Last week I wrote about sex scenes, which are the most difficult scenes to write. A close second are fight scenes. Like sex scenes, they require a close focus on choreography, and a deep dive into the characters’ psyches to ensure that the reader is receiving the appropriate emotional punch. A clinical description of what’s going on just isn’t going to cut it.

Similar to the way authors will throw in sex scenes to try to spice up their story without actually understanding how to make them good, a lot of authors include gratuitous fight scenes in the hopes that they’ll up the tension and keep the readers invested. But a bad fight scene can turn a reader off more quickly than having no fight scene at all. If they get bored during what should be the most exciting portion of the book, they won’t want to continue to waste their time.

The most important part about writing a fight scene is to make the reader feel the tension. It’s not about showing off your main character’s cool fighting skills; it’s about upping the stakes and making your reader want to root for the main character. That’s not to say you can’t include some gratuitous scenes that demonstrate what a badass your main character is. Just that such scenes should probably be relatively short, and embedded within another scene; otherwise they’ll feel anticlimactic.

Pacing is incredibly important when writing fight scenes. You may have noticed that I tend to have a rather flowing pace. My paragraphs are several sentences long, and my sentences tend to have multiple clauses. The words flow from one to another, allowing readers to take in the concepts and mull them over in a leisurely fashion. The way I write is almost conversational.

Fight scenes need to be quicker. They’re packed full of action. We want the reader to read them at the same pace they’re happening. Fast. All at once. Each sentence should pack a punch. What would be a single sentence in a normal scene can be split up into two or even three sentences for a fight scene. Paragraphs should also be shorter, consisting of only two or three sentences. This allows the reader’s eyes to speed down the page, making it seem as though everything is happening more quickly.

It’s also important to engage the senses when writing fight scenes. Don’t spend long, rambling paragraphs setting the scene, but throw in little descriptions. The coppery scent of blood. The thud of fist on flesh. Searing pain as a sword cuts into your character’s side.

Also, don’t fall into the trap of describing everything that’s going on. Fights are chaotic by nature. Your character probably isn’t aware of the entire scene. Being sparse on the details can help your reader feel like they’re present in the moment. It recreates the chaos. Any internal monologue should be brief, and perhaps cut off halfway through, both to maintain the pace of the scene, and to show that your character just doesn’t have time to think.

Your character doesn’t have to come close to losing the fight to make the scene exciting and full of tension. The most gripping description of disarming a bomb I’ve ever read was in Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain. The bomb is disarmed with, like, thirty seconds to spare, but because the person disarming it doesn’t have a way to tell how much time is left, and because of the way the scene is written, it’s even more impactful than watching a clock slowly count down from ten as the hero desperately tries to diffuse the bomb.

In fact, if your hero almost loses every fight, the fight scenes will start to lose their impact. The greater the danger the hero regularly faces without lasting consequences, the more the reader will start to trust in their plot armor to see them through. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far. The first time a bullet whizzes by your hero’s head is terrifying; by the fortieth time, it’s old news, and your readers no longer care. Worse, they may lose faith in your writing. In a battle where the odds against surviving are ninety-nine to one, there are still going to be some survivors, and it makes sense to choose one of them as your hero. But in real life, the next time that hero goes up against a hundred-to-one odds, he’s probably going to lose. Eventually his luck is going to run out.

You have to up the stakes. Allow your hero to get injured in a way that affects his ability to fulfil his quest. Or just don’t count on the specter of looming death to keep your readers invested, but rather write in a way that the hero’s fear is evident on the page. Maybe he didn’t come close to dying, so your readers aren’t becoming skeptical about how often he’s managed to cheat death; but he did injure his ankle in the fight, and now he’s limping. He’s aware of the pain with every step.

I’m not saying this is easy to get right. It’s not. Every time I go to write a fight scene, I have to completely change the way I form sentences, the way I convey what’s going on. Not to mention the difficulty with striking a balance between showing off how utterly badass your main character is, letting them get beat up a bit to demonstrate that they’re actually in danger, and not making the possibility of success so slim that your readers can no longer suspend their disbelief.

But fight scenes can be integral to the success of your story. They’re worth putting forth the effort. And the better you make them, the more invested your reader will be in your book.