One of the things I find most challenging in writing is fight scenes – not a huge number occur in my work, but just enough to cause me annoyance and frustration. Lucky for me I’ve got Alan Baxter, International Master of Kung Fu and, coincidentally, award-winning author of dark fantasy, horror and sci-fi on speed dial. I figured all writers could benefit from a few tips from an expert in the field of punching people in the face (but not in a psychopathic manner), so I asked him to write a post about it. Take it away, Al!
Top Five Tips for Tip Top Fights
So you want to write a fight scene. Even if you don’t now, you probably will at some point. After all, stories are powered by conflict and that can mean unrequited love, an obstructionist boss, a broken down car or a million other things. But it often means actual, genuine, drag-out fisticuffs. People love a bit of ultraviolence in their fiction and it’s usually the safest place to find it.
The trouble is, most writers haven’t had many, if any, fights. And that’s a good thing. Fighting is not a great experience for most, unless you train in the martial arts and enjoy combat sports. Or you’re a psycho who beats people in the street, but if that’s you, you should be in jail. Go and hand yourself in, you animal.
And that’s where I come in. I’m not a psycho (go ahead, try to prove it!), but I’m a writer and a martial artist. I’ve trained for over 30 years and fought in a variety of environments, so I can draw on my knowledge to write good fight scenes. In fact, I started to get a bit of a reputation for it and was asked to run some workshops on the subject. Following that, I even wrote a short ebook on the subject called Write The Fight Right. It’s a very short book, but it’s designed as a reference guide for writers to make their fight scenes as authentic and exciting as possible.
Recently, Angela asked me to write her a guest post on the subject of fight scenes, so I said “How about a Top Five Things To Consider When Writing Fights?” She said “Sounds perfect!”
So, here are my five top tips to make a fight scene in your story as realistic and visceral as possible:
- Your book is not a movie. Most people, without any other point of reference, simply transcribe a movie-style fight scene onto the page when writing. Movie fights are (most of the time) incredibly unrealistic and designed for that medium. In a movie, we have to watch from the outside, we need to see what’s going on, so combatants take turns and use big, clear attacks and blocks. Real fighting is nothing like that. With writing, we can get inside the action and inside the characters’ heads and make everything more exciting and gritty and downright brutal.
- Less is more! A fight scene should be the fastest, most visceral scene in a story,
but so often they’re slow and cumbersome when authors try to describe everything that’s going on, all the complexities of attacks and blocks and so on. It’s boring! Short, sharp and pared back is the way to go.
- The five senses. Movies are a visual medium with added sound. When we write, we can use touch, taste and smell to great effect as well. What does it feel like to get punched in the face? Can you smell the sweat and fear? Can you taste the blood? (The answers to these questions are: pretty horrible, yes, and yes.) Using these things along with sight and sound adds enormous impact to your fight scenes.
- Adrenaline and emotion. Anyone in a fight who isn’t scared is a psychopath. Even the best fighters are afraid and they have to deal with massive dumps of adrenaline, they have anger, shock, pain to deal with. The better a fighter you are, the more you’ve trained to deal with these things. The less experience you have, the more these things will fuck you up.
- The knockout myth. You know in movies when people are knocked out for long enough for other characters to do all kinds of stuff, then they wake up and carry on like normal? Such bullshit. When a person is knocked out, that’s brain damage. If they’re only out for a few seconds, they’ll come around groggy and almost certainly concussed, but hopefully not too badly off. If a person is out for several minutes, they have suffered serious brain injury and absolutely will not be able to function normally for a long time after they wake up. If ever! This fact isn’t much use in stories when you need someone to be out of action for a while, but if you’re looking for realism, the KO is not it.
Hopefully these points will give you some food for thought in your next fight scene. Of course, (shameless self-promotion ahead!) all these things and more are dealt with in much greater detail in my ebook, Write The Fight Right. Now go forth and write great fights!
Alan Baxter is an award-winning author of dark fantasy, horror and sci-fi and an International Master of Kung Fu. Read extracts from his novels, a novella and short stories at his website – http://www.warriorscribe.com – and find him on Twitter @AlanBaxter and Facebook.
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