Fight scenes are difficult as it is when you have to keep track of actions, gear, styles, locations, and several other factors. Then, you end up considering the pacing, which turns out to be essential. Can’t go too fast without it being rushed or sloppy. Can’t go too slow without it being boring or immersion breaking. So, what do you do?
Clearly, you have to find a middle ground. The battle needs to be fast in terms of actions, but also be easy to follow. Books don’t have the luxury of video games, movies, and shows where people watch with their eyes. We read the words and hope our brains can translate everything into a cohesive fight. This goes for the author and reader. Too much cluttered info can mess things up to the point where nobody knows who is doing what. An impatient reader might just skip to the end of the scene to see if someone dies and then move on.
I think the easiest way to write a long fight scene without losing the audience is to NOT treat it like a straight line scene. Just like the overall story, you should make it more like a rollercoaster. There can be a bunch of fast moves with maybe an injury, but nobody gets the upper-hand enough to win. Things slow down a bit as the fighters regather their wits or try to maintain momentum depending on if they are winning or losing. Another rush of action that can change the tide, but not push far enough. You slow things down again and then go for the finale. You can kind of see how a fight could work like a multi-act play on its own. The tension rises, falls, and rises again, but never goes away entirely.
As exciting as a fight scene can be for the author, I’ve found that working on it slowly helps with pacing. This could seem counterintuitive since you’re building tension and making things go quickly. You might fear that you’ll lose the pace and things will be too slow, but this is more for clarity of actions. One of the dangers of writing too fast here is that moves won’t make sense when a reader thinks about them. For example, a character sweeping the legs out from under an enemy who is standing out of reach. You can easily lose track of where everyone is, which makes a mess of the fight pacing for the reader because they’re too busy trying to decipher your scene.
Some tricks to help with this specific issue:
- Create a simple timeline of actions even after finishing the scene.
- A crude map to help you note where characters are standing.
- Reading over a paragraph of pure actions before moving on to the next one. I recommend this one because if you find out something doesn’t make sense here then it could change everything that comes after it.
You’ll notice that this has a lot to do with clarity. I feel that a clear fight scene creates the best pacing because people know what is happening. There isn’t a sense of having missed an action or forgetting who is doing what. Not the easiest thing to pull off on the first try, so editing and beta readers help here. I mean, the author tends to know exactly what is happening in the moment. Going back or getting a second opinion, you can find that you made some major mistakes. Lost track of how many times I came across an action that messed up the pacing because I couldn’t figure out what was happening. Usually involved a body part twisting in a way that didn’t seem natural or possible. Live, learn, and keep on editing, I guess.
Legends of Windemere 