Tips for choreographing a fight scene inside the ring or octagon

For those of you that might want to try your hand at writing a fight story that takes place in a boxing ring or an MMA octagon, here are some tips that I learned and the education I went through while going round after round through this pugilistic world of fight fiction.

When I first stepped in the field of modern pulp fiction, and took a shot at writing an MMA short story. I quickly got lost in what fighter was doing what to who, and at the end of the scene I was looking over my text and going, the wrong guy won! After I fixed that punch drunken mistake, my editor looked it over went “I know what an arm bar is, but most of the audience won’t have a clue, so take out the entire fancy lingo that goes along with MMA, and take out the fluff.”

I was crushed I liked putting my characters in “arm bars”, or “guillotine chokes”, and fluff what fluff was he talking about, this was fight story. The lingo sounded cool, and all my friends new what I was talking about. But in order to write a better story, I used his suggestion and eliminated all the fancy talk, examined the scenes in a different context and set out to write a better fight scene with more punch and less fluff.

Before I tell you how I went about this task, I need to tell a little history about myself as a writer. I started writing Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. In those stories a lot of the conflict was between large groups, and in the case when it was between two individuals, the fight scene ran along the theme of; wham…bam…pull out a ray gun and blow the looser away. I’m being a little bit glib, but for the most part so many other things are available to the combatants that it’s not like two individuals going at one another with just muscle, training, and guts to determine the outcome. Fights in other stories that take place outside the ring or octagon, are usually life and death situations, so you want to finish them fairly quickly. And to be honest most science fiction fight scenes are not going to have it end with one of the combatants in an arm bar.

What I needed to learn was the difference between writing fight scenes for an MMA or boxing story and writing a fight scene for almost any other genre. I needed to learn to stop writing like a Ramones song; fast, loud, and over in one and a half minutes, and start writing well-orchestrated symphonies full of subtle dynamics, fantastic changes and a complete resolutions stretching over fifteen minutes or more. But keeping the audience interested in a fight that goes on for two or three pages can be difficult. It can be made worse when the fight doesn’t follow any plan or in my case the wrong fighter wins.

For many of you, and maybe your different, that’s ok but for most of us we can see a fight scene fairly clearly and it lasts for about five to seven exchanges between the fighters, then one of them wins. Easy enough but add that when you first imagined that scene you already know who was going to win before you even put pen to paper. Now the other guy really has the cards stacked against him, you imagined this scene with him losing and everything you write will be towards that end. Ufortunately what you end up with is a fight that looks heavily favored towards one individual. How can you break out of this choke hold? Put the other guy at and advantage, well then you can run into two problems; once again the wrong fighter wins or the advantage is such that the victory is not believable.

Here is what I did.

Read - And I don’t mean reading other fight stories, I mean reading the play by play action of an MMA or boxing event. It’s dull and dry and it tells you what one opponent did to the other, how they countered and who won or what the decision was. I read a lot of them; I looked up classic fights and read them. In doing this you get a feel for how a fight goes, how one opponent can be winning, and then a slip on the canvas and the other opponent has the advantage and wins. How a lucky punch comes out of nowhere to knock someone out. After reading several of these, particular ones of fighters you have never heard of or fights you’ve never seen, you as a writer can identify and internalize the ebb and flow of a fight. These are real fights, but I must admit to read them is pretty boring you need something else, you need to punch them up, but before you can do that you have to write through the drudgery.

Write - The next thing I did was to write a fight as if it were an MMA bout. Making it as technically accurate as the numerous ones I’d read before. But I wanted it to be believable so I put some well-known names in as the fighters, I used match ups that never occurred, and I gave them to my MMA friends. I usually set it up; by saying did you ever see this fight between so and so. The reactions were everything from, I know that fight never occurred to I wish I would have seen that fight. After that I told them what was up and asked if they thought the fight was believable. Everyone agreed the fight sounded believable. But this only proved one thing that I could detail a fight over three paragraphs and make it believable, which is huge, but it didn’t breathe life into the fight or the characters.

Re-Write History – This is where I had the most fun in learning how to write a fight scene. I started with a fight that occurred read the play by play account and then set out to write it as if for a book. This part was fun but it was harder than I thought. How do you take three paragraphs of technical and tactical text and turn them into prose that the girlfriend to the MMA fan would want to read? Get in the fighters heads, try to internalize what their game plan was, and what they were thinking when they were going toe to toe, or on the mat. Here is where you earn your marks as a writer. This is where we separate the technical pros of a journalist and the story telling of a writer. But before you can do that, you need to know how to choreograph a fight.

The piece below is taken from my novelette “Golden Gate Gloves,” written under the pen name Jack Tunney. In it the main character Conall O’Quinn is going against his hated enemy Barry, the son of a union boss, in the final fight scene. The history between Conall and Barry is developed over the course of the story, so some of the context doesn’t make sense.


The bell opened the ninth. Barry came in tentative with his glove out; the corner must have doused him again. I batted them away and wouldn't let him get inside. I went to work on his body, and he covered up. I drove a hard pile driver of a punch up town, and landed on the button. Blood sprayed, and the crunch of broken bone echoed well into the audience. Barry stumbled back and hunched over, blood pouring from his ruined schnozz. I came in fast to take advantage, when the punch landed in my crotch. White pain blinded me, and I went down in a heap on the canvas my stomach rolling, and threatening to puke up my guts. The ref admonished Barry, as I crawled to my knees amid a torrent of boos from the crowd....




In a future post I’ll talk more about adding flavor and color to your fight scenes, how to add that story telling flavor to your fights. But until then keep reading writing and laying out those fight scenes, one punch at a time.