Fight Scenes - Tumblr Posts
Not an aroace but fights that end up with kisses drive me mad. Both when it's training sequence and when it's actual fight. Exception is given for cases when kiss is a distraction, but still, no way to do it naturally. I see kisses in fight as sign of one of sides overpowering (or they think they overpower) another, so instead of focusing on fight they can mess with other person.
Actually no why do allos love to have characters resolve a fight with a kiss. I'm not even the most romance repulsed aro, and I love the enemies to lovers, but like if we're arguing I'm mad. Maybe it's an autistic thing (anger issues + one track mind), idk, I'm just saying it's hard to pull off that trope without it feeling a degree unnatural to me. Except like, Panto and Silas in Dirk Gentlys. I mean they were only pretending to be enemies, they're not arguing or fr fighting
I'm not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but there's a compilation of fight scenes with staffs, including bo staffs, from multiple movies. I'll link the video to this post, I hope it helps!
Question, does anyone know of any movies or tv shows in which people fight with bo staffs or similar weapons? I'd love to have a couple references but other than Aquaman, I honestly can't think of anything.
LETS TALK ABOUT SPARRING
I’ve read a lot of fics, have seen many shows, and have watched many movies that are completely inaccurate when it comes to sparring. NOW, i know it’s fiction, and I greatly enjoy it nonetheless, but I would like to share a few things with you, as a person who trains in Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA). There are a few general things in this, as well as stuff more focused to a certain european weapon. (this is all Historical European stuff, obviously if you’re writing for a different region, this probably won’t apply that much.)
SPARRING
-you don’t practice with real sharp swords. Never. It’s incredibly dangerous, especially since sparring is trying to practice your killing/injuring skills. In older times, you would use wood, maybe wrapped in leather or canvas to practice. Today, you use weighted nylon swords/weapons, and you usually wear a mask while doing so. Steel is and was an option, but the blade will be completely dull, and the tip will be bent over itself.
-It’s practically impossible to knock someone off their feet while sparring, unless you are hooking your foot or weapon behind their leg. It’s hard to push back and cause someone to fall, since they can just retreat back a bit.
-YOU. DON’T. SPEND. HOURS. SPARRING. ESPECIALLY WITHOUT A BREAK. It’s exhausting, the most people usually go is 10 minutes before they have a break. During Training, you only spar for about 2-5 minutes before stopping and having a rest.
-You try your hardest never to cross your feet. It’s dangerous and it unbalances you. Your opponent can take advantage of you easily.
-Usually, you want to strike your opponent with the last ¼ of your blade, basically just the tip and a little below. That’s the sharpest point, and you get the most force behind it.
-Swords aren’t super heavy. Stop the giant, huge, I-can-barely-lift-this trope. Longswords are usually 3lbs. It’s not heavy when you pick it up. However, it gets heavy when you’re holding it up above your head for a while. Swords were not made to be heavy, especially since you would have to hold them up in battle for sometimes hours.
-It’s incredibly hard to engage in witty banter and such. You are constantly moving and trying to strike your opponent. Since it’s fiction, you can do what you want, but just know that trying to have a conversation while sparring is like trying to have one while running. It tires you out even more, and usually just comes out breathless and wheezy.
-Swords are not lightsabers. You cannot try and hurt someone with just any part of your blade. It will just annoy your opponent. Now, for sparring, you will want to focus on hitting your opponent with the edge of your blade, and you won’t really ever be trying to hit someone with the flat of your blade.
-In sparring, you will get hit. And get bruises. I count five from just 2 days ago. (Also reminder that bruises don’t form for 1-3 days.) If you happened to get a hard thrust to the ribs, they will probably fracture. It happens. I haven’t had it personally, but those who’ve trained longer have. The worst injury I’ve gotten is a bruise on my chest that didn’t fade for nearly a month.
I will be focusing on using a one handed sword in this next bit, specifically a Scottish Regimental Broadsword. A basic sword to build off of.
-FOOTWORK. It’s not a super complicated series of perfectly planned out steps. It just isn’t. With Regimental Broadsword (which is what I will focus on, since it’s what I’ve trained with most), you have to have a good base (rear-weighted stance, front foot pointed at your opponent, back foot turned sideways), and then once you have that, you just have to move around and try not to get hit.
-Slipping. (Continuation of footwork). With a rear-weighted stance, the goal is to be able to move the front foot anywhere. You should actually be able to keep your front foot an inch off the ground without having to adjust your back foot. Slipping is when this comes in handy. If your opponent takes a swing at your front leg, you should be able to just slip it back to go next to your other foot, and swing your sword up to get your opponents head. Slipping is really important.
-Advance and Retreat (other continuation of footwork). While moving forward or back, you always want to feel the ground with a heel-toe movement, so you can tell if there are rocks or branches and such. Advancing, you want to move your front leg first. Retreating, your back leg.
-Traversing (last continuation of footwork)(maybe). Transversing is basically advancing in on your opponent in a circular motion. You’re trying to get close and personal. Reminder to not cross your feet. You will loose balance and probably end up getting whacked with a sword. Traversing is a spiral motion sort of. Your opponent can avoid getting trapped If they do it as well.
I will probably come back and add more soon, because there’s more I know, but can’t remember at the moment.
Q&A: Short Fighters and Centers of Gravity
any specifics to be mindful of on writing a very short fighter? like under five feet tall? i don’t necessarily mean children, just like, ppl who are short
I’m going to discuss writing short combatants below, but I want to make it clear. What I’m going to be discussing is about adults, not children. You want to set a clear distinction between the two in your mind right now. Children are their own category, broken down into several separate categories of roughly 1-5, 6-8, 9-10, 11-14, 15-16, 17-19. Segment them out by age categories, break apart older and younger teens, and keep a beat for mental/intellectual/emotional maturity in line with their physical growth rates. Children are different from adults, and different ages face different challenges.
When you’re writing children, you need to take their age into consideration, the fact they’re bodies are still changing and growing, the fact their minds are maturing. They don’t have the same capacity as adults, the understanding, or the ability to utilize their experiences to the same degree. The problems for children are not just in their size, but in their brains, in the softness of their bones, in the bodies that are constantly changing, emotions only just emerging, which combined with a lack of experience and maturity often put them at a significant disadvantage.
A twelve year old who is set against a seasoned killer faces a lot more problems than just a height difference, would face those same challenges even if they were the same height.
Now, let’s talk about short fighters. They’re not much difference from anyone else, nothing more than a different set of natural advantages, that may not even mean much in the grand scheme. Spend too much time obsessing on physiological differences and you’ll end up thinking they’re the only thing that matters. There’s not that much difference between someone who is 4″10 versus someone who is 5″1 or 5″2 in terms of combat.
What you want to understand about the size of humans is that the benefits are mostly in the mind. There are a lot of culturally defined stereotypes, conventional wisdom, and cries of “realism” when it comes to martial combat that are complete bunk. The perception that short people are at an automatic disadvantage is one of them. Every body type comes with their own strengths and weaknesses, learning to compensate for the weaknesses and take advantage of the strengths is what training is all about. You’re going to need to throw out most of your internalized prejudices and start over. You’ll find you’re full of biases when you really get down to thinking about it, ones you’ve subconsciously picked up over the years, and, I want to make this very clear, addressing them doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.
Center of Gravity – People who are short are closer to the ground. This is important because the center of gravity is your body’s balance point. This is your body’s point of stability, and useful to know about for a large variety of exercises. This point changes based on each individual human being, with constant motion, and is somewhat subjective. So, everyone has to locate this point within themselves and find their own individual balance.-
However, what you need to know about for the purpose of this question is: Short people are very difficult to knock over if they know how to create their base and set their weight.
Now, the center of gravity in a man versus in a woman are physiologically different. A man’s is located in his chest, and a woman’s is approximately in her pelvis. Physiological differences mean men and women will show progress in different exercises more quickly because they’re more naturally inclined toward them. A woman’s balance point being lower lends itself to more stability in the lower body. From a practical perspective, what this means is that a man has to spread his legs wider and get lower in his stances in order to achieve the same physical stability as his female counterpart, and likewise a tall man has to bend his knees more than a short guy for similar results.
This is a taught advantage, not a natural advantage.
What does this mean?
Well, it doesn’t mean much of anything except that short people are naturally better at grappling than taller people. If they know how to set their feet and get down low then good luck throwing them. You won’t pick them up. They’re not going anywhere. After all, throws are not strength based (someone who is tall is not necessarily going to be stronger than someone who is short) but are instead dependent on destabilizing your opponent’s base (the position of their feet, and stance) then utilizing their own force against them.
Someone who is short is much closer to the earth than someone who is tall, and this advantage lends them more stability. Weight isn’t weight, and strength isn’t strength. The martial arts battle is primarily over an ever-shifting balance point and breaking your opponent’s stability. You’ve got to work harder to get them to fall over.
The Intimidation Station – Tall people can be naturally intimidating, because conventional wisdom says they are. Intimidation happens in the mind. However, short people can be intimidating, because intimidation comes from presence, not physicality.
Here’s something to keep in mind when writing short characters: When you’re short, you live in a world of tall. You’re used to being (physically) looked down on. These characters will have been learning to compensate (if they need to) from day one, so the idea they’ll fall apart while facing off against someone significantly taller than they are is silly… really silly. They’ll be more used to fighting tall people than someone who generally fights people of equal height or mild differences. If you’re used to constantly being at a “disadvantage” then that state becomes normal and you learn to just roll with it.
Aggression – Short fighters can be, but are not uniformly, or always more aggressive combatants, and women are often more actively aggressive in combat than men. This doesn’t mean they have more aggressive personalities, but they can be much more pro-active when it comes to rolling over into an offensive mode.
Reach – You’ll hear this one brought up a lot, mostly by people who don’t really understand the concept. Reach matters more with weapons than with bodies.
I hear a lot of writers searching for “natural” advantages, or see an over reliance on those perceived advantages in fiction. The reality of success lies with technique and hard work, not the body you were born with or the talents you were gifted with. You’ve got to polish what you have. In hand to hand, there are plenty of ways to compensate for a difference in height. The primary means of overcoming distance is footwork, not the length of your arms or legs.
Mind Over Matter – In terms of physiology, the rules aren’t hard and fast. They’re not black and white. There’s no can and can’t. There’s mind over matter, mind over internalized biases, and mind over perceived impossibilities. What there isn’t is magic. No matter who they are, your character will never be suddenly amazing or skip all the perilous trials of learning. There’s pain, yes, embarrassment, frustration, and failures, which are all part of building character. Skill requires training and practice. It’s difficult, it takes time, and you’ll need to do a lot of pushing past what you believe to be physically possible (rather than what is) before you’re done.
What your character perceives about their own abilities and their actual abilities are not one and the same, the same is true of their potential. The hill may seem impossible from the bottom, but we progress up it one step at a time.
Here’s one last thing to keep in mind:
They’re short. So, what?
-Michi
This blog is supported through Patreon. If you enjoy our content, please consider becoming a Patron. Every contribution helps keep us online, and writing. If you already are a Patron, thank you.
Q&A: Short Fighters and Centers of Gravity was originally published on How to Fight Write.
Writing Techniques: Fight Scenes and Clarity
kerzoro said to howtofightwrite:
What would you say at the writing techniques to write a fight? I’ve received (what I feel is valid) criticism that my action scenes need to be punchier and feel too passive, but I’m not 100% what that means, or how to translate that to paper.
What your critique partners are telling you is that you’ve got issues with passive voice which is a common problem for new writers. Passive voice is an overuse of the subject acting on the verb rather than the verb being acted upon.
Passive Voice
She was chased.
Active Voice
He chased her.
Now, both passive and active voice have their uses in writing and can be applied to great effect under the right circumstances. Some writing advice will tell you to rid yourself of passive voice entirely, never use “was”, “were”, “felt”, “is”, etc. While the advice is useful in encouraging you to practice your active voice, it can result in your writing falling out of balance. Passive voice is excellent for framing within a scene while active voice is solid for action. Overuse of active voice can lead to reader fatigue. You want to find a balance between the two which creates a solid rhythm.
However, this is basic advice you can get from any writing blog. Many blogs will tell you that the key to writing a good action scene is to use active voice, make your sentences shorter, raise the tempo of your sentences so the pace quickens and tension increases. These are all good techniques and well worth the effort to develop.
To really succeed at writing action sequences, you need to look beyond surface prose and dig deeper. This involves learning about both real world combat and action created for entertainment. Both have different purposes, but one informs the other by providing you with more options and ways to structure your scenes.
The major failures of most action sequences revolve around lack of clarity.
Clarity of Understanding.
Clarity of Visual Image.
Clarity Setting Reader Expectations
“How” and “Why” Create Worlds
If you don’t understand what’s happening in your narrative and why then you cannot write your story. Narratives are built on cause and effect. Actions happen and a result occurs, these actions large or small build your story. Fight scenes, down to individual actions, are the same way — action happens, result occurs.
If your critique partner is telling you that your fight scenes should be punchier, you’re not just lacking in sentence structure, your imagery and stakes are also suffering.
The problem for most writers when they sit down to write fight scenes is they don’t really understand the material they’re working with. Whether this involves the reasons and motivations for conflict (why does the bully start a fight with a male protagonist in a bar?), or the mechanics of violence itself (what happens when you punch someone?). Despite consuming violent media for most of your life, if you’ve never considered the mechanics of violence in depth, choreographing violence in your narrative is difficult.
Make no mistake. When you are crafting a fight scene in your narrative, you are choreographing a sequence like one would performance art. When a critic stresses the importance of realism, you shouldn’t chase the real world blindly. You failed to set appropriate expectations for your reader and abide by your own rules. No reader really cares about the real world, they care about suspension of disbelief. Learning how things work helps build suspension of disbelief.
For example: if your amazing military general understands nothing about troop movements, military structure, supplies lines, army bureaucracy, the role of spies, interaction with the ruling governing body, etc, then both your character and your world building will suffer. As a result, your suspension of disbelief also suffers.
The goal is not to mimic, duplicate, or import a real world individual or military wholesale, but rather to learn how and why different militaries throughout history (successful and unsuccessful) worked the way they did. From how and why, you can create. Your way doesn’t need to be the best way, the most perfect way, it can be the way that evolved because these individuals had access to these resources to create this culture.
If you’re wondering why I’m talking about world building on a post about writing techniques for fight scenes, the answer is: your character’s culture and the resources they have access to defines how they fight just as much as their personality. How they choose to fight defines their portion of your action sequence. Violence is an expression of identity.
The Parry, Parry, Thrust, Thrust Conundrum
Many fiction writers treat all swords as the same. In reality, less than half a centimeter of distance can be the difference between victory and defeat with bladed weapons.
Why is this piece of information important?
If your answer was: whoever has the longer weapon wins. Well, you’re wrong.
Understanding a weapon’s designated use, it’s strengths and limitations works as a means of setting reader expectations which builds your narrative’s stakes.
A character taking a scimitar into a narrow alley is going to be different from a character taking a rapier into the same narrow alley. In fact, a character with a rapier might choose to lure the character with the scimitar into a narrow alley because they feel choice of terrain benefits them.
This one choice transforms a character from passive into active. The character makes decisions based on the information they have available. They may make the wrong choice, but the choice itself creates an active participant. You cannot make educated choices without knowledge. The more knowledge you have, the more information you have, the smarter and more interesting your setting becomes.
Take these two characters discussing the use of a specialty weapon — a lasbow, which shoots psychically generated lasers bolts.
Suits you, Nathan’s warm thoughts filled her. You could’ve killed that spino with a carefully constructed shot.
Yes, she grit her teeth, but lasbows require more concentration, expend more energy, and bolts fly only so far as imagination and focus allow. A plaspistol just needs a charge.
Here, we see the character lay out the strengths and drawbacks of a lasbow before we see the weapon in combat. We know a lasbow is different from a regular bow. While a lasbow can strike a target at any distance with devastating effect, it is not fire and forget. The wielder must maintain the shot from start to finish. This is a significant weakness in frantic melee if the wielder is not shooting from a defensive position. If the difference between life and death is losing concentration, that might be a little worrying.
Now, let’s see the lasbow in action.
Together, the rexes lumbered into the canyon. Humans perched on saddles atop their massive heads. The rexes were armored in saurohide and plasteel pieces reconfigured from ancient dragon and carno armor.
Leah raised her bow. The rexes’ large nasal cavity allowed them to locate prey from across great distances. Some bonded raiders learned to utilize this sense to locate caravans and other enemies. Probably how they found us. A sharp whine filled her ears, the buzz of electricity. And riding reconditioned fly-bikes. Six humans rode two per vehicle. One driver, one gunner, bikes with built-in weaponswere difficult to come by without a technician. Surprise. Distract. Overwhelm. Simple tactics; terrify and distract with the tyrannosaurus while the bikes and raptors cut the enemy to pieces. Effective against the inexperienced.
Patterning the mental signature of the rex rider on the left, Leah generated her bolt by drawing two fingers through the air. The bolt burst to life in a crackling, snapping hiss of blazing yellow. She fired. The bolt shot through the trees, searing away fronds and leaves.
The rex rider sensed her touch. Their rifle raised, eyes scanning the canyon.
Female. She caged the woman’s mind. No alarms. The bolt pierced through the center of the rider’s helmeted forehead, sliced through the brain, and vanished.
The tyrannosaur’s rider slumped, corpse held in place by saddle straps.
The rex bellowed in agony.
Surprise shook the human minds. Too late. They were committed.
Leah smiled. Let’s go.
Multiple important details occur in this scene.
The enemy is defined and the main character, Leah, instructs the reader regarding the raiders’ intended tactics. This builds anticipation for the battle to come.
The preemptive strike with the lasbow is launched, but Leah also cages the mind of her target to keep them from psychically warning the others. Tactics.
Strategy is also at play, Leah waits until the raiders advancing force is in too deep and cannot retreat when they realize their enemy’s strength. She kills the rex’s rider rather than the rex to create a battlefield wild card, cutting off the only easy escape route.
Leah’s confidence at the end of the scene builds the reader’s sense of security for the coming battle.
A character’s actions can be multi-pronged while the effects of those actions have multiple outcomes. If the world you create is convincing and works off its own logic, you don’t have to worry about it matching reality. If you understand how different kinds of violence work, you can create clear images within your scene that are advanced beyond punches and kicks.
The reason why I generally suggest looking at films rather than novels for your action sequences is because films have the advantage of being choreographed by professionals. As a writer, you’ll never be able to really make use of the same visual spectacle, but the important point is a fight scene choreographer’s business is choreographing fight scenes for entertainment. Whether you’re watching Spiderman, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or Heat, you’re given the opportunity to see a martial artist’s mind at work constructing action in the service of a greater narrative. As a creative who lacks similar experience, you can review a lot of good and bad fight scenes from the famous to the unknown. You can see what worked and what didn’t. You’ve been consuming film fight scenes non-critically for most of your life, now it’s time for you to start learning about the choreographers who created them, figuring out how they work and why.
I’m not suggesting you mindlessly copy, but carefully consider. Each action sequence is an expression of all your characters.
– Michi
This blog is supported through Patreon. If you enjoy our content, please consider becoming a Patron. Every contribution helps keep us online, and writing. If you already are a Patron, thank you.
Writing Techniques: Fight Scenes and Clarity was originally published on How to Fight Write.
Helpful things for action writers to remember
Sticking a landing will royally fuck up your joints and possibly shatter your ankles, depending on how high you’re jumping/falling from. There’s a very good reason free-runners dive and roll.
Hand-to-hand fights usually only last a matter of seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s exhausting work and unless you have a lot of training and history with hand-to-hand combat, you’re going to tire out really fast.
Arrows are very effective and you can’t just yank them out without doing a lot of damage. Most of the time the head of the arrow will break off inside the body if you try pulling it out, and arrows are built to pierce deep. An arrow wound demands medical attention.
Throwing your opponent across the room is really not all that smart. You’re giving them the chance to get up and run away. Unless you’re trying to put distance between you so you can shoot them or something, don’t throw them.
Everyone has something called a “flinch response” when they fight. This is pretty much the brain’s way of telling you “get the fuck out of here or we’re gonna die.” Experienced fighters have trained to suppress this. Think about how long your character has been fighting. A character in a fist fight for the first time is going to take a few hits before their survival instinct kicks in and they start hitting back. A character in a fist fight for the eighth time that week is going to respond a little differently.
ADRENALINE WORKS AGAINST YOU WHEN YOU FIGHT. THIS IS IMPORTANT. A lot of times people think that adrenaline will kick in and give you some badass fighting skills, but it’s actually the opposite. Adrenaline is what tires you out in a battle and it also affects the fighter’s efficacy - meaning it makes them shaky and inaccurate, and overall they lose about 60% of their fighting skill because their brain is focusing on not dying. Adrenaline keeps you alive, it doesn’t give you the skill to pull off a perfect roundhouse kick to the opponent’s face.
Swords WILL bend or break if you hit something hard enough. They also dull easily and take a lot of maintenance. In reality, someone who fights with a sword would have to have to repair or replace it constantly.
Fights get messy. There’s blood and sweat everywhere, and that will make it hard to hold your weapon or get a good grip on someone.
A serious battle also smells horrible. There’s lots of sweat, but also the smell of urine and feces. After someone dies, their bowels and bladder empty. There might also be some questionable things on the ground which can be very psychologically traumatizing. Remember to think about all of the character’s senses when they’re in a fight. Everything WILL affect them in some way.
If your sword is sharpened down to a fine edge, the rest of the blade can’t go through the cut you make. You’ll just end up putting a tiny, shallow scratch in the surface of whatever you strike, and you could probably break your sword.
ARCHERS ARE STRONG TOO. Have you ever drawn a bow? It takes a lot of strength, especially when you’re shooting a bow with a higher draw weight. Draw weight basically means “the amount of force you have to use to pull this sucker back enough to fire it.” To give you an idea of how that works, here’s a helpful link to tell you about finding bow sizes and draw weights for your characters. (CLICK ME)
If an archer has to use a bow they’re not used to, it will probably throw them off a little until they’ve done a few practice shots with it and figured out its draw weight and stability.
People bleed. If they get punched in the face, they’ll probably get a bloody nose. If they get stabbed or cut somehow, they’ll bleed accordingly. And if they’ve been fighting for a while, they’ve got a LOT of blood rushing around to provide them with oxygen. They’re going to bleed a lot.
Here’s a link to a chart to show you how much blood a person can lose without dying. (CLICK ME)
If you want a more in-depth medical chart, try this one. (CLICK ME)
Hopefully this helps someone out there. If you reblog, feel free to add more tips for writers or correct anything I’ve gotten wrong here.
the essentials of writing FIGHT SCENES!
I realized that there weren’t a lot of fight scene tutorials on here that addressed a lot of the common mistakes of fight scenes. I have a non-zero amount of experience with Krav Maga and have been told I’m very good with fight scenes so I thought I might as well write out a little advice
Keep in mind that this is best suited to “nasty hand to hand street fighting” and even then there are probably better people to ask about it. But here goes.
What’s the One Important Thing I’d have you remember?
Best piece of fight scene advice I’ve ever heard: Violence is fast. Whenever people are involved in some kind of accident or tragedy, what they say is “It happened so fast!” So no matter what, think fast. The main mistake I see with fight scenes is unrealistic description, and it comes from a lack of understanding of a fight being a very altered state of consciousness, where your character is at the limits of their ability to process shit. So:
How to Describe a Fight Scene!
The Language: Go for the strongest verbs you can find and use them. Think slam, crash, smash, pound, grind, shove, ram, claw, rip, gouge, bash…You want very verb driven writing. This is the time to pull out that thesaurus and that list of 500 verbs to use in writing or whatever. Don’t let adjectives and adverbs carry the weight. “She punched him hard in the gut” needs to be “She slammed a fist into his gut.” Or better, let the fist be the subject: “Her fist slammed in his gut.” If there’s any time to adhere hardcore to active voice, it’s now. Also notice that I shortened “into” to “in”- it’s best to go with language that’s as short and well, punchy, grammar be damned. This is also why I go with “gut” rather than “stomach.” Sentence fragments and em-dashes and such are your friends. Cut out articles and conjunctions wherever you can. And try to keep the subject and verb of every action close together–it’s much more direct and better able to connote that intense aggression that you want.
So, you might have something like this: “As she tried to throw a punch at his face, he dodged aside, moving in, his body twisting, to kick her in the ribs.”
You might notice the following issues: The verbs are fairly weak- tried, moving. “Dodged” is good but the others fall flat. There are a lot of extraneous words. And the clause at the beginning makes the sentence feel too indirect.
So these are the changes I would make: “Her fist darted for his face. He dodged aside. Slipped closer, twisted–his heel crashed into ribcage.”
That’s the technical stuff out of the way. Now for some more general advice on fights:
In a fight, you really don’t think. There are two things your brain can do: percieve and respond. In such an adrenaline-fueled survival situation, you’re a bundle of instinctive reaction and OHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCK. A skilled fighter doesn’t mentally remember techniques, the techniques are just the first response that springs out at an attack because they’re second nature. And the thing is, you CAN’T remember techniques in the fight. Adrenaline makes you big stupid. Brain is a faraway land, but body is here, in danger, and trying to stay alive. This is what I mean by your character being at the limits of their processing—they have very little room to think because they’re in survival mode.
That’s why you practice techniques One Fuckthousand Times in martial arts. It’s actually wild how little conscious thought there is to it. I’m always going to remember the time when I, a smol orange belt, was sparring with a larger guy and his fist was flying at my face and I just…wove underneath it. Without even thinking. Pure instinct. I had two guys like, beaming at me and pounding me on the back at the breakthrough but I was confused at the time because it felt like a complete accident. So what you should get out of this is—yeah, no internal monologue! Write what your character perceives and write what they respond.
Description of any kind, but especially visual description, will be highly fragmented. If your character is in a fight with another character, they’re not going to be extensively perceiving their surroundings and noticing the thick curtains of ivy on the walls or whatever. Their focus will be. On the fight. Part of the reason for this is that adrenaline makes you focus hard on threats and kind of cancels out irrelevant data. I want to point out visual description specifically as an area of concern though because for one thing, your field of view is going to be limited as you try to protect your head and face, you’re going to need to pay attention to your aggressor and anticipate their next move, and finally, if you get punched in the face or have anything come close to hitting you there you’re going to be blinded temporarily because you’ll instinctively shut your eyes. NO SCENERY! If your character’s getting pummeled in the face they’re probably not noticing the vicious gleam in their adversary’s eyes outside of a quick glimpse. Imagine the whole thing is being filmed through a panicking amateur’s shaky camera.
Hone in hard on your character’s body in your descriptions. They’re inhabiting their body in a super intense way and most of your description will probably lean toward the tactile. This not only includes the awareness of pain or of being hit, but also the movement and coordination of their muscles and how they are working together, their breathing, potentially exhaustion or fatigue. Martial arts allows you to experience how your body produces force—to percieve the flow of power through your entire torso that culminates in a punch. This feeling can add a lot to a description of a fight. A punch or a kick’s power doesn’t come from muscular strength of your limbs, but originates throughout your body and the ability to coordinate that and draw it together into a single hard point of power involves a lot of consciousness of your body, which also becomes second nature.
Almost the entirety of your character’s focus will be firmly in their body. They are perceiving their adversary’s movements, but that is sharply edged with their own reactions to them.
I feel like people often don’t realize how intense taking a hit in a fight can be. A punch to the face or head is blinding and dizzying; taking a hit to the temple will snap your head aside and put you completely out of it for a second. Descriptions of these things need to be very grounded and intense to feel right. Getting hit in the chest hard enough can knock the wind out of you. Getting hit in the gut WILL make you retch or throw up. A hard kick to the gut is like instant vomit. (There’s another post with really excellent descriptions about what certain blows feel like so I’ll leave this at that.)
Your character will perceive pain, both the force of the blow they take and a sense of the scale or breadth of the pain, but adrenaline will keep them going through it to a degree that isn’t possible when not pumped full of adrenaline. Your character will probably know that they’ve been injured (oh fuck, that was a nasty hit to the side) but AFTER the fight, expect the real pain to suddenly hit (oh fuck, there’s a giant bruise over my side and it’s aching so deep I can barely move).
Adrenaline makes you straight up loopy sometimes. Y’all know how much I hate anecdotal evidence, but one of my former instructors told a story about how he was mugged, got slammed against the sidewalk and briefly blacked out, fought back, and then just…decided to go to work. He thought he was fine. A few hours later, paramedics were asking him questions and he was completely incoherent. He had a severe concussion but the adrenaline rush had caused a delay in the damage really hitting, to the point that he was just like “heh, I can go straight to work, I’m fine!”
Some general facts:
A fight is probably going to be over pretty quickly: Movies are deceptive about this but it’s not super realistic to have two characters tangling with each other for like…ten minutes straight. You get tired. You get sloppy. And there’s only so much damage you can take.
Fancy kicks not recommended: They look nice on screen, sure. But having your leg above your waist for any length of time is one hell of a risk when your opponent can grab it and slam you to the floor like a sack of concrete mix. HOWEVER, kicks can be fight enders. A heel kick will break ribs easily.
Dirty fighting: This is the Kravist in me, but knees to the groin are valid and will completely immobilize a testicle-having attacker. Elbows are also highly destructive, but you tend not to see them in movie fights much. Biting is valid and bites can be very nasty. Gouging eyes is very effective. It’s also easier than you would think to rip the skin off someone’s face with your nails if you’re already going feral. A good punch to the throat might end a fight.
Blocking or dodging blows: Your character can deflect a punch or a knife attack to the upper body with forearms, and your arms will cushion a blow to the head as well. You can also duck your head around an attempted blow to the face. It’s important, though, to think of your two characters’ actions as interlocking rather than alternating—a character going in for a hit will at least briefly have one of their limbs extended instead of protecting the body, and the other character will be taking that opening. Have them dodge the blow and slide into their own opportunity in a single movement.
Shit Happens: A fight is not an equation where you plug in the size and weight of both adversaries and get the result. Again, this is the Kravist in me, but the only law is Murphy’s law. An attempt to land a blow can go sour and break somebody’s wrist. An attacker can trip and fall. Puddles and improvised weapons and getting blood or sweat in your eyes can all be wild cards. An experienced fighter can get fucked up by someone smaller and less experienced than they because of luck. That said, though, experience is what helps you adapt to the Murphy’s-law-ness of everything.
Yeah that’s what I’ve got, enjoy ur violence
Helpful things for action writers to remember
Sticking a landing will royally fuck up your joints and possibly shatter your ankles, depending on how high you’re jumping/falling from. There’s a very good reason free-runners dive and roll.
Hand-to-hand fights usually only last a matter of seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s exhausting work and unless you have a lot of training and history with hand-to-hand combat, you’re going to tire out really fast.
Arrows are very effective and you can’t just yank them out without doing a lot of damage. Most of the time the head of the arrow will break off inside the body if you try pulling it out, and arrows are built to pierce deep. An arrow wound demands medical attention.
Throwing your opponent across the room is really not all that smart. You’re giving them the chance to get up and run away. Unless you’re trying to put distance between you so you can shoot them or something, don’t throw them.
Everyone has something called a “flinch response” when they fight. This is pretty much the brain’s way of telling you “get the fuck out of here or we’re gonna die.” Experienced fighters have trained to suppress this. Think about how long your character has been fighting. A character in a fist fight for the first time is going to take a few hits before their survival instinct kicks in and they start hitting back. A character in a fist fight for the eighth time that week is going to respond a little differently.
ADRENALINE WORKS AGAINST YOU WHEN YOU FIGHT. THIS IS IMPORTANT. A lot of times people think that adrenaline will kick in and give you some badass fighting skills, but it’s actually the opposite. Adrenaline is what tires you out in a battle and it also affects the fighter’s efficacy - meaning it makes them shaky and inaccurate, and overall they lose about 60% of their fighting skill because their brain is focusing on not dying. Adrenaline keeps you alive, it doesn’t give you the skill to pull off a perfect roundhouse kick to the opponent’s face.
Swords WILL bend or break if you hit something hard enough. They also dull easily and take a lot of maintenance. In reality, someone who fights with a sword would have to have to repair or replace it constantly.
Fights get messy. There’s blood and sweat everywhere, and that will make it hard to hold your weapon or get a good grip on someone.
A serious battle also smells horrible. There’s lots of sweat, but also the smell of urine and feces. After someone dies, their bowels and bladder empty. There might also be some questionable things on the ground which can be very psychologically traumatizing. Remember to think about all of the character’s senses when they’re in a fight. Everything WILL affect them in some way.
If your sword is sharpened down to a fine edge, the rest of the blade can’t go through the cut you make. You’ll just end up putting a tiny, shallow scratch in the surface of whatever you strike, and you could probably break your sword.
ARCHERS ARE STRONG TOO. Have you ever drawn a bow? It takes a lot of strength, especially when you’re shooting a bow with a higher draw weight. Draw weight basically means “the amount of force you have to use to pull this sucker back enough to fire it.” To give you an idea of how that works, here’s a helpful link to tell you about finding bow sizes and draw weights for your characters. (CLICK ME)
If an archer has to use a bow they’re not used to, it will probably throw them off a little until they’ve done a few practice shots with it and figured out its draw weight and stability.
People bleed. If they get punched in the face, they’ll probably get a bloody nose. If they get stabbed or cut somehow, they’ll bleed accordingly. And if they’ve been fighting for a while, they’ve got a LOT of blood rushing around to provide them with oxygen. They’re going to bleed a lot.
Here’s a link to a chart to show you how much blood a person can lose without dying. (CLICK ME)
If you want a more in-depth medical chart, try this one. (CLICK ME)
Hopefully this helps someone out there. If you reblog, feel free to add more tips for writers or correct anything I’ve gotten wrong here.