Day eight - Fight Scenes!

Everyone loves to watch the fight scenes in action movies. ("EXPLOSIONS! CAR CHASES!" Yes, I'm looking at you, Michael Bay.) We love to read them in books. Especially when justice is being dispensed, fist into face.

We get disappointed when there isn't action in our movies/books. Obviously, the producers of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II didn't think viewers would show up to the theaters unless they added in more fighting than was in the book, hence a lot of the stuff that was changed in the movie that I didn't like. Here's another one: the extended fight scenes in the Lord of the Rings movies. They are really badass, but they aren't always what was word for word in the novels. Point being, people like fight scenes.

Today I'm continuing yesterday's work with other characters. I'm writing a fight scene for Iris. Most fight scenes that I'm going to write in these books are going to feature her, because hey, she's the fighter. Just like, most elemental magic we see will be Robin or Anya. The one I'm writing today is one of the first in the book, when she starts going to a town defense class. Here she meets Tym, one of the villains of the series. This scene is actually loosely based on a very similar one I did in my earliest form of "The Greenstone". One of my original plot elements was having a villain who took instant exception to Iris. Whatever his reasons for disliking her (she's a girl, she consorts with Rebels, she's a "traitor"), he becomes her Nemesis. This scene is their first interaction, when they practice sword fighting together, and they weigh each others skills. Their mutual dislike will only increase each time they meet.

Writing a sword fighting scene for me is like writing about driving a manual: I know the theory behind it, and once I even got behind the wheel and managed to inch around a parking lot in first gear. Yeah, I was in fencing club for... a day. (Hey, they didn't give me any padding, and those tips HURT.) I've watched Lord of the Rings and The Princess Bride and Clash of the Titans (dude, the original). So that makes me an expert, right? No, but hey, this is my fantasy world, and I do what I want. Yet, a writer has to make things believable enough to keep suspension of disbelief in place.

I'd like to brag say that I sat on YouTube all day and watched videos of people sword fighting and went to the library and did oodles of research. I could then say that I learned all the fancy names for all the moves and am now qualified to choreograph the lightsaber duel in the next Star Wars movie. But I didn't. Because really, ain't nobody got time for that.

So how do I write a fight scene? I wing it. Yup, I'm pretty sure that's the secret. It's the writers secret code - just make it up and people will believe you. (This is true not even in just the fiction genre...)

Soooo yeah I'm not linking any samples of my fight scene today. The first draft is just word vomit and needs to be rewritten once or twice before it's digestible. Perhaps in a later post I will regale you all with my super awesome believable sword fights!