A few years ago, one of my close friends was in charge of a Creative Writing program at our local library. Knowing that I was a writer, she asked me if I’d be interested in crafting something that could work as a lesson plan of sorts. Well, I’ve never liked being someone who leads a program like that, but I was more than happy to write something for her to teach the others in the class. And so, after thinking for a while about what I’m most proud of in my own writing, I settled on Fight Scenes as my topic.
Thus, I crafted a list of tips to keep in mind for writing good fight scenes. I don’t like tooting my own horn, but I truly believe that I write really engaging brawls and showdowns. At this point in my writing career I had just finished my first complete novel (unlike a plethora of half-finished stories), and it’s a big sci-fi epic bursting with action and battle scenes. So that story informed most of the tips here, but I’d also started my first murder-mystery at this point, so I tried to keep more realistic storytelling in mind too.
I feel like its an interesting topic, and given that I’ve just done an article about fight scenes, it’s clearly an area of storytelling that is quite important to me. And so, I figured I’d go ahead and just put what I wrote back then in here for this week’s article, for you all to enjoy!
Fight Scene Writing Tips
- Visualization ~
- THE single biggest tip to writing a fight scene is to visualize it in your head before you begin (or, at minimum, visualize a paragraph’s worth of the scene, write that paragraph, and then visualize again).
- Essentially, play the fight in your head like you’re watching a movie adaptation of your story. Visualize everything dramatic/cool that you’d want to replicate in your writing, and then translate those visuals (as best you can) into words on the page.
- Dynamic Start and Decisive Finish ~
- As a general attention getter, starting a fight scene off on the right foot is a great thing to keep in mind. Some options could be putting the protagonist at a severe disadvantage, one of the characters utilizing some technique not seen before or having one of the characters interrupt another character’s dialogue by making the first strike.
- Similarly, a fight scene needs to have a properly bombastic finish, or else it has the potential to not be very memorable in the long term. The protagonist could land some huge, epic blow on the antagonist, the fighting characters could knock each other out simultaneously, or the BIG ONE, which is ending the fight by killing off one of the combatants.
- Longer is Better than Shorter (To a Point) ~
- Fight scenes almost always move at an extremely quick pace, both in terms of the story and in terms of literally reading the finished product. It won’t take a reader long to speed through a fight scene, due to blocks of action-packed text inherently enabling skimming.
- Even a fight scene several pages long can take just minutes to read, and the text may also only reflect a few minutes of in-universe fighting.
- That being said, don’t drag a fight out if it has clearly worn out its welcome. If you’re getting tired just writing it, it may be time to wrap it up (but perhaps not, as length is a tricky subject for fight scenes).
- Grounded Versus Fantastic ~
- Is your fight scene set in the real world with two angry teens duking it out, or is it a tempestuous spell-slinging clash of wizards in a fantasy world? The genre and setting will determine the logic of the fight scene.
- Real people cannot jump thirty feet into the air or shoot lasers. Wizards can. Real people don’t survive explosions, and they will break bones when struck hard enough. Wizards don’t have to play by those rules.
- At the same time, it is those precise rules that make grounded fight scenes just as (if not MORE) compelling than rule-breaking fantasy showdowns.
- Know Your Genre ~
- This one is simple enough. A fantasy epic is going to have countless fight scenes both big and small. Your typical murder mystery might have just one (a clash with the killer). As fun as fight scenes can be, don’t throw them in just because you can. Your reader will be able to tell that there’s no point.
- Don’t Be Afraid to Get Rough ~
- I see a lot of pretty popular authors struggle with this idea. It is 100% okay to rough up your main heroes. In fact, it makes them more believable and realistic to see that they aren’t infallible. Cuts, bruises, broken bones, or other injuries are a great way to add tension to a fight, and potentially lead to organic evolutions of their character arcs (I.e. – the hero just lost their arm in a battle, how will this change them?).
- Just be careful not to write yourself into a corner with the injury stuff. Don’t brutalize your character if you want them running and jumping like nothing happened one scene later. Not unless you have an in-universe explanation for such a recovery, that is.
- Writing by the Seat of Your Pants is Okay (With One Exception) ~
- The exception is this: You are fully required to know both how your fight will begin and how it will end BEFORE you start writing. Who kicks off the brawl? Who finishes it, and how and where? Decide these things before writing, or you will absolutely regret it (and it leads to long sessions of writer’s block).
- Then, let your imagination go wild! If you know how the fight ends, you know exactly what you can and cannot do on the road to that conclusion. Who can take part in the fight, and who can be knocked out from injury? What weapons are in play, and how does the setting of the fight change? You can do whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t contradict the ending you’ve already decided on. The middle ground is for experimenting with fun ideas and the overall length and pace of the fight.
- Knowing a fight’s end also allows you to intersperse foreshadowing and tension throughout the fight, to lead the reader on to that inevitable conclusion. Chekov’s Guns are brilliant for this.
- Keep Things Interesting ~
- Time to pull out your dictionaries and thesaurus! Fight scenes can become very old very quickly if all you end up writing is “he punched her, so she kicked him, so he then kicked her, so she punched him” ad nauseum. Spruce up your writing with as many different adjectives and verbs as you can, in order to keep the fight flowing uniquely.
- It isn’t just about word choice either. Vary the actions of what is happening during the fight too. Your combatants don’t just need to punch and kick. They can grab each other, throw each other, wield weapons, scratch and bite, any a whole manner of other things. If you are writing a fantasy story with powers, by all means go nuts with the powers! Make it interesting!
- Dialogue Gives Breathing Room ~
- Perhaps my favorite technique to create pauses in fight scenes is to utilize dialogue. Frequently, I will have the combatants each hit each other hard enough to stagger them backwards, and exhaust them. Since there is now space between them, it is believable that they would pause their fight to catch their collective breath and talk. Usually, these conversations tend to be arguing over ideals, but they can be whatever makes sense in the moment. A fight scene is a great chance to develop characters.
- On the topic of making sense, dialogue breaks aren’t always the answer. Don’t shove them in when you can just feel that it doesn’t make sense. Typically, they’ll be less applicable to grounded real-world fights, and more commonly seen in fantasy (after all, heroes and villains alike love their monologues).
- Three’s a Crowd (And More is Worse) ~
- You’ll inevitably want to write a fight scene that is more than just a one-v-one scenario. In your head, it might be the perfect scene. Then, when you put pen to paper, you’ll realize just how difficult balancing even three people is. Add even more to the mix, and it can quickly become a headache.
- You MUST be aware of what everyone is doing at all times in a multi-person fight. If you slip up, you’ll realize you haven’t given that one character anything to do for the past six paragraphs, and you forgot all about that other character. Logical holes will begin to pop up in your writing. Your reader may wonder “wait, why didn’t those two attack together?” or “what about that guy, he’s just standing there!”.
- The easiest way to get around this is to pair off combatants, so that your massive melee basically becomes a group of individual one-v-one or two-v-two. Then, to spice things up, you can have the combatants organically cross over and shuffle around the fight, switching up their opponents and keeping things fresh. In aids in the illusion of a huge brawl (that, in actuality, isn’t technically happening).
- This is immensely difficult to get right, and until you are supremely confident in your fight scene skills, I’d recommend sticking to one-v-one.
- Don’t Rehash ~
- This is exclusively for stories with more than one fight scene. Take extra care not to rehash your earlier fight scenes or copy too many of the same techniques and choreography. It’ll only add to the samey feeling that you’re trying to avoid with all of these fight scenes.
- Music Seriously Helps ~
- Hand-in-hand with the visualization process is listening to fitting music. Find a playlist (or usually even better, a single song) that fits the feel of your fight scene and listen to it while visualizing the beats of the fight. Keep listening to it while writing too, and most of the fight writing process will breeze on by.
And that’s everything that I wrote!
The Contrarian Corner 