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Scoot sort of asked, so I’ll deliver:
Eric Falden’s Rapid-Fire Principles of Writing Combat
It’s (predictably) something I’ve spend time dwelling on, but I’ve never articulated a real “guide” or “style” for myself. So: this is fire-from-the-hip. I’m trying to think about what I think about when I write scenes of violence.
Combat is really, really fast. Even long before guns, fights with deadly weapons tend to last seconds, not minutes.
If pre-modern (e.g. swords and spears and axes) then combat ends very soon after the distance closes. Once both combatants are close enough to reach each other with edged weapons, it is likely that someone will suffer a mortal wound within the next 3-5 seconds.
Several things happen as a consequence of these:
Combatants often spend a long time just outside of the “closing” distance, much in the same way that boxers spend a lot of time hopping and circling each other (and then when they get close enough it gets intense very quickly).
Killing blows are often less spectacular than hollywood would have you believe because they very fast and thus easy to miss. The cliche of “I didn’t even see him move! I just saw a flick of the wrist and a guy died!” can actually be closer to the truth than theatrical fighting.
Combat is also incredibly chaotic because there isn’t actually time for much active thinking. The trained combatant has better instincts, better reflexes, and is likely more calm, so they can think while in combat, but the sheer speed of things means that the right instincts and right timing often carries the day.
As for writing this, I think writing combat is a task of balancing a reader’s ability to follow the action with also a careful decision to leave a lot of things out. Consider a strictly close narrative distance rooted to a particular POV. That POV will not see, understand, or track most of what’s going on (because combat is very fast and very chaotic and very much based on instinct).
So choose what to focus on, and choose what not to focus on.
Short sentences keep the pace moving. Make it feel fast. Sudden. Chaotic!
Vagueness can communicate chaos. “Something hit him in the back and he fell” The POV combatant doesn’t know what it is. He’s acting on instinct, not conscious thought.
Focus on one thing at a time. Tunnel-vision can work better than trying to explain everything going on. Show the progress of the wider battle as the character tries to take it in, not as its happening — the rest of the world doesn’t matter so much as the guy in front of you who wants to put sunlight inside your ribcage.
Implication can work better than explicit explanation. “They toppled to the ground. When the knight stood up there was blood on his knife.” // “He looked up and there two more, coming at him.” How did they get there? An author might be tracking each person in the scene, but that doesn’t mean you should explain. // “There was a wet sound and the bandit folded into the dirt.”
But the hard thing to balance in all of this is that the reader has to be able to follow the action and understand why the character is doing what he/she is doing.
Combat is not excluded from the idea that all actions should be made in character. Why are they fighting? How do they feel about fighting? Are they terrified, angry, purely reactive, aggressive? What is their goal: survival, victory, glory, a specific person’s head, something else? All those things fold into what you show and don’t show.
It all comes down to balancing intelligibility with the knife’s-edge chaos of true peril.
Sometimes Ian Dunmore and I talk about ‘geometry’ of combat, where, in the edit, we have to make more clear who is where doing what. Every word that isn’t spent making clear the geometry of the fight should be spent on the feeling of the moment — the emotional core of the scene — whatever that emotion is.
Also there are my particular flavors of combat that will color the above advice. Your mileage may vary because it may not match your vision:
My goal is never to glorify violence. Killing is ugly and it wounds the soul. I try to make it ugly and costly for my characters.
Chaos is part of that ugliness.
Most of the combat I’ve put to paper exists in melancholy stories where a character’s relationship to violence is at least part of the theme. Hence the heavy POV-rootedness. YMMV.
I can link examples below, if asked.
