Episode 80: Transcript
Episode: 80: How to Write a Fight Scene
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction and everything else. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, the author of the upcoming young adult novel Victories Greater Than Death.
Annalee: [00:00:12] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:19] Today, we're going to be talking about fight scenes. Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. Fight scenes are awesome when they work. When they don't work, they're not so awesome. But how do you write a fight scene when you personally have never engaged in fisticuffs, or swordplay, or gun fighting, or space fighting? So today, we're gonna delve into the mechanics and all of the secrets of fighting. And later on, we're gonna be joined by Fanta Lee, author of the Green Bone Saga.
[00:00:47] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:14] So Annalee, why do we even need fight scenes? What's the point of having a fight scene in a story?
Annalee: [00:01:21] I mean, this is the thing that's so interesting about fight scenes is that we think that fight scenes are all about just blowing things up or having a conflict. But actually, a fight scene can serve many different kinds of purposes in the story. So, in one sense, a fight scene can bring characters to a realization that they never would have had. They can be a way of showing the consequences of violence. A fight scene can be not so much about the scene itself, but what comes after?
[00:01:59] What do you think that fight scenes are good for?
Charlie Jane: [00:02:02] I think that fight scenes are basically a way to escalate and kind of clarify a conflict in a story. I think that often a fight scene happens when all other recourse has been exhausted. We've tried every other way to resolve something. A really good fight scene is kind of surprising and has twists. And, I always think about scenes in general, any type of scene, as having structure or having a structure where there's a beginning, middle and end to the scene. And in a good fight scene, often things happen that come out of nowhere, like somebody betrays you, or somebody does something shocking, because they're like, I'm in a no-win situation, I'm gonna blow everything up. Fight scenes, at their best, kind of reveal something about the people involved in them, and also are a turning point in the story. And they're one of those sort of one way doors that you go through where like after this, nothing will be the same again. I think a good fight scene is one that kind of is irrevocable. And that kind of moves the story forward in a really interesting way.
Annalee: [00:03:07] I love that idea that a fight scene is irrevocable, that that's kind of the beauty of it, is that once you've gone through that scene, things are changed that can't really be unchanged. And I was, earlier I was thinking, oh, I'd really like to compare fight scenes to a musical number because oftentimes theyre staged—when you're when you're not just reading a fight scene, but when you're actually seeing one on stage or on the screen, they often have the quality, visually, of a dance number. In the sense that all of the people in the scene who are normally just doing regular things suddenly start doing these incredible physical feats. And it's not usually verbal, although sometimes people exchange kind of zingers and stuff. It becomes something almost like a ballet or, or like a Busby Berkeley number, depending on how many people are involved in the fight.
[00:04:01] And they can be comedic, they can be scary. And again, just just like a musical number. But, the big difference is, I feel like a musical number is almost the opposite of a fight scene in terms of consequences.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:16] Right.
Annalee: [00:04:16] In that numbers are often, I mean, depending on the musical, of course, and obviously there's exceptions, but often, they're there to kind of underline something that is happening or has already happened. And it's not, it's not there to kind of say, all right, the characters have gone up to the brink, and now they've gone over. Instead, it's like, the characters are in love and here's a song about it. Or the characters are really sad and here's a song about it. It's not changing things, it's kind of heightening them. And so I love that idea that the fight scene’s function is to kind of slam a door shut or open a door, maybe, but then you can't ever shut that door again.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:54] Right. So yeah, I mean, I think that the comparison with dance numbers is really interesting and it's really true that a dance number often doesn't impact the plot directly. Like, one of the things that I've used to find perplexing and also delightful about Bollywood musicals is that you'd have these dance numbers that were sometimes fantasy sequences. And you'd be like, oh, that happened. And then the dance number’s over and people are like, it didn't happen. It was basically a dream sequence. Like, I watched this, I'm gonna butcher this title. But I watched this Bollywood musical in the theater one time called Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, where like, the main character is estranged from their parents. And then there's a dance number halfway through where they're dancing with their parents, and everybody's happy together. And I’m like, oh, they got back together with their parents. And then dance number is over, they're still estranged from their parents. That actually was just like a dream.
[00:05:41] And the thing about dance numbers that I love is that they are so physical, and they kind of get to part of the joy of combat is the physicality of it. And there are plenty of examples of things that are both. Like, West Side Story, people are kind of dancing and fighting. Breakdancing movies from the ‘80s, people would kind of battle by dancing. There's the Prince movie Graffiti Bridge. Prince battles against like Morris Day and the Time by having dance fights. And it’s just, the two things blur together in a really fun way. But the dancing makes it kind of consequence free, in a way, because nobody's actually getting hurt.
[00:06:19] And you know, fun factoid that I stored up for this episode, the ‘80s rock star John Cougar Mellencamp famously said in an interview that he learned all of his dance moves from watching James Bond movies. He studied the way James Bond moved when he's fighting bad guys, and the way he kind of struts across. And he was just like, that's how I'm gonna dance. I'm gonna dance like James Bond.
Annalee: [00:06:41] Wow.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:42] Which I always think is so funny, because like, James Bond is sexy, I think.
Annalee: [00:06:48] Oh, James Bond is, yeah. And I would say, Bruce Lee started out as a dancer. I think he was doing like the tango or something like that. He became quite a dance master. And I know that Jackie Chan has also talked about how dance kind of informs some of his moves. But yeah, I think, I mean, obviously, there is a big overlap.
[00:07:07] But then as we say, remember the movie Gamer with Gerard Butler?
Charlie Jane: [00:07:11] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:07:13] It has. It's like, this is an example of the surprise dance scene, which kind of is also a combat scene. Where, this is a movie that's basically… it's an action—it's sort of a futuristic action movie about people gaming by taking over the bodies of prisoners. And so prisoners are like letting people use their bodies so they can get out of prison more quickly. But then, of course, you can be killed in the game world.
[00:07:36] But anyway, the point is that at the end, this is not really a spoiler, when we meet the bad guy, he does this crazy dance number, where he's sort of singing about how great it is to do this game, and how fun it is to kill and all that kind of stuff. And it's just so weird, because the whole movie has been this techno thriller with Gerard Butler—
Charlie Jane: [00:08:01] It’s beautiful.
Annalee: [00:08:01] Shooting people, and suddenly, we're all dancing around.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:05] It's creepy, but it's also lovely.
Annalee: [00:08:07] Yeah, 500 Days of Summer has a similar thing where in the middle of the movie, they suddenly do a dance number about being in love. And then there's no other dance sequence in the film. So I think that those are great places to think about how fight scenes often function that way, too. Where sometimes you… I should say, quite often you have a movie that only has like one fight scene, or you have a book that only has like one really big fight scene in it. And it's sort of startling, and heightened, and then changes everything. Whereas these dance numbers are also startling and heightened, but kind of don't really change anything.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:45] Yeah, so thinking more about the irrevocability of a fight scene. Part of what makes the fight scene irrevocable is that it kind of clarifies things in a way. Oftentimes in a story you have a character who's like, are they my friend? Are they my enemy? Are we on the same side? And when somebody’s tried to kill you, you know that they're not on your side. Like, if somebody takes out a gun and starts shooting at you, that's a pretty good clue that you're not going to be friends. That if they're trying to put a bullet in your head.
[00:09:14] So Annalee, you've written some amazing fight scenes in your work, and I love how you describe kind of the build up to combat but also combat itself. What do you think are like the key ingredients of a good fight scene?
Annalee: [00:09:26] One of my favorite fight scenes I've ever written is in my novel, Autonomous and it's where the robot Paladin is in the middle of shooting up a bunch of bad guys who are all kind of faceless corporate police. So we don't really care about them. We don't need him to develop any relationship with those people. But he's in the middle of trying to figure out who he is and Paladin is kind of falling in love with this guy that he's working with and the guy he's working with, has explained to Paladin that they can't possibly be anything other than just friends because he's not gay. And Paladin is like… He actually says, “I'm not a faggot,” because he's very… has a lot of internalized homophobia. And Paladin is like, “What?” I don't even understand. What does that even mean? Like what does faggot have to do with being a robot.
[00:10:16] And so as Paladin is fighting, because it's written, I was able to splice together bits of fighting where Paladin is crushing people's brains and shooting their faces off. And then he's also doing basically the futuristic equivalent of internet searches on the word faggot trying to figure out what the heck faggot is, and why are humans so obsessed with it? And so, as a result, for the reader, as you're going through, you're sort of forced to think about how homophobia and violence are connected. And that was my intent.
[00:10:52] But also, you're simply inside the head of this really confused robot who is able to multitask and he is able to crush people's heads while doing an internet search on the word faggot and learn about it. And so partly as a way of showing you what it would be like to have robot consciousness where you could actually do that kind of multitasking. But it's also a way of thinking about how these two social issues are kind of connected, shooting people in the head and being allergic to having gay sex.
[00:11:28] And that scene took me a really long time to write. And it was something I planned to do. I kind of plotted a huge chunk of the novel around that scene. But other times when I have a fight scene, it's just purely to move the plot along in a way that makes sense. And I've found myself doing a lot of things like watching YouTube videos of fights to figure out how they work.
[00:11:50] How do you do fight scenes in your work, Charlie Jane? Do you watch YouTube videos and try to figure out how to punch? Or what do you do?
Charlie Jane: [00:11:58] I mean, I do some of that. I definitely have read up about different forms of combat. For Victories Greater Than Death, I have physical fight scenes, but I also have—I mean, I have combat between people, but I also have space combat.
Annalee: [00:12:14] Yeah, it’s so hard.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:15] Which is something that I spent a lot of time reading different online resources and different discussions of the techniques and tactics of combat with spaceships involving, like, if you're in orbit, if you're near a gravity well, if you're… What kind of weapons you could possibly be using, the realistic how momentum works in space, because there's nothing that’s ever gonna stop your momentum if you're in motion unless you do something to stop your momentum. So I thought a lot about the physicality but I also, part of what I tried to do, was make every fight scene as emotional as possible, while also having a clear kind of image in my mind of all the dance moves. And that goes for if it's two people or two spaceships. Where are they in relation to each other? Who's trying to go get to where? Who's trying to… What are they each trying to accomplish in this scene? It's really like any other scene in a sense of knowing what people's agendas are, and what they're capable of doing, and how they're going to leverage their capabilities to accomplish something in the scene. And it’s thinking about the physical and the emotional at the same time.
[00:13:23] There were a lot of bits in Victories Greater Than Death where I kind of had a placeholder fight scene where it was like, and then they fight and this happens and this thing. It felt very rote. It felt like I had just written down a description of something from an action movie, I'd watched or something. And I had to go back later and really think about both how can I make this more real within the world as I've set it up? We know that they can do this, and they can't do this? And also, how do I make it feel like a fight scene that I've never seen before? And how do I make it feel like it’s the culmination of character stuff? You know, when Tina fights the bad guy, Marrant, like, the third time that Tina faces him should feel different from the first time because they've now faced each other, and they know more about each other, and they have some more history. And they're both desperately trying to achieve their opposing goals. It should feel like there's a ramping up of intensity from fight scene to fight scene as well as within each fight scene.
[00:14:23] But you know, it just every fight scene needs to have twists and turns within it. Like it can't just be like, and then they fight and fight and fight and then it's over. Has to be like and then they fight and fight and oh no, this happened. And now it just got a lot scarier. And now they're doing this. Or this person just did this thing that we never thought they were going to do. The more that you can build in surprises and developments, the more it's like not just, fight fight fight fight fight fight fight, okay, we're done.
Annalee: [00:14:54] It's so hard. When you… I actually just started getting an anxiety attack when you described how that fight scene needed to do all that work of like bringing everyone together and having character development and also being exciting.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:04] Oh, man.
Annalee: [00:15:04] And that is why they're so hard to write because they do have to do that work sometimes. Not always. Of course, you can just have like a regular old fight scene, or you can have a show like my beloved Into the Badlands, which I can't stop pimping. And I think I've probably talked about it like a billion times on the show before. But that's a show that's built around fight scenes.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:25] Mm-hmm.
Annalee: [00:15:26] The star of the show is a martial artist. And so you always knew going in that there would be like, X number, probably like two to three really amazing fight scenes per episode. So those fight scenes were not as weighted, because they were part of the kind of action and the fun of the show itself.
[00:15:44] But yeah, I just had… The novel that I'm working on now, I have a huge, basically like, a war scene. A giant battle drones and robots and weird other kinds of vehicles and people dying and people being shot. And it's really quite big. And it was so hard to do, because of all that stuff. And also, because I was realizing that it is an escalation of previous fights in the book. But the previous fights were all verbal. So it was like people getting angrier and angrier at each other, often, over video calls, because they're, it's outer space and things like that. So they're not even in person yelling at each other's faces. They're just having really bad business meetings. And then finally, they have this physical battle. And it's really hard to bridge that. And I will admit, when I wrote that fight scene, I knew that it was a first draft. I was just like, okay, I'm blocking this out and when I'm done with the novel, I'm going to go back and I'm going to make it good, because I just I didn't, I felt like I needed to finish writing the book before I could go back and make that scene matter.
[00:16:55] So yeah, it's tough. So before we talk to Fonda Lee, what else do we want to say about fight scenes?
Charlie Jane: [00:17:03] Yeah, one thing I wanted to bring up about fight scenes is that the build up to the fight scene is important. And part of what I love about a really good fight scene is that the feeling of the fist pumping awesomeness of it, even though I also really want to deal realistically with how violence is destructive and costs the person committing the violence something as well as costing the people who are on the receiving end of violence. I also… I love action movies, and I love a movie where somebody is just like, hell yeah. Like they're being awesome. And actually, we have a clip right now from Lord of the Rings, which is one of my favorite like, hell yeah, fist pumping moments.
LotR Clip: [00:17:45] Nazgûl: Fool. No man can kill me. DIE NOW.
Nazgûl screeching and Éowyn grunting with effort.
Éowyn: I am no man.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:09] And that just gets me going every time and while I was looking for clips for this episode, I found the moment in Avengers: Endgame towards the end where, spoiler alert all of the Avengers like everybody who's ever been in any one of those movies, comes together to fight Thanos. And Captain America thinks he's alone against this huge threat. And then suddenly, he's just surrounded by a giant army of all his friends. And he's like, “Avengers, assemble!” And everybody’s like “YEAH!”
Annalee: [00:18:39] Yes!
Charlie Jane: [00:18:39] And it’s just that moment of hell yeah, we're doing this and we're friends. And we're awesome. And the bad guys are made out of poop. And we're made out of gold and everything's great. I love moments like that. I'm a sucker for moments like that. Like—
Annalee: [00:18:53] “We’re calling off the apocalypse.”
Charlie Jane: [00:18:55] Yeah, “We're canceling the apocalypse!”
[00:18:57] Yeah, we haven't we have another clip for you. It's very brief. It's Darth Vader meeting Obi Wan for the first time in years in the original Star Wars.
Star Wars clip: [00:19:05] [Lightsaber humming]
Darth Vader: I’ve been waiting for you, Obi Wan. We meet again at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but the learner. Now, I am the master.
Obi Wan: Only a master of evil, Darth.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:20] I love how it's kind of smack talk. Obi Wan is like, “Well, you suck.” And Darth Vader is like, “Well, you suck.” And then they're like, No, you suck. And then they start fighting. But it's also got all this weight of history. They used to be friends. They used to love each other. And now they're just gonna… one of them is gonna kill the other. And it's like, oh, man, you know, we used to be friends. And so I love the two sides of that, the smack talk and also the regret and I feel like when you can get those two things together. That makes it a really emotional fight scene.
Annalee: [00:19:56] Mm-hmm. The tragic fight scene, yeah.
[00:19:58] I mean, I think as we were talking about earlier, a fight scene can be funny, or it can be really sad. Or it can be really scary or really gross. We haven't even talked at all about body horror type fight scenes where it's like someone rips someone's skull out of their head or pulls—or turns them inside out, or cuts them up a billion times. And that's also part of a fight scenes is doing that kind of work to make the reader feel repulsed and disgusted by the violence.
[00:20:33] So what we're really coming around to realizing here is that fight scenes are hard to write because they do many things at once. They're fun to watch for that reason, but they're incredibly hard to put together. And when you're writing one, you have to be thinking on all those levels. What are you doing physically? What are you doing emotionally? What are you doing in terms of tone, and when it's done well as a reader or as an audience member, you don't notice. And when it's done badly, it’s so obvious. It's just so clunky. Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:16] Yeah, I'm just so glad that we've got an expert to talk to us about this now because we are so lucky to have the incredible Fonda Lee joining us.
[00:21:23] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:37] Now, we're so incredibly lucky to be joined by Fonda Lee, author of the Green Bone Saga, including Jade War and Jade City and the forthcoming Jade Legacy.
[00:21:47] Fonda, thanks for joining us. One thing that Annalee and I both love about your writing is the way that you handle fight scenes. And I'm wondering if you can talk us through a little bit more how you handle fight scenes, and like, what kind of planning goes into writing a fight scene?
Fonda: [00:22:02] So first of all, thanks for having me on. You’re here to make me talk about something that is one of my favorite subjects, which I'm always happy and I love writing fight scenes. Happy to do that any time. I love writing fight scenes. I know a lot of writers struggle with it. But for me, it's like the candy in writing. I can get through any other type of scene if I think, okay, there's a fight scene coming up. And I have a background in martial arts so it's a lot of fun for me to bring some of my personal experience into how I approach writing fight scenes. For me, the most important thing to keep in mind when you're writing a fight scene is the narrative importance of that scene. Because oftentimes, I think people think of fight scenes as something that just kind of amps up the energy and the excitement of a story. But the fight scenes should really advance the narrative. They have to have a purpose. So if you take that fight scene out of your story, does the entire story fall apart, and it should. If you can take that fight scene out, but nothing really materially has changed about the characters, then your fight scene is superfluous and it's not necessary. And we've all seen Hollywood movies like this where there's a fight scene, but you're not entirely sure what's at stake and why it matters. And you don't want your writing to be like that.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:34] Mm-hmm.
Fonda: [00:23:34] You want the characters to come out of it in a fundamentally different place than they were going in and you want the story to have changed in some way. So that's the first thing that I keep in mind. And the second piece of advice that I always give is that action is not about just the physical blocking of this scene, but about the emotions of the characters. Because the advantage that we have as prose writers over say, a visual medium like movies, is that we are able to get into the heads of our characters. And so the only way that you're going to communicate the fight scene in a way that is compelling, is if you're along for the ride on an emotional level. So the stakes have to be real for these characters and you have to set up the scene in a way that the reader is really invested emotionally.
[00:24:37] And that's one reason why I don't recommend, for example, starting with a fight scene at the beginning of your story, because you don't know these characters yet. You don't know who they are, you're not invested in why this matters to them. So those are the two things that I always keep in mind is the narrative importance and the emotional impact.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:59] Yeah, I just want to pick up on one thing you said. First of all, I love what you said about movies because I feel like that is the problem. That is the thing Hollywood has kind of trained us to think of fight scenes as being just sort of, almost like a break in the story. Like, now the story is getting grinds to a halt while people punch each other. And then the story will resume when the punching is over, which I think is kind of a waste of a good fight scene. But also, I love the thing you brought up about, like something should have changed. Something, there should be a change as a result of a fight scene.
Fonda: [00:25:29] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:29] Right?
Fonda: [00:25:29] Yeah, definitely. I would say make sure that your fight scene has crucial and irreversible consequences.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:37] Right.
Fonda: [00:25:40] There's many reasons to have a fight scene and it is not divorced from the character’s development. You should not be choosing between a character development scene and a fight scene, the fight scene and the character development scene should be enmeshed in one another. So your scene could reveal character because you're putting your character in a vulnerable position, a desperate situation and it's under those circumstances that character is really revealed. We get to see who this character really is when they're in that life or death situation. It could also be setting up a really crucial plot point that's going to have ramifications later. I bring up often the example of the fight scene between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back. That fight scene that happens with Luke's hand being cut off and him hanging over the chasm. That's the moment where the crucial plot point is revealed that has ramifications for the entire rest of the trilogy. So what is it that you're trying to accomplish with the scene from a narrative perspective? Not what happens in the scene from a who punches, who blocks, who cuts with the sword? That's not important. What's important is what is the consequence. And the fight scene I think of as being much more than just the confrontation itself, but the lead up to that scene, and then also the repercussions of that scene.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:00] Right and so when you're watching someone fight somebody that we hopefully care about, do we learn about them partly from the way that they fight, like if they fight dirty, their fighting style, how they learn to fight? Is that one way that it reveals character?
Fonda: [00:27:15] Yeah, definitely. And also, you have to think about this particular character and how they respond in that situation. I think one of the things that makes a fight scene sing is having a protagonist who is vulnerable on some level, who is at risk in some way. It could be mentally, emotionally, physically, and they're in this desperate situation. And it doesn't mean that they are helpless, or that they're an inexperienced fighter. You could have the most badass fighter, but they have to be vulnerable in some way. It could be that they are fighting to save somebody that they love. It could be that they are fighting in order to stand up to somebody who's a threat to them. It could be that they're fighting to uphold who they are to the rest of whoever's watching. It could be that they need some crucial piece of information. There's multiple reasons why they could be in a vulnerable situation, even if they’re a very experienced fighter.
[00:28:26] And then you also have to think about that character and what's believable for them, and not just believable, as in, like, how many villains could they take on at a time, right? What makes a fight scene believable is that the situation and the way that your character is responding to it is consistent with what you set up for the reader, and that the reader can believe could happen based on the information they have. So if you have a villain who's a genius mastermind, you can't have that villain just do something so stupid at the last second that your hero wins. Or if you've established that there's certain types of magic in the world, you can’t have a fight scene where all of a sudden your character pulls out another type of magic. You can't have someone who has no experience with firearms, pull out firearms and shoot up a room full of terrorists. So you have to be leading your reader along the way so that they're in this state of tension but believable tension when the fight happens.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:30] Yeah, so in a fight between two people or two or more people, how can it be partly about their relationship or their unfinished business? Like you mentioned, the Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader fight, and that's a great example. But my favorite fight scenes are often ones where a lot of the energy comes from these two people have history. They have something between them that they are working out in part by shooting at each other or punching each other. How do you kind of think about that when you're putting together a fight scene?
Fonda: [00:30:01] Yeah, a fight is a really intimate relationship. If you think about it, you've reached the point in which all other methods of conflict resolution have failed.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:13] Right, that’s a good way of putting it.
Fonda: [00:30:14] And people, we generally are socialized to avoid physical conflicts. We go through our lives, being generally very cognizant of not getting to a point where we have to get into a situation where it's fists or knives or guns, right? The intensity of the emotion in that moment has to be really high. And that's one way to think about the relationship between the two characters who are in this fight. Because we've all heard that saying about fiction, conflict being the lifeblood of fiction. And a fight scene is the distillation of pure conflict, really. You've got nowhere else to go but physical violence at this point. So I think that when you have a fight scene between these two characters, they both have to be in a place where you understand why it's come down to this. And that, as a writer, that gives you the motivation, the need to build these characters up to a point where it's not just like, they're opposed to each other, but they’re opposed to each other to a point where they have no other choice, or they've chosen this, because there's enough, now, enmity baggage between them. And that kind of goes back to what you're saying about the setup of… the fight scene starts way before it happens.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:43] Yeah. Which is another thing that bugs me in Hollywood movies, sometimes, where it feels like fight scenes just sort of come out of nowhere, like they just like, oh, now we're having a fight. Like, it just feels like, there's no kind of, there's no kind of build towards the fight scene. It's just like, well, it's time for another fight scene, because it's been 15-20 minutes since the last one, kind of. It’s just like—
Fonda: [00:32:05] I mean, there's definitely those those situations where you're, watching whatever, Transformers 3, or something like that. And it’s like, okay, it's time for another fight scene, right. Not to say that, I mean, I love movies that are high on the action quotient. But back to the point of, there has to be a narrative that is being driven by these moments of high action. And they have to be clear, not just from the standpoint of you can see it clearly blocking wise, it's not confusing, but also clear from the standpoint of the motivations of the characters and what you're trying to accomplish and where the story is going.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:51] Yeah. And so finally, for those of us who don't have a martial arts background, and who haven't been in a lot of fights in real life, or been in any kind of situations where combat was a possibility, how do you advise people to go about researching and kind of imagining fight scenes, and is it sometimes better to just kind of leave out some of the gory details and kind of gloss over it, especially if you're not an experienced fighter?
Fonda: [00:33:16] I wouldn't say you need to leave it or gloss over it, because I think you can write great fight scenes without any sort of extensive background, if you keep in mind the fact that you can do a lot of research. And I've written a lot of fight scenes in areas where I have no experience. So I've written… I am not a knife fighter. I have written a lot of knife fights. I'm not a sword fighter. And I've written that. I have practically no experience with firearms, but I've written lots of scenes with firearms. So, with that in mind, like there is a lot of research that you can do, yes, you can do the firsthand research of taking classes, going to the shooting range, going to a knife drills class, you can do the firsthand knowledge. You can also read a lot of works that have action and fight scenes that you admire and see how those authors do it. You can watch films and drawn on inspiration there. You can get experts to help you. Have some people in your writers contact list, including you know, someone with some training in hand-to-hand combat, a gun person, a doctor or EMT that you could ask the gory questions about wounds. So have those people as your support.
[00:34:37] And if you're writing about like a particular profession as well, finding firsthand accounts or memoirs or interviews of people who are in roles like your protagonist, whether it's a police officer or a soldier or a prizefighter, you can find a lot of that as well.
[00:34:59] So if you are writing a story that calls for action and fight scenes, you don't want to cheat the reader by being like, well, I don't really know how to write this, so I’ll just get rid of it in a line. And your reader is expecting that there's… that all that emotion and tension is going to be rewarded with a fight scene that's going to get their adrenaline up, that's going to be exciting.
[00:35:24] I also would say, don't worry too much about all the nitty gritty details. You don't need to write out every single move that happens in the scene. In fact, I highly advise you not to do that. Nobody needs to know he punched low, and she blocked, and he did a roundhouse. You don't need a beat by beat explanation of everything that happens in the scene. In fact, you just kind of need to evoke what's happening in a general sense. You need to show how the fight starts and how it ends and what like happens in between to some extent, but you don't even… In fact, some martial artists, I think, maybe because they have too much knowledge, go a little overboard over describing every move, you don't need that. So don't be held back from writing fight scenes, because you don't have 10 years of training.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:20] That's super useful. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. Fonda, can you tell us more about your work? What you're working on right now and also where people can find you?
Fonda: [00:36:30] Yeah, so I have just finished and turned in the final book of the Green Bone Saga, Jade Legacy, which comes out at the end of 2021. And the Green Bone Saga is an epic fantasy trilogy that is martial arts and magic and mafia. So if that sounds up your alley, it will be a complete series by the end of the year. I also have three young adult science fiction novels. And you can find me online at FondaLee.com or on Twitter at @FondaJLee.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:05] Cool. Thank you so much.
Fonda: [00:37:06] Thank you.
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Charlie Jane: [00:37:20] This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you so much to our heroic supporters on Patreon, of whom you could be one. We're at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. You can also be following us on Twitter at @OOACpod or on Facebook at OurOpinionsAreCorrect. And we just welcome any reviews you want to leave on Apple Podcasts or any of the other places that podcasts are reviewed. We're available wherever fine podcasts are found.
[00:37:50] Thank you so much to our heroic, fantastic producer Veronica Simonetti. Thanks to Chris Palmer for the music and thanks again to you for listening. We'll be back in two weeks.
[00:38:00] Bye!
Annalee: [00:38:00] Bye!
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