Quick and Easy Strategy for Writing Realistic Fight Scenes

How to Build Incredible Fight Scenes That Will Captivate your Readers

F.H Archer | Fiction Writer
5 min readFeb 7, 2024

This is a Short and Easy Guide to Build Great Fights Scenes Using Quick and Simple Writing Techniques Base In:

  • Utilize Sensory Details
  • Emotion

When we build fights scenes or scenes in general we end up with this process of sensory details, actions, place and emotions, normally we use a single character or some characters to build this whole scenery, plus dialogues to complement it.

One thing that I like to remember, mostly because I write action scenes basically my whole life and also my favorite genres evolve it in a way or another.

The biggest problem of fight scenes is to be confused and this mistake happens all the time(also with great names of literature, like Brandon Sanderson).

Quick disclaimer, I love his books and I love his work as a high fantasy writer, but my first experiences with his fight scenes were pretty strange.

But again, in my list of favorite fiction writers he is probably in third or fourth place. Tolkien and Raymond E. Feist at the top.

With all this said, I will give you quick and good advice on writing action scenes at the end of this article. To guarantee you can write a very clear and nice fight that your reader will truly like it.

This single tip, I only discovered after writing for 6 years, plus studying psychology and marketing. You will have it with less effort and a more clear approach. So see you at the end. Have a great reading. S2

Back to the main point: How can we incorporate sensory details such as sights, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations that can bring fight scenes to life, making them more immersive and believable for readers and ease the process of dialogues, show, not tell and emotional scenes?

Craft an Engaging Fight Scene for your Fiction Story:

Imagine a fight scene in a book or movie that left you breathless, heart pounding, and fully engaged. What made it so captivating?

If you’re remembering the scene of somebody you hate getting his or her ass kicked, we are both in the same boat. 😂

It probably has something of value in the game and a good portion of emotional impact to us.

When writing fight scenes, it’s crucial to go beyond mere physical movements and delve into the sensory experience.

Most of the time, you can just focus on simple movements, blows and strikes and let your reader imagine the rest.

We do this to make the process of vivid sensory details and emotional impact more easier and the reading more immersive, simple and fluid.

Describe the metallic tang of blood in the air, the adrenaline-fueled pounding of the combatants’ hearts, the gritty texture of sweat-slicked skin. By engaging multiple senses, you create a more immersive experience for your readers, drawing them deeper into the action.

Short tips to make great fight scenes, using emotions and sensorial details:

  • Visual Details: Describe the scene’s surroundings, the appearance of the fighters, and the choreography of their movements. (Here some character building can help you on how this fight could go).
  • Auditory Sensations: Capture the sounds of combat, from the clash of weapons to the grunts of exertion. Plus you can use some internal dialogues and thoughts to make it even more impactful.
  • Olfactory Descriptions: Include smells such as blood, sweat, and the metallic tang of weapons.
  • Tactile Sensations: Convey the physical sensations experienced by the characters, such as pain, fatigue, and the impact of blows.
  • Emotional Impact: Explore the characters’ thoughts and feelings during the fight, adding depth and resonance to the scene. Plus I encourage you to give at least one goal or fear, based on the consequence of this fight and the reason for it. This makes the process of emotional impact much easier.

The major tip:

You have a good list of things to work with, the tip I was talking earlier, was this one:

Normally I create a short script for the battle, base on a copywriting tip I learn years ago:

Every word has an emotional impact that we can explore. This is in marketing, when comes about fiction writing the sentence would be:

“Every information have an impact”

So, to make my fight always clear I use a method on my script to build short acts or short scenes if you prefer call then like this. Normally this is the way my script goes:

  1. First I set what information I want to show
  2. Second I list the fight scenes for this information
  3. Next I set a short period on description or dialogue to keep the text easy to read and clear to understand

And I keep doing this, normally in 3 or 4 short acts the text would be finished.

But if I need more acts, I do a breath scene change, talk very little about another event involving another character and I go back for the fight. Plus I normally use roman numerals to divide the scenes something like this:

I

Fight Scene

II

Scene that involve the plot, but with another importante character

III

Back to the fight scene again

This keeps my reader interested and engaged with the story, while also helping him or her to keep calm and enjoy a clear and pleasant experience.

These were the two tips to write better fight scenes, by the way.

Before we finish a quick advice, in fight scenes sometimes our difficulty can be just the vocabulary of the fighting style and/or the fight elements

When I mean vocabulary is the name of a technique, blow or weapon and the impact of them on the character.

So, if you keep struggling in writing fight scenes, this is a good element to improve your vocabulary.

At the end, if you want more articles about fiction writing, I highly recommend you to go on my profile and see my last posts:

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F.H Archer | Fiction Writer

"If we acknowledge the richness within our imagination, there would be no greater joy than if our fears never hindered the power of being creative.”