Between the Lines "Write Fights Scenes" with Christine Haggerty
This episode is part of a series of book discussions on the art and craft of storytelling called \u201cBetween the Lines.\u201d
Show Notes:
Special Guest:
Christine Haggerty, author and black belt, loves to create and share stories of strength and survival. Visit her author page on Amazon, and follow her on Twitter and Facebook. From the back cover of the book, "Christine Haggerty has a B.S. in Secondary Education and over fourteen years experience teaching both language arts and traditional karate. She is an expert in both writing and fighting and combines her expertise in these fields to bring you an effective guide on action scenes. She is also an award-winning author of dystopian and dark fantasy fiction and loves to spin fire on the weekends."
Key points from her book and our discussion:
Assess your audience
If you are including a fight/action scene, you are writing genre fiction, NOT literary fiction
Prewrite, this should probably also involve pictures and toys and maybe some movies or video games
Consider the amount of training and experience your character has, what is their relationship with violence?
"The point of the set-up is to create context for the fight so that the actual fight can be written as nothing but a nitty gritty sequence of action measure in heartbeats."
Emotional fallout is the point of a fight scene in a story.\xa0 How does this situation affect your characters?
Chapters
10:00 AJ Scudiere and the Author\u2019s Combat Academy
15:03 customizing for the Young Adult and Romance novel genres
17:27 fight scenes v. action scenes
19:29 5 moves and John Wick and Ant Man and the Wasp
21:39 write according to the laws of physics, then add magic
24:19 accessibility and flare
25:22 character blocking and measuring it out
29:35 favorite fight scene that she\u2019s ever written
35:04 from one character\u2019s point of view
35:42 Adrenaline
42:18 emotional fallout
52:03 why readers like fight scenes so much
53:27 primal and universal