How To WRITE Awesomely

How to WRITE FIGHT SCENES

Yes, you needed skill. Yes, you needed focus and balance, but in the end, you needed gall. The will to fight, the will to survive. All in all, courage. And that's nothing you can learn in a simple classroom. It's something rooted inside of you, and if you don't have it, then it's not the teachers fault for teaching you wrong.

- Rei Lee Natsuo, Reconnected

Because I'm tired I'm going to make this as short as possible. Here are a few ways to make fight scenes realistic:

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#1: It Hurts

When you fight, it hurts and makes the breath squeeze right out of your lungs, and it takes a few seconds to recover. When someone slashes at you with a sword, it's scary as all hell, and when you are being ganged up on, its threatening.

Remember, your characters are people too - (unless they aren't, but then they don't count. Real people get scared and angry). Things like that aren't a walk in the park and AREN'T fun.

#2: Don't Overwrite

It's a general rule that you should leave as much to the reader's imagination as you can, and this is doubly true for action scenes. The choreography of the fight may be exact in your head but you can't force readers to see the same thing.

Let them know the outline of the fight and they'll imagine their own visceral fight scene. Counter as it is to a writer's instincts, 'they struggled' paints a far more vivid picture than describing the exact position of each combatant's arms.

#3: Pace

Intensifying the pace of your writing can communicate the immediacy and suddenness of conflict. Short, simple sentences keep the reader on their toes. Fights happen quickly and your description needs to match that.

#4: Perspective

"Instead of looking who had pushed him, Fletch tried to save himself from falling. The edge of the parade route's pavement shot out from under him.
Someone pushed him again.
He fell to the right, into the parade.
A foot came up from the pavement and kicked him in the face."

The writing, and thus the reader's experience of events, conforms to Fletch's experience: the attempt to right himself interrupted by sudden acts of violence. You can also write to match the perspective of the attacker: there's something especially brutal about a villain methodically taking an opponent apart.

#5: Verbs not Adverbs

Fight scenes demand brevity and adverbs are the opposite. Instead of 'Adam hit him hard in the chest, again and again' use 'Adam pounded at his chest'.

The occasional adverb might have its place but you want the punch of the sentence to come with the character's action, not lagging after it.

There are a few exceptions. Variations on 'She hit him. Hard' have currency because they're purposefully simplistic. They embrace guttural simplicity to communicate that same quality in the action, but this trick only works once before you start sounding like a caveman.

#6: Sensory Information

Description doesn't work in fight scenes because thought doesn't play a big part in immediate, physical situations. What there is plenty of is sensory information. The taste of blood, the ringing in their ears, the ache of their injuries. Evan Hunter wrote fantastically brutal fight scenes by stating a simple, basic physical act and then following it up with evocative sensory information: