Fight scenes are tremendously popular but difficult to write by most writers. Martial artists and sport fighters sometimes throw out elaborate technique names and expect the reader to know what they are. Inexperienced fighters base their combat off of TV which is terrible. When I read a fight scene if it is ridiculous and impossible I go "pffft!" and put the book down. On the other hand a highly technical fight scene is quite boring to read.

I loved the fights in Starship Troopers (the book), Dune, and Lireal by Nix. I despised the fight scenes in Star Wars or Xmen books. I really like R A Salvatore's characters but hate his fight scenes. If you prefer mystery I like the Spenser novels for the fights and John Sanford novels for the shear intensity leading up to the fights.

Most short stories though do not have the page space to allow a good deal of fighting- so they focus more on charcater and technological problems. It can take a good page to have a full fight that only lasts twenty seconds. I have read fights that lasted for two chapters before!

Your other comment is on target- hard science fiction avoids violence if possible. This is due to the nature of the hard science fiction readers being highly educated and generally loathing violence. Except in the abstract sense.

I personally like pulp science fiction to hard science fiction due to the fact I like laser battles and green woman trying to seduce the captain! (he's always a captain or sargent in the pulp stories, eh?)

Lee Childs in his Jack Reacher novels has some good ones, too. These days I mark good fight/action scenes to come back to and study. It’s not just a matter of making the action-reaction of the moves reasonable. There is a level beyond that where you make the scene read so the reader can enjoy it instead of having to work hard to see in his own mind what the author was trying to show.

It seems to me….that a lot of the sf I wind up reading these days wallows in violence. Not that I’m against it, just that it doesn’t do good, readable violence. There are points in stories where a little action is a relief. But that clarity issue comes up. A fight needs to be as well-written as anything else in the rest of the book, even as well-written as those opening 13 lines.

I do have one scene where the protagonist is attacked by two goons, and the weapon at hand happens to be shovels. I do worry about it quite a bit as it was quite challenging to attempt. As it is a short story, most is blurred into narritive summary.

Cornwall's key seems to be to keep it short and to operate on a few levels. On one level, Sharpe might tell Sergeant Harper to take some men and do X, which Harper intuitively understands will accomplish tactical goal Y for purpose Z. Similarly, if one of the characters is watching the battle, you might get a tutorial on military tactics in the Brown Bess era. But when it comes to the one-on-one action, its more impressionistic. Instead of going blow by blow, it gives a general sense of what is happening but concentrates more on the grating, smashing, vaulting, thundering experience of it.

I was reading a webcomic a while back which had a story arc devoted to making fun of anime. The lead characters end up attending a highly improbable anime convention after not-quite accidentally driving their car off a bridge, after which they obtain transportation in the form of a tour bus full of Japanese school girls who, for reasons I can't explain, were attending an anime convention somewhere in the American Southwest. Said bus load is, for reasons that are much easier to understand than anything else in that story arc, attacked by a tentacle monster. After various other things happen, a transforming magical girl with a big sword shows up to fight the tentacle monster. Eventually, she says, "All right, that should be enough battle scenes for filler material. Now I can finally use my ultimate attack!"

By the way, in case you couldn't tell from the description I gave of where the story arc leads, you shouldn't peruse this comic if it is even possible for you to be offended by a webcomic. Really.

Anyway, back on track...there weren't really all that many pages of incomprehensible filler battle scenes. More importantly, I flashed back to all my favorite animes where the main character spends a month's worth of episodes getting beaten up by the bad guy before finally pulling out some ultimate technique or other which ends the fight decisively in one blow. I also remembered item 40 on the Evil Overlord list, "I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I have an unstoppable superweapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in reserve."

And yet, I also remembered this one time when I was losing at Halo. There were various reasons, the rules were set to replace all weapons with Rockets, we were playing three player and I was stuck with the quarter screen, my controller had a broken trigger which I hadn't fixed yet...and player one was the best player in that household, he'd beaten the game on Legendary with his wife's help (she was also playing). But still, that's no excuse for letting myself fall fifteen frags behind. Mind you, I wasn't losing on purpose or anything, I was simply losing. And with a 25 frag limit, I suddenly realized that I was really going to not win the round if I didn't do something about it. Also, player one's laugh was starting to irritate me.

So I finally pulled out my ultimate Halo skill, Rolling Running Riot, and started blasting away both members of the happy couple without letting either of them get any more frags.

Now the reason I hadn't been using that skill from the start wasn't because I was being chivalrous or sporting (though you can see how it would be kinda boring for them if I did). It was because using it takes the kind of total concentration that you can't use until you are absolutely determined to win. And you can't gain that kind of determination till you are in real danger of losing. It isn't like a superweapon, something external to yourself where you can push the button 'pochito' while chuckling.

Now, real fights are different from playing Halo in many important ways. But one thing that isn't different is the mental difference between fighting like it's an exercise and fighting like it matters. I think that you can tell a lot about a character using both outlooks, but they are still completely different points of view.

The Princess Bride used a lot of dialog and movement to get through the scenes. The characters discuss the techniques being used. Because the book did this, the fight scene between Wesley and Indigo was IMHO one of the best sword fights on the silver screen in a very long time.

Another book that I just recently read, described the first (very short) combat in detail and then let the battle take backstage as the MC went into survival mode. The reason I can't remember the name is that this is a fairly common convention when you can't have things exploding.

Starship Troopers also did a good job with sci. fi. battle scenes. Just enough technobabble without getting in the way of the action.

My favourite fight scene of all time is the one that comes at the end of Sergio Leone's "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" when Clint Eastwood and the other guy (apologies all Spaghetti western fans) face off and stare at each other for what feels like five minutes. Its probably about a minute, but on-screen it feels like a lifetime. Then they both lunge for the guns and less than five seconds later, one character is dead.

And it's not just those 60 or so seconds of silence and staring that builds up to those five second of violence, but it's the whole damn 3 hour movie.

For a fight scene to work, there has to be the proper build up. Violence has to be in contrast to what has come before; a brief outburst.

The second problem facing fight scenes is that there needs to an exact amount of balance between description and pacing. Most writers fall into the trap of a person thinking about the philosophy of their fight as a guy with a shovel runs at them. Even after avoiding that, the issue of how much detail should be made about each move comes up. Then, there is the problem of actually having a realistic description because in a sword or gun fight, where there are apparantly "rules" and "styles".

SF is largely a literature of ideas---and only rarely do the characters exchange blows while exchanging ideas. Still, a little here and there won't hurt.

Looking back at this as a writer I can see all kinds of difficulties in actually writing that fight as a scene, even though I lived it. After all how dramatic would "it was all a blur, and after it was over he was still alive" be?

The lesson in this to me is two-fold:

1. If I write a fight scene it will be all about the 'before' and the 'after' and with little of the 'while'.

2. I'll be sure to incorporate somehow at least a memory of the training that lets my MC win the fight.

Tournaments one knows that they will not die, rather at worse be embarrassed.

Combat one does not think so much on how to stay alive as one does in just destroying another enemy. Sword fights really don't happen on the battlefields- there is no time for intricate movements. In reality you just cut and thrust without much regard for personal safety. It's more like trying to clear brush and brambles than sword fencing. Back when I used to teach knife and sword in Oregon I used to offer anybody a $20 bill who could stop me from touching them with my sword. Nobody ever won that $20 bucks and I am not that good of a fencer. If I am willing to kill you no matter the cost you'll die even if I will. Duels were even worse. Like old west gunfights both parties usually died. One just lived a few hours longer.

Self defense in situations like Mike pointed out really have no prior history except a willingness to survive by acting and attacking rather than being dominated. Martial arts only helps if the victim is willing to act. Most victims who are beaten or attack make no attempt to fight back. According to the Memphis Police crime lab the most common response to attack wasn't physical it was verbal "Why are you attacking me?" That response did not work.

The reality of the situation is this: a savage man willing to do anything to hurt you will unless you kill him before he can. You will not reason with him, he will not tell you why, and you may not even know him.

In writing reality does not make for good fight scenes, unless your writing horror. Real fights very rarely have exchanges of blows. Unless it's a drunken brawl. Real fights start when you feel knife enter your kidney from the girl you picked up at the bar and then her boyfrend starts stomping your face in. Just for the money in your wallet. Or you are on guard duty and go by a tree to take a leak and the commando's knife enters your scrotum and a wire goes around your neck. You can learn more about real combat by watching national geographic series on predators and prey than you can any martial art movie. This is coming from someone who was raised in martial arts and has been teaching continuously since 1990.

To quote from a Spenser novel I read in high school (summarizing) "The best fights occur outside of the ring, after you've bashed them in their unsuspecting skull with a sap. A ball ping hammer to the fingers makes even the world champ humble."

Great fights in books are fantasy and most people know that. You don't have to have reality- just believabilty.

A fight, like a love scene, has to have a mini story arc. Rising action, Ultimate weapon, denoument in which the winner ensures that the loser isn't going to reattack (Like that bar scene in "Blast from the Past" where Nathan Fillion keeps apologizing, then punching.)

For most humans, the potential outcome of a combat situation significantly impacts the experience of the combat itself (even leaving beside issues such as rules of engagement, which do make quite a difference). But this is simply not true of the most successful fighters. A key element in turning a human into a highly effective killer is increasing the emotional distance between the act and the consequences, and this holds true for most types of armed combat (where raw strength and ferocity are not the key determining factors).

It is also true of non-lethal armed combat, but the emotional barrier that must be overcome is significantly lessened when the combatants know that no one is going to die, so specific training in overcoming it isn't usually necessary. Which is why non-lethal combat with weapons which closely simulate lethal weapons is an important step in overcoming the emotional barrier for lethal combat. It is also important to dissociate from sensory cues that would normally mark a fight as "real".

Of course no amount of training will succeed if the subject is basically unable to overcome the theoretical difficulty. That is, if the combatant isn't capable of taking action without consideration of what's at stake. In other words, the combatant has to be able to think only in terms of winning, without regard to the consequences.

Example 1, I beat the **** out of a guy twice my strength in a parking lot in my younger days because, after the first time I hit him, he was more concerned about getting hurt more than with hurting me. He fought hard, and I took quite a beating in the process of winning, but there was something pyschological at work that kept him from capitalizing on his immense physical advantages. He hesitated, he protected himself rather than trade blows, he tried to escape a grapple rather than lean in and exploit his strength advantage (I was biting him at the time, but it illustrates my point). It's not that he didn't fight hard or hurt me significantly; it's just that his efforts to avoid getting hurt cost him the fight. C

Example 2 was an Irishman I boxed. He was four inches shorter than me, weaker, slower, and less skilled (I think it's fair to say that he had little actual skill, but a great deal of Irish courage and elan). We drew the bout, and I looked like I had been gang-beaten by gorillas with crowbars for a week. No matter how hard or how often I hit him, he would just smile a bloody smile and keep coming right at me, windmilling his arms. I spent most of that fight on the ropes or in the corner, trying to get six inches of breathing room.

[Edited because I thought better of including Example 3]

Now isn’t that often the defining moment of a story or a character?
I was watching THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE movie last night. That’s the moment when Peter faces the wolf and Aslan holds back the troops to let him fight and kill it. We have many phrases for it. To be blooded. To be made. To break his cherry. Etc.

But our time is a relatively peaceful time, I think, to dwell of this so much. I read wathisnames book, ON KILLING. How strong was that innate prohibition on killing your own kind/species in the past when death was an everyday occurrence? Among hunter gatherers? Ancient Chinese? Egyptians? Mongols? Aztecs? Do degrees of separation from the sight of killings (butchering animals for food/pleasure and watching executions for entertainment) have a strong effect on the average person’s ability to overcome that repulsion?

I love a good fight scene, kudos to whoever mentioned Dune - one of my many favorite books - and unintentionally, in my story, I plan on having lots of good fight scenes, hopefully well paced, well flowing, etc.

Anyways...will post more later, but it's time for me to leave.

toodles!

I, like most readers, don't know a THING about fighting of any sort. Sure, I loved the Matrix, and despite the gore, I thought the battling in LOTR was fantastic. However, when I'm reading, I don't want to have to wade through all of that. I'm interested in the story itself. David eddings does pretty good fight scenes, in my opinion. The descriptions are brief and to-the-point, and the descriptions of blood and gore are also brief, and used only to convey the awfulness of what's going on.

Back to fighting...the people that end up winning a lot of fights are usually naturally good at fighting to begin with, so it's not unrealistic for them to win fights. In a recent book, I felt that it was unrealistic that someone was able to break the protagonist's arm with a billet of wood. Why? Because the guy was supposed to have survived all manner of life and death fights against far more dangerous foes over the course of many years. And some punk with a block of wood can break his arm? Puh-leese.

It's true that a lot of the choreographed fighting you see isn't very realistic, but you can always watch video of real fights (whether refereed or not). That doesn't necessarily give you any insight into what it's like to be in a fight yourself. Even being in a fight or two yourself doesn't give you much insight into what being in a fight is like for a character who is very different from yourself. I've never been in a fight where my own life was in danger, though I have had to fight to protect others. Some people might say that I have had my life on the line in one or two fights, but I never felt like my life was on the line, and that's what counts.

In the words of the immortal John Wayne in The Shootist: "It's always some six-fingered buster that's never held a gun before that gets you."