Unlock the Secrets Behind Writing Fight Scenes That Leap Off the Page
Enforce Causality
When I talk about causality, I mean that a cause should be shown first, and then the effect afterwards. If you show the effect first, and then the cause, it looks absurd. As in this paragraph:
In any event, Arnie ducked his head and spun to the right, simultaneously kicking out furiously with his foot and shouting that Bruce was an ambidextrous excuse for a moron, just after he saw Bruce throwing another punch at him.
So let’s untangle this. What happened first? Arnie saw Bruce throwing another punch at him. But that’s shown last in this sentence. The effect is shown first, and it’s a long sequence of events that I’ve drawn out ludicrously: Arnie ducks his head. Arnie spins to the right. Arnie kicks. Arnie shouts. Only after we see all that do we see the cause for it all.
