Out of all the phases of fight planning and writing, the conceptualization phase is easily the most important. After all, you can’t move onto any of the other phases without at least an idea of what you want to do next. Luckily, if you’ve got a bit of imagination, it’s also the easiest. 

Nearly everyone daydreams at some point in their life. If you can daydream, then you’ve already mastered the core of conceptualizing. All you have to do is find that little nugget of inspiration that’ll lay the foundation for what’s to come, and then give it a little shape. 

For me, that idea often comes from a piece of music, or maybe something I watched, that triggers a specific vibe. That snippet might be wildly unrelated to the idea of combat, but the vibe is all you need to start the process. 

The conceptualization phase of fight planning doesn’t involve much in the way of writing. Or at least, not in terms of crafting a coherent narrative. If an idea comes to me and I don’t have time to fully ruminate on it, I like to jot it down somewhere I know I’ll be able to find it later. That idea might be as simple as a few words, or as much as a paragraph describing what’s going through my mind. 

I also like to work out the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the situation. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by breaking down what that means in detail. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you don’t know how to sort that out, you need to go back and take a look at the fundamentals of writing. I will say that I like to at least try to firm them up during the conceptualization phase, so I can have a general direction for research moving forward. At a minimum, I like to know who’s fighting, what they’re fighting with, and when, where, why, and how they’re fighting. 

I also like to think of cool shit they can do in the fight. There’s no real limit here. The story and setting might not allow for my super gritty and realistic gunfighters to whip out lightsabers, but goddamn that would be cool. What if they had lightsabers? What would they do with them? What would that fight even look like?

Obviously, the lightsaber thing isn’t making it anywhere near a draft version of the fight, but that doesn’t mean it’s a waste. You never really know what ideas will turn out to be useful in the long run, no matter how impractical they might be. 

Example: Okay, sure, my MC may not be able to use a lightsaber to cut through a wall to attack the baddies from a weird angle, but what if he had something else that could do the trick, something more realistic. There are cutting torches, sure, but they’re a bit slow and it’s probably not a good idea to lug around tanks of oxygen and acetylene into gunfights. That style of torch is slow and ungainly anyway; I’d need something much quicker. Oh wait, what about explosives? A good breaching charge can take a door off its hinges, or make a new one altogether. That could work a lot like a lightsaber and let my MC attack from where he’s least expected. 

And just like that, I have a usable concept. It’s not the whole fight planned out, but it’s a step in the right direction and gives me something I can grow other ideas around. 

From there, one leap of logic leads to another. Nothing has to make sense at this point. Nothing has to be coherent or cohesive. I’m not even really worried about telling a story. It’d be nice if things start to take shape, sure, but for the most part I’m just daydreaming in a vacuum. I may come up with three ideas for every one concept that makes it into the final fight. 

As you might’ve guessed, that means I try to do more brainstorming than I think I’ll need. After all, I know I’m going to end up discarding at least some of them. Not every idea can be a winner, after all. 

Having said that, I never really throw anything away, either, not permanently. Now, maybe I can’t use the breaching charges in this fight. They require a fair amount of prep time to do correctly, and if you don’t put in the work, you’re likely going to be counting in base 7 for the rest of your life. Plus, it gives the MC a pretty substantial advantage over the baddies. Maybe I need the MC to struggle for narrative reasons. Can’t have them winning it all, right?

But just because I can’t use the idea for this fight doesn’t mean there might not be another where it’s just what the doctor ordered. So, I’ll take the paragraph I spent writing that bit out and copy-paste it into a document I keep in my Google Drive for just such an occasion. And while I’m in there, I’ll poke around and see if any of my previous brainstorming sessions cooked up something useful to replace it. 

If you don’t take away anything else from this section, remember this: truly bad ideas are few and far between. Most of the ones you think are bad are secretly good ideas that just haven’t found the proper context. It doesn’t cost you anything to store up the ones you don’t use for a rainy day, and you never know when they’ll come in handy.