Bradel Bookwork – Fight Scenes · 6:07am Apr 5th, 2014
So lately, I've taken to listening to the Writing Excuses podcast in my free time—when I walk to and from school, when I walk to and from restaurants... well, when I walk places. If I'm going to spend a significant amount of time on largely mindless activities like travel, I like to have something to engage my attention. Sometimes that means thinking about stories, sometimes that's thinking about statistics, sometimes that's hearing what other people have to say about writing.
One of the podcasts dealt with how to write a fight scene, and as soon as I listened to it, I knew I wanted to write up a post on the topic myself. Why? Well, fight scenes are one of those things that can absolutely destroy a story for me, when done poorly.
I'm a bit of an old hand at fanfiction, and back in the day I used to read Harry Potter fanfic. There's a ton, obviously, but I ran across one story in particular that I really enjoyed. It was a complete retelling of the series, with a couple small-but-important tweaks. Huge piece of work, roughly comparable to the books themselves in length. And I really enjoyed it.
Right up until the author put in the first major fight scene. That scene was such a jumbled mess that I wound up abandoning all hope for the story. If the author couldn't deliver a convincing account of action, what hope did I have of enjoying their retelling of an increasingly action-packed story?
So tonight, I'd like to run through my own thoughts on the central problems involved with writing fight scenes and some key points to consider in doing them well.
First off, why are fight scenes hard to write? I contend, strongly, that they are. Some people may have a gift for them, but they're fundamentally not something that the written word is well suited to. As an example, consider the full stage directions for the duel between Tybalt and Romeo in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", which is often a pretty big action scene when performed on stage:
They fight; TYBALT falls
Probably the most detailed Shakespeare ever gets is at the end of Hamlet, where Laertes (with poisoned rapier) scores a hit on Hamlet and Hamlet, using Laertes own rapier, stabs him back, so both are poisoned. Stage directions?
LAERTES wounds HAMLET; then in scuffling, they change rapiers, and HAMLET wounds LAERTES
Shakespeare wasn't one for overly detailed stage direction. Compare that to what you may have seen in a production, if you've ever had a chance to watch either of these plays. Or compare that to a nice long action stretch of Jackie Chan's "Drunken Master II".
Feel free to quit watching after the first two minutes or so. Now ask yourself, if you were trying to write that scene into a story, what would you write?
A blow-by-blow description of the action? No, that'd become boring very fast.
A quick "They fought, and the hero won"? No, then you lose all the emotional impact.
So how do you do it? How do you avoid becoming dry, boring, and repetitive while still delivering a satisfying moment of climax to the reader? Well, I've got four ideas I'd like to run through.
1) Make your writing serve multiple purposes.
One of the first things to recognize about fight scenes is that, and their core, they're just another type of description. And like any description, they're prone to fall flat if you leave them there and don't take them any farther. Good, descriptive prose might be able to get you a paragraph or two of interesting fight scene, if you're lucky, but most readers want more than just pretty words.
Like any other place where you need description, one of the best things you can do with a fight scene is to make your writing serve multiple purposes. Try to show more of the character, or the plot. How does the ebb and flow of the fight affect your character's emotions? Are they glad that they're winning, or frustrated that they're being delayed from more important goals? How does the battle affect the plot? As the fight goes on, you can highlight the consequences of winning or losing.
Or use fight scenes to contribute to the tone of your story. Maybe, like George R.R. Martin, you want to write a world where combat is swift and brutal. Then be spare with your prose, and try to pick words and phrases that suggest that brutality: cleave, sever, crush. Or maybe you want to write combat so that it seems more beautiful and romanticized. You might want different words in that case: feint, dodge, gash.
More than just trying to choose words and actions for secondary effect, consider breaking up your action with more conventional forms of storytelling. Dialogue can often be an important part of fight scenes, and a good way of linking the action to character and plot, by making the characters tackle their motivations head-on.
Focusing on prose multi-tasking won't get you all the way to a good fight scene, but it's a start.
2) Avoid blow-by-blow, except when blows have consequences.
Generally speaking, blow-by-blow is a bad way to do a fight scene. The reader needs enough descriptive information to form a picture of the event (and different readers will need different amounts of description for this). Because of that, you want some key blocking. What's the setting of the fight? Where are the participants? Are there any important objects in the scene that the combattants will use in the course of the action?
Beyond that sort of simple blocking, you probably want to keep descriptions of the action down and stick to using a fight to explore your characters—except when the characters do something that matters. Take that Jackie Chan scene, for example: specifically the fight in the first two-and-a-half minutes. The two fighters trade a lot of blows. How many of them are important, i.e. how many have meaningful consequences within the story?
One: when Jackie knocks his opponent out of the fight. That's it. Nothing else in the fight matters. None of the blows result in a handicap for a character to overcome, like a broken arm. None of them cause a character to re-evaluate the choices they've made that have gotten them into this situation. None of them develop character or advance plot, except for the one blow Jackie uses to win the fight.
The fighting in this scene just doesn't need detailed description, pure and simple, because the action doesn't contain any important events. Jackie's quest isn't impacted beyond a slightly singed shoe and a cleared obstacle between him and the end of the story. Now if he took a meaningful injury that was going to make his task harder, or if one of his friends died, that's something we'd probably want to read in detail. But if the action is just there for its own sake, save yourself and your reader some time and avoid giving a detailed account of the fight. Just stick to the necessary blocking so that readers have an image of the scene.
3) Use descriptive rules (multi-sensory, metaphors)
So if you're not going to give a detailed account of the action, what are you going to do? Well, I'd suggest going back to some of the tricks I mentioned in my look at Skywriter's writing a few months back—namely interweaving descriptions from multiple senses and metaphorical renderings of the action.
Consider the following two passages:
The foreman swung the chain through the air, and Jackie ducked to avoid it. The chain swept through the coals behind Jackie and the flames leapt higher. Advancing, the foreman caught Jackie's arms with the chain and forced him back toward the furnace.
The foreman swung the chain through the air, and Jackie ducked to avoid it. The chain rattled as it swept through the coals behind Jackie, its passage stoking the fires of the furnace. As the foreman advanced and forced him toward the furnace, Jackie could feel the heat of those flames like a constant pressure against his back.
The first passage is just a description of the blocking in the scene, essentially visual description. The second passage ties in sound and the sensation of heat, and at least to me, makes the description a lot more compelling. If you have to provide blocking, try to do it in a way that's more interesting for the reader.
Metaphor isn't always easy to accomplish with fight scenes, though this is one area where I think Robert Jordan kind of excels, simply because of the way he constructed sword fighting in his world. Swordsmen use a number of pre-defined 'forms' for attack and defense, and these forms have descriptive names like: "the river undercuts the bank", "the courtier taps his fan", "the hummingbird kisses the honeyrose". Jordan will often describe swordfights with little more than some rudimentary blocking and a few names of sword forms. And yet, at least for me, the three names above immediately conjure up images associated with how those forms might look. "The river undercuts the bank" would have to be some sort of horizontal slash. "The courtier taps his fan" sounds like a quick, shallow strike, possibly a feint. And "hummingbird" is obviously a stabbing action of some sort. Just like using multi-sensory imagery, finding some well-chosen metaphors can liven up a block of fight description enormously.
4) Goal-directed fighting (play to your character's strengths)
The three points above feel less like "how to write a good fight scene" and more like "how to make your fight scenes minimally bad". So let's see if we can tie these together with a point that can actually make fight scenes useful.
Above all else, I think a good fight scene needs to involve goal-directed action. This is a tactic a lot of professional authors seem to use. It ties characterization to action and gives a fight scene a sense of purpose it might otherwise lack. Instead of treating the scene like a fight in the traditional sense, think of it as a problem your character needs to overcome, the same as any other problem. Then ask yourself, what aspects of your character will allow them to overcome this problem?
If your character is clever, she might be resourceful enough to identify aspects of her setting she can use to win a fight, like the swashbuckler who lures her opponents underneath the giant chandelier and then cuts it free to let it come crashing down on top of them. If your character is strong but not particularly bright, he might try to use his strength to overpower his opponents before they can get the better of him. If your character is good with words, he might settle for defending himself from attack long enough to charm or trick his opponents into leaving him alone.
Going into a fight scene, in writing, consider how your character tends to resolve problems he or she is faced with. Then look for a way to adapt those problem solving skills to a fight, and instead of worrying about keeping track of a lot of frenetic action, frame the fight in terms of your character's strategies for winning. If the fight needs to go on for a little while, to pack more emotional punch, think of a few different ways your character might try to win the fight. Let your character try a couple and fail—preferably in ways that cause real consequences for the character and raise the stakes. Let yourself describe the action in detail any time it really affects your character, but otherwise settle for just enough blocking to keep your reader engaged in the scene and prevent them from getting confused.
If you want to try your hand at this, go back to that clip from "Drunken Master II" and check out the fight scene starting at about 5:45. Unlike the first fight scene, this one includes sections where characters take meaningful injuries, and where characters actually try to engage in problem solving. Also, we get a better look at characterization through how the various characters choose to fight. The first section of that clip is hard to translate into a good written fight scene, because so little actually happens in it. The section starting at 5:45 (which, by the way, is the climactic battle for the whole movie) is a lot easier to pick apart in terms of the sorts of elements we can use as writers to build tension and deliver an engaging and effective scene.
A quick note, which I never really found a good way to slip into the blog post:
I think this basic framework of what makes for a good written fight scene applies pretty directly to a lot of other areas that call for extended descriptions of action—most notably writing sex scenes. Nobody likes IKEA Erotica. Tying a sex scene to the emotions of the characters, using multi-sensory imagery, and not degenerating into a blow-by-blow of every little detail of the act is probably a good idea.
I'm not quite sure how you apply your character's problem-solving strategies to sex, though...
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It can be done. But I'm not sure I'd care to post any examples...
Oh thank heavens. Of all the things I could possibly write about, I have the least amount of faith in conveying a fight scene through text.
Making a first observation, I believe the main issue that many writers face is that they can't actually imagine a good, interesting fight. Creating an interesting fight in one's head is no simple task, and I believe the only cure for this is to actually watch a good number of interesting fights to have more reference, preferably paying attention at how the characters are moving and why they are moving that way.
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Or, in other words, any place where the author wants to awe the reader with what is happening. Chase scenes (and, since some characters have wings, aerial chases), scenes that highlight a character's skill in a physical task, etc.
Using the Mane 6 as reference, this might be Rainbow Dash practicing her stunts, Pinkie as a whirlwind of activity while organizing a party, Applejack doing her rodeo routines, Rarity showing her skill at controlling multiple objects while making a dress, etc.
Heck, the manga Hikaru no Go uses similar techniques, though translated to a graphical medium, to show the characters placing the pieces on the Go board
1983183
Hmm. I hadn't thought about that before, but yes. Also, I absolutely adore "Hikaru no Go".
I looked up some threads on battle scenes to see if I could add anything. You did a pretty solid job, so I don't think there's much I can say.
Looks like it's once again time to rec Perfect For Me's deleted scenes. (Twilight Sparkle on Twilight Sparkle clone.)
Action is a particular weak point of mine, which is why so many of my stories stall right at a fighting part and then never get picked up again (or get picked up uncomfortably late). There's a lot of good stuff covered here.
I've done my fair share of fight scenes, with mixed results. One thing I can add here is that if you want to add some frenetic energy or want to make each point count, use shorter sentences. Long sentences drag out the action and can leave the reader confused if too many moves are used. Not to say that short sentences make things too simple, but it helps keep the action focused.
An author that I admire when it comes to battle scenes is Capn_Chryssalid. Look through some of his stuff if you want to get some ideas on how to orchestrate battles. My only criticism towards his style is that he tends to let fights go on a bit too long. Your mileage may vary.
I have to agree with your assessment of Robert Jordan's fight scenes and the forms used therein. Hell, they are so descriptive that fans have worked out how each of them would look and be performed, and I personally have participated in a little competition using them. (Hummingbird Kisses the Honeyrose is sort of a crouching upward thrust by the way.)
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img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120706093604/mlp/images/2/29/Iron_Will_demands_a_half_day_S02E19.png
"If they won't orgasm, THRUST TILL THEY SPASM!"
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This is officially, I think, the dirtiest thing that's ever gotten posted to my user area on Fimfiction.
1986036 Pffft. I am now highly amused.
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Interestingly, of the 104 Iron Will tagged stories on this site, 16 of them are clop—in other words, one clop story for every 6.5 regular stories. Compare that to Twilight, who's got a clop ratio of approximately 1 to 9. So I guess, yeah, that's what he's there for.
1986366 I wonder if that has anything to do with him being humanoid? I notice a lot of clop is "anthro" or "human", though I haven't formally surveyed it, so I may just be seeing my own biases, as I'm not fond of anthro or human stories. But maybe all those people who don't seem to like the idea of pony sex latch on to Iron Will as less pony-like? Dunno, idle ramblings here.
A lot of great stuff there. The one critical observation that I can whole-heartedly support is that a fight means nothing except in as far as it affects the characters. A thousand traded blows or sword cuts are mere filler unless they change the characters or the course of the story.
But, I still contend you can easily substitute "conflict" for "fight" and most of the above observations will still apply.