595 – Narrating Fights and Action Scenes

It’s time to narrate a deadly fight or a thrilling chase, but unfortunately, readers expect more than comic book action bubbles. Pretty unreasonable, if you ask us. However, let it never be said that we shirk from a challenge, so this week we’ve got advice on how to describe physical clashes. We talk about making sure each action matters, keeping track of multiple combatants, and why you probably can’t replicate one million punches on the page.  ## Show Notes - Eragon - Sin City - Ministry of Time Fight Scene - Babel - Rise of Kyoshi - Fight Scenes - The Mortal Instruments - Children of Blood and Bone - So, Your Fantasy World Is Based on D&D - Magic Systems for Fight Scenes - Shield of Sparrows - Rational Magic System - Santa Olivia ## Transcript **Generously transcribed by Maddie.** Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. \[Promo for Tension & Hooks 2026] **Chris:** You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. \[Intro Music] **Chris:** Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.  **Oren:** And I’m Oren.  **Chris:** Kapow! I unleash a whole storm cloud of kicks while I simultaneously throw a grenade at the enemy. A whole bunch of them fall down at once. The blood is running in streams as the bodies pile up, but the horde keeps coming, impaling themselves on the blade which I now have. **Oren:** A whole horde?  **Chris:** Yeah.  **Oren:** On one blade?  **Chris:** Yeah.  **Oren:** Wow, okay.  **Chris:** I’m skewering them like a shish kebab, just a bunch at once.  **Oren:** They’re just all getting on there. Okay. All right. Got it.  **Chris:** It happens in *Eragon*, so I don’t see why I can’t do it.  **Oren:** That’s a fair point. *Eragon* sold well, so you should be able to do whatever it did. **Chris:** Uh-huh. Next, the leader is bearing down on me, so I’m gonna run up the wall and do a back flip and land right on the leader’s head. It goes smoosh, and then everybody runs away.  **Oren:** Are all the bad guys still shish kebabbed on your sword while this is happening?  **Chris:** \[Chuckles] But it’s a good fight scene because I have blood running in streams, and it’s very dramatic. **Oren:** That’s where blood typically does run, so that tracks.  **Chris:** It is funny how many writers completely neglect description until it’s time to talk about blood.  **Chris, Oren:** \[Laugh] **Oren:** Look, they all saw *Sin City* as kids, which has, everything’s black and white except for the blood, which is red, and it’s all cool and aesthetic, and they’re like, “I want that. That’s for me. That’s for my book, thank you.” **Chris, Oren:** \[Laugh] **Chris:** Tells you something about the writer’s priorities. So this time we’re talking about narrating fights and action. Fairly similar. They have some special concerns. Nothing that you won’t see anywhere else, but when you have these kinds of scenes, first, they happen very fast, and so we kind of want them to feel fast, and so the pacing starts to really matter. There’s often a lot of spatial logistics involved in these kind of high-stakes movements, shall we say.  **Oren: “**Where is everybody standing?” suddenly becomes very important.  **Chris:** And did we know there was a wall there before I ran up it to do a back flip? And of course, we want them to be very tense because they’re exciting moments. **Oren:** Incidentally, this is one of the few places where you can actually get away with *more* doing this in a role-playing game than writing it down. Because normally, if you try to do anything contrived in a role-playing game, your players will be like, “Uh-uh. No.” They’ll be on you.  But if it’s in a fight and you’re like, “Yeah, you’re close enough to hit the enemy. Don’t worry about it,” they won’t. Whereas with readers, if you start to lose track of where everyone is, they’ll notice. They’ll be like, “Hey, hang on. Weren’t they across the room a second ago? What’s going on?”  **Chris:** I think some people notice more than others. I did do a critique of a book where there was running around a house, and I thought about how things were laid out, and I’m like, “I don’t… No house is laid out like this. I don’t know what’s happening. Are we in the upper floor? Are we in the bottom floor?” It’s like all the bedrooms are along a hallway that has a *door*. Usually the hallway’s open, so if you come in the front door and there’s a hallway on the first floor, you can just see down the hallway. Things didn’t make sense. The protagonist was facing the wrong way. And it’s funny to think about that because that does require me to map it out all in my head. But most of us are familiar with how most houses are laid out to some degree. So it’s like taking a very familiar thing and then putting people in really unexpected places, and putting doors where I didn’t imagine there could be a door, and that kind of thing. **Oren:** The one that I’m always gonna remember is that bizarre fight scene from *The Ministry of Time*, which involves things like the love interest pulling the unnamed narrator out of the way of a laser blast. Like, uh, no, step out of the way of the laser. **Chris:** Very slow laser blast.  **Oren:** The world’s *slowest* laser. Which for some reason the bad guy aimed at her *feet*, which is weird. You would think he would aim at her center of mass, but no, instead he aims at her feet. And then suddenly the love interest teleports to him so that they can wrestle, because I guess it would be kind of awkward if he shot the love interest as the love interest was trying to close the distance. Which gives me, either the love interest teleported or this is a muzzle-loading laser gun that takes two business days to reload. **Chris:** Okay, I have to say, one of my now most hated tropes is the trope where somebody pushes somebody else out of the way and gets shot instead of them, because it never feels like that’s how it would happen. Why are you pushing them? Why don’t you just run with them? If you have time to get them out of the way, I’m pretty sure you could get out of the way too. Why are you just pushing them and standing there?  **Oren:** You could imagine that if you hit them some of your momentum is absorbed, so maybe you would stop, but often there’s clearly plenty of time for you to keep going.  **Chris:** I’m not gonna say that there’s no circumstance in which this makes sense. Or somebody steps in front of the person about to get shot instead of grabbing them and moving them or something like that. I’m not gonna say there’s no situation in which this is not plausible, but I’m increasingly noticing how implausible it seems, and then sometimes it’s extremely frustrating, particularly if somebody dies. Like in *Babel*. So angry with that book.  **Oren:** That book makes some choices, for sure.  **Chris:** So if it’s really contrived and then something upsetting happens, that’s the worst combination. **Oren:** I’m upset, and so now I’m just gonna pick apart everything.  **Chris:** The author personally hurt me, on purpose. The logistics of that, I don’t think they work very well in most cases. So trying to get spatial stuff and communicate that is always extremely tough. I suppose if you have to, you can use the o’clocks. Something’s at 2:00, something’s at 6:00, if that helps. I think mostly you have to keep it simple and not try to do something too complex.  **Oren:** One thing that I think new writers need to understand, because I see a lot of people asking for advice, is like, “How do I narrate this cool action sequence from a movie that I’m watching?” And it’s some kind of kung fu scene where the characters exchange 30 blows in the space of a minute. And you probably can’t, is the answer. **Chris:** And you shouldn’t.  **Oren:** Because if you try to do that, what you’re gonna end up with is one of two situations. You’re either gonna end up trying to describe every punch, which is not going to work. That’s too many punches. Or you’re gonna do something like, “He let loose a flurry of blows.” And now you’re summarizing the fight scene, which you also don’t want. And I’m not saying you can’t do kung fu fights in prose, but I am saying they are probably going to be *less* extended than the ones you see on TV, because those ones are visual spectacle. **Chris:** On the plus side, they could be, in some ways, more realistic because they’re short.  **Oren:** Exactly. You’re gonna make less mean more. I think we did a podcast about that. Fewer blows will mean more when they are written down.  **Chris:** And again, human bodies are fragile, so many of the things that we see in movies are not actually plausible. The fight lasts too long, somebody would go down with just a few hits. We could talk about battles. Battles, the bigger it gets, the less we can really stay in the moment. But I think by default, what I try to say is, we want this to be exciting, and what makes exciting is how meaningful it is.  Instead of the visual spectacle, we have to make meaning out of these actions. And if you start summarizing the blows, then those blows become meaningless by virtue of you summarizing them. So we want to, by default, minimize summary and make the fight in-story shorter.  Now, with something like a chase, ’cause we’re talking about all kinds of action scenes, obviously the equivalent is almost like footfalls. Those don’t matter. So we obviously don’t wanna focus on every footfall. So depending on what kind of action scene you want, you have to look for the actions that could make the difference between winning or losing in that conflict. Those are the actions that matter, and you wanna focus on that.  So if it’s a running scene, for instance, jumping over a hurdle would be a make it or break it moment. So that’s the part that’s important. Maybe rounding a corner fast enough, that kind of thing. Those are the parts that you wanna focus on. But in a fight scene, a punch can put somebody out for the fight. So a punch really should matter, and we don’t wanna decide to exaggerate and rely on spectacle at the cost of making it feel like a punch is insignificant. **Oren:** And what’ll end up happening if you try to describe a flurry of blows is that, well, now you feel like you’re writing a Marvel fight, where everyone’s made of rubber, and it’s just not that exciting. The *Avatar* Kyoshi books have that problem, and you can tell because in the TV show, the bending battles often involve a lot of punches and kicks and blasts of elements. And so the writer is trying to directly adapt that instead of altering the way the fights work to make them fit better in a written format. ‘Cause I 100% fully believe that you could do a cool elemental bending fight on the page. I just think it would have to look a little different than most of the fights we see in the show. **Chris:** And related to that, we have these make it or break it moments, and in running that could be jumping over an obstacle. In a fight it could be a punch or a block or a dodge, what have you. In some of these moments, your protagonist would naturally not succeed. So the thing we wanna show is that it matters. This gets back to people being rubber or not. We wanna show why it matters when they don’t succeed. So if they, instead of jumping over something, they trip and fall, we can see, oh, if maybe they’re running from somebody, we can be able to describe that person gaining. We can see that there are consequences for that. If they take a hit to the stomach, maybe they’re winded, and it gives the antagonist an opportunity to hit them again, that kind of thing, and actually have injuries. The more you can make injuries, and you can have injuries during running too. Somebody could sprain an ankle. We want to have them, but also have them feel like they matter and that they’re actually doing something to change the course of the action scene. **Oren:** You also need to consider, and this is another thing, I’m just pulling stuff from *The Ministry of Time* fight scene ’cause it’s so rare that it’s so clearly laid out like this. You have to remember what *everyone* is doing. That includes both your character’s allies and the other side. And I don’t mean that you need to be fully describing every single character. Most of the time, that will be impossible. But you need it to *feel* as though the character didn’t just *disappear*.  So if you have an ally, you might describe the thing that they’re about to go do, and then not mention them for a little bit because they’re doing that thing, and then they come back. Or if it’s the enemy, you have to keep in mind, “Okay, what is the enemy doing in response to the things my characters are doing?”  ‘Cause often with really badly written fight scenes, you have enemies that just kind of stand there, this is how you end up feeling like turn-based combat. Now, of course, you are actually taking turns. Due to the linear nature of time, you can only write one thing at a time that the character is doing. **Chris:** You can stop and *say* everything happened at once.  **Oren:** Right, but that means nothing.  **Chris:** \[Lauhgs] It doesn’t make it *feel* like it happens at once. There may be niche situations. I don’t like that so much ’cause it’s very heavy-handed. I want the reader to just look at how the fight is written and how it feels, the pace of how it feels. There may be some scenarios in which you need to specify two actions happen at once and just trust me, reader. I know it feels like they’re happening in sequence, but I swear they happen at once. It’s just to be avoided. Related to that, when you have multiple people, it’s easy to lose track of somebody, so we don’t know what they’re doing.  And then another thing is, is what they’re doing take an equivalent amount of time? So there’s a problem that I refer to as time dilation, which is pretty common in action scenes, where the timing does not line up. The time seems to stretch out in some way, and one of the reasons that happens is because people aren’t doing things that take equivalent amount of time. A really funny one is in the beginning of the first book of *Mortal Instruments*. They go into this storage room that some nightclub owner forgot to lock, or some door that says storage. I assumed initially it was a closet. It’s a door that says storage, and they go through it, and it’s like I kept revising it to make it bigger and bigger. Because I thought this was a closet, but this is a room for one person to be tied up and for several other people to interrogate the captive person, so I guess it’s a room.  But then we have an action scene where one person is *running* inside this space while somebody else, I think they get knocked down and have to recover, which would naturally take a little time. And think of how far somebody could run while another person gets knocked out and recovers. Quite a long distance. So at that point, the storage room is very, very large. But that’s the kind of weird time dilation that happens.  **Oren:** That happened in *Ministry of Time* too. There’s a sequence where the boyfriend and the bad guy are wrestling on the ground, and for some reason, the boyfriend lets him go even though the bad guy still has the gun. And so there’s time for the boyfriend to have the protagonist run to a motorcycle, stop grappling, and then also run after her, get their *helmets* on, and get away on the motorcycle before the bad guy can shoot at them again, which really raises the possibility of the muzzle-loading laser gun, I think would solve this problem. **Chris:** We saw the same thing in *Children of Blood and Bone*, where they’re surrounded by enemies, but they need to escape, so suddenly people come on, like, giant cat mount, and they’re able to climb aboard the cat mount with nobody shooting arrows at them, and then leap away. So that’s another thing that I see that causes time dilation, what I would say is kind of balancing the urgency of the situation. It happens when we want the situation to be extremely urgent so that it’s exciting, but then the hero needs time to do stuff. So then we have weird pauses where the enemy apparently is not shooting while the hero gets on a mount. Or you can have this happen with, “Oh, somebody’s coming. I need time to prepare.” Okay, how close did you say they were? If they’re right outside the door and they’re about to walk in, you don’t really have time to make a makeshift weapon out of the ordinary objects in the room, for instance.  Or in some kind of chase, if the antagonist is close and is about to chase after, we have to think about, “Okay, how much faster is the antagonist than my character, and how far away were they?” Because if they seem like they’re really close, and then we start a chase sequence, and then it takes a really long time and they don’t seem to be catching up, then that feels a little off.  **Oren:** Here’s a question. When we’re talking about describing these exchanges during either a fight scene or a fast action sequence, theoretically I still want my words to be good sounding. I still want them to sound like a cool thing to *read*, and so I don’t want to be like, “And then he attacked with sword.” But I also don’t wanna spend a ton of time on details ’cause this is supposed to be fast. So please bridge that gap for me.  **Chris:** You want to be specific, but not technical. So I will call it technical if we specify exactly which limb. And when I say this, there are always times when it matters. So if your hero, for instance, has one injured arm, then it does matter whether or not they’re using the injured arm. And in many cases we can *assume* they’re not using the injured arm, but you might wanna specify.  But normally you say that they kick, say that they punch, say that they grab something. You don’t need to say what body part is used for any action. Usually that is too technical. Sometimes I guess if they’re shielding their face and their hand is gonna get hit and injured because they shielded their face, you might want to mention their hand specifically. There might be some niche cases. **Oren:** But what if my protagonist is using *two* daggers, dual wielding, and one dagger is enchanted with poison damage and one dagger is enchanted with toxic damage? Then how am I supposed to tell them apart?  **Chris:** I think we need to go backwards in time to your earlier decisions. **Oren:** \[Laughs] **Chris:** In fact, I know somebody, colleague of mine named Oren, who wrote this blog post on converting D&D to a written story, so maybe you could start there. **Oren:** I think you wrote that. I don’t think that was me. \[Laughs] **Chris:** You wrote one!  **Oren:** No, I think we actually wrote several articles on this topic. **Chris:** I think we have several articles on this topic. That’s getting so technical, we’re almost in magic system territory. We do have another podcast on magic systems for fight scenes that you probably have to visit our website to get to at this point. It’s probably older than the last 100 episodes. I don’t know, maybe not.  But anyway, so which limb is usually too technical. The exact direction, left to right, up to down, is usually too technical. So just say specifically what the action is. Is it a kick? Is it a punch? Or if they have a weapon, is it a thrust? Is it a slash? Is it a stab? So try to use specific verbs, but then focus on what actually matters. Is the limb they’re using, does that matter? Probably not. If they’re taking a step, in some situations, taking a step during a struggle *could* matter. If somebody tries to hit them and they take a step to the side so it misses them, then the step matters. In many cases, the step is not gonna matter.  So I think that’s really what it’s about. We wanna use specific verbs, and then we wanna focus on what actually makes a difference in the fight, and that’s how we keep the pacing super tight. Now, but that said, going back to the spatial ramifications and trying to communicate, I like to keep fighting tightly paced most of the time if I can. But on the other hand, it’s really important for readers to understand what is happening as clearly as possible, because you don’t want them to just know what happened. You want them to know what are the *ramifications* of what happened. So if somebody struck somebody else, or if somebody managed to jump over an obstacle, what does that mean for the fight going forward? And kind of understand how things work, because that’s gonna make the conflict a lot more riveting.  And if you have to slow down the pacing to make sure they thoroughly understand, I think that’s often a worthwhile trade-off. Because if they don’t understand, then they’re gonna start tuning out, and nothing’s gonna matter, and at that point, trying to make the prose tighter so it moves fast just doesn’t pay off anymore. So for instance, oddly enough, I’m going to use *Shield of Sparrows* for a positive example. \[Laughs] **Oren:** Hmm. Wonders never cease.  **Chris:** Wonders never cease. So we have a sequence in there where there’s a monster in this tree house village. And the protagonist wants to save this boy of indeterminate age from this monster, and so she grabs him and she starts climbing up a rope ladder with him while the monster is on the ground. So we have this sequence. And by the way, this is the same protagonist that apparently is not strong enough to lift a sword. A sword which at max are usually, like, six pounds.  **Oren:** That’s a *really* heavy sword, six pounds.  **Chris:** And even six pounds is a really heavy sword, so she’s not strong enough to lift a sword, but she can climb a rope ladder while lifting a boy who’s probably 50 pounds at least. **Oren:** That’s maybe a very light boy.  **Chris:** \[Laughs] **Oren:** Maybe that’s a three-pound boy, Chris. You don’t know.  **Chris:** But any case, there’s a lot of description that really does slow down the pace of this fight, but at the same time, how she’s climbing that rope ladder and where the monster is, is really important to the scene. And looking at that scene, I don’t know that it would be any better if we tightened it up, because the really important thing is that we understand what’s happening. **Oren:** Well, and in that scene, she’s covering quite a bit of ground, if I remember correctly. So I think that it makes sense to slow down a little bit. It’s weird to slow down when your characters are chest-to-chest knife fighting, but if you’re leaping around from one platform to another, that does create some space, both literally and narratively. **Chris:** The other thing to keep in mind is that sometimes slowing things down is a good way to build anticipation, and that *can* happen during your action scenes. Often, we would do that before the action starts, but if you have a moment in the action where things are particularly tense, doom is nigh, sometimes it’s a good time to actually purposely do a little bit of slowing down time. So the protagonist feels helpless, sees a blow or something coming their way, and we do a lot of embellishing description, a lot of sensory description to increase immersion while slowing down the pace on purpose to build anticipation for this thing that is coming. So that’s one technique that you can use. It doesn’t always have to be fast-paced.  **Oren:** There’s also one other scenario that I think is useful to think about. It’s a kind of an expert level, but it’s still cool, is if you really *establish* the mechanics of especially a specific type of fighting, you can almost use that the same way that you might use a rational magic system. And at this point, details that might otherwise be too technical can be really helpful.  And the example I’m thinking of is the book *Santa Olivia* by Jacqueline Carey, which I can’t swear if this is accurate or not, ’cause I don’t know anything about boxing, but the main character is a boxer, and we establish very firmly *how* boxing works and the mechanics of boxing. So when she has her plan of how she’s gonna go at the other guy and what kinds of blows she’s going to throw, that matters more because we’ve been taught what those mean. And so if you’re gonna do something like that, you have, I would say, more room for technical details than if you just have two guys meet in an alley with knives. **Chris:** Definitely trying to front-load things because we do want the pacing to not be *too* slow usually during our conflict. Looking for ways to take that information, if we wanna understand boxing and give people an idea of how boxing works ahead of time, so that when we’re in a really tense moment of boxing, maybe we just remind them a little bit or maybe we don’t have to because we already explained that ahead, can be a really good idea to do. **Oren:** Well, I think with that we can deal a knockout blow to this podcast, thus calling it to a close.  **Chris:** If you’re ready to come to blows over this episode, you can battle with us much more effectively if you become our patron. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Or if you’re not ready to come to blows with us yet, but you are still somehow listening right now, you probably got something from this episode, so consider going to patreon.com/mythcreants. **Oren:** I like how you got them either way. That’s perfect. There’s no escape.  **Chris:** No escape.  **Oren:** So before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. \[Outro Music] **Outro:** This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.