How Long Should Fight Scenes Be?

Red Letter Media touched upon this in the Star Wars reviews, but I wanted to know what you guys think.

I really love epic fight sequences. However, one complaint I've heard some complain about them is that they go on for too long. Take the final duel at the end of Revenge Of The Sith. That fight went one for like, ten minutes, and it got to the point that some felt like they were feeling bored by it, despite the incredible effects.

So my question to you fellow writers is this. How long should one write fight scenes? And if they go on for a long time, how do you keep the audience from feeling bored by them?

I think that my answer to the first ("how long should they go on") might be "as long as is right for the given fight": one fight might be best conveyed in only a few words, another might not be well-served by less than several pages.

As to the second ("how does one keep the audience interested"), one possibility that comes to mind is advancing the story: a long fight seems likely to be more tolerable if the events of the fight are relevant to the plot (killing that character ends the rebelling, or foreshadowing of the protagonist's dark powers, for example). Conversely, and tying in with my first point, if the plot isn't advanced in the fight, why spend so much time on it?

edited 11th Aug '14 4:39:47 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

As long as you need it to be.

This is not a "dodge". It comes down to this: given the pacing of your story, do you want to overview the fight or do you want to go scene-by-scene? A good author knows when to use one and when to use the other.

To quote what I've written on the subject in the Combat-Writing Thread.

Naturally, you never want to have a fight just for the purpose of having a fight. That's just fanservice. Depending on what you intend to achieve with the fight scene, it can written in a number of different ways, with different emphases and different styles.

Seconding as long as it needs to be. Some fight scenes should be short. Some should be long. All depends on the development and lead up.

Main character versus nameless nobody should be short. Main character versus antagonist or The Dragon should be longer.

A big problem with the Star Wars scene was not only did it take forever, it played like a checklist of Hollywood cliches. Floating platforms. Falling platforms. Impending waterfall. Lava. Even swinging on ropes.

Thirding as long as you need it to be.

It also depends on the opponent's fighting skill too. If the Big Bad isn't a good combatant but his Dragon is, then the fight against the Dragon should generally be longer. Mooks should be down in 1-3 hits.

Yes, fight scenes in movies these days are too long.

I think that there is only a certain amount of time that you should have just plain fighting before you break up the action with something different so you don't bore the viewer, whether that something be dialogue that advances the story, combatant(s) discussing or switching to a different strategy, or even switching to an entirely different action scene altogether. Somebody mentioned the Star Wars prequels before; it is interesting to note that while the original trilogy action scenes, although not nearly as flashy, use all of these suggestions.

Another thing that no-one has touched on yet: it should be as detailed as the narrative viewpoint allows and requires, no more and no less— and that's going to affect how long it feels to the audience.

If it's a first-person viewpoint narration, and that character is involved in, say, a four-way shootout. What they are going to be experiencing is likely to be chaotic and fast. They aren't going to be able to provide a lovingly detailed and choreographed fight scene, because 1) they were in the middle of it themselves, and 2) they don't know what all happened (see 1); they know what the guy they were concentrating on was doing at that instant, but they don't know what he was doing before or after, or what the other two guys were doing at the same time.

A third-person omniscient narrator allows much more detail because the description isn't limited by what a particular character was doing during it.

Sometimes, what I do is utilize a build-up. I start them slow (often with a chase scene), and gradually increase the stakes. First it's just two people, and then bystanders are involved, then larger vehicles, then out come the weapons, then I describe some property damage, then some injuries, and finally a climax. This can take you maybe four to six pages.

Hence some of the criticism leveled on The Hunger Games. The first-person POV meant that a lot of the action and fight scenes ended up happening off-page.

edited 11th Aug '14 6:42:36 PM by shiro_okami

Shifting POVs is a very useful trick for all kinds of situations. Charlie Stross's Laundry Files does this pretty well on a number of occasions. On one occasion, the main POV character is responsible for raising a lot of hell while not being able to witness the main conflict; instead, the camera follows other characters to see how the battle's going. (Fuller Memorandum, if you're curious.) Another, really neat narrative trick he pulled followed the main character as he went through one conflict that turned out to be the less important of two going on at the moment; he has to essentially refer to the official postmortem incident notes to describe the other conflict, so it's presented in the manner of a reconstruction of a shooting incident, with a mask of clinical analysis over terrible horror.

edited 11th Aug '14 7:44:07 PM by SabresEdge

To be fair, the point of the book was the impact of the violence, and showing it would glorify the whole thing.

How long should a fight scene be? Well I would look at the scene in three stages. The first is what you want to say in the fight if anything, how vicious one of the fighters may be, how much they overcome whatever odds they face, if there is a crux to the story, what the stakes are if they win or lose. Real fights don't tend to last very long, you don't get the real fancy moves you see in films and games, and they are not meant to be a twenty or thirty minute wrestling match that should be consistently entertaining. It really depends on the style of fight and it's importance to the story, on the one hand a Mike Tyson comeback fight or Randy Couture vs Jon Jones would be real fights that end in the first round, on the other you have five or ten minute fantasy ones where the fate of the world rests on fisticuffs or one that even goes for half an hour that is either meant to be entertaining or showcase how tough the fighters are meant to be. It all boils down to what you want to showcase in the fight, are the fighters such a badass they can demolish anyone in their way? Is it one who is so violent and vicious and the other fights back no matter what is thrown at them? Is it meant to be real where one blow could end it? Are they fighters who would tap to a submission hold or risk injury? Would the fight keep going even were that to happen? That's up to you as a writer to showcase and demonstrate.

From there I would try and visualize how the fight scene would play out. If you cannot actually play out the different punches, kicks, holds, throws, ect (maybe some Character Customization in a fighting game to get a feel of how a fight would actually play out) then look at what works in the style you are going for and see what works and what doesn't. Different things will translate another way from film to text and some of it may be bloated or does not work well from one to another.

Then you basically write the scene down and see if it translates to the image you have in your head. Is it clear? Does it match what you set out to write? Does it have the impact or style of what you wanted to portray?