How to Write Fights in Fiction

[Whypostopher]

Has this happened to you? You carefully choreograph a fight scene, punch by punch, sword swing by sword swing. Every dodge, every block, every hit on the page. Then your readers call it confusing, boring. They can’t visualize what’s going on. The prose is clunky and awkward. They start skimming entire paragraphs or pages.

The problem is you’re thinking of the fight like you would in a movie or a video game. That can work for things like dialog, character, plot, and conflict, but not for battles. Movies and video games are visual mediums, and literature is not. So I’ve pulled together some excerpts from literature. Let’s take a look at them and see what we can learn.

Here is an example of King Rodomont attacking an entire city, from Orlando Furioso, written in 1516:

Out of all those whom he slashed, stabbed, and slit there was not one who would turn to show his face. Fierce, terrible Rodomont charged down the street leading straight to St. Michael’s Bridge; it was crowded with people, and he wheeled his bloody sword about him, making no distinction between master and servant, showing no greater mercy to the good than to the wicked. To the priest his ministry was no safeguard; innocence availed nothing to the little child, nor did soft eyes and rosy cheeks to women and maids; the aged were herded and stricken down. Here the Saracen gave greater proof of cruelty than of valour, paying no regard to sex, rank, or age.

Notice that this is actually an example of telling, not showing. It goes against the advice to show everything. We don’t actually see the enemy, we are only told that they are there and they are numerous. We don’t get an example of each and every person Rodomont slays, we only get a three examples of the innocent non-combatants. What we do see is where he’s going (down the street, to a bridge), and him “wheeling his bloody sword.”

Here is an example of a one on one battle, between Rinaldo and Ferrau, also from Orlando Furioso:

“Drawing his sword, he ran full of menace towards Rinaldo, who feared him but little: many a time had they set eyes on each other, and indeed tested each other’s valour at arms. Both of them were on foot as they flung themselves upon each other with naked sword; no armour plate, no chain-mail could have resisted the blows they delivered— enough to split an anvil. For a long time the two champions strove in vain each to gain the upper hand, but neither was less skilled than the other in the use of arms.”

Once again we have an instance of telling, not showing. Notice how there is no mention of blocking or dodging. We are shown the very start of the fight, where they “fling themselves” at each other. The rest of the fight is merely a description of how powerful their blows are.

Here’s another example, after Ferrau finds his friend Olimpio de la Serra dead:

[Ferrau] brought his sword down on Olimpio’s slayer with such force that he cleft him from crown to chest, dividing the helmet, forehead, eyes, and face, and threw him dead to the ground. Without pausing he went on whirling his sword about him, splitting helmets, slashing coats of mail, leaving his mark here on a forehead, there on a cheek, slicing off one man’s head, another’s arm, spilling out blood and life. He stabilized the battle on that front, where the quaking rabble had been fleeing in total disarray.

This one is very much an example of showing, not telling, but observe: once again there is no blocking, no dodging, no missing. Ferrau kills his enemy in one swing. The focus of the battle is how the enemy dies, not how they fight. When Ferrau moves on to attacking other knights, we only see the wounds, the decapitations, the amputations.

Here’s an example of a one on one knife fight from Blood Meridian:

He kicked the man in the jaw. The man went down and got up again. He said: I’m goin to kill you.

He swung with the bottle and the kid ducked and he swung again and the kid stepped back. When the kid hit him the man shattered the bottle against the side of his head. He went off the boards into the mud and the man lunged after him with the jagged bottleneck and tried to stick it in his eye. The kid was fending with his hands and they were slick with blood. He kept trying to reach into his boot for his knife.

Kill your ass, the man said. They slogged about in the dark of the lot, coming out of their boots. The kid had his knife now and they circled crabwise and when the man lurched at him he cut the man’s shirt open. The man threw down the bottleneck and unsheathed an immense bowieknife from behind his neck. His hat had come off and his black and ropy locks swung about his head and he had codified his threats to one word kill like a crazed chant.

Kill kill slobbered the man wading forward.

But someone else was coming down the lot, great steady sucking sounds like a cow. He was carrying a huge shillelagh. He reached the kid first and when he swung with the club the kid went face down in the mud. He’d have died if someone hadn’t turned him over.

Here we see some blocking and dodging. It’s much more of a choreographed fight. Notice how the fight is still brief. Only 250 words total. Notice how the sentences depicting action are brief, not long. “He kicked the man in the jaw,” is seven words and there’s no flair in the prose. It’s direct and simple. “The man went down and got up again.” Direct and simple.

I think the most striking visual of this fight isn’t the attacks or the dodges, which make up a relatively short part of the fight, but the visuals of how they “circled crabwise” in the mud, and Toadvine’s “ropy locks swinging about his head” as he chants “kill kill kill.” The actual swinging of the bottle doesn't really stand out much.

And while we’re at Blood Meridian let’s look at a massacre:

A legion of horribles, hunreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the hrns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador.

...A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped from their mounts. Horses were rearing and plunging and the mongol hordes swung up along their flanks and turned and rode full upon them with lances.

...Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone.

…and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about he skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, guttering the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore hey might have rolled in it like dogs…

This massacre is highly visualized, there’s a lot of showing. McCarthy describes the Indians during the charge. We see the arrows taking out a whole platoon of men. Then we get an endless sentence of men scrambling, getting skewered, scalped, and trampled. Then we get another very long sentence of scalping and desecrating the bodies. Nobody really puts up a fight in this scene.

Things are not shown the way we might expect them in a battle. The main character, the kid, almost completely disappears from the scene. We get an overwhelming description of the Indians. We see not individuals, but groups. It’s not “one man” getting scalped but “men caught up the by the hair and scalped.” It’s not one man getting trampled but “the fallen” being trampled.

This is a good example of a fight not being a matter of “character A attacks, ok now character B attacks, ok now character A attacks again.” This is people acting in groups. No singular person dies. Scores of them die. No singular Indian scalps someone. Scores of them scalp.

So these are the key lessons we can learn from these examples:
1. Don’t think of a fight as a series of blocks and dodges. That’s how movies do fights, not literature.
2. The attacks themselves, the swinging and punching, is not what makes a fight interesting or compelling. It’s the killing blow, the mortal wounds, that make a fight compelling. Get to that moment as quickly as you can. Ideally, every attack lands and every attack injures. That keeps the readers attention.
3. Tell, don’t show. It sounds weird. You’ve probably heard people saying “show don’t tell” all your life but what they should be saying is: “show the interesting parts of the story, tell the boring parts of the story.” By all means, show the very start of a fight, and show the very end with the killing blow, but all the middle stuff— tell it.
4. If you’re writing action: be direct and simple. “He brought the sword down on Olimpio’s slayer,” “He kicked the man in the jaw,” “they flung themselves upon each other with naked sword,” “the kid went face down in the mud.” If you’re doing description of things, you can be more elaborate. Don’t try to mix action and description together. At least not in a fight.

Hopefully you enjoyed reading these examples of fights in literature. There’s more that could be said regarding their tone and narrative voice, but focusing simply on the action, and what’s happening, and how it’s being told, I think could serve as a helpful lesson for authors struggling with writing battles.

If you want more examples of battles in fiction, I can go through my library and search for some.

 

[Bimbanana]

Mmmhh...

I personally prefer using staccatos during action scene (yes its un–conventional, yes its AI that introduce it to me)

But it deliver the fast-pace action and clarity that i wished to deliver, and i do try to set my reader experience as close as watching movies.

So basically....

So these are the key lessons we can learn from these examples:
1. Don’t think of a fight as a series of blocks and dodges. That’s how movies do fights, not literature.
2. The attacks themselves, the swinging and punching, is not what makes a fight interesting or compelling. It’s the killing blow, the mortal wounds, that make a fight compelling. Get to that moment as quickly as you can. Ideally, every attack lands and every attack injures. That keeps the readers attention.
3. Tell, don’t show. It sounds weird. You’ve probably heard people saying “show don’t tell” all your life but what they should be saying is: “show the interesting parts of the story, tell the boring parts of the story.” By all means, show the very start of a fight, and show the very end with the killing blow, but all the middle stuff— tell it.
4. If you’re writing action: be direct and simple. “He brought the sword down on Olimpio’s slayer,” “He kicked the man in the jaw,” “they flung themselves upon each other with naked sword,” “the kid went face down in the mud.” If you’re doing description of things, you can be more elaborate. Don’t try to mix action and description together. At least not in a fight.

I broke 3 out of 4

 

[JordanIda]

This has nothing to do with media. Nor is it about showing or telling or the mix thereof.

Fights in movies bore me. Bruce Lee and all the dancers who've ever copied him? Boring.

Heck, I've never been able to sit through Pirates of the Caribbean, and that's a trite, Disney-PG-goreless dance. Doesn't matter. Boring. Just as it starts to hold my attention, another fight breaks out, and they lose me. Literally puts me to sleep. Every single time. I've never made it through that movie awake.

Some people are into fight scenes, for whatever reason. The choreography, maybe? Most find it boring. The fight itself doesn't do it for people. Boring.

What grabs viewers and readers isn't the fight itself. It's everything swirling around it. The implications of the fight. That is what's memorable. Any action scene can either convey emotive power or not. Could be a fight, a sex scene, a wedding, anything.

The action isn't memorable. Everything around the action. That's memorable.

Negan and his baseball bat: memorable as f'ck (in his words). No choreography to speak of. Hell, the scene didn't even really show all that much. But whether viewers loved it or hated it and left the show forever, it "Sure as SHIT" was memorable. Why? Not the dance. Not the violence. What made it memorable was everything around the violence.

 

[Bimbanana]

This has nothing to do with media. Nor is it about showing or telling or the mix thereof.

Fights in movies bore me. Bruce Lee and all the dancers who've ever copied him? Boring.

Heck, I've never been able to sit through Pirates of the Caribbean, and that's a trite, Disney-PG-goreless dance. Doesn't matter. Boring. Just as it starts to hold my attention, another fight breaks out, and they lose me. Literally puts me to sleep. Every single time. I've never made it through that movie awake.

Some people are into fight scenes, for whatever reason. The choreography, maybe? Most find it boring. The fight itself doesn't do it for people. Boring.

Well, everything is about the target market at this age. You definitely not the target market of of those movies.

 

[Dawnathon]

This is a good example of a fight not being a matter of “character A attacks, ok now character B attacks, ok now character A attacks again.” This is people acting in groups. No singular person dies. Scores of them die. No singular Indian scalps someone. Scores of them scalp.

It's a case of apples and oranges there, isn't it? While you can use the word "fight" for both, there's many differences between groups waging full scale warfare and two individual characters in a duel. So many differences that it's hard to imagine trying to write both the same way.

With warfare, it's closer to writing out a natural disaster unfolding, unless you're very keenly focused on the commanders' tactics. It's less a scene, more of an event. While you can write one on one fights as brief events, that tends to lead to not a lot of tension. It has its place, but it's just one way to incorporate combat.