Lost in Transl-Action: Some Thoughts On Why Writing Fight Scenes Is Hard · 2:12am Oct 18th, 2020

When I think of fight scenes in media, not only do I think of the stuff scene in the John Wick or The Raid series of films, but also of this particular passage:

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 9-10
He swung with the bottle and the kid ducked and he swung again and the kid stepped back. When the kid hit him the man shattered the bottle against the side of his head. He went off the boards into the mud and the man lunged after him with the jagged bottleneck and tried to stick it in his eye. The kid was fending with his hands and they were slick with blood. He kept trying to reach into his boot for his knife.
Kill your ass, the man said. They slogged about in the dark of the lot, coming out of their boots. The kid has his knife now and they circled crabwise and when the man lurched at him he cut the man’s shirt open. The man threw down the bottleneck and unsheathed an immense bowieknife from behind his neck. His hat had come off and his black and ropy locks swung about his head and he had codified his threats to the one word kill like a crazed chant.

If you found that difficult to read both on a visceral and mechanical level, don’t be too surprised. McCarthy’s style combines moments of rapid-fire minimalism—to the extent that he refuses to use most standard punctuation—with lengthy sentences composed of multiple clauses and polysyndeton (the repetition of “and”) to achieve some kind of desired, ethereal effect.

Blood Meridian is filled with scenes like this. Blood becomes not necessarily a thematic motif of the whole book, but instead is parodied. The characters engage in some of the most violent acts I’ve ever read in literature, to the point where the heavy-handed brutality found in fics like Fallout: Equestria is almost laughable.

McCarthy, however, despite quite literally soaking the entire story in blood, guts, and gore, never glorifies the violence. If we were to write a thematic statement about the story, we would be accurate in assuming that he wants to make the reader as distant to violence as the men who cause it in the book themselves. In order to paint vividly how awful these men are, he must make us as neutral to their acts, as uncaring, as instinctual, as they are. This actually makes the violent moments almost nothing, in that they happen so often, and so quickly, that you’d be hard-pressed to remember every single one. It is the quieter moments where there is no violence, when the men face the evening redness in the west (as the secondary title says), when McCarthy lets his wide breadth of two-dollar vocabulary loose and free—these are the moments that stick the most with me.

But I bring up this scene because of how it functions as a fight scene. You will notice that the writing is, actually, incredibly simple. The language isn’t complex. Monosyllabic words occupy a majority of the sentences, and it seems more likely, if you had no experience with McCarthy and/or read only the first two lines, that a third-grader wrote this, albeit a violent one.

Through this simplicity, McCarthy is able to transition the reader from their position as an outsider into the violent moment itself. Perhaps, upon re-reading the sequence, you’ll notice that it’s actually a lot easier once you’ve become accustomed to McCarthy’s style. With that aesthetic element no longer an issue, “falling into” the sequence becomes all the more easier.

All this simplicity sets us up to view the action itself. A few mechanics, however, make it stand out. For one, taking into account what I said about McCarthy’s simpler vocabulary in this sequence, you’ll no doubt see that his verbs follow the same pattern. The characters swing and duck and step and hit; the bottle shatters; the kid and man lunge at each other, fend off the blows, reach for the knife, slogging in the mud. McCarthy doesn’t dress up the scene with anything necessarily special or aesthetic, preferring to get into the rawness of the sequence. That’s also why, I think, there are very few adjectives or adverbs, and the only extensive descriptor occurs at the end with that somewhat archaic, abstract series of words: “he had codified his threats to the one word kill like a crazed chant.”

McCarthy also does a good job of making the sequence feel like a sequence. That is, this is a fight scene, not writing pretending to be one. Due to the nature of that polysyndeton, each active clause follows the next; the reader’s mind and eye jumps from each verb, going from swings to ducks to hits and so forth. McCarthy also doesn’t spend a lot of time with each individual “blow”; things happen, and they happen quickly, and they happen without giving either the kid or the reader a chance to pause. There is only action, here, nothing superfluous about it (until, of course, the very end, when McCarthy tips his hat and reveals his strange idiosyncrasies).

I don’t think you have to be a fan of Cormac McCarthy to recognize the rawness of his writing. It’s especially effective for when he wants to write these dark and terrible things.

But writing violence, and, really, writing fight scenes, is nothing new. I’ve talked to a lot of new and experienced writers who have expressed a strong desire to write amazing and perfect fight scenes. This is not surprising, I don’t think, and let me be clear when I say if you want to write such a thing, go for it; writing is an open act, and if we cannot delve into the more violent, raw, visceral, and primal aspects of existence, then we are not nearly diving deep enough.

That said, I’ve noted that a lot of these writers who want to write these fight scenes will say something along the lines of “I was inspired by this anime” or “I want to replicate the way fights appear in this particular movie.” While it is okay to be inspired by outside sources, I must express my hesitation when it comes to validating whether one can translate what those things do, in terms of fight scenes, and what writing actually does, in regards to the same thing. It is this hesitation which will be the focus of this particular exploratory essay.

Once again, I don't really have any art in mind for this post. So here are a few images associated with fights and action that relate to MLP. Above image, "Villains of the End", courtesy of AssasinMonkey

Firstly, what do we mean by a “fight scene?” Let us ignore the apparent redundancy of that question. This is not as self-explanatory as we might think.

There are multiple definitions for what a “scene” is, but put broadly, we may think of it as the moment when characters engage in action or dialogue. Action, here, we mean just as broadly as scene—description, narration, and other non-dialogue elements all constitute part of it. Such a definition of “scene” allows for a widespread grasp of how to structure the many different kinds that occur in writing. After all, writing is, more-or-less, a series of scenes tied together by what we call a “plot.”

When we place “fight” in front of “scene,” we narrow that definition to a specific category. The connotations of “fight” relate more strongly to the traditional use of “action,” which is the active engagement of physical sequences and particulars. To turn a more mechanical gaze upon the subject, let us associate certain kinds of words to this secondary attribute. Verbs that are physically transitive—they happen to other things—fall into this category, and furthermore, verbs that are linked to external, bodily function and movement, may also fall into it just as well. For a quick list, we can actually consult McCarthy’s above sequence: swung, duck, swung, step, hit, shatter, lunged, stick, fend, slog, lurch, cut… almost every verb there falls into this categorization.

These things, I’ve found, are not things writers really think about, at least not consciously. While I can’t speak for those long dead and gone, I can speak on the part of what many new writers have told me when they think about writing fight scenes. They’ll use words like punch or kick or stab, and in some cases, blow and attack and eviscerate, with each word becoming more and more specific to the action. It becomes even more apparent with writers who want to infuse their fight scenes with certain powers—when they want to bring in, say, energy blasts, ki blasts, elemental manipulation, etc. Transitive, physical-related verbs are almost necessary in fight scenes, and in a more general sense, are necessary for transcribing movement and action to what would otherwise be abstract notions of character and space.

Based on this unconscious patterning, we might actually expect that writing fight scenes could be second nature to us. If we understand how to describe a movement as specific as “throwing a punch at something,” then in theory we should be able to write that quite easily: “He threw a punch at the kid.” A series of these syntax structures would therefore make up a fight scene.

And yet, we’ll find a lot of forum posts on more than a few sites asking how do we write a really good fight scene? (For example, a glance at FIMFic’s The Writers’ Group and searching threads with “fight scenes” in the title yields 23 results.) There’s a clear barrier between the flashing images of an ultimate clash that occurs in the writer’s mind and transcribing such a thing onto the page. Many new writers have expressed perplexity at this particular problem, with more than a few most likely arguing that it shouldn’t be this hard to write a sequence as seen on TV. Yet something always feels off, missing, or insubstantial, and their efforts feel wasted. Why is this the case?

Let me return to an earlier point, that of my hesitation in regards to those who openly admit to being influenced by movies, anime, cartoons, etc. This is not a rip on them, but it is a pointed observation about some necessary differences.

We must note, primarily, that writing for the screen, big or small, is fundamentally different from writing prose. A screenplay does not read like a typical prose story, since a lot of the necessary “nuts and bolts” are either entirely removed or changed to fit that medium’s purposes. Consider, for instance, the fact that most screenplays are heavy with dialogue, and that moments where there is no dialogue are used to only briefly describe a scene or camera movement. And this must be very clear, without being obnoxious, for several reasons: first, because it is important to be able to transcribe the mental approximation of an image in your head onto the sheet in any writing medium; and second, because it is important the the directors and actors all understand how a scene is supposed to play out, either tonally or visually.

A similar process occurs in fight scenes. To demonstrate this, let’s look at a brief snippet of a screenplay:

Creed, Scene 3
INT. RING- FIGHT CLUB/ BAR- TIJUANA MEXICO
Adonis, prances around the ring, avoiding Florez who is struggling to make contact, and growing tired. Florez corners Adonis up against the ropes, and after missing a few jabs, WHAM he ducks into Adonis and lands a pretty deliberate head but above his left eye, opening a deep gash. As Adonis tries to recover: WHAM WHAM, he lands two bone crunching hooks to
the gut.
Adonis takes an airless breath and stumbles back to the middle of the ring, wiping blood from the gash as the bell sounds.

The first line tells us what the “shot” we’re looking through. It’s an interior one, and we know it’s occurring in Tijuana, Mexico.

The next two paragraphs are the main fight scene of this particular section. While the viewer may not know either of the character’s names, the reader of the script—who may be the director and the actors—does. We see a breaking of convention grammar in order to emphasize the character’s name: ADONIS. Sentences are also interrupted by this onomatopoeia, WHAM; no doubt the script writer wants this sound to be prevalent, obvious, and painful to hear. Let us also quickly note the verbs: prances, struggling, make contact, growing tired, corners, missing, ducks, lands, opening, tries, to recover, takes, stumbles, wiping. Of these, we see most are transitive, and most refer to a physical action.

What the astute writer should notice, however, is that this is a rather vague scene. There’s really no description, no way of showing where we are short of what we are told at the literal beginning. We also get no sense of the Adonis’s thoughts, and while we do get a bit of descriptive flair and figurative language with the phrase, “bone-crunching,” that more or less is it for stylistic opportunity. The writing here is very barebones, is what I’m saying, and necessarily so; script writing cannot waste time on pretty words, and must get sequences and dialogues across quickly.

This barebones quality, however, grants a second effect. The director can read this scene and interpret how it’s supposed to look. While we know this is an interior location, the director can choose if this is a close-up or a long-shot. They can also decide if, for each WHAM, there should be a separate cut, or if there should only be one single cut of the whole fight. Cuts, of course, create a kind of streamlined rapidity (see the often criticized series of cuts in Batman’s first fight scene in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins), so this may be what the director wants, if they want to convey the speed of these punches, the weight of these blows.

Let us now take a step away from film and think more broadly about, say, non-live action sequences. Similar techniques must be used in the presentation of scenes to the screen. We must know where we are, given by the first line as in Creed; we must see a brief series of words that attempt to portray, in the broadest sense, an accurate scene. It is then the animators’ job to take those words and “draw them to life.”

Animators will draw one moment, then another, then another; then, the backgrounds and characters’ positions may change in such a way that another layer, and thus, another series of re-drawings, are required. We must note that while animation can have the seemingly innocuous effect of scenes occurring in “one take,” due to the nature of animation, this is not the case all the time.

(I am not an animator, and I know this is a huge generalization of the craft. I apologize for the necessary ignorance there!)

In such analysis, though, it should now be clear that fight scenes in visual mediums such as movies or animations have a lot more tools to play around with; that is, those who manipulate these scenes have more ways of doing so. They get to use actors, camera, visual and auditory effects, and more, in order to accomplish this. One may say there is a certain freedom in writing screenplays, at least on the part of the director, who gets to decide more than just how the words should sound. They get to figure out the progression and presentation of those words as a visual medium first and foremost, more than a succession of what was once written.

Image by rrd-artist (found on Derpibooru)

Meanwhile, the prose writer operates in an arguably more limited space. There are no cameras with which multiple shots can be portrayed, at least not in the traditional sense. Prose writing also necessitates, in many cases, an avenue into characters’ heads which transcends natural means; after all, we don’t all know what any person is thinking, or at least we do not have that possibility with every person we meet. The writer of prose must also juggle with not being a visual medium; that is, they must do more than get the reader’s attention on a surface level. They must appeal to the reader in a way that is unique to prose and poetry. The effect cannot be one of sight, as it were, but of something else. Perhaps this something else is a sonic phenomenon, owing to the way words sound to our ears and mind, or, at the risk of sounding overly sentimental, this something else relates to the heart and soul in every reader.

Because of these differences in process, these necessary limitations for these mediums of writing, I believe my hesitation should be more than justified. Allow me, then, to elaborate on it.

Writers who say they want to write a fight scene just like ones they’ve seen on TV or on the movie screen do not understand that you cannot write a fight scene in this way—at least, not in prose. The extent to which one can make and disseminate a fight scene in the visual world does not extend as fully or as easily to the world of prose. This is just mechanically speaking, but mechanics are an important part of the whole writing process.

One mechanic in particular, in my opinion, is what really gets in the way of writing “good” fight scenes—good in the sense that they are reflective of their visual medium counterparts. This mechanic is the understanding of sentences, of syntax. And I do not mean, when writers do not understand good sentence structure or grammar. What I mean is, when writers fail to make the most use out of the flexibility that sentences can have, if used smartly.

Let us return to McCarthy. In place of cuts that you would find in a movie, he instead repeats the word “and” before each blow. This allows a seamless transition from each hit, which, in a visual medium, would have caught the viewer’s eye. Note, too, the fact that when McCarthy writes, he writes with quickness and brevity, letting only the most important details slip into the rawness of the scene. In this way, he somewhat mirrors the conventions of the screenplay, but he still writes with a strong understanding of how to link sentences together, how to use them to their fullest ability.

"Cold Change", by AssasinMonkey

I’m not saying that writers should not try and write action and fight scenes. If they accentuate your writing, if they play a key point in the narrative, by all means, they should be said. A story is full of many kinds of scenes, and it is up to the writer to discover and employ them as they see fit.

But, to write them, I think the writer must disavow themselves of a strong connection to visual mediums. While, yes, I love me a good, epic fight scene from, say, My Hero Academia, it’s important to realize that being inspired by something isn’t the same as writing it. Thus, being inspired by a visual medium’s fight scene does not translate to writing a fight scene in and of itself.

I don’t mean to sound elitist when I say, the beauty is in the sentences. We cannot forget that the main tool that we as writers use are sentences, not images. We can conjure images through words, but the words must be able to carry that weight in order to translate themselves to the foreign reader.

This, to me, represents the main issue of why writers say they struggle with writing fight scenes. It is because they are no longer writing scenes with words, but with images, and end up trying to translate in the opposite direction. We must understand how to employ words and sentences in accordance to those images; we cannot let the images themselves rule the writing.

This does not mean that even the most syntactically sound writer will be able to write great fight scenes. Like any, there will be hiccups in the execution. But new writers should not be caught up in trying to write the most accurate depiction of a fight scene. They should instead be focusing on what draws readers to the story from a mechanical standpoint: the sentences themselves. How they work in these fight scenes will translate to how effective those fight scenes are, and furthermore, how much they resonate with the reader.

Report Jarvy Jared · 211 views · #essay #craft #fight scenes #writing #storytelling

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Clarke Otterton

Clarke Otterton #1 · Oct 28th, 2020 · 2 · ·

Great essay! I particularly agree with the final point you present - the power of the sentence and all it's encompassing mechanics in written language are so often misunderstood. To use your comparison to visual media, the language and syntax a writer chooses in prose is like the control over composition and palette that makes an artist's painting speak more than the actual scene he is referencing.

Your advice will be helpful as I continue to hone my own writing. Of course, I still need to break my habit of composing long, complex sentences when doing my fight scenes.