Chris Grey
05-27-2007, 03:57 AM
I imagine quite a few people who write fantasy have an epic battle between the hero and the villain sometime near the end of the book, but most have a realism problem when they get there: the villain has the upper hand.
Two recent threads on this (which have a lot of good advice):
My protag would get his butt kicked by my antag. . . what should I do? (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65476)
Dagger in the boot ending? (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65535)
I'm not going to add much to what's in those threads, but I am going to add some general advice for people writing fight scenes that they want the reader to come away from with that Rocky or 300 feeling.
The most important advice I can think of is to check out role-playing games. You don't necessarily have to play them, but there's tons of advice on keeping encounters interesting and fair. Two sites I can think of off the top of my head are Johnn Four's roleplaying tips (http://www.roleplayingtips.com/index.php) and Burning Void (http://www.burningvoid.com/rpg/). There are others, they're not hard to find, but any tip that works for a roleplaying game works for writing fantasy.
For example: if you're not sure if your heroes will be able to defeat the villain, make the villain a little weaker to start. If the fight's going well, you can always make it harder (villain pulls out a secret weapon, his henchmen show up with guns, etc), but you can't make the fight easier without doing something remarkably cheap (villain has an asthma attack, etc).
Don't just study Lord of the Rings for your fantasy fights. Study movies, cartoons/anime, comic books, and video games. You'll see plenty of things that work and plenty of things that are cheap.
Two recent threads on this (which have a lot of good advice):
My protag would get his butt kicked by my antag. . . what should I do? (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65476)
Dagger in the boot ending? (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65535)
I'm not going to add much to what's in those threads, but I am going to add some general advice for people writing fight scenes that they want the reader to come away from with that Rocky or 300 feeling.
The most important advice I can think of is to check out role-playing games. You don't necessarily have to play them, but there's tons of advice on keeping encounters interesting and fair. Two sites I can think of off the top of my head are Johnn Four's roleplaying tips (http://www.roleplayingtips.com/index.php) and Burning Void (http://www.burningvoid.com/rpg/). There are others, they're not hard to find, but any tip that works for a roleplaying game works for writing fantasy.
For example: if you're not sure if your heroes will be able to defeat the villain, make the villain a little weaker to start. If the fight's going well, you can always make it harder (villain pulls out a secret weapon, his henchmen show up with guns, etc), but you can't make the fight easier without doing something remarkably cheap (villain has an asthma attack, etc).
Don't just study Lord of the Rings for your fantasy fights. Study movies, cartoons/anime, comic books, and video games. You'll see plenty of things that work and plenty of things that are cheap.