Fight drafts suck. 

That’s not me ragging on the concept. They are, by design, incomplete and often incoherent messes. They pretty much have to be. 

The purpose of a fight draft isn’t to take your storyboard and transform it into a fully fledged fight scene. It’s to take your storyboard, flesh it out, and then trim off all the extraneous bits until you have something vaguely shaped like a fight scene that you can plug into the hole in your main draft. If you do it right, there’s a lot of blood and a lot of extra bits and more than a little screaming. It's going to hurt. It’s supposed to hurt. 

But, it’s necessary. 

As awesome as the fight we dreamed up and storyboarded out might be, we really shouldn’t try to include every single little detail in the story. The written medium doesn’t lend itself well to long, technical, drawn-out exchanges between combatants. Unlike film, where the use of clever editing and choreography can carry an extended fight scene, you have to use your words to tell them what’s going on. 

If you go back and read your favorite fight scenes, you’ll notice a tendency to try to break up the action. By carefully metering the flow, the author draws the audience along and builds tension without exhausting them. 

When you get right down to it, the bulk of any given fight scene probably isn’t going to be the actual fight. For each action, you’ll have descriptions of what the characters are thinking, what’s happening around them, what other characters are doing, so on and so forth. Maybe they’ll bunch phrases of a given fight together and let them play out in rapid succession, but they’ll usually slow things down before and after to help maintain flow and pace. There’s not really one right and true way to break things up, but it needs to be done.

Me personally, I like to treat the action of a fight like a series of snapshots, each one presenting a different phrase and connected by emotive and narrative beats. The purpose of the fight draft is to figure out which snapshots work best for the story I want to tell, and to get an idea of what that connective tissue might look like. 

There’s no hard and fast formula for telling the best possible story. It’s largely going to depend on your tastes and skills as a writer to determine which parts work best, not to mention the demands of the story you’re trying to tell. I do have a format I like to use, and while it might not work for everyone or in every circumstance, it’s the closest thing to actual advice I can give you. 

The opening of any important fight is going to be the second most important part. So, I like to make sure I give the reader a good impression of what’s going on before we start transitioning to another snapshot. This usually involves between 3-5 phrases of combat. I’m making sure the reader has a good idea of what’s going on and frontloading action, but I’m not trying to bury them in it, either. I want to get the readers pumped and work on building up narrative tension by presenting both sides and giving them a chance to make a real impression on the readers. 

For the meat of the fight, I’ll typically only do two phrases of action and reaction per snapshot. How much detail is involved with each one depends on the flow rate I’m trying to achieve, and the order is determined by the type of story I want to tell with this particular fight. The latter part is easy enough to keep straight, thanks to the storyboard I’ve already done. 

As the fight progresses to the climax, I like to make things feel more frantic by spacing the snapshots closer and closer together. They’ll also get a little longer, maybe 3-4 phrases instead of just two, as I try to give the impression that things are about to draw to a close. This is an excellent point to hone in on how the things the characters are feeling, both physically and emotionally, impact their choices and decisions. 

And, of course, the final snapshot will be the fight’s climax. If I want the good guys to win, I’ll linger on the emotions of the scene, like triumph and exhilaration. Victories are supposed to be cathartic, both for the readers and the characters. Granted, you do have to match the catharsis to the stakes. No one’s holding a grand feast over a friendly sparring session, not if they’re sane. But if it feels like the victory is earned, then everyone involved is allowed to celebrate, just a little.

If I want the bad guys to win, I like to make it shocking and abrupt. No one has time to process anything in the moment. The fight might be over, but I like to heighten the emotional devastation by putting off the emotional processing for as long as I can, letting the frustration, desperation, and despair build up and fester until it boils over. No one is allowed to process anything until they’re either safe, or at least thoroughly out of the action. 

One thing I’m not trying to do during the fight draft is weave all that into coherent prose. The snapshots are just that: snapshots, snippets pulled almost directly from the storyboard and expanded on just enough to give them some context. I’ll put a little more work into sketching out the connective tissue between the snapshots, but not so much that I’ll feel bad if I have to explain later. 

See, at this stage of the writing process, I’m worried almost exclusively about the fight. My brain is still in rule of cool mode. That’s really great for coming up with awesome ideas, but those awesome ideas don’t always bear out when you try to mesh them with the overall narrative. If they work with the overall vibe you’re going for, that’s great. But if they don’t, then you’ve got a whole lot of meatball surgery ahead of you, and it’s going to get ugly. 

That’s why I like to let the fight drafts suck. If the fight draft sucks, I don't feel so bad about the work I'll have to do later on in the final draft.