fighting can be a deeply personal experience that pits character against character in a drama without words. This is the perfect time to get in your character’s heads and also to show who they are by how they move. Are they defensive or aggressive? Are they focussed on the fight or thinking about their opponent? You can use a fight to show two people in love. You can use a fight to show two people who used to be friends who are now bitter with each other but nostalgic for times gone by. You can use a fight to bring out raw qualities of human emotion. Don’t ever settle for just he punched/she blocked when you have the opportunity to dig into who your characters are with this scene. So far we’ve talked a lot about watching movies and footage, which might lead you to believe that film is the best media for showing fights. In some ways, that’s true, but in others, I think that’s completely false. Because in film we cannot have introspection in the same way we can in writing. And that’s why I think it’s really important for writers to make full use of the medium they have and to really show us what’s going on internally when a character fights.

Fights are often pretty messy, and even an experienced martial artist will find that, in reality, adrenaline and the unexpected will throw lots of their technique and hard practice out the window. How rattled is your character by this fight, and how often have they ever properly fought another person? What are the stakes in the fight? Does it really matter if they lose? Why are they fighting? What about them as a person is changing over the course of the fight? If they were reluctant to fight, is that reluctance increasing or decreasing as the fight goes on? How is this reflected in their moves? How has violence changed your character? By the end of this fight scene, your reader should know more than just the outcome of a fight. They should have learned something about the characters involved that they didn’t know before. Lots of self-control that people have during social interactions gets lost in the heat and adrenaline of a fight. People you thought were calm, witty, and together can be revealed as barely in control, hard-hitting, and bitter. You can see how competitive someone is and how much they want to win. Even a friendly sparring match can reveal a lot about who a person is.

As an additional point: if you have a heavy focus on the way that a fight is transforming your character, you can reduce the focus on the fight itself. This is especially useful for more drama-centred genres rather than action genres. It can even feel out of place to have a high-octane fight scene inserted into a character drama piece. A fight written to be more about a character’s emotions and inner turmoil can be just as fun to read as one rammed full of action. Remember to think about genre and what elements of what we’ve discussed are going to be more prominent in your chosen genre.

6.      Purpose of the Scene

Finally, what is the purpose of your scene? As writers, we’ve got the ability to choose our language carefully and present a scene that can move our reader’s sympathies in different directions. We have very different tools at our disposal to those that a film director has. This is going to get more subjective here, but personally, I don’t think the purpose of a fight scene should ever be to glorify violence. I think a good fight sequence will hold in mind that pitting humans violently against each other will mean every victory has a bittersweet element to it. This particularly goes for gruesome scenes and those resulting in death. Think about what you as a writer want to convey to your reader through this scene, not just in terms of plot and character development, but also in terms of how you want your reader to come away thinking about violence itself. Sometimes, a fight isn’t big and cool and dramatic, even if it is a climax of a story. Sometimes a fight is meant to be horrifying, and the reader should be appalled by it. Sometimes it is a swift execution and not a balanced fight at all. Think about how the scene will sway your reader’s sympathies one way or another. Even if your fight scene is instead fun and pulpy, think about whether you are perpetuating the idea that violence is cool, and whether or not that’s really the message you want a reader to walk away with. I try to use a fight scene to show what someone’s ideals are, or to show that being forced into a lifestyle of violence has destroyed something empathetic inside them.

So the main things to think about when it comes to fight scenes:

I wish you all the best in your fight scene writing! Feel free to message me if you would like further clarification or advice!

Short sentences! Keep the action moving! Don’t slow the flow! Leave behind unnecessary descriptors!

Though ymmv on what is a ‘necessary descriptor’ and what is not. What color the curtains are in the room the fight is taking place is probably not. What another character looks like when they’re punched in the face probably is.

But in the midst of high emotions, the human brain also has a habit of noticing and latching onto odd, incongruous things. There’s this one fight scene I wrote in which, at one point, a character is pinned against a glass candy counter. While his face is smushed against it and he knows he’s losing the fight, he notices the varieties of candy inside. It’s a detail that adds a discordant note of realism to the scene in that it reminds the reader that this isn’t happening in a place where violence normally happens and also foreshadows that, like the candy, he’s about to get consumed.

But the golden rule with fight scene descriptors - I think - is “is it something the character would notice in the midst of the action?” If so, keep going with the flow.

On the topic of short sentences: I think fight scenes are most effective when the violence is sudden and jarring and the style used to write it is markedly different from that used in the rest of the story. Sometimes I even go so far as to warp the rules of grammar during a fight scene. A sentence is cut off by a too-swift-to-react-to hit. The action becomes disjointed and divided by the blinks of a character’s eyes as he tries to blink away the irritants the other combatant just threw in his face, while still going on with the fight in spite of everything. A character’s entire sense of reality is warped as he beats the tar out of another character and sees, not the person he’s literally beating, but every single other person (including himself) that he’s actually mad at. 

I used to write free form poetry and weirdly, that’s the practice that’s helped me the most in writing fight scenes. It’s a style of writing that requires the crystallization of intense emotions within just a few sentences and really, that’s the core of what a fight scene’s all about. 

On a more down-to-earth note: Know the abilities and limits of the human body! I absolutely cannot recommend @scriptmedic enough for that. The philosophy of her book Maim your Characters has had a huge, huge, cannot-be-overstated impact on how I write fight scenes and violence in general. 

Watching fight scenes and then describing what happened in them to yourself or another person is also really good practice. Kind of acting them out yourself while you’re writing also helps. Bonus points if you’ve got another person willing to play-fight with you.

the essentials of writing FIGHT SCENES!

I realized that there weren’t a lot of fight scene tutorials on here that addressed a lot of the common mistakes of fight scenes. I have a non-zero amount of experience with Krav Maga and have been told I’m very good with fight scenes so I thought I might as well write out a little advice 

Keep in mind that this is best suited to “nasty hand to hand street fighting” and even then there are probably better people to ask about it. But here goes. 

What’s the One Important Thing I’d have you remember? 

Best piece of fight scene advice I’ve ever heard: Violence is fast. Whenever people are involved in some kind of accident or tragedy, what they say is “It happened so fast!” So no matter what, think fast. The main mistake I see with fight scenes is unrealistic description, and it comes from a lack of understanding of a fight being a very altered state of consciousness, where your character is at the limits of their ability to process shit. So: 

How to Describe a Fight Scene! 

The Language: Go for the strongest verbs you can find and use them. Think slam, crash, smash, pound, grind, shove, ram, claw, rip, gouge, bash…You want very verb driven writing. This is the time to pull out that thesaurus and that list of 500 verbs to use in writing or whatever. Don’t let adjectives and adverbs carry the weight. “She punched him hard in the gut” needs to be “She slammed a fist into his gut.” Or better, let the fist be the subject: “Her fist slammed in his gut.”  If there’s any time to adhere hardcore to active voice, it’s now. Also notice that I shortened “into” to “in”- it’s best to go with language that’s as short and well, punchy, grammar be damned. This is also why I go with “gut” rather than “stomach.” Sentence fragments and em-dashes and such are your friends. Cut out articles and conjunctions wherever you can. And try to keep the subject and verb of every action close together–it’s much more direct and better able to connote that intense aggression that you want. 

So, you might have something like this: “As she tried to throw a punch at his face, he dodged aside, moving in, his body twisting, to kick her in the ribs.” 

You might notice the following issues: The verbs are fairly weak- tried, moving. “Dodged” is good but the others fall flat. There are a lot of extraneous words. And the clause at the beginning makes the sentence feel too indirect. 

So these are the changes I would make: “Her fist darted for his face. He dodged aside. Slipped closer, twisted–his heel crashed into ribcage.” 

That’s the technical stuff out of the way. Now for some more general advice on fights:

In a fight, you really don’t think. There are two things your brain can do: percieve and respond. In such an adrenaline-fueled survival situation, you’re a bundle of instinctive reaction and OHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCK. A skilled fighter doesn’t mentally remember techniques, the techniques are just the first response that springs out at an attack because they’re second nature. And the thing is, you CAN’T remember techniques in the fight. Adrenaline makes you big stupid. Brain is a faraway land, but body is here, in danger, and trying to stay alive. This is what I mean by your character being at the limits of their processing—they have very little room to think because they’re in survival mode.

That’s why you practice techniques One Fuckthousand Times in martial arts. It’s actually wild how little conscious thought there is to it. I’m always going to remember the time when I, a smol orange belt, was sparring with a larger guy and his fist was flying at my face and I just…wove underneath it. Without even thinking. Pure instinct. I had two guys like, beaming at me and pounding me on the back at the breakthrough but I was confused at the time because it felt like a complete accident. So what you should get out of this is—yeah, no internal monologue! Write what your character perceives and write what they respond.

Description of any kind, but especially visual description, will be highly fragmented. If your character is in a fight with another character, they’re not going to be extensively perceiving their surroundings and noticing the thick curtains of ivy on the walls or whatever. Their focus will be. On the fight. Part of the reason for this is that adrenaline makes you focus hard on threats and kind of cancels out irrelevant data. I want to point out visual description specifically as an area of concern though because for one thing, your field of view is going to be limited as you try to protect your head and face, you’re going to need to pay attention to your aggressor and anticipate their next move, and finally, if you get punched in the face or have anything come close to hitting you there you’re going to be blinded temporarily because you’ll instinctively shut your eyes. NO SCENERY! If your character’s getting pummeled in the face they’re probably not noticing the vicious gleam in their adversary’s eyes outside of a quick glimpse. Imagine the whole thing is being filmed through a panicking amateur’s shaky camera.

Hone in hard on your character’s body in your descriptions. They’re inhabiting their body in a super intense way and most of your description will probably lean toward the tactile. This not only includes the awareness of pain or of being hit, but also the movement and coordination of their muscles and how they are working together, their breathing, potentially exhaustion or fatigue. Martial arts allows you to experience how your body produces force—to percieve the flow of power through your entire torso that culminates in a punch. This feeling can add a lot to a description of a fight. A punch or a kick’s power doesn’t come from muscular strength of your limbs, but originates throughout your body and the ability to coordinate that and draw it together into a single hard point of power involves a lot of consciousness of your body, which also becomes second nature.

Almost the entirety of your character’s focus will be firmly in their body. They are perceiving their adversary’s movements, but that is sharply edged with their own reactions to them.

I feel like people often don’t realize how intense taking a hit in a fight can be. A punch to the face or head is blinding and dizzying; taking a hit to the temple will snap your head aside and put you completely out of it for a second. Descriptions of these things need to be very grounded and intense to feel right. Getting hit in the chest hard enough can knock the wind out of you. Getting hit in the gut WILL make you retch or throw up. A hard kick to the gut is like instant vomit. (There’s another post with really excellent descriptions about what certain blows feel like so I’ll leave this at that.)

Your character will perceive pain, both the force of the blow they take and a sense of the scale or breadth of the pain, but adrenaline will keep them going through it to a degree that isn’t possible when not pumped full of adrenaline. Your character will probably know that they’ve been injured (oh fuck, that was a nasty hit to the side) but AFTER the fight, expect the real pain to suddenly hit (oh fuck, there’s a giant bruise over my side and it’s aching so deep I can barely move).

Adrenaline makes you straight up loopy sometimes. Y’all know how much I hate anecdotal evidence, but one of my former instructors told a story about how he was mugged, got slammed against the sidewalk and briefly blacked out, fought back, and then just…decided to go to work. He thought he was fine. A few hours later, paramedics were asking him questions and he was completely incoherent. He had a severe concussion but the adrenaline rush had caused a delay in the damage really hitting, to the point that he was just like “heh, I can go straight to work, I’m fine!”

Some general facts:

A fight is probably going to be over pretty quickly: Movies are deceptive about this but it’s not super realistic to have two characters tangling with each other for like…ten minutes straight. You get tired. You get sloppy. And there’s only so much damage you can take.

Fancy kicks not recommended: They look nice on screen, sure. But having your leg above your waist for any length of time is one hell of a risk when your opponent can grab it and slam you to the floor like a sack of concrete mix. HOWEVER, kicks can be fight enders. A heel kick will break ribs easily.

Dirty fighting: This is the Kravist in me, but knees to the groin are valid and will completely immobilize a testicle-having attacker. Elbows are also highly destructive, but you tend not to see them in movie fights much. Biting is valid and bites can be very nasty. Gouging eyes is very effective. It’s also easier than you would think to rip the skin off someone’s face with your nails if you’re already going feral. A good punch to the throat might end a fight.

Blocking or dodging blows: Your character can deflect a punch or a knife attack to the upper body with forearms, and your arms will cushion a blow to the head as well. You can also duck your head around an attempted blow to the face. It’s important, though, to think of your two characters’ actions as interlocking rather than alternating—a character going in for a hit will at least briefly have one of their limbs extended instead of protecting the body, and the other character will be taking that opening. Have them dodge the blow and slide into their own opportunity in a single movement.

Shit Happens: A fight is not an equation where you plug in the size and weight of both adversaries and get the result. Again, this is the Kravist in me, but the only law is Murphy’s law. An attempt to land a blow can go sour and break somebody’s wrist. An attacker can trip and fall. Puddles and improvised weapons and getting blood or sweat in your eyes can all be wild cards. An experienced fighter can get fucked up by someone smaller and less experienced than they because of luck. That said, though, experience is what helps you adapt to the Murphy’s-law-ness of everything.

Yeah that’s what I’ve got, enjoy ur violence

Writing Arguments Between Characters

– Arguments in books are some of the most pivotal and important scenes in a narrative, but they’re also some of the most difficult because fights, in the moment, can seem much more dramatic in our heads than they would seem to an outsider. The great thing about writing is that you have the option to add context you wouldn’t have otherwise, which puts the reader in the characters’ heads and into the heat of the moment. I decided it was worth an article because it’s a very hit or miss kind of scene to pursue and I’ve received a lot of questions on the subject, so I’d like to answer (most of) them here. Enjoy! 

Instigation

Which character began the fight? Sometimes fights start days before they actually turn into a heated argument, so if there is a build up to the scene, make sure you’ve taken the time to make that clear in the last couple scenes or chapters. 

Sometimes, it isn’t actually clear to the characters what or who started the argument and it just sort of bubbles up over time or as events make the characters more confused, angry, scared, etc.

That’s another thing you need to know before you start writing an argument: what emotion is driving the characters to participate? Fear? Anger? Confusion? Sadness? Frustration? Tiredness? Repression of past feelings? Betrayal? In order to make the characters argue believably, you need to be in their headspace, and you can only do that if you know why they’re fighting in the first place.

Tone and pace

Build up

In order for an argument to be impactful to the reader, there needs to be some substantial escalation. Fights are like stories. There’s something that starts it, there’s rising tension, there’s a climax, and then there’s a cool down period before the resolution. Focus on the way you do the rising action especially, because the climax of the argument should be an “oh sh*t” moment.

Dialogue & Interraction

There are different types of arguments people can have. There’s the slow burn ones that the reader knows are coming, but are still really jarring when they come to pass. There are also the ones that seem like they’re out of nowhere if you don’t have context, but to someone who has been following maybe the past few days of the two people’s lives, they can tell that the actual subject of conflict isn’t what they’re really fighting about, but a deeper underlying issue they’ve both been struggling with. There are many ways an argument can go and feel to a reader, but a huge part of the subtext is how the two characters interact. 

If your characters are screaming about a dish that was put away wet and left a ring on the stained cabinets, it will be fairly obvious to the reader, as that sort of interaction, at surface level, wouldn’t serve much of a story-telling purpose, and therefore will lead the reader to assume there’s more to it and search their arsenal of contextual evidence to find the real source of tension between the characters. This can also be accomplished through clues in dialogue, such as sarcasm in response to when something relating to the actual issue is mentioned, or a lull in the argument when the two characters realize that they’re not really talking about a stupid bowl, are they?

Resolution

How the argument ends could be used to shift where the reader believes the story is going from there on. The end could be very insignificant to your story, as fights between characters are often used to get across some key information about characters or context or introduce new conflicts, which brings up my next point.

Integration

Arguments are a really good opportunity to integrate lots of important information for your reader in a way that shows instead of telling. You can use arguments to relay lots of information to your reader, such as:

and many more.

Some General Tips To Keep In Mind

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how does being punched in the face feel like

literally i just wanna know

It depends on where you get hit

Cheek: a round dull pain that clocks your entire head in a different direction. It’s painful and throbs but the main effect of a punch to the cheek is how jarring it is. You feel it in your mouth, your teeth. And no matter how you position that punch the knuckles will always hit the jaw and cheek bones adding a frame of sharp pain in which the redness will be painted.

Temple: getting hit on the temple pushes your head to the side rather than turning it. It’s disorienting because it leaves you very off balance. It essentially feels like a bad pressure headache, like when you have a sinus infection on a plane, but in one spot and on the outside. It’s sharp in the middle and radiates outward and even after the initial impact it pulses like an earthquake epicenter. It easily causes long lasting headaches and is the most likely of these examples to cause a concussion.

Eye: this is a weird one. The fist doesn’t fit within the eye socket so either the knuckles on the brow and cheeks bones protect the actual eye or they don’t. The former option gives a full spreading pain below the eye which results in the classic black eye look and a sharp pain on your brow similar to hitting your shin on the couch. The latter option, well bad things can happen when a hard fast object makes direct contact with your eye but for the sake of this it feels like a vacuum bc the concave shape is being covered and pressurized. The eye feels pushed back and pulled forward all at once. It doesn’t necessarily hurt that bad for that long unless the punch was meant to do damage. I’m fortunate to say I don’t know what it would feel like then.

Nose: remember that prank kids used to pull where they’d line up their hands with their nose, push them in one direction and crack a knuckle at the same time to pretend to break their nose? Yeah that’s what it looks like when someone punches you from the side in the nose, except it’s someone else’s hand and your nose makes the sound instead of their knuckle. It’s just like breaking any bone where you hear it and feel the action if it being done but that moment of shock blankets you for a split second until all the pain comes rushing back. It’s sharp and needlelike and can give you black eyes just to add insult to injury. If you get hit in the nose from the front it’s like the uncomfortableness of when you have to sneeze but can’t. Except that feeling took all the steroids and is now using your face as a punching bag to express its roid rage. It crackles outward like static electricity under your skin, your eyesight gets fuzzy and you can’t tell if it’s because you’re tearing up, it’s hard to open your eyes, or you’re momentarily stunned and blinded. Just know it’s all three. I find that this one knocks the wind out of you the most. Gotta remind yourself to breathe just don’t try to do it through your nose.

If you really want to know what this feels like I’d suggest joining a mixed martial arts because they’ll teach you correct form and power distribution and you can spar with pads and actually hit each other.

I’d also recommend learning what it feels like to punch someone in the face. It’s much more fun and pretty damn cathartic when they deserve it.

Fantasy writing tip:

Ducking and jumping in sword fights doesn’t work. You’re not going to be fast enough to get low enough for the duck, and you’re not going to jump high enough for the jump to work, and also horizontal “duckable” and “jumpable” cuts are pretty rare in sword fights anyway. Most swings are going to be diagonal because it makes them easier to recover from and harder to dodge.

Dodging is actually slower than parrying with your blade or crossguard anyway in most cases, but if your footwork is good, a dodge backward or to the left or right is a much safer and more effective means of dodging.

There are effective things you can do when crouching low, but these are usually combined with a high guard to protect the head instead of relying purely on the duck to keep you safe.

Q&A: Fight Scene Length

Usually, the shorter the better. I’ve talked about this before, but different mediums lend themselves to different approaches to combat.

Film and games thrive on a longer, drawn out, format. In a film, each strike can carry individual drama because you’re getting the responses of the actors. Film can also thrive on spectacle, a visually exciting environment and engaging choreography can sell a fight that, on paper, is fairly dull.

Comics thrive on spectacle. It’s not about how long the fight is, it’s about being able to have dynamic moments that your artist can bring to life. If you have that, your fight can be one panel or it can comfortably go for pages. I haven’t pointed this out before, but in comics, as a writer, you really need an artist who fits what you’re trying to do. You’re equal parts of a team.

In prose, you want your fights to be as brief as necessary. Note: “As brief as necessary.” If it’s just a fight between two characters, that can be over in a couple paragraphs. Even if it’s part of a larger battle, that stuff can be pushed to the side for this individual fight. However, background elements can intrude, extending the fight. For example: If a fight is interrupted by other characters, and one chooses to break combat to escape, you could have a much longer encounter without resorting to a blow by blow.

You want to avoid a rhythm of repetition at all costs. RPGs can easily break down combat into round after round of, “I hit them with my axe,” and the sound of dice rolling. There’s nothing wrong with that in that format. The experience that sells that is three fold: First: You’re a participant. This isn’t something affecting a character you care about, it’s affecting your proxy in the story. Second: The outcome is not preordained, you’re still rolling dice. Third: It was never about the content to begin with, it’s the people you’re there with. So combat that gets repetitive isn’t a problem because it’s not the main event. This is not true in prose, and one of the most dangerous things about transposing combat from a game system into prose.

This may sound a little stupid but, each time your character acts they should be trying to achieve a goal. Yes, “harming my foe,” is a legitimate objective, but if they can’t do that directly, they shouldn’t resort to, “I’m going to repeat the same action a dozen times hoping for a different result.”

If your character is in a fight, they try to attack their opponent, and the attack is defended, they need a new approach.

There are a few things your experienced character should do that will help with this. First, they don’t start with direct attacks, their first goal should be to test their opponent’s defenses. So, they’ll start with probing attacks, looking for weaknesses in their foe’s defenses. They’ll be studying how their opponent moves. On the page, there’s a huge difference between a character simply attacking, and specifically trying to tease their opponent’s parry to get a look at it. Once they have a solid grasp of how their foe fights, then they’ll probably move in for the kill. This could be complicated by other events. This is the background, the environment, or even sustained injuries. This stuff is not safe, and minor miscalculations could result in your character being injured, which then becomes a complication they’ll need to deal with as the fight progresses. If your character can’t exploit their foe’s weaknesses, they’ll need to find a way to open them up. This could include attempting to wound in order to create a future opening, or forcing them into a disadvantageous position. Once they’ve taken control of the fight and gotten it to a position where they have a decisive advantage, then they’ll kill.

While your character is trying to take control of the fight, an experienced foe will be doing the same. Obviously, if only one character knows what they’re doing, it will seriously impact how all of this plays out, and the fight will be very one-sided. It’s entirely possible the veteran will simply disarm and kill the rookie.

Impact is a more complex concept. I think the simplest way to describe it is: Impact is determined by how quickly, and sharply, and scene goes wrong for the characters.

In a fight scene, you want to clean it up quickly because your readers will get bored. When you’re asking about impact, you need to it to resolve fast or the impact is lost. The scene needs to transition from, “thing are going well,” to, “everything’s fucked,” in as few words as possible.

For example: Let’s look at that template above. You start with your protagonist testing their foe’s defenses, finding an opening, and moving their foe to a position where they think they have the advantage. Their opponent is struggling to deal with their assault, and then when they’re about to press and kill them, their enemy lops off your protagonist’s sword arm and executes them.

The part where things are going well can be longer, but it needs to go wrong, roughly, that fast. You can also foreshadow this in a lot of ways. If you’ve established that their foe is a more skilled swordsman than you’re seeing in that fight, you’ve warned the audience that this will happen, but in the moment they’ll think your protagonist is just that awesome, or that the villain’s reputation was unearned. It’s only after the walls are painted in blood that they realize you realize your protagonist walked into a trap.

The second thing about impact is, your audience will acclimate very quickly. You can get away with a hard shift like this, maybe, once per story. If you’re reusing characters, you don’t get that back, you’ve already turned things sideways once. If you want to hit hard again, it needs to be completely different. In the example above, if you started by killing a protagonist, you’re not going to get that kind of impact with another death. You’ve already told your audience that you’re willing to go there, and doing it again isn’t going to surprise anyone.

Fight scenes need to be as short as necessary. Impact has to as fast and hard as possible.

There is no, “this number of words/pages,” for how long a fight should be, because the answer will be different. It depends on the specific scenario. It depends on your style as a writer. It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. The only universal answer is that you don’t want to waste words in a fight scene.

-Starke

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Q&A: Fight Scene Length was originally published on How to Fight Write.

Tips for fight scenes