jamal asked Michael Grant:

Michael, could you give me some pointers on how to write descriptively during fight scenes? But, not forget the actually fighting is happening. Especially the scenes in Light with Gaia and the rest.

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[OK. The way I do it is first create the environment for the fight. I want that environment to feel real, and that means detail. If the environment feels real, you can get the detail across without too many words. But the place where the fight occurs is critical, and it is critical that it come BEFORE you decide how to work the fight.

Now you're in a specific place. Hopefully you have well-defined characters and you have a clear idea of what they can and cannot do. The question in your mind is the same as the character's question: how do I win this fight? But you also have to be fair to the opponent. You know how phony martial arts fights are because it's five against one but the five always wait their turn? If you want the fight to seem real you have to be honest and fair to the villain.

Real, real, real. Detail, detail, detail.

At that point it's a matter of figuring out how to win, then describing each beat with enough detail without sacrificing momentum. Momentum is important and here you can play little tricks with the prose. You don't want a monotonous pace, you want to speed it up, slow it down, speed it up, depending on how long the scene is to last. If you break a short sentence out and make it a stand-alone paragraph it acquires an importance it won't have in a long paragraph. If you use a bunch of short sentences it creates in the reader a sense of frustration and that feels like momentum. If you write a really long paragraph with minimal punctuation and let the words just come vomiting forth that leaves your reader feeling breathless, like they're being swept along.

Then there's the pure shock. I personally despise bowdlerized violence, comic book movie violence. Violence is awful. Fights are brutal and dangerous and painful. Blood flows. Teeth are knocked loose. Bones crack and may protrude. Eyes may be forced from sockets. People grunt, scream, curse.

So be specific about location, be real, be detailed, be fair with your villain, use the length and punctuation of your prose to convey momentum to the reader, and show the bloody consequences and the pain. (hide spoiler)]

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