Writing Fight Scenes

So, I’ve been working my way rather slowly through Eric Lowe’s book The Use of Medieval Weaponry and also Marie Brennan’s book Writing Fight Scenes. These are both excellent, but I’ve found Lowe’s book more immediately useful. That is, I was reading The Use of Medieval Weaponry while doing final revisions for Suelen, which means I not only had a chance to reconsider various commas, I also switched out casual references to leather armor to “layered linen,” which is WAY MORE REALISTIC, it turns out, and did any of you know that?

Leather armor as a light armor for agile fighters is apparently almost entirely a fantasy invention, while in the real world, long jackets made of twenty or up to thirty layers of linen cloth were in common use by ordinary soldiers, and quite effective too. Particularly when combined with chain mail, because linen is highly resistant to cuts while mail is much more resistant to thrusts. This is really neat stuff to know about. I’ve never described armor in the Tuyo world because I didn’t want to encourage a European vibe, which is inevitable if you mention chain or (especially) plate armor, but I didn’t know what other kinds of armor I might want to use, so I kind of passed lightly over the whole topic. Linen totally lacks any particular connection to pop culture and can easily be defined as cheap, easily available light armor for ordinary soldiers. Now that I’ve read Lowe’s book, you can bet I will more readily mention and describe soldier’s ordinary gear in the future.

Eric Lowe also describes the actual use of all sorts of Medieval (and Medieval-adjacent) weapons – long sword, arming sword (I didn’t know there was a difference), greatsword, sword and shield, sword and dagger, sword and cloak, two swords, maces and axes, pole weapons. Much of the time, I’ve fortunately done plausible things. I based the Lau formation work with short sword and shield on the Romans, of course, so I knew that was fine, but it turns out that a sword alone, without a shield, especially without armor is a stupid way to fight … unless you consider honor and showing courage paramount, in which case it’s great! So that works fine for the Ugaro, especially since in real battle rather than duels they’d more likely fight with a sword-and-dagger or two-sword combination, both of which are good choices. The eagle warrior with the two swords? Great choice, very suitable! That’s a relief, especially since I did it that way just because the visual worked great in my mind’s eye.

But let me back up.

Lowe got into Medieval weaponry via gaming, then became an expert in historical European martial arts. He quotes extensively from surviving European fencing treatises, then explains those quotations again in modern language, which is not the part I followed particularly well since I have no personal experience in fencing. But then Lowe describes the sorts of situations where a weapon or weapon combination would have been particularly useful, as for example here: “Few other historical weapons combine the greatsword’s ability to threaten a large area with the ability to redirect its attacks as quickly as a sword. Both elements are critical to the greatsword’s role as a crowd control weapon. Unlike the cuts of two swords, which can surround a fencer with a rapid but short range flurry of blows, the greatsword’s cuts are relatively ponderous (I am speaking in relative terms: in absolute terms the cuts of a greatsword can still come eye-wateringly fast). However, the great reach of a greatsword means that it can keep opponents very far at bay. A single fencer armed with a greatsword can hold off a great many opponents armed with shorter weapons …” Lowe then goes on to describe exactly how this weapon could be useful for getting through an alley stuffed with opponents, defending yourself when totally surrounded in an open area, defending a ship against boarders, clearing a house, protecting a nonfighting companion from a hostile crowd of enemies … can’t you just see the fiction scenarios writing themselves at this point?

In contrast to Lowe, Marie Brennan comes to fight scenes via cinematography.

“So I had to figure out how to give the director what he really wanted – a big dramatic scene – within the constraints of the stage. … I sat down with the actor playing Troilus, and together he and I constructed an arc for the scene: how it would start, how it would end, what shifts would happen along the way. … Like a piece of music, it needed dynamics. And that meant digging into character, making use of the space, and lots of other things I now realize are integral to a good fight scene. … That’s what I came to understand about fight scenes. They’re part of the story, and not just on the level of plot [but also character].”

Lowe understands this too, as is clear in this Quora answer illustrated with a fight scene from one of Tamora Pierce’s novels. But using fight scenes to move the plot, build character, and support the story’s themes isn’t what Lowe’s book is about. It’s what Brennan’s book is about. Her books hardly touches on the mechanics of how weapons were used and how people actually fought. Brennan says up front, “… the details of how to fight are possibly the least important component of a fight scene. The crucial components are the same ones you’re already grappling with in the rest of your writing – description, pacing, characterization, and all that good stuff.” Which is true! But it’s still obviously useful to know how people actually did fight with a sword and a small shield, and why someone might choose that combination rather than two swords.

These two books are therefore highly complementary. But of the two … if you twisted my arm … I would kind of recommend Lowe’s book. This is because you, as a writer, can pick up the dramatic part of how to structure fight scenes by reading good fight scenes (such as the one in Tamora Pierce’s novel) that succeed in carrying forward the plot and building character, and watching cinematic fight scenes that are visually persuasive and compelling (such as the one in the Princess Bride). But nothing or almost nothing in fantasy novels or movies is going to tell you that leather armor wasn’t actually used and layered linen was; or how a whole bunch of types of fighting depended massively on grappling and wrestling to finish the job; or the specifics of how different weapons were used in a wide variety of circumstances. Not that an author has to accurately represent anything at all; in writing fiction, believability is a lot more important than accuracy and making things sound plausible is and should be the aim, not getting every single detail exactly right. But personally I do think it’s neat to also get things more or less right.

Overall assessment: these are both actually useful resources for writers. I’ve been highly, and I mean highly, disappointed in various other books that purport to be resources for writers. I’m thinking particularly of a book about poisons and figuring out causes of death that is all but useless for fantasy because it’s aimed so firmly at novels with contemporary settings, and one about injuries that deals with the subject exclusively from the modern point of view, where you basically stabilize the patient and head for a well-equipped hospital. Absolutely useless, both of them. In contrast with that sort of thing, if you’re writing in any kind of fantasy setting, both Lowe’s books and Brennan’s are great books to have read and to keep handy for reference.