Flow and pacing are related concepts. If we define pace as the speed at which events progress within a narrative, then the flow is how smooth or turbulent the transitions between events are. Allowing events to transition smoothly between one another helps the pace feel steady and consistent, while jarring transitions can bring the whole thing to a stop or make it feel like it’s moving at breakneck speed. 

When it comes to fight scenes in particular, the flow matters more than almost anything else when crafting the reader’s experience. How smoothly you transition from one phrase or another will go a long way towards setting the pace of the fight, and there are a number of ways to use that to your advantage. 

For instance, you can get away with a lot if you keep the reader’s attention from focusing on one place for too long. By zipping along between phrases of the fight, you can fairly effectively paper over mistakes or a lack of technical experience. 

Think of it like turning the graphics settings on a computer game down to make it run more smoothly. If you’re struggling to keep up, you can turn down the detail in exchange for better pace and flow. That said, if you turn it down too far, you risk losing critical details. It’s easy for the reader to miss things that might be important later. Combine that with the exhaustion that moving too quickly can induce in them, and they could very well end up deciding that they’re too tired and confused to want to carry on. 

On the other hand, if you want to show the audience that a particular character is a planner or a plotter, you can slow things down and share some insights into what they’re thinking as the fight goes on. Let them linger on the little things, or try to predict what the enemy is going to do. Let them explain what they’re trying to do and why they’re trying to do it. Just remember that if you do too much of this, you’ll bog things down and make the fight boring.

If you guessed that I’m going to tell you that finding the right flow is a balancing act, you’re absolutely right. Different writing styles and different types of fighting work best with different rates of flow. Finding the balance between detail and drama is something you’ll probably have to play around with before you find that comfortable medium that works best for you.

Me personally, I like to maintain a fairly breakneck pace for melee combat, and I like to slow gunfights down. 

Pretty much any fight that involves getting up in someone’s face and trying to kill them is going to rely more heavily on instinct and muscle memory than a conscious plan. You might go in with one, but as someone who’s really good about beating people up once said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Once that first hit lands, whether you win or lose has a lot more to do with how much you trained beforehand. 

If you’re trying to convey that in a fight, you probably don’t want to focus on every single detail of every single phrase. I like to try to present the reader with a series of snapshots, moments in time that let them see what the POV character is seeing and doing, and then link them together with what they’re feeling, both physically and emotionally. 

My goal is to transition between these snapshots as smoothly as possible. The feelings form the connective tissue between snapshots and give the fight a feeling of frantic action that’s going on too quickly to be consciously processed, while the snapshots keep the reader apprised of who’s doing what to whom for how many jelly beans. They’re not likely to know the names of various guard positions or strikes anyway, so throwing too much technical jargon at them is just going to confuse them and chop up the flow. 

Winning a gunfight is more like chess than it is boxing. Before you can hope to win, you have to outthink your opponent and put them in check. The tactics involved often aren't super complex. It's hard to control a bunch of moving pieces when everyone's high on adrenaline and trying not to shit themselves. But, you still need to be mindful of them, and you need to act with deliberate intent. If you act impulsively, without making sure the enemy is pinned down or otherwise distracted, they’re probably going to perforate your vital organs in alphabetical order. 

To convey that to the audience, I like to get deeper into the POV character’s head as they try to analyze the situation and plan their next move. It’s necessary to chop up the flow to do it. They’re going to pay a lot more attention to their immediate surroundings, to what their friends are doing, and to what they think they should be doing, than they are to the bad guys. This slows the flow of the fight right on down and conveys the sense that everyone is acting with malice aforethought. It's also a good chance to explain some of the mechanics of gunfighting. I still don’t want to bury the audience in jargon, but I can take my time and really let the scene marinate. 

Now granted, that approach isn’t for everyone. It relies a fair amount on personal experience and years of training to convey concepts that most folks will never encounter. Most folks aren't going to have that level of experience to call upon, and your results may vary if you try to directly copy my methods.

Instead, you’ll probably want to play around with different flow rates until you find one that works for you in a given scenario. But once you do, you’ll find your fight scenes become a lot more engaging, and the pressure to get the mechanics perfect diminishes exponentially.