Young Writers Society

Hi everyone,

Does anyone have any advice on how to write a decent magic duel scene? Any help rendered would be most appreciated.

Thank you,

yizhongt

Writing the scene will depend on quite a few factors, including:

- How magic is performed (wands, chants, focusing, manifested along weapons)
- How it impacts the target (physical wounds, invisible wounds)
- What type of magic it is (elemental powers, empathy, telepathy, mana, the arcane)
- The rituals of the duel itself (any rules of decorum for fighting)
- The characters' own fighting styles and quirks when it comes to magic use

If you answer those factors, at the very least the first four, then we'll be able to help you much easier.

Hey Rosendorn, to answer some your question:

I) Magic is performed by the use of wands

II) Depending on the type of spell, there would be some sort of physical
injury or effect of sort.

III) There is a formal salute of sort at the beginning of each duel, but it is
just a formality. Normally duels in the outside world won't begin in
such a manner.

IV) None of the characters have a sort of quirk, just yet.

What type of injury? Is there a large variety of spells that have different effects, or is the damage all the same? How does the spell physically manifest— is there a light show, the element in question moving towards the target, some sort of energy ripple, or is it difficult/impossible to detect?

Also, I asked for rules of the duel. Are there any forbidden spells? Unsportsmanlike moves that are allowed but will destroy your reputation? How strict are these rules? Is there anything that will make the duel stop in a formal setting? Informal setting?

Speaking of, you brought up how in "the outside world" and now I'm wondering the context of the duel. Is it official or not? Are they trying to be flashy, or are they trying to be subtle?

Writing, especially fight scenes, are made up of details. If you have no idea how the basic mechanics even work, then you're going to fail spectacularly at delivering them to the reader. This isn't to say a fight scene should be composed of play by play information in its final form, but you have to know what the play by play is in order to get from point A of the duel to point B.

Mechanics also includes the worldbuilding around the duels, from the nitty gritty of how magic works to the cultural context of duels. Whether or not they need a certain setting, how commonplace they are, the questions about practices I asked you earlier, the way society as a whole sees duelling, the way the characters involved see duelling... the list goes on.

If you can't figure out how a duel generally looks, the physical actions involved, and how people treat it, then you will ultimately fail at writing them because you won't have enough information to properly construct the scene.

I don't have much experience writing action scenes (yet :P), so take this with a grain of salt, but here's my first thought: focus on the characters. Of course you have to spend some time describing the action, but a long list of "he sent a fireball in her direction", "she leaped aside and hurled a curse at him" etc. could get boring quickly no matter how well it's written. In a movie pure action can work because it simply looks cool, but in a book, because it all falls on the reader to imagine, too detailed action scenes could be draining. So instead of describing every action in detail, you might want to focus on the relationships between the characters and more generally on what's on stake. Why are they dueling? What will happen when one of the duellers loses? What are the thoughts running through our character(s)'s head? Are they frightened, confident, or angry? How are the people around reacting to the duel? Some dialogue can also help with making the action less dense.

Again, of course you have to give the reader descriptions of the duel itself as well, but I'd think describing a handful of well-picked actions might do better than a dozen more generic ones.

Rosendorn's comments are spot-on for conceptualising and plotting the scene, but I'd argue it could steer you wrong with regards to the actual writing of the scene. You need all that context as scaffolding, but for an exciting, fast-pasted fight, that information needs to be very subtle, all about implication, context, and set-up from other areas of the story. During the actual fight, you don't want to be bogging down your narrative with those details.

IMO the best approach is to match the tone of the narrative with the tone of the scene: short, tense, exciting sentences. Save the long, ponderous sentences for your scenes full of introspection. At the same time, however, I agree with mephet that you want to be careful about ending up as a blow-by-blow of "He did this. Then he did that. Then this happened."

As always, Brandon Sanderson's lecture on the topic is much more insightful and articulate than I am. I found the section at 6:30 especially spot-on, but really you should watch the whole thing!

@Megrim - My point was not to write it out as a play by play (you'll notice I flat out say not to do that), but to know the play by play. These are different.

In writing, the writer has to know more than gets actually written out. I completely agree that the details need to he subtle (and that the focus needs to be on the characters), the syntax needs to be specific, and you have to generally keep it interesting.

What I said was, you have to know what those details are. If the writer cannot answer what type of injury is given for a certain spell, then how is a writer expected to execute the scene well? How can you write about what a hit feels like if you have no idea what damage magic wrought? If you don't know how a duel is treated within society, how can you begin to understand the character's attitude towards it?

My point is a writer must know far more than what makes it on the page. My general attitude towards writing, which I have seen mirrored in many of my favourite published writers, is the amount of detail you show is only the tiny tip of the iceberg for what you know.

It can be hard to hear that most of the work you put into a story or scene won't show up on a page, but it is necessary. You can't just expect to be able to write a sparse, tense, action-packed scene when all you know are the bare bones of what action happens. If you only know generalities without any specifics, you end up recycling the same tired old fight scene cliches because you don't know enough about the scene to actually write the scene.

Generalities without any depth breed tired old lines we've all heard before. If you just go "Oh, it's kinda like this", then you get a scene that's kinda like everything that's ever kinda like that. But if you go "My magic produces bone chilling, unimaginable cold every time it strikes an individual, the results not actually being frostbite but open sores, and duels are a way of establishing dominance and power", suddenly you have a solid mechanic to incorporate into your fight scene and make it real. I heard about that mechanic and read a magic duel using it years ago, and I still vividly remember it because it was so rich and detailed I actually felt something.

You can't even begin to incorporate those details subtly until you know what they are overtly.

That was what I said.