Writing 201: Fight Scenes
Greetings and stegnosis! …I don’t need laxatives, anyway. Today's amazing blogpost is about fighting and fight scenes specifically. I, who absolutely know how to fight, am nothing compared to the veteran general Sun Anne! So let’s give the floor to Lady Verbosa! And begin the glorious treatise on fight scenes by the great Sun Anne!
Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance…
…without fighting.
Wait, am I seriously saying no fighting when this whole post is about writing fight scenes? No, Sun Tzu is saying it. I’ll be using his quotes for all of the section headings, because the Art of War is amazing, and there are some excellent pieces of information in there whether you’re writing a fistfight, a drunken brawl, a battle, or a full-fledged war. So let’s set the stage for this post, shall we?
Ha! You think I’m just going to tell you what this post is about and set the stage without a fight? Yeah right! Oh, you’re challenging me to a duel for the information? So be it!
But before we can duel, we have to set the stage… Wait, damn it, you’ve tricked me! Well, I’ll let you win this time, Victor. After all, you’ve demonstrated your supreme excellence in breaking my resistance before I could even take off my glove to slap you.
In this post, I’m going to go over how to write a fight scene, looking at a variety of factors and strategies for anything from one-on-one combat to entire war scenes. I am going to be assuming that the story follows at least one point of view character and isn’t an omniscient pov. Not sure what your pov is? I have a whole post about that!
Some things I’ll cover today are how to set up your battle, how to choose your combatants and their technology level/weapons, figuring out the overall flow and objectives, the fight itself and realistic reactions, and of course how to finish the fighting. Or at least that’s the plan, unless Vivian starts chopping off my hands to get me to write less. We’ll see if Lady Verbosa strikes again!
He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not…
…will be victorious.
One key factor to lying in wait is that your audience knows that you’re doing so, and they know a fight is coming, or, when looking back, they can see that a fight was inevitable. You never want a fight to come out of nowhere for the reader, even if it's a complete surprise to the characters. That doesn’t necessarily mean foreshadowing. Often, it means planting. What is that, and how is it different? I think it’s time for some definitions!
Foreshadowing is a warning, indication, or advanced sign of what is to come.
Makes sense, right? If I’m saying that it shouldn’t be a surprise, then there should be some warning. Not necessarily, which is where planting comes in.
Planting is a brief, significant mention of something that will become important later on.
There’s obviously overlap, and planting is, in a very real sense, a type of foreshadowing, but two things tend to set them apart. First, foreshadowing is a little more heavy-handed. When something is foreshadowed, you can usually see it coming. Those ominous clouds forming on the horizon probably indicate trouble on the way.
(Vivian:) Jumping in a wee bit, foreshadowing is generally not explicitly obvious, but rather implied by tropes, environment, subtext etc.
(Anne:) Those are all indeed important parts of foreshadowing. Tropes, as I briefly describe when talking about character types, are genre dependent characters, events, items, actions, environments, and more. They can be almost anything, but the important thing about them is that they’re determined by genre. Tapping into your genre’s tropes can give you a great way to foreshadow what’s to come. Environment is also huge, as it’s something that’s often in the background but can have a huge influence on mood. And the subtext is very important, as I talk about in this gloriously long post (I swear, I’m getting better at being concise!).
Planting, on the other hand, puts something into the story that will be significant later, but it does it in a different context than it will be used later. For example, you might have a character with their love interest in a field of flowers, and have them search through the wildflowers to find a beautiful blue flower. They tuck it behind the love interest’s ear and say, “A beautiful flower for my beautiful flower. They say it can cure disease, but you’re my panacea.” Naturally at this point the love interest smacks them for being so cheesy, and the scene remains focused on the romance, with that little mention of the healing powers of the flower hardly worthy of attention.
Now, obviously, some readers will take note of it, but for most, the focus is on the cheesy pickup line. Then, at the climax of the story when the character is dying from poison, the love interest will see a flower and remember their words, and start a frantic search for the right kind of flower, praying the character wasn’t just making stuff up. When the character is poisoned, the reader might, at that point, think of the flower themselves, or they might not realize it until the love interest does.
The key point is that the first mention of the flower isn’t used directly as foreshadowing. It’s used in a different context for a different purpose, and then later the characters realize it can be used in another context for something important. When that happens, the audience has an ah-ha moment where things snap together, and the audience can marvel at how this solution was planted at the very beginning.
There are a lot of tricks to successfully planting things. If you’re too obvious about it, it becomes foreshadowing that lasts the span of the book or movie or whatever you’re making, which is exhausting for the audience who might constantly be expecting the character to get poisoned. By the time they do, the audience is over it. On the other hand, if you’re too subtle, the audience won’t be able to look back and find hints of it earlier in the story or film. Maybe on a second read/viewing they would, but let’s be honest, very few in your audience will do that. Some creators cater to those people, and you might, too, in which case, be as subtle as you want, but in general, it’s good if the average member of your audience can look back and remember whatever you’ve planted.
You also want to plant things as early as possible. When writing books, I try to get everything I’ll need for the climax planted within the first three chapters (out of 30+ chapters). In my five book series, I have things planted in book one that are going to come up in the climax of book five. However, planting things early means you occasionally want to bring them up to remind your audience that the thing exists. For my series-wide things, I try to have a mention or two per book, and for those within a single book, I’ll still only have a couple of references. They don’t have to be direct references, and again, they should be in different contexts. The love interest might see a blue flower and it reminds them of the one the character gave them. Nothing else needs to be said. One great thing about planting is that it helps prevent deus ex machinas, where something appears to come out of nowhere to save the day.
All of this is to say that when a battle comes up, you want to either directly preview it and explicitly forecast its coming, foreshadow and give strong implications through things like tropes and setting, or have it rely on planted information that all comes together. You, the creator, have been lying in wait the entire story up until the fight, and your audience needs to be able to see that one way or another.
Know the enemy, know yourself…
…your victory will never be endangered.
So how do you go about knowing these things? Well, first things first. Before you can start any kind of fight, you have to answer a fundamental question: who are you? Your point of view character, that is. I’ll be writing a post on narrative character types in the future, but the pov character is the character whose eyes you’re looking through, essentially. You first have to determine your point of view, and then figure out who the best person is to tell the story. For some people, this will be the same as the rest of the book. For others, it’ll require a choice. No matter what, figure out what your point of view is for the book as a whole. Insanely brief guide is first person pov = I/we pronouns, second person pov = you pronouns, third person pov = she/he/they/it pronouns, with limited third being inside a character’s mind/body and omniscient being like a camera watching from above. Got your point of view ready? Let’s go!
If you have a story in a single character first person pov, then you’re stuck. Single character third person limited (or on the limited end of the range), you’re also stuck. Those are your characters and you don’t get a choice in the matter. If you have second person or third person omniscient, then you can move between characters. It’s possible to have single character second person, but, well, second person is just weird. In multiple character third person limited, you are within one character’s pov at a time, but you can move around every so often (usually at scene or chapter breaks). I want to look at what happens when you have multiple characters available, whether because you’re omnisciently floating or you’re choosing one to stick with.
The key thing when choosing a pov character at any time is to pick the person with the most at stake, usually with the most to lose. In fight scenes, this is especially true. So for each moment, each scene, figure out who will lose the most if the fight turns for the worse. Then, obviously, make it turn for the worse until the very end.
(Vivian:) Quick jump in again! Stakes don’t necessarily mean material, life, or the likes. It can be emotional or other. An example is One Punch Man that I always love because his stakes are very different from traditional stories.
(Anne:) That’s a great example, since in his case, the actual physical part of the fight is far less interesting than the internal stakes. In terms of stakes, another fun one to play with is pride. Having characters too damn stubborn to back down or risk a threat to their sense of worth is an interesting way to reveal their priorities. Stakes can also involve other people, too, of course! You might be fighting to save the prince in distress, or fighting to support your friend even though you think their quest is foolish, or maybe you’ve sworn revenge and this is a deeply personal moment for you. In the heat of the battle, these stakes often give way to the instinct for survival (depending on how serious the fight is), and you don’t always need to spell out the stakes if they’re clear from the subtext.
If you want to switch pov characters in the middle of the fight, then again, just make sure you’re moving to the character with the highest stakes. Now, it often happens that the stakes are equivalent for various characters, in which case it can be fun to choose specific moments where those stakes are challenged the most and bounce between them for those moments only, then shift to the next person.
One strategy that can help reveal character and build up drama is to switch between different sides of the fight. It depends entirely on which characters you have access to, but it’s a good way to ensure that your pov character is always essentially on the losing end. However, your audience does need some victories to help them along!
To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy
Once you have your character figured out, you want to figure out who you’re fighting. Who your enemies are is usually dictated by story concerns, so I actually won’t spend time on how to pick the right people/groups/things, but when you’re writing your enemies, you need to understand them, their motives, their typical strategies, their personalities (and if it’s a group, the personality of their leaders or just the group’s personality), so many things.
So before you start your fight scene, really analyze your enemy. See the world from their eyes, and even if you don’t write from their point of view, you should be able to if asked. What are they thinking and feeling? Why are they doing what they’re doing? If you don’t know this, you can’t write a good fight scene. Does your audience need to know this? Not necessarily. But you do. If you don’t fully understand the enemy, then their moves and reactions will seem unrealistic and may cause problems for you down the line when any dissonance becomes worse or comes to a head.
Once you have your point of view character(s) and your enemies, you’re ready to get the fight going within the confines of your plot and story! The story may not allow your character to get your enemy into the battlefield that they want, but you need to be able to get all of your characters into the writing space that you want. But can you trick the enemy into going where you want? Well, you need one more thing…
Know the ground, know the weather…
…your victory will then be total.
All right, we’re going to be planting things, we know who we are, we know who the enemy is, what next? The setting, of course! Setting is a huge aspect of battles! First, you want to figure out scale. Is your fight going to take place in a single corner of a single room? A wrestling ring? A tavern? City streets? A farmyard? Rolling hills? A misty forest under the light of a waning moon? Figure out as many elements as possible because you can use all of that in the fight itself.
Elements of settings can lend themselves to the mood or other abstract elements of the scene, but they can also be good, concrete things that your characters can use. Is your character about to throw down with a rival in a tavern after a few too many drinks have been had? Well, what’s close at hand?
If you want to be a little cliche, grab that bottle and smash it! Why not? You’re not paying for it! Well, your character might have to, but that can be an interesting element to add to the post-fight scenes. But how about you grab the plate of boiling arnusk-eye stew from the tray of a poor server passing by and splatter it on your rival, dousing them in putrid, dense goo?
On a broader scale, how about if your army hides in the shadows of the trees, moving silently as the thick padding of moist leaves absorbs the sounds of your feet? You’ll have that ambush complete in no time! Oh wait, are there trackers following the imprints in the undergrowth and ambushing you in turn? Well, that didn’t turn out well!
It isn’t just the environment and props; other people in the environment can be used as well. If your revolution is racing down the city streets to begin its siege of the castle where the evil capitalists reign, how are you going to treat the innocent bystanders? What if your character accidentally shoots a child instead of a capitalist? How is that going to impact their ability to continue? People don’t like to kill, in general, though this can be manipulated, as Vivian discusses when talking about murder and killing. So how will this stray, unrelated person wandering into your scene at just the wrong moment impact the fight?
Using the environment as a weapon of some sort is an excellent way to keep your fight going and make it far more interesting than a simple battle between two or more individuals. Which leads us to our next subtopic, because…
Even the finest sword plunged into salt water will eventually rust
You grab a bottle and smash it, that’s a weapon. That might be the only weapon your characters have in their fight. But often, fights involve more deliberate weapons chosen in advance. Vivian has a great breakdown of weapons, and you can use it to figure out what kind of weapon you want, and what kind of damage you want to deal.
Your world’s technology level has a huge impact on your potential weapons as well, and keep Vivian’s four criteria for weapons in mind: they need to be convinced to work by a user, simpler design is better design, anyone should be able to use them at a basic level, and the deadliness needs to be controlled. So think about what your world has that could be used as a weapon. What are the people likely to use and why? What kinds of damage are acceptable, and what isn’t? Are there formal or informal codes of warfare? Does slapping someone with a glove indicate a challenge to a duel, or is that just how you say hello?
You need to figure out what kind of damage your weapons will do because that will dictate the verbs that you use for it. You can use weapons in unusual ways that use unusual verbs, like smashing a sword against someone’s head, but you’re usually going to be slashing or stabbing, and you want to have that vocabulary ready to go. Interesting, specific verbs are always good, but as long as you stay active, don’t be afraid of simple verbs. Sometimes all that your audience needs to know is that the sword is doing its thing.
Passive voice can be a problem in fight scenes, but it can also be used purposefully. Or should I say, you can also use it purposefully. There, that’s a little more active! Passive voice avoids blame and makes it appear that things are happening on their own, essentially. Active voice names a doer and puts that doer in the active position. When you’re dealing with a fight, you generally want doers doing things, not things happening on their own. But if you want to hide who is doing an action, passive voice is definitely your friend. You can slip it in and no one will even notice in some cases, letting you subtly build up suspense and tension without the audience even being directly aware of it.
Overall, be deliberate as you set up your setting and environment, and make sure your weapons work for what you want. Stay active as much as possible, but passive voice can be effective in moderation.
Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night…
…and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
We’ve been setting up a lot, haven’t we? Surely we’re at the point where we can start the actual fight, aren’t we? Well, just one more little thing first: what are your goals in this fight? You the creator need to have one or more goals that you need to achieve, or else you wouldn’t want to include the fight in the first place, and every single character involved, whether pov character, enemy, or that poor random child in the wrong place at the wrong time, all of them need to have a goal as well, whether to defeat the villain or just get home safely.
The number of goals you have is partially determined by how long and in-depth the fight is. If it’s a playful rumble between allies to let off some steam, you might only have a few goals; perhaps you’re hoping to create a stronger connection between the characters, or perhaps you’re planting the seeds of future conflict or betrayal. If you’re writing a multi-scene, complex battle involving multiple characters over an extended amount of time (time meaning either the amount of time it takes the audience to get through it or else time within the story itself), then you want to have a goal for every character and every scene. Why do you want to show each particular angle of the fight that you show? What is driving you to include this, and not that? You want to be able to defend your choices even if no one ever asks you to.
It can help to lay out each character in a table and write their goals and motivations, and include your own goals and motivations in including the various characters and scenes. Of course, not everyone likes planning in advance, and it’s fine to just write and see what happens. But if you work that way, then after it’s created, go back and see if you can identify all of this information. You might have to adjust your story slightly, or you might need to adjust the goals and motivations that you started with.
Energy may be likened to the bending of a crossbow…
…Decision, to the releasing of a trigger.
We did it! We’re finally at the fight itself! You’ve landed the first punch, fired the first shot, blown up the first planet, and it’s on! How do we actually write conflict while keeping it engaging and realistic?
First, in terms of language. You want to use concrete language. Concrete language is language that deals with things that exist in the physical world, aka things accessible to the senses. This is in contrast to abstract language, which are ideas and concepts with no physical referents. A fight isn’t the time to talk about freedom, even though that might be what you’re fighting for. A fight is the time for pulsing heartbeats and searing pain as your knuckles smash into the doughy flesh of your opponent giving way under your force and jostling sickeningly, sending your opponent reeling to the ground as blood splatters your face, a hot, sticky reward for your efforts.
Let’s talk pacing with writing. Short sentences signal action. They punch. But you don’t want all short sentences even though you want to keep it moving. The occasional longer sentence works well. As always, variety is a good thing. However, you’ll probably have more short sentences than usual in a fight scene. Use active verbs. Dialogue will probably be limited in most kinds of fight, but there are types of fight where dialogue is as important as the physical weapons.
Try to view your fight scene in terms of moves. For each move, there will be an action: the move itself. This should be concrete (as in, available to the senses, something the character can see/feel/hear and potentially taste/smell). It’s external as well, and creates the action.
Then, we have the reaction. First, your character will react instinctively, then more rationally. What does that mean? Something instinctive is often emotional, as emotions tend to be primal and without rationale. Sometimes they’re physical, though you want to make sure it’s something you don’t have conscious control over. Flinching is a common one, or crying out. It’s instinctive.
Then we get more rational with a deliberate action (or rather, reaction). These might be movements, such as dodging or bracing, that don’t require much thought but are still deliberate, or an action that requires thought, such as casting a spell of protection or striking back while the enemy’s guard is down. Often after this, you’ll get thoughts, though it depends on how close your pov is. This might be something like “That was close” or “I barely avoided that.”
Say an axe is about to slice your pov character:
The axe slashes through the air and pierces her skin. Panic floods her as she howls in pain. She gasps in air, struggling to gather her wits and push past the pain. Tears in her eyes, she raises her sword with her remaining hand. That fucker is going down!
There are plenty of exceptions, of course, times when you want to skip certain elements, or change the order. Still, the essential order of action -> reaction should be maintained, and within the reaction, you want to keep the essential order of instinctive/unconscious -> rational/conscious. Things like where you put internal monologue within the rational/conscious, however, are entirely up to you and your character.
If the mind is willing…
…the flesh could go on and on without many things.
Now, if you’re getting the flesh in your fight scene to go on and on with what you want them to do, you have to start by defining where the flesh is and what it’s doing. In the future, I’m going to write a post about how to write sex scenes, and there’s one big thing sex scenes and battle scenes have in common: you must keep track of your body parts! Unless you’re writing parody or comedy, you don’t want your character holding a sword in one hand, a shield in another, and a dagger in another.
(Vivian:) Unless the species actually have more limbs than a human! Like my Djonee species with 4 arms!
(Anne:) And in that case, you want to remember that they have one arm left that needs to be accounted for! Actually, this is a really good point for scifi/fantasy: if your character has an unusual number of limbs, USE THEM!!! I read an otherwise amazing book where one species of alien had four arms, which was a really cool detail, and it was just… never used. Like, in physical descriptions, they would be described as having four arms, but they never actually used their extra arms for anything. Every single scene, only two arms were used. I was so disappointed.
(Vivian:) In my story, Adva, a Djone, uses four arms to more easily carry a person at one point.
(Anne:) See? So many options with additional limbs! Similarly, if your character has fewer limbs, take that into account!
If you’re writing and you’re a visual person, then definitely try sketching out the scene. A few key frames will help you remember where everyone and everything is so that you can keep things straight. For visual formats, it’s usually a little easier because you can see things, but it can still be easy to lose track.
Now, just because you’re keeping track of all of these limbs doesn’t mean that you need to write where every single limb is at all times. But you, the creator, need to know! Generally speaking, you want to indicate when a limb is doing something significant or if you’re planting or foreshadowing something to come. And generally speaking, you don’t need to specify whether left or right, as that often feels forced. “He held a sword in his right hand and a shield in his left hand” is pretty clunky unless there’s a very good reason for specifying which is which. Instead, you could just say, “he held a sword and shield” and let people assume he’s doing it in his hands. And really, they probably know if he’s right- or left-handed or else assume right-handed, so again, unless it’s really relevant, you don’t need to specify.
One time where it might be good is in a situation like the sword duel in Princess Bride when both Indigo Montoya and Wesley start the fight left-handed only for Indigo to dramatically reveal that he’s not actually left-handed, followed shortly by Wesley dramatically revealing that he’s not left-handed either. Here’s the sword fight in full, just because it’s superb. Enjoy the conversation beforehand, too, which is a great way to set up the fight with character development and motives.
Here, the hand that the sword is being held in actually matters! This is also a great example of a scene where the dialogue is a huge part of the fight, so while the action portions might use short, punctuated sentences, the dialogue provides a humorous counterpoint.
Appear weak when you are strong and strong when you are weak
Feigning weakness is a classic strategy, but I actually want to touch on that last part, and the dangers of appearing too strong when you’re weak. Because seriously, for the love of Divinum, have characters react realistically to injuries! Unless you’re doing comedy, you don’t want your characters turning into the Black Knight!
Real people take real damage, and even superheroes aren’t immune. For all that bravado and appearing strong when you’ve taken serious damage is a good strategy, damage is still damage. Bravado is different from being fine.
When you surround an army, leave an outlet free…
…Do not press a desperate foe too hard.
Blows have been exchanged, spaceships destroyed, battles won or lost. One side has clearly won, and one side lost. Or perhaps the odds are even, but one side sees an advantage in slipping away. The battle is over, and it’s time for you, Victor, to be named victor.
Ending a fight can be simple or complex, but there will always be a moment when nothing more can be done, and at that moment, you want to leave yourself some flexibility. If you kill someone off, be sure you’re not going to need them later. Every death needs to be deliberately thought out, and even then, you might leave yourself some wiggle room. There’s a reason why people in Marvel movies die by falling off things–you never actually see their death, and then voila, they’re back in a movie or two!
You probably don’t want to be that obvious, but leaving yourself space where they could reasonably recover and come back later isn’t the worst idea. Even if you have no plans for it, those plans might change. Only show an explicit death if you’re really, really sure about it. This includes minor characters, too. Just like in real life, killing someone shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Now, you can show a death to an extent, of course. I had a minor character who I thought I might want to bring back in a later book, but I also wanted her killed in front of my protagonist, so I went with a bullet to the gut: usually fatal, but the protagonist immediately leaves at that point, and a few people sympathetic to the shot character remained, so I figured it was within the realm of possibilities that I could bring her back if needed. I ended up not needing to, so for all intents and purposes, she did in fact die in that scene. But there was just enough wiggle room for future expansion if needed. As Vivian says in zhir rules of worldbuilding, you always want to open doors, not shut them, so if you’re going to shut the door on a character’s life, you want to be sure that doing so opens doors in other ways and doesn’t just lead to a dead end.
A kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being…
…nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.
One thing you have to make sure to do is have consequences for your fight, no matter how small or inconsequential the fight seems. It’s easy to show consequences if it’s the fight at the climax of your story, but even if it’s just a little squabble early on, there need to be consequences. If there aren’t, then why did you include the fight?
If you identified your goals in advance (or went back to identify them), then it’s often easier to see what the fallout needs to be. But in addition to story concerns, make sure to look at your characters as people (or aliens, or whatever). Fights have a real emotional cost, and there’s often a physical cost, too, no matter how minor the fight is, even if the fight is done playfully or without malicious intent.
Look carefully at the action of the fight scene. How would you feel after this? Look at it physically first, as that’s often easier. Now, if your character actually received injuries, that’s an easy step. Identify those injuries. I recommend writing them down somewhere. You don’t want that wounded leg to switch from the left side to the right side because you forgot. In addition, make sure the injuries last a realistic amount of time! Do some research on the types of injuries you’re inflicting, and look at timelines for recovery. You might need to adjust the injuries they receive to better reflect the healing timeline you need.
The recovery time of your injuries also depends heavily on the technology and/or magic available in your world. Even if you have instant healing, it’s good to have some echo of the injury for serious injuries, like a memory of pain in the body, or the character instinctively protecting the injured area even though it’s not injured anymore. This helps emphasize the severity so that the reader understands the impact.
If you don’t have advanced medicine, be aware of things like disease or all the bacteria and viruses that swarm into openings in the body. Tetanus, sepsis, and gangrene were common causes of death back in the day thanks to cuts or similar injuries, so if your character gets slashed with a sword and you want them to live, make sure you show them caring for the injury.
Unsure what diseases or illnesses there might be? Vivian has a post for that! And curious how to adapt that to a fantasy world? I have a post for that! Whatever you choose, make sure to make it realistic to your world and technology level. And remember that even if your fight doesn’t leave lasting impacts, your characters might just be plumb tuckered out afterwards and need a nap.
Fights also leave a mark psychologically. Vivian and I go into some of the consequences of trauma in our post on (appropriately) trauma within our character series. We look at a lot of long-term trauma, but also abrupt traumas that you might get with fights, such as relationships ending, loss of status or power, and, of course, betrayal. Even in playful fights, you might have a flash of betrayal or suddenly have doubts about another character’s feelings towards you. Maybe they landed that blow a little too hard for it to just be a game… jump to the other character’s pov, and they’re wondering if maybe you had a look in your eyes that was a little too blood-thirsty. Doubts creep in, and you as the creator can take advantage of this to drive a wedge between your characters. Because let’s be honest: you don’t want your characters getting along too well!
And finally, on a broader scale, the world is often changed in some way. There will be ripples from even the smallest fight, though of course larger conflicts leave a greater mark. Try to figure out how the consequences might play out, and be creative. If you’re doing a small-scale conflict, maybe a different character later down the line is less willing to trust the first person to throw a punch, or the one that pulled the underhanded move to win. If it’s a battle, maybe the losers make their way to a nearby village and whine and moan and turn the villagers against them (or earn their favor), or maybe one of the victorious soldiers–not one of your main characters, just an unnamed character–exults in their victory by abusing their power in that nearby village, turning the village and eventually the entire nation against your main characters, who weren’t even aware of the incident when it happened! How can they be blamed?! But they can be, and if they were in charge of the soldiers, they likely will be.
Overall, remember that fights don’t happen in isolation. There’s always a consequence, no matter how small. After all, as I asked earlier, if there wasn’t, why did you include it? So make your fights meaningful, and traumatize those characters!
Summa summarum
Well, Lady Verbosa appears to have struck again, dealing a fatal blow to my dreams of a short post. Her arrow pierced my ambition, my heart fell, and I sighed with resignation. Another post, another excess of words. See? You can use the action -> reaction structure even for metaphorical battles! Despite Lady V’s victory, I hope you found these enlightening words.
(Vivian:) 🔪🔪 🔫 🔫 Stab stab pew pew
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Copyright ©️ 2024 Anne Winchell. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as fighting and how to write it are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, all language or exact phrasing is individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
We at Stellima value human creativity but are exploring ways AI can be ethically used. Please read our policy on AI and know that every word in the blog is written and edited by humans or aliens.
