Okay, new plan. The topic of writing action is just too large to cover in one or two post, so I'm going to break it down further into categories. Today I'm going to talk about writing hand to hand combat. Later I'll cover shootouts and chase scenes. There are many more kinds of action scenes than those of course , but I think those are probably the most common.
So, hand to hand combat. The more of these blogs I do, the more I see that nearly every kind of scene comes with questions to be answered. For hand to hand combat, the first question is who do you need to win the fight in your story? When you know that, ask yourself, who wins on paper. By that I mean, when you tally up all the advantages and disadvantages of everyone involved who is still standing at the end of the fight? If a character is meant to win in the story, but loses on paper, you'll need to come up with some scenario that swings the odds in their favor, IE. they get their hands on a weapon or they manage to blind the other guy with chemicals, that sort of thing.
So what constitutes an advantage in hand to hand combat? Size for one. There's a reason combat sports have weight classes. A larger person has a advantage in mass. That means they can hit harder and absorb more punishment than a smaller person. They'll generally have a reach advantage meaning they can hit the other guy while staying just out of the other guys threat range. There's physical fitness. That's strength, endurance, speed and agility. A fighter who is smaller, but physically fit can cancel out some of the advantage a larger fighter has if it's mostly fat. There's training. A trained fighter is more efficient than a brawler. He waste less energy, his attacks are more accurate and hit more often. Depending on what he's trained in he may be a fighter who throws combinations to set up a knockout while the untrained fighter usually throws hay-makers. Any kind of weapon is an advantage. They increase a fighter reach and make any hit more damaging. Disadvantages include a lack of physical fitness, an exploitable injury or condition like bad knees or partial blindness, and a lack of training or experience. The average chartered accountant is less likely to have a killer instinct than a marine back from his second tour of duty in Tikrit. That lack of killer instinct can make you hesitate when you have a chance to finish an enemy, or be slow to realize a situation just escalated into a fight.
In general, I believe it's better to think of fight scenes in terms of stage by stage as opposed to blow by blow. Think where does the fight start? Where does the fight need to finish? How do I get there? A blow by blow description of a fight is going to be overlong and tiresome to read. IE.
Jake should have known better than to try to hustle pool in a skinhead bar. He sensed movement behind him and something told him to duck, as a pool cue whistled through the space his head had been moments before. He threw an elbow back and felt a satisfying crunch as the skinheads nose shattered. Now the big one with the swastika tattoo on his forehead moved in with a vicious right cross. Jake barely got his arm up to block, then countered with a left jab, then a right to the body and a left cross which swastika head barely seemed to feel. He smirked at Jake then grabbed his jacket and pulled him into a headbutt which left Jake seeing stars. Jake staggered back against the bar where his hand fell upon a empty beer bottle. Grabbing the neck Jake smashed it over the head of swastika face and backed away waving the jagged remains of the bottle menacingly....
All that for about 10 seconds of bar fight. It's a bit wordy. There isn't much room for imagination. What I meant by thinking in terms of stages in a fight, is what are the highlights? the transitions from one thing to the next in the fight. This fight from the Jason Bourne movies is a very dynamic fight between two highly trained master assassins. The first stage is fighting for control of the gun, then the disarm, then the transition to an exchange of empty handed blows and blocks, then another transition to getting hold of improvised weapons and using them, then another disarm, then a change of location into the bathroom and so on.
The use of weapons and environment to harm the enemy is a good way to make a fight very fast paced and visceral. Jason Bourne kicks killer in the head, good. Jason Bourne kicks killers head through ceramic toilet bowl, better. You just know that someone who takes a hit like that is badly hurt if not dead. In my experience, a short brutal fight scene plays better than a long drawn out fight with lots of descriptions of where and how guys hit each other.
I guess the last things to think about here is the mood of the fight, and whether or not the story calls for the fighters to become allies later.If the mood of the story is comical, the fight can't be vicious. If a character is going to become your heroes friend later in the story or series, your hero probably shouldn't maim him in a fight, even if it would make sense to do so at the time. This is running long, so I'll end it here. Next time we'll talk about shootouts.
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