Fight scenes. Action. It’s not as easy as it looks on the big screen, when you try to put it on paper.

I’m in the middle, or somewhere near the end, of writing something I call a kung fu novel. It’s about a lot of other things, or aspires to be, but there’s kung fu in it. I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last decade being intermittently obsessed with the Chinese genre called wuxia, basically a specific martial-arts fantasy set in more or less historical times. Crouching Tiger is a direct movie translation of the wuxia world, as are most of the low budget beauties you’ll watch in terrible, hilariously misspelled subtitles at 1am in the morning.

It turns out that the one of the most widely read authors in the world (despite being nearly unknown in the West) is Jin Yong, or Louis Cha, the most popular exponent of this genre in the 1960s and 70s. I can’t recommend him highly enough. He’s a kind of Chinese Dickens, maybe Dumas (with kung fu), writing long, complex serialized tales, which huge audiences people would eagerly wait for, and have ultimately bootlegged all over the world. The social criticism in the works was often subtle, as Chinese literature often is, but was sharp enough to keep his novels banned for considerable periods of time on the mainland. Although his books tended to center on historical conspiracies, brave outlaws and honorable fighters, there was formal experimentation going on in them as well, playing Rashomon-like with different ways of unfolding stories that grew progressively more sweeping with each new discovery.

Naturally, at some point I decided I wanted to write an American wuxia. Doesn’t quite work, because we have a different tradition — gangsters and cowboys, private eyes and so on instead of fighting monks and imperial intrigue. But in the book that’s evolved, I’ve kept a bit of kung fu, which has meant writing fight scenes.

I didn’t give this much thought at first, until I finally hit a bit one, and realized I didn’t know how do do it. Maybe I still don’t, but a bit of study and some trial and error has taught me a few things. Cha’s scenes can be beautiful and funny, but they’re specific to the genre, with people announcing or marveling at the styles, and the excellent performance of the moves. IE:

Lu heard the projectile coming and leaned slightly to one side. As it passed, he stretched out the index finger of his right hand and, carefully calculating the speed and direction of the dart, tapped it gently as it passed so that it fell into the teacup he was holding. Then without looking back, he made use of his Lightness Kung Fu and almost flew back to the inn, where he went straight to his room. He took the dart out of the cup and saw it was made of pure steel with a feather attached to it. He threw it into his bag.

I love that stuff

It doesn’t really translate, except in its pacing. And that’s really the key.

That pacing isn’t a simple thing, though. It breaks down to a lot of little choices you make while you’re writing. I sure don’t have any magic bullet, and I’m loath to say there are actual rules, but I am finding a few things helpful as I try this.
Choreograph it. Don’t get stuck in the descriptions of moves and events, but make sure you as the author know what’s happening to each character at each moment. There’s a clockwork element to fights that compresses the time scale, so that they have to considerably more tightly planned than conversations. Until I figured this out, I got confused, had characters just standing around, like extras in a video game. Terrible.

Stay in point of view. Not just in fight scenes. But if you’re in someone’s head, make sure the fight doesn’t wander off somewhere else. Unless that character has something better to do.

Balance thoughts and action. Pure action is boring as hell in print. Like everything, it’s better when it means something to the character, other than simple sound and fury. Someone fighting isn’t going to be analyzing everything, but they’ll be perceiving, and often intensely focused on very specific smells, sensation, feelings, etc.

Read it out loud. If it sounds like shite, it probably is. If you get bored quickly, so will everyone else.

I don’t have any good examples in my little expat book collection, but if anyone has any recommendations, I’d love to hear them. I’m what you might call a welterweight at this particular task.

Thirty years and four novels later, after his first failed escape, Harry Angstrom has had enough. I’ve just finished John Updike’s quartet of Rabbit novels, and a sad low depression has seeped into me. The kind of sadness you feel at the loss of someone who you’ve admired from afar, someone with whom you felt a kinship despite all the years and ideas that have built up between you. Updike allows us to know Rabbit, but it is Rabbit who does not know himself. His blind optimism. His undeniable narcissism. His cocky self-assuredness competing with the sense that he cannot get behind the curtain to see who it is that moves things along without him. It seemed at times that Harry Angstrom knew nothing at all. A clever, useless man skidding forward on his heels wanting only to slow things down. And other times that all the answers came too easily, if only too late or to no end. In this way he is a character for his time, caught in the miasma of late 20^th century American malaise, and knowing somehow that he’s doing it all wrong. The tragedy of his life his contentment with it.Rabbit is at turns beautiful, intelligent, sympathetic, loving, hateful, spiteful, cold, and asinine. He is what we all are: complex. People misunderstand him as he does them. A terrible husband and father and friend, we can agree that he’s not much worse than most. There is too much of him for us not to see ourselves in him. Larger than life and entirely assailable. The perfect character.

I’m taking some time from writing to study the way people are described. I’m not particularly good at it; I find myself with turns of phrase I like here and there, but only rarely yet do I rise to the level of honestly evoking a personality. Which is where I’m going here.

When I first write a character’s entry, I find it almost always terribly flat. I tend to default to a purely physical description, and often of the most unimaginative variety: hair and clothes, facial shape, rudimentary gestures. It’s like I’m creating a video game character for Second Life or some similar world: enough to distinguish the figure from the others around it, but not enough to bring it to life.

But to be fair to myself and all other writers, the immediate first draft is probably the wrong time for genuinely rich descriptions. The best of these, or at least my favorite, evoke personality with subtleties of metaphor and allusion to quirks of personality that (maybe) a writer can only come to know through writing, through learning the character as he/she acts and evolves through the course of a story or longer work. I’m beginning to think that a good character description may not come at least until the second draft, when the character has already evolved into an entity who at least resembles his/her finished form, instead of being simply a wordless idea in the author’s head.

Two writers’ descriptions stand out for me: those of Scott Fitzgerald and Saul Bellow. But each does it differently. Fitzgerald tends towards a single lyrical evocation of character when the person is first introduced. Bellow, more than anyone I’ve read, often has a long and utterly quirky description as a new person is introduced, but then continues to layer new aspects on throughout the work, never content to relinquish the power of additional detail.

Both use language that evokes character, relying on physical descriptions only as a skeleton on which to drape personality. Ie Fitzgerald: “He seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing” ??? a man who’s powerful and impatient, strains against his everyday life as against the leather. Bellow: “Theoretical willingness to slay class enemies. But Lustgarten could not even hold his own with pushy people in a pissoir.” — a brilliant encapsulation of meekness.

Here are a few from the books I have at hand:

From Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, first description of Rosemary Hoyt, as a young girl:

The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way. However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood ??? she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was on her.

Tom Buchanan, From Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body ??? he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage ??? a cruel body.

Hymen Lustgarten, from Bellow’s short story Mosby’s Memoirs:

You could see at once that there was no harm in him. Despite the bold revolutionary associations, and fierceness of doctrine. Theoretical willingness to slay class enemies. But Lustgarten could not even hold his own with pushy people in a pissoir. Strangely meek, stout, swarthy, kindly, grinning with mulberry lips, a froggy, curving mouth which produced wrinkles like gills between the ears and the grin. And perhaps, Mosby thought, he comes to mind in Mexico becaue of his Toltec, Mixtec, Zapotec look, squat and black-haired, the tip of his nose turned downward and the black nostrils shyly widening when his friendly smile was accepted. And a bit sick with the wickedness, the awfulness of life but, respectively persistent, bound to get his share. Efficiency was his style ??? action, determination, but a traitorous incompetence trembled within. Wrong calling. Wrong choice. A bad mistake. But he was persistent.