In your outline, it sounded so much better. “The protagonist and the antagonist duel in a showdown for the ages.” Then, when it comes time to sit down and write it… you can almost hear the kerplunk sound of the scene’s tension sinking to nothing. We’ve all seen and read a million fight scenes in our time. So why does it seem like they’re so hard to write? Where is the tension—the stakes you had in mind from the outset? Put ’em up, and we’ll see how it’s done.

How to Write a Fight Scene

For novice writers, fight scenes are all about the blueprint of the action. Protagonist throws a blow. Antagonist dodges it. Antagonist throws a counterpunch. Protagonist blocks it.

Yawn.

The problem? It’s as if you’re writing stage directions for a play. If you’ve been in the protagonist’s head all along, this sudden “zoom-out” to third-party description feels boring and stale.

But top-selling authors don’t approach it this way. Lee Child infuses Jack Reacher with the inner monologue of a fighting expert as he considers angles, pursuit, and environment. Elmore Leonard writes the realistic fights of people who are untrained—the flailing, the confusion, the awkwardness. G.K. Chesterton writes with fantastical summations, especially when reflecting the point of view of a character who knows nothing about fighting and can only sum up for us.

Ditch the blow-by-blow narration and consider the following before you set down to write a fight scene:

Perspective or Point-of-View (POV)

Who is describing the fighting to us? Let’s imagine it’s a detective investigating a murder, suddenly strangled by a hooded figure. Would a blow-by-blow account match the tension and mystery of the scene? No; we would need to get into the detective’s head. Maybe that detective mistakes the hooded figure as a painting on the wall—before it moves. That’s a trick that only limited perspective can pull off, and it adds to the tension of the scene.

Texture

Many novice writers tackle fight scenes like a script from the 1960s Batman. They figure they need a blow-by-blow description, so the only challenge is to check their thesaurus of onomatopoeia. Blam! Wap! Ka-pow!

Instead, vary the texture of your sentences. Short blows can be short sentences. But maybe the next sentence is a character struggling to get up and wondering where her enemy is, and now you have tension to milk as you have her peer around corners. Maybe her inner thoughts pop into italics throughout, breaking up the blow-by-blow action. This is far more interesting to read than “A, then B, then C.”

Obstacles and Tension

In the TV series Game of Thrones, the writers infused their sword fights and action scenes with moments of dramatic tension. The character you were rooting for might find themselves disarmed, only for someone else to come in at the last second with a well-timed arrow or sword strike to finish things.

They leaned on it because it works. You don’t want every fight to be on equal footing. In the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, note how the final chess match sees our protagonist losing his Queen early on. If we’re rooting for him, we feel that loss in our guts. 

Put your main character at a disadvantage. The fun is in discovering how he or she is going to crawl their way out of it and win the day.

Mind Your Scale

Your selection of details is critical to scaling the fight in your reader’s mind. If it’s an intimate fight between two people in a room, something as small as a broken shard of glass is going to have the utmost importance. 

But what if you’re writing battles at massive scales? George R.R. Martin of A Song of Ice and Fire fame sneaks in a larger scale by tackling scenes from multiple points of view. Giving us multiple perspectives from the same place and time helps illustrate the sheer size of what’s going on.

Give Your Opening Fight Scene Some Impact

Creative Writing Essentials: Writing Stand-Out Opening Scenes

Build Your Stakes

Before you sit down and write a word, we have to know what the fight is about. Why should we care who wins or loses? What’s on the line?

Let’s stick with George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. In the third book, A Storm of Swords, we have a trial by combat. One main character’s fate hangs in the balance; if his champion loses, his life is certainly lost. 

That seems enough for an exciting fight, and it is. But Martin doesn’t stop there. One of the fighters, the so-called “Red Viper,” also has an old vendetta against his opponent. This adds an element of personal stakes that have bearing on the physical match itself. 

All of the work—introducing the Red Viper, exposition about why he has this beef—only heightens the suspense when the trial by combat arrives. With every potential death blow, we’re on the edge of our seats because of what hangs in the balance.

Use Description to Lengthen Tension in Fight Scenes

At the moment of tension—when everything in the fight is riding on a single move—is the time to unleash your blow-by-blow description. If you’ve done everything right, the reader will sense it almost in slow-motion. At this point, they’re hanging on every word for a clue as to how the fight will end up. 

Remember: Long descriptions tend to drag out the tempo of a moment. That’s a good thing when a character is arriving in an ominous setting, like a haunted house, that will be important to the plot. It’s not so important when you describe a character having breakfast in a scene that has nothing to do with your plot.

When you know you’ve got a climactic moment, however, feel free to stretch those moments out. Show us the spear sliding off the protagonist’s armor as he dodges it, the metal glinting in the sun. Show us the sand kicking up as he whirls around for the counter-strike. Watch the antagonist’s eyes go wide as he realizes what’s about to happen. 

Observe how George R.R. Martin does it right as the Viper and the Mountain are about to decide their fates:

“Clegane’s hand shot up and grabbed the Dornishman behind the knee. The Red Viper brought down the greatsword in a wild slash, but he was off-balance, and the edge did no more than put another dent in the Mountain’s vambrace.”

At this point, even five words—but he was off-balance—can make us breathe uneasy. Now the blow-by-blow serves to heighten tension, rather than merely describe. 

If this same description took place at the beginning of the fight, you might find yourself skimming it. 

Making Your Action Scenes Worth Writing

No action scene should exist on its own. There should be something else happening: revealing that one plucky character is really a martial arts expert, for example, or showing the lengths to which a parent is willing to go to find their long-lost child. 

Infuse your fight scenes with dynamic tension, intensely personal stakes, and avoid the “blow-by-blow” descriptions until the key moments. You’ll likely find that leaves a bigger impact on your audience than writing about nothing by flying fists and flailing swords.

Create a Plot That Moves

Writing Fiction: 5 Exercises to Craft a Compelling Plot

Written By

Dan Kenitz

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