ave-aria:

starforgedsteel:

berrybird:

• Sticking a landing will royally fuck up your joints and possibly shatter your ankles, depending on how high you’re jumping/falling from. There’s a very good reason free-runners dive and roll. 
• Hand-to-hand fights usually only last a matter of seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s exhausting work and unless you have a lot of training and history with hand-to-hand combat, you’re going to tire out really fast. 
• Arrows are very effective and you can’t just yank them out without doing a lot of damage. Most of the time the head of the arrow will break off inside the body if you try pulling it out, and arrows are built to pierce deep. An arrow wound demands medical attention. 
• Throwing your opponent across the room is really not all that smart. You’re giving them the chance to get up and run away. Unless you’re trying to put distance between you so you can shoot them or something, don’t throw them. 
• Everyone has something called a “flinch response” when they fight. This is pretty much the brain’s way of telling you “get the fuck out of here or we’re gonna die.” Experienced fighters have trained to suppress this. Think about how long your character has been fighting. A character in a fist fight for the first time is going to take a few hits before their survival instinct kicks in and they start hitting back. A character in a fist fight for the eighth time that week is going to respond a little differently. 
• ADRENALINE WORKS AGAINST YOU WHEN YOU FIGHT. THIS IS IMPORTANT. A lot of times people think that adrenaline will kick in and give you some badass fighting skills, but it’s actually the opposite. Adrenaline is what tires you out in a battle and it also affects the fighter’s efficacy – meaning it makes them shaky and inaccurate, and overall they lose about 60% of their fighting skill because their brain is focusing on not dying. Adrenaline keeps you alive, it doesn’t give you the skill to pull off a perfect roundhouse kick to the opponent’s face. 
• Swords WILL bend or break if you hit something hard enough. They also dull easily and take a lot of maintenance. In reality, someone who fights with a sword would have to have to repair or replace it constantly.
• Fights get messy. There’s blood and sweat everywhere, and that will make it hard to hold your weapon or get a good grip on someone. 
• A serious battle also smells horrible. There’s lots of sweat, but also the smell of urine and feces. After someone dies, their bowels and bladder empty. There might also be some questionable things on the ground which can be very psychologically traumatizing. Remember to think about all of the character’s senses when they’re in a fight. Everything WILL affect them in some way. 
• If your sword is sharpened down to a fine edge, the rest of the blade can’t go through the cut you make. You’ll just end up putting a tiny, shallow scratch in the surface of whatever you strike, and you could probably break your sword. 
• ARCHERS ARE STRONG TOO. Have you ever drawn a bow? It takes a lot of strength, especially when you’re shooting a bow with a higher draw weight. Draw weight basically means “the amount of force you have to use to pull this sucker back enough to fire it.” To give you an idea of how that works, here’s a helpful link to tell you about finding bow sizes and draw weights for your characters.  (CLICK ME)
• If an archer has to use a bow they’re not used to, it will probably throw them off a little until they’ve done a few practice shots with it and figured out its draw weight and stability. 
• People bleed. If they get punched in the face, they’ll probably get a bloody nose. If they get stabbed or cut somehow, they’ll bleed accordingly. And if they’ve been fighting for a while, they’ve got a LOT of blood rushing around to provide them with oxygen. They’re going to bleed a lot. 
• Here’s a link to a chart to show you how much blood a person can lose without dying. (CLICK ME) 
• If you want a more in-depth medical chart, try this one. (CLICK ME)

Hopefully this helps someone out there. If you reblog, feel free to add more tips for writers or correct anything I’ve gotten wrong here. 

How to apply Writing techniques for action scenes:

– Short sentences. Choppy. One action, then another. When there’s a lull in the fight, take a moment, using longer phrases to analyze the situation–then dive back in. Snap, snap, snap.
– Same thing with words – short, simple, and strong in the thick of battle. Save the longer syllables for elsewhere.
– Characters do not dwell on things when they are in the heat of the moment. They will get punched in the face. Focus on actions, not thoughts.
– Go back and cut out as many adverbs as possible.
– No seriously, if there’s ever a time to use the strongest verbs in your vocabulary – Bellow, thrash, heave, shriek, snarl, splinter, bolt, hurtle, crumble, shatter, charge, raze – it’s now.
– Don’t forget your other senses. People might not even be sure what they saw during a fight, but they always know how they felt.
– Taste: Dry mouth, salt from sweat, copper tang from blood, etc
– Smell: OP nailed it
– Touch: Headache, sore muscles, tense muscles, exhaustion, blood pounding. Bruised knuckles/bowstring fingers. Injuries that ache and pulse, sting and flare white hot with pain.
– Pain will stay with a character. Even if it’s minor.
– Sound and sight might blur or sharpen depending on the character and their experience/exhaustion. Colors and quick movements will catch the eye. Loud sounds or noises from behind may serve as a fighter’s only alert before an attack.
– If something unexpected happens, shifting the character’s whole attention to that thing will shift the Audience’s attention, too.
– Aftermath. This is where the details resurface, the characters pick up things they cast aside during the fight, both literally and metaphorically. Fights are chaotic, fast paced, and self-centered. Characters know only their self, their goals, what’s in their way, and the quickest way around those threats. The aftermath is when people can regain their emotions, their relationships, their rationality/introspection, and anything else they couldn’t afford to think or feel while their lives were on the line.

Do everything you can to keep the fight here and now. Maximize the physical, minimize the theoretical. Keep things immediate – no theories or what ifs.

If writing a strategist, who needs to think ahead, try this: keep strategy to before-and-after fights. Lay out plans in calm periods, try to guess what enemies are thinking or what they will do. During combat, however, the character should think about his options, enemies, and terrain in immediate terms; that is, in shapes and direction.
(Large enemy rushing me; dive left, circle around / Scaffolding on fire, pool below me / two foes helping each other, separate them.)

Lastly, after writing, read it aloud. Anyplace your tongue catches up on a fast moving scene, edit. Smooth action scenes rarely come on the first try.

maisiethewriter:

I wrote a fic recently and the word count for the first
draft came to about 40,000 words – roughly the length of a novella or ficlet.
And that’s fine because I wasn’t striving for a novel or a 100K slow-burn coffee shop AU.

But coming to edit my first draft I realised something about
myself. I am an underwriter. My fic
could actually be at least 10k (maybe 20k) longer. Of course it’s not all about word count, it’s about the story,
but in this case a smaller word count isn’t because I’m a fantastically efficient storyteller it’s
because I’ve missed out a lot of stuff. Like, Important Stuff.

So as I set out to add muscle to the skin and bones I’ve
already created in draft one I thought I’d share five tips for my fellow underwriters
to help you flesh out your writing too.

1)     Make sure to describe the place and space in
which the action happens.

There are quite a few places in my first draft where there’s
no indication as to where things are taking place– or there is, but it’s the
bare minimum and not really enough to build up a clear picture.
This probably because as the writer I know exactly what the place looks like so I make the
assumption that a bare minimum description will mean the reader knows too.

Now I’m not saying go into masses of detail about what your
settings look like. In some cases it’s not useful to describe setting in a lot of detail (e.g. during really
fast paced action sequences) but doing a
verbal sketch of the space is essential for putting your characters in context and reader understanding.

I really is a fine balance (which is why beta readers are your friend!) But
definitely go back to your setting descriptions if you’re an
underwriter, they might need some work.

2)    Make sure to describe your character’s appearance.

Similar to the above point – you know what your characters look like, but unless you describe them,
the reader won’t.

It’s fair to say that descriptions are open to reader
interpretations, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t describe them in a healthy
amount of detail. So you might try to nail down some of the interesting quirks
about your characters to help the reader build a picture – not only will it
help the readers understanding, it’ll boost your word count too!

Note: This one functions a little differently in
a fic because the readers are probably familiar with how the character looks,
but there is nothing wrong with adding your interpretation (or even reminding
them, especially if the characters are from a book.)

3)   Include character reactions outside of what they
say out loud.

Real life conversations aren’t just about the stuff that
comes out of our mouths. So much of human interaction is about body language –
so include it in your writing! Saying that the character covers their mouth
with their hand when they talk suggests shyness. While another character crossing
their arms shows they’re defensive -perhaps because they’re feeling threatened.
In real life we don’t always say what we mean – but a lot of the time our actions give away what we’re really thinking. By including these actions around dialogue
writers can influence how we as readers view characters and how we interpret interactions
between characters. And it can boost your word count too.

The big stuff:

4)     Check your pacing.

When you write it feels like your scene is taking place over
hours, days, weeks because when you’re writing it takes time. Reading, on the
other hand, is much quicker. A seasoned reader can fly through a 100 page novel
in a few hours – a seasoned writer can spend hours writing a 100 words.

When you read back your writing, make sure to check your
pacing. You might just find that the Impossible Task you set for your
characters at the start of the story is suddenly resolved within the next fifty
pages. To boost your word count you
might want to start by adding more obstacles between the character and their goal.

For example; your character has to find an object such as a
precious jewel. Sounds relatively easy, right? But what if the jewel is lost in
the mines of an ancient people, amongst thousands of other treasures that look
very similar? What if no one has found this jewel because it’s guarded by a
fire breathing dragon? What if the ancient mines and dragon are located in a
mountain which is miles and miles away across dangerous lands? What if your
characters need to enlist the help of someone with a very specific skill set?

You take one simple objective (finding the jewel) and you
put into play a series of obstacles that must be overcome in order to complete
the objective. Your underwriting tendencies, like mine, might just mean that there
aren’t enough metaphorical (or real) dragons in your story!

5)    Sub-plots.

A sub-plot is a smaller scale plot – often involving
the supporting characters – which runs secondary to the main plot. It can be
directly linked to the main plot, i.e. the info provided in the subplot
directly influences events in the main plot. Or it can simply be linked through
place, time or themes of the overall story (e.g. Hermione’s elf rights campaign
‘S.P.E.W’ in Harry Potter and the OoTP is linked to the overall theme of
oppression.)

Sub-plots are great because they can serve as some respite
from a traumatic main plot; your character is fighting a war (main plot) but
also fighting and failing (in hilarious ways) to win the affection of their love
interest (sub-plot).

Plus, sub-plots can also help with characterisation, can
cause your main character to have the moment of realisation which allows them
to overcome the obstacles they face in the main plot and is generally a better
reflection of real life! Sub-plots often centre on side-kicks and other
characters – people who might not be as devoted to the end goal as the
protagonist is. In fact, well written
side characters seemingly live their own lives with their own goals. You might choose to showcase
this in your sub-plot by letting the conflict of interest cause more
problems for the protagonist to overcome.

Either way you could find your word count sky rockets as soon
as you add in a few clever sub-plots.

I hope this helped!

Got any questions? Send me an ask