Writing Fighting: 12 Things Writers Need to Know

Posted on | January 12, 2012 | 11 Comments

Writing about fighting is a popular pastime*. In fiction straight out combat is the resolution for a lot of problems, and it crops up in most genre fiction in one way or another. Unfortunately because most writers aren’t the type to pick fights a lot of strange things end up being written about fights that don’t ring true to anyone with even a shred of experience.

I’ve been in a few fights. Mostly they were during my time as a doorman and I’ve been doing martial arts almost my entire life, but I’m hardly an expert, so this slews towards the things I know the most about. I’ve also spent a enormous amount of time researching and speaking to people in the know about life or death struggles.

So you want realism, but you don’t want your readers skipping your carefully crafted brawls. How do you do that?

1. Most real fights are over in seconds

I didn’t learn this until I did some door security work at a nightclub. Up until then the only fighting I’d done was in the ring and at training. When you’re matched up with someone of roughly equal skill and fitness, fights can last a long time, particularly if you’ve both agreed not to punch each other in the reproductive organs.

A street fight is very different. Even assuming it’s one on one and there are no weapons involved usually one person is going to have a clear advantage. Whether that advantage comes through size, training, experience or just because they screamed “look the Goodyear blimp!” and then struck when the other person wasn’t looking doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the longest fight I was ever involved in outside of the gym lasted less than a minute.

The one glaring exception is if both combatants are both physically weak and mentally uninvested in fighting. Then you get those weird slap fights, but generally those don’t make for exciting fight scenes.

This can be a problem in your writing, especially if you have a character who is abnormally skilled or strong. It can also be an opportunity, because nothing says badass like having your protagonist (or any other character) disable someone in seconds. If you are going to have them do that, play up the fact that the fight was over quickly and brutally.

2. Muggings aren’t fights

Muggers aren’t looking for someone who is going to fight back, they’re looking for victims. This means that someone who is looking to take your character out isn’t going to give them a fair chance. This goes double if your character has a reputation or looks like they can handle themselves.

Muggings where the bad guy leaps out from a dark corner do happen, but they’re quite uncommon, what’s far more common is the interview.

An interview in the context of a street mugging involves the mugger (or muggers) approaching their target and asking an innocuous question (got a light? What’s the time?). This is a test to see if the target scares easily, and also to see if they’ve picked the wrong kind of person. Even if they don’t consciously know what they’re doing, they are looking for body language that says their intended victim is frightened or clueless. Assuming they think they’ve got a viable target, they will either simply attack…or they’ll “woof” their target.

Woofing is sudden, extreme verbal aggression design to get the target to experience a huge dump of adrenaline that freezes them to the spot and makes it much harder for them to think. This is also usually when a weapon will be flashed to further scare their target. If they truly want to hurt their victim then this is the point where the violence happens.

How can this tie into your story? Well your superhuman, super confident hero is just plain unlikely to get mugged at all unless it’s by a gang. Even then it’s unlikely because your hero probably isn’t going to be projecting the signals that tell others they’re a good victim.

Now, if your hero is totally unaware of their own abilities, or doesn’t have them yet then they are far more likely to be targets.

If your MC is a monster of some kind then this can also be a great (if morally questionable) way for them to find food. Have them walk down a dark alley projecting fear and anxiety and then when the mugger appears…well I’m sure you can make something up from there.

3. Muggings aren’t assassinations

There is a very different kind of street assault, often involving weapons that couldn’t be more different from a typical mugging.

They are far more like assassinations or hits and they typically involve weapons. The biggest difference between this kind of attack and a mugging is intent. A mugger wants something from their target: money, fear, sex, something that they’re prepared to use violence to get. Violence isn’t their end goal, just a tool for them to get what they want.

However a street hit is far faster, meaner and has harm as its end goal. This means there will be little or no warning. Weapons will tend to be hidden until they are actually used. If there is any kind of an interview its sole purpose is to distract the victim.

I think this is a far more likely attack for characters to come across, especially if they’ve annoyed someone in the criminal world. If they spot the attack at all, they’ll only have a half a second to react at best. Far more likely the first anyone knows of this kind of assault is when they feel pain.

4. Combat is ridiculously confusing

When it actually comes down to fighting, it’s incredibly had to keep track of what’s going on around you. People with extensive training (military, police etc) and/or experience can do it, but even then it’s very hard to know what’s actually going on.

It’s very easy to mistake friend for foe in the middle of a brawl. In a gunfight, with the extra stress, noise and distances involved it can be even harder to form a coherent plan. Of course training helps, and so does experience, but even then it’s easy to see why the vast majority of gun fights end up with people panic firing at each other from close range and missing.

My only experience of this is in hand to hand. I was at an open party where a friend of mine was playing in the band, and I confronted a group of guys who were trashing the place. It all went to hell very quickly and I ended up spinning back and forth trying to keep an eye on everyone who was hitting me and it was actually very hard to tell.

In writing it’s important that you either impart this sense of fear and confusion that occurs when a fight is happening, especially if the person involved isn’t trained for it. It can be a great way to ramp up the tension of the fight if all the character is getting is impressions.

On the other hand if your character can keep their head, the readers need to know why. Have they had extensive training? Are they an ex-cop or a Marine? Are they just freakishly tough? Are they protecting a child or a loved one?

If there is no good reason for your character to keep their cool, especially if guns or other weapons are involved, then having them keep track of everything perfectly and having them stay totally calm will not ring true.

Of course in real life this does happen sometimes, ordinary with no training do sometimes just step up. Sadly, when you’re writing things have to make sense, whereas reality can be as bizarre as it likes and no one gets to complain.

5. Viciousness can overcome skill

We’ve all seen movies where the totally ice calm kung fu master beats the raging psycho without batting an eyelid. This can happen, someone who is sufficiently skilled and calm can get the upper hand over a raging maniac by staying focused…

But it’s really hard. Someone who knows how to fight angry, knows how to channel their viciousness can unleash a huge number of very hard blows very quickly and it’s impossible to block or avoid them all. Even Bruce Lee said that master martial artists are lucky if they can block 50% of blows being thrown by a motivated opponent.

In fiction there is a lot of scope for turning this to your advantage. Your hero may be able to beat a more skilled opponent just by being more motivated than they are. Or you could give a hero with delusions of grandeur about their fighting skills a nasty shock in a street fight.

Of course someone with a lot of skill who is also uncommonly ferocious is going to be an absolute nightmare.

6. Fitness

Fighting takes a lot of effort. For the fights that do last more than a minute fitness becomes a big factor in who wins.

Assuming you’re relatively fit, and don’t have any outstanding injuries, give this a try. Go and find a punching bag, put on some bag gloves and whale on the bag as fast and as hard as you can for as long as you can.

If you’ve never done it before, or in fact even if you have, it’s very hard to keep going at that rate for more than thirty seconds. Now add in the stress of a real fight, the fact that you’re taking shots as well as giving them and the possibility that you’re fighting more than one person and you can imagine how quickly combatants can get tired. Even in static gun fights the incredible stress placed on the body by adrenaline can leave people exhausted in minutes.

The general rule of thumb with hand to hand combat is that if two people of equal skill fight, then the fitter of the two is going to be the winner.

If there are multiple opponents, then it gets even worse, and unless your protagonist is unbelievably fit they are going to have to take out at least one of their opponents immediately to have any chance of walking away alive.

7. Most people don’t want to fight

In fiction, everyone it seems like everyone wants to scrap, to fight people who are clearly going to fight back. In the real world the opposite is true.

Very few people want to fight.

Sure there are plenty of people who’d be happy to punch you while you weren’t looking. Or to be the person who brought a gun to a fist fight, but very few people really want to put themselves in a situation where it’s likely they’re going to get smacked in the eye.

For the most part the people who do put themselves in harms way actually have another goal in mind. The police are a good example, for the most part they are all about protecting people and keeping the peace, but in order to do so they’ll happily put themselves in situations that could hurt or even kill them.

In fiction, you can use this to differentiate between antagonists who are prepared to murder your protagonist to achieve a goal (steal the macguffin, collect money for a hit etc) and the ones that love fighting and killing for its own sake.

You can also use this to draw a line between those that are prepared to fight face to face and on equal footing (rare) and those that will only fight if they think they’re going to win (depressingly common).

8. Knives are freaking terrifying

I’ve never had to take on a blade (I have been stabbed, but that was an accident) and I count myself very lucky.

Even in the hands of an unskilled opponent, a knife is something to be frightened of. In the hands of a skilled opponent there is almost nothing an unarmed person can do other than run like hell or reach for an improvised weapon.

Yes there are a very few freakishly skilled people who can take on a blade even in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing and come out on top but those people are the exceptions, not the rule.

Knives in fiction often seem to be written off as little more than a signal to say the person wielding the blade is a dirty cheater. The protagonist effortlessly disarms the scoundrel and everyone walks away with their blood inside their body.

Most of the time if there’s a knife involved in a fight, someone is going to bleed. This isn’t such a big deal if your main character is Wolverine, but assuming your protagonist doesn’t have some kind of super power that totally negates a knife’s advantages then they should be scared to face down anyone with a blade in their hand.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that at extremely close range a knife can trump a gun simply because a knife can cut or stab from almost any angle whereas a gun has to be aimed.

In your writing make sure your characters take a blade as a serious threat. If they are going to use a knife themselves make sure they know what the consequences of using that weapon is (or if they are unaware, have them dropped in the poo when someone unexpectedly dies).

9. Adrenaline runs rough shod over technique

Adrenaline can help you in a fight, but it can also kill you.

Because of the effects adrenaline has on your body, you lose a lot of your fine motor control when it comes to fight time.

This means even very well trained people who know hundreds of techniques tend to fall back on the basics when they’re under stress. This is partly because they’ve performed the techniques so many times their body and mind remember the moves over the top of their body’s impulse to just go feral on whatever is attacking them. It’s also because basic techniques (and this holds true in hand to hand, melee and firearm combat) tend to use big, easy movements that are based on the bodies natural reactions to stress (or at least they should do, there are some martial arts that seem to have forgotten this).

10. Dirty fighting wins fights…up to a point

Currently I train in MMA (mixed martial arts) at a school that emphasizes Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai. These two arts are sport focused, which means they forbid certain moves that have been deemed too dangerous for the participants or too dirty to make for good entertainment.

Every few months someone shows up to a beginner’s class convinced that their wide array of dirty tricks makes them invincible and they try eye gouging or groin grabbing on one of the instructors.

This never ends well for them.

The reason it never seems to work out is that the MMA instructors and or fighters that they are, without warning, going nuclear on have their delivery systems down pat. This means that even though MMA doesn’t allow eye gouging or biting, it does teach people how to work themselves into an advantageous position and then unleash strikes or submissions (chokes, leglocks arm bars) without them having to risk a counter attack.

Think of it like this: Someone who knows only dirty tricks in their fighting, but doesn’t spend a lot of time sparring against live resisting opponents has a nuclear warhead attached to a skyrocket. They have the world ending payload, but no way to ensure it gets where it’s going.

MMA fighters, boxers and other athletes who regularly fight against other very fit, very strong people may not have the arsenal of dirty tricks, they have perhaps a high explosive warhead instead of a nuke, but they can get it to any target they chose and wreck havoc.**

What’s more, body positioning, footwork and timing take a long time to learn, but learning how to twist a pair of testicles or gouge an eye doesn’t take long at all.

However…

In a fight between two skilled opponents, or between two relatively unskilled opponents dirty tricks can make all the difference.

It can also be the deciding factor if someone physical.ly weak but skilled is facing a physically dominant but unskilled foe.

If you want to use this in fiction, make sure that you emphasize why the move works and how the character has set it up. A lot of dirty tricks use pain compliance, and if your opponent is sufficiently motivated (or crazy, or drugged up) pain compliance doesn’t work nearly as well as you’d think.

That in itself can be a plot point. Let’s say your protagonist, trying to fight off a guy that outweighs them by sixty pounds, kicks him squarely in the reproductive organs…and he doesn’t bat an eyelid. Why? How did he ignore the shot? Just plain vanilla mortals hopped up on adrenaline are capable of incredible things but in fiction we have to be able to explain them (or at least imply that we know).

That’s not to say a dirty trick can’t come out of nowhere and turn the tide of the fight. In my experience shots to the eyes and the throat are the dirty shots that have the most effect, but they have to be followed up immediately; either by running the hell away (always a good plan if you can) or dropping a finishing blow while your opponent struggles to regain their equilibrium.

 

11. Fighting multiple opponents is a really bad bet

One person is tough enough, even if they aren’t particularly fearsome. Two is far, far worse. Things come at you from unexpected angles, people grab at you and there is ample opportunity for someone to slip a blade between your ribs while you are otherwise distracted.

The few group fights I found myself in while bouncing where complete chaos, and if any one of the people I’d been trying to shuffle out into the street had been armed I would almost certainly be dead. Not because I can’t fight***, but because it’s very hard to focus on more than one opponent.

The only way to successfully fight groups is by rngaging in a kind of running battle where you constantly create space between them and you. Going for an all in melee is a great way to get punched in the back of the head.

If your character has some kind of power, then this might not be nearly such a big deal, but unless they’re superman someone stabbing them, shooting them or breaking a chair over their head while they’re occupied with someone else is still going to be a serious problem.

A gun can help, especially as an intimidation tool, however it’s hardly a cure all especially at very close range. A lot of a gun’s value against a mob is in the fear it creates, and if that fear isn’t present or if a large group is motivated enough to move past their fear a gun isn’t a guarantee of survival by any means.

Even if your protagonist does fight their way out of a group attack, make sure they end up taking blows or some kind of injury. No character should get of a fight with multiple opponents scott free unless that’s a specific point you want to make about how badass they are. Even then you will have to be very careful about how you justify their abilities.

12. All violence has consequences

Again this is something I’ve spoken about before but it’s my pet peeve with a lot of modern fiction, so bear with me here.

All violence comes with consequences attached. If you kill someone in self defense, no matter how justified you are, the police are going to ask you some pointed questions. If you fight your way clear of a gang trying to mug you and end up killing one of them, even by accident, congratulations you now have enemies for life.

Violence has other consequences. There are very, very few people who can kill without it having any kind of effect on the psyche. Soldiers and police get special training to allow them to pull the trigger on people who are trying to kill them and even then combat records show that most people are just plain reluctant to hurt other people.

This is a good thing.

However if your hero is constantly forced to fight to the death, it’s going to change them, unless they’re a sociopath and even then there will still be consequences.

Ask yourself how your character is going to deal with the guilt (and there will be guilt) and the vividness of the memories that violent conflict will ingrain in them. How will they deal with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which they almost certainly will get some form of if they don’t have counseling of some kind)? If they don’t get PTSD, why didn’t they?

These are things you have to answer, otherwise your character is going to become a monster without you even realizing. Even if they are only killing evil things, it can still wear away at them in unexpected ways.

A book well worth reading is On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. It discusses the psychological and societal cost of killing and it explains this far better than I’ll ever be able to. It’s not a comfortable read, but it’s well worth it. I can also recommend pretty much anything written by Loren Christianson as well worth a read.

What else?

This has been very geared towards hand to hand combat because that’s what I have the most experience with. If you know about guns or knives, and you want to share your expertise please let me know in the comments the things you’d like other writers to know about your subject of interest.

Also, if you think I have something wrong, I’d love to know what it is and how you’d approach the subject.

* I write novels because poetry is clearly out of my reach

** Metaphor totally stolen from Matt Thornton of Straight Blast Gym

*** I’m hardly a great fighter either, just ask my gym-mates who beat me up on a semi regular basis

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