by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

It’s a pleasure to welcome Carla Hoch back to TKZ. Carla is the author of the essential reference Fight Write: How to Write Believable Fight Scenes. (See the TKZ interview here). She’s out with a follow up: Fight Write: Round Two—Crafting Chaos, Combat & Crime. Today’s post is adapted from that book.

Carla is a popular workshop teacher, trained in MMA, Muay Thai-style kickboxing, taekwondo, Brazilian jiujitsu, street defense, Filipino martial arts, judo, iaido and aikido. She’s a brown belt in Brazilian jiujitsu with Team Tsunami at Global Martial Arts. Learn more about her at FightWrite.net.

Here’s Carla:

You can write a great fight scene without knowing how to fight. But that doesn’t mean you can write a technically sound scene. And that’s ok; you don’t want to focus on technique anyway because most readers don’t know how to fight. You’d lose them in the midst of the blocking.

Sure, you may have a few readers who want more detail, and maybe even one who puts down your book because you didn’t specify what punches went into a combo. But you’re far more likely to lose readers by making a fight scene too complicated and needlessly specific.

Your fight scenes are not your story. They support it.

Which Moves to Write

Before you start putting moves together, it’s good to know which moves to focus on. That way you won’t waste your time worrying about the moves you won’t write.

And the good news is, what you won’t write is a lot. Even good-er news, you have visual resources available to help you understand the whole concept.

Get Graphic

When you’re trying to decide which moves to include in your fight scene, look no further than comic books and graphic novels. Books that tell stories visually are expensive to make. The real estate on every page is a premium. The moves these writers/illustrators include in their storylines are gross motor movements such as punches, stabs, and strikes with large objects. And the target for each tends to be above the waist.

That’s not to say that small moves won’t ever be illustrated. It is to say that the small move must be pivotal to the scene because they come at the cost of drawing something more easily imagined. Remember, every page of a comic book/graphic novel is expensive.

Another takeaway from illustrated media is its ability to make a flat picture a multi-dimensional experience. When we see a superhero in a comic book punch a villain, we see sweat and blood fly from the villain’s face. We see a call-out bubble that reads “POW!”

If there’s a zombie on the page, you can see how bad it smells. When someone screams, we see the veins in their neck bulge.

Graphic novel/comic book illustrations aren’t simply drawings; they’re an experience. Not only can you follow the fight visually, you can also hear it, smell it, feel it, taste it. You aren’t just holding the scene in your hands; you’re in it with the characters. That’s exactly what we writers should aim to achieve as well.

So as you’re considering the moves to write, think like an illustrator and ask yourself a few questions:

1. Would this movement be easily understood if drawn?
2. What exact moment of the movement would be drawn?
3. Is the physical response easy to imagine?
4. How can I make this a sensory experience?

Where to Start

To begin blocking your fight scene, know how it ends. What is the intended injury of the scene? I know I have beat this point like a second‐hand piñata, but it is that important. The intended injury determines the movement of the fight.

Once you decide on an injury, think of how it directly happens. Then step back and ask, how did that movement happen? Then step back to the previous move and ask the same thing: how did that movement happen?

When you ask yourself how something happened, you don’t get so hung up on wondering what comes next. Instead, you consider what created a certain result.

Here’s what I mean. Let’s say your intended injury is a black eye. How did that injury happen? Instead of getting technical, just be literal.

The black eye happened from a punch to the eye. What happened before the fist hit the eye? A character punched. What happened before that punch? The character took a step forward. What happened before they took a step?

When in Doubt, Map it Out

One way to keep up with the fight moves of the scene is to map them. Ask yourself the above questions and jot down the answers. Then, look over the moves, cross out what wouldn’t end up in a comic book, and make note of anything you notice that seems o or could be improved. Keep in mind the last moment of action or contact.

There are a million ways to map a scene. And I suggest you map it out in a way that helps you keep it straight in your head.

However you map, your first action is the injury, so the character you’re starting with is the character that injures. Map that one character’s movements first. After the injury, ask how that injury was possible. The next movement will answer that question.

Continue asking yourself questions from each movement. The answers to each will help you determine what logically comes next.

Comments welcome.