Writing fight scenes

I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone that I thoroughly enjoy writing fight scenes. I studied martial arts for nearly ten years, I love everything to do with swords, and I'm a fairly violent minded person. These things tend to come nicely together for the purpose of writing a fight. However, writing a fight scene is roughly as difficult as winning a real fight, though for very different reasons.

I find that with experience comes a lot of technical jargon. I know the names of a variety of attacks that I could easily throw out, and in some cases it would be a fairly good description. A front kick to the chest, a round kick to the ribs, a jab between the eyes. Most people who have ever heard of the concept of fighting would probably be able to take a good guess at what these attacks are. Others are a bit more vague. A crescent kick to the side of the head, a hook kick to the face, or a knifehand strike to the throat. All wonderful, difficult to preform accurately and powerful strikes. But I wouldn't want to just drop those into a fight scene because the reader is going to find those more difficult to visualize.

I could describe these motions in great detail easily. I've done them a dozen times, I can feel the push and pull of the muscles for each blow in my body just thinking about it, and I can put all of that into words. But fights are frantic, quick paced. How often do we mock movies and tv shows for stopping in the middle of a fight to have a long dialogue? You might not think so, but long descriptions can be just as disruptive as such abrupt exposition.

Let's go to the hook kick to the face as an example. First, I will go into long detail about this single attack, then I will try to describe it as briefly as possible.

"His body slipped to the side as he dodged the oncoming straight blow. His foot pivoted in the motion, and he used the momentum to begin turning. His head snapped around from one side to the other so that he could keep his eyes on his opponent. At the same time, he lifted his back leg, his knee bent hard to keep his foot attached to the back of his thigh. As he turned, his opponent continued to move forward, carried by the momentum of his own attack, placing him exactly where he could strike. In the blink of an eye, his leg straightened, as he turned, giving his leg a smooth circular motion before it snapped hard, moving with the spin of his body as it closed once more to rip across his opponent's face, breaking the man's nose and knocking him hard to the ground."

There's no question of what happened here. Every motion is planned and useful, but the length of the action is exaggerated. In reality, the entire attack takes only a second. That might look something like this.

"He slipped to the side as he dodged the oncoming straight blow. He pivoted hard, lifting his leg as he did so, and as he faced his opponent once more, his knee snapped his leg shut to rip his foot into the man's face, breaking his nose and knocking him hard to the ground."

The speed of the attack is apparent here. It happens in literally less than a sentence. However, the purpose of such a flashy spinning move is lost. In the first example, you can see that he never lets his opponent out of his sights, and that the turning is used to build speed and power. In the second example, however, it just seems like he is showing off.

It's a hard decision to make between the two. A fight can be a hundred blows, and I can describe every single blow throughout the entire fight in both ways. Deciding which is better for the given situation is what makes writing a fight scene so difficult. Making the fight both realistic and interesting. Giving a sense of both the speed and power of each attack, but also giving each attack a purpose. This, however, is a challenge that I love, and I will gladly go step by step through an entire fight to make it right.