Bustin' Caps, Bashing Heads, and Bloody Knives: Writing Realistic Violence
by Romie StottEditor's Note: This article is not an endorsement of violence, nor should it be used as a primer for self-defense. If you want to learn to fight safely and responsibly for sport or for self-defense, visit the martial arts dojos in your area and find the one that best suits your needs. If you want to learn to protect other people, consider the police academy, bodyguard training, or the military.
More than one pundit has said that the difference between literature and genre fiction is that literature focuses on thoughts and genre concentrates on actions. Certainly, fight sequences are prevalent in genre - swordfights, gunfights, fistfights, vampires getting staked, dragons getting slain. Genre loves warriors, people who make a difference through skill and sheer force of will; genre audiences love to read about them, and genre authors love to write about them.
The problem is that most genre authors have never been in a fight; we tend to be bookish types that live in societies which have advanced to the point where violence is strongly prohibited. Sure, some of us have been bullied, some of us have been beaten up, and some of us have trained in martial arts - but very few of us have fought for our lives, or attempted to kill someone.
Even if we know people who have - policemen, soldiers, or criminals - most will have agendas which prevent them from being completely honest; they'll try to make themselves sound braver and more in control, or will tell only horror stories to warn people away. This is complicated by the fact that fights are hard to remember; long-term memory has trouble keeping up with the speed of adrenaline. Certain seemingly random moments of a fight will remain crystal clear for years to come, while other sections are blurred or completely missing.
Therefore, most of us rely on other books, or movies, for our fight sequences. We research the way a weapon was used, pick a few moves that look particularly cool, and run with it. Maybe we stage the fight with a friend to make sure the physics works. But books are not visual like films, or plays; we need to know what a fight feels like, how much injury the average person can take, how much thought goes into a strike. Fortunately, while weapons and fighting styles change all the time, the human body has been constant for thousands of years. There are certain principles you can apply to any fight, any time.
THE EFFECTS OF ADRENALINE
Whether you run from a fight or instigate it, your body's threat response is the same: it dumps a lot of adrenaline into your bloodstream. Adrenaline is a hormone, and it is also a drug, with some vaguely narcotic effects. It speeds up your heart, your breathing, and your nervous system - which means that not only are you moving faster than usual, but your brain itself is in overdrive, so you'll perceive everything to be going slower. Time dilates; something that seems to last forever may take only seconds in real time. At the same time, your reactions will often happen before you can consciously process what you are doing.Adrenaline affects your perceptions - your vision improves and your other senses disappear. Your hearing will be dulled and can go away completely. You won't always be able to feel when you're hurt. Your vision of your target will be extremely acute, but your peripheral vision will go away; you'll be as focused as if you're looking through a magnifying glass.
As more and more adrenaline dumps into your system, you'll start to lose higher-processing power. You'll stop understanding language, or being able to speak. You'll lose fine motor control - you literally won't be able to unclench your fist to dial a phone number, or get a key out of your pocket, or stop strangling someone. In extreme cases, your whole body will clench up; your muscles will tense to form a kind of armor, and you will stand there, frozen, like the proverbial deer in headlights. Some people's blood pressure will shoot up so high that it begins to burst blood vessels; they'll develop spontaneous nosebleeds, or bruises where they haven't been hit. A few minutes into a fight, you might even overdose on adrenaline and pass out.
In a very real sense, you don't control your own body once you're in a fight. It falls back on whatever training it has, and it runs on autopilot. It doesn't have time for complex moral decisions: its only agenda is to protect you. Often, people in fights will have out-of-body experiences where they seem to watch from above, and don't particularly identify with themselves.
The major difference between experienced and inexperienced fighters is how much control they have over their adrenaline response - how much they'll let their body take over from their brain. The body of an experienced fighter will have a reference point for how much adrenaline it needs, and so will be much less likely to overreact and freeze up. The learning curve here is extremely steep, and evens out quickly; the difference in adrenaline load between someone who has been in one fight and someone who has been in no fights is gigantic, while the difference between someone who has been in three fights and someone who has been in 50 is comparatively small. By the same token, this means that if your body doesn't catch on quickly, it never will - you may be someone who freezes up every time.
TRAINED VS. UNTRAINED FIGHTERS
There are two big differences between trained and untrained fighters: one is theory, and the other is reflex. Fights are fast, and movement happens as quickly as you can think it - sometimes faster. Trained fighters practice the same moves over and over again so that when their bodies fall back on reflex, they reflexively hold their fists, or their swords, the way they're supposed to. The catch is that if they practice wrong, their bodies will do the wrong thing every time, too - even after they realize it's wrong. Another effect of this repetition is to build up the muscles they need in a fight - muscles they might never use in other areas of their lives.Theory is what fighters are taught, either through direct instruction or through observation, about how to fight effectively. Where an untrained fighter is likely to plant his feet and make huge movements that feel strong, but waste a lot of time and energy, a trained fighter will focus on improving her odds. She will try to present a narrow profile and will keep her feet moving, so she is harder to hit. She will bend her knees to lower her center of gravity and improve her balance, so she can't be knocked over. She will learn to dodge and deflect instead of block, so she never has to take the full brunt of a blow. When she takes a swing, she will use momentum, torque, and a lot of muscle groups, so that her hand is powered not just by her arm, but by her legs and stomach; this will not only make the blow stronger, but will stop her arm from tiring as quickly.
Trained fighters will also learn tricks specific to their training - the best way to hold a fist, or a sword, or a gun; the best places to strike based on their weapon and the armor of their opponent. They will likely practice breathing techniques to help manage their adrenaline response. At advanced levels, they will learn how to disable someone without killing him, and may learn how to defend themselves in court in case of an assault charge.
Somewhere between trained and untrained fighters are half-trained fighters - people who have reflex without theory, or theory without reflex. Someone who has reflex without theory might as well be a berserker; he will not bother to control his adrenaline response, will not strike with any predictable pattern, and will not know when to hold back. These people are extremely dangerous, and absolutely miserable to fight against, but they are as likely to injure themselves as their opponents.
Conversely, someone who has theory without reflex will overthink everything and psych herself out; she won't let her body take over enough. In many ways, she is in more danger than an untrained fighter, because she knows what she's supposed to do, but, in the heat of the moment, can't. She might not even have the muscles she needs. Her reflexes are confused and so she does nothing.
On a final note, fighters who are used to fighting trained opponents will sometimes be floored by someone untrained, half-trained, or even from a different fighting style. They can get used to fighting one way that is extremely effective against one kind of opponent, and get locked into it - reflexes again - even though they're up against something dramatically different. This is why many trained fighters continue to teach, and to practice against less experienced opponents; they want to stay adaptable. Many a skilled fighter loses because he doesn't expect his opponent to try something stupid.
TARGETS
Your body has its own armor; it's called a skeleton. It protects your heart, lungs, and brain, and it keeps your arms and legs pretty solid. Your weak spots are the places your skeleton doesn't protect - your neck, your abdomen, your hands, your eyes, your feet, and your joints. In other words, your skeleton is flexible or absent in the places you need mobility - so it's where most man-made armor will be weak, too. Anything that protects these places will be a tradeoff, mobility for strength (or, in the case of the eyes, sight for protection), and different fighters will make different compromises depending on the situation, personal preferences, and the technology available. Trained fighters will learn to protect their weak spots and to target other people's.head
Unless we're talking about guns, it's normally a bad idea to go for the jaw or eyes; people are very protective of their faces, and if you're fist fighting, you can break your hand. You're also unlikely to do much damage. Being able to drive people's noses up into their brains and kill them is a myth. All you'll do is break somebody's nose. (However, this will make them bleed a lot and will make their eyes tear up, so it can still be an effective strategy.) Although some people have what's known as a glass jaw, and will pass out with a correctly-aimed strike, most people don't - and some trained fighters know how to hold their mouths to stop this. While ear claps can do a lot of long term hearing damage, they're not going to end the fight much sooner. Finally, aiming that high leaves you wide open for a counterattack.
Aiming for the face has a strong emotional component; a stranger is unlikely to do it. In a sense, our face is who we are, and so it will often be the target when someone is angry at us. A blow to the face is extremely intimate. It grows out of a personal desire to hurt someone specific, someone we're in love with or angry at. It is no coincidence that domestic violence is often aimed at the face. If police investigating an assault or murder see damage to the face, they assume the perpetrator and victim had a preexisting relationship - probably an emotionally charged one.
On the other hand, if you can knock someone's head against something, or hit them with a blunt object, the fight is over. You might have to hit them a few more times, but you've won. You've jostled their brain enough that they're out of it. If your head gets hit, you stop caring about the fight, and everything gets kind of fuzzy. You may start thinking about completely unrelated subjects. You are effectively - and sometimes permanently - brain damaged.
neck
The neck is a popular target for people with arrows or edged weapons - it's soft tissue, and it contains the windpipe and two major blood vessels. Oddly enough, it doesn't occur to most people to hit the neck with a fist, or with a blunt weapon, which can do almost as much trauma, without any risk of injuring the fist. People will never attempt to strike the throat unless they intend to kill their opponent (strangulation is another matter, dealt with later), and for good reason - even a single hit will likely result in death. It is possible to aim a fist to knock someone out instead, but being off by even an inch will kill them. Trained and experienced fighters will often duck their chins to provide some protection to their necks, and may wear stiff leather collars as armor.
The neck is also extremely vulnerable to breaks; the muscles are thin and flexible, and the spinal column delicately held together. All it takes to break someone's neck is to grab their head and twist. It rarely takes more than a 180 degree turn. Often, people will inadvertently break their own necks trying to get away. Never, ever grab a friend's head while he's moving, especially not if it would surprise him; if you want to mime breaking your own neck, don't actually use your hands to turn your head. It's too easy to make a fatal mistake.
abdomen
The abdomen is hard to protect without armor, and it is where most strikes will be aimed. It's at a level that can be both punched and kicked without much fear of injury to the fist or foot; it's at the level where most people hold swords, knives, and any other melee weapon you can name; and it's conveniently centered, so archers and gunmen can hit you there even if you move a little, or if their aim is a little off. Fortunately, it's right where your arms are too, and where you'll be holding a shield if you have one. (It's also the place most people start to wear armor.)
There's a lot of important stuff you can hit in the abdomen; if you puncture or rupture things like the bladder or appendix, a lot of toxic liquid is going to pour right into someone's abdominal cavity, where it will probably kill them within a matter of days, and will incapacitate them almost immediately. All these internal organs - which are meant to stay internal and undamaged - are close to the surface; with a knife as small as three inches, you can hit any of them.
Something important to realize is that your abdomen is basically a sack that's full of various important squishy things, most of which are, in turn, full of specialized volatile liquids. There's not really anything holding the squishy things in place except each other, and the pressure from your abdominal muscles. If those muscles get cut and stop doing their job, or if even one organ gets punctured or burst, things can get very tangled and very septic very quickly - there's no partitioning.
On the other hand, there are some small spots between organs that are basically empty - just fat, or, occasionally, nothing at all. It is possible for someone to get stabbed or shot in the abdomen and yet not be seriously injured. However, this absolutely can't be planned for, no matter how experienced or trained a fighter is. Anyone who has done dissections should know that internal organs are never arranged the way they are in textbook drawings; everyone's insides are different. Not only are individual organs differently sized, but they can move around. (Sack full of squishy things.)
Although the abdomen is a minefield for someone with a weapon or a fist, open-handed body blows can be an excellent way to incapacitate someone without injuring them. You can try this on yourself right now. Using an open palm (as though you're clapping) pat yourself on the stomach - not so lightly you don't feel it, but not hard enough to bruise (again, like you're clapping). Keep doing this, regularly and somewhat quickly. You can clench your stomach muscles or not, and pay attention to your breathing or not - it doesn't matter much. Soon, you'll start to feel light-headed, and your blows will start getting weaker even if you don't mean them to.
What you're doing here is disrupting your diaphragm, which is what makes your lungs work. You're forcing yourself to hyperventilate - to take quicker, shorter breaths than you want to. Your body's oxygen balance gets out of whack, so you become euphoric - the fight goes out of you. You get dizzy. You go limp. You might start giggling. (Incidentally, don't do this for hours at a time - although you shouldn't be able to hurt yourself seriously, you will lose a few brain cells. It's not on the scale of huffing, or even smoking, but it's not the healthiest thing in the world, either.) If you've ever been really intensively tickled, you may recognize this sensation.
The same principle can be applied against someone else with an unprotected midsection. You can use your shoulders to pin them against a wall and strike with your palms, or you can get them bent over and knee them - lightly! - until they get weak and stop wanting to fight you. If you want, you can go ahead and try tickling - sometimes it works. Keep this up long enough, and they'll get so winded they won't be able to stand on their own, and may pass out.
knees and hands
As many people hurt their own knees and hands as get them hurt by other people. Most people - even people who know to keep their thumb on the outside of their fist - have no idea how to throw a punch, and even fewer know how to kick well, or even how to stand in a fight. Newton's Third Law of Motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you punch someone, the same amount of force goes back into your hand. If you don't know how to hold it in the right shape, with the right amount of tension, it's going to break. The bones in it are small and brittle.
As for knees, they're hinge joints. They're meant to bend forward and backward, to stay in line with your foot, and to never go past your toes while supporting your weight. (Yes, pliés and engineer's crouches are horrible for your knees.) Knees do not deal well with lateral movement, or with torque. They're just small plates of bone held in place by a few muscles and tendons. If someone kicks you in the side of the knee while it's locked, you'll probably be crippled for life.
Similarly, if you try to turn quickly while keeping your feet in place - like if you're trying to do a fancy martial arts kick and didn't pay attention to the footwork - you'll turn from the knee instead of the hip, and, again, be crippled for life as your knee pops out of place. Some people compensate for the weakness in their knees by wearing knee braces - tight pieces of fabric that don't let their knees turn sideways. Others do special exercises to build up the small muscles alongside the knee. But any way you cut it, knees are extremely vulnerable, and make an easy target for a kick or for a sword.
feet
Feet, like hands, are full of small bones which are easily crushed. However, most of us are used to wearing shoes, which offer some protection, and we move our feet around a lot, making them inconvenient targets. Moreover, feet have arches; they're used to supporting a lot of weight. Finally, to look at someone's feet, you have to stop looking at their head, arms, and torso - and you might miss seeing an incoming attack.
Although high heels are a terrible choice of footwear for a fighter, they can be useful in certain cases. They make the foot a smaller target and provide a lot of arch support, plus a sharp heel can do a lot of damage to an opponent's foot - or do a killing blow to a throat or abdomen, if that opponent is on the ground. On the other hand, high heels raise the fighter's center of gravity, so she's more likely to be knocked over, and lower her mobility.
groin (and inner thighs)
A blow to the groin will incapacitate most male fighters; the genitals provide a lot of exposed nerves, and the pain from a hit is often debilitating (at least for a short time). Men will feel the pain not only in their genitals, but in their abdomens - the abdomen has few nerves, each of which covers a large area, and those nerves are often cross-wired with other areas of the body. Most men will also experience ringing in their ears.
Despite this, the genitals are not always a convenient target; most men work hard to protect theirs, and few fighters stand with conveniently spread legs. On the other hand, the inner thigh provides an excellent target for any weapon that breaks the skin; the femoral artery is close to the surface, and one stab or slash is enough to make most people bleed to death almost immediately. Moreover, few people will remember to protect this sensitive area.
so, how many hits can someone take?
One. It's just that sometimes, after you've been killed, you're still walking around because you haven't died yet.Obviously, that's an exaggeration. Some people are very resilient. Some people get lucky. Some people have great armor. Some people get extremely competent medical attention.
But most of the time, it takes one hit, especially with a weapon. You shoot, slice, and move on.
CHOKING, STRANGULATION, AND DROWNING
In the end, most unarmed fights devolve into wrestling and strangulation. One person grabs the other's arms to stop him from punching, and it's only a matter of time before both are on the ground, hands or arms around each other's throats.Although the words "choking" and "strangulation" can sometimes be used interchangeably, it is useful to make a distinction. Choking involves a blocked airway; strangulation uses external pressure to block the flow of blood to the brain (although it may also block the air passage). To choke someone, you put pressure on their windpipe (trachea), which is just under the chin. To strangle someone, you put pressure on the blood vessels which run alongside it.
Suffocation can take a long time. With preparation, the average person can hold her breath voluntarily for 90 seconds before her discomfort becomes pronounced; people with training can go much longer. Pearl divers have been known to hold their breath for five minutes at a time, and people who sing or play wind instruments work hard to expand their lung capacities. In addition, mountain climbers and people who live at high altitudes are used to operating at a lower oxygen level.
After five minutes of suffocation, brain damage begins, at which point you stop feeling pain. The dizziness becomes euphoria, and you see white light. By the fifteen minute mark, you are brain dead (although if you are in freezing water, you can be revived as much as two hours after death). Let me repeat: it can take as much as 15 minutes for someone to die by suffocation, and five minutes to pass out. You can't just push a pillow on someone's face for a few seconds in the heat of anger.
Suffocation hurts. Your chest feels as though it is being crushed, and your lungs feel sharp and fiery. Your muscles cramp from a buildup of lactic acid. If someone is choking you by holding your neck, they'll have to push your windpipe hard enough to bruise; in fact, without the help of the bruising, they may not be able to close off enough of your airway - and it is unlikely that they will do so completely.
Strangulation, on the other hand, can be so painless that people don't know it's happening. There aren't nerves in the bloodstream the way there are in the lungs, and the brain can't always figure out what's going on. Since lungs are working, the brain can't tell that it's not getting oxygen - it only registers the euphoria of deprivation. As a result, victims of strangulation often don't know to struggle until it is too late. They often accidentally kill themselves through autoerotic asphyxiation or the childhood "passing out" game.
If you block the blood flow to someone's brain, they will black out within three minutes, and be dead within eight. The blackout itself feels like falling suddenly asleep. In addition, if one releases the strangled person just after he passes out, and it is before the five minute mark, he will wake up fifteen to twenty minutes later, without lasting brain damage. Because strangulation can be extremely lethal or totally non-damaging, and because it seems so gentle, it is often a favorite of women, and of killers trying to spare the victim the pain of living.
When writing strangulation or suffocation scenes, don't forget that adrenaline screws up your time sense. Just because your character thinks he's held someone down for a long time doesn't mean he has - and, conversely, he might hold on much longer than he needs to.
knives
Most knife fights are over within 30 seconds of first contact. The human body does not handle puncture wounds well; it is not unusual for someone, once stabbed, to immediately go into adrenaline overload and pass out. As for slashes, they cut through not only blood vessels, but muscles and tendons. A cut that isn't deep enough to make someone bleed to death may still make an arm or a leg go limp, permanently mutilating the victim even if he survives.Knives are exceptionally formidable weapons. They're fast, and they're hard to dodge - a slash covers a lot of ground, and the knife-wielder is often very close to you. If you want to get an idea of how impossible it is to avoid a knife, dress up in junky clothes and invite a friend to do the same. Then take an uncapped washable marker each (the fat ones are best), and pretend they're knives. If you like, you can set an egg timer for 30 seconds or a minute, or have another friend time you; otherwise, you can go for as long as you feel like. For your own safety, you will want to prohibit attacks to the face.
When you call stop, look each other over, or use a mirror. Think about each marker line or dot on your body, and what is under the skin. A tiny line across your arm is enough to make it unusable; a tiny dot on your stomach or between your ribs, enough to kill you. A slash or stab to your neck, and you probably died instantly. Did you survive?
GUNS
Guns are the great equalizer. If you have a gun, you can shoot somebody basically anywhere and kill them - but in some cases, it could take them hours or even days to die, during which time they can easily shoot you back. Stopping power depends less on the gun used, and more on the ammunition. Size differences are important; a larger bullet leaves a bigger hole, but it is also less likely to go where it's aimed. Beyond that, one has to examine the composition of the bullet itself.Bullets with full metal jackets (a solid metal casing around a soft core) will go straight through most people - and often several people in a row - but the entry and exit wounds will only be as large as the bullet itself. While this is enough to kill most people who don't receive medical attention, and to shatter bone, it will not push the target backward, and may not immediately impair him (especially in the heat of battle). Full metal jackets are not instant killing machines, except in the case of a blow to the heart or head; as a result, they are used by many police officers, who want to be able to bring down an opponent without murdering him. They are also commonly used by the military; they are considered humane.
Dum-dums are basically full metal jackets with a cross-shaped notch cut in the tip of the outer shell; they expand into a metal star upon impact and do a huge amount of damage. The exit wound, if it exists, is much larger than the entry hole; alternately, the bullet could remain in the body. The victim will likely be pushed backward with the force of impact; because the tip of the bullet expands, it transfers considerably more of its kinetic energy to the body. Dum-dums are illegal in many places, and forbidden in military conflicts by international law.
Hollow-point bullets transfer force in the same way dum-dums do; some of the inner core is scooped away so that the tip of the bullet flattens on impact and imparts more kinetic energy. Although they do less gruesome tissue damage than dum-dums, they do considerably more than full metal jackets; they tend to be the favored bullet of those who use guns for self defense. In addition, some police forces prefer them because they are less likely to pass through the target and into an innocent bystander. Although hollow-points and dum-dums are formidable against unarmored opponents, their tendency to transfer maximum force on impact means their effectiveness is dramatically decreased against a target wearing even light armor.
Finally, there are bullets with explosive tips, and flechette rounds. Explosive tips are designed to explode on impact, doing maximum damage. They are often very loud, and are usually considered to be inhumane; they are illegal in most places, since one cannot claim they are useful for hunting - only for hurting humans. Flechette rounds are long thin bullets that look like arrows, made to penetrate body armor and then fragment into several nail-like shards. Contact with an unarmored target is often not enough to fragment them, dramatically diminishing the amount of damage they do.
Bullets are not simply automated swords or knives; the speed of impact itself does a great deal of damage. When a bullet hits a person, the sheer force of the shockwave can mangle the tissue around the bullet, effectively turning it into hamburger. And the bullet doesn't just cut, pushing flesh aside; it crushes the flesh in its way. Many bullets split in two as they enter the body; others begin to tumble, doing additional damage as they spin, and sometimes cut a jagged exit wound. Other bullets ricochet off bones, sometimes more than once. Because the flesh around the wound swells, it does not always bleed much, and people who have been shot may not immediately recognize how much damage has been done.
The chief attraction of a gun is that someone without any training or physical fitness can still do a great deal of damage. However, hitting someone with a gun is not as easy as it looks in the movies or on the firing range - especially if you're on an adrenaline high. Your hands get shaky; your fingers often clench around the trigger when you don't mean them to. In addition, it's difficult to hit a moving target with an entirely linear weapon; you can't slash with a gun. According to the 2004 US National Crime Victimization Survey, only 30% of people who fired a gun in self defense hit their targets - and this sample included trained police officers. And the only shot that will definitely stop an approaching target immediately is a shot to the brain or the heart - in short, a killing blow.
ALTERED STATES
There are certain conditions under which a human being will be much more formidable than average. Normally this occurs when a fighter cares more about winning the fight or damaging his opponent than his own survival. Dervishes, Haitian zombies, berserkers, and Sioux and Cheyenne suicide boys all reached altered states before battle, using hypnosis or meditation to reach states in which they could ignore pain, sometimes with the help of drugs.PCP (phencyclidine, a.k.a. "angel dust"), woad, and other psychotic or anesthetic drugs have been used to numb or enhance fighters' experience of battle. Some of these drugs block the feeling of pain and distance the fighter from the violence she commits; others make her irrational, with an attendant feeling of immortality and a feral need to lash out. The same drug will have different effects on different people - remember, people have varying reactions to aspirin, let alone mind-altering drugs. The same drug may even have different effects on the same fighter: drug loads can vary in superficially identical and similarly manufactured doses, and drugs can interact with different chemicals in the bloodstream of the user.
In addition, because pressure can stop most bleeding, some warriors will wrap themselves tightly in strips of cloth. They look almost like mummies. This inhibits their movement and makes them less able to damage others, but they can take a lot of damage themselves before they fall down. Famously, this technique was used by Somali warriors, in combination with psychotropic drugs, during the early '90s; they could be shot by as many as 20 full metal jackets before they went down.
ADDITIONAL RESEARCH
Although movies are usually a bad resource for authentic violence, there are a handful which provide important insights into the psychology of a fight. For an idea of what a fight looks like from the inside, try The Matrix and Gladiator - both movies get a lot of things wrong, especially about weapons use and human resilience, but The Matrix gives you a sense of how time slows down during an adrenaline rush, and Gladiator gives you an idea of how the rest of the world fades out.To get a sense of what a fight looks like from the outside, try the prison fight at the start of Batman Begins - it's fast and confusing, and you can't really tell what's happening. In addition, watch anything by Kurosawa - the people in his movies always take realistic amounts of damage, and are realistically disoriented. Seven Samurai has especially good examples of the confusion and bloodiness of battle.
To see how differently people can fight using the same weapon, watch The Three Musketeers (1975); to see how tiring a long fight can be, watch The Four Musketeers. Both are fight directed by the great William Hobbs. Not only are his fighters appropriately exhausted at the end of fight, and realistically injured by a sword thrust - they are affected by their environments, and by their individual builds. They all stay authentic to their period, but each uses a sword in a unique way, specific to his background and personality, which helps the fights integrate with the rest of the story.
Although the human element in fights stays the same throughout most of history - same internal organs, same reaction times - history has seen countless advances in weapons, armor, and military strategy. Even a decade - or a mile - can make a huge difference in fighting style - and there are military history buffs who will never forgive you if you get it wrong. Fortunately, these same military history buffs write countless tomes on the subject every year, and have for centuries. The hard research has already been done for you; you just have to find it. If you need help, call a librarian, a university history department, a games and hobby store, or a local fight director.
© Romie Stott
Romie Stott is the associate editor of Reflection's Edge.