Crafting the Fight Scene

When emotions are high, honor is called into question, and lives may be at risk, you know it’s time for a deadly showdown. You’ve been building up to this explosive moment for pages, if not your whole novel, but suddenly you’ve come to a standstill Because you have no idea how to write a fight scene!

Fortunately, it isn’t as difficult as you may imagine. Follow these five simple steps to write a fight scene that relieves plot tension, resolves inter-character conflict, and meets your reader’s nervous expectations all at once.

Step 1: Motivate Your Players

When was the last time you witnessed someone suddenly start throwing punches? Almost certainly never. Whether it’s over a lifelong grudge or a few heated words at a bar, people need believable motivation to start a fight in both real lives and in fiction. Here are a few suggestions for motivating your characters’ conflicts. Use it as the trigger for your battle scene and provide the required layers of depth and complexity.

Survival

Survival is a major motivator for any character, but it is especially essential for protagonists in horror and dystopian literature. For example, in The Hunger Games, Katniss must assault and murder her fellow adolescent opponents to survive. However, this drive to survival may intensify any physical battle, such as the gang scuffles in The Outsiders, where anyone could take out a knife at any time. Remember that for survival to be a legitimate character motive, the circumstance must be severe.

Protection

Even those who dislike conflict will come to the protection of what they value. This might be a person, an idea, or a hybrid of the two – conflicts in fantasy and adventure stories sometimes include both. Harry Potter, who is always fighting Voldemort to preserve the wizarding world, is a good example of a character-driven by the desire to defend others. Simultaneously, he defends the values of kindness and inclusiveness (as opposed to Voldemort’s goals of “blood purity” and bigotry).

Honor

Honor is the driving force behind Shakespearean blood feuds, eighteenth-century duels, and, yes, modern-day bar fights. While honor may appear to be a less powerful motivator than survival, it can lead to a highly passionate fight, especially if insults are hurled beforehand.

Use honor as character motivation in violent conflicts between long-standing enemies, as Mercutio and Tybalt’s duel in Romeo and Juliet.

Consider the stakes through the eyes of your characters: if they win, will they acquire the respect of others? What are the ramifications if they lose? Is their honor worth risking their lives for? If the answer is “no,” you should definitely try a different approach.

Step 2. Use Stimulating Descriptions

During a battle scene, you want the reader to feel the adrenaline running through the veins of your characters. To achieve this, you need to describe the fight with all the immediacy and stimulation of someone who isn’t just witnessing the struggle but part of it. If you do a good job, your reader should feel like they’ve been pounded – by your words!

Employ Strong Verbs

Use your verbs to color and enrich the battle action as you describe it. Instead of “hit,” try “pound,” “smack,” “wallop,” or “bash,” depending on the level of force you want to convey. Use powerful verbs to describe how your characters move concerning one another and navigate their battleground:

• “He stumbled forward, reeling from the hit, swinging blindly.”
• “She flew toward me, arms outstretched, ready to claw out my throat.”
• “I collapsed to the ground, shaking and crying, as my enemy towered over my weak form.”

These descriptions show rather than tell — they build a clear image of each situation without overuse of adjectives and adverbs. Purple prose is not advised! Remember that a battle scene is all about action, so use strong, energetic verbs to describe it.

Include Sensory Details

Though you’ll want to focus mainly on the action of the fight scene, it can be quite powerful to include some sensory details as well. For your reader to feel the entire adrenaline rush of the scenario, they must be privy to everything your characters go through. This means using all five senses: what they see, feel, hear, smell, and even taste.

• “The wind had been knocked clean out of me; as I lay gasping on the floor, it felt like I would never breathe again.“
• “Distantly, I heard the frantic screams of my friends, but these were obscured by the blood pounding in my ears.“
• “His fist slammed into my jaw, and I tasted a surge of coppery blood.“

Take note of how these sensory elements have been paired with powerful verbs for maximum impact. The greatest and most exciting descriptions of a battle scene immerse readers in the action, with the taste of blood almost in their lips.

Step 3. Control the Pace

Though you want to give your reader a sense of urgency in a battle scene, you also don’t want to hurry through it or bog it down with unnecessary descriptions. In a nutshell, you need good pacing. A good rule of thumb for creating a fight scene is that it should take approximately the same amount of time to read as the actual confrontation would. Because most bouts take only a few minutes, you should limit your page count to one or two pages for each fight. Generally, you won’t see a fight scene lasting the length of an entire chapter — unless it’s a pivotal war that’s taking place.

Match the Atmosphere

Because you only have a limited amount of time to stage your battle scenario, each line must represent its tone. With your verbs and sensory elements, you should be well on your way to this, but now make sure you’re picking your words specifically to match the tone of the scenario and pacing it correctly.

If you want it to be fast and aggressive, use snappy verbs and succinct descriptions. This is especially crucial if your narrative contains many conflicts and you don’t want them to drag on. Lee Child regularly uses this snappy manner in his Jack Reacher series, such as the jail standoff in Killing Floor:

Instead of counting three, I headbutted him full in the face. Came off the back foot with a thrust up the legs, whipped my head forward, and smashed it into his nose. It was beautifully done… It must have caved his whole face in.

However, if you want the scene to be more melancholy or dramatic, you should draw it out — have charactered exchange dialogue, offer sensory descriptions of each hit, making one opponent appear vanquished till they fight to their feet in a last-minute comeback

To put it another way, even if you’re already utilizing powerful verbs and sensory details, you still need to consider the type and amount of those words to build an effective pace.

Avoid “CHOREOGRAPHING”

You could be tempted to use extremely technical terminology during your fight scene, such as “left fighter’s stance” and “reverse pivot sidekick” to show the exact actions your characters are performing. Keep in mind, however, that the ordinary reader will be unfamiliar with these words.

Even if you have the scenario perfectly planned in your brain, cumbersome technical terms like these will simply confuse readers, slowing them down and robbing the energy that is essential to a superb fight scene. If you want to successfully pace the scenario, use basic yet strong wording that your reader can swiftly grasp.

Step 4. Infuse with Emotion

You should have your description and timing down perfect at this point, and your fight scene should be fluid and entertaining. But there’s one thing that’s still missing: feeling.

Even the most action-packed, nail-biting combat scene would be incomplete without some emotion. Your audience will empathize with a decent person beaten to a pulp, but they will empathize if he is doing so to defend his loved ones. Even though they should already be aware of that character’s purpose, make sure to properly incorporate it into your battle scene.

Use Internal Thoughts

Including your protagonist’s thoughts is one of the finest ways to bring emotion into a battle scene. Try sprinkling them between the action (verbs) and your characters’ reactions (sensory details) as you compose the scenario. Using your characters’ internal thoughts to show their feelings is useful, even in the third person.

Spending too much time on inner monologues might distract the reader from the action. Concentrate on the muddled, impulsive thinking of an adrenaline-fueled combatant, whose reasoning may be illogical. This is most definitely the case for Humbert when he shoots Quilty after Lolita:

In distress, in dismay, I understood that far from killing him, I was injecting spurts of energy into the poor fellow, as if the bullets had been capsules wherein a heady elixir danced.

This line of thinking brings the scene’s — and the book’s — intensity to a climax. As readers, we witness Humbert in his most twisted form: deluded and wicked, yet pathetic. At some level, he feels he is so weak that even wielding a pistol won’t help him overcome his opponent. The presence of emotion in this scenario genuinely invests the reader in its conclusion, regardless of how they feel about the players’ morality.

Step 5. Resolve (at least for now)

Finally, you’ve reached the conclusion of your battle scene — but not necessarily the conclusion of your tale. No matter where it is in the narrative arc, a conflict must be resolved so that the story may either go ahead or finish satisfactorily. This entails slowing down the activity and creating some emotional conclusion, even if it is just momentary.

Consider what would actually happen once the combat scene has concluded. If your character has a fractured rib, they are not going to get up and stroll about. They may lie there for a few minutes, regaining strength, before hobbling to medical care.

This transition out of a fight scene is critical because it allows the reader to feel the full effect of the battle – both the consequences and the future ramifications. For instance, if your primary character is badly injured, they will require time to heal. Indeed, the conclusion of a battle might be a key turning point in your story, so give it your full attention.

Remember that if you’ve decided to finish your narrative with a battle scene or scenes, the fight(s) must settle any outstanding problems. Perhaps there was a fundamental misunderstanding between characters, which the fight scene clarifies, or an act of vengeance is ultimately carried out. One of the most gratifying resolutions in literature is the encounter between Inigo Montoya and the man who killed his father at the end of The Princess Bride:

“That was just to the left of your heart.” Inigo struck again. Another scream. “That was below your heart. Can you guess what I’m doing?” “Cutting my heart out.” “You took mine when I was ten; I want yours now. We are lovers of justice, you and I — what could be more just than that?” The Count screamed one final time then fell dead of fear. Inigo looked down at him. The Count’s frozen face was petrified and ashen, and the blood still poured down the parallel cuts. His eyes bulged wide, full of horror and pain. It was glorious. If you like that kind of thing. Inigo loved it.

A satisfying conclusion is the icing on the cake of a well-written battle scene. And with character motivation, meticulous details, effective pace, and strong emotion all in your arsenal, you may be confident that yours is a winner.