Fight scenes and sore legs

I’ve been a martial arts practitioner for about five years now, though I did have to take a break when I came out to New York this summer. I just now found a branch of the school back in Denver that is also established out here, and so went to a class last night to hopefully start back up. Waking up today involvd having my legs scream at me…”What did you do to us!” Ah, well. I’m glad to get back into this, as it’s a great way to dust myself off from sitting at a desk. For anyone interested, I study Shaolin Kung-fu with this school: www.shao-lin.com

And the branch I went to here in NYC can be found at this site:

http://www.newyorkshaolin.com/home.html

Turns out I’m one of two black belts (not including the instructor, and the school here has only been around a year now), though there are several brown belts getting ready to test up. It’s a great style, as it has so much variety to it, is very applicable if you ever got in a true fight situation, and is a system you can advance in at whatever pace you feel comfortable with. Anyways, I thought I might segue from this topic into a few comments about writing fight scenes, as I’ve sometimes drawn from my practice to add some realism and detail to literary brawls (and no, I’m not talking about what happens at happy hour after writing conferences).

First, use shorter sentences and break the prose up into bite-sized pieces to give the illusion of a lot of action happening fast. For instance:

“He grabbed. Missed. A fist caught him in the gut. Stumbling, he whacked his head against the wall.”

Also, know when to summarize. Say you’re writing a sword-fighting scene. Too much detail of the sword angles, exactly where the person is attacking, and how shiny they are will bore a reader. Sometimes a simple sum-up will do. For instance:

“Equally matched, they traded blocks and blows while trying to force the other toward the cliff edge.”

Yes, you could draw that kind of scene out into a couple of pages. There are people who put that kind of detail into their stories, especially in fantasies where you have uber-cool, sword master type characters. But again, too much of that turns into bland filler. The real question is what approach is going to be best for the pace of the story? If a good paragraph of agonizing detail will ratchet up the tension, go for it. However, if you start into the, “He punched him hard. He punched him back really, really hard,” territory, Warning, Warning!

I see that smile.