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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32930
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32930
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

First, make sure that you are not subconsciously trying to write a movie fight scene. Movie fight scenes are all about movement and noise (and generally far too long and tedious for anyone older than 10). Good fight scenes in the movies are actually more dialogue than action. (Consider the sword fight between Mandy Patinkin and Cary Elwes in _The Princess Bride_.)

Prose does not excel at movement and noise. It does excel at dialogue. So if you are going to emulate movie fight scenes, at least emulate the dialogue heavy scenes.

But a good prose fight scene is not about the cut and thrust. You can't describe cut and thrust in anything like real time, and even the best description of cut and thrust is hard to follow. Thus cut and thrust scenes end up confusing, laborious, and generally overblown.

Instead, focus on the things that create tension in a fight: the stakes at hand, the changes of fortune, the tiring of the fighters and their dwindling ability to continue and defend themselves. Often the tension in a fight comes because it delays the hero from some vital task (saving the princess, conventionally), distracts them some necessary action, or drains them of the capacity to continue their quest.

Above all, remember that in any good story, the central peril is not physical but moral. It is the lost of status or the loss of virtue or the loss of loved ones that is compelling in a fight scene, not the loss of blood. Even if blood is lost, it is the moral consequences of that loss, not the physical loss itself, that is compelling.

So many fight scenes end with the hero having to make a decision whether to kill the antagonist or not. This is the moral quandary at the heart of the fight, and the echoes of it can ripple back through the fight itself. The hero's reluctance to kill often leads them to the moment in the fight when the antagonists boot is on the hero's throat. This moment, and the moment of victory, are the great moral turning points of a fight, the moments that will make the fight satisfying or not for the reader.

Of course, not every fight is a climactic fight. Many are just skirmishes leading up to the climactic fight. The function of such skirmishes is to advance the story by changing the balance, and thus presenting a moral challenge to the hero. Again, the cut and thrust is not the heart of the fight, but what it reveals about the characters and how it changes the conditions under which the hero's next moral quandary must be faced.

Original score: 11