FWA Conference Recap – Staging Fight Scenes

Author L.E. Perez gave a good talk on fight scenes at the Florida Writers Association 2017 Conference . Here are the tips I garnered. Any errors are due to my misinterpretation.

• Focus on character emotions.
• Defending yourself is not the same as being prepared to injure someone.
• PTSD happens to anyone who experiences a violent event or is a crime victim. This also applies to domestic abuse since the characters are at war.
• Consider words that reflect a fight: sudden clarity, adrenaline rush, freeze up, smashed, buffeted, rage, pain.
• If your character punches someone, he may need to shake his hand out afterward. It hurts to throw a punch.
• Allow for recovery time. Either use the recovery in the story, or skip ahead and have the character recount what happened during this interval.
• In a knife fight, someone invariably gets cut. Or your hero might survive a knife fight and then cut himself chopping vegetables for a bit of humor.
• Act out your action scenes to get a sense of motion. How is your character moving during the scene? How is he holding a weapon?
• Kamas is a weapon with a scythe-like blade on one end and a pointed blade on the other end.
• Not all knives are throwing knives. They have to be properly balanced.

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