Help me improve my fight scenes

I have a lot of trouble with writing fight scenes. I'm a martial artist, a 1st dan blackbelt in Taekwondo, and I get how a fight goes, and what X and Y feels like and all that. But my fight scenes always come out sounding like Beige Prose, and even I find it off-putting. Unfortunately, I don't have any of my old ones (they were deleted by tech staff accidentally, and then my harddrive crashed) to show you guys what I mean. I can write one later, when I'm not rushing, though, if that will help.

My prose is just...blah. My sentence length variation goes to pot (normally, I get complimented on it, profusely), and I feel like everything reads like Ikea Fight Scenes. It's "A hit B. B went flying. B got up and tried to attack. A countered." and so on... Ick.

How can I fix this? My writing isn't usually like that, and it frustrates me.

We'd really need a sample of your writing to comment on it specifically. In the mean time, this thread (Fight Scenes for the Inexperienced) has some tips on writing fight scenes.

Understood. I'll work on a quick one on my lunch break.

Sound effects.

I'm a martial artist in European longsword, and I find that this is a risk I face in any duel-based fight scene.

What I recommend is thinking from the character's martial perspective. For instance, I find myself thinking about the strike I use to engage my adversary and perhaps a couple of the initial responses, but once the fight gets a bit furious I function on trained instinct. So you could start a fight scene with a description of the specific technique used, and then make it less descriptive but more emotive as the fight continues. Beforehand and afterwards, you might also mention how they feel about the engagement.

You might even do it in retrospect:

That was improvised, but bear with me. The general idea was to give the final moment of action, and then give the audience a clue as to what happened. You can take it further, depending on the context. In this case, I noted Reginald's economic concerns given the price of plate armour, but you could use just about any other consideration.

After that, you could tie some of those secondary results into a later event. What if Reginald didn't have his armour at a critical moment and got injured? He might have to fight more defensively, causing him to fail at some objective. He might even die.

edited 12th Sep '11 8:39:15 AM by MadassAlex

I just wanted to say I like your style.

Thank you. :D

Always a pleasure to help.

edited 12th Sep '11 9:11:31 AM by MadassAlex

As do I.

Thanks, Alex, that was really really helpful!