Since the first storyteller sat around a campfire spinning tales of gods and heroes, it has been a given that a little action makes a mildly interesting story into a real grabber. Put your hero or heroine in physical jeopardy and you can have a winner. Conflict is the key and physical conflict, i.e., a fight, is often the answer.

It is not the only answer, to be sure, and emotional conflict is the essence of real drama, but the line where drama ends and adventure or melodrama begins is an iffy one. If the level of your drama is high, if the characters are convincing and we as a reader care about what happens to them, then you can get a frenzy of worry out of us by having a villain try to club our hero. Or shoot him or ... you get the idea.

First thing in making choices about action sequences in a manuscript is; why is it there? What purpose? To move the plot along (and therefore includes some clues or character points) or does it serve as a diversion to the main plot (not a sub plot but a red herring) or is it an emotional catharsis for some character to deal with some larger issue?

Or (and let us be frank--this happens) is it filler to get your word count up? This is a legitimate reason; it is a business after all and some decisions are not wholly artistic. Perhaps you need three thousand words to get your word count up. In that case maybe the two man duel becomes a small war.

It doesn't make you a bad person.

And a fight/action scene can serve all these reasons at once, but it will have one of them as a prime reason.

Any writer will want the level of the action to up the level of the drama, just as you would want the details of the car race or the deep sea diving or whatever story element was needed to tell the story.

Too often (at least in the film work I have done) the action is the red-headed stepchild of the story, hastily added in or used as a patch between talking head scenes. This cheats the reader and the writer of great opportunity to explore how the characters react in stressful situations and to inform the readers of some background facts. Where did the character learn to do a certain move, or what about the fighting style of the bad guy triggers a memory from our heroine's past?

Fights, like dramatic styles, come in a variety of flavors, each suited to the overall tone of the story.

A grim, down and dirty knife fight might be fine for a thriller, but wrong for a romantic comedy.

So how does it break down--what makes a fight funny or scary or realistic?

The first principle to understand in writing action is that violence hurts.

Always.

Even in the improbable Inspector Clouse films, action has reaction and when people get hit or fall down they experience real pain.

In a cartoon comedy like that where they get right back up again, in that moment of 'impact' they feel the pain like anyone else. That is the key--we can all identify with the pain someone feels when getting bopped on the head or stabbed with a fountain pen; at least for that second of occurrence. That is our window into the world of the characters--the verisimilitude that makes it all seem real to us. Regardless that the consequence of the violence in a single Three Stooges short would fill a hospital ward and leave the leads severely crippled, we can ignore the aftermath if they do. If, in the moment of the inflicting of the pain, we can identify with them, we will accept the story as 'real'. It becomes totally within the confines of our willing suspension of disbelief.

James Bond would be a cripple if all his wounds were treated realistically in the Ian Fleming books, but here, Fleming was clever--he always heaped the most heinous violence on his hero near the end of the book, even letting him pass out with his survival uncertain at the end of From Russia with Love. But he was always functional by the next book, albeit with a mention of the new scars or some physiological trauma that had to be worked out.

All this lip service to 'reality' allowed the reader to dismiss his doubts while reading the story and staying immersed in the action. In effect, Fleming had 'trumped' the reader's disbelief with a nod to reality.

The same is true of superhero cartoons; Superman is boring if he just shrugs off every mortar shell, so now and again you have him grunt and stumble to help the audience connect with the human part of the demi-god.

So no matter how 'real' or 'comic' you want the fight to be (in a sliding scale from hardcore realistic to complete cartoon farce with swashbuckling, Three Musketeer type action wavering between the two) you must always find a way to help the reader be part of the action and experience the hero/ine's moment of humanity.

That moment can be when they run out of breath, realize their last bullet is gone, discover the knife wound on their side is serious or suddenly remember that if they don't vanquish the villain by three pm. they will be late to pick up the kids from school!

Once you understand that it hurts, you can think about the 'ouch factor': that is, how much damage and how much recovery time.

Seems a no-brainer, but now that you've determined your moment of humanity for your character, you determine just how real you want the fight to be. Remember, The Three Stooges get a saw cut on the head and recover in the next scene, but when Athos is wounded in the shoulder in The Three Musketeers it bothers him for a number of chapters. In between is the level of 'reality' for your story.

This is where the flavors come in--how you balance these elements: how real, how much pain, and to what end the action in the scene in the story determine if the fight is farce or frightening.

You can do a serious fight scene with a stuffed panda or a comedy fight scene with an axe if you deal with the individuals involved in a realistic or farcical fashion. Once you have determined that 'ouch factor', it is how the people involved react to what is happening to them that you get to your fight's tone.

There is no distinction as far as how a fight is handled in a fantasy world from how it might be handled for a hardboiled crime story or a western in terms of sentence length, cross cut technique, level of pain (that ouch factor again) or weapons technique. Even if your hero is blue skinned or furry or a robot (that can feel pain or experience anxiety at least) they have a vulnerability and an agenda within their world which is the 'human' component that will let your reader connect with them.

The choices extend beyond purpose and tone for a fight, it must also be appropriate to the time, place and character.

I mean, really, Babe Ruth should not be swinging an aluminum baseball bat unless it's a time travel story, and if your 1860s cowboy hero starts throwing/jumping roundhouse kicks he better be named James West!

A certain amount of credibility with your reader is purchased from their imaginations with the preconceptions of what they expect versus what is credible or possible.

Mauser semi automatic pistols existed in the 1890s, for instance, but do you want your cowboy in the Indian territories to have one?

If so, the reason better be good enough to steal the focus from the cattle rustling storyline, because it will. Later in the book, I've given a rough outline of some of the timelines you might deal with, but always research each weapon or style for each story. When I read a story and something as simple as the wrong style knife is used in the wrong place, it takes me out of the story.

Now that you decided what is appropriate to the time and place, you have to consider what is appropriate to the character.

A soccer mom will not necessarily be a dead shot with a machine gun or a priest a karate expert, though they might. And that in itself would be a story: ex C.I.A. killer is now a suburban mom, or Father O'Malley trains all the local boys to defend themselves.

How or with what they fight and their attitude to the action are all great means to understand who they are and how they fit into the mosaic of the story's world.

As to appropriate weapons or fighting styles, that takes a little more work.

If magic is in the air, it had better have rules that the audience is aware of (or at least are explained along the way) and in world building, thoughts about how and where violence occurs are as complex as in our real world.

Religious rules and cultural taboos can determine a lot about how a person fights: what areas of the body are the prime targets (the Thugee of India liked to strangle victims as an offering to Kali, goddess of death), or what weapons or protocols proceed or conclude a fight.

Industrial level and availability of resources determine what weapons and materials for those weapons can be used. The Philippine islands, for instance, had very limited metal deposits but abundant hardwood, so they developed the unique arnis stick fighting styles. Likewise a primitive fantasy world, barely above the Stone Age will not have developed a long slim rapier so your choices in combat styles will be limited by the technology or social structures of your worlds.

Just as in Japan's closed culture, 'the floating world' modern firearms were banned (although the samurai had guns for over a hundred years until the shogun had them rounded up and destroyed), so the samurai knew they existed). It is possible to tell a story in 1866 where guns are not a factor at all, so too in a closed culture fantasy world you can introduce or restrict an advance, provided you have a cultural/political justification. This can mean that you give your hero/heroine some secret advantage or fighting style unavailable to the rest of your characters. I did this in my Dragonthroat/Altiva series by first giving my hero T.K. Mitchell a weakness (his Kryptonite was that he could not use any bladed weapon because of a psychological issue--a real problem on a world which is a sword culture) and then giving him a way around it by being a Filipino stick fighting expert. Any time he fought, he dazzled the locals who had never seen anything like his fighting style.

Exercise:

A short self-questionnaire about the fight:

Since the fight has to serve the purpose of the story, you have to use the same criteria as any journalistic or dramatic story. Ask yourself, 'is this fight necessary?' If it is then you can use the old six questions: Why, Who, How, Where, What and When?

Why?

Why is this fight the solution to this moment of the story, instead of a dialogue scene?

Who?

Who is involved in the action; the principal? A secondary character? If so, what is their stake in the confrontation (their personal why)?

How?

How did the fight come about? How does it end? And in what state are the participants when it is all over? Will there be lingering effects? And will the effects be physical or mental or both?

Where?

Where does the action take place? Is it an interesting enough place, i.e. a kitchen, a garage, a spaceship port? What makes that place of particular interest? Does it add color to the story, or is it just a drab background, a diorama in front of which the action takes place?

What?

What is involved, physically in the fight? A sword fight: if so, what style? Or styles. Do they use the objects at hand or did they bring the 'death dealers' with them. (Jackie Chan movies are especially good at finding clever things to do with found objects in action scenes--you don't have to be 'clever' funny but you should be clever smart.).

When?

When is it appropriate to have a fight instead of a non-physical solution? I know I keep stressing this, but that cuts to the heart of the situation of many literature snobs who will not deal with any 'action' because they feel it cheapens the purpose of a story (same people in my opinion who pretty much feel if it doesn't make them sad it must be junk).