fight scenes, anyone?

jurched said:

I've got a lot of fight scenes in my fantasy book.

Thing is, I want them to be fast. Fast to read, fast to imagine. They are a means to the particular subplot, not the ends.

Only problem is, they read rather like a mechanic's manual.

I have two majour fight scenes later in the book that I adore. But they are the ends. They are long, drawn out affairs, with much input from participants, observers, and narrative. As a result, they are very entertaining.

But the short ones are not.

Any similar experiences out there?

J

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If I'm not mistaken, Boromir's defense of the hobbits is not portrayed at all in The Fellowship of the Ring, but is later recalled in hindsight.

The important part of the fight, though, Boromir's redemption, is still handled, through his final conversation with Aragorn, and Pippen's retelling to Denethor.

So do you even need to have battle scenes at all?

Hard to say. Depends on the book, the storytelling method. Depends on a lot of things.

I would agree with you that the last thing you want to do is write your battle like you're taking notes from your karate instructor.


I'd also say that the level of intimacy in a battle should match the scale of the battle.

Good luck!

This thread might have something of interest:

"Individual Combat?"
http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17967

What I've been finding whenever I write a fight scene is it helps if I concentrate on the POV characters perception of what's happening. I don't know enough about fighting to give a plausible blow-by-blow account, so I try to focus on the impact of the fight and the consequences.

I can not give you any advice, but will tell you a story;

Many years ago, on one of my ships we had this old stoker onboard. He was a placid man and not prone to exaggerations.
One evening we sat in the lounge and the younger able bodeis tried to brag about their, oh so poor, experiences from the sea, when the old stoker suddenly said;
"I remember when I was onboard the "---". It was 1952, in Argentina. We went ashore, got to drinking and all of a sudden there was a fight..." He silenced and looked down on his hands.
We waited for his story to continue, but he just took a slow gulp from his beer and said nothing further.
"What happend?" the boys shouted in union.
The old stoker held out his right hand and asked them to look at it, and they did.
"See how I have no knuckle above my pinkie?"
Thay all nodded.
"Well, Haven't had one since that night." He put down his glass and left the room.

To this day, I picture the worst fight ever.

If my short story is based on warriors, soldiers, a duel, a war, a slug-fest, a competition (you know what I mean) I try to write descriptive fights and give it fluid movement and pace. If my story has incidental fighting I skip pretty much all the details with a broad over-view of what's transpired.

Some folks like to read about detailed fights because they enjoy having the picture painted for them. Some would rather conjure most of the circumstances for themselves. Hell, some people don't like violence in the first place. I've never figured out what the never-fail best approach is. I figure if you're good with narrating a brawl, do it and never apologize for it. ^_^

-An

Melisande said:

I can not give you any advice, but will tell you a story;

Many years ago, on one of my ships we had this old stoker onboard. He was a placid man and not prone to exaggerations.
One evening we sat in the lounge and the younger able bodeis tried to brag about their, oh so poor, experiences from the sea, when the old stoker suddenly said;
"I remember when I was onboard the "---". It was 1952, in Argentina. We went ashore, got to drinking and all of a sudden there was a fight..." He silenced and looked down on his hands.
We waited for his story to continue, but he just took a slow gulp from his beer and said nothing further.
"What happend?" the boys shouted in union.
The old stoker held out his right hand and asked them to look at it, and they did.
"See how I have no knuckle above my pinkie?"
Thay all nodded.
"Well, Haven't had one since that night." He put down his glass and left the room.

To this day, I picture the worst fight ever.

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I! LOVE! THIS!

I'm not the hugest fan of beta readers, but when it comes to fight scenes, I found it helpful to show them to some people who really can fight and get their opinions.

Orwell has five (six) rules for writing.

If you want to write an action scene that flows like a train, use them.

Make them short...

Real fights are - usually - short anyway.

Give them plenty of build up. Make the stakes and consequences clear. Then resolve them in a single, violent, exchange.

If you don't know any martial arts, try picking a metaphorical theme, e.g Water: blades swirl then flow around each other, waves of steel break on the the hero's defence, blood splashes, sprays etc.

Don't skip them, unless you're writing something quirky (like the sailor story upterhead), or Tolkien, which means you're already dead.

Hi all,

I've been looking for books with great martial arts type fighting or just great fight scenes in general. Blow for blow, one-on-one combat where I can clearly see whats going. Preferably samurai/Eastern type fighting with style. Like katanas and maybe some kung fu. Can anyone recommend good stuff to read or maybe fighting excerpts I can check out?

Thank you.

George Martin has very nice fight/battle scenes in his Ice and Fire series.
Jordan's battles in WoT series are good too (especially from tactical standpoint)

jurched said:

Speed is of the essence. I even timed the first fight on a stop watch, and read it as fast as I felt the action was moving: 34 seconds!

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In thirty-four seconds Jason Bourne could kill sixty-eight well trained, heavily armed bodyguards.

Think about it.

If you feel like your fight IRL would last thirty-four seconds, then you're not watching a fight. You're watching a sporting event with lots of rules designed to prolong the battle.

You pit two extremely well trained fighters against each other, that fight is going to be over very, very quick. It doesn't matter if they're fighting with knives or fencing swords or guns or their bare hands. With very little exception, somebody's going to make a mistake, or the other guy's just going to be faster, more often than not, somebody's going to get lucky. And boom, the fight is over.

If you're writing an epic Jedi fight where the fight goes on for twelve minutes and nothing is really happening, then we're not talking about a fight. We're talking about a dance. You see what I'm saying?

In all of my one-on-one fights, I make it a point to start and end the battle within a single short-to-moderately-sized paragraph. That doesn't necessarily mean that somebody's dead at the end of the paragraph, but in a real fight, we're talking quite a lot of buildup followed by three seconds of action tops, and then maybe some puttering around. Usually if you knock a guy down in a fight it's all over, there's generally just no coming back from that.

Realism and momentum is the key. If you can end the fight in three sentences or less then you don't need to worry about being overly wordy fight that's going to confuse or annoy your readers.

Some people like big epic battles where people can just fight for-frickin'-ever, but those people probably have no idea how to fight. If you want to build a fight that is not only exciting but is going to please your more scrutinizing readers, do it that way.

Another technique I use is to use run-on sentences with my fight scenes. Run-on sentences, while typically taboo, can be very well utilized during a fight scene. It helps sustain the upward momentum throughout an entire fight. So if you wind up having three sentences of a fight, from beginning to end, try taking out all the periods. Hell, try taking out all the commas. See what that reads like.

I swung my fist at his face but he was too fast for me. Before I knew it he shifted to the left and dodged my blow, stepping into me so that his shoulder was hard into my armpit. Braced against me, he flung my feet off of the floor and sent me crashing onto my back, knocking the wind out of me. That would have been it for me, but I grabbed my knife up off of the floor and backhanded it into his Achilles tendon. He screamed and fell off balance. I rolled into him and sent him tumbling onto his back. He was too stunned and in pain to see me finishing my roll by hammering the knife square into his chest. In one sharp pound it was buried to the hilt, and all I heard after that while I caught my breath were the ragged gurgles of the better fighter struggling to come to terms with the fact that he's dying because I got lucky.

Not bad, and fairly succinct despite going on for eight sentences. But how much more potent could that fight be if we not only shortened the overall length, but also took out several of the commas and periods in order to keep the momentum going?

Before I even started to swing he was stepping into me so that his shoulder was braced under my armpit, an instant later I was crashing into the floor and gasping for air. He stepped with me, the fight already over in both our minds, until my hand found the knife I'd dropped earlier and I quickly backhanded it into his Achilles tendon, sending him stumbling and screaming. Rolling into his legs he fell onto his back, still too stunned and in pain to even register what was going on with me, I brought his attention back where it should have been by hammering the knife square in his chest, burying it to its hilt, and the screams were replaced instead by the ragged gurgles of the better fighter dying because I got lucky.

This is just unpolished generic crap I came up with over the past five minutes, but you can see how I reduced eight sentences to three, and the momentum was significantly enhanced without really losing any relevant information. The same fight occurred, but one could be read in much less time than the other due to the less frequent breaks, which helped keep the pace of the fight. Also, speaking of keeping the pace of the fight, you'll notice that there are only periods at the end of each exchange. The first exchange being the winner throwing a punch and totally getting taken down. The second being him luckily landing near a knife and being able to grab it up, turning the tables by slashing the loser's vital area. The third is him striking the killing blow, and him registering that the fight was truly over.

The other thing is, if you take notice of where I put commas, it was only after each significant move. His punch wasn't significant as it didn't land, but the loser catching him in the shoulder was. The second comma with him stepping isn't relevant, though it provided a break for a quick info dump, that by any realistic standards the fight should be over, with the man on his back the loser, which both lets you know that the man on his back isn't the better fighter, while also letting you know that it's not over yet, and that something else is coming. Then him backhanding the knife into the guy's Achilles tendon, etc. etc.

Anyway, brief is best. You can choose to leave things up to your reader's imagination if you want, but with the exception of horror and unknown circumstances that the reader isn't actually observing, it's pretty lazy writing to have your reader to your work for you. Let your reader use his imagination by visualizing what you're writing, not by completing the story you're not telling him because you're not good at writing fight scenes.

Perhaps I'm weird, but I liked your first paragraph better than your second. By the time I was reaching the end of the second I found my eyes starting to gloss over the words. Never a good thing.

Could be two things: One, I honestly was looking more at shortening the second fight scene than I was on making it more exciting, and since this is a forum post I wasn't taking my time, so it could be that it's simply just not as exciting. Two, and equally possible, you'd just got finished reading the first one, and reading the exact same fight scene written a slightly different way just made it less potent to you.

It's probably a combination of the two though, as in the first paragraph I was more focused on writing a fight scene, and in the second example I was mostly focused on shortening an already written fight scene.

I'll play...

It needs more white space, for the blood to flow into , and some sense of one thing following from the other. Also, some of the empathy verges on POV violation. I like the choreography, though. So...

Not perfect. I want some smells, and perspiration.

Why do I get the feeling you're a Tarantino fan?

Anyway, the problem with that much pacing is that the fight comes off very slow, which, at least for gritty realism's sake, just doesn't cut it. If you want to write an over-the-top, contrived fight epic, that's one thing. But if you want it to feel real, there's honestly going to be less blood spraying and more "POW -- It's over."

But yeah, more sensual information would probably improve it a great deal.

One of the most famous fight sequences in literary history is the epic quarterstaff fight between Robin Hood and Little John on their first meeting. When I had a quarterstaff fight in my first book, I dug out my Howard Pyle to reread that epic fight so I'd have it fresh in my mind. It was an epic, famous fight! It had to take up pages and pages, so I should've found it as I flipped through the book.

Couldn't find it.

All right, so it wasn't pages and pages--maybe just a page or so, so I flipped slower through the book. Could find where Robin approached the bridge--could find where they'd become buds a couple of pages later--where was this epic fight?

Read through the couple of pages. The epic fight was, IIRC, one sentence long in the original version.

To add to that, in traditional Greek theater, they'd never have a death on stage. The doomed would go off-stages (sometimes followed or preceeded by their murderer(s)) and the audience would stare at the empty stage and hear horrific screams and allowed to conjure their own scenes in their imaginations. Then the murderers would come back on-stage, blood-covered and get on with the story.

Back in the days of radio, people had to do the same thing with what they listened to to get the "full picture."

FWIW, I've often found that most readers enjoy putting in their own two cents into such details--like the story about the old stoker. Nothing is more vivid than a fueled imagination. Let it work for you and your story.

I very much prefer reading fairly detailed fight scenes. The leave it out and let the reader imagine it idea kind of makes me thing of someone handing me a title--here now imagine it.

I want the writer to do some work for me. But, of course, it's a matter of taste and style.

The thing is if you are going to describe fight scenes find out a little about fighting. I hate having to describe a knife fight because I know very little about them except that they're usually over fast. While having been a member of a RP sword fighting club for a long time a few years ago I can give a pretty good go at describing a sword fight. It doesn't mean I could win a real one, but I have an idea at least.

Just please if you don't know about it, try to find someone who does to read it. I had one guy I critted think that you could evade a sword swing by sitting down. A lot of people think ducking is a good idea.

As a matter of personal taste I hate the fight scenes like the one in Princess Bride (of course that particular one was satiric so I like it there) where the writer makes up all these silly names for moves. You know the "I come at you the the Flaming Sword Swing of Doom but you parry me with the Extreme Dodge Everything on Earth move which I counter with the Most Supreme Godly Headchop move." *rolls eyes*

I like fight scenes to move FAST. The scene (IMO) should last no longer to read than the fight and most fights don't last long. And I like short sentences. But that's a style thing and is arguable.

Shane Fitzsimmons said:

Why do I get the feeling you're a Tarantino fan?

Anyway, the problem with that much pacing is that the fight comes off very slow, which, at least for gritty realism's sake, just doesn't cut it. If you want to write an over-the-top, contrived fight epic, that's one thing. But if you want it to feel real, there's honestly going to be less blood spraying and more "POW -- It's over."

But yeah, more sensual information would probably improve it a great deal.

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Well, I can't speak from experience of a real fight, but when I'm in martial arts mode, I am aware of every move and countermove. Moreover, time runs slower.

Do me a favor--I'll be eternally grateful. Don't have your characters fight with "fencing swords."

zornhau said:

Well, I can't speak from experience of a real fight, but when I'm in martial arts mode, I am aware of every move and countermove. Moreover, time runs slower.

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Isn't that the truth. Even though an exchange in kendo may only take a split-second, there's a lot of jockeying for position, staring at the opponent, feeling where they are trying to get you to move and trying to force them to move in the direction you want. All this before the sudden violent meeting of sword and body - and that's if you do it right. If you're both pretty inexperienced, you probably wouldn't have done any real damage to the person even if you had live steel.

I remember facing some of the sensei at the World Kendo Championships in Glasgow. You walked out to meet them and I knew I had lost before we even came out of the bow. They had such a presence that they'd seen it all before and knew what I was going to attempt to do even before I settled into my stance. Intimidation is a powerful weapon.

I see all these things when I'm fighting with swords. I can't imagine writing about a duel between equally matched opponents without bringing some of that detail in. A bar fight? Hell, that's just chaos unleashed and the character isn't going to know anything other than what's happening right in front of them (if they're lucky). But a duel? That's gotta be worth some exposition or why have it?

It depends on where the POV resides, I suppose. What to a judoka or an aikidoka looks like a textbook throw may seem almost supernatural to an untrained observer - let alone the attacker, who wasn't expecting to get thrown in the first place. A trained onlooker might take a far more analytical approach to describing a fight, something more like ringside commentary. And of course different styles have different contexts for describing what happens in personal combat: fencing relies a lot on geometry (especially the Spanish varietals), taiji/aikido on "taking balance", karate on miai or distancing. A Chinese monastic martial artist might have really thought to himself something like "Okay, now I'm doing flying crane fist..." even if he might not have shouted it out loud.

And of course beginner vs. beginner will be messy and almost always end up on the ground, if it's a hand to hand fight. I decide what effect I want the scene to have and then locate the POV accordingly.

In a total sideline, not enough fights in fiction end with someone failing to align their wrist properly and spraining it, or breaking their knuckles on someone's skull, etc. etc. etc. Sci-fi/fantasy fights often feel really clean to me.

Just my $0.002 though.