Bittercon: Let's all Fight, Portraying Hand to Hand Combat in Fantasy and Science Fiction Settings

[attackfish]

You are lying in bed with a book.  You’re exhausted, and you’re settling down for a relaxing evening, when suddenly you have a sword in your hands, and you’re right in the middle of a bunch of people hacking each other to bits.

Fantasy stories are frequently the stories of combat, of duels and wars, and tavern brawls, and sword cuts and bloody noses.  Even in Contemporary Urban Fantasy settings, hand to hand combat shows up almost as often as it does in Historical and Secondary World Fantasy.

Bizarrely, for a lot of people with an in depth knowledge of anatomy or fighting end up snickering their way through the scenes which are often choreographed with no accounting for realism.  Then there are writers who research painstakingly and build as accurate a battle scene as can be constructed.

To give some examples (in television and movies, because film makes it all more obvious)  Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s combat scenes are all kinds of fun to watch, but absolutely ridiculous.  This isn’t uncommon at all.  The beloved fencing scene in The Princess Bride is actually the same set of sword moves done twice and filmed at different angles.  On the other end of the spectrum is Avatar: the Last Airbender with its very accurate fighting, that is also all kinds of fun to watch, and includes fire, water, flying, and chucking boulders at people.

Is either one the right way?  Is there a right way?  Is there a wrong way, other than boring?  That’s the other thing.  Fight scenes, as action packed as they are by nature are difficult to write and keep interesting because they lack dialogue.  Do fight scenes more dialogue?  Creating a certain mood in a fight scene is another way to make it less boring, but that’s hard to do too.  Writing the combat becomes a matter less of reporting faithfully where each blow lands and more about conveying the internal dynamics of the characters involved.  And mapping the whole thing out in one’s head is fiendishly difficult as well.  What do we as readers and writers of fantasy get out of or want to see fight scenes, and what would you put into them?

Written for bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind.

Comments

[clarentine]

I’m going to caveat this response by noting that I write mostly close-in third person or first person point of view. In those POV frames, I have internal dialogue to work with, taking the place of the external dialogue that drives so many other scenes, and I lean on that to give purpose to the fight – and it’s that purpose that I really want to see in a fight scene, and which I work very hard to incorporate in my characters’ fights.

A well-choreographed fight scene is not a blow by blow catalog. The POV character is not going to remember each blow, anyway, or see every move his or her opponent makes. What matters, and what I try to depict, are the blows and moves that affect the plot of the scene. Is the POV character, a thief, expected to manipulate lock picks in the next chapter once she gets past this guard? Then if she takes a blow to the hands that breaks bones or otherwise makes picking locks a (more) difficult task, you’d want to get that on the screen. Does your character need to be out the door before the pursuit baying in the near distance catches up? Illustrate every little trip and slowing action that keeps him from gaining the door…and maybe toss in some internal dialogue as your character remembers what happened to the last guy those hounds caught up with before he could escape. If each action depicted increases tension, there should be no worries about the scene being boring!

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

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.

[clarentine]

I never want to do that again.

And you have, of course, just cursed yourself. *g*

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

*facepalm* of course.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

There's also the difficulty that if you have a real badass character, established as a powerful fighter, but you dwell on the things making them nervous, the setbacks, and the injuries without the things that they're doing well, do you make the reader wonder if they're really as good a fighter as you say?

[marycatelli]

In some series they have the new menace always take on the biggest guy on the good guys' side and make him look weak.

It makes him look weak. . . .

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the the Worf Effect (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWorfEffect).