Step 3: Language, Timothy
This can be split into two sections, dialogue and description. We will deal with dialogue first.
In fight dialogue is something that is common to many fandoms:
|
"Slayer."/"Slayee." |
Particularly if one of your characters is a smart mouth, you will need to be able to put in suitable dialogue as you write otherwise you will have that character acting out of character. As this will depend entirely on your characters and the fandom you are writing for, we have only two pieces of advice on this point. Firstly, writing out the fight 'grunts' (and this particularly applies to fandoms such as Power Rangers) is not a good idea and may conceivably reduce your readers to giggles. Focus on proper dialogue and the action and leave the 'hiyahs' to your reader's imagination. Secondly, mid-fight is not the place for a thirty-line soliloquy. Your dialogue should be kept short and snappy (see the three examples above).
Moving onto the description, word choice for your description is important. Fighting and action is a very visual subject matter. It works very well on screen in film and TV, but it can be hard to translate that to the written page and it can lead to over description.
Which of these two punches takes the longest to actually arrive?
|
- He clenched
his fist tightly, drew his arm back and pushed it forward at a lightning
pace, sending it surging towards his enemy's unsuspecting jaw in
a powerful right cross. |
The answer is the second one does. The first one tells you a lot about the punch, but most of that description gets in the way of the actual action, leaving you with the feeling that you're watching someone move in slow motion, and fight scenes should be something that feel as if they're happening at speed.
To avoid the slow-mo effect, keep your description simple. Use short words and short sentence structures to give the words more bite. Fragments, particularly one word fragments, can be very effective.
Which has more impact:
|
- He fell,
hard, tripping on the uneven ground, leaving him robbed of breath
and dazed. He ached so badly that he had no idea how he was going
to stand again. |
Again, it's the second one. Note: Fragments are grammatically incorrect (we would be remiss if we did not point this out!), so should be used carefully.
Also to bear in mind, your word choice should be varied. This is a basic rule of writing - repetition of the same adjectives gets tedious for both reader and writer - but in fight scenes, you may find you're more limited. Have a good thesaurus and dictionary to hand (if you use the former, make sure you double check in the latter in case your alternative doesn't mean quite what you think) so that if you find yourself constantly using 'hit' you can vary it with 'punch', 'strike', 'slap', 'thump'...
Tips:
- Keep it simple.
- Keep it short.
- Keep it snappy.