A friend on discord asked me for my thoughts on fight scenes, and what I came up with was too long to fit into a discord post. So, it’s going here.
I’m not going to say anything new here, but perhaps if you haven’t read a dozen writing manuals like I have, something here might click for you.
What is a Fight Scene?
A fight scene is a conversation by other means. A written conversation, a good one, has disagreements in it, friction and contrast. This is both more pronounced and less necessarily complex in fight scenes. A fight scene can be premised on something as simple as “fuck you, you’re gonna die!” “no, you’re gonna die!”, and resolved by punching each other very hard for a bit. A conversation that simple would sputter to a stop pretty quickly.
Now, a compelling fight scene has more moving parts to its conflict than “fuck you!”, and a compelling fight scene involves more than a sequence of punches. These facts are intertwined. Put a pin in that.
Thinking of fights as heated conversations — debates — illuminates one fact. Fundamentally, that’s what prosaic fight scenes are. A story is (beneath a a few levels of abstraction) you, the author, arguing why events would play out as you describe them. So when you have two characters fight (and when the fight’s conclusion isn’t obvious from the start — it shouldn’t be), the actions taken on either side is effectively an argument for why that side should win, and generally one of these arguments is stronger.
As I said, good fights have many points of tension and contrast. Maybe you have a big buff guy on one side, and a dude with a puny little knife on the other. Each necessarily has to approach fighting differently; they will argue on different terms.
This brings me to the really important point about fight scenes. Any article on fight scene writing worth it’s salt is going to have a bit where it tells you how bad a fight that, in so many words, essentially goes “She punched him. He kicked her. She dodges and slaps him,” is. My take is that, yes, of course this is bad, and not just for reasons of lack variety — those are symptoms — but because there’s no change. A punch is ephemeral, and may as well not be written about unless it accomplishes something.
A thing you’ll learn, if you write enough, is that what’s long isn’t a short thing stretched out or filled in, but an intrinsically different thing, the way a square and a cube are intrinsically different. The long is long because it has more variables and dimensions to play with.
So if you have “Guy meets dude, he fights him, dude wins,” and want to turn it into a full fight scene, the way to do it isn’t to C-c C-v ‘he fights him’ a dozen times and replace each ‘fight’ with a hyponym, (or write something that looks like you did). You need to find or create tangible differences that you can alter to landmark and demonstrate the progression of the fight. Pivot points.
The above, you’ll note, is a stripped down version of the first premise: a big buff guy with a sword, and a dude with a little knife. Even with that little, you can already see points where the dynamic of the fight can change: the guy has more reach than the dude, so dude is going to have to get inside guy’s guard to do anything, and this suggest a pivot point (or points) between two different parts of the fight — one with the dude outside guy’s guard, and one inside. Similarly, he introduction of weapons introduces the possibility of disarming, which can decidedly change the dynamic of the fight. And the implied size difference between the two creates a general narrative bedrock for the argument — the big guy has an inherent advantage, a basis for his argument (though at this point, I imagine we would sooner expect a David and Goliath story).
Reframing this in terms of arguments, the pivot points are place one side has to change arguments. One character could come into a fight swinging, going for quick direct blows, and their opponent shuts them down, reading their every move, dodging and blocking and attritting them. The first character is either going to tire themselves out, or change tactics.
And this all focusing on the mechanics of the fight. Your fight (hopefully?) is happening within a larger story, and that context is essential to informing the arguments and subtext of the fight. To pick a somewhat cliche example, consider a haughty knight proud of their noble blood and years of professional training, and a scruffy street rat trying to rob them.
Suddenly, the argument aren’t just about who has best the physical advantages, but about whether noble blood means anything, about technique vs instinct.
Addendum: Spectacle
In 2002, Jerry Cleaver wrote Immediate Fiction, easily a top tier writing book. In it, he claimed prose is a visual medium. Today, in 2021, this is what we call a hot take.
But I do, unironically, think this is a salient point. Ignoring aphantasics, in many readers, writing will trigger mental images. And there’s a reason “show, don’t tell” is the most repeated piece of writing advice, and it’s because what’s visualizable is more compelling than what’s abstract, even when all is just abstract words on a page.
What I’ve written above, about tension, arguments, and pivot points, is a framework, but I don’t really think about fight scenes in those terms, unless I hit a roadblock and can’t figure out a scene by feel. Let me tell you how I actually think about fight scenes.
I figure out what I’m doing with a scene, what the scene’s doing for the story. What am I trying to reveal about the fighters? What stakes am I trying to introduce into the story? What esoteric facts about my magic system am I contriving to introduce?
And then I daydream. I think, “what fucking cool shit can I make happen in this fight?” And I find a way to string them together.
I think this works out for me because I’ve internalized what makes fight scenes tick. When I have a character cut out a robe bridge beneath a charging monster — and when that same monster grabs on to the falling bridge and starts climbing up, or when a character gets disarmed in a frantic fight but then thinks to use her magic powers to pseudomagnetically attract her sword and impale her assailant, or just when I write ordinary cool shit like a parrying sword cutting through a weaker weapon, or someone cutting flips and mid-air rolls — I write it primarily because it’s fucking cool, but on a gut level, I know it advances the logic of the fight in a way that keeps with the principles I outlined here.
Conclusion
This isn’t a good article on writing fight scenes — it started, and primarily functions as a quick reply to a question in my DMs. This article would be better with more concrete examples of what I’m talking about, and more advice about the nitty gritty. Many people struggling with fight scenes probably also struggle knowing e.g. when to do a blow by blow and when to summarize and elide. And vague advice that amounts to “only focus on the places where the dynamic of the fight changes” can only be so helpful when I’ve given no concrete examples.
This article was written without referencing anything, and I haven’t read or watched any material about writing in general, let alone fight scenes, in several months. But I’m sure my work here is heavily inspired by & synthesized from primarily the following sources:
Brandon Sanderson’s chapter of Writing Fantasy Heroes (The book is a collaboration of many authors, and I’ve only read Brando Sando’s chapter. If you’re reading this, you probably got here from discord. DM me if you want a copy.)
What Makes a Fight Scene Interesting? by Super Eyepatch Wolf.
I’ve also watched these videos, but managed to form no memory of their contents.
How To Do A Fight Scene, by The Closer Look
On Writing: Fight Scenes!, and On Writing: How To Master Fight Scenes both by Hello Future Me