GenreCon Sydney 2012 - Part 2 - Fight Scenes

Picture this: GenreCon Sydney 2012, Saturday 3 November. The session is Writing Effective Fight Scenes. The speaker, Simon Higgins. His favourite weapon: the katana. Let me quote the GenreCon website: "A former police officer and homicide investigator, Simon came fifth in Iaido’s World Titles in Japan in 2008."

That in itself would have been good enough for me. But Simon's also a writer and a highly entertaining speaker. What I got out of the session would take pages and pages to report (I took pages and pages of notes, and actually wish I'd recorded the session, copyright laws be damned). So, here are a few memorable pointers:

• When you're in a fight, time slows down.
• Mention the above fact in your writing, but don't go overboard reporting every excruciating detail in slow motion.
• Like in a sex scene, Tag A Into Slot B gets boring pretty fast, unless you include emotions, senses, stakes. So:
• When writing, less is more.
• Do your research.
• Mr Spock was so wrong about the pressure point. Human Nature Interesting Fact 1: everybody in the audience wanted to know where the correct pressure point was. When I got back to my hotel, the 8-year old and the 44-year old both wanted to know where the correct pressure point was. Human Nature Interesting Fact 2: The 10-year old's female, and all she wanted to know was what Simon's fighting clothes looked like. :-)

Have a look at Simon's books and at the photos from the session (yes, I volunteered for the pressure point demonstration):

Simon Higgins and Yvonne Walus - this is one of the pressure points

Simon Higgins and Yvonne Walus - this is _not_ one of the pressure points ;-)