How I Craft a Fight Scene
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Fight scenes.
Be it a comic book, a movie or TV show, or prose fiction like I write, fight scenes are a hallmark of superhero fiction.
After all, if you’re going to give your colorfully costumed characters superstrength and an equally powered enemy, you’ve just gotta have them fight.
But fight scenes are hard. They’re more than just two characters beating each other up (there can be three characters beating each other up!). They can be tense or terrifying, tell a story, build up a later confrontation, or be the climax of an entire story or series. They can be gritty, realistic, fantastical, epic, and everything in between.
And this is just for fight scenes in general. Superhero fight scenes go above and beyond because the characters can do literally anything, within the confines of their powers at least.
Plus, fight scenes are most often associated with movies and TV. And superheroes are most associated with comic books. I write prose fiction. Writing a fight scene or an action scene in a novel is cranking the difficulty to hard mode.
You can’t use a bunch of highly choreographed flashy moves, big explosions, and a techno-rock soundtrack to put together a fight scene that captures the audience until you decide to end it by having one character beat the other. You have to be able to string words together in a way that doesn’t bore your audience, and novels weren’t really made with fight scenes in mind.
And there are so many different ways to approach a fight scene. Do you want it to be gritty and real, or do you want it to defy your audience’s imagination? Is it supposed to be an adrenaline-inducing spectacle to fill the time, or does the fight itself tell its own mini story? Is your fight scene part of a more kid-friendly story like The Adventures of BLUE EAGLE, or something that can have a little more punch like SWITCH and the Challengers Bravo?
There are so many wrong ways to craft a fight scene, but….actually there are also just as many right ways to craft a fight scene. It’s just that it’s easy to do the former and very hard to do the latter. As I said, fight scenes are hard.
Hence the title of this article, “How I Craft a Fight Scene”. It was originally going to be “How To Craft a Fight Scene”, but I realized that I really don’t know how to, and it ain’t my impostor syndrome talking. I may give writing advice, but I don’t claim to be a writing expert. I’m developing my own skills and sharing them with you as I go.
But one thing I’ve noticed when thinking about how I craft a fight scene is that there are three things that I call Focuses that I, well, focus on. They are at a very macro level and don’t really get down to the nitty gritty of word choice and sentence structure, but more with actually making your fight scene more than just an exchange of punches, laser beams, or LitRPG skills and numbers. Every fight scene you create will have some element of each Focus, each of which can be “dialed” in one direction or another.
Those three Focuses are Story, Spectacle, and Realism.
And I’d like to take a look at each one and how I consider them when putting together my own fight scenes.
Focus #1: Story
This is a pretty far reaching Focus. “Story”, in this context, means the story of the fight itself.
Even within a wider story, a fight scene tells its own story. One character might be on the backfoot, only to gain the upperhand through trickery later on. A fighter might exploit another’s weakness, or might find themselves unable to play to their strengths.
A fight tells its own story. Even absent the context surrounding it, a good fight scene is rarely just a series of punches, kicks, and eyebeams until one character falls. And so the question becomes how far in either direction do you want to go.
On one end, you can just have your characters trade blows, maybe with the hero slaying the villain upon realizing The Power of Friendship and having his LitRPG numbers suddenly go up.
On the other end, you can have your fight be a chapters and volumes-long tale of twists and turns, like a shonen fighting anime.
I have to give a big shout out to YouTuber TotallyNotMark for this video breaking down the pacing of a fight scene. He is right in that it is something hardcore pro wrestling fans like I used to be have known for a long time, though I had never had it mapped out like he did, nor had I ever applied this outside of wrestling.
But if you’ve watched wrestling long enough, you’ve probably noticed this pattern in the matches:
First, the babyface and the heel are about evenly matched. The face might be better, even, and it’s annoying the hell out of the heel. At this point, though, no one has done anything outside of the rules of the match or engaged in any unsportsmanlike conduct.
Then the heel gets the upper hand, usually by cheating. A low blow while the referee wasn’t looking, or perhaps their manager outside hit the face. Now the heel is at an advantage, working some injury on the face. Working the leg is a very popular one throughout the match. If this is a tag team match, this is where the slightly less popular face is getting worked over by both heels.
We get a bit of a fake out where the face seems to be getting their second wind, but now is down and the heel(s) is/are working them over.
Something happens that gets both guys on the floor. The heel might have gotten frustrated and went for the steel chair, but the face countered at the last second. Maybe that got the referee knocked out, or maybe the ref is doing the ten count. In a tag team match, the face might have moved out of the way of a double team attack, causing one heel to hit the other. If it’s a tag team match, this is the part where both legal men in are crawling towards the corners while the crowd is getting louder and louder. This ends when the face makes what’s called the “hot tag”.
With the new, fresh, more popular face in (almost always The Rock back when I used to watch the then-WWF), they start absolutely wrecking both heels. The crowd pops, it’s absolute chaos and pandemonium. Except a manager to be knocked out, the heel to be hit with the very weapon they brought into the ring when the ref’s back was turned, and a finisher and three-count to end the match.
Personally, I think a good fight scene, insofar as you are pitting hero vs villain, should follow something relatively close to that setup. Not always that exact setup or without deviation, but some element of that should be there.
A fight’s story shouldn’t replace your larger story like it often does in anime, but there should be a story on its own there. Think of mini stories to tell within your fight.
Perhaps your characters are moving toward making an opening so that one of them can deliver a decisive finishing blow. You have the setup, which is the realization that this is the only way to defeat the villain, and then the journey as they work on a plan to expose the villain’s weak point, and then the triumphant climax as the heroes capitalize on it.
Or your character is on the run from a superior enemy. You have the setup, that they cannot defeat the opponent, and then you have a series of steps they need to take to do something that would stun the villain long enough to get away, and then you have the payoff where something happens that distracts or momentarily incapacitates the villain enough to get away.
It could be two characters fighting over a gun. It could be your hero trying to deactivate a device that’s stealing his powers. It could be a character that is drugged fighting to overcome their current weakness.
The story doesn’t have to be something out of Dragon Ball. There doesn’t have to be as many story beats in any of your fight scenes as there are in the Cell Games. I don’t, but I also make sure that my big fights aren’t just two characters exchanging blows until one falls. I make sure that each of my big fights has at least one major “event twist”--meaning something that occurs that notably changes the dynamics of the fight–or some sort of exterior goal other than win.
For that last part, that could mean almost anything. Hack a computer, create an opening in the villain’s defenses to exploit, or just overcome one’s own hang ups or insecurities in a bout of character development.
Focus #2: Spectacle
This might be my simplest Focus, but also a very important one. It’s the moment-to-moment choreography of your fight.
If Story is the broad path the fight takes, then Spectacle is each punch and kick thrown.
To be clear, we are not talking about word choice. We are talking about, as I said, the choreography. And you need to think well in advance of how much of a “spectacle” you want your fight to be, which is the main decision that’s going to inform each punch and kick once you get there. That’s why I don’t think of this Focus as “Choreography”, because I feel like that can not only come pretty easily, but be brushed aside with broad passages about your fighters “exchanging blows” and “rolling through the mud and dirt” and stuff like that. But you can’t brush the “spectacle”, the broader character of your fight, aside with such broad phrases so easily.
It sounds trivial, but understanding Spectacle has been important to me in crafting my fights.
There are incentives to go towards big flashy battles or towards grittier down-to-earth fights depending on your genre and medium. Hollywood films love their big stunt-filled spectacles.
I always remember my dad complaining about how over the top that one fight at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest was, where it’s a three-way battle where they are running on that giant runaway hamster wheel thing (my memory of that film is a bit hazy, sorry) and how much better the final fight in the first film was as they moved in and out of the moonlight engaging in a far more realistic and believable battle.
Sorry, that just came to mind. Leavin’ it in!
Where was I? Right, Hollywood films love their big stunt-filled spectacles. That works for a visual medium like film and TV. And even comic books, where superheroes are most at home.
But I write prose fiction. Things don’t work quite the same way there. Novels are words on a page, and flashy moves don’t quite move readers the way they do viewers.
But I also write superheroes. Superheroes are flashy. Superheroes are spectacles. You can’t just ignore these strengths when creating your fight scenes.
What I do is I do both.
I have characters that lend themselves to larger, more fantastical fights, and I have characters that lend toward more focused, realistic ones. And I alternate. I have some of both so that the reader hopefully never gets bored. I can have a realistic martial arts battle in one episode and a fight against a giant plant monster in the next.
Or I blend a bit of my techniques. I’ll get into this more in the next section, but I might take the level of detail and care in describing the tactics and techniques of a more realistic fight and apply that to the larger, unrealistic fights with giant monsters and robots in order to have my big flashy fight without the drawbacks of writing one.
I find too little spectacle can make a superhero world mundane, but too much can make things seem too chaotic and hard to describe. So narrowing my focus on specific “micro battles” going on–say by following one POV during a large army battle scene, or by switching that POV around–and writing it the way I would write a realistic fight scene in a more grounded world is how I can make a fight where I ramp up the Spectacle work.
But the main thing you need to do is decide on the Spectacle. And that means you need to understand your setting just as much as you (and hopefully your audience) understand your characters.
Not just your larger setting, but the setting of your more immediate scene and conflict.
Is your world a more “out there” setting filled with aliens and magic and a multiverse, like Invincible? Or is it a more realistic setting, like The Boys?
Is your character fighting a cackling mad scientist with a doomsday laser pointed at the White House, or are two brothers about to allow decades of personal animosity finally bubble to the surface?
You understand your setting, characters, and themes, and you understand the tone of your story. You understand that, you understand your Spectacle.
You understand your Spectacle, you have the foundations for your fight scene.
Focus #3: Realism
Compared to Spectacle, which was about the external choreography, Realism is about the strategies, tactics, and overall experience of your fight.
It is the internal perceptions of your character. Their thoughts and feelings.
And the reason I call it this is because a flashy fight is unrealistic, but anyone who’s been in a real fight knows that there are plenty of things going through your head that are not really conveyed through the simply punch-kick exchange. To focus on the flashy moves is to focus on the spectacle, but to focus on what’s going on in your superhero’s head? That’s a focus on realism.
What are your hero’s skills, beyond their powers? Are they a marksman? A fencer? Perhaps an expert with electronics?
Perhaps that knowledge informs their tactics. You should be describing the challenges and difficulties of overcoming an opponent as much as you are describing the actual fight itself.
It’s a good idea to learn a bit about the type of fighting that your characters are going to be engaging in. As I continue to write SWITCH and the Challengers Bravo, my main series, I began learning a little bit about different types of martial arts for my character of Moon Shadow. With this, I can have her recognize a more efficient way to attack an opponent in any given battle and switch to that martial art.
Not every part of every fight can be this, of course. You need to choose when is the time to focus on a fighter’s strategies and skills, and when is the time to shift focus on the external: the goings-on of the fight, or the story and progression of events.
It’s not just their tactics, but their experience in the fight. The fear they feel, the adrenaline rushing through them, the pain they fight through.
In a novel, you have the ability to describe those things. Just as much as when describing a setting or another character, your prose can tell your reader of the lead an anxious character might feel in their limbs, the doubts and anxieties pushing or pulling them throughout the fight. Maybe this plays into their strategy, changes the tactics they use?
Could the smell of dead bodies on the battlefield be nauseating? Could the adrenaline and pain be creating conflicting sensations? Could the sudden murder of a loved one be creating a sense of tunnel vision and rage? What about the feeling of betrayal or hatred toward a character for making them participate in a fight they don’t want to?
Where the medium of comics and movies might incentivize a focus on the more flashy aspects of a superhero battle, and quite understandably so given the nature of superheroes, a prose novel allows you to dig deeper and focus on the realism. That internal experience and perceptions of a person fighting for their life, and the lives of others.
There’s not much more to say here as I already kind of addressed this in the previous Focus, but the way I approach Realism is by putting it right there with the Spectacle.
A character with a hatred of an alien due to past tragedies caused. What is going through their mind outside of the actual fight, and how are they influencing each other? A character who doesn’t know how to approach superheroics now suddenly having to lead a fight on their own, without anyone to defer to? How do they manage their own personal insecurities, and how does that play into their ability to take down this giant ninja robot?
Because, as I said before, you’re not going to get anywhere with just a transcription of laser blasts and explosions. Remember, explosions and exposition may be two totally different things, but reading the words “explosion” and “exposition” are two very similar experiences. Even if your Spectacle means a big flashy fight, make sure to shift your readers’ focus to the internal experience of your characters.
Final Thoughts
Fight scenes are cool. They are awesome. They are the culmination of pages, chapters, and entire books worth of conflict.
They are also really hard and a major pain.
I can’t tell you how to craft a fight scene. I can only tell you how I craft a fight scene. And that, like any other part of my writing, is a work in progress.
There are plenty of places to get further–and better–advice on writing fight scenes. I can’t recommend this video from Hello Future Me enough. I’d also check out Writing Fight Scenes: Professional Techniques for Fiction Authors] by Rayne Hall.
But definitely consider these three Focuses when you create your fight scenes. Story, Spectacle, and Realism. The sequences of larger events in your fight, the scope of the choreography, and the internal perceptions and realism of the participants.
While none of this is the whole of learning how to get this very difficult part of writing down, they are an important part of how I craft a fight scene.
For exciting superhero fiction written by me, be sure to check out the BLUE EAGLE Universe!