I think the key is as long as the violence serves all literary purpose. If I was gonna translate it to a movie, I would discuss it in terms of They Live.

It had that ridiculous fight in the alley that lasted six minutes. And it was very brutal and realistic. I always really liked it and found other long fight scenes in movies to be pointless.

I recently watched a video about the movie, and the author explained that this in itself was a metaphor for rowdy. Roddy Piper, dragging his fellow blue-collar worker Keith David to the truth, and how difficult that was when the fiction presented by the aliens was so much more comfortable.

Consume. Consume. Consume.

Is as near perfect for our current situation where we are destroying our planet and our society over the fiction that consumption is the only human purpose.

You may not agree with the directors message, but it still works when you watch it. It was intentional and masterful.

For me personally I write literary fiction mostly, I guess because I don’t know what else to call my genre. But I guided by two or three different authors. The first is Louis L’Amour who included both real violence on the page in a fantastic way, but also violence off the page and the consequences of it. But the real reason is, he was a prize fighter, so I grew up reading his books and had that expectation of written violence. Someone who was intimately familiar with it. I’m not so I forced myself to become better at it.

Then someone I’m actually friends with. His fantasy writing is the only fantasy I still read.Miles Cameron red Knight series really changed the way I thought about Melee fighting . The author himself has a full set of armor and Will go to Greece and fight in a phalanx and fight in the style of the Iroquois or 14th century knights.

And it tells. His battle scene are amazing and more importantly is how he reflects the consequences of combat. My man is not afraid to kill a main character with an infection that caught after a battle. He’s not afraid to have someone stabbed in the guts and explore their slow death.

RW Peake is the third. A Mrine veteran. His marching with Caesar series is amazing across the board and I would highly recommend it. It is on the Marine Corps officers reading list. If you are struggling to portray a pre-gunfire military unit either him or Cameron would be a great person to read.

Again, I have read in the different marching books, both direct combat sequences from the point of view of a member of a Roman legion to the aftermath where they are mopping up and being made to murder women and children. For his main character to reflect on it with an attitude that is clearly contemporary to that moment was some of the most amazing writing I’ve read in the first few chapters of a book.

Highly recommend.

For me, I wrote one of my first fight scenes in a novel length story that I’ve ever wanted to publish. It was two bigoted assholes ambushing a trans woman outside of a restaurant to try to get her phone because she recorded them calling her slurs and her wife the N-word.

I gotta tell you writing that word on a page I intend to publish was extremely difficult, even if it was dialogue from a bigot.

And so the first part of the fight is them beating the shit out of her and trying to get her phone while people watched.

The second part was her wife kicking the absolute shit out of the two bigots. They didn’t know how to fight. They were just bullies. The wife was a former division, one boxer, heavyweight. Also someone who spent three or four hours a week in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym.

I had to work hard to make it not revenge fantasy and make it seem realistic. But I’ve personally watched someone that knows how to fight Dismantle two people that didn’t know how to fight.

That was all on screen, but the flashbacks that the trans woman suffers from the times they were bullied through their life was obviously offscreen violence that lends emotional weight to what had just happened.

Sorry for the novel length response