Finally leaving guns, lets look at bladed weapons. Technically, I could be writing on bladed weapons for the rest of 2018, but I think just dealing with swords and knives should get us through.
The information here is not a how-to, tutorial, or to be considered survival training advice. If you are in danger, call 911 and let the Police sort it out. The information below is ONLY for novelists who are trying to learn how to write fight scenes in their novels.
The idea behind a bladed weapon is to open a big enough hole in someone’s body to allow blood to escape. It’s death by blood loss. Since knife blade cuts from stabbing tend to be small, you end up stabbing and stabbing and stabbing, panicky and horror filled with “Why don’t they die!!!!”. They will, your protagonist just has to keep stabbing.
It’s never neat and clean like in the movies.
The stereotypical knife scene where “a person is stabbed once and drops, blade still visible” has a lot of problems.
The knife is plugging the wound. They’re still going to bleed, but it’s kind of got something plugging up the wound. And they’re probably going to live, except for some stitches. Maybe they’ll get an infection that will trouble healing.
But then they’re going to go buy one of the guns from the previous 5 articles, and go find the knife thrower, and it’s going to be ugly.
By the way, “bringing a knife to a gunfight” is a bad day for the shooter if the knife man is close enough, and knows what he’s doing. 25 feet or closer, the knife man wins.
I’ve been trained in how to hold a knife, and I can tell you, almost everyone does it wrong. Don’t use your thumb to grip the knife!
In Filipino martial arts, the tip of the thumb rests on top of the index finger. If you parry the knife on a Filipino martial artist, you just switched their grip, and they’ll still filet you. If you parry the knife on someone untrained, you just literally took the knife out of their hand.
Most people panic while using a knife, and it’s just a mindless stabbing fest. A Filipino fighter has targets they go for, and they do it quickly.
But let’s assume your character is not trained. If it’s a kitchen knife, they can expect severe lacerations on their fingers. Basically, they use the knife until their fingers lose the ability to hold it, because they’ve severely injured themselves. An untrained person who’s been in a knife fight ends up panting, sweaty, exhausted, covered in blood – some of it their own.
If it’s a fighting knife, most of the fighting knives today follow either Bowie or Tanto design. Bowie is the style of the “Rambo” knife. The serrations on his knife are due to the concept of the knife as an all-in-one survival tool. Survivalism has gotten away from this. Most Bowie style knifes don’t have the serrated factor.
The Tanto has a slightly curved blade, with a diamond’-shaped tip. This is the knife of the Samurai, and was intended to simply look like the Samurai sword, the katana. However, those that learned to fight with a tanto discovered it’s an excellent knife design.
So let’s say your protagonist – being a good guy – wants to keep the antagonist alive in a knife fight. Okay, real simple. One good hacking slash with the front third of his blade across the knuckles of the antagonist, and he drops the knife.
And a couple of fingers. He’s in trouble, but if he gets medical help now, he’ll live.
By the way, I read some advice in the 1980’s that experts say was astoundingly bad – and that was to slash the forearm. Yes, that works – but if you cut the wrong spot, the tendons in the hand lock, and the person can’t drop the knife.
Knife fighting is ugly. The victim is usually lying in a very large pool of blood when they die. Are there targets you can attack to kill quickly? Yes.
And I’m not giving that information out, thanks. You’ll have to look that up elsewhere. I don’t know who’s reading this. Some information you just don’t share.
Throwing knives – um. Read the above. You quickly get the idea that throwing a knife at someone is not that effective. There are men who can accurately throw knives into targets. But it takes one big hole to allow enough blood through for the person to die. The most realistic way I’ve seen a knife thrown was in “a Fistful of dollars”, where it’s obvious that Clint Eastwood’s character of Joe Banco throws a machete with a great deal of force, so that it embeds up to the hilt. The man died not from blood loss, but from shock. The machete would have penetrated enough major organs that either the gunman suffocated through his lungs collapsing, or shock just shut everything down. Instant death.
Swords. Swords fall under a million categories. There’s broadswords, scimitars, cutlasses, rapiers, etc. I could write forever on this. My interest in them of course was inspired by my father’s Marine Corps Officer sword that hung in his study. And of course I had to buy a plastic one when I was a kid. It had a Civil War style blade, but a pirate’s hilt. Huh. Well, you don’t expect toy manufacturers to be accurate.
But in my youth, I was enamored of Martial Arts, so my interest in them became professional. In every style of Kung Fu, the broadsword is taught. And in Japanese martial arts, the Katana is revered (although it is not taught as part of the art, and I believe it’s a mistake).
The first sword I learned to use was a Katana, and of course, being in the 1980’s the Ninja-to was the next sword I learned to use. After that, the Chinese Broadsword.
As I wrote in the beginning of this lengthy series, their is two different philosophies behind the swords. The Katana was designed to kill anyone at the distance of the first third of that sword. The Ninja-to was designed to get inside of that distance, and kill the Samurai at a closer distance. And the Chinese broadsword was designed for rapid swordplay.
Not one of them is better than the other, but the Katana ranks as one of the best designed swords of all time. Gallic warriors used to carry sharp swords, but they’d have to drop them and stand on them to straighten them out between kills. That tended to be fatal on the battlefield.
A more rigid sword was less sharp. The katana was the first sword to master the rigid blade and the soft, sharp edge. Chinese broadswords tend to softer, springier metals that last to this day. A Chinese made Katana will have a softer blade than a Japanese made one. If your protagonist has a cheap Katana and faces off against a more well off antagonist, he’ll be dismayed as the first cut of the antagonist slices his katana in two. That’s a good plot point, but now he’s got to run like mad. Watch out for the rooftop ledge!
(why is it that most swordfights in movies take place in basements or roof tops? Is there just some rule we can’t have a sword fight in an office space?)
Medieval swords tended to be big and heavy, and designed to hack through armor. As the economy of Europe worsened in the Middle Ages, knights reached a point they couldn’t afford armor or big swords – so they adopted the Italian sword style, which tended to be rapid, thin, light blades. The lumbering knight with the heavy sword couldn’t keep up with the lighter blade design. In their armor, the lighter blade was ineffective, but the armor was increasingly too expensive.
The idea of a sword is to open one big cut, by hacking open one’s chest cavity, or striking off a major limb. Decapitation worked nicely. The terrifying sharpness of the Katana is evidenced by the propensity of striking down onto someone’s head – and Samurai usually wore ornate helmets to prevent that. Watch a Kendo kata, and you’ll see almost all the strikes are down onto the head.
Okay, I think I’ve written enough on fight scenes and weapons for now. I’m sure more will pop into my head, and I’ll be tempted to write about some Kung Fu weapon in the future. Hopefully, you’ve learned enough about weapons and fighting to write good fight scenes in novels!
