Action scenes are the bane of many writers. Fight scenes are often considered the quintessential action scenes, but a “fight scene” can mean anything from two guys slugging each other to an epic battle between massive armies or space armadas. There are several key points for making a fight scene work, and they scale in importance right along with the size of the fight.
The first one is the most obvious: Who is fighting?
“Who” can mean two or more specific people (for instance, the protagonist and a couple of bad guys), a couple of nation-states throwing spies or armies at each other, or two or more galaxy-spanning empires. Who is involved can also change over the course of the fight, whether that means bystanders joining a barroom brawl or the reinforcements from Rohan arriving in the nick of time.
This leads directly to question number two: Why are these people fighting?
A slugfest between two people who have hated each other since kindergarten can blow up for tiny reasons, including both parties happening to run into each other when they’re each in a bad mood. In most stories, though, there’s more to it than that. Something made one or the other lose their temper; it wasn’t just random.
As soon as you have a bunch of people involved, the why gets more complicated, especially if some people are joining later on. Why have they chosen to get involved? If it’s a barroom brawl, you can lean heavily on the “everybody is drunk and really feels like punching someone” trope, but if the fight takes place anywhere else, under any other conditions, addition people need more of a purpose. Two families in a long-running feud; two gangs fighting over territory; a group of thugs/villains trying to rob or kidnap one or more people…basically, there needs to be a motive for the attack that’s more compelling than “they felt like fighting.” Because the more people you have involved in the fight, the less likely they are to all just happen to feel like fighting at the same time and place.
When the fight scene is a battle, the reasons behind them get more important for any writer who wants them to seem plausible. Even a small Viking raid involves a lot of purely practical considerations that take time, money, and effort to arrange. The larger the number of warriors and material that need to be moved into place, the more compelling the reason for it has to be (at least, for the person making the decisions). Also, in a battle, any late-comers are unlikely to be spontaneously joining in. Reinforcements don’t just show up at random; they got the news and decided to come, either because somebody sent for them or because they had reasons of their own for taking one side or the other.
Which brings me to the next point: Where and when is the fight taking place?
Even if it’s a two-person fight, it will play out differently depending on whether it happens in a barroom, the middle of the town square, a road through a forest, or a nearly-abandoned maintenance level on a space station. The likelihood of additional people getting involved in a two-person fight depends heavily on location—in a bar or a town square, there are probably people around who can impulsively interfere, but in a road through the wilderness or an abandoned space station it’s a lot less likely that a random rescuer will just show up. At the other end of the scale, battle strategy depends heavily on the terrain, and on the kinds of soldiers and weaponry involved. The logistics of getting armies into position and of having reinforcements appear in a timely manner also depend on what transportation is available. (Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army is a gold mind of information on the considerations involved in moving a large army for long distances through difficult terrain that doesn’t allow the army to live off the land.)
And that leads directly into the next key point: What are the resources each side has available?
In a two-person fight, that’ll depend on what the characters normally carry around with them. Renaissance noblemen like Romeo and his buddies, or Dumas’ musketeers, routinely wore swords and daggers; a modern bar fight might involve anything from bare fists to brass knuckles, switchblades, or handguns, depending on the characters. People in the seedy Star Wars bars seem to routinely carry blasters. Individual characters may also have martial arts skills, magical knowledge, or other abilities that affect how the fight will go.
Battles likewise depend on whether you have Roman legionnaires, cavalry and cannons, warships, zeppelins, submarines, or various kinds of spaceships (which writers can design to suit the type of battle they want to have, if they are sufficiently into making up futuristic military technology).
Finally, there’s what the writer wants to happen. This can get built from the top down or the bottom up. Top down means the writer thinks first about things like who is fighting, why, where/when the fight is taking place, and what each side’s resources are, and then works out reasonable strategies for each side and what can/will go wrong with them once the fight starts. Bottom up means that the writer starts with how they want the fight/battle to work and then arranges the resources, terrain, reasons for fighting, etc. so that the predetermined way the fight goes will look at least believable, and preferably reasonable. For instance, if the writer wants the cavalry to charge dramatically out of the forest, there has to be a forest, cavalry, and a reason why the other side didn’t think of or plan for that tactic.
Another issue with the lead-up is the pacing. Should the scene(s) building up to the fight:
– feel slow and inevitable?
– feel slow and full of dread?
– start slow but go faster and faster, with the fight being climactic?
– start slow, speed up, but then in comes a revelation of some kind, bringing things to a stop while the new info is assessed or assimilated?
Lots of ways to approach the fight.
Critical to any action sequence is the level of detail portrayed. Conflict between nations or empires will most likely be handled at a broad strategic level, a bar fight will be concerned with discete tactics. The latter is in some ways more difficult to write, because you have to make it clear to the reader where everyone involved is, how they are moving, and the result of each individual action. I find it hard to avoid falling into the trap of delineating too much detail, which slows down the action and, far from making things clear, often will just confuse the reader.
I had a scene where, in the course of a battle, the protagonist’s horse comes charging past him in a panic. I initially had a lenghthy paragraph on exactly how Grayl got into position, but after beta readers pointed out how convoluted the description was, I replaced most of it with the simple word “somehow”:
“From nowhere there was a rush, a sudden breath of heat, and Grayl’s arms wrenched as he was yanked off his feet. He was flying for a moment, weightless, then he was hit in the stomach hard enough for the world to go grey about him. Somehow he pulled himself forward and his feet found stirrups and his grasping hands released the saddle he had grabbed by instinct, and his fingers tangled in the mane of a madly running riderless horse.”
I think the lack of clarity at the beginning of the action actually helps in this case, as it mirrors Grayl’s own confusion.
Does the point of view character understand the fight while watching it?
I did that in “Free Passage.” She stayed out of the fight and didn’t get much of it. Though she saw one thing. . . .
The links to Part 2 give a 404 error. The page has been mistitled or misplaced or something.
@Pat, the link to part 2 of this post isn’t working. I try to open it from your blog’s main page and keep getting error messages.
All fixed now. I hope.