Cadence: The Back-and-Forth of Dialogue & Fighting

Dialogue has a lot in common with fight sequences—or at least it does in mine. I can’t say that other authors’ writing has a similar cadence or that they share a similar view, but it’s something that I leaned into within my own writing. So, let’s talk about—or rather, allow me to monologue a bit about some back and forth in both dialogue and fighting.

Before you can dive into your characters speaking, you need to cover the setting where this conversation is actually taking place. And if you’re looking for guidance in setting up your scene, I touched on that info back in this article so feel free to look at that for further guidance.

It’s vital to delineate the different components of your story. And the more effectively you can do this, the easier it’ll be for your reader to consume it while continuing onward. This becomes even more essential when your story’s pacing increases such as in fight sequences. So, what I always try to do is get most of the static descriptions out of the way at the beginning of the scene. Here, you can spend more time on describing things but when the characters and world actions gain motion, you typically won’t be incorporating as much detail so that you don’t slow the story’s forward momentum.

Take this example from an early chapter in Twilight Wolf:

Mioko mentally recycled Brandr’s words while the passing world continued vying for her attention. It passed in a blur, surrounding pine trees reduced to smears of brown and green. The wind folded her hair over her face as she stood reverent, the train beneath her eliciting a repetitive click-click sound as it raced down its tracks.

Mioko pulled her hand away from her heart, opening it to reveal the metallic pendant. She tucked it under the hand wrap, which ran across the palm of her hand, then closed her fist around it. The hand wrap folded a metal plate into place ahead of her knuckles as she made a fist and attempted to flex her wrist back against a metal plate that ran across the top of her forearm. It wasn’t comfortable, but at least she wouldn’t spring her wrist.

In this, you get a glimpse of the location, then the character for a total of seven sentences. This is an example of what I touched on in the previously linked article. It’s the natural movement of the reader’s eyes, moving from the setting down to the character, then to whatever the character will be involved in. And this is just prior to a fast paced action sequence.

Every scene is going to require something similar as a sort of set up. If you’re like me, you’re dying to get to the fun involved in thrown punches and possibly thrown people, but the above is an important first step. It’s the chores. And it’s the homework. That thing you need to do before you can go play. But now that it’s complete, you’re free to give the following actions your undivided attention, only breaking up the sequence with minor, vital details that keep the reader grounded in each moment.

In dialogue, we differentiate speakers by what we call tagging. It’s the ‘say, said, yelled, replied’ bits that accompany spoken parts of your story. And you should think of tagging, ‘said’ in particular, as a lot like punctuation. Within dialogue, it’s vital to use it often because it helps your reader follow the conversation, tags like ‘said’ typically landing at the end of a spoken line.

Famous writers and well established editors are a bit of a house divided when it comes to more descriptive tagging verbs. Take for example:

“...,” she shrieked.

“...,” she blurted.

“...,” she chided.

Some think you should just stick to ‘he/she said,’ while most think that the alternatives should be used sparingly. My advice is to do the latter. Use the alternative verbs, but not so frequently that it draws the readers attention away from what’s being said. If you’ve got a character that’s constantly shrieking, that’s going to get old fast.

Another tool to use, albeit sparingly, is tag adverbs:

“...,” he said, sheepishly

“...,” he said, suddenly.

“...,” he said, angrily.

Just as before, sometimes ‘said’ just doesn’t say enough. But most of your conversations should qualify for ‘said.’ Even if you’ve got a highly excitable character, who’s always speaking with exclamations, you’ll mostly show that through her characterization. Done properly, the reader will follow her dialogue and know that she’s speaking in her usual excited way. But for those uncharacteristic changes in character speech, don’t be afraid to grab an adverb or use a verb variation to better depict the mood.

I briefly mentioned learning a technique from a fellow writer in this article. That technique was a form of tagging and it greatly improved my own dialogue. The difference here is that instead of tagging like punctuation, you’re doing so as an advance notice on who’s about to speak. Take this for example:

Little Red shook her head. “No. Just let them keep coming. I’ll come to you after I torch the place. The more we kill now, means less to deal with later.”

This first sentence is giving a character action and can sometimes impart bits of characterization. And even though you don’t have the aforementioned tagging, it’s clear who’s speaking. So, your best practice is to use a combination of the two.

In dialogue, there’s a back and forth between multiple characters that allows the reader to follow along. Each spoken thing is segregated with its respective character, which alternates and allows us to follow the back and forth between the speakers.

In fighting/action sequences, you have the exact same thing. It’s a back and forth with the actions segregated with whatever/whoever is doing the action. Take this exchange for example:

Mioko blocked another blade, leaning forward as she dragged her katana out of its scabbard in an attack, then resheathed it.

The figure doubled over after a wound opened across his abdomen.

She continued up the train, taking an occasional punch or kick as well as cuts along the periphery of her guard. But fighting into the wind made her ache more than the damage she took. Her muscles burned, but more importantly, it burned away her anger, some of the ninjas dissipating as smoke wisps before they attacked.

There are three delineated paragraphs, the first focusing on Mioko’s experience, the second on an opponent’s, then back to Mioko. So, there is a back and forth exchange that has a similar cadence as dialogue. In most cases, the individuals and their actions are parsed with paragraphs but not always.

The creature staggered away from Jack, who nursed an injured arm.

Sometimes there will be exchanges that focus on a character but include a detail about who the character is having the exchange with. In this example, the creature is the focus but it’s doing something in relation to another character. Here, the characters aren’t separated into different paragraphs but it’s still clear who’s doing what.

So, yeah. This may be obvious to some of you, but it took me a great deal of time to really stick the landing with both dialogue and action sequences. Half, if not most, of the battle is properly showcasing who is acting/speaking at any given time. But if you can manage what I’ve just detailed, you’ll be well on your way to crafting easy to follow dialogue and fight sequences.

I hope this helped! If you’d like my opinion on any other aspect of writing, feel free to ask. I don’t bite unless provoked and even then, I’m a picky biter. :)

Until the next one, happy reading!

JT