StarDestroyer.Net BBS

trying to dust off my own writing, but this is the first time I've tried to write a reasonably cheorgraphed fight scene.
thoughts?

http://alteredegosinhyding.tumblr.com/p ... found-true

A knife waited for them at the end of it, with a second moving out the shadows behind them.

I think I know the effect you're going for here, focusing on the weapon rather than the attacker. But it and it's following sentences read rough and ambiguous.

I assume from the writing, she hit nose, brought her arm around clockwise, catching his hand/kinfe at the 7-8 o'clock arc, then finished at ~12 on his neck? It's hard for me to understand how she could then catch his arm and deliver a straight kick to the chest. A knee definitely.

The last of them came in low, no theatrics, just a heavy knife and a grunting thrust. Again, she shifted her weight, the knife ripping her leather jacket as she slid her forearm under his thrust, lifting it over her and leaving his throat unguarded.

A stab coming straight on from a (I assume larger and longer armed attacker) has better reach than a girl cutting her reach in half by attacking with her forearm. It makes me wonder how the heavy knife only rips her jacket unless she deflected or side-stepped it.

There's 4 attackers, yet 1 isn't mentioned after the lead-in.

Awesome, thanks Fenix!

Huh. I'm a tall bugger, a lot of those reach problems have simply never happened to me. Need to work on that. The first spot is her turning back and forth between two different guys. I'll give one a different weapon, make that a lot clearer.

The heavy knife rips the arm on her jacket - she scoops his thrust over her and moves completely under his arm. Again, I've not really caputured it here. Thanks for the spot!

Is it a leather jacket? In that particular case and perhaps in general, the onematopoeia might be your actual problem: the sound of the word "rip", at least to me, suggests something serrated, something that would tear/saw rather than slice, or make a very large, sloppy cut at the very least. If you feel that applies, you might choose a word that would convey a different visceral feeling.

serrated was the perfect word, thankyou

My pleasure. It's a bit of an odd choice though; I'd expect a blade chosen by a knife fighter to have a straight edge. I suppose it could be something like this, which in a sense is serrated.

well, those guys weren't exactly professionals. probably a steak-knife or something. I'm still waiting for the chef character to turn up on the character generator
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... ring#gid=0

Yeah, those can be serrated. (I just like to say the word serrated a lot.)