Meh. I’ve never thought he was all that hot, personally.

Also, I think Avocado is an awesomesauce name. It’s pronounceable! :)

Nate mentioned it on another discussion. Er, I think it’s here.

And ‘Snate’ was all I could come up with at the moment. What else are you supposed to be called? Winchesterleft? Stephwin? Whatwin?

Phate

Win.

“Phate”

Seconded.

I have a question for fight scenes: if you don’t know anything about swordplay, or indeed any kind of fighting, what do you do? Do you fake it, never make your characters fight, read various novels and pick up their techniques… what?

Check if your library has this

I have a question for fight scenes: if you don’t know anything about swordplay, or indeed any kind of fighting, what do you do? Do you fake it, never make your characters fight, read various novels and pick up their techniques… what?

Lesson learned from Paolini: don’t try to fake it. If you know nothing about swordplay, don’t try to write it, or the reader who do know about swordplay will shun you for it.

I’m a very immersive writer, I have to experience certain things before I’m willing to write about them. Swordfighting is one of them.

Phate.

I completely give up on you guys.

Hooray!

Man, I don’t have anything to ship but “Phate.”

Make up more. It doesn’t matter if they have any canon support as long as they have clever portmanteaus.

Don’t pair me with her. She’s mean.

I like Naste. :D

Quick! We need more crack pairings couples! And portmanteaus!

Uh, Jeni…Jeni and….Lord Snow! Yeah! Lord—-uh, no.

I’m out of ideas. I’ll just pair Un-Dante’d with anyone. It’ll work somehow.

I thought along the lines of things like “LordJen,” “Jenlord,” “Jennow.”

P. S. Smartante?

Should I make a shipping thread?

Wouldn’t be a bad idea, just to try and limit spillover.

Fencing would be a good place to start, too. I’m sure there’s a Fencing for Dummies book out there.

Using a book about modern fencing to familiarize oneself with sword techniques is a bad idea. Fencing is a game, with the goal of scoring points. For Japanese sword technique (kendo), I would recommend Miyamoto Musashi: His Life And Writings. Musashi was one of, if not the best, Japanese swordsmen, and the book includes a translation of his “Book of Five Rings”. I don’t know as much about European or Asian sword, but I’m sure there are books.

I suppose Musashi would be better for someone who is wants to write more in depth about martial arts. I can’t find any online diagrams for techniques. :(

A few points I have picked up along the way about armed fighting:
1) Fights are over QUICKLY with a sword. It’s not like what you see in a film, it’s more circle circle BAM somebody’s down. (This only applies without armour. I have no idea how fights work with armour)
2) You don’t have to kill someone to win a fight. You can take someone out with a chop to the arm, you don’t have to aim for vitals. Of course, once someone is down, you could finish them off easily if you wanted to.
3) Different weapons are nothing like each other. You are not going to be able to, say, fight properly with a scimitar if all your training up to that point has been with a double edged straight sword coughcoughEragoncoughcough. Also, weapons develop into a specific role. A curved blade, such as a katana, is good against unarmoured enemies. Against someone in armour, you want something pointy and rigid, or blunt like a warhammer. A slashing weapon will just bounce right off (unless you can hit an unarmoured point, which is pretty hard to do unless you can take time to line up the blow, which is pretty unlikely in a fight)
4) Using a bow in a small fight against more than one (or possibly two, if you can draw fast or have a range advantage) opponent is highly stupid. bows don’t fire that fast, and are pretty much useless for defence. If you were fighting with a bow, you’d want to take a shot, then drop your bow and draw whatever backup weapon you had.

If anybody thinks I’ve got anything wrong, please feel free to correct me.

1) Fights are over QUICKLY with a sword. It’s not like what you see in a film, it’s more circle circle BAM somebody’s down. (This only applies without armour. I have no idea how fights work with armour)

That only applies if one or both combatants are using the same techniques to fight the unarmored fight as they would if they were wearing armor; that is to say, large swings with a lot of strength behind them, more value placed on offense than on defense, etc. If they both realize that they could very easily die from being hit once, and still need to fight each other, they assume a fighting posture more like this (from our school’s website). More cuts are made to the hands, and attacks are made advancing and retreating. These fights usually last about 2-10 minutes in my experience.

2) You don’t have to kill someone to win a fight. You can take someone out with a chop to the arm, you don’t have to aim for vitals. Of course, once someone is down, you could finish them off easily if you wanted to.

Absolutely. In fact, a solid cut to the inside of the arm or leg can be a fatal blow, there are major arteries in there.

A curved blade, such as a katana, is good against unarmoured enemies. Against someone in armour, you want something pointy and rigid, or blunt like a warhammer. A slashing weapon will just bounce right off (unless you can hit an unarmoured point, which is pretty hard to do unless you can take time to line up the blow, which is pretty unlikely in a fight)

A katana isn’t really that much different from a European sword is this respect. Neither are a good weapon against someone in a full suit of 15th century plate armor. The best method when using a sword against armor isn’t to stab through the joints (hitting the armpit requires moving into range of their attacks to your head, elbows are mobile, and you can’t hit the knee joints from the front), but to knock them down with a series of blows, then kill them when they’re down. A katana is a very bad choice in this situation not because it is primarily a slashing weapon, but because it is sharp, rigid, and brittle, and will break after a few swings against plate armor. European swords are flexible (they can often bend almost double, and then spring back to their natural state), less sharp, and not as breakable. This makes them better for beating someone down. In fact, against full armor you might even want to try fighting half sword. IMO, the best weapons to use against heavy armor are a war-hammer in your strong hand and a dagger in your off hand. Use the hammer to knock them down, then pin them down, open their visor, and start stabbing the face.

Bumping this thread, because I’d like to ask the more experienced writers here how to write fight scenes that aren’t like this:

Character X does this. Character Y then did that. Character X then did this. Character Y then did that.

My action scenes tend to be like this, and someone commented that I should vary the sentence structure. How do I do that?

@ BrandonP:

These may be helpful:

http://impishidea.com/writing/29/writing-action-scenes-part-1

http://impishidea.com/writing/53/writing-action-sequences-part-2

Oooo… bookmarking. Thanks, Armourer. I have a paranoid fear of screwing up things like that when I write, because I know someone, somewhere is going to call me out on it, so this is very helpful!