Planning fight scenes, Part 2

Once a writer knows who’s fighting, where and when they’re fighting, why they’re fighting, and all of the resources each side has, they can get to choreographing the scene itself.

How much choreographing needs to be done depends, again, on the size of the fight, and the more people are involved, the more planning tends to be required. There are two levels of planning the writer needs to pay attention to: first, the planning done by each side in the fight, which depends on what each side expects the other to do under the circumstances; second, the planning the writer needs to do to get the fight to work dramatically and believably on the page.

It’s a lot easier to make a spontaneous small fight plausible than it is to convince a reader that two entire armies just happened to run into each other by accident. Two people getting into a bar brawl (and possibly involving the rest of the patrons) is a common enough trope to be a cliché in certain genres (Westerns, anyone?); the same is true for a fight between street gangs, bandits, and other small groups. Spontaneous fights usually don’t need a lot of first-level planning, because neither side was expecting to get into a fight.

Also, in a spontaneous fight, the answers to the who, where, when, why, and resource questions are usually obvious from context. If the protagonist is ambling down a country road, they’re not suddenly going to be involved in a barroom brawl (unless there’s a time-skip or some sort of surrealism going on). So for spontaneous fights, the only thing the writer usually has to worry about is their own planning—what they want the fight scene to show (be that the protagonist’s kickboxing skill or how pathetic their situational awareness is), how the scene is going to progress the story/plot, and how the writer wants the scene to end.

Confrontations between two people, or two fairly small groups of people, are not always spontaneous, however, and if they’re not, at least one side will have done some planning. The kidnappers who are going to grab the protagonist on the way home from work should have done a fair amount of planning (assuming they’re at all competent). A formal duel (in those cultures and times that engaged in duels) has accepted rules (which vary by culture and time). Middle-sized fights are often planned, at least by one side. The bandit raid may have been a total surprise to the village, but the bandits had some sort of plan. The fight between two smuggler gangs might possibly be just because they were both after the same shipment, but it’s equally possible that it’s as carefully planned as D-day was. And as I mentioned before, anything that involves moving armies around—especially large armies (See last week’s reference to Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army)—requires lots of planning on both sides.

In any fight, the pre-fight planning done by characters is not going to work out exactly as they hope, for either side. This means that the second level plan—what the writer wants to happen—is the most important, though even then, sometimes the characters will run away with things and change how everything works out. Still, the writer’s plan for the fight scene has the best chance of being what ends up happening, because the writer can arrange “what goes wrong” (and how badly) for each of the sides in the fight.

What I’ve been talking about so far is the nitty-gritty of the fight: who stands where, whether there are tables to throw or flaming arrows to shoot, whether the cavalry has a grassy hill to charge down onto the opposing army’s flank. Ultimately, this is about making the overall fight and its outcome look and feel realistic. People go into fights intending to win; that means that most of the time, the author doesn’t want either side to do something that is clearly and obviously stupid, based on what they know about the terrain, the other side’s strength, and so on. Mistaken assumptions about the other side’s strength, skill, resources, motivation, ability to prepare, etc. are some of the most plausible ways a writer can use to insure that things go the way the writer wants—the protagonist that the kidnappers think they can capture easily turns out to be a black belt or a former Marine, the defenseless country village that the Vikings expected to plunder turns out to be the center for manufacturing Greek Fire, the underpowered Rebel forces know the one weakness of the planet-destroying Death Star and therefore only need one good shot to blow it up and end the attack.

How much fight choreography the writer has to do depends on one final factor: what viewpoint the writer is using for the scene. For first-, second-, and tight-third-person, it matters whether the viewpoint character is participating in the fight/battle, seeing it from close up as a non-participant, or watching from a distant vantage point). A viewpoint character who is involved in the fight is not going to have a lot of time to notice what is going on or make conscious decisions. Describing things from their POV can plausibly be fast and a bit confused, focused mainly on details of getting hit, blocking, ducking, striking the opponent. Someone who is peeking from behind a barrel while other characters fight has a broader view of things, and more time to make sense of what they’re seeing, while still in a position to be terrified about who is winning and/or guilty about not joining in. The distant viewpoint is good for battles where the writer wants the reader to understand troop movements and the overall ebb and flow, rather than just what’s going on within fifteen feet of the protagonist.

One of the absolute best battle sequences is Georgette Heyer’s long and detailed description of the Battle of Waterloo in An Infamous Army. It was used for years at the Sandhurst Military Academy in England to teach the battle. It’s in an omniscient viewpoint that moves back and forth, from a bird’s-eye view of the battle and the troop movements to zooming in on one of the several characters who are fighting in key areas at different times. Zooming in and out between the overall picture and the close-ups of what’s happening in specific places gives the reader both a clear picture of the overall battle and a sense of what it’s like up close and personal. It also sucks the reader in; it took me decades of reading and re-reading that section to figure out how she did it, because I kept getting sucked into the story.