Today, we are continuing a small series on how to write that I’m putting together. I just got back from a writing retreat where I learned all sorts of awesome stuff, and I want to share it with you. Part of the reason for that is because by teaching, I am reinforcing these ideas in my own head, which is super important.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to write combat. One of the speakers for the retreat, Morgan L. Busse, had a really tight way of dealing with combat that I’m absolutely going to steal. You can go and check her out here. This method revolves around understanding six distinct things, the first of which is your conflict.
People don’t fight if there is no conflict. Now, that’s not 100% true. In theory, you could fight if there wasn’t a conflict, if you just wanted to fight, if you wanted to spar, or you wanted to test yourself against another person. Though I guess that is kind of a conflict in a light sense of the word, but in a novel, it’s very rare for people to engage in combat if there isn’t some direct conflict between them.
It might be that one of the people wants to kill the other person, and the other person doesn’t want to be killed. That is a very simple conflict, but what’s nice about this is that combat changes depending on the motivations. There are a lot of reasons that one character might want to kill another character. There are a lot of reasons that the other character might want to survive, and depending on those reasons, the way the conflict is going to play out, the way the combat is going to play out will change.
For instance, imagine with me that one of the characters who wants to kill the other character is interested in stealing the second character’s gold. The lengths they’re going to go to in order to kill this other person might not be as extreme as if their motivation is, say, revenge. That seems like a lot stronger of a reason to engage in mortal combat than, say, one person has some gold and the other person wants it.
And so, to understand the conflict, we really need to understand the characters. And this is our second thing. What are these characters’ motivations? Where do they come from? Where are they going? Why do they want what they want? What is it that they want? When we start to understand this, the conflict naturally comes out. We start to understand the why of their engaging in combat.
But also, we start to understand how good they are at combat. One of the things that breaks immersion for me a lot of times is when there’s a character who shouldn’t really be good at combat and all of a sudden they’re just amazing. Or when there’s a character who should be good at combat and they just can’t do anything.
It’s sort of like the meme with the stormtroopers. Like, stormtroopers literally can’t hit anything. But you would think, considering the amount of training that they’ve gone through, considering their skill, that they would be able to hit something. And it’s really curious because in early Star Wars, when they were all clones, they were very effective. But then, as time went on, they just stopped being able to shoot anything.
Anyway, that is a completely random aside. But the point is that if you know your characters, if you understand them, then not only will you know why they’re in the conflict, but you’ll also know how well they’re going to do in the combat.
Now, this brings us to our third thing that you need to understand. You need to understand the rules. Really, you need to understand the world that this combat is taking place in. One of the greatest things about the book Ender’s Game was the fact that Orson Scott Card really had a good grasp on how combat in Zero-G would actually play out. Or at least a good enough grasp that it felt real to all of us readers.
Can you imagine, though, if he had treated it like a normal battlefield on Earth? You need to know the rules of engagement before you start writing the combat. In fact, this is one of the things that makes the fight scenes in Princess Bride so very good. Because the Dread Pirate Roberts and Inigo Montoya both understand the rules, and they understand how they are supposed to comport themselves in combat, they have this delightful sword fight that ends not with death, as one would expect, but with one of the characters besting the other.
Now, that fight would have looked very differently if one of the characters had not upheld the gentlemanly standard of the swordmaster, and instead had just fought dirty. So, the rules of combat really make a difference in how your scene is going to turn out.
The fourth thing that we want to understand is combat styles. How do people actually fight? The way that somebody with dual axes fights versus the way that somebody with a rapier or somebody who’s grappling fight? Very, very different things. As soon as projectile weapons get involved, everything goes out the window, and the way people fight changes.
Lethality matters. And so, how lethal a combat system is plays a huge role in how your fights turn out. So, understanding the combat systems, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each, and being able to properly apply them makes a huge difference.
Speaking of combat styles, that brings us to number five. Understand the flow of combat. If you go and you watch an exhibition match between two masters of karate, it has a very different flow than if you go and watch world-class jiu-jitsu. They’re just very different. Boxing matches and wrestling matches, very different. Ship-to-ship combat is very different than tanks or mass infantry battles.
Each kind of combat has a very different flow to it. And so, understanding that flow is going to allow you to write a realistic battle scene. It’s especially important when you’re dealing with more than one person on each side. The way a battle flows determines whether it feels realistic or not. If you have one person who is just fighting on forever with no fatigue, it’s not going to feel really realistic.
At the same time, if you’re breaking up your fight scene with huge paragraphs of descriptors or thinking, it’s just going to feel really slow and flat. Combat happens typically at a very rapid pace. And so, understanding the flow of it can help you write better combat.
And then finally, understand how the cleanup works. When a fight starts to wrap up or is over, it’s important to understand what lingering effect the fight has. And one of the things that Morgan suggested is that fights don’t just have physical consequences. They can have psychological consequences as well.
It would be perfectly normal, if your character has just been in a brutal fight, for them to wince or flinch when something happens around them that could be construed as starting another fight. One of the best ways to show the lingering effect of a fight is through the character’s response to similar circumstances.
So, those are six ways that we can improve our combat scenes by understanding how fights work. Again, check out the author’s website who I’ve swiped this from. And let me know if is there anything else that you think it’s important to understand before we can write really good combat scenes?
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/bYPqZqicO_I
Thanks for reading and watching.
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