Jan 14 2008
Five Ways to Write Sizzling Fight Scenes (Superhero and Fantasy)
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This article will teach you how to get the girl and save the world in 400 words.
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Immerse us in the scene.
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Engage as many senses as possible, particularly the visceral ones (touch, smell, taste).
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Avoid anything that makes your readers wonder what’s happening. It may help to create a diagram of the scene so that you know what’s happening. One frequent area of confusion is how far away the characters are from each other.
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Don’t put in too many characters.
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Each additional character dilutes the fight and makes it harder to visualize the fight in real-time.
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I highly recommend capping your fights to 3 people at a time. If you really want more combatants, I’d recommend writing the battle as a series of 2-3 person duels rather than a battle royale with 8+ fighters. This was a problem in Soon I Will Be Invincible.
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In comic books and movies, the superhero mows down waves of mooks to show off his powers. Is that necessary for a novel or short story? Probably not. You don’t have any visual special effects to show off. The main advantage a written work has against a visual work is drama, but fighting faceless and hopeless enemies is rarely dramatic.
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Be creative.
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How do your characters interact with the scenery? Brainstorm a few items or props that are in the scene and try to work in a few when the hero gets desperate. Using props helps remind readers that the hero and villain aren’t fighting in a vacuum.
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Try to have your hero use his powers in an unexpected way. We’ll expect a shapeshifting hero to copy a guard or the villain to infiltrate the villain’s lair and rescue his girlfriend. But we won’t expect him to copy his girlfriend and get captured in her place.
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Let your hero improvise. Throw a few wrenches in his carefully laid plans. If your supervillain really is a genius, surely he will anticipate some of the things your hero will try. (The forcefield generators will be within the forcefields, dammit!)
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Make it suspenseful– you may find these elements helpful.
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Stealth and desperation. Typically, heroic efforts that are stealthy and/or desperate are more suspenseful because any false step could result in failure. In contrast, it’s less suspenseful for a hero to barrel into the villain’s lair because readers know that there’s no chance a faceless mook will kill the hero.
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Ticking clocks. If the hero has 15 minutes to defuse the bomb or 48 hours to get the medicine to Nome, that adds urgency to the plot. Perhaps the most successful example of this was D.O.A., where the main character gets fatally poisoned and has to solve his own murder.
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Strong side-characters. If we feel for the damsel-in-distress, we’d care a lot more whether the hero is able to rescue her. We’re more likely to feel for her if she’s well-developed and has a distinct personality. I recommend looking at Teri Hatcher’s Lois Lane in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
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A suicidally determined hero. If the audience knows that the hero thinks that success is beating the villain—not coming home alive– then we’ll wonder whether the hero will survive. Whether he does or not, there will be more suspense.
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Keep it as short as possible.
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Generally, fights should be the climax of action chapters, rather than the bulk of the action chapters. Dragging out a fight scene for pages typically feels pretty tedious. The worst-case scenario is that the fight will feel like a scrolling list of hits the hero and villain are landing on each other. Eww.
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Another thing I think is important in superhero fighting seens is that you don’t say something like “It was as if time slowed down.” In a real fight with fists and feet flying in every direction do you really think that it would feel as time slowed down? No. Now if your character is in the middle of the fight and time slows down because he has that power and didn’t know it thats different, but a little *cough* extremely *cough* carried away. Unless your character JUST got their powers they probably know them by now.
“In a real fight with fists and feet flying in every direction do you really think that it would feel as time slowed down?”
Actually, adrenaline really does have that effect on some people– making everything seem to slow down. For other people it’s the opposite; everything feels like it’s moving too fast, and they can’t react quickly enough. The latter would certainly be an interesting weakness in a superhero…
“For other people it’s the opposite; everything feels like it’s moving too fast…” Adrenaline can slow down your reflexes? That’s very interesting from an evolutionary perspective. I wonder which conditions would make it advantageous to have slow reflexes. I’m more familiar with the standard cliche that survivors of near-death experiences will say that their lives “flashed before their eyes”. Adrenaline can induce intense mental activity and quicken reflexes, to facilitate the fight-or-flight response. In some cases the burst of energy and dopamine lead to a manic state, which may explain the origins of the phrase “trigger-happy” and Winston Churchill’s contention that “nothing is as exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
As for explaining heavy-adrenaline scenes in fiction, I find it believable to either describe it from an observer’s detached perspective (a crazy flurry of punches and kicks) or from the character’s adrenaline-fueled perspective, which would process the same events at a slower and more manageable pace. Another consideration how well-trained the character has been. Many times, a soldier explaining how he responded under fire will say that his training “kicked in.” Experienced soldiers likely have better reflexes and you may also wish to consider the possibility that a soldier’s reaction to being fired upon is mostly subconscious.
Even though I probably won’t, say I chose to write a novel instead of a comic. How could I effectively describe Sketch using his power. I know his superpowers probably don’t work well for a novel but could you give me a short fighting or action sequence that would effectively show him using his powers.
It would probably be extremely difficult, try anyway anything will help. Just use any object you want him to summon that’s convenient.
Hmm, that’s a good question. I’ll come up with a page, but I’d like to do it justice. Check back in 2-3 days.
Have you started the page? or are you too busy? I can wait. This is just a reminder.
I got sidetracked by a thesis deadline but am still working on it.
If you haven’t already, you can quit the page. Unless you haven’t, in which case I would like to see it.
How can I write a scene where Isaac is simply disarming someone, rather than kicking butt and getting his butt kicked? In one part he gets a gun shoved into his face, and I want him to make the guy drop it. How can I do that? Thanks!
What exactly are Isaac’s powers?
He has increased intelligence (but is not a genius), can run a bit faster and is a bit stronger than most guys his age (but this isn’t often used). His main abilities are mental. He can turn the air around him into energy, and is able to direct it at people or objects in order to knock them backwards. He also fires it outwards to fly.
I haven’t had cause for any major fight scenes yet, just one where he’s fending off some school bullies and one where he simply disarms a robber (which is what I need help with). But I’m keeping an archive of descriptions and basic fights to drop in when I need them. I just wrote this:
What do you think?
Makes since to me, then again I don’t know much about fight scenes. Here one from the top of my head, just because!
I tried to establish a character voice, but it sounded pretty generic, I think.
Suggestions? Opinions?
I could have probably remove the line about having to transform to conjure water, and I probably need a filler sentence between “water gushed from my mouth ‘and’ Always works, it feels to quick (I think).
I think it’s okay, but maybe you could describe the looks on the thugs’ faces. Like: “I grinned in amusement as their aggressive expressions became looks of horror, and they looked about ready to run”. As for a filler sentence, how about: “The water rushed outwards, splashing against them and knocking them off their feet”. If it’s very powerful, maybe something about them getting dragged away for a small distance before getting up and calling for reinforcements.
Wow, looking back over my fight scene, it needs alot of revision. But then again most pieces need to be fleshed out and redone, so I don’t feel bad about the mistakes.