This week’s video talks about the pitfalls of writing fight scenes in the age of blockbuster movies, as well as some tips for keeping the action tense and engaging.
Video Transcript:
If you’re like me you like nothing better than a good fictional fight scene. Aerial dogfights. Lightsaber duels. Gunfights at high noon. It’s all good. But this type of scene can be surprisingly difficult to write. The first problem, of course, is getting all our facts straight—because the people who are interested in these things are usually fanatical about the details. If you get something wrong, sooner or later you’ll probably hear about it.
But strictly from a craft perspective, your main challenge is going to be keeping it interesting. At first, that may sound a bit counter-intuitive. After all, thanks to the inherent conflict and danger involved in fight scenes, you’d think it would be pretty easy to keep to readers glued to the page. But it’s actually not. The truth is fight scenes, in themselves, really aren’t that interesting. Recounting a physical altercation blow for blow can get boring really fast. The visual age we live in, thanks to movies and TV, has brought a lot of attention to fight scenes. People love the big blockbuster movies that offer more explosions than they do dialogue. Movies can get away with this because their special effects and choreography offer eye candy. Books can’t.
This means our fight scenes have to offer something else. It should go without saying that fight scenes are going to need to propel the plot and advance character. But what doesn’t always go without saying is how to mix things up to keep readers interested. Fortunately, the solution is easy-peasy. All you have to do is add dialogue and a little internal narrative. Very few written action scenes can wow readers the way a movie’s can. But what we can do better than the movies is give readers a glimpse inside the characters. Whenever you can, verbalize the conflict. Let us hear these opponents talking to each other. And, even more important, let us hear the narrator reacting internally to this exciting and dangerous adventure in which he finds himself.
Photo Credit
Thumbnail – Screen Capture From Video
Originally published on Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors
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