Writing Fight Scenes by Marie Brennan

Author:Marie Brennan [Brennan, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: writing advice, how to, martial arts, fight scenes, combat
Publisher: Book View Cafe

As you can see, these are purely utilitarian, even in the cases where I started getting fancy. They primarily exist to mark boundaries and obstacles—walls, slopes, large pieces of furniture— and keep those things from accidentally wandering off to the other side of the combat space because I got turned around as to which way my character was headed.

The less specific you are about the movement of a fight, the less necessary a map tends to be. If your scene is primarily about the viewpoint character’s psychological reaction to violence, you may not need to remember whether the staircase was to the right or the left as she came in the door. But the more you bring spatial details into play, the more it helps to keep a record of them.

These particular maps are remarkably light in arrows; I thought I remembered the first one having a lot more. (Possibly there was another version, not in my box of papers from that book.) If a fight moves widely around the combat space or has multiple participants, I will frequently scribble arrows all over the page, to keep track of where everybody is—it’s really helpful to do the map itself in pen, and the arrows in pencil, so you can erase them at will. Because of my stage combat background, sometimes I’ll designate the sides as downstage, stage left, etc, and then jot down shorthand notes to myself about the action in the fight: “M runs DS, knocks #3’s blade wide SR, steps in, breaks elbow.” The point is to do something that will help me keep track of positions and movement, so I can visualize it well enough to then relay the necessary info to the reader. Otherwise I’ll come back to read the scene the next day and have no idea how it looked in my head. And if I can’t re-create that, the odds of the reader doing so are pretty small.

Some writers I know use figurines to help plot out their fights. These don’t have to be special; you could use Barbie dolls, if that’s what you have on hand. So long as the figures are all on a comparable scale, it can be a great help in thinking about positioning and movement. (Unless you’re writing about your characters fighting a giant, in which case, by all means choose wildly different models.) Few of them will be articulated enough to let you work out the individual moves—but for that, there are other techniques you can use.

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