Action Central

the first three chapters of my story are posted at witchsnovel. I could use all the help I can get.

Title: Gladiator's Fury
Author: Witch of November
Character/Pairing: Richard B Riddick, a bunch of original characters because at this point there are four canon characters left alive. Pairing: Riddick and Fem OC,
Fandom/Original Fic: Chronicles of Riddick between Pitch Black and Chronicles.
Word count: 1852/12000+
Rating/Warning: R- violence and language for this scene; The whole story is NC-17 for graphic sexual violence, rape, forced prostitution, language, drugs, murder, mayhem, consensual sex and suicide.
Disclaimers/Author's Notes: Riddick has been captured and forced into taking part in gladiatorial games. He hooks up with Michaela Cotton (OC), one of the women provided for the fighters pleasure. Together they plot to escape. Set a week or ten days after the other fight. Michaela sticks up for a friend and Riddick has to get involved. Edited to correct word count.


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Title: Gladiator's Fury
Author: Witch of November
Character/Pairing: Richard B Riddick, a bunch of original characters because at this point there are four canon characters left alive. Pairing: Riddick and Fem OC,
Fandom/Original Fic: Chronicles of Riddick between Pitch Black and Chronicles.
Word count: 852/12000+
Rating/Warning: R- violence and language for this scene; The whole story is NC-17 for graphic sexual violence, rape, forced prostitution, language, drugs, murder, mayhem, consensual sex and suicide.
Disclaimers/Author's Notes: Riddick has been captured and forced into taking part in gladiatorial games. He hooks up with Michaela Cotton (OC), one of the women provided for the fighters pleasure. Together they plot to escape. This bit is about training fights and I could use all the help making it believable and interesting I can get.


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I just reread the profile, and I understand I may post fiction here for feed back. Would passages or scenes be okay? Or do you want the whole thing?

Basically I would like to post my fight scene and have somebody tell me if it works or would somebody have to unscrew his arm at the elbow or something like that.

I'm writing a scene where a group of fighters are sparring. The main character is watching and waiting his turn. It's been several years since I was in martial arts and I was never an upper level fighter. So what does a really good fighter look for while watching somebody he might have to fight later?

Thank you.

Right now, swan_tower is doing an intermittent series on Writing Fight Scenes. Her current post is on setting, and you can see previous posts here.

icecheetah2 offers advice on transposing game mechanics into prose action scenes; the crucial thing is to figure out how the spell and attack effects would translate into tangible reality:

...I hate it when an important fight scene sounds like it could've been plagiarised from a walkthrough ("Red cast ice spells when Wolf was orange and fire when he was blue until he died".

...Is it so hard to adapt in game battles to things that would work in literature? Say in game Wolf has the following strategy. 1: Slashes at Red 2: Uses a HP draining spell when his HP is below 100. 3:Blinds Red with a powder. The fight is on an icy lake.

How do you adapt the fight? How about Wolf tosses a bag of powder at Red as soon as he sees her, and the stuff stings like heck? Red relies on her hearing and what small glimpses she gets when she can force her eyes open (no time to use eye drops) to gauge where he is. She realises that she can use the sound of the ice cracking to tell where he is, and uses that to her advantage. Much slipping on the ice and hacking away later, Wolf digs SOMETHING into her (she still can't see), and Red starts to feel much, much more tired than she had been a few seconds ago. She lashes out in the middle of his attack (which wouldn't work in the game's original system), sending him sprawling. There is a huge crack, and then nothing. Red, though exhausted, carefully sits down in the ice and, hoping the battle is over, searches for eye drops...

(The original context is here.)

bebopsamurai  has devoted a lengthy, in-depth, eloquent, and hilarious essay to addressing the question, "How does M. Night Shymalan's The Last Airbender suck? Let me count the ways."


Part Five is of specific interest to members of this community; Bebop Samurai's analysis of the original animated series' use of action scenes and fight choreography as vehicles for characterization and worldbuilding--and ruthless checklist of the movie's failures in that area--can serve as useful advice to writers in general.

 

ratmmjess , under the header, "Now, see, this is how you write a fight scene",  has posted this excerpt from The Manchurian Candidate ( Richard Condon's 1959 novel that served as the base for the movies):

http://ratmmjess.livejournal.com/1…
 

 

 Condon clearly did his homework on Judo (the dan is commonly understood to be a degree of  the black belt, but that's an overnice nitpick for 1959, when the whole area of Asian martial arts was largely still shrouded in mystery for Western readers ) with the result that the fight choreography is readily legible; two sufficiently athletic people would have no difficulty reenacting the exchange.  The specific, matter-of-fact detail (the twenty-nine-pound difference between the antagonists, the gawking onlookers; the abrupt ending) give the scene a lived-in air; the viewpoint character's berserk fury is fervently felt, but with a hard-boiled tersity that never slops over into hyperbole.  As Jess puts it: "There is no single way to do it. (Or rather, the single way to do it is, 'Do a good job.' There are many ways to do that.") But this is one of them."

Sure ain't much action, here at “Action Central.”