Counter as it is to a writer’s instincts, ‘they struggled’ paints a far more vivid picture than describing the exact position of each combatant’s arms.So, if you’re not describing what your characters are doing, how do you communicate the action? 2.Intensifying the pace of your writing can communicate the immediacy and suddenness of conflict. This fight feels slow, and that feeling is paramount – if your reader is instinctively bored by a fight, you can’t convince them it was exciting by describing more of it.Instead, let them know the outline of the fight and they’ll imagine the rest. I was in trouble.This might be exactly what you imagine happening, but the excessive stage direction stretches the moment out, turning a frenzied series of blows into a dissection of body language and intent. Turning ninety degrees to the side, he brought his right forearm up to counter the blow, formed a fist with his left, and threw it at my outstretched jaw.Every time a new person takes an action in thisPassage, Goldman starts a new line, making the reader encounter each attack asThis ‘new line’ technique is pretty cheesy – it works for Goldman because his story is a deliberate homage to adventure yarns – but short, to-the-point sentences are a must for any fight scene. In The Princess Bride, William Goldman writes a brilliant sword fight, and perhaps the most enjoyable fight scene ever put to paper:The cliffs were very close behind him now.Inigo continued to retreat the man in black continued advancing.Equivalent of a sudden move. Fights happen quickly and your description needs to match that.
Best Samurai Fight Scene Series Of BlowsMcdonald mimics this experience for the reader by having longer passages between the single sentences of violence:Instead of looking who had pushed him, Fletch tried to save himself from falling. In Gregory Mcdonald’s Carioca Fletch, the protagonist attempts to get his bearings as he is set upon by unseen assailants. The key is to thrust the reader into the thickOf the action, and to do that they need to experience the fight through aThat’s not to say that you have to suddenly adopt the first person. This is another reason thatHovering around the fight describing the actions of both characters limits howGripping the experience can be. 3.Excitement when you describe something objectively. Mimicking perspective leads to a more energetic, visceral experience, which tends to make a fight more compelling, but perhaps you want the opposite. The opposite can also be trueOf course, as with all the advice in this article, there are reasons to do the exact opposite. You can also write to match the perspective of the attacker: there’s something especially brutal about a villain methodically taking an opponent apart. Instead of ‘Adam hit him hard in the chest, again and again’ useThere are too many adverbs in your fight scene. 4.Verbs not adverbs (and avoid passive voice)That. Keep in mind that your actual first step to improving your fight scene is understanding how you want your reader to feel about it. In this way, there are few ‘bad’ writing techniques – just different effects that either work with or against your intent for a scene. The taste of blood, the ringing in their ears, the ache of their injuries.Evan Hunter wrote fantastically brutal fight scenes by stating a simple, physical act and then following it up with evocative sensory information:He pulled him to his feet, almost tearing the collar… He heard the slight rasp of material ripping.That description, from his short story collection Barking at Butterflies, adds more physicality to the encounter than any physical description could.Use sensory information to make a fight scene relatable. In contrast, physical situations do tend to come with a lot of sensory information. Agency – a person’s ability to effect the world aroundThem – is a huge part of compelling fight scenes, and the passive voice is allAnother reason description doesn’t work in fight scenes is that immediate, physical situations aren’t characterized by a heightened degree of analytical thought. While the reader can’t call to mind theExact experience of the fight on the page, fear of injury is something everyoneThe written word is capable of many feats other typesOf media can’t match, but one thing it isn’t is visual. It depends whether you’re trying to provide action or communicate violence, but for the latter this can be incredibly effective.Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club isn’t about fight scenes or action, but communicates physical violence fantastically:Tyler said, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”Two screens into my demo to Microsoft, I taste blood… My boss doesn’t know the material, but he won’t let me run the demo with a black eye and half my face swollen from the stitches in my cheek.Here, we don’t get any details of the fight, don’t even have it confirmed that a fight took place, and yet the visceral nature of the missing scene is more powerful because of it.Completely, but remember that you can create a powerful sense of what’sHappening by referencing the results. Make the result clearThe opposite of writing a fight scene, but something worth considering in many cases, is to skip the violence entirely. You can summon incredibly detailed information through these minor descriptions: the pull needed to tear a collar is something most people can appreciate, so they understand the violence of the grip without ever consciously considering it. Not everyone has been held up by the collar, but everyone has heard fabric tear and tasted their own blood. Your fight scene as an action sceneIt’s useful, in this sense, to understand your fight scene as just one type of action scene, similar to chase scenes, arguments, and even sex scenes. In books, fights don’t bring so much of their own context, and if a reader doesn’t understand who is fighting, why, and what the consequences will be, they’re far less likely to be thrilled. We can see the people taking part, appreciate their emotions, witness their speed and flexibility, even wince at their pain. Starwind virtual san pricingIf we care about Character A and Character B, and have a preferred outcome to the chase, now the scene matters. If we know the stakes of Character B escaping, the scene is much better.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorMark ArchivesCategories |