Avril_rocks07

I'm not sure how to write a realistic fight. Here's what I have so far.....

Quote:

“Fire in the hole,” I yelled as we set off the blasting cap. A large explosion erupted several seconds later. The barbed wire exploded into several pieces. We hurried forward as fast as possible. By this time, the machine gunner near our position was silent. He wasn’t firing at all. I had a bad feeling about this as I went over the mound and landed on the other side. I felt someone’s fist slam into my face as my feet touched the ground. I fell backwards and was disoriented for a few seconds. I heard several bodies hit the ground as I struggled to get up. I felt blood trickle down from my nose. I quickly wiped it off. I punched the nearest German as hard as possible. He fell to the floor. A second German lunged toward me with a dagger in hand. I fell onto the mound of dirt. I grabbed his hand as he tried to stab me. I tried to put the dagger’s edge into his chest instead of mine. I kicked him as hard as I could. He fell backwards dropping his dagger as he went. I tried to grab the dagger before he did. The second German got to his feet and quickly tackled me to the floor. We wrestled before I managed to stab him in the chest. I stuck it deep into his chest. I felt a warm liquid splash onto the dagger’s handle. I looked down at him. His eyes were wide open in panic. I felt like I wanted to throw up as I watched him lay there. I looked around me at the chaos. Several bodies’ lay about as the battle raged around me. I picked up my pistol, checked to see if it’s loaded and moved along. I opened fire as a German walked out of a nearby pillbox. I shot him in the chest and fired a second shot to make sure he was dead. I decided to enter the pillbox with four others. I grabbed a submachine gun from one of the dead krauts. He really didn’t need it anymore. I checked to see if it was still loaded before moving any further. We ran up the stairs toward the machine gun position. One of the others threw a grenade in before we entered the top floor. I opened fire as the door swung open. We killed anything that moved inside. Dead bodies lay everywhere. The floor was covered with blood.

I'm not sure about some of it. I'm worried that it sounds mostly cliche or something like that. So what do you think? Does sound sort of realistic?

__________________

Biscuit

Hello-

Let me say that you did a nice job on the paragraph--but I think I see your problem. Writing effective fight scenes can almost be difficult, especially if it's on the longer side. Short but good sentences are a must for a fighting scene because we want the reader to skim through the action, reading every punch, kick and blow. But, sometimes the reading flow can be bogged down if all the sentences are of the same length; creativity has to step in strong. I hope I'm making some sense...if not, I'll be glad to rewrite what I'm typing in a way that's actually understandable.

Hope that helps!

imrhati

Nothign anyone can say woudl really help you write a figth scene. The ebst wya you coudl learn is to start off writing crappy figth scenes and keep practicing until you get better.

__________________
Super humans need love too!
____________________________________________
If your story is critiqued please take the five minutes to repay the favor.

red lantern

Thats a good scene I like that, it feels real. Your protagonist as a soilder will have privy knowledge to the jargon of the battlefield and have specific knowledge of the types of equipment present and this will be in his mind automatically for example:

In WW2 german hand grenades had longer handles and adjustable for long range throwing and were called 'potato mashers' or 'mashers'

A type of german machine gun was a MPG40 known as a 'grease gun' or 'greaser'

Germans were often referred to as Krauts, Fritz or Jerries

Daggers were also trench knives, boot knives and bayonets, officers such as the Werchmat, Luftwaffe and SS officers had special narrow and combat long knives for dress that were much sought after as trophies.

Obviously I realise that your are still laying your ground work but your reader has see your world through the informed or ignorant eyes of your character.

__________________
When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you: Friedrich Nietzsche.

I live in a cemetery full of good will and integrity: Silverchair

Destroyer2000

It sounded good, but there are places that I see improvement in. There were too many sentences; trying making some of them compound. It was choppy. Also, some better descriptions might be in order.

bob rulz

Try varying your sentences a little more and streamlining it a bit. It's choppy and disjointed, although the descriptions themselves aren't bad. One of the problems is that nearly every sentence starts with a pronoun. See how you can very the sentence structure some more to cut down on that. Certainly in a fight scene you're going to start many sentences with "I", "he", "they", "she", etc, but there are still ways to vary it some more, change the sentence structure, so that you're not starting every sentence with that.

ChrisF

Hi, everyone has pretty much already made the points that I would have suggested re short sentences, and lack of variation of length. I think the use of colloquial description is good... makes it more immersive for your reader. As an example, I've just made a couple of changes to your text (almost all grammatical) so you can perhaps see what people mean when they talk about sentence length.

“Fire in the hole,” I yelled as we set off the blasting cap. A large explosion erupted several seconds later. The barbed wire had exploded into several pieces, and we hurried forward into the gaps as fast as possible. By this time the machine gunner near our position was silent: he had stopped firing, and I had a bad feeling as we went over the mound and landed on the other side. Someone’s fist slammed into my face as soon as my feet touched the ground, and I fell backwards, disoriented for a few seconds. Several bodies hit the ground as I struggled to get up.

Hope that helps!

penforhire

I love writing fighting and action scenes. The rules I follow are this:

1. Small easy to understand sentances. Vary the size a bit, but generally no more than one comma per sentance.
2. Paragraphs should have no more than four lines.
3. Dialogue should be brief.
4. In action, it's show, not tell. In other scenes, telling should be just as important as showing.
5. Description should be SPECIFIC, and CONCISE. Big words, I know. But try to follow this rule, because in my opinion this is the most important. I hate long descriptions... argh lord of the rings.
6. Your characters cannot, under any circumstances, be more powerful than the enemy. EVER. Use cunning or cheap tactics, you want a heart pounding challenge somewhere.

There you have it. Six golden rules.

Talk to me.

__________________
Always without desire we must be found,
if the deepest mystery we would sound,
but if desire within us be,
its outer fringe is all we shall see.

Azmakna

well i think its alright in general but what you need to do in a scene like that is keep things moving:

this sentence is a little static for instance. its better to descibe what the explosion did to the barbed wire

__________________
don't count me a blank page
waiting to be written on,
see me as a written page
waiting to be photocopied.

http://www.writersbeat.com