The Art of Bull

How to Write a Fight Scene

What Not To Do

1.      The Blow-by-Blow: Please, do not do the blow-by-blow. There are many reasons for this, the first and foremost being that it’s boring. There’s no emotion, no description, nothing for the reader to chew on.

2.      The Conversation: I was reading a published author’s blog not too long ago. Whose blog it was escapes me, but she was one of the first things up on a Google search. She had a post about fight scenes and something else. She seemed to have a very high estimation of her skills, and she was talking about how she showed her main character’s ability to handle conflict. She committed the cardinal sin of fight scenes: the main character held a conversation in the middle of an exhibition of sorts, and his opponent was trying to kill him. Never have your characters hold conversations in battle. It just doesn’t work, especially in hand-to-hand combat. Your brain goes on auto-pilot, and you can’t think clearly enough to do much but grunt indistinctly. She had comments disabled on the post, otherwise I would have said something.

3.      The Olympic Gymnast: Your character is not an acrobat. Your character will not be doing flips and somersaults down a battlefield. I really don’t know how that got started (I blame Hollywood), but don’t ever do that. It’s not realistic, and it seems... well, stupid, frankly. Another thing: Your character will never willingly part with their weapon. So that whole toss-the-sword-and-catch-it thing holds no water.

4.      The Weapons Expert: Your character is not the best with every weapon. Your character may be proficient with two or three, maybe even four, but they do not know how to use every weapon, and they won’t win competitions for them all. Even with different types of swords, the styles can be very different based on what you’re wielding. The Roman gladius is a stabbing weapon. A scimitar couldn’t stab without great difficulty, and very limited success. In the time took you to figure out how to go about stabbing someone with a scimitar, your opponent would have taken your head off. A battle-axe requires big movements, because it’s heavy and long. You can’t fight in close quarters with it either. On the other hand, you can with a rapier. It’s slender and flexible, very light. Also, your five foot tall female character is not going to have the strength to handle most traditional swords. You have to be realistic.

5.      The Walking Armory: No one walks around with a crossbow, a couple spears, and fifty other assorted pointy objects strapped to their backs.  Don’t laugh. I’ve seen it done. You can carry around a dagger or two with a sword or a morning star, and maybe even all three, but you can’t have a longbow and quiver slung over your shoulder with it. I think why is pretty self-explanatory.

6.      The Natural: You must have training. You can’t just pick up a Glock .35 and go win sharpshooting competitions. It takes time and experience to figure it out. The first you fire one, it’ll like your arm is popping out of place. The kick is stronger than what most people believe. Not only that, but your trigger pull is going to be all over the place. You’re not going to hit anything right out of the gate. If it were that easy, we’d have a lot more snipers, and it’s probably a good thing it isn’t that easy. With a rifle, you’ve got to know how to breathe, or you’re going to be worse than you were with a handgun. No one is a master right off the bat.

 Part Two

1.      Emotion: Emotion is key. This goes on back to the boring blow-by-blow. There has to be some emotion, be it fear facing an opponent you know you can’t beat, triumph as your enemies flee before you over fields of red, pain as you take a shield to the nose, despair as you think of all those you’ll leave behind. Another thing is, war changes people. Violence can turn even the best among us into murderers. That adrenaline can be a high you don’t want to lose. You are the reader’s window into these feelings. You need to show all sides of conflict, including the sadness of death and destruction, and the flip side of that coin, the siren’s song of that adrenaline.

2.      Description: There is a fine line you must walk. You need to give enough description for the reader to be able to easily visualize the conflict, but it can’t be an info-dump, if that makes sense. I like to try to balance blow-trading with, again, emotion. Try to avoid thoughts as much as you can if you need to break up the action, because you don’t have time to think. It’s all about reactions. Things come too fast and you’re too high on adrenaline to process anything, really. You brain simply doesn’t work that fast. People learn how to fight well be conditioning those reactions, not with brains that go on hyper-drive. Conscious thought stops. The “lizard brain” and muscle memory are what keep you alive and breathing.

3.      Realism: This ties back in to the whole Olympic gymnast thing. Your characters are not doing back flips down the battlefield, nor are they vaulting over strikes. It is not possible. It comes across as ridiculous, and it leans too heavy on the idea of invincibility. Everyone gets nicked from time to time. There’s always the one guy you don’t see coming until he’s sticking that rather pointy dagger in your spine. Also, if someone whacks you upside the head with the flat of their blade, you will see stars. If you’re lucky, that’s what you’ll see. If you’re not, you’ll black out and you’ll be dead. Some blows you can’t shake off right away, and some you can’t shake off at all.

4.      Research: Do your homework. Study the fighting style you’re portraying, even if you created it, because there’s always someone who will give you crap for inconsistency. If your character is Russian, but she fights like an American, there’s a problem (Ooh... there’s a plot... and a Burn Notice reference!). There are different styles for different times, and different tactics for different situations. Romans liked to stab people with short swords. Greeks preferred spears, but they were fine with slashing at people with swords. In the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong were outnumbered and outgunned. Therefore, they used guerilla tactics to outsmart everyone else, and they kicked butt. Study the principles of warfare. Study the people you’re working with. Are they cautious or bold? Do they strike to kill, or only to incapacitate? Do they aim to make their enemies suffer, or only to warn? It all plays a part, and the more you know, the more credible you sound. Now, there are exceptions to the rule, and some people are just really good at what they do, and sometimes, what they do is not considered normal. It’s fine to portray the exceptional, but not everyone is some sort of war god.

5.      Effects: When you intentionally hurt another person, you are not the same. Something inside you dies—for most people. For others, it feels like they just came to life. That’s why we have so many serial killers. They live for the thrill. Also, some people are too good, too young. You see this in sports all the time. Some people are born amazing, with astonishing natural talent, and it takes very little formal training to make it blossom. When that happens, the kids lose their chance to be anything else. The world sees the blessing, but they pressure the kids so much with it, it becomes a curse. Also, they don’t know what to do with it. It makes them reckless, irresponsible, arrogant, and—in their eyes— immortal and unaccountable. They don’t respect their gifts because they didn’t earn them. They forget what life was like without it, because it’s all they’ve ever known. When it’s all gone in an instant, the world stops making sense to them, and life no longer has meaning. They become what their skill made them. They know that, and they’d rather die than see it go like that. The young soldiers become so accustomed to the violence and the destruction, it means nothing to them. It means nothing to tear a family apart. The power blinds them. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.