While I’m finding my own sources on fighting, I want to see some of yours! Tips, tricks, online articles, and personal findings in writing fighting and combat.
My story information
I’m writing a fantasy story where over 20 different characters are basically battling their whole lives, yearly, to inherit the throne. The story only follows one year’s battle.
It has a whole ‘hunger games’ moment without the murder, where they’re dropped into an arena, spend the night, and are racing against each other for the chance to be taken out of the arena. The rest have to climb out of this giant stone pit themselves. So there’s a lot of hand to hand fighting throughout this part.
However, the story gets more intense after there’s a murder during a ball. The main character has to go on this huge dangerous journey into a second world filled with mythological creatures. There’s not a lot of magic fighting but I would enjoy some resources for that too if you have any.
I don’t write fight scenes very often so I don’t really have many resources or examples, but you really should check out the entries from the Write to Rank contest by Wattpad’s Action profile. There are a lot of awesome authors writing action/fighting scenes for this contest, AND as a plus, they’re all relatively short so you can really find lots of different examples with different styles, genres, etc. with minimal effort. You can find links to some of the entries in the comment section below each round for easy searching. I also have a Write to Rank support reading list on my profile that has some entries that might not be found in the comments section. Also, the contest is still on-going, so more entries will be coming out soon too. Each round the entries get a little longer (more or less) so you should be able to find some larger and more complex action scenes if you wait a month or so for them.
Of them all, I’d highly recommend KurokageJS’s entries. She’s one of my best friends and she’s an incredible writer, too. She has some heavy hitting entries, as well as some that will make you laugh for days after reading it. And if you end up really enjoying her style, she has over 150 chapters of her Eliona’s War series posted on Wattpad, which has some really awesome new adult fantasy action scenes and is very binge-readable.
Mostly, just playing video-games with other people. I also read some fencing rules and read some Three Musketeers fencing descriptions, watched a few YouTube videos on wolves and bears hunting/dueling when I wrote werewolves fights. For more of a big-picture view of a battlefield, I looked up specific historic battles.
The main rule, though, is to give the center stage to the emotions, because very few people like reading accurate and long descriptions of blow by blow. They have to be into it…
Fighting or love-making are basically very limited set of actions that are pretty much the same, but the emotional feedback is what makes it more interesting.
For fiction writing examples I recommend the works by Andy McNab and Chris Ryan. Both authors are former British SAS, and it shows in the quality / realism of their writing. Terry Pratchett’s books also have some interesting fantasy fight scenes.
For non-fiction resources I recommend accounts of famous battles / wars / fighting units. Some examples and personal favourites: The Dam Busters, Reach for the Sky, the Osprey aircraft aces book series, Ghost Force: Secret History of the SAS, The Green Beret, Delta Force, The Eve of Destruction, Lion hearts: Heroes of Israel, The Commando: The Life and Death of Cameron Baird, Warrior Brothers (Australian SAS).
