- Writing Time: 02:30
- Session Word Count: 2085
- Total Word Count: 30857 (30000 par)
I’m back in the saddle again, getting in a couple longer writing sessions and boosting my word count.
I’m happy that I was able to bank some extra words before missing a day, and it’s nice to be on vacation and able to immediately work on getting that count back up. I’ve had years where I fell behind early, and it’s demoralizing to know that you need to write even more just to stay on pace.
Today’s story involved some breaking and entering, scaling a wall, and a brief fistfight. And with that, my characters have finally done what needed to be done on shore. Next session, they head out to sea.
Words Deferred 
I’m bad at writing action scenes, possibly because I rarely read one that interests me much, what are your thoughts on writing fistfights?
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Fight scenes are a huge topic, and I’m not an expert. I think you just need to treat it like any other scene. What’s the purpose? What is the situation going in, and how will things change as a result?
The mechanics are just choreography and emotion. As a writer, you basically have the same job as a movie/TV fight choreographer, except that you can have the characters do crazy things and throw in special effects without killing the stunt people and blowing the budget. You need to understand the space and how everyone moves in it, well enough to communicate all of that to the reader. I find it really easy to get bogged down in too much detail and kill the pacing, so the trick is to describe the action as tersely as possible so it feels fast.
The emotion part mostly comes down to showing how the characters feel while this shit is going down. It can be as simple as an action/reaction loop — character acts — the universe responds — character feels something — repeat. It’s easier to get invested if I sympathize with how the character is feeling.
This fight scene wasn’t really a threat to my characters. The purpose was for Character 1 to see Character 2 being competent at fighting. So Character 2 takes down a faceless goon in a few quick moves, and Character 1 reacts by wondering whether this might be a sign that Character 2 is not such a good guy.
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Thanks
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