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Writing Fight Scenes: Who?
Jan. 6th, 2011 02:39 amNOTE: You can now buy the revised and expanded version of this blog series as an ebook, in both epub and mobi formats.
[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]
The short story is DEAD AT LAST -- or at least written, revised, and sent off to someone who can check it for howling factual errors -- and so it's time for the triumphant return of How to Write a Fight Scene!
So: who's fighting?
I said last time that the most important question to ask yourself is, what is the purpose of this fight? Only slightly less important is this: who is involved in the fight? This both arises from and feeds back into purpose, of course, so you generally end up asking them both at the same time, but they're both major enough issues that I split them apart for the purpose of discussion.
The answer to this is, in its simplest form, very short: a minimum of two people (or one person and some kind of opponent, anyway). But it isn't enough to have their names. There are a lot of details packed into the question of who, and those details can have a strong effect on how the fight goes. So let's take a moment to unpack them.
( Do not be frightened by what you find inside. )
I'm probably missing some there, too, but we'll stop there, because by now some of the readers of this post are crouched in the corner making wibbling noises and wondering if they have to fill out full medical information and Myers-Briggs tests for the characters before they can write the scene. The answer, of course, is no: you don't have to sit down and consciously figure out the answers to all of these questions. But by the time you get to the scene -- so long as it isn't the first thing in the book -- you probably know a lot of it already; you have a mental image of your tall, bookish, asthmatic librarian who had some fencing lessons as a kid, or your stocky, street-veteran thief missing three fingers on her left hand. The important thing is to keep those details in mind when you put them into combat, and make use of them as the opportunity arises. Don't let the fight become generic, as if the participants were two armed automata smacking away at each other in textbook fashion. Like any other scene in a book -- you may have noticed this is something of a mantra -- it should reflect who the characters are, in the most interesting way possible.
With the holidays behind us, I hope to maintain a more regular pace. Keep an eye on this space for the next exciting installment, in which we actually give our characters weapons!
[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]
The short story is DEAD AT LAST -- or at least written, revised, and sent off to someone who can check it for howling factual errors -- and so it's time for the triumphant return of How to Write a Fight Scene!
So: who's fighting?
I said last time that the most important question to ask yourself is, what is the purpose of this fight? Only slightly less important is this: who is involved in the fight? This both arises from and feeds back into purpose, of course, so you generally end up asking them both at the same time, but they're both major enough issues that I split them apart for the purpose of discussion.
The answer to this is, in its simplest form, very short: a minimum of two people (or one person and some kind of opponent, anyway). But it isn't enough to have their names. There are a lot of details packed into the question of who, and those details can have a strong effect on how the fight goes. So let's take a moment to unpack them.
( Do not be frightened by what you find inside. )
I'm probably missing some there, too, but we'll stop there, because by now some of the readers of this post are crouched in the corner making wibbling noises and wondering if they have to fill out full medical information and Myers-Briggs tests for the characters before they can write the scene. The answer, of course, is no: you don't have to sit down and consciously figure out the answers to all of these questions. But by the time you get to the scene -- so long as it isn't the first thing in the book -- you probably know a lot of it already; you have a mental image of your tall, bookish, asthmatic librarian who had some fencing lessons as a kid, or your stocky, street-veteran thief missing three fingers on her left hand. The important thing is to keep those details in mind when you put them into combat, and make use of them as the opportunity arises. Don't let the fight become generic, as if the participants were two armed automata smacking away at each other in textbook fashion. Like any other scene in a book -- you may have noticed this is something of a mantra -- it should reflect who the characters are, in the most interesting way possible.
With the holidays behind us, I hope to maintain a more regular pace. Keep an eye on this space for the next exciting installment, in which we actually give our characters weapons!
