One reason for this might have to do with the prevalence of visual storytelling mediums. Television, video games, and films—particularly those with highly choreographed fight sequences—have changed the way we view action sequences and heroic fight scenes. Much blow-by-blow writing I read seems to have been directly influenced by great fight sequences from action cinema.
The thing is, blow-by-blow fighting can work wonderfully in visual mediums. If you haven’t seen it before, do an internet search for the “ladder scene” from Jackie Chan’s film First Strike. Through use of absolutely stunning fight choreography, Jackie can go for an extended period kicking, dodging, and punching without it feeling boring. A different example of this would be the single-shot fight sequence from Tony Jaa’s The Protector. Both of these use environment, cinematography, and choreography to create a low-dialogue sequence that is absolutely captivating.
Unfortunately, the same thing—even dressed up—often becomes excruciatingly dull in fiction. There are some writers who do blow-by-blow well, but it requires a very specific type of story, and is best in short bursts. So my first bit of advice for authors is simple: remember that you’re writing a book, not a film.
The two storytelling mediums tickle different nerves and use different types of visualization. Books are never going to be able to compete with films when it comes to quick blitz action sequence for in books, the reader must supply much of the work done by the cinematographer in film.
As powerful as the imagination is, this requires effort—and a few missteps in the writing can result in a lost reader. In addition, the imagination needs good priming to encourage it to expand and supply properly powerful sequences. If you don’t lay your groundwork correctly, the reader isn’t going to do his or her part supplying exciting visuals, and you’ll end up with a terrible scene.
I’ve got three specific suggestions to help you fix these sorts of narratives, and will apply each one in turn to the paragraph I wrote at the start, transforming it (hopefully) from a dull blow-by-blow to a dynamic sequence with a focus on a single, engaging hero standing off against a crowd of villains.
PRINCIPLE ONE:
CLARITY FIRST
Clarity as a rule is important for good fiction in any form, but I feel it’s specifically important for fight sequences. As I said above, if you lose the reader, your scene will become an unredeemable disaster. For this conversation, I see clarity in action sequences as having two main parts:
First, accurately and solidly setting up a scene before you begin the action.
Second, maintaining the reader’s focus on the hero and clearly showing where people are moving in relationship to one another.
Setup is probably the more important of these two. If your reader doesn’t have a good handle on the layout of a scene, you’ll fail before you start. In fact, if you set things up properly—drawing the reader into the scene at the start—they’ll often keep with you even if you make mistakes later on. When you set a scene, let us know ahead of time how many people there are, their general relationship to one another, and their spatial relationship to the environment.
This probably sounds obvious to you, but I can all but guarantee you’re doing a worse job of it than you assume. Setup is king in these kinds of sequences, and if you’ve never taken time to specifically think about how to lay things out—and how to describe that layout in the most clear way possible—I suggest you do so.
The second half of this conversation has to do with blocking, which is a stage term for the motions characters make—where they are going and what they are doing. Without clear blocking, a fight sequence can quickly devolve into a muddy blur of some people (maybe) getting hurt, and others (maybe) escaping. This is dangerous for you, as when you are writing specifically heroic fiction, you’re going to work hard to suspend disbelief. You need to encourage your reader to visualize an action sequence to be able to view your hero as being in danger—if not, they will simply fall back into the assumption that your hero cannot lose, and will skip the fight to get on to the next portion of the story.
This isn’t to say that every single moment in the scene should be described. What you need is enough information to give a feel for where everyone is and for the mood and layout of a scene, but not so much information that the story drags. Getting that balance right takes practice. As we’ll speak of later, often a few small details are all you need—but make those details vivid.
I’ve found that it’s particularly helpful to keep abstract language to a minimum in fight sequences. The sentence I wrote above—“Jim flew into battle, a storm of fists and anger.”—is the type that many new writers find evocative. However, it’s basically a series of abstract metaphors that serve to confuse the reader and keep them from really visualizing what is happening.
Try to keep your language neat, crisp, and specific. Minimize metaphors, particularly when establishing your scene. Here is a quick retooling of the sequence above, where I have begun to clean things up and do some proper set up.
Jim burst through the doors to the hideout, slamming them open to either side. A group of thugs sat at the center of the narrow, dim chamber. It had once been a kitchen, with doors at either end, counters along the walls. The thugs at the table stood up, throwing back chairs, exclaiming in surprise.
Two thugs stood just inside the doors, standing guard. Jim ignored the six at the table for now, attacking the two nearby. He took the first down with a kick to the chest, then spun on the second, blocking a punch with his forearm. Jim pushed in close and threw a shoulder into the man’s chest, crushing him back against the wall beside the doorway.
This is a big step in the right direction. It’s still bland, but at least we know how many people we’re fighting and generally where they are. The more we do things like this, the more our hero—and the danger he is facing—will become real to the reader.
PRINCIPLE TWO:
IMMERSION
For all of film’s strengths—and they are many—I believe that prose can be more immersive. We can draw a reader in to a scene and make them really feel what it’s like to be the characters.
Part of establishing a scene should include an effort to take the reader and stuff them into the hero’s shoes. Replace the abstract, metaphoric language with character passions, goals, and motivations. Fill out your descriptions with increased use of high-sensory language.
Don’t just tell us what the setting looks like, let us feel the humidity, hear the wheezing of the smoker’s cough, smell the pungency of a beggar’s breath. Including a few lines of powerfully concrete description at the start of a scene can go a long way toward solidifying a reader’s focus.
I’d argue that this is even more important for action sequences than dramatic ones. If you’re writing a contemplative inner monologue for a woman walking home from a wretched date, her thoughts and concerns can be the focus. However, if you’re writing a heroic fight sequence, you will depend on the reader specifically imagining the proper terrain and blocking. Giving them an evocative sensory experience can coax the proper imaginings. In a way, your “special effects” as a writer are directly dependent on how interested the reader is in the setting.
Don’t go overboard. Usually, a seemingly insignificant, tiny sensory cue can be more powerful than two paragraphs of lazy, verbose description. A skipping record player, repeating the same line over and over because an unconscious butler is laying across it. A room where your hero’s each footstep crunches because thieves have been tossing peanut shells to the ground. A martial arts studio which has heated floors, after the Korean style, that warm bare feet during the fight. These kinds of simple, yet dense, descriptions can be unique, evocative, and—most important—immersive, yet can still be conveyed in an economy of words.
Let’s go through that opening fight sequence again, this time adding some real, concrete detail and giving the scene some uniqueness. I’m going to take this scene into a more modern setting with my descriptions, as for this
exercise, I don’t have the space to lay the framework of a solid, fantastical setting. In this way, my example can be somewhat generic so that it can be applied to any type of writing you may do.
Keep in mind, however, that these principles are just as important in fantasy as in realistic fiction—perhaps even more so, since many setting details can’t be taken for granted. If you've got dragons fighting in midair, you still want to establish where the dragons are in relation to each other and the ground. Your heroic magician still needs to know where everyone is before he can fling spells.
Jim burst through the doors to the hideout. The old kitchen inside was lit by dusty lamps that hung from long chains. They swayed softly as a train rumbled across the nearby tracks. The air still bore hints of garlic and oregano from the foods that had once cooked here.
There were eight of Suro’s men inside; thugs with slab-like faces and brutish features. Six sat at a table scattered with cards and folded bills. The two lounging by the doorway jumped back, uttering exclamations of surprise.
Jim punched one of the door guards with a loose jab—his knuckles popping against the man’s jaw—then spun and roundhoused the thug on the other side, slamming him into the wall. The thug went down with a crunch; Jim couldn’t tell if it was bone or wood that had cracked. He turned back to the first thug and knocked the knife from the man’s hand, then buried a fist in the man’s gut, then dropped him. The wooden floorboards trembled as the guard hit the floor.
You can see that we’re getting longer with each iteration. This is okay; if we’re doing our job correctly, the story will actually read more quickly despite the increased length. This phenomenon is something to be aware of, however. Detail and scene-setting both take extra space. Generally, I’d suggest planning on a few stronger sequences than a large number of shorter, weaker sequences. A few good fights can go a long way.
Our scene with Jim isn’t done yet; it still has the feel of a dressed up blow-by-blow. It’s getting closer, but we still need a final touch, a last bit of depth.
PRINCIPLE THREE:
CHARACTER
Writers often expect that the nature of a fight sequence will make it interesting by default. Because the heroes are (presumably) in danger, writers assume tension will be maintained naturally.
This assumption is true, to an extent, if you’ve laid your groundwork (i.e., you’ve built strong rooting interest for your characters and have established a real sense of danger). However, sometimes you can’t lay this groundwork—such as when you start the book with the action sequence. In addition, I don’t feel that rooting interest is enough to prevent readers from skipping a bad sequence.
And so, we come to my final suggestion—the one that may well be the fundamental trick to writing good action sequences. It has to do with remembering the strengths of prose, as opposed to other kinds of storytelling. We have the awesome ability to put a reader directly into a character’s head, give the reader direct thoughts, motivations, and emotions.
The most powerful fights I’ve read in books have been the ones where every moment—every description, every punch—is channeled through the motives, emotions, and goals of the hero. Obviously, an action scene isn’t the time for your hero to sit down and ponder the philosophy of identity. However, just a few character cues added to a sequence can change it dramatically.
Don’t let the reader forget why your hero is fighting. Don’t let them forget what he or she is trying to achieve. These are the threads that bind the reader to the page and truly inspire a sense of danger and tension.
In this, books have a huge advantage over film. Yes, we have to give labored descriptions of scenes they can paint with a three-second panning shot. Yes, they can maintain audience interest through inherent motion and visual action. But we can give you the why and make you really feel it. The audience of a film gets to watch the hero; we can make our readers be the hero.
Make sure to use this; don’t ignore your greatest strength. Take out some of your blow-by-blow hitting; you don’t need as much of it as you think. Replace it with fighting that is personal to the hero, showing motivations through careful hints and expressions of emotion and thought.
Your viewpoint character should be the lens through which the story is experienced. And in a fight, a time of passion—anger, pain, tension, motion—is when it’s most important to give us solid characterization. Here is one more revision of our scene from the beginning of the essay.
Jim burst through the doors to the old, worn-out kitchen. The room was lit—poorly—by two dusty lamps that hung from long chains and swayed softly as a train rumbled across the nearby tracks. The air bore hints of garlic and oregano; it smelled like his mother’s own kitchen had, long ago.
There were eight of Suro’s men here, their hair slicked back, wearing tight shirts underneath sports coats. Suro liked his thugs to look like...well, anything but thugs. Seeing them made Jim sick; dressing men like them in suits was like dropping a handful of dung on a nice, silk handkerchief.
Suro himself sat at the end of the table scattered with cards, an incense punk hanging from his lips, the tip sending a curling line of smoke into the air. The room was pungent with the spicy scent. Suro didn’t smoke them, really. He just liked to chew on the ends as they smoldered in front of his face.
Jim forced down his anger upon seeing the man, banishing images of Limi’s bloodied lips and lifeless eyes. There was no time for reflection. The twins—Dak and Moe—lounged by the doorway, probably trading insults, as they usually did. They were dangerous. Very dangerous.
But, fortunately, they weren’t terribly clever. Jim tossed his half-eaten apple toward Dak.
“Skata!” Dak cursed in his thick accent as he ducked the apple. It hadn’t been meant to hit, just distract.
Were you there when she cried in pain, Moe? Jim thought, bringing his fist around toward the other twin’s face. Did you listen to her pleas for mercy?
Moe ducked back by reflex, eyes wide, reaching for his coat pocket. Jim sprang forward and caught the man’s necktie—it flapped in the air following Moe’s dodge—then yanked it forward. Moe urked, eyes bugging as he stumbled. Jim’s fist took him in the jaw.
Moe dropped, the flimsy floorboards rattling beneath Jim’s feet. No time to stop, no time to stop. He could weep later. He could rest later.
He could die later.
Jim spun, taking Dak in the gut with a roundhouse. The man had been staring at the apple, dumbfounded, as if he’d been expecting a grenade. Dak crunched back against the doorframe, causing it to shake, dust sprinkling down.
Jim drew in a ragged breath. His fatigue was draining away, fading before his fury. Thirty-six hours without sleep, but only a few more minutes until vengeance. He turned toward the center of the room.
The sounds of the train grew distant. The incense punk dropped from Suro’s stunned lips and hit the table, singing a card, scattering ash. Only a few heartbeats had passed.
Jim dashed for the table as Suro finally yelled a belated “Get him!” to the other dumbfounded thugs.
Notice that in this final version of the sequence, the actual fighting takes a back seat to Jim’s motivations and emotions. Our story stops being about the fighting and starts being about the hero, and within that context, the fight becomes far more interesting and personal.
I feel that many writers get this backward; that the action makes the hero. No. The hero makes the action. Even in cinema, we’re not so interested in what James Bond, Aragorn, or Luke Skywalker is doing as we are who is doing it. In the final sequence above, we try to show Jim’s thought process—he considers what he needs to do, though does so quickly.
As the sequence would progress, we could ease away from this and into some more focus on the fighting. The deeper you get into the action sequence, the fewer motivation, character, and setting clues you’ll need. (Though you shouldn’t stop them entirely.)
Just make sure the scene doesn’t go too long; if it does go more than a f
ew pages, pull back and give a breather, then re-establish, and re-cement the reader into the scene with more setting and character. Then shift back to fighting.
You might notice that in the scene above, I also revised to give the fight a little more variety. Suro has a quirk, the men by the door have names and personalities, and we do things like use the apple and the necktie to play with expectations and use the setting as part of our fighting.
When you write, each few lines should try to do something innovative, attempt something slightly out of the ordinary. When you can show a character being clever—or considering their surroundings, or making connections and using them in the midst of the battle—it will make a scene more engaging. This is because your reader won’t lose sight of character, and will get to experience variety and flavor with each line.
Another tip is to use sentence length and variety to your advantage. Short sentences will feel like a clipped staccato. Long sentences will feel smoother. Don’t get it the other way around—a lot of new writers assume that short means fast. That’s not always the case; a lot of short sentences can give a feel of focus, but their clipped nature can actually slow the reader down.
A single sentence paragraph slows them even more.
The single-sentence paragraph is a moment of revelation or change. A literary punch to the face. I suggest not overusing it, for if you do any one thing in large quantities the readers will adapt to it and it will lose its effect.
The most important thing, however, is not to assume that your fight scenes will be interesting just because they are fight scenes. Try to imbue each one with the same quirks and variety that you give your heroes themselves. And remember, the fight sequence can’t just be about the fight. Give your readers a reason to care about who is getting hit, give them a place for the hitting to happen, and give them a pinch of ingenuity in each and every scene and your action sequences will stand with the best of them.
Writing Fantasy Heroes Page 5