In her latest Writer’s Digest post on writing great fight scenes, Carla Hoch discusses the importance of pacing. Hoch shares examples of strong scenes from well-known authors and examines why they work.
Hoch discusses scenes from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.
“Palahniuk tends to give a sentence of action then goes hard into the sensory experience,” Hoch writes. “In truth, Palahniuk’s fights take a supporting role to the physical experience of them.” He also varies his sentence length, which also forces the reader to keep pace. In contrast, Tolkien shows more action than sensory experience. Importantly, the reader doesn’t need to know anything about fighting to follow along. “Your reader should not have to know how to fight to follow your fight scene, and you should not aim to teach them,” Hoch says.
Card breaks up his action scene by getting into the minds of the fighters. “He will devote a few sentences to action then back away to give the reader a breather,” Hoch notes. Card also makes use of strong verbs to describe the action and provide sensory detail.
Hoch also recommends describing no more than a few beats of action before pulling away and giving the reader something else. “Having smaller bites of action keeps the reader in the scene,” she explains. Also, when you back away, you have the chance to drop those sensory details that make your reader feel like they are in the room. If you struggle with this, practice describing your fight out loud, as if you were telling it in conversation. “It’s not likely you will bog the listener down with a million tiny details describing every single move,” Hoch writes. “At some point in the telling, you will probably describe how a fighter responded or bled or what they said. That is natural pacing in a conversation. Try to carry that on to your page.”
