In another in her series of articles for Writer’s Digest, Carla Hoch talks about writing fight scenes when your characters aren’t trained to fight.
Some one percent of U.S. persons age six and over practice some kind of martial arts, so it’s likely that far fewer train to proficiency. Therefore, unless you’ve built a fighter, the odds are your character isn’t trained for combat. But what happens when they have to? “While I can’t definitively say what every untrained person would do, I can say that by virtue of the fact they are human, their response to a physical threat will likely be greatly impacted by sociological pressures, psychological wiring, and biological construct,” Hoch says.
- Sociological Pressures. While there’s little difference between men and women in trained fighting, they react differently when untrained. “Men and women can differ in their fighting style as well as their willingness to engage,” Hoch says. “Whether unspoken or stated outright, we learn what society expects of us and often conform to that.” In other words, men are expected to know how to fight, women aren’t. That can change, however, based on community. Women from disadvantaged circumstances may be expected to fight or be seen as weak. “So, before asking how an untrained character would fight, ask if their community would even allow it,” Hoch writes.
- Psychological Wiring. “How people fight is also heavily influenced by how their brains are hard-wired to respond to threat,” Hoch says. “Your character may behave contrary to what comes naturally to them depending upon the stakes of the fight. However, many people do have a predominant response.”
- Threat Responses. When confronted with a threat, people might fight, run, or freeze in place. Each of those responses can be good or bad, depending on what or whom the character is facing. For example, a fighter might throw their attacker off-guard, but also get into more trouble than they bargained for. A character might also throw their chest out and attempt to get their confronter to back down. Or they could acquiesce, acting submissive in order to defuse a threat.
- Biological Construct. Your character’s physicality will also affect how they respond. “Characters who are large, either in height, weight, or both may grab their smaller aggressor to cause pain, push, throw or pin their combatant,” Hoch says. “Smaller characters, even those whose natural response to threat is fighting, may avoid confrontation for the simple fact they are smaller.”
So, what do untrained people do in real life? Hoch shares her observations from her high school teaching days. “The males generally tried to look like they knew what they were doing,” she says. “They clenched their hands into fists and hit each other from every angle. The fighters also grabbed each other by the shirt to sling each other down, tackled one another at the waist and rammed their opponent’s head into lockers or the ground.” However, Hoch says most of the fights were for show, as male students tried to save face in front of their peers.
In contrast, girl fights were brutal. “They grabbed hair, earrings, nose rings, clothing, you name it,” Hoch writes. “They punched, slapped, and scratched one another as well. I also saw the females use weaponry more than the males.” Yelling rarely stopped fights between two girls and male students were reluctant to intervene.
Interestingly, Hoch notes that students never yelled for help, even when attacked. “In teaching self-defense, I can tell you that it is hard to get people to cry out for aid even in a controlled environment,” she says. “It may be that your untrained character, or trained for that matter, is attacked and never cries out for help.”
