attackfish

I'm just coming off of writing 9000 words of pure fight scene, and it took me one hell of a long time to block the whole thing out, and more practically, I had a list of things that had to happen at certain points (one character had to be almost mortally wounded, one character had to succumb to mind control, another had to fight it off, the character with throwing knives had to run dangerously low on weapons, and one character had to be run down almost to zero and go into emotional shock). So I framed the fight to include those things. I write most scenes that way, with a bullet pointed list of what has to happen, but fir fight scenes, it's even more important. I also split the fight into quadrants so I could focus on them in turn. Throughout the fight scene, I made sure that I showed two of the characters, who are close friends who become lovers, fight in close proximity and watch each other's back. I wrote the play by play, but mostly to show some of the characters doing some very unexpected things, and lingered on the emotional impact of the fight.

I never want to do that again.