: Re: What's Essential In A Combat Scene? I've just been reading a bunch of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files books. Although they were the most enjoyable read I'd had in ages I always found myself skimming

@BetL639

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I would say that in order to make a combat scene more interesting, there should be some sort of meaning to it, something that lets the reader relate. Ernest Cline's Armada has a good example of this, where when the main character goes into a video game to zap his enemies, he describes it as "It felt like I was venting compressed rage every time I pulled the trigger." In order for people to not skip fight scenes, try to make them engaging and relatable to the reader.
I'm not entirely sure of this next idea, but I think another way to do so that I'm toying around with is to leave some sort of tactical detail inside of the fight. For instance, in my writing, one of the fights includes a scene where the main character figures out the weal point of a certain class of robot. I think that if I mention that tiny detail later in the book, but not word-for-word (like saying instead of "the weak point was in the neck" I would simply say, "I took them down one at a time, hitting that weak and squishy point on their bodies), then it would force the reader to look back to see if they missed anything. It's still experimentation, though.

Hope this helps with your writing.

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