Nothing motivates someone to keep their guard up quite like getting punched in the face. If you’ve never been punched, well, it isn’t fun. A solid blow to the ear can make the world turn sideways as your brain sloshes around in your skull. A hit to the nose makes your eyes instantly water, obscuring your vision and making the next blow more likely to land. A hit to the mouth mashes lips and cheeks against teeth, cutting them open and flooding your tongue with the taste of copper. 

You only have to go through that once to realize “oh shit, I might just want to keep my damn hands up.” 

No one likes getting punched in the face. Well, lemme backtrack a bit. No one sane likes getting punched in the face. I’m not usually one to kinkshame, but if that’s your thing, you need therapy. 

Anyway, the point is, getting hit sucks. And yet, we still manage to find all kinds of reasons why we’re willing to put ourselves in harm’s way. Some people fight for money. Others fight for pride, or honor. Still others fight to protect, while some folks just like to break shit with their fists. Each and every one of them has something that motivates them to risk getting their nose broken. We don’t have to like their motivation, or even understand it. But, we can’t deny that it exists.

The same should hold true for our characters. 

No matter what they’re fighting for or why, they need to be fighting for something. It doesn’t matter what. For fun, for profit, for justice, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s internally consistent. Maybe they just like fighting. That’s fine. That’s still a reason.

When two characters have their own reasons to fight each other, the stakes are derived from their motivations. Maybe one wants to destroy a town, and the other wants to save it. Maybe one just loves the thrill of battle, while the other simply wants to be left alone. Hell, maybe they both love fighting and just want to knock the dust off each other. So long as there’s some logic behind it that the audience can understand, you can probably justify it from a narrative perspective if you try hard enough.

If you ask me, a lack of stakes is the single most critical failure point for new writers trying to write fights. There’s a real tendency to try to make fights work just because they think they’ll be cool, or because the plot demands it. That’s all well and good, but there needs to be some narrative weight there to support the idea. The characters need to be invested in the outcome. 

It doesn’t matter how badass a fight scene is. If the characters are just fighting because the author wants to smash their toys together, the fight scene is going to feel hollow and inconsequential in the greater narrative. No amount of bicycle kicks or gun fu is going to fix that. 

If you want to look at a modern example of a character being set up to go on an absolute fucking rampage, look no further than John Wick. Our boy John is just minding his business, learning to cope with the grief after the loss of his wife. He gets a puppy. He starts to move on and remembers how to feel joy. And then, Theon Greyjoy comes in and kills that puppy. 

Now, we have motivation. John wants his revenge, while literally everyone else wants to not end up on the business end of it. The stakes are pretty clear too: either John dies, or everyone who stands in his way does. 

Everything that happens in the following movies is the direct result of that single event. The more we learn about John and the more we learn about the world of assassins and beggar kings, the more the character beats from the first movie are reinforced. John’s actions become the motivation for a bunch of other characters, and while the stakes remain fairly small by the standards of the average blockbuster, they’re absolutely dire for all involved. 

You really can’t ask for a simpler setup for a movie franchise. But because we the audience can understand why everyone does what they do, and we can understand why they’re willing to put their lives on the line, that simplicity pays off. 

Having said that, simpler does not always equal better when it comes to storytelling. I don’t want the takeaway from this to be that you should boil everything in your plot down to a single inciting incident. Most movie franchises aren’t elaborate excuses for Keanu Reeves to try to sell center axis relock to the tacticool community. 

What I am trying to say is that you don’t need to write 500 pages of backstory for every character in order to establish motivations and stakes. The important part is that you have them, and that you let them inform the story. If the character is invested in the outcome of the fight, the reader probably will be, too. 

Before we move onto the next fundamental, it’s worth noting that your stakes should probably match the intensity of the fight, and vice versa. While it can be fun to have characters take a friendly sparring match way too seriously and end up leveling a city block, that sort of action requires a very particular style of storytelling. 

Just like you let the stakes and motivations inform the character, you need to let the character inform the stakes and motivation. It’s a feedback loop of sorts that’ll keep you from going too far in any one direction. 

If your character is supposed to be a fairly standard neutral-good hero, it wouldn’t make much sense for them to mow down a patrol they could just as easily hide from, then mutilate the bodies to make it look like they were ambushed by someone else. Sure, the stakes are high, but the sheer brutality is all out of whack when compared against the character motivation. 

On the flip side, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for a brutally pragmatic character on a quest for revenge to leave loose ends. If you set out on your quest after finding out someone close to you was murdered, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to murder someone else in front of their loved ones and expect to get away scot free. Bouts of mercy come across as stupid and shortsighted if all you’ve done thus far is the smart, amoral thing. 

Maybe you can sell it as character growth, but if you try to revisit that plot point later, there’s a 50/50 chance the audience is going to bounce off it if you try to make it look like they’re taking the high road. A protagonist doesn’t get to claim moral superiority after beating a man to death in front of his daughter and brother once they try to return the favor. You’ve got the motivation and stakes aplenty, and that can make for some really dramatic fights, but it’s pretty shitty storytelling. 

That sort of mismatch of motivation, stakes, and characterization has been the downfall of many an otherwise competently told story.