As a former competitive fighter, I’ll admit to being more judgmental than the average person when it comes to reading fight scenes. However, any reader can be ‘taken out’ of the narrative by a clunky fight scene. And there are a few things you can do to satisfy even picky former fighters who like to read fighty-fantasy.

Overly descriptive prose. Fight scenes are fast. This is not the time for waxing poetic or describing the scenery, unless someone is smashing through it. You want to avoid confusing your reader, which is easy to do in a fight scene, especially if you overdo the stage directions. Your fight scene should be simple sentences. As a fragment lover, this is my favorite aspect of writing fight scenes.
Boring verbs. Verbs are action words, right? Your fight scene is literally their time to shine. Since you need to keep your sentence structure simple, your verbs are key to bringing color to the scene. Your character didn’t ‘punch his nose,’ he ‘drove his fist into his face.’ His knees didn’t hit the floor, his kneecaps cracked against the concrete. His eyebrow didn’t bleed, instead a trickle of blood dripped into his eye. This is the time for your thesaurus.
Have obviously never experienced what they’re writing. Okay, not everyone wants to go out and punch each other for fun, I get that. But you can learn a lot on YouTube these days. And even more by asking someone who knows more than you do to read your stuff over. To that end, avoid naming specific fighting disciplines if you have no experience with them. That’s a sure way to get people passionate about their art (and every fighter thinks their way is the best way) to not only find and read your book, but also tear it apart. If you’re going to get specific, have someone who knows what they’re doing read it over.
Defying the laws of physics. Unless your character is magical, or you land is magical, or some kind of magic is happening, you need to follow the rules of Earth. You can go probably about as far as Hawkeye when being spectacularly talented with weapons and fighting as a human, but you risk taking your reader out of the narrative if you ask them to suspend too much of their belief.
Characters not getting hurt or staying injured. If your character has magical healing powers, define those rules clearly at some point before the fight. During the fight, we just want to focus on the fight. If your character is a normal human, be consistent and just throw in some mentions of soreness or pain following a big fight. And if they fight with blades, someone is getting cut somewhere, I don’t care how awesome they are.

In short, keep it simple, keep the verbs interesting, and stick to what you know and your fight scene will be better than 85% of those out there.

Any fighters out there? I’d love to hear your fight scene pet peeves!

Five things writers get wrong in fight scenes.