Writers Craft - The prize in your writers toolbox

My first book “Innocence Lost” had a pretty good amount of weak fighting scenes. Everybody raved about the car accident like it was pure gold. It was flattering to have strangers email me telling me how realistic and believable the whole accident was. So I looked at my fight scenes trying to determine what was the difference in them. My car accident was based on my own life experience. The fear, tension and wide array of emotions that I was able to pull it flowed onto the pages easily. Now when I was a child I had been in fist fights, but the closest thing to a knife fight I had scene was on TV or playing Zorro with my cousin so I had no real life experience to call on. Now I had thought of taking a self defense class or karate and I might still do it, but I truly didn’t think it would allow me to understand the basics of fighting properly.

Luckily I was reading on twitter and someone had mentioned that they had stumbled upon author Rayne Hall’s book “Writing Fight Scenes: Professional Techniques for Fiction Authors (Writer's Craft Book 1)”. They described it as an author’s fighting bible so I had to check it out. I immediately went online and read the reviews for the book. I wasn’t really sure if the book would help me or not, but I figured I would spend the three bucks and buy it. I am just way too small and pretty for prison so reading a book was a logical step rather than experiencing it.

It was a fantastic book that delivers exactly what it promises. It provided detailed in-depth understanding and steps on how to write realistic fight scenes. It was amazing to learn how a skilled and non-skilled person could use them and make it a believable not only for me, but my readers. I immediately reread what I thought was my best fighting scene and found so many flaws and best of all was following the five step blueprint outlined in the book helped me improve my fight scenes. Now I am not talking about copying what Rayne so skilfully outlines and gives you in examples, but learning the skills and adding to them to make them your own. This is an awesome resource for writers. Now I think the whole series is absolutely amazing and eagerly bought the whole writers craft series.

Now I know authors who act out fight scenes with action figures (Vintage Starwars action figures), some hang out with karate instructors or cops. Everyone will have their own way of dealing with fight scenes. I highly recommend Rayne’s Writers Craft series. I have a giant collection of books on my kindle and Rayne’s books are the ones I refer to repeatedly. It’s how my fight scenes went from being described as weak and awkward to epic and so believable.