In this three part series, I am going to teach you how to craft realistic fight scenes.
Fight scenes might be my favorite thing to write; they roll off my fingers nearly three times faster than dialogue. I also love reading a good fight scene. Given that I spend about six hours a week swinging a sword, this isn’t really surprising. What was surprising, at least to me, is that many of my fellow authors dread fight scenes.
What makes fight scenes intimidating to write? And what makes a good fight scene? I think the answer to these questions are one in the same. There are three parts:
Crafting a fight scene is a distinct skill that has to be cultivated. It requires (among other things) tight pacing, high tension, and visceral description.
Fight scenes require knowledge of weapons and martial techniques, which in turn requires research or experience.
Many (perhaps most) writers have not experienced either a fight or a combat sport, and therefore aren’t writing from personal experience.
Part 1: Crafting a Fight Scene
We’re writers, so let’s start with craft. When writing a fight scene, it is critical to understand the purpose of the scene. If you don’t know what you are trying to convey, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to make the right choices.
All scenes should advance at least one (and preferably two or three) of the following: plot, character, or world. Fight scenes usually focus on the first two.
Plot
Your fight scene needs to serve a purpose. Does the hero defeat the bad guys? Do the bad guys capture the hero? Is the real villain secretly someone the hero trusted? If the fight scene does not affect the plot, it will feel flat even if it’s well written.
Character
Use your scene to add depth to your characterization. How someone prepares for, participates in, and reacts to a fight all tell a lot about them. It’s easy to get caught up on choreography and neglect character. It’s also easy to fall back on cliché. Picture this: a badass assassin calmly walking into a fight, casually killing people, and walking away unphased.
That’s not cool; it’s boring. What is underneath that? Is the assassin mentally distancing themselves, so they don’t have to deal with the emotional implications of killing someone? Are they an anti-hero with severe antisocial personality disorder who genuinely feels nothing when killing someone? Does their mental clarity contrast with the inevitable adrenaline rush as their body prepares for battle? A fight scene with no character work will always feel hollow.
Now that we’ve established the goal of the scene, let’s run through a non-exhaustive list of things that good fight scenes need:
Stakes: The stakes of a combat scene in a book are twofold. The stakes for the character are not always life or death, but (grievous) bodily harm is usually a possibility. If there’s no real danger to the characters, there’s no real tension in the fight. However, the outcome of the fight should also matter. The hero can survive unscathed and still lose. If the outcome of the fight doesn’t matter, neither will the fight.
Tension: A fight is adrenaline filled; your fight or flight response is in overdrive. The reader needs to feel that.
Rapid Pacing: Fights go fast. Split second decisions save or lose lives. The scene needs to feel like it’s moving at the speed of a real fight.
Tight prose: I love a plush description of blood blooming like roses on skin like alabaster and soaking into the soft carpet of loam to feed the hungry forest as much as the next fantasy reader, but the middle of the fight scene is not the place for it. Stopping to describe things (such as weapons and armor) in loving detail will ruin both tension and pacing.
Visceral Description: the mechanics of most fights are actually very boring, but the experience of one is far from it. In writing, the description makes that difference. Consider the difference between: “She punched him hard enough to break his nose” and “bone crunched as her fist slammed into his nose”. Your character sweating in a fight is boring, but a character’s eyes burning as sweat drips into them can help the reader experience what the character is.
Conclusion
Between the action inside the scene and the craft needed to construct the scene, there is a lot to keep track of when writing a fight scene. If you find combat scenes overwhelming, don’t try to do everything all in one pass. If you know what needs to be achieved in the scene (e.g. the character needs to kill the guard and get the keys to her cell), you can start by blocking out the choreography, build up character and description layer by layer, and then finish by tightening and polishing the prose.
Do you find fight scenes intimidating? If you do, what is the number one stumbling block standing in your way? If you don’t, what is your number one piece of advice for other authors?
About Alex
Dr. Alex Jemetta (she/they) is an astrophysicist and fantasy author. When she isn’t at her desk with her two cats, she is practicing historical longsword. Her love for research, the night sky, and historical weapons seeps into her world building. As a disabled, neurodivergent, queer author, she’s passionate about writing classic fantasy stories from a non-traditional perspective.
If you want more in depth ramblings about fight scenes and swords check out her website or subscribe to her newsletter.
You can also find her on Instagram, twitter, threads, blue sky, and TikTok at @astroalexwrites.
This is a tough question to answer as it depends upon the project. Knowing when to stop is a helpful skill to develop.
Consider the following:
Have you already found useful information from a variety of sources?
If you added a new angle now, would it further the plot?
Are you collecting information that’s not really on your topic?
Given a deadline by your editor or publisher, do you have enough time to write your story?
Do you have sufficient research to cover the main points of your Work in Progress?
If you answer “yes” to most of the above it’s likely time to move on—even though it’s tempting and perhaps addicting—to continue looking for information and falling down rabbit holes. Otherwise, you may end up with a big pile of resources and not enough time to do anything with them. Who needs the added stress?
When starting a new writing project, it’s common to think thoughts, like:
“To write about this, I must read everything about this topic.”
“Just one more book to read. Then I’ll have my break through.”
“As soon as I know everything about the topic, my confidence level will soar.”
There is some truth to these thoughts. It helps to read about the topic you’re writing. However, expertise is not necessary and attempting this for every writing project is going to cause an extreme amount of stress, delivering a whopping dose of anxiety.
Why do we become obsessed with research?
Research can be addicting. When learning something new, your brain experiences a boost of dopamine, one of the neurotransmitters affecting the pleasure center in the brain. When your brain discovers new information, the dopamine boost tells your brain, “Give me more. Keep searching for information!” This may end up feeling like an endless research loop.
How do you get out of the research loop?
Take notes. Major points, not extensive outlines.
Write on how you feel about the book or article you’re researching. Compare it to other information you’ve read. Document these thoughts as if they are part of a journal or diary.
Composing a research diary helps you start the writing process early in the research phase. This may help avoid writer’s block, which can happen when you have too much information to process.
Benefits of a Research Diary
Taking notes of what you read will improve memories of that information because you’re creating associative pathways in your brain.
You’ll know early in the process how to craft the new story or article. When you start in earnest, your writing will flow faster.
Experiment with this. Try writing a research diary of what you’ve discovered via researching today. This won’t take much of your time and can be a confidence booster.
Research is part of the writing process for all genres. Research is necessary to make your writing accurate. It can be time-consuming, but it shouldn’t take over your life. Eventually, you’ll need to set aside research materials and get down to the business of writing.
Make a Goal
Begin by setting aside 30 minutes a day to get yourself in writing mode habit. If possible, try to write at or near the same time of day. That way writing becomes part of the daily pattern. Get over to the table and write. I do the same thing for music practice and have found that I rarely miss guitar time.
Consider a specific goal. Say you’ve joined a writing critique group and want to present one chapter per week. A two-thousand-word chapter is doable for this goal. If you write four-hundred words per day over five days, there’s your word count with plenty of time for editing before bringing the new chapter to critique.
Limit Research Time
If you find yourself using too much time researching and not enough writing, try the following method author Diana Clark uses.
“A rough guide I use in fiction writing is that my research time shouldn’t exceed my writing time. If I expect to produce a first draft in ten weeks, then, I will spend ten weeks or less researching my book and establishing a timeline and character chart. That block of time doesn’t include the simple fact-checking I will do later as part of the review process.”
If You Hit a Wall, Do Something Else
You’re on a roll. The muse is with you and the writing has never come easier. Then full-stop. You need more information. This is when I either go into research mode or step away from the laptop and regroup by doing something completely different:
Have a snack
Play with the pup (Our black lab, Bailey, used to hang out with me on the floor while I pondered my writing. Always helpful and a very good boy.)
Read
Listen to music
Watch travel videos
Ponder the state of the world
There are writers who can put a pin in it and keep writing. That doesn’t work well for me. I think too much. I must stop writing, do the research, or physically move away from the writing area and do something else. Otherwise, I feel twitchy. Do what works best for you. There is no one right way.
Set Aside Time for What You Love
Find balance in all things.
Sometimes we research too much because we love learning new things. There is nothing wrong with that. Trouble comes loping in when we tumble down the rabbit holes, one interesting topic leading to another.
Don’t put too much of your research into your story.
My editor told me that it’s a bad idea to show your research. It’s cool to learn extra tidbits found while researching, but if the information isn’t driving the story forward, it’s merely an interesting tangent. As I recall, she referred to it as “Showing off.”
Save the research you don’t need in a Work-In-Progress and file it away to use it in another story. That way your time and hard work won’t be wasted.
Do you find yourself entangled in a maze of thoughts, examining situations from all angles? What do you do to climb out of rabbit holes? How much research do you think is enough?
* * * * * *
About Ellen
Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written non-fiction for parents, and The Adventures of Charlie Chameleon chapter book series with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Works in Progress are The Hobo Code, YA historical fiction and The Crystal Key, MG Magical Realism/ Sci-Fi, a glaze of time travel.
Imagine two readers. One reads phrases like, “She walked into the bakery.” The characters do things and go places and exchange snappy dialogue. The other one reads phrases like, “The aroma of fresh-baked bread stirs great flutters in the chest of the girl with very large, odd, and attractive eyes that could shoot a man dead in love.” Most likely, both readers will abandon their books. In the first story, there is a litany of actions with no sensory anchor for the reader. In the second, sensory details clutter and obscure any hint of plot or character, and overwhelm the reader.
So how much sensory detail should a writer put in or leave out of a story? There are lots of theories riding in the ether, but there are no hard and fast rules. However, if you treat the senses as narrative tools rather than decoration, you’ll exercise the level of sensory integration that works for you and your story every time.
The Sensory Hierarchy
Ever notice that sight dominates not only sensory details in any descriptive writing but many of our proverbs as well? “Seeing is believing.” “Appearances are deceiving.” “Out of sight, out of mind.”
We even talk more about sight than any other of the five senses. Fun fact: in the last 100 years, there have been more studies done on vision than on any of the other senses. Hearing comes next but numbers fewer than half the vision studies. The gustatory sense, or taste, has had the least. Why do we feel sight is so important? Losing one’s sight alone isn’t life-threatening. But losing one’s sense of touch (pain in particular) is life-threatening. So why is sight still so dominant?
Sight is both personal and social. We share mutual glances, exchange looks, and make eye contact. It’s linked psychologically and socially to security and power. We recognize faces, surveil, stalk, “see the light,” and stare down our opponents.
No matter how important we believe our sight to be, our other senses make our worlds (real or imagined) more tangible and understandable. But if that’s true (and it is), how does the writer decide which senses to include in the story?
Strategic Sensory Integration
Choosing which sensory details to use in a story, scene, and sentence based on your story’s emotional and narrative goals is called strategic sensory integration. It involves weaving different senses through the story instead of cataloging every detail a character encounters. This reflects how we perceive our world IRL. Which details we perceive are determined by our preferences, our personalities, the strength of our senses, our experiences, our skills, and our focus.
Purposeful selection of sensory details allows those details to do more than one thing for the story. A detective who studies a murder scene and notices a metallic taste in the back of his throat conveys one personality while a detective at that same scene who catalogs a metallic scent in the air presents another personality type. A skilled writer might also use the description to reflect an old unresolved trauma or to present the reader with a clever red herring.
Things to consider in selecting sensory details:
1. The Scene
2. The Viewpoint Character
3. The Setting
4. The Plot
5. The theme
Guidelines for Strategic Sensory Integration
We don’t notice all five senses all the time in real life, so don’t put all five senses on every page. As a guideline, focus on the 20% of the details that carry the most impact in your story. Stick to two or three descriptors about 80% of the time. Use more than two or three during turning points or moments of significant meaning for your characters.
Remember, this is a guideline. Let your genre be your guide. You can add a little more description and still meet your readers' expectation. Having fewer sensory details might put your readers off.
Allow your first draft to be messy and less detailed if that comes more naturally to you. Make strategic sensory integration part of your revision process.
Match Sensory Details to Emotion
When choosing sensory details that match the emotional tone of a scene, know what your scene’s primary purpose and tone need to be. What emotional impact will work best for this scene?
What key details for the plot and the character’s arc are in this scene? Avoid labeling the emotions. Intentionally select physical responses that show what the viewpoint character feels. Anchor the emotions in the setting with mood words, dialogue cues that reflect the tone of voice or unspoken words, and action verbs that convey emotion.
Think about which sense is often associated with the emotion you want to evoke. For example, fear often involves sound or touch, people associate love with scent, and bright colors or sweet tastes and scents often convey happiness.
Identify the emotion in each of the examples below
The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.” The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I heard the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees cold as a stone, and then my courage sank.” Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The heat lay leaden on the graveyard, squeezing its putrefying vapor, a blend of rotting melon and the fetid odor of burnt animal horn, out into the nearby alleys.” Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
Kendra took the wooden bowl, dipped it in the water, and drank. Sunlight gleamed off the surface of the water, dazzling her. The clear liquid tasted thick as honey, light as bubbles, rich as cream, tart as berries, and fresh as dew.”―Keys to the Demon Prison by Brandon Mull
The cold carved bone deep, fueled by the lash of the wind, iced by the drowning rain gushing from a bruised, bloated sky….Dark Witch by Nora Roberts
Analyze the examples above. Identify the strong, specific words used and what story elements those words enhance.
What to Avoid
Don't rely on a single sense to convey the emotion in a scene or the entire story.
Avoid labeling emotions. Writing 'he was angry' is far less impactful than showing us his clenched fists and reddening face.
Clichés will make your writing stale.
Unusual comparisons, vague non-sensory nouns, and unique descriptions may make your sensory detail vague or incomprehensible.
Filter Sensory Details Through Character
When you use sensory details filtered through the character, it gives your character depth and verisimilitude. Ask yourself what senses and details most align with the character’s experience, personality, preferences, skills, and training? For example, a chef notices food smells and tastes; a musician will probably interpret things as tones, rhythms, and beats; a carpenter notices structural things most of us don’t, and so on.
Consider how the character’s medical conditions, past traumas, and family relationships affect the character’s perceptions. For example, a past trauma may make your character deathly afraid of fire or have a deadly fascination with fire. A character who survived a tragedy that claimed many of his friends and neighbors may have an over. A character who had a great relationship with her mother may see a certain color (or food) and think fondly of it because of associations with her mother. Yet another character who had a contentious relationship with her mother might hate that color because of the associations with her mother.
Look at the examples above again. What did the sensory details in those sentences tell you about the character?
What to Avoid
Avoid using generic sensory descriptions. “It was the worst thing she ever tasted” is too vague.
Avoid comparisons to things that don’t exist in the world and to things your character has never experienced. If you’ve created a character who grew up on a farm and has never seen a city, the sound of trucks and cars won’t startle her, but the speed of those vehicles might frighten her.
Layering Sensory Details
Layering in sensory details is as important as layering in the clues to a mystery or the acts that make your character grow. In real life, sensory details flood our brains. Your brain ignores a lot of the information. It notices the most significant detail first. That could be the life-threatening smell of smoke, or the flash of a blade, or a scent that evokes a pleasant memory. Then the brain gives you another detail and another as you need them. (Note: all this happens faster than I can write about it and faster than you can read.)
Do the same thing for your readers. Give them the one sensory detail that is most important in that moment. Seed the other details in decreasing order of importance.
What to Avoid
Avoid the habit of dumping all the sensory details at the beginning of a scene, with few or no more sensory details in the rest of the scene.
Don't use a lot of sensory details in scenes that aren't turning points. The more details in a scene, the more importance the reader assigns the scene.
The Sensory Callback
Use one or two sensory details to represent or emphasize your thematic content. Edgar Allan Poe was exceptional at this. Most of us remember the sensory details from his works like the clock with its pendulum, the raven, and the beat of the telltale heart.
Sensory details can be used to bookend chapters or scenes. They can be a motif throughout your story. Remember the great white whale in Moby Dick?
What to Avoid
Avoid forcing a sensory detail into a motif. Motifs work best when they fit the character, the setting, the theme, and the story.
Confession
Do I think all of this through for every scene I write? No. Most of the time, I immerse myself in my viewpoint character and write by instinct. However, in revisions I try to pay specific attention to the sensory details, particularly in my turning point moments, those scenes where my character must change something. By focusing on what this character will notice and when this specific detail will influence character and my readers, I give my story a strong chance of being one my readers can’t put down and can’t forget.
Expand Your Sensory Vocabulary
Less is more. Choose the sensory details you use for specific reasons that enhance your character and your story.
Study sensory writing in books. Some poetry is full of sensory details, but don’t overlook the books you like to read, the books in your genre. After you’ve finished reading the story, go back and highlight the sensory details. Study how they added tension or conflict, or revealed key pieces of information. Are there sensory detail dumps you skipped? Did the scene create an image in your mind? Were there details that instantly placed you in the setting? What details set the mood? What other things did the sensory details add to the scene and the story?
Read children’s books. Yes, that’s right. Many children’s books focus on sensory details because that’s how children perceive the world. There are children’s books like Cold, Crunchy, Colorful by Jane Brocket written to help children learn sensory words. Use those resources.
Use a photograph of a setting. Write a paragraph describing that setting using three of the five senses.
Practice in real life. Visit several new-to-you locations. At each location, take notes about what details you notice, when you notice them, and how you reacted or felt about each of those.
Rewrite the same scene five times, focusing on one sense at a time.
Have you ever put down a book because the sensory descriptions were either too overwhelming or completely absent? Your readers don’t have to gush over how lovely the sensory details were in your story. Some readers love stories where the writer uses details sparingly. Other readers love lush descriptions. The goal is to use sensory integration that supports your characters and your story and gives your reader the reading experience they desire.
What are your favorite resources for helping you with sensory details in your writing?
About Lynette
Lynette M. Burrows is an author, blogger, writing coach, and Yorkie wrangler. She survived moving seventeen times between kindergarten and her high school graduation. She contends that alone qualifies her for writing stories of characters who struggle against the odds.
Book One, My Soul to Keep, and Book Two, If I Should Die, of her Fellowship Dystopia trilogy explore the struggles of a young woman fighting oppression. They are available at your favorite online book seller. Book Three, And When I Wake, will be published in December 2025.
When Lynette’s not writing she avoids housework and plays with her two yorkies. They live in Dorothy’s home state of Kansas. You can follow Lynette on her website or her Facebook page or Sign up for her newsletter.
