: Re: How can I write a hand-to-hand combat scene that is not too brief or detailed? When I describe hand-to-hand combat, I include EVERYTHING that's going on, EVERY action and motion the characters

@BetL639

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The way I've heard it said is as follows...

Only show blows that are important. Gloss over unimportant parts of the fight with generalized dialogue because it doesn't provide any useful information to the reader.
Focus on events which show reversal of the situation. One party or another gets the upper hand, the fight escalates, there is a significant change in the nature of the fight (think Anakin and Obi-Wan on Mustafar going from the relatively safe starport to the more dangerous lava).
Focus on a three-act structure. Don't overstay your fight's welcome, keep it short. Most straight-up fights in fiction are only a couple of pages long. If you're playing a cat-and-mouse game beforehand or have a chase scene or strategy you can space it out longer, but the actual physical confrontation is typically a few pages long. Individual motions are rarely described unless they have character meaning (e.g., a martial arts movie where a character has learned a technique and is demonstrating that they know what they are doing now).
Focus on your character's reactions to what is going on in the fight scene. What are they thinking?
Dialogue. Dialogue can break up a clunky fight scene and make it a little more interesting. Be warned, though, this can help resolve the problem but it can't outright fix everything, it more just helps cover up rough patches.
Treat the fight like a conversation, not a fight. The appeal of fights in live-action and animation is spectacle, with character development as the topping. The appeal of written fiction is dialogue, psychology, and the ability to see internalized thought processes. Fights in prose are primarily designed to drive character growth and character development. Fights in written fiction are basically a conversation played out with fists and feet. You can see into the head of a written character but you can't see the spectacle, be sure to play to strenghts and weaknesses of the medium.

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