Rules for Fight Scenes

"Cinematic" fight scenes? Meaning that in your story they are making a movie?

Break all the rules. Starting with the ability for anyone to be punched multiple times in the face and not have a broken jaw or broken nose. Or that anyone can punch another person's head multiple times without breaking bones in the puncher's hand.

I think you'll need to define your terms a little more crisply before anyone can give you advice. Are you talking stylistic rules? Or laws-of-physics-and-medicine rules?

Even in cinema it depends entirely on the tone and genre. The consequences of taking a single punch or falling a 15-foot drop are going to vary wildly depending on whether you're in a gritty action movie, noir detective film, a superhero movie, a horror film, a slapstick comedy, or a relationship-driven character drama. And even within a genre you have numerous different subgenre conventions.

Ordinary human fighting capabilities will also swing totally different directions within a genre based on subgenre conventions. The Raid and Die Hard are both action cop movies about infiltrating a tower full of armed criminals, but The Raid is a martial arts film so fights are lengthy acrobatic displays of incredible pencak silat from just about everyone, while Die Hard brawl violence has that 80s action aesthetic of wide haymakers and sudden drops (though admittedly more often to bullets than a swing and knockout). Both protagonists endure way more than any real world human actually could, of course.

That's a pretty hard thing to say. LizMonster is right, in that you need to tell us what you are actually looking for. On the other hand, I can say that most cinematic fight scenes are not life like. In life, fights are short and brutal. Someone wins. Someone loses. Everyone gets hurt. There really isn't much dodging, parrying, juking, or dancing. Swords fights end quickly because it's hard to fight with your innards spilling onto the floor. Gunfights end quick because even getting winged is mind bendingly painful. Fist fights end quickly because it's rarely a fair fight, and when it is, no one wants to let it go on very long. Real fights last seconds and end ugly.

If it's in fantasy or similar, you make up the rules about what's possible. It needs to be internally consistent otherwise magic can fix every possible story problem and you don't have a story. Your character can't be too powerful relative to their adversaries otherwise they win the battle (or whatever) too easily and it gets very boring.

If you're going for realism and you don't have real life fighting experience then you probably need to get someone with real life fighting experience to read it and tell you if it seems realistic. InkFinger makes some really important points and I second all of them.

Another thing writers commonly get wrong is to have characters thinking far too rationally. In any threatening situation, the rational mind shuts down and you revert to instinct and past experience - the bits of your brain that you share with reptiles take over. That's why emergency services, the army, etc spend so much time doing drills. So fights are over before your rational mind even figures out what's going on. This is from experience - years of competing at martial arts and one occasion of using martial arts in a self defence situation. And a few punch ups over the years, mostly while playing ice hockey. Even in the comparative lack of threat in an ice hockey game, it's still the lizard brain in charge. 2+2 for roughing and unsportsmanlike before the rational mind decides to saunter in... lol.

ETA: I'm a non-violent person the above was all when I was very young. I fully recommend learning martial arts - among many other benefits it teaches the kind of self discipline that stops you from getting into silly punch ups in ice hockey games.

I am not trained in fencing, but I once spent an hour talking to a fencing master. He told me that there is a reason you go to the touch. If the blade weren't blunted, that is where the other guy dies or is disabled. The is no point in going beyond that.

I have to do blood lab work pretty frequently, and it always makes me exhausted, many times I pass out. Today I thought about how poorly I would do if I were, say, a fantasy character who was injured in a battle and lost blood. And add on top of that the "energy" being used to do magic, too. But seeing a character say "uh oh I had one bad wound, I gotta sit down for a bit" isn't very exciting, so I'm just gonna...ignore that. But in the fantasy genre there is a bit of wiggle room as to how much abuse someone can take in a fight before they can't go any more, so that's not too crazy.

Have you ever shot a gun? Do you know what the kickback feels like? Or how LOUD it is? So, SO many pieces of media just...ignore that guns are really loud. If you fire a gun without ear protection, you're going to have problems. You won't be able to talk to someone, for one, and tinnitus really affects your ability to navigate/do things in ways you don't really realize until you end up in that situation. But it would be not very exciting if your character can't understand what anyone is saying to them after a gunfight (though the use gun/explosion-caused tinnitus as a running joke in Archer). We all just sorta accept that guns in tv/movies/books/video games don't act the way they do in real life to make the story work better.

If you're familiar with the tropes and conventions of the genre you write, the more you'll get a feeling of what is in the normal realm of possibilities and what would be too out there.

Hello!

Maybe you would find this useful:

How To Fight Write

It's a Tumblr blog about writing fight scenes, full of really good advice. Highly recommended.

Chuck Norris knows a thing or three about cinematic fights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAbKV6lmvDM

Chuck Norris said:

Look -- I can't live up to the way I am on the screen, okay? I mean, really. Think about it, Jimmy. If someone hits you over the head with a chair you'd be in a coma.

Click to expand...

Rules? What Rules?

I kid, though there are many, many ways to write fight scenes, depending on your genre, age-range, and how realistic you're going for, among other things. One general guideline I can give would to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of your media. In a movie, we see each and every action the characters take, and it's quick and flashy and fun and obvious who is winning. In a book, if you take the time to describe the blow-by-blow, it ends up being slow and tedious, a laundry list of actions that some readers will be able to visualize and most others only sort-of will, or won't be able to at all. Meanwhile, books have advantages like, you have a direct line to the characters thoughts and emotions, which you can use to color and add interest to the scene. My absolute favorite resource for writing fight scenes is here: https://youtu.be/jKkKNKUK_GE which describes more of the nitty-gritty specific elements of writing a fight scenes, and here https://youtu.be/gSafcUuHFnk which talks more about the general flow of fight scenes and how they can further the narrative.

The late king of the mass market western novels, Louis L'Amour, was at one time in his life a boxer. Some of his novels include fight scenes. His books are still selling, decades after his death. Despite his claims, the books are often lacking in historical accuracy but they read well. You might look at some of them for writing about fisticuffs.

One with a boxing match in it is "Lando." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/161544.Lando

There's another fight scene in Rustlers' Roundup, which is a novella in a collection of short stories: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/end-of-the-drive_louis-lamour/335826/#edition=2409865&idiq=2808627