What drew you to swordfighting and writing fight scenes in your stories (be they novels, short stories, or scripts)?  I don’t remember when I started loving this stuff, but I’m pretty sure it all started with movies for me.

There’s something so romantic and thrilling about swordfights.  They stir the soul and the imagination, and if we are storytellers we inevitably want to put them in our own tales.

So what’s so special about swordfight stories?  It’s hard to pinpoint.  Maybe it has something to do with swords not being something we see every day.  Maybe it’s something to do with romanticizing the past.

Whatever it is that makes them so, swordfight stories are special. And swordfighting is a pretty specialized skill, too.  Which of course means we need some specialized knowledge to get it right.  (That’s where we come in, in case you were wondering.)  And getting it right is important, but I don’t think those old stories and movies that don’t get it quite right are useless.

While we are working to get our fight scenes and sword lingo as realistic as possible, I think sometimes we also need to look at the classic stories that made us love swordfighting tales in the first place.  We need to learn to capture that thrilling feeling we got when we first saw or read a swordfighting scene.  Our fight scenes should have good technical info woven through them, but we need to put that magic, that stuff that got us fascinated in the first place, in there as well.

Where it started for me:

• The Three Musketeers (1939)
• The Adventures of Robin Hood (Errol Flynn)
• The Mark of Zorro
• The Sea Hawk
• The Scarlet Pimpernel

Yep, it all started with movies for me.  What’s your list of where it all began?