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So I'm on v2 of my novel. I could call it "second draft", but it's more of the second semi-prose outline. I have a fight scene in Chapter 13.
The fight scene involves an inexperienced demigod villain, an inexperienced demigod hero, the hero's kung fu master mom who is not a demigod, and their support android. It's all at the mom's house in front of the ocean. The demigods have flight, telekinesis, increased strength, and semi-invulnerability when they maintain their personal body forcefields.
Either way, here's a few things I learned while writing this fight scene, off the top of my head:
- Fight scenes really aren't natural to me. I always wanted to write this science fantasy action piece, and I'm learning that I'm much better at philosophy, and at painting a picture of wonder, than I am at action. I already instinctively understood how to pace a fight scene quickly with terse sentences and good flow, and to not focus on choreography. But planning out the actions is still tough.
- I kinda knew this, but: never focus on choreography. The individual movements of characters, while necessary, are— in isolation— the least-important part of a fight. What's important is keeping tension; turning the fight into a mini-plot with stakes, problems to solve, solutions, and probably character and plot development/reveals; and having some kind of novelty in the fight if you can, in order to keep things interesting. The actions that characters do should display their personalities and mostly lead up to a development of some kind, instead of just looking cool.
- My present challenge in writing a fight scene is finding the balance between interesting fight environments and actions, making sure characters behave and fight in-character, and directing the fight to develop and end a certain way. This takes a lot of brain power for me.
- I found myself taking longer to write these chapters with fight scenes in them than many of my other chapters; because using this much brain power means I must end my daily writing early to regain my mental energy for the next. There's been a lot of times where I revised a chapter of my novel in one day; and so my first impression was that I would be revising most of my chapters in only one or two days. But revisions like these are taking me a week, and I'm learning to let myself be okay with that— that I'm not slacking, I'm just burning the creative energy candle faster.
Anyway, that's all I got for the moment. Happy writing! <3