Introducing Fight Scenes
There are a wide variety of action scenes and fight scenes that you will come across in your time as a writer. Some are easy to write. Person A walks into a room, doesn't see person B and is therefore surprised when Person B knocks them unconscious. Some are vastly more complicated. The purpose of this course is to help you perfect the simple ones - once you have them down, the complex ones are a snap.
Fight and action sequences aren't easy. They do require practice. Sometimes, they require you to go the extra yard and try something for yourself. By this we do not mean attempting some of the gymnastics that are by definition involved. We are not athletes or trained gymnasts and our back wouldn't thank us if we tried. But what you can do is walk through the steps. If you've stepped forward on your left leg, how easy is it to then kick with your left? If you're balanced on one leg, how practical is it to throw a right hook?
Other ways you can practice: Pay attention to the fight scenes you see in TV shows and films. You can learn a huge amount about what the human body really can and can't do in them. Watch professional wrestling from time to time. As fixed and as fake as it is in sporting terms, the gymnastics involved with the moves, particularly the high-flying moves, are real and it is a very real resource when it comes to seeing how the human body reacts in a fight.
Lastly, it doesn't matter if you don't know your round house kicks from your thrust-parry-ripostes. The chances are your readers don't know that level of detail either and so will be confused if you just toss jargon at them; and if by chance they do know some form of martial arts (from fencing to judo to rapier work to karate) and you get your jargon wrong, you may either annoy them or cause them to laugh (this is something we have learned the hard way and would not wish the experience on anyone else).
The three most common types
of fight scene are:
One on One
Many on One
Many on Many - a mêlée or major battle, in other words
All of the 'step' essays are broken down into two main sections. Firstly, the primary explanation, which is usually between three and four paragraphs. Then secondly a few quick tips. Anything that shows up like this:
| Introducing Fight Scenes |
is an example of what the essay is discussing, or is something for you to try.
The first four 'step' essays are written from the point of view of writing One on One fights. Step 5 introduces the idea of more than one opponent, while Step 6 deals with the biggest sorts of fight scenes. The last essay, 'Other Types of Action', deals with anything else you may come across while writing action.
So. You have your hero, you have your villain. They need to have some form of confrontation and the chances are, that confrontation needs to be a fight of some description. But where do you start?