#writing training

Tsuki sensed young Okho's anger at the sudden burst of his cosmos, and knew he was most likely going to take it out on the kids in the surrounding villages. It always ended that way, because it was perhaps the only way, for an impetuous child who believed only in violence. But Tsuki knew she had to try and stop him, to talk to him and prevent him from losing the opportunity to get the dragon armor. She took just a moment to close her eyes and spot his cosmos, roaring like an angry tiger. Using all the psychic strength she could muster in her spirit form, Tsuki teleported to a path she knew Okho would take to the surrounding villages. She didn't have to wait long to see the young boy arrive, tears of frustration filling his dark eyes. Tsuki walked calmly along the rocky path, her voice softer than a late afternoon breeze:

"Okho.... tell me what happened, before you go and fight. "

"You really think you're going to stop me? You're just a spirit! "

"Okho......"

Tsuki's tone grew slightly more impatient, the young boy having struck a chord. However, Okho's arrogant air didn't go away, the apprentice smiling confidently.

"You can't stop me from going off and beating these idiots, because I've become stronger than you! "

Tsuki didn't reply, letting him sink into his delusions of childish glory. You couldn't force a mule to change his mind, you could only stop him. Okho stuck his tongue out at Tsuki before dashing off, ready for a fight, when he came up against an invisible wall. The boy fell to the ground, landing sitting on the dirt, as Tsuki crouched beside him to declare:

"I still master telekinesis, Okho . I fought Hades himself, you know? "

The second sentence immediately captivated Okho, who scrambled to his feet, his thoughts of violence forgotten for the moment. He was still a child, after all, fascinated by the legends of heroes and heroines. 

"Did you have a master,Tsuki ? Better than the old master?"

"Well....I don't know your master personally, but the Knight of Virgo trained me. His name was Asmita. I think he traumatized me a bit, but we understood each other on a certain mental level. He still has my respect and affection, and I hope that training me was a pleasant task".

The child and the ghost had started walking, the resemblance between them almost touching. An older sister and her younger brother. An attacker and his defender. A warrior and his protector. 

But Tsuki couldn't help noticing the still vexed look on Okho's face, and knew she had to distract him a little longer before he'd open up completely about what was so irritating him. 

"Okho? Can I nickname you my impatient little tiger?"

"I'm not little but okay....you'll call me a big tiger when I'm stronger than Shiryu okay?

Tsuki smiled in response, her hand running through her hair, but Okho wasn't finished with her questions.

"You often tell me that you knew someone with a name similar to mine. Did you call him my impatient little tiger too?

Tsuki stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes widening as her cheeks took on a lovely crimson hue.

"Of course not! I mean....no . Would you call Shunrei your pretty little flower?"

It was Okho's turn to turn red, the little boy looking at Tsuki with a strangely offended expression, which she returned. 

"I would never call Shunrei that! She's just a.... friend! I don't like her like that! "

"Okho , I lied for 250 years, I know lies when I hear them "

"If all you do is lie, that's why you say the person who almost had my name was just a comrade to you! "

The two look at each other before bursting into laughter, the sound startling a flock of swallows resting there.

When they finally calmed down, Tsuki took on a softer expression, kneeling down to Okho's level. 

"Now, tell me why you were so upset."

"It's because....the old master prefers Shiryu and that's unfair! Shiryu never dares to face me! "

A mixture of tenderness and sorrow filled Tsuki's eyes, as she placed her translucent hand on Okho's . 

"Use your violence with a purpose Ohko . Accompany it with precision, wisdom and determination. Hit hard at a precise spot, use your frustration at the right moment and learn to contain it, and never stop training, okay? "

The young boy looked at her with almost recalcitrant

 respect, before quickly looking away. He didn't really know how to give gratitude. 

"I've got to go..... to train . "

"I understand Okho . Remember, you're still my favorite, my impatient little tiger "

"Don't take it to heart but thank you.... Tsutsu....I mean...Tsuki "

When Okho quickly left, he didn't see Tsuki's touched and amused expression. 

(i need to train myself to write romantical stuff so if anybody have in ideas with one of my oc, i take it ! )

my character is just too nice and soft to fight but she learned how to use a bow, is this realistic?

This is fairly normal. Especially with archery, though it can be true with any martial training. Not necessarily the “nice and soft,” part, that’s optional, but many people train with weapons or in martial arts for recreation, and not because they’re planning to use the weapon in a combat setting.

I’ll use myself as an example here. I took archery classes as a teenager because I was working towards a merit badge. I had (and still have) no interest in using a bow for hunting or combat. In a modern context, it’s still a very limited weapon, so most people who learn to use them aren’t going to be planning use them outside of a range.

Bow hunting and fishing are sports, because of the added difficulty. You don’t take a bow out and hunt large game because you want to be efficient, you do it because you want the extra challenge. Bows require you to be much closer to your target, so you need to get there undetected.

Now, supposedly, there is a flavor difference between bow killed venison and firearm killed. I can’t comment on this with authority, as I’ve never experienced that difference personally.

There’s nothing wrong with saying your character’s personality would be incompatible with combat, however, if you’re going that route, asking them to then kill someone would be fairly traumatic. There is a big difference between learning how to operate a bow, and using it to kill someone.

It’s also worth remembering that knowing how to use your weapon is only one component of combat training. You need to be able to shoot straight, but, especially with a bow, you need to understand how to fight. You’re talking about a weapon that is nearly silent, but has very limited range, very bulky ammunition, and has a long delay between shots. If you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, you’re not going to achieve much.

So, while it’s possible for someone to learn how to use the bow, even though they’d never consider going into combat, that training doesn’t mean they can instantly turn into a badass without warning. They would know how to use the weapon, but not how to manage living targets, and their mindset would be working against them the entire time.

-Starke

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It's training in the physical and moral description of a character, so it's only a one-shot. Let's get to it! 

Warning : suicide and depression mention 

phantomjedi1 said to howtofightwrite: Your blog is amazing – you’ve saved me from so many mistakes! If someone is trying to come back from injury, especially one that lays them up for an extended period, what are ways that their former level of skill would trip them up in a combat situation? And is there anything they can to more quickly adjust to their new mobility limitations, etc.? I have a character who used to fight well, but was injured and has trouble walking without pain. They’re trying to get some ability back. Thanks!

The major thing an injury takes from you is your conditioning, that’s your musculature, your endurance, your wind, your flexibility, etc. The toll is primarily physical, so this character (outside of their injured body part) cannot fight as well or for as long as they used to. They’re slower, their reach is shortened, and they find themselves breathing more heavily more often.

Now, they can get that back but it usually takes months of consistent effort as they slowly build themselves back into their previous levels of conditioning.

You have to think of conditioning, the working out part, like a mountain. A significant portion of any athlete’s day is spent working out. This isn’t just the exercise training in the techniques, it includes your conditioning. Your push ups, sit ups, pull ups, weight lifting, long distance running, wind sprints, etc. It requires a lot of effort to maintain your body at peak condition and any break (not just an injury) will cause you to start slipping down that mountain. An serious injury that requires you take months off to heal? Expect months of dedicated conditioning to get yourself back to peak performance, and that’s if the injury completely heals. You can’t just jump back in at the levels you were used to before your injury, you’ll actually hurt yourself all over again. You have to climb the mountain the same way you did the first time, bit by bit with a little more each day or each week.

This is what drives athletes crazy. Their minds say that they can go “this” hard, at the levels they were used to before their injury or they took time off, and they can’t. The trope will pop up in almost every sports movie where the main character suffers a major injury, and it’s accurate to life. Whether they’re martial combatants, Olympic athletes, or just a high school football player, they run the risk of hurting themselves all over again by pushing their body too fast and too hard to return to previous levels. Most of them will get impatient and try. Sometimes, they have good reasons, like the soldier who doesn’t want to leave his squad a man down. Sometimes, the reasons are selfish or based in fear, like missing a major competition.

Recovery is, in large part, psychological. The fastest way for a character to adjust to their limitations is to accept they have them. They need to figure out what their body can do, find their current limits, and start slowly pushing the envelope, rather than trying to get their body to behave exactly as it did before. The mind’s expectations are what’s actually lying to them. They have to retrain their brain to accept their new circumstances.

In the early parts of returning to training, the mind will constantly miscalculate because it’s relying on the body’s old reaction times. Every action will be slower. Their mind will move at a similar speed to what they had before, but their body won’t. The disconnect between the two is where most of the problems occur, and why coming back from an injury feels a lot like starting all over again. You know what you can do, but your body won’t cooperate to do it.

If your character is trying to come back from an injury and the injury hasn’t completely healed, like this leg injury, then they’re going to be forced to train around it. If they put too much pressure on the leg, if they push the injury too hard, the injury will get worse. They run the risk of the injury becoming permanent. They’re going to have to stay off it and when they’re on it, go slowly. They may not be able to train that leg more than fifteen minutes a day, and, depending on injury, are only able to stretch it out. Depending on the severity of the injury, they may only be able to put their full weight on the leg for a few seconds each day. Those few seconds can extend, they can become minutes, but that’s going to be the results of months of work. If they feel pain when they walk on it, that is their body saying no. Whatever pain they feel from just walking, strenuous activity will hurt a hell of a lot more.

Martial artists/martial combatants/athletes are trained to push past pain, but they also need to be able to tell the difference between the pain caused by the body’s resistance/laziness and serious injuries. Serious injury pain is the stop and no further pain.

The problem with leg injuries is that your entire axis revolves off the legs, if both legs don’t work then you can’t fight. You need both legs to be capable of bearing your body’s entire weight for at least a few fractions of a second multiple times throughout the fight. Both legs need to split that body weight. You can overcome that necessity and train one of the legs to carry more of the burden, but if the injury is permanent (like a knee injury) then they will always be limited in what they can do.

I’ve known a few individuals who’ve come back from major leg injuries where the doctors said they’d never be able to do martial arts again. The willpower, patience, and work they put into their recovery was monstrous. They really loved what they did. That love was their foundation, their foundation fueled their efforts and kept them from giving up. There are going to be times when the frustration sets in, when the climb feels impossible, where your body is not fixing itself fast enough to satisfy what you want, where you’ll want to throw in the towel, and the question you need to answer as a writer is, “what keeps your character coming back? What is the source of their motivation?”

To be at the top is not easy. Most people who don’t heavily engage in the world of sports, or martial arts, or martial combat, don’t really grasp how stiff the competition is. Or how hard it is to defend the seat once you’re there. Outside of true story sport’s narratives, many characters lack convincing motivation. “I don’t want to die” only gets you so far, and “I want to protect my friends” again only gets you so far. Those are the motivations of the mediocre, and, in most situations, mediocre is enough.

However, that’s not the motivation of the person who arrives first and leaves last. The person who always shows up, rain or shine. The person who sacrifices time with friends and family, the person who skips out on dates to train, the person who makes their training their life. The ones for whom their training is their life are the only ones who come back from extreme injuries because they find the motivation to go through the agony of starting over.

Recovery can take years, usually recovery from a major injury takes at least half a year and then, once you start training, there’s the three to four months (or more) of pushing yourself to return to the previous level.

For reference, when I was twelve, I broke my leg. I broke my leg in the fall and wasn’t able to get back into martial arts training until late spring, and even then, the order from the doctor was, “no jumping until June.” I went from no pressure allowed, to supported pressure with crutches, to walking, then running, and then finally jumping.

If you’re really interested in writing a character going through recovery after a major injury, I actually recommend watching the (admittedly sometimes cheesy) true story sports movies. They’ll cover everything, from the grieving period to the difficulties in recovery, to the points where it gets too hard and the character wants to stop, to when they finally get back into sync and come out stronger. Sometimes, they skate over some details but it is a realistic progression from one to the next in the cycle.

It’d be a good reference point for you.

Never forget mental fortitude when you’re writing a combat character. Willpower is their true strength, and it can be easy to forget when you’re distracted by physicality. The unwillingness to give up in the face of impossible odds. The faith they have in their own abilities to push through, even after that faith has been shaken.

It can be hard to get into that mindset, especially if you’ve never experienced a major injury (even if you’re not in sports) or been a martial artist/invested in physical training of any kind. You can do it though, but you’ll need to do a lot of research. In this case, sports movies where the character experiences a major injury and biographies/autobiographies written by sports professionals documenting their own recoveries are going to be key. You can then apply that structure to your writing, the crossover is really in the conditioning. If you really need it to be martial, there are a couple of war movies and boxing movies which cover similar material. This is well-documented, you just need to find the sources.

Once you have the framework and the arc, you can apply it to your story. The basic steps are fairly simple and can be molded into any narrative and setting.

-Michi

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What kind of things do you need to emphasize in a training scene? One of my characters, a fairly prodigious fighter, is trying to teach a craftsman’s apprentice the basics of fighting, and I want to show the learning. Your post earlier talked about the buildup & payoff to a fight scene, but how does it work with scenes that happen fairly early and don’t carry the same kind of weight/stakes?

There should always weight and stakes to any fight scene, any scene in your novel from big to small. You should always be on the lookout to figure out how to build into your small scenes because that will lead you into a bigger whole.

Let me ask you a question: What will happen if the craftsman’s apprentice never learns to fight? What happens if he or she fails? How does this potential failure impact their future? How does the prospect impact them personally?

Learning to fight is difficult. No matter how good your teacher, the onus for success is on the student. The student who doesn’t want to be there won’t be for very long, and the student who does may give up rather than persevere. The building of endurance, the slow pace, the physical requirements, the necessity of patience, focus on simple techniques broken down and studied piece by piece. Going to bed tired and aching every day if the training lasts for prolonged periods of time. The student learns quickly that all the glory they imagined is replaced by hard work. Most of them give up.

If you haven’t contemplated the possibility of this apprentice failing, you should. You should contemplate how this character behaves when they start to struggle, when they get bored, when they feel like they want to quit.

If they fail, does it matter?

Those are your stakes.

As for what you should emphasize, the sports movie training montage and training sequences are some of the best templates to choose from. Alternately, the martial arts movie training sequence and training montage or the military bootcamp training sequence and training montage. Once you’ve watched enough of these, they become pretty easy to conform into writing.

The basic template for traditional martial arts is:

Student is excited to learn training.

Training is not what they expected, training is repetitive singular motions which may not connect to what they thought they’d be learning (wax on, wax off, or hang up the jacket) and endurance exercises that wear them out. They go home every day tired and aching, don’t feel like they’re making progress.

Student gets frustrated and complains to teacher. Teacher tells them to practice more.

Student practices more, gets more frustrated. Threatens to quit. Because student is close to the hump, Teacher relents and shows them how the motions they’ve been practicing connect into a single technique. They realize they have been learning to fight.

Student goes back to training, but more excitedly than they did before. Master gradually opens up to them.

Several weeks/months later, student shows off their basic technical mastery. Leaves their master ready to face the world, the big tournament, or whatever it was they were training for.

Encounters the real world, discovers that their training has prepared them well but will be much more difficult than previously expected.

This will be difficult for you is if the trainee is not the main character of this story, but a stop over point for the character who will be training them. Training another person to fight is a long and involved process if you want to do it well, and requires anywhere between months to years of commitment from both student and master.

If you don’t know anything about the technical details of fighting or the specific style your character practices, then you’ll find writing a training sequence to be extremely difficult. You can’t write what you don’t know. You’ve got to sit down and learn what you didn’t know before. Part of the reason I recommend watching a film over reading a novel is you’ll be able to see the physical intricacies of training which often get glossed over (outside some authors wanting to portray a romantic connection.) Training someone else to fight involves a lot of physical contact on the part of the instructor, this is usually in adjustments. They mimic what you show them, then you correct their positioning into the correct one so their body can feel the difference. They remember that sensation, and practice the motion until they can achieve that same feeling.

You’ve often got to move their feet into the proper position for their stances, remind them to bend their knees so they go lower, move their shoulders back or sideways so they’re on the proper angle, lift their elbows or shift the position of their arm while their hold position, tighten up their stomach/abdominal muscles, fix their breathing (breathe through your diaphragm and not your stomach. You want as little air in your stomach as possible.) Etc.

There’s no one size fits all training, you have to adjust your approach per student based on their strengths and weaknesses. You’ll rarely have the perfect student. They may have a strong grasp of their physicality, but a weak drive or poor endurance. Where some students grasp the basics faster than others, the slower ones with good endurance and drive can outpace the more talented students at higher levels because their grasp of the basics ended up stronger. Students who are rushed to the more advanced or difficult techniques (the way they usually want) are usually weaker than students forced to master the basics before given opportunity to advance. The reason for this is because the basic techniques form your foundation for both attack and defense, they’re also the most commonly used techniques.

The biggest component of training is endurance based. The assumption is that this is “strength” as in what you can lift, but it is not. Re-focus on long distance running and short sprints which build up lung capacity, climbing exercises which emphasize agility and dexterity, push ups, sit ups, and others which build your core muscles for better balance. You’ll see a focus on fine motor control, lengthening (endurance exercises) rather than tearing (weight lifting) the muscles. Unless you plan on having them wear armor or draw a bow, they’re going to develop the type of body similar to a long distance runner. They’ll train on a multitude of surfaces if their teacher has the option, indoors, in the flats of forest, in the mountains, on the beach, so they learn to adjust their body and their fighting style to effectively fight/conserve energy on different terrains.

If you’ve never tried to run on the beach, you’ll learn quickly you want to be running near the waves and were the sand is wet rather than on loose sand. The surface is harder and more stable where its wet, dry sand will sap your energy.

A good teacher will try to expose their student to most situations which can be done in relative safety. One of the advantages of training is the preparation and that preparation leads to quicker responses than from someone experiencing the situation for the first time. However, you cannot prepare your student for everything and some experiences can only be learned by experiencing them outside the safety of the training floor. As a writer, you’ll be making the executive decisions for your trainer about what is and isn’t too dangerous. This is where most of the suspension of disbelief breaks occur in these sequences because the trainer ends up requiring their student to do something far above and beyond what they could conceivably be asked in a real world scenario.

Two humans fight with real blades rather than training blades without any safety measures is one example. The scene may seem sexy, but contextually the decision is stupid.

Always treat your characters in your head like they’re real people. Your trainer is making decisions based on what is safe for your character to learn. Any serious injury the trainee suffers could lead to months of recovery time or them never fighting. You want to push them just hard enough that you take them beyond the limits they’ve set for themselves, but not past what they can actually accomplish.

Always ask yourself: what are they learning?

Training exercises generally have multiple lessons attached beyond the technique itself. Remember, training isn’t just training the character’s body but also their mind and their character. Their values are reshaped, their beliefs shift and mature, and they develop as a character. Training is character development. Consider who this character is at the beginning of their training and who they are by the end of it, if you don’t envision them changing you should ask yourself why.

Most writers are tempted to do what the student wants or sympathize with the student in their training sequences, this is either because the student is their main character and they empathize more with them or because they’re beginners themselves. Or, it could be both.

You’ll handicap your character and your narrative if you give them what they want, but most of your audience won’t notice. Only a very small contingent will respond with, “lol, no.” I’m not saying you shouldn’t try your best to do it right, I’m just saying don’t worry too much about blow back. You’ve got nothing to worry about. The vast majority of people can’t tell its not bacon.

Again, don’t trap yourself into thinking you need world altering stakes in order for your character’s story to matter. The stakes of any narrative are what you make them and they are driven by the participating characters’ desires, wants, dreams versus their situation and what they are asked to sacrifice or do in order to attain those desires. Leave yourself open to possibilities and uncertainty, contemplate failure even if you know long term the characters are going to succeed. Failure is not always malicious or malevolent, sometimes its unintentional. It can be easy as saying “I don’t want to do this anymore” and deciding a few days later that you really do, only to discover the opportunity has passed.

There is always an alternate world or worlds filled with the choices we did or didn’t make, and there are stories in all of those potential choices. Learning to make the most of those potential stories is part of what writing is all about.

-Michi

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