How to Write Fight Scenes

    So, fight scenes:

    As with nearly every other writing skill an author has in his/her repertoire, writing fights is a skill that takes a lot of practice. Sorry, kids, I know you wanted some gloriously simple answer, but there is none. I can’t just sprinkle magic Street Fighter dust on your head and make you a good writer of fight scenes. If you want to get better at it, you’re going to have to practice.

    If you didn’t want to hear that answer, I promise you that you’re going to be as equally unhappy with my next directive: research. Research is critical to writers no matter what you’re writing about. I’ll elaborate more below on how research plays a part in fight scenes, but rest assured, if you’re serious about developing your skill as a writer, you’re going to have to square yourself with the fact that you’re going to spend hours researching things.

    The good news is that there is more than one way to skin a cat. “Goodness” is a subjective term when it comes to writing, and that definition will be as varied as you all are, my young Padawans. What works for me may not work for you, and that’s fine. I’m lucky as a writer of fight scenes because I’m an advanced level martial artist – I have a brown belt in San Soo and Wing Chun, and almost a purple belt in Hung Gar – and I also have, at my disposal, a husband who has a gift for choreographing fight scenes. When it’s time for me to write a fight scene in one of my stories, I tell him what characters are involved, what I want to accomplish with the scene, and where it takes place. He then puts that beautiful brain to work and designs kick-ass battles for me. I write down every step of the fight as he dictates it to me, and after a while (usually an hour) of talking it out and debating with him what will and won’t work, I go to work writing the scene. So, yeah, I readily admit I probably have an advantage when it comes to writing fight sequences.

    But it’s one thing to hammer out step-by-step the events of the fight (which I recommend you do to help keep things straight), and another matter entirely to make it pretty for an audience. Again, there is no one set way to make the fight enjoyable to read, but in researching this matter, I’ve found that most authors (myself included) all agree on some fundamental points.

    First, you’ve got to keep it real as much as you possibly can. I always tell my students, particularly if they’re not martial artists, to hop on YouTube and look up real fights – not staged Hollywood fights, but real fights – between real martial artists or boxers, and study them intently. Hollywood fights are famous for being glamorous and fun to watch, but they are almost always complete and utter bullshit. On the silver screen, the laws of physics go right out the window. Combatants react in unrealistic ways. They're two-dimensional, meaning they take turns. Fights drag on for much longer than they actually would in real life. From an audience member’s viewpoint, fight scenes in movies are cool. But from a martial artist’s perspective, they’re annoying as hell.

    Real fights are ugly and brutal. They happen fast and are chaotic, frequently involve alcohol or drugs, and almost always start over something stupid. There’s no great, motivating factor, no lofty purpose, no good versus evil. It all boils down to the fact that some people are assholes. And those assholes inevitably start a fight by pulling some chicken-shit move – some drunk fool comes up behind you and breaks a beer bottle over your head. Very rarely do fights play out like high noon in a spaghetti western where the good guy has a pre-scheduled showdown with the bad guy in the middle of a dusty street.

    A fight in real life begins and ends quickly, with the altercation lasting maybe a minute. If there are people around, most people are decent enough (or at least smart enough to not want their friends to go to jail for assault) to break up a fight. And if they don’t, someone’s bound to call the cops, and the cops will break it up. Or, the fight is painfully one-sided and someone gets their ass so thoroughly kicked that if they’re not a broken mess incapable of fighting further, they’re simply knocked-the-fuck out.

    In my Hung Gar class, we’re taught that the fight should – if you’ve done everything right – end after one punch because the longer you fight, the more damage you take, and the greater the odds will be that you lose. You don’t want to brawl for fifteen minutes like they do in the movies; yeah, it looks epic, but you’re getting beat up too, Champ! And that’s bad. Getting hit in the face has a way of making you extraordinarily tired and weak, so imagine how screwed you’d be if you took multiple shots to various points on your body. I know this is a bad situation from personal experience…So when you’re writing your fight, remember that.

    Now, to be fair, in my fight scenes, I tend to make them last longer than they would last in real life. That’s because with the fandom I write for – Mortal Kombat – the audience expects drawn-out battles between their beloved characters, and I get away with bending the rules that frown on long fights because the videogames are like that. You might find that your battle, for art’s sake, needs to be more than just a one punch knock-out. That’s cool; you’ve got to experiment and figure out what works for your particular story. But as a general rule of thumb, you don’t want to make your fight scene as lengthy as War and Peace, okay?

    But don’t knock the short fight. Who remembers Gandalf fighting the Balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring? That fight scene lasted what, a paragraph? Maybe two? But admit it; it’s one of those fights you will remember to the day you die. Tolkien did such a splendid job building up to that scene with the mythology, with the chase through Moria, with the Balrog hot on the characters’ heels (pun most definitely intended) that he didn’t need to make his fight scene long and drawn out. The length was perfect.

    Another point other writers and I agree on is this: in a fight scene, your characters have to obey the laws of physics. Again, Mortal Kombat kind of gives Stephen Hawking and company the finger, as do many fandoms and genres of fiction (fantasy and sci-fi to name a couple). But please remember that your average Joe can’t just climb walls and do amazing, acrobatic stunts to beat up bad guys like Spiderman would…that is, unless his name is Peter Parker and he was bitten by a radioactive spider. But if they’re not our beloved Spidey, if superhuman strength or skill is not in their story, then your characters need to behave in a fight like real people would.

    Let me give you an example. What’s one of the most common things you see in a movie fight, particularly a martial arts epic? Inevitably, one of the combatants leaps high into the air with his leg extended. He sails half a city block towards his opponent and somehow manages to kick his enemy in the face, knocking the person out, and saving the day.

    I call bullshit on that. Sure, it looks cool, but there are a couple of problems with that. For one, kicks only have power when you’re connected somehow to the earth. It’s simple physics, yo. The physical energy generated by the earth gives your supporting leg power, and that force is passed to your hips and into your kicking leg, giving it the force it needs to inflict serious damage. You add some spin to that like you would for a roundhouse, and the blow can be pretty devastating. I’m sure there’s some fancy-ass formula to even work out the math on that, and I even used to know it. But the point is that when you’re disconnected from the earth and sailing through the air on a breeze, you don’t have as much power in your leg as you do when you’re just walking. How do you expect to take out an opponent like that? It would be akin to throwing a marshmallow at their face.

    For two, and of even greater importance, is that if your character is doing one of those fancy ass kicks, he or she better be doing it against an untrained opponent because a trained martial artist sees those kinds of kicks coming from a mile away, and not only will they block it, they will make your character pay for attempting it. I do, and I’m not even half as good as people like Jet Li. Anytime someone comes at me with a kick like that, I calmly block them and face-plant them in the mat without batting an eyelash, and that’s the nice way of dealing with it. If I wanted, I could hurt someone badly. I’m talking serious injuries like compound fractures and grossly hyperextended knees, injuries so severe that the person might need to buy stock in the Hoverround company for the rest of their life. In my Kung Fu classes, we learn how to do those kicks not because they have a practical application (they usually don’t), but to strengthen our bodies, develop coordination, and build our stamina. So when you’re writing a fight scene between two normal human beings, you should probably steer clear of writing in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon types of moves.

    The third point I agree with is research. While you’re on YouTube watching real fights, watch how the combatants react to being hit, and how they, in turn, hit back. This is another way that Hollywood gets it wrong. For example, I give you the classic nut shot. The movies usually have the unfortunate gentleman hunch over. In real life, the man’s knees would buckle and he’d crumple into a weird goat-shaving stance. So, it would be prudent for you to not only study the punches thrown, but how the body bends and flexes when it’s hit in a certain way. Research anatomy and physiology. Watching how the body reacts to a punch to the throat, for example, gives your fight added realism and takes the scene to a whole new level.

    And while we’re on the subject of the nutcracker, keep in mind that from the time they’re born, little boys instinctively learn to protect the family jewels any time someone so much as blinks at them. As a result, it is a lot harder to hit a man in the ‘nads than you might think. A nut shot requires (in a statistic I just made up on the spot) about 20% distraction and 80% extremely good luck. Bad news for Johnny Cage, huh? So I’d think twice about making that a convenient way to wrap up your fight scene.

    You also need to work hard to keep your characters’ weapons and fighting styles realistic and faithful to the historical era you’re writing in. For example, if you’re writing about a ninja in feudal Japan, he’s not going to be using a machine gun and doing Krav Maga in a fight. Or at least he probably wouldn’t. Perhaps his character invented an early prototype of the one and the precursor to the other…but I digress. If your character is wielding a weapon and using a martial art that isn’t true to the history and the region, you need to explain why. There might be a perfectly logical explanation as to why your ninja has a machine gun and does Krav Maga, but in order to keep it real, you have to make sure your audience knows why. It can’t just be there for no reason. But, all things being equal, do your research and learn about the weapons and martial arts in a particular region in a particular time period.

    Now, if your character has superhuman powers, you can still be realistic in a fight. For example, my Mortal Kombat protagonist, Sub-Zero, obviously can control ice and snow. In the games, he has very specific powers, but those started to get boring and repetitive to me; how often can he throw an ice ball and it still be interesting to read? So I started doing research on the different ways snow and ice can manifest. I discovered all sorts of cool phenomena that I never even knew existed – my favorite is penitentes, or stalagmite-like cones of ice that are formed by wind in the coldest places on the planet. I took what I learned and I developed new powers for him that are still true to his inherent gifts, but gave them a facelift at the same time. You can do that as well as long as you stay consistent to their character. Like, it wouldn’t work if you gave Sub-Zero the power to set people on fire like Scorpion would.

    And since we’re talking about it, you need to depict your injuries realistically too. I don’t just mean what kinds of injuries your characters take, but that they take injuries at all. I catch so much flack in my stories for not making my protagonist invincible to harm like Superman. Many people want me to write one-sided fights with him just kicking ass and taking names without getting hurt himself. And that’s all well and good, and I’d love to see that as much as my readers, but that’s not true to real life. If you punch someone hard, you’re going to split your knuckles. That’s how that works. So if your character gets hit in the kidney, he’s going to piss blood for a week, and that’s after he collapses and possibly passes out. If someone breaks his leg, he’s going to be lucky if he can crawl from the fight alive – he sure as hell isn’t going to be doing tornado kicks five feet off the ground. But giving your characters injuries can be a positive thing – some of the most interesting fights, I feel, are the ones that are won with nothing but the protagonist’s wits to save them, not with brute force.

    But furthermore, in the Mortal Kombat universe, the characters are all pretty evenly matched; they’re all extremely experienced martial artists, so I’d be hard-pressed to explain why a fight between characters was so one-sided. In real life, you’ll get seriously beat up just by training to fight. One day recently, my Sifu and I were hitting our arms together to strengthen them, and that simple drill instantly gave us black and blue arms. If your characters – especially if they’re martial artists like mine – are hitting each other to maim or kill, they’re definitely not going to walk away unscathed. They’re just not. So you’ve got to show them taking blows and how those blows affect their ability to fight.

    Something else to consider is your characters’ historical backgrounds. I’m not saying delve into their history during a fight – that’s bad timing and makes for boring reading. But ask yourself how that person’s past is going to affect their fight now. Going back to my ninja example from above, what was life like in his clan? Was he hailed by all who knew him and given a proverbial crown of laurels without really having earned it, or was he mistreated his whole life and had to fight tooth and nail for everything he had, what little that was? If it’s the first option, then perhaps he’s arrogant, and that will be his downfall. Or, if it’s the latter, he might be scrappy, so he might fight harder than the average person. Did he earn a scar in a prior battle that causes him emotional distress when he fights now? Did he lose a limb, get stabbed, get burned? How do his prior injuries affect his physical movements now?

    For example, in one of my stories, my protagonist was suddenly confronted by his long-dead, super-abusive father. While ordinarily a determined, fearless man, this particular character suddenly reverted to a childlike mentality. He was unsure how to fight against this man that he both hated and feared, and he suddenly became a deer in the headlights. He didn’t dare raise his hand against the man. This allowed his “father” – it was only an illusion designed to psych him out – to beat the snot out of him before he snapped out of it and started fighting back.

    To cite another example of personal history from my own work, that same protagonist almost died after he got a flail chest. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s when you get hit in the chest so hard that an entire segment of your rib cage – not just one or two ribs, but an entire piece – breaks off and threatens to puncture your lungs. He was my protagonist so obviously, he pulled through, but any time he gets hit in the chest in a fight now, it seriously slows him down.

    Here are some other tips for writing cool fight scenes:

    1.      Don’t overwrite a scene and bog it down with detail after detail. This is a tricky balancing act; you want to paint a clear enough picture for readers to visualize in their heads, yet you also want to leave enough to the imagination that they don’t get bored by all the description.

    2.      Make sure the pace is fast. Real fights, as I said above, happen quickly. Your fight scene needs to reflect that. One of the tricks to making the pace match the intensity is to write shorter sentences.

    3.      Use verbs, not lots of adverbs and adjectives in the scene. This goes towards tip #2. Adverbs and adjectives tend to slow down your pacing because they drag out the action. Furthermore, they are a way to pretty up language, but fights are brutal and barbaric. The prose shouldn’t be pretty. It should be coarse. Instead of “Michael fiercely hit his enemy in the chest over and over,” you should say “Michael pounded his enemy in the chest.”

    4.      Focus on sensory details. For example, the coppery taste of blood in the fighter’s mouth, the strange, jagged grating of broken bones shooting pain through the limb, the ringing inside the ears. That tends to be more revealing than giving your readers a play-by-play as to what move each character is executing and when.

    5.      Reveal character through action; how a person reacts in a fight is more telling than if they won or lost it. This doesn’t just apply to the fighters, incidentally. This can extend to the bystanders watching the fight unfold. Do they run and board up their windows when the fight begins, or do they charge in to help or break it up? Fights are a brilliant way to show, not tell, who your characters are.

    6.      Make every fight scene unique and special. Don’t have your characters win fights by doing the same crap over and over. Instead, change the fights up and have them resolve the conflict in different ways. Sometimes, they could win with brute force, but sometimes they could win with their cleverness. Do your best to make each fight memorable.

    7.      Use the setting to aid the characters. If your fight scene takes place in a bar, your fighters damn well better pick up a bar stool or shot glass or pool cue and use them as weapons. Something I’ve learned in Kung Fu is that the floor/ground is the biggest weapon you have at your disposal, so you’d be a fool not to use it. Throw your characters over rocks, into ship booms, down a ravine. Wherever your characters are at, the setting they’re in should become one of the fighters too.

    8.      Have your men and women play to their strengths. A woman is probably not going to stand a chance against a man in a fight if she’s having a strength contest with him. Men are typically physically stronger than women, but women, on the flip side, are typically faster and have better balance. Be aware of each gender’s strengths and weaknesses and make sure your characters play to them.

 
As with any other writing advice I give, these are just general guidelines and not concrete rules. You will need to figure out what works and what doesn’t. But the bottom line is that you need to keep your fights as real as possible. This is achieved by doing your research and staying true to human nature. Good luck and happy writing!