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

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

For me, fight scenes in written fiction need a purpose. They need to show what's going on in someone's head, as related to the fight. A few years ago I wrote up a big discussion of this (http://barbarienne.livejournal.com/83297.html) using a scene from Nine Princes in Amber as an example.

As a reader I'm always annoyed by fight scenes where the narrative is a play-by-play but the blocking and stage directions don't make any sense (presumably because the writer isn't particularly good at visualizing fights). My gold standard for "bad" was a scene in a book where the heroine jumped on an opponent's back, and then kicked him in the throat with her foot, causing him to fly backwards, away from her. The author had completely omitted how the heroine moved from the guy's back to standing in front of him.

Unless a writer is really good at spacial visualization, it probably best to leave out the play-by-play and concentrate on the feel of the scene.

[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!

[zanzjan.livejournal.com]

I would really like to have more of a sense of the practical differences of brawling in zero or low gravity, if anyone wants to share some physics with me (-:

[zanzjan.livejournal.com]

Responding more to the main topic (I'm at work and apologize for my piecemeal participation at the 'mo.) As a reader I tend to find fight-scenes that are merely slug-it-out contests (either with fists or guns) kind of boring, unless either the way the characters fight, or what they say/do during the course of the fight, somehow provides either additional insight on the character or the unfolding plot. You brought up Avatar the Last Airbender, and that's a fantastic example of this: by associating very different martial arts forms for each of the types of bending, the very movements of the characters added an additional layer of emphasis to who and what they were.

As a reader, I tend to want my fight scenes to either be short or to provide me with additional information/insight/entertainment/satisfaction I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. As a writer, I don't tend to write a lot of fight scenes, and when I do it's often more about the dialogue during the altercation than the specific foot-moves and punches. I do try to make it make sense from a purely physical standpoint, though -- for big melees, lego people are a handy diagramming tool. (-:

[marycatelli]

Ah, the knowledge problem. . . .

I was watching the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie with my sister who fenced and the scene in the smithy. They were moving too quickly for me to pick out flaws, but my sister says -- it's nicely choreographed.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I had a look at one of my fight scenes.

I suppose it's OK to describe the character as moving like a combination of Fred Astaire and Miyamoto Musashi. I hardly described the actual detail of the fighting.

How about higher gravity?

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

One person in the fight is very good in 1G, and okay in 0G. But the fight is in 1.05G (picking a number I think is high enough for some differences, but not the stereotypical 1.5G.) And the other person is only moderately good, but used to that gravity.