Pow! Right in the kisser

Again a good series of thoughts about how to depict fights - this time of the hand-to-hand variety not ship-to-ship. I can think of only a handful of authors that do this well. John Sandford is about the best I've read and his trick is to join everything with "and". It gives it a real sense of pace and I've copied it shamelessly. His other virtue is that he has the knack of keeping the details of who is doing what clear. In books that do a bad job of portraying violence I've had to go back and read who did what to whom just to be sure who came out on top.

There's a good point too about how visceral and physical combat is. I have precious little experience of that but often combat as depicted on the page seems more about thoughts and minds that it does a fists and bruises.