There are fight1 scenes, and then there are fight2 scenes.
We generally think of fight scenes as bar-room brawls; a violent melee in which our hero, looking much the worse for wear, eventually emerges victorious.
The fight scenes I aim to discuss today are of another form entirely: a scene where two people fight, not with swords or fists or pistols, but with words and ideas. An argument, not in the sense of debate, but in the sense of a feud, most often between people who are, were or are about to stop being friends, lovers or family.
Writing a bad fight2 scene is much like writing a good fight1 scene: the dialog is rote and familiar, there's a lot of violence and in the end, only one person walks away.
At first blush, it sounds like all the pieces are there. Exchanges like "I wish I'd never been born," "don't bother coming back," or "I can't believe you would say that to me" are the hallmark of such disputes.
Avoid them.
A rote fight may as well not happen at all. If the best your characters can come up with to fling at each other amounts to "I hate you" and "I hate you more," there's a chance they shouldn't be fighting in the first place. At least, not with words.
A well-written fight is a good deal less paint-by-numbers, since the best fights draw on unique and underplayed elements within the same work. These are the boiling points between characters, where two people are at least somewhat out of control and flinging whatever comes to mind, uninhibited, from their lips.
Every fight is unique, but it's not always as simple as putting the pieces together. When you write a murder mystery, you can lay out clues in whatever order and have the hero slowly unravel the riddle without having to strain your own brain too much in the process.
With a fight, the point is not to win. The point is not to solve the puzzle. The point with a fight is to fray, and that is a good deal more difficult.
If you have an easy time writing an argument between people who otherwise love each other, then either you're a practiced writer, or I'm very sorry. This is one area where the old adage that art is born of pain is unmistakably true: the most compelling fights are the ones mirrored off our own lives. You never know which words can really sting until you see the look on someone's face the moment they escape your lips.
There are three things that will help you design a decent, emotionally-impactive fight: what the characters want, what the characters know, and the knowledge that angry people are stupid.
...Okay, so that last one probably needs some explanation. We'll start there and work our way back.
Angry people are stupid. Really, all people are stupid at some point. We forget where we left our cell phone. We lock ourselves out of our cars. Everyone does it. Normally, in fiction, it's not a fact we play on. If Batman locked himself out of the Batmobile, it would be hilarious, but doesn't necessarily fit the genre.
For the most part, characters get a pass. We assume that they can get by without any of the minor slips and inconveniences of life unless those slips directly assist the plot.
Occasionally, that same notion of error-free living extends into a quarrel, which is exactly where it does not belong. By their very nature, most fights are stupid. If someone has a rational objection and another raises a reasonable obstacle to an otherwise sensible resolution, there's no reason for raised voices and stomping feet.
Which makes it a perfectly peaceful but emotionally dead argument.
A fight generally stems from the decay of patience to the point where an otherwise strong or quiet individual simply snaps, breaking from their everyday equilibrium to briefly become another beast entirely. That is the essence of a fight.
In an argument, people will bring in issues that are emotionally close but rationally unrelated, they will sling senseless salvos in an effort to "win" this arbitrary contest that they themselves may have started. In an argument, people will say things that are untrue, half-true, or no longer true, either because they don't know or simply because their reason is almost fully impaired.
In short, angry people are stupid.
This brings us to our second element: what the characters know. Dramatic irony is a hell of a drug, and one I don't think we can ever overdose on (I have yet to try). If you're looking for a way to boil an irrational argument out of a perfectly logical set of circumstances, remove a piece from what the characters knows.
Allow for assumption and inference. If one lover has seen the other sneaking out late at night, visiting a seedy part of town and going into the apartment of another man, they might leap to the conclusion that they're being cheated on.
If instead the man in the apartment is the second lover's half-brother who tends to their ailing mother in the apartment where they both were raised, a fact the second lover might want to hide for fear someone might think less of his or her humble beginnings, it changes the situation entirely. Which is a wonderful thing to do to a character that has just made himself red in the face from shouting about how he is the "victim."
Better still: once the truth comes out (likely after a top-volume tirade about the supposed illicit tryst), it makes the second lover, momentarily the villain, suddenly sympathetic, turning the tables on the first and opening the doorway to reconciliation while simultaneously giving depth to the second lover's story overall.
Much like with a murder mystery, you the writer know the score, but your characters don't have to. They don't even have to infer very well off the evidence. Depending on the tone, an argument the audience sees coming can be just as good as one that takes them by surprise. Just remember what the characters themselves do and don't know.
Lastly we come to what the characters want. This is at the heart of every argument, and will be where a good bit of the emotion comes from. If a lover feels slighted, that's one thing. If a lover who was on the verge of proposing suddenly feels as if all their trust has been shattered, as if they have been tricked into opening up just to have themselves hurt again, now we're getting somewhere.
Know what the characters want, and don't stop with the current issue: start there.
Take two characters with musical aspirations: one a small-town vocalist with hopes of leaving the dull, dreary, hopelessness of the little rural burg where she grew up, the other a quiet guitarist who left the lights of the big city for fear it would take all the heart out of his music.
The two meet in the middle and begin playing together, content with the rush of the dive-bar-gig life and the small, sincere fame it brings them. One day, a record producer approaches them, asking if they'd like to sign with a label.
For the vocalist, this is her shot. A chance at nationwide notice and the promise of a global tour mean never being mired in the miserable mediocre melancholy of her home town. For the guitarist, this is the very devil he ran from catching up with him, trying to tempt him back into a life full of shallow compliments and one-night friends.
The producer is very clear: he will not take either of them alone, it's both or neither. Whatever they decide, someone is going to be unhappy, not because they don't play well together, but because of where each was headed when they met. The paths that brought them together in the middle are now finally working to tear them apart.
The fight here can be over nearly everything the two know of each other: it may start with a simple discussion of the pros and cons, with the vocalist espousing the fantasy world of rock fame while the guitarist dimly shoots down each myth from personal experience.
The vocalist, still driven by her dreams, might try to dismiss the guitar player's objections as overstated, or "just one man's experience," leaving room for the hope she isn't willing to set aside. The guitarist, thinking he's doing his partner a favor, becomes all the more insistent that she not take the contract.
Compassion becoming controlling is a key theme in many fights. When advice is mistaken for demand, especially when the advice runs contrary to what the character believes (or wants to believe), you have a great friction point to set alight the conflict.
The vocalist becomes angry at the guitar player's insistence, and her dismissal of his claims about the industry become a "bitter" reaction to "washing out." The guitar player, who may or may not have washed out, in turn gets offended at the implication that he can't hack it in the music world.
This becomes a great branch point for the second vein of argument, where the characters depart the main line of discussion and begin fighting about something else entirely. Here, for instance, they may start to fight about tastes in music or start to snipe at one another's musical chops in an effort to "win" the fight.
At last it comes to a head: the vocalist accuses the guitarist of being common, drawing on confessions he may have made to her earlier in the work that his real dream is not to fade into the "pop" scene as just another faceless sound. That does it. The guitar player, seeing an opportunity to walk away, ends the debate with the assertion that, if he's so common, she should have no trouble finding another.
He walks away.
And here is where fights2 differ from fights1 the most: no one wins. The guitar player got the last word, but there's no joy in his exit. The vocalist hurt him the most, but that only brings regret. Fights don't resolve things. Fights break things.
This is what makes them difficult to write: you have to leave things broken.
You have to give the audience time to worry and wonder and fret. You have to give them time to think that the characters might never resolve things, that the relationship (platonic or otherwise) that the audience has come to love might be irreparably shattered.
In short, you have to make them hate you, at least for a little while.
If you don't find yourself having to step away from the computer halfway through writing a key fight, there's a good chance it's not personal enough. If you don't get a sinking feeling in your gut when you go back over the dialog, up the ante. Fights should suck, in the sense that they make us, even as readers, uncomfortable.
This is true even for the good fights. I said before that fights only break things, and that's true, but some things are good to break. An oppressive regime, even if it's just the iron grip of a guilt-wielding parent on their full-grown child, is not something you want to leave intact.
Sometimes, somebody wins.
But even in a good fight, before the walk-away moment, before the surprise victory wherein the hero realizes that the very thing they've been scared to break are the chains holding them to the floor, in that in-between time where it seems like the antagonist might win, you have to make the audience worry. You have to make them wait.
There are all manner of fights out there: bosses and peons, agents and talent, lovers, parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends, neighbors, co-workers, strangers on a bus together. None of them need to be vapid and rote, none of them need to be small, and oddly none of them need to be loud.
But if you want them to have an impact, they do need to hurt, at least a little. And that means hitting below the belt. That means denying your hero common sense and perspective for a time. That means staring at the page, screaming "you idiot!" because you know just how easy a puzzle it is to fix, but you've hidden some of the pieces.
Fighting means being a jerk to your characters, no matter how much you love them.
Having a character writhe and flail over nothing just because the world is inconvenient (or being woefully distraught over something ephemeral like "but my boyfriend the vampire doesn't have a soul, how can we go to heaven together?") is a cheap way to conjure conflict.
A real fight hurts to write, because either someone's wrong and they have every right to be, or no one's wrong but something still got broken in the process. In a real fight, there is no victor, no kind release of death, there are only weapons and the wounds they cause. The worst part, as a writer, is that you have to sit and watch them bleed.
Then, and only then, can you make things right.
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1 A physical and often violent contest between two or more parties involving attempts by either side to wound the other
2 An emotional conflict between two or more parties with conflicting goals who are for whatever reason past the point of calm, reasonable discourse
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