Hi all. THis is my first post on this website, so please bear with me. I am someone who is trying to write a book where there will be a lot of impacts. The impacts will be caused by characters being thrown into objects, such as buildings, fists and the like. There will basically be a lot of fighting in the book, with major property damage around them as they fly through buildings and such The one problem I am having with these fight scenes are the moments that characters hit something. And they hit it hard. I am struggling to describe those impacts so I was hoping you writers can give me some ideas on how to vary my descriptions of these impacts and not describe all the collisions the same way. Because there will be a lot of them/ Thank you for your time
If you have different POV's your characters themselves would provide some variation in describing the impact(their own or someone else's) based on their personalities. Another easy way is to use a variation of materials and buildings. Slamming into a garage door and causing a big dent would be different than crashing into a restaurant window and ending up in the lobstertank. There's a lot of setting-stuff you could use where the impacts are really different from each other and that would help with keeping descriptions feel fresh. If the wording itself is your major concern right now, I'd suggest picking up a thesaurus, and also check out some books with a lot of action to get ideas for descriptions. Superheronation.com and sites like that might have articles on the subject. Good luck!
When I wanted to know how to describe firearms, I watched a bunch of real videos of people shooting, and talking about shooting. Then I read some fiction by authors that were known for doing it well: Tom Clancy, Lee Child and so on. Then I stewed on it for a while.
Die Hard was pretty much left unchanged when it went to movie. I'm certain there is a lot of fighting in there.
That is a toughie! I had to do this twice in my novel, and both times I struggled. I got one of them pretty well, the other ...meh. I'm still not entirely happy with the result. I know when I'm reading 'action' pieces (often in the workshop here, as I don't normally read 'action' books) I find I get annoyed if the description is excessive. Impacts are usually pretty fast. It's not the details of what splatters and what crunches and what flattens and what bends or folds that's really important to see in minute detail. It's usually the aftermath. I think if you can get the knack of describing the aftermath more than the slo-mo filmic action, you'll have an easier time. Try the, 'something hit me from behind, and the next thing I knew I was face down on the pavement, spitting teeth' approach. Rather than, 'I felt something like a large rock or possibly a metal object hit my back. My spine seemed to crumple and intense pain ran up and down it, The blow was so strong that I rose into the air and then arched toward the pavement, both arms outflung. I felt a crunch as my elbow hit first, and I thought uh-oh, I've broken something. And then my chin followed and I felt my teeth hit the concrete and a horrible pain as, one by one, they broke (with a horrible crack) and came out of my mouth, along with about a pint of blood' ...and etc. While you can get away with a detailed description once or twice, it's going to be tiresome to read this kind of thing over and over. And what's more, any 'impact' you wanted to have on the reader is going to be very much weakened. Nobody is going to care after one or two of these lengthy 'descriptions.' It's the result of the 'impact' that really matters, isn't it? I'd concentrate on that—most of the time anyway.
Read books, think about how other authors did it. Lara slammed into the concrete wall, shoulder first. Alice turned as she fell from the cliff, grabbing for passing plants, rocks, anything that could slow her fall. The shale sliced her palms open, razor-sharp pain, dirty cuts. John hit the water. The icy impact knocked the breath out of him. The car rolled off the road. It hit the chain link fence and kept going, dragging the fence with it. He didn’t even feel the bullet hit him. It was like getting punched in the arm; no pain, just a momentary sensation of being stunned. The toddler sucker punched her right in the kidney. Motherfucker. Just think about what happened and say it. If you’re having a bunch of impacts, you don’t need a lot of description for each one. Just pick one detail- how it sounds, how it feels, how it looks.
