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Building Narrative Tension: How to Keep Your Fight Scenes Interesting
Let me start by saying that violence by itself is actually rather dull.
I’m talking, of course, about fictional violence. Fictional violence is meaningless until given meaning by it’s creator.
Have you ever asked yourself, why violence is terrifying? If you haven’t, ask yourself that question. Why is violence so frightening?
Answer that question for yourself, in detail. Now, don’t just settle for one answer or a broad answer. Keep digging until you get specific, until you get personal.
One of the major problems writers face when writing violence is the assumption that the violence or the act of violence is going to do the work for them. The truth is, it won’t. You’re going to need to put in the effort to move your characters from stick figures slapping each other to people with meaningful goals and stakes. Action means nothing without emotions to hook into, without costs and consequences.
So, again, why is violence scary?
Think about your favorite fight scenes either in written fiction, comics, or in film. Consider why it works for you. Why were you invested? Why did you care?
You’ll probably have different answers depending on the scene you chose, but behind each one, you’ll find a host of them. Those which are overarching in terms of plot, those which are personal on the character level. Goals. Desires. Stakes.
Part of the reason why it is so hard to provide good examples of fight scenes, (just like every other fictional scene, really) is that the real impact isn’t actually in act of the violence itself. In fiction, a fight scene is actually a climax, a culmination, and release of the tension built up in prior scenes. You might immediately think of a climactic battle at the end of a narrative like the Battle of Gondor, but it can be as small as two people arguing in a bar until one of them hits the other across the face with a glass mug.
A is standing at the bar, chatting with their friends. They’re a little tipsy, they’ve been drinking, but they’re not so drunk as to have lost all cognitive or motor function.
Enter B, at a nearby table with their companions. B is a mercenary from a unit garrisoned just outside of town. B gets up from the table and goes to the bar. B elbows A’s friend, a member of the local militia aside to order from the bartender.
A’s friend stumbles.
A grabs B by the shoulder and pushes him back.
B glares at A, demanding to know why he’s in the way.
A insists B apologize.
B refuses, insults the state of the local militia.
A’s friend tries to break in, stating they’re fine. They think everyone should calm down.
A takes a breath, relaxes.
B spits in A’s face.
A grabs their glass mug off the bar, clocks B across the face.
B stumbles backwards.
Pause.
Let me break this down:
A hitting B with the glass is actually the moment where the scene ends, the tension releases, even though the action continues into a new scene with B’s reaction. We’ve got our setup, our dilemma, our decision, and then action. On the action, the tension releases, and you start all over again.
An example is the scene from The Princess Bride where Wesley is climbing cliff and Inigo offers to throw him the rope. This sequence is a separate scene from the following duel, but works as establishment for the characters and the kind of men they are. The scene climaxes when Wesley tells Inigo to throw him the rope and enters it’s denouement as he finishes making his way to the top.
This sequence is crucial to the duel. We begin to really care about Inigo, feel a sense of camaraderie. This camaraderie is now in conflict with our desire to see Wesley save Buttercup and, as a result, we worry over Inigo’s future. He’s no longer just a mook, but a compelling character in his own right.
If you wanted the true underlying tension of The Princess Bride’s duel, it’s this conflict and not the duelist’s skill level.
The equal skill provides additional tension against the goal of saving Buttercup, but, due to Princess Bride’s fairy tale structure, we know Wesley is going to win. What keeps the duel itself interesting is, how will Wesley win and will he defeat Inigo before Buttercup is killed by Vizini?
The same question is asked in the following duel with Fezzik with a similar structure. Then, we see the same structure play out again with Vizzini. Wesley matches their skills against his in a fair fight, and, ultimately, defeats them.
There are, however, multiple fight scenes within Wesley and Inigo duel. You can see those breaks when they stop fighting, to give the audience a breather and breaking the fight up to ensure the scene doesn’t become monotonous. With action sequences, monotony is, ironically, a real danger. Putting in breaks allows you to extend the action without losing audience attention, and let’s their brain rest.
These breaks are just as important in writing as they are in film. You want to make sure you keep ratcheting up and releasing that tension, along with audience expectation.
(If you’d like an interesting breakdown of how historical fencing compares to The Princess Bride, Skallagrim’s got a good one. The Princess Bride itself is a love letter to the likes of Zorro and swashbuckling films from the Golden Age of Hollywood, digging into it’s influences can help you if that’s a genre you want to chase.)
You should start thinking of every fight sequence in your novel as not one scene, but many little scenes broken up around character action and dialogue. Build up, up, up, then release, and start over.
Setup: This is the moment before your characters engage, where you establish the stakes and potential consequences. The surrounding pieces at play, A is drinking with their friends, B is a mercenary, A’s friend is in the militia, and there might be some bad blood between them.
You start establishing your tension here, your pieces stressed against each other before we start ratcheting up.
Rising Action: This is where the tension really starts to build. Depending on the type of scene you’re structuring, your character’s violent actions could actually fit in here. Most likely, initially, prolonged violence will be part of the second scene.
Climax: Your tension dissipates on the opening strike. Then, the characters must decide if they’ll escalate. Any violence in the following scene can end here.
The climax of the example is A hitting B.
Denouement: I like to call this “The Decision”, the fallout, the realization, where characters decide if they’re going to back out. This can be the retreat, where they try to get away before being forced back into a fight, the dialogue where characters try to buy themselves time, realizations of injuries, or just their breather between bouts.
The denouement of the scene is B stumbling.
Escalate: The violence in the next section escalates, which means the situation becomes more serious, more intense, more violent. Basically, things get worse.
The escalation of the scene? If A continues to attack B, or if B’s mercenary friends join the fray.
The consequences of violent actions are, usually, events escalate into more violence.
Remember, violence is about problem solving. It’s a tool in the box of conflict resolution, one which often acts as a short term solution but ultimately makes the situation worse in the long run. If your character has chosen to resolve a conflict this way then they have limited their options to resolve the conflict differently. This is true whether you’re looking at widespread warfare or an interpersonal dispute. Violence closes off alternative routes for resolution, and builds expectations for audience over what will happen next.
When you build your world, your characters, and your narrative, you are making promises to your reader. A large part of the tension which comes from violent actions by your characters, or fight scenes, will be consequences resulting from them. If you promise, say, that violent actions by your MC will result in swift, harsh consequences which could cost them their life, then you better deliver. The character doesn’t need to die, but something should happen. Showing up to work the next day like nothing went down, especially if someone else in a position of authority saw it? Now, you’ve not only undercut your narrative tension but devalued your world and broken the reader’s trust. You promised consequences. You didn’t deliver. At that point, there’s no reason to take any other threat presented to your characters seriously.
Suspension of Disbelief is not built on realism, it’s built on your compact with the reader, the rules you’ve set for your narrative and their expectations, the narrative you’ve promised to deliver. You need rules because they create a framework for your story, for your scenes, and, especially, for you fight scenes.
Your fight scenes are only a part of your story, but they’re important. They provide an opportunity to expand your character and also create disruptive inciting incidents around which action occurs.
If people complain your characters aren’t realistic, you shouldn’t immediately jump to make events and characters more like the “real” world. Rather, you should step back, look at your worldbuilding and the expectations you set in the early pages. Did you do the prep work?
You can’t win ’em all, but, often, the criticism you’ll get won’t be helpful until you realize what it means. Everything is permissible, so long as you put in the work to set it up first.
A bar brawl at the beginning of your novel could be the foundation of the entire story with all the spiraling consequences falling like dominoes from that one action. And that, my friend? That is tension.
Tension is uncertainty. It’s in the question, what will happen next? What will happen to these characters I care about? Will they be okay?
Turning heel, Leah raced toward the window at the cavern’s opposing end.
Soldiers struggled to stand, clamoring off the benches. Some of the beta-kings drew their lasabres and laspikes, while the pteroriders yanked out pistols and force-blades.
Leah dodged past a soldier reaching for her, jumped onto the table, and flung herself forward with a telekinetic thrust. She landed hard, half-way free, lasabre springing to life in her hand. An orange flash sliced through a long wooden table hurled at her head. The pieces fractured cleanly and broke apart into two flat planes. Thrusting them behind her, she didn’t wait for the crash but heard the screams.
Overhead, footmen moved to the edges of the balconies, rifles ringing the room. They took aim as a unit, and fired into the crowd.
Dancing between the bolts, Leah dove through fleeing petitioners. Three strong presences flashed through her.
A knight in silver lunged into view, a turquoise blade ignited in his hand. His armor shone, his identity hidden by his mask.
Another, familiar, presence closed in from behind.
Nathan, Leah thought. Cor!
They were going to cut her off, pile on like raptors in the diplohouse.
Leah’s jaw tightened. She needed to get out. That meant reaching the cavern’s overlook. Her eyes moved to the left-side balcony. There!
Orlya thrummed with approval.
Leah spun, diving into the crowd.
Two knights gave chase.
A third followed, but at an easy pace. Petitioners screaming as his telekinesis seized and hurled them from his path.
Switching off her sword, Leah catapulted high into the air, over the soldiers at the balcony railing, and landed hard. Shoulder and back aching, she rolled to her feet.
Several men stared at her.
Leah smiled.
A soldier lifted his rifle.
With raised hands, she stepped backwards.
Roaring, Hector Darenian dropped in from above — a raging ball of sapphire blue. He crashed into the gathered soldiers, plowing through them, blade shearing through their bodies. Hot blood cascading across the stone, Hector slammed headlong through the opposing wall.
Leaping over the fallen, Leah landed neatly on the balcony’s railing and stepped off. She hit the cavern floor. Another quick dash carried her to the overlook.
“Stop!”
We can sit here and talk about tension, but tension is all about the pieces you pressure against each other. External factors pressure internal goals and desires, external consequences cut off alternate paths. You can switch up with more techniques, add new odds like more enemies or more dangerous enemies, change the rules like switching from the left hand to the right, pull out new pieces of information, but there also needs to be the promise the event is going to lead somewhere, that it will affect something, that this furthers our story.
Some writers, especially new writers, have a habit of writing their story like it’s modular. The scenes are individual rather than interlinked. The hot boy gets into a bar fight to show how cool and dangerous he is, but that’s the only narrative purpose the scene has. However, you can add tension to this scene and the MC’s relationship with said boy if the police show up at their house a day later to ask questions about the brawl. Now, interacting with him could have real consequences for their own goals, their future, how good an idea is this? And, suddenly, we’ve got stakes.
If your violence serves no purpose, it has no purpose. In the world of fiction, your fight scene is what you make it. You can’t expect real world expectations or fears or the concept of violence itself to do the work for you. You’ve got to latch the actions into both your characters and your world.
How does a bar brawl between two factions affect the relationship of the town militia and the mercenaries camped outside? How does a bar brawl affect A and B’s relationship with the other locals in the bar? With the bartender? With their friends? How do the injuries sustained change the severity of what happens? What if someone dies?
Your inciting incidents are what you make of them. Your fight scene can be a workhorse building up your narrative, or it can be meaningless fluff with stick figures clashing together on the page.
-Michi
Building Narrative Tension: How to Keep Your Fight Scenes Interesting was originally published on How to Fight Write.
(via kuno-chan)
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In the original draft of Gideon, Harrow doesn’t say ‘Oh, I have hurt your heart,’ she says ‘Oh, I have rustled your jimmies.’ She says that purely because that’s what my brain thrust into my hand and I liked the way it sounded. Carl said, ‘You can’t put that in a novel’ […]
drawing out my feelings on the most recent tazmuir interview
(via saltwife)
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PLEASE…I am begging yall to go watch Lackadaisy it’s so good 😭😭😭🙏
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Yes, it’s amazing and heartfelt that this project finally came to life with many talented artists across the area, but I’m just over here laughing at Wick’s reaction to all the damage Rocky caused:
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Speaking of Lackadaisy…
They have a small team…
-and yet Hazbin Hotel, a show backed up behind a studio has barely been promoted outside of the fandom and doesn’t even have a trailer yet when it’s likely going to come out in less than a few months while Lackadaisy already had a trailer. Not trying to go “___ is better” or anything, and even then…
What’s wrong with that?
It’s art, and every piece of art varies in quality.
Why does EVERY OTHER SHOW get comparisons, criticism, and gets in and out of trending success-
But Helluva Boss “can’t” be interpreted differently or it’s “bad faith”, it can’t be critiqued, at all, or you “dont understand writing and you’ll never be a writer if you EVER critique it!”, you “cant” compare it to anything else or you’re a “dick measerer!” and you’re an overall “bad person” that’s “insulting Vivziepop or her fans “personally” for saying anything negative about this cartoon with fictional characters. The fandom basically treats Helluva Boss as if it were their God that could never be critiqued or you’re committing “blasphemy!” against it’s “perfect form that compares to no one other than itself”! They worship it, and the creators, and it’s starting to feel weirdly cultish- even for fandom standards.
It feels like a religion, a very very very VERY strict religion that always expects you to kiss the feet of it’s “Gods!” at every turn or else you’re “punished” for it with harassment and verbal abuse. It’s messed up, and the fact that the creators encouraged this find of culture within their fandom is actually causing a monopoly by always manipulating their audience into almost always praising it or giving it positive reviews with toxic positivity with other shows barely getting a chance in comparison. -and if you don’t almost always praise it, you’re considered as a “bad faith fake fan!” that “needs to be flamed and taken down!” for thinking differently.
It’s a Catholic Church level monopoly.
-and im afraid if it continues to stay that way,
That the indie industry, like any other industry, will become unstable with Helluva Boss being constantly worshipped and being given positive reviews regardless of quality while other shows continue to barely be given success. It’s the kid that takes all the candy, the president who uses propaganda to always win. When monopolies take over, it causes other businesses to become less and less known or to fail altogether. Lackadaisy got lucky, same for MD, but for the past three years no other indie cartoon has been nearly as successful. Not because they’re “less good” but because Vivziepop manipulates her audience to keep herself on top. It’s causing a monopoly in the indie animation industry, with constant overworking and rushing to meet demands of consumers. Which if anything, makes Helluva Boss the very thing it said it would “never” be:
Corporate, a corporate show that monopolizes anywhere it goes with over 40+ million dollars behind it while other shows don’t get nearly as much. It’s causing indie animation to become unstable, and keeping it in this state by telling people to “NOT GIVE ____ SHOW A CHANCE IN THE SPOTLIGHT! DONT COMPARE HELLUVA BOSS TO BETTER SHOWS AND LET HB ALWAYS BE ON TOP! HELLUVA BOSS MUST ALWAYS BE PRAISED AND SAYING THAT OTHER SHOWS DESERVE BETTER IS BAD FAITH!” is only going to hurt the indie industry further.
The “Helluva Boss can never be criticized or be less successful because it and it’s creator are perfect in every way! There must be MULTIPLE FULLY ANIMATED EPISODES A YEAR! Demand must be met- always! Give us your money no other project matters and you’re a “fake fan” if you don’t always give us want we want! 😡” ideology that’s causing this monopoly in the first place… needs to end. It’s holding down even the freelance parts of animation with capitalism. HB has had it’s chance to shine, and other shows deserve a chance at being in the spotlight of trending success just as much as HB does. -and I believe that if other shows get successful enough, that it might break this monopoly and give HB’s creators the wake up call they’ve been needing since Hazbin Hotel’s pilot. So with that said:
Let’s get Lackadaisy, Far Fetched, and Murder Drones to 15+ million views this year!
We cant keep having this monopoly last forever, so if you’re interested in these shows, please give them the support they deserve!
Capitalism has no place in freelance animation! Let’s get em’ trending boys!
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rainy day with aranara <33
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