Writing battles and fight scenes

Discussion in 'General Writing' started by alvin123, Sep 10, 2008.

  1. Coolman

    Coolman Member

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    I am hoping to write a novel some day about a man trying to track down a cyberterrorist. The twist being that the MC is actually a shapeshifter who can turn himself into cryptids. One scene in this novel is where the MC is confronting one of the Baddie's henchmen at a resort in Hawaii, resulting in a fight scene. Can I have some advice on writing fight's in a novel and making them exciting?
     
  2. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    Jenna pretty much sums up what I was going to say here, be aware that shes a real potty mouth though so the vid is NSFW
     
  3. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    Jenna M. does not follow her own advice, so listen to her with a grain of
    salt.

    Depends on the type of fight, and how high are the stakes? Is your MC just
    a badass that kicks ass, while never getting a scratch? Then you might consider
    making them a bit more vulnerable, and taking their share of the lumps
    handed out. A few paragraphs of exchanging blows, resulting in a conclusion
    of who comes out on top. Most of these scenes rely on tension, and the possibility
    that your MC could lose (or at least take a nasty beating before winning). Each
    punch should pack some weight behind it, seeing as most fights will only last
    a few minutes at most when in a physical altercation.
    I hope you find this helpful, and good luck. :)
     
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  4. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    whether she follows the advice or not it is good advice to take

    short sentences, powerful verbs, don't interrupt the action with overly heavy description, don't try to describe the exact choreography of blows, and know what you are talking about ... don't try to write a MMA fight if you don't know your Krav Maga from your Muay thai.

    And I do practice what I preach so you can take it from me instead if you want, although I am considerably less easy on the eye

    Also remember that most fights (excepting large scale battles) are over in a few seconds, the choreographed punch block, kick stuff you see in films is strictly Holywood - also in real life if someone his hit hard over head with a chair, crowbar or whatever they are going down hard, they don't get to be running around like nothing happened 5 seconds later
     
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  5. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    I didn't mean to upset you Moose.

    I find her entertaining, but how much do you
    trust a person who has only written one book,
    and acts like they know everything? I don't
    claim to know jack, just offer up an opinion
    is all. Fame does not make up for exp. for
    anyone.

    Though I will agree, that if you are writing
    Martial Arts that it is best to know what you
    are talking about. :)

    Again I did not mean to upset you.
     
  6. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    I'm not upset

    I don't agree with everything she says, just on that segment she summarised pretty much what i wanted to say and linking it was a lot easier than typing it out (she also said the same as you did about making your mc vulnerable btw)

    for quality writing advice I prefer Joanna Penn (20 plus books and a 6 figure income from writing speaks for itself) but I couldnt find Joanna on writing fight scenes at the time of posting
     
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  7. Brigid

    Brigid Active Member

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    Long time no see. Sorry, was really busy, my friends.

    I noticed that action beats are slowing me down. With action beats, I mean what the characters do while talking.

    Here is an example, instead of “This looks odd,” said Anna.
    "This looks odd." Anna pushed her glasses up her nose and squinted at the text.

    Instead of “I’m fine," said Jane.
    “I’m fine." Jane dragged her trembling fingers through her thick hair.

    It is not the "she said" action that slows me down, but the stuff that I could use instead of "she said", the action beats.

    Plotting comes relatively easy to me. Pure dialog too. But I often have a blank as far as the action beats between dialog are concerned.

    How to you handle that issue? Any tips how to tackle this issue?

    Thanks in advance to all who are so kind to answer.
     
  8. hyacinthe

    hyacinthe Banned

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    I generally roar through the scene and just write the dialogue. if a tag comes to me in the process, I will use it.
    then once I've completed the scene I go back and think about what actions will reveal character in the dialogue, and add them in.
    I do this as I go, since I don't want to spend a month doing nothing but dreaming up the blocking and internalizations of the scene.
     
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  9. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    I too tend to write the dialog first and quickly, and the associated actions later.

    Your beats seem a bit longer than necessary. They could be:

    Ann peered at the parchment. “This looks odd.”

    Jane pushed her hair back. “I’m fine.”

    Also, you don’t always need a beat or a tag—especially in a two-person conversation, some dialog can be fine with neither.

    I also interactive beats that are part of the communication.

    Joe. Joe. Come here.” Anna beckoned. “Look at this. It’s weird.”

    “Stop it!” Jane raised a hand, then turned away. “I’m fine.”

    Joe stared at Meg for a long, eyebrows-raised moment before he said, “Yeah.” Followed, a moment later, by, “Sure.”
     
    Last edited: Dec 2, 2018
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  10. John Calligan

    John Calligan Contributor Contributor

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    I feel like action beats work for me when they take as long to read as do.

    John opened the door.

    ^ I like this one because it reads at the speed of doing.

    John rubbed his eye with his finger to remove the bit of dirt that threatened to become trapped behind the lid.

    ^ doesn’t work because it takes too long to read it.

    Also, if the action is being done simultaneously to dialog, I think you want it to be as few words as possible.

    They kept driving.

    If it isn’t simultaneous, then the beat of choice should also imply a break in conversation.

    John opened the door.

    ^ again, this one is good because people usually shut up while a door is opening.

    John got his cell phone out

    ^ this one is super rude if you don’t imply somehow that John is still talking while getting it out.
     
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  11. John Calligan

    John Calligan Contributor Contributor

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    I think these have a good cadence.
     
  12. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    I agree with everything that's been said so far, and would only add a couple cautions:

    First, it's totally possible to overdo beats. You can often skip most attributions when there are only two people talking. The paragraph break shows a new speaker, and there are only two people, so your reader doesn't really need many clues.

    Second, there's not anything wrong with "said". If there's no logical action beat and an attribution is needed, use "said". It's a useful word.
     
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  13. Carriage Return

    Carriage Return Member

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    Last edited: Dec 31, 2018
  14. Brigid

    Brigid Active Member

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    Thanks to all of you for your valuable advice. I REALLY APPRECIATE IT and I hope that others who struggle with the same issue find this thread!
     
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  15. Millamber

    Millamber Senior Member

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    I'm really glad you asked this, because the advice/replies back has been excellent and will come in handy for myself in the future!
     
  16. Razvi

    Razvi New Member

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    Hello,

    I'm writing a story and I've almost reached the end where I am planning to write a big scene of action with shooting, dodging, running and stuff like that. I don't really know how to tackle this episode of action, can someone give me some tips, please?

    Thank you very much!! :love:
     
  17. John Calligan

    John Calligan Contributor Contributor

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    Find three authors who you like and hope your style is similar to, find an action scene in each of their books, and transcribe them word for word. Then go back and reread what you wrote, paying attention to action, description, exposition, word use, and pacing.

    Then write your own scene. Then edit it and make it sound good.
     
  18. Razvi

    Razvi New Member

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    Thank you so much! I will do this hopefully it will help :)
     
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  19. Azuresun

    Azuresun Senior Member

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    Part of it depends on what sort of mood you want--"action scene" is quite a wide umbrella that could cover everything from Black Hawk Down to a James Bond movie to Avengers Assemble. If you could give a few more details of what the novel's been like up till this point and what sort of mood you want to the scene to have (grim and gritty, high-action, superheroic), that would let us give more precise advice. But in general, I'll suggest the following:

    Do some research on real gunfights, and the details of taking cover, reloading or unjamming a gun, suppressing fire, getting hit by a bullet, etc. You may end up ignoring some or all of that research, especially if you're going for a cinematic approach, but it's nice to have it handy.

    Use the environment to add interesting complications to the fight, either from the effects of the fight itself or what's going on outside. For example, a stray bullet shatters a window, punctures a pipe and sprays water everywhere, or hits a fleeing civilian. Maybe it's raining (slippery surfaces, reduced visibility) or the building is burning down (choking smoke, poor visibility, structures collapsing). Think of Terminator, where the final fight has four stages, each with a different environment and complications--they need to escape the police station, they need to escape the robot in a road chase, they need to fight it in the factory, and finally Sarah needs to escape and destroy the damaged robot on her own.

    Use the senses of the characters to get the reader into the scene. They might be briefly deafened by an explosion, or have to wipe blood out of their eyes. They might be trembling with fear or buzzing with anger. If they're injured, it might distract them with pain, or they might not even notice they're hit until they see the blood.

    Remember to keep the story going. It might seem obvious, but an action scene should continue to advance the narrative and the characters, and not just be a pause. For example, maybe the hero puts themselves at risk to save a civilian, or maybe the bad guy executes a minion who was trying to flee. These characters probably have a good reason why they're fighting to the death, so think about why they're here, and how far they'll go to win this. John Woo movies sprang to mind when I was writing this, and the final fights in movies like The Killer or Hard Boiled do a great job of developing the characters even during the fighting.
     
    Last edited: Jan 17, 2019
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  20. Iain Sparrow

    Iain Sparrow Banned Contributor

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    Make sure you've invested in the action passage or scene before you get to it. Prepare the reader beforehand so you don't need to break the action for unnecessary descriptions. For the action itself, use quick words and choppy sentences, keep it visceral and immediate, and don't overuse internal thoughts.



    “Hsssssssssss!”

    Adeline jerked back, upsetting the magpie, who took flight to a nearby tree. Hunkered down on all fours and crawling a serpentine path toward the mongoose, was Mabel, who looked every inch a mad girl. Donning the impression of a hooded cobra she stopped short of the agitated mongoose, shot upright to her knees, cupped her hands behind her ears, and began to bob and weave and make an awful sound. “Hsssssssssss!”

    Mango bared his fangs in rage, answering his master’s challenge with a menacing growl. Then, with a flick of his tail, the nimble duelist went to work; he skittered back and forth, feint-and-retreat-hop-scurry-jump and whisked by the hissing girl to give her a nip on the ankle. Mabel rounded on him, but too late. He was behind her again and gave her other ankle a nasty bite.

    “Oh, let it alone, will you?” Adeline said reproachfully. “You’re frightening the poor thing!”
     
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  21. Razvi

    Razvi New Member

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    My story is about a girl, her name is Camille, who is abused by her father and she runs away from home, then she meets Amira, who helps her hide from her dad. Camille’s dad finds them and the girls manage to escape, they leave London and head for Salisbury, where Curtis, Amira’s best friend, will help them. The scene is in the finale of the story ehen Camille’s father and her aunt kidnap Amira and they threaten to kill her if Camille doesn’t give them the money her mother left her. Camille’s mother passed away six years ago.

    The action scene will happen when Camille reaches the place where her aunt and her father kept Amira and with Curtis’s help they manage to free Amira and then they run but they are chased by Camille’s aunt.

    I hope you undersrand my point, and thank you for the tips, I appreciate the help :)
     
  22. Razvi

    Razvi New Member

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    Thank you very much! The example will help me a lot!
     
  23. Stormburn

    Stormburn Contributor Contributor

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    This is an answer by Kamila Miller to the question, asked on Quora, What is a good example of a well written fight scene?
    I was so impressed by her response that I'm posting it here:

    Fantastic question. I wish more authors asked about this before they settled in to write their first fight scenes.

    Most people haven’t been in a serious fight. Most people haven’t been attacked. Most people haven’t experienced battle. Most people don’t know the difference between a fight, an attack and a battle. Finally, most people do a terrible job at conveying violent situations because they’re taking their inspiration from movies, which get the reality aspects of it wrong most of the time, but at least get the emotional/tension/storytelling aspects of conflict right. As a writer, you don’t have the luxury of movie-style pacing and visual effects to shore up the flaws. But you do have a huge advantage over movies: you can use all the senses, and you can manipulate a reader’s emotions much more easily because the reader is inside the scene, and often inside the character’s head.

    Okay, now that we’ve got the groundwork down, let’s talk a bit about what a badly written fight scene does:

    It focuses on the choreography. This is the main thing I see done wrong. I don’t care if it’s his left or right hand punching someone on the right or left side of someone’s face, or whether he’s in horse stance or whatever martial arts/boxing/etc. that most writers with some training in something want to throw in there. It’s boring and usually confusing.

    A badly written violence scene excludes emotions like fear, rage, excitement, horror, or makes those emotions into a monotone so that there are no ups and downs to the fight. Also, even if your combatant is an expert, he will not be bored or plowing through his enemies with his mighty sword as if they were nothing. If you’re going to include violence, at least make it some sort of a challenge for your pov character. It doesn’t have to be physically or emotionally tough. It can be a challenge for the character to focus, for example. If he or she is a soldier who has done this kind of thing a thousand times before, there will still be tension because an experienced soldier will know that plans go to hell all the time, and the stakes are high – if they fail, people will die. They often depend on their team members to remain cool and professional so that they can remain cool and professional, and they’ll still sweat under their armor even when things are going well. So get those emotions on board.

    A badly written scene depends on fantasy forms of violence to inform it. Most writers don’t realize that there’s such a thing as a ‘dojo ballerina’. That’s a somewhat derogatory term for a martial artist whose never been tested in the real world, but insists that they’re an expert. There are also firearm ‘experts’ who use dangerous practices, self-defense ‘experts’ who don’t have a clue about self-defense law and have never had to defend themselves, and so on. If you rely on the wrong expert to inform you about whether or not your scene is realistic, you’ll end up with a silly mess that makes no sense. (Hint: you will not have time to take off your shoes and put them on your hands if you are threatened with a knife attack. You probably won’t even see the knife coming. You’ll feel it as you’re being stabbed.)

    It glorifies violence without understanding it. Yes, there is glory, and a sense of victory when you come out on top or you’re in your zone, but there are consequences and prices to be paid. For one thing, people tend to be ostracized if they admit that they felt like a god on the battlefield, because most of the people on that battlefield were scared and trying to hide under the bodies. If you’re a soldier, your buddies may look at you as a hero, but in your head you might be replaying the image of small person body parts, and when you go home to people telling you that you’re a baby killer, you believe it because you saw the damage done. If you’re the victim of an attack and you survive, you will have all kinds of people telling you how brave you were, but chances are you’ll feel like you weren’t, and you’ll be haunted by nightmares … Authors are in the business of entertainment. You don’t always have to be ‘real’ about this stuff. But you need to decide before you write any kind of violence exactly how real you want to be, and where you want to take your audience. You don’t have to portray real violence as it is, but do please be respectful of your audience and the real world when you do it. If you write the next Kill Bill script, remember that what made those movies work was the stylized and carefully crafted violence that put the audience in an alternate reality. And remember who your audience is. If it’s kids, be careful with how much and how you portray. If it’s women, remember that rape is not something you want to throw out there casually as a plot point for a revenge story.

    Finally, a badly written scene is usually derivative. It will echo the fight scene the author saw in a movie based on a book, or worse, a fight scene the author enacted in a video game based on a movie based on a book. Read some non-fiction as well as fiction. It’s especially valuable to read a broad range of non-fiction where violence is a central topic: war, assault survival, terrorism, etc.

    I read mostly fantasy, and one of my favorite authors is Ellen Kushner. I think she did a splendid job of ‘panning in’ to the life of a sword for hire in Swordspoint, and how he handles violence. In Chapter Three you can read about how a cold-blooded killer who knows he’s the best swordsman in the city handles an ‘easy’ duel. She does a great job of balancing emotion (which in this case involves careful calculations, almost machine-like in nature) and choreography and even weaves the setting in.

    John D McDonald is reliably good. In fact many pre-Vietnam authors had a background in war or lived and/or worked in a truly violent environment. Right around the writing of ‘Rambo’, increasing numbers of authors did not have that sort of background, and even protested against violence (war, street violence, etc.) without experiencing it or understanding it. In sneering at violence while writing about it, these authors ended up stylizing and contorting violence to the point where it became less impactful on the page and more and more dull and/or disgusting and/or disrespectful of real human suffering, while simultaneously managing to make violence more and more unrealistic on the page. Again, you’re in the business of entertainment, so you don’t have to be truly realistic, but writing from a position of ignorance or worse, moral superiority, will undermine your efforts to connect the audience to the physical drama unfolding on the page. It’s the same situation as an author who wants to write romances because it’s ‘easy to write smut for a quick buck.’ Well, the audience can feel the disdain for the genre bleed through the page, and such a work probably won’t be very successful or satisfying. If you want to write successful, satisfying fight scenes, you’ll have to educate yourself about violence first.

    Many authors have found Violence: A Writer’s Guide by Rory Miller to be a good resource. It doesn’t tell you how to write a fight scene. You’ll have to study good writers and employ good prose techniques to figure out what style you want to use, and how you want to manipulate language in a way that conveys the scene in a sensory-rich manner to your audience, hopefully without taking them places they don’t want to go. But Miller’s book will lay some groundwork that will help your violence make more sense on the page. (Full disclosure: I’m married to him. But Steve Perry and Barry Eisler both recommend this book as a resource, and the book gets high ratings from authors. I always feel a bit weird recommending it, but I haven’t found a lot of other books to recommend in its place.)

    I believe Marc ‘Animal’ MacYoung also has a series for writers that talks about violence. I haven’t read those but I hear they’re good.

    You may also want to check out Strong on Defense, The Gift of Fear, Achilles in Vietnam, Betrayed by the Angel, Deadly Force Encounters, Why They Kill, and Sharpening the Warrior’s Edge. Look in the bibliographies in the books that have them if you want even more valuable resource books. Again, none of these will teach you how to write the scenes, but until you have the scenes mapped out in your head in a way that works and jives at least somewhat with physics and human emotions and human capacity, you won’t be able to write it.

    Oh, and short sentences and short paragraphs are generally the best practice to keep the action moving along, but again, it’s a style thing. You’ll make those kind of choices based on the type of story you’re telling, in the narrative voice you’ve developed, using your best writing practices.

    I hope this helps!
     
  24. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    We have to draw a line between well written = entertaining, and well written = realistic. The reason so much fiction is choreographed and more like a dance than a fight is that that is what people have learnt to expect from holywood.

    In reality most fights are over extremely fast, and in a full on brawl most participants won't be able to tell you who did what to who or even what they did themselves (which makes writing up statements afterwards 'entertaining' ) - the same applies to firefights, even trained soldiers won't be able to give a blow by blow of where their bullets went and who shot what at who.

    This is why people who've been there and done that say the only difference between fairy story and a war story is that one starts 'one upon a time' and the other starts 'no shit bro, I was there'
     
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  25. Laughing Rabbit

    Laughing Rabbit Active Member

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    Thanks for this, it's definitely something I have to work on. I wrote a scene where a character is attacked, and I know I didn't write it very well, but decided to wait until the book is finished before going back and editing it, mainly because I have to figure out how to write the scene realistically. I've never been involved in a physical fight so it's hard to imagine what it's really like without looking back on movie/tv fights in my mind.
     
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