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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47267
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

My personal opinion is that most fight sequences that involve more than a half dozen people will be too complex to describe in their entirety.

When you need to do is condense the whole sequence down to the key parts and emote the battle rather than describe it graphically - a reader's imagination will fill in far more gaps than you ever describe.

Still, everything has to fit.

**My suggestion is** to plot out the entire battle as a time line and a tactical chart/map. This way you have a complete reference to the whole mass-melee.

Once you have this, you can pull out the most important points/confrontations and build your story from it. From here you can add or remove details until the flow of the story has the correct balance of detail and speed you are aiming for.

With a timeline and tactical map, you know when one fight finishes, where and how long it takes the winning gang to get to reach the next gang. This gap is a natural transition to another fight. You could even just write the initial confrontations and the finales to each fight and let the reader's imaginations fill in those gaps. [As B.L.E. mentions](https://writing.stackexchange.com/a/47261/2533), the feeling is usually the more important part.

Original score: 1