Crafting Dynamic Fight Scenes: Leveraging Prose Strengths in Storytelling (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: The thing to keep in mind is that you should play to your strengths as a writer and to the strengths of the medium you're using to tell your story. That means if we are using prose novels to tell our story, we are going to have certain strengths that other mediums don't have, and leaning into those is going to be handy for writing a fight scene. What are our strengths? We can show direct character emotion and thoughts in a way that films just cannot. And even comic books, we can do more of it because we have more words. What we can do in a fight scene is that we can very easily connect character motivation character actions and give a sense of progress through a scene. A great fight scene in a book often has markers of progress that are happening through the course of the fight and has its own narrative flow, meaning beginning, middle, and end. Within that middle, escalation of stakes or escalation of danger in some way, or changing and reassessing of goals. Showing a character going into a fight wanting one thing, realizing halfway through they need another thing. Raising the stakes because they have now been fighting for a while and that other thing has been getting further and further from their grasp is something that works really well in a novel. What you want to avoid, and where I got taken aback by this YouTuber who was correct, is blow-by-blows tend to be boring in any situation. I said that blow-by-blows were fun in visual mediums and not in books. And the YouTuber is correct. They're boring everywhere. If you want to tell a great fight, blow-by-blow is not the way to go. Another rhyme. Instead, you want to show the character's progress, the character achieving things, the character leveling up or leveling down. Trying things and failing, it should be progressing the plot, the character, in some way, plot or character, ideally both. And it should have its own mini sequence of, like I said, beginning, middle, and end with goals and changes and goals and things like that. One easy trick is to, don't overuse it, is to say there are this many bad guys and the fight ends when they're down, and show the character being pushed more and more to their limits as they are trying to deal with all of these different forces fighting against them, to bring it to a natural conclusion of do they win or lose at the end. But look for ways you can give a sense of progress. Readers love progress. This is like one of the key ideals for telling great stories, is to know that as a reader, most of us want to be able to feel like there is motion going on through the narrative, not just from where the characters are going. And that motion should give us a sense of progress toward an ending in some way.