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Aiki Flinthart
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Fight Like a Girl: Writing Fight Scenes for Female Characters Kindle Edition

by Aiki Flinthart (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 104 ratings
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Women are not men with mammaries. They don't approach, handle, or react to violence in the same way. Aiki Flinthart is a long-time martial artist, archer, knife-thrower, assault-survivor, and author of 11+ novels - all with kick-ass heroines and heroes.
In Fight Like a Girl, she brings her own experience, plus the results of extensive research and interviews, to the table for fellow authors.
You should come away with an excellent understanding of the differences between males and females, how they fight, react, and think. What weapons and techniques work well for smaller physiques. How it feels to be involved in a fight.

You'll also get a deep understanding of how to apply that knowledge to an actual fight scene. A step by step guide to how to write and pace your fight scene, word choices, foreshadowing, character arcs, and how to pack an emotional punch.

Make sure your readers devour your fight scenes. Pick up a copy of Fight Like a Girl.

Review: "Flinthart's 'Fight Like a Girl' is a considered, credible, and practical writer's guide to crafting believable fights for female protagonists, as well as creating fights that serve the best interests of the story."- Angela Slatter, author of the World Fantasy Award-winning "The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings".
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  3. Publication date
    October 5, 2019
  4. File size
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Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07WRN5577
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Computing Advantages & Training P/L (October 5, 2019)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 5, 2019
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 948 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 104 ratings

About the author

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Aiki Flinthart

Aiki Flinthart

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Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Aiki lives in Australia and hasn't yet died from ANY wildlife encounter. Go figure.

She has numerous published sci-fantasy and fantasy novels, plus an action-y romance with a kickarse heroine. She has also edited a couple of short story anthologies and has a number of her own short stories in various e-magazines and anthologies.

Her works have been shortlisted in the Australian Aurealis awards and in the USA Writers of the Future competition.

When not writing, she runs a business and does heroine-approved hobbies such as martial arts, archery, knife-throwing, lute-playing, and belly-dancing.

You're more than welcome to check out more details at www.aikiflinthart.com

Always love to hear from happy readers.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
104 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Steven Ramirez
5.0 out of 5 stars An Invaluable Resource for Writing Action Thrillers Featuring Strong Women
Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2020
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I picked up a copy of Fight Like a Girl by Aiki Flinthart after reading a recommendation from another author. And wow—just wow. So, besides writing books, this woman is skilled in martial arts and knife throwing. Knife. Throwing. I mean, who does that? Well, Aiki Flinthart, apparently.

The author’s style is informed and laced with humor. I found the book to be well researched and diverse in its approach to writing female characters in life-threatening situations. Chapters include insights from the perspectives of biology, psychology, emotion—and grammar.

The author provides concrete examples of how to write—and not write—females engaging in combat with males, who are typically larger and stronger. As a bonus, she dissects poorly written scenes where the description of the fight is illogical. And she provides solutions.

I love this book and plan to refer to it often. And I recommend it to any author writing action thrillers that feature strong female characters. Oh, and at some point, I might even look into knife throwing. It sounds like fun.
7 people found this helpful
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Bowen Greenwood
4.0 out of 5 stars great info
Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2023
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The first half of this book is incredibly valuable advice about the physical reality of combat. The second half is more “writing advice.” Really enjoyed, and I’ll be coming back to this for research purposes often in the future.
One person found this helpful
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Samuel Carvell
5.0 out of 5 stars Valuable Reference
Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2020
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Excellent book! Aiki’s style, wit, and frank expertise shines in this book.
Anyone writing characters of any gender needs to read this book.
I’m a generally large cis man who has never been in a fight, and I learned so much about my own response to adrenaline and threats. It has improved my understanding of myself, and refreshed my awareness of how others perceive the world as threatening, daily, in seemingly innocuous places where I have simply gone unchallenged.
It will be a enduring reference on my writing shelf.
Thank you, Aiki.
One person found this helpful
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars What a guy author needs to know
Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2020
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I decided to introduce the female protagonist in my new series with a bar fight. It seemed like a good idea, and with my martial art background; I thought I could pull it off. I was wrong. Right after that, I saw Aiki Flinthart on an episode of the Self Publishing Formula. Listened to her story, grabbed her book, and read what she had to say.

Fight Like a Girl is an excellent guide to the dynamics of both male and female combatants. Aiki Flinthart not only covers the differences between male and female but also between skilled and unskilled fighters.

After reading the book, I consider it a valuable resource for getting a fight scene written well and am looking forward to injecting the ideas in the book into my writing. I’d highly recommend the book both for fellow authors and for those interested in how people behave in stressful situations.
8 people found this helpful
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Inspiring
Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2021
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This book brings straight to the point insight for the mind that’s oblivious to the ways of women, and men for that matter, while including relevant examples, quotes and research to hammer the points in. I read the book with the understanding that the author is teaching bare minimum application while maximizing information, leaving the reader to come to their own conclusions about how they will apply the information to their writing without defaulting to an algorithmic and patterned work process.

Excellent read, looking forward to learning more from the same mind.
2 people found this helpful
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Liz Bullard
4.0 out of 5 stars insightful
Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2021
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Definitely more than fighting like a girl! Loved the breakdown of biology and comparison to male characters. Very informative book.
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MG
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Resource
Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2022
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A fantastic resource for writers of any genre who want to get the details right. I recommend it highly!
One person found this helpful
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Michael Allenson
5.0 out of 5 stars Required reference material!
Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2019
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Considering I'm working on a novel/series where the main character is a career, female, mercenary I had been waiting for this to publish for a while. It didn't disappoint at all! After doing the writing exercise and reading her sample revisions I have a much better grasp. Highly recommended even if you aren't writing fight scenes from a female character's perspective.
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Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Exactly what I was looking for.
Reviewed in Canada on February 5, 2022
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This book had the info I was looking for to add a realistic scene to finish a story, also real world should's and shouldn'ts to keep in mind.
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FictionLover
5.0 out of 5 stars A necessary book for writers or fighters regardless of gender
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 6, 2020
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Fight Like A Girl was conceived so that women or men who want to write ‘fight scenes’ in their fiction have a source of well-researched, real-world information rather than relying on the clichés and special-effects trickery of cinema and TV. ‘Fight scenes’ could mean men fighting other men, women fighting men, women fighting women and group dust-ups of all kinds.

FlaG is big on male-to-female differences (like the obvious: smaller female size and reach, for instance) and how they shape fighting, but also on psychological, biochemical, social and behavioural variations that are less discernible (such as the ‘don’t ever hit a woman’ conditioning handed out to men and that “women also have years of social conditioning against fighting back if they are attacked”). The author comes across as an unreconstructed feminist.
I learned about Aiki Flinthart on Mark Dawson’s Self-Publishing podcast (episode 243). She is a successful Australian fiction writer (Brisbane, half a million downloads), a writing teacher, a book editor and martial artist. She makes it clear in FlaG that something bad happened to her when she was young; the experience drew her to martial arts so that she was prepared if it happened again. She settled on aikido though she talks through the characteristics of many other schools and styles. She also deals with the reality of fighting with weapons including edged (knives, swords, axes), what she calls ranged weapons (firearms) and other implements.

This book is very thorough, and the reader is grounded in fighting/writing basics from the very start: “Stories are driven by conflict and steered by relationships.” When I read that I knew I was in good hands; and she reminds us to be sure that a fight scene is *absolutely necessary* to advance the plot. And dig this: “When it comes to fighting (be it an argument or a battle), women are not men with mammaries.” Aiki makes the basics abundantly clear: because men have more height and reach, unarmed women cannot compete like man-on-man, but that the odds change in their favour if they get inside a man’s guard. And there is the OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act—the ‘freezing’ stages that we go through when confronted with aggression, threats, attacks. The OODA loop is attributed to US Air Force fighter ace Colonel John Boyd, and my heart warmed to the author, because I’ve seen his name so rarely since reading “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War” almost twenty years ago.

But FlaG is not perfect: I kept on waiting for the examples, instances where the author took fight scenes from books and dissected them, analysed, improved. Oh, they came, but I had to wait until the last 15% of the book—and there were very few of them. I felt the author could have traded some of the theory and backstory for practical illustrations, because this is a book aimed at authors, not martial artists.

But I’d recommend Fight Like A Girl to any writer who wants his or her fight scenes to be realistic, powerful and un-clichéd. It is a welcome book, an easy to read book, a necessarily unusual book, and to this reader, an unbalanced book. And, ultimately, it is a sad book. The author has told the world that she has a terminal illness. Aiki Flinthart says that fight scenes reveal character and she has revealed hers: she has the heart of a lion.
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Nathan
5.0 out of 5 stars Covers psychology and physiology and weapons and strategy and writing techniques
Reviewed in Australia on October 5, 2020
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If you have a female character faced with potential violence, or an actual fight, and you want to write her from a woman's perspective, then you will probably think it's worth reading this book. It also covers the sequel scene when a man and a woman recover from a battle together, and how male and female motivations surrounding conflict are typically different. When fights escalate or don't, and why.
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MS G.
5.0 out of 5 stars Very informative.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 12, 2020
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I've found this book very informative and interesting. It's written from an experienced, well researched point of view. If you have fight scenes in your writing, especially if you have female characters fighting, you'll find this really useful.
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Dion Perry
4.0 out of 5 stars A must read for all authors regardless of the genre you write
Reviewed in Australia on October 31, 2019
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Aiki is an author of a number of fantasy series with kick-ass heroines. She is also an experienced martial artist who is also trained in a range of weaponry including bow and arrow, swords, knives, darts and so forth. She can frequently be found at writing conventions with a hair sword stashed in her bun, so unless you like being cut, or like the feel of the floor on your back, don’t sneak up on her from behind. She’s the real deal, so just say hi the normal way.

Having established her credibility, let’s talk about the book. It’s well written, with practical examples in an easy to follow style. It has convenient sub-heading, for quick reference and it also has exercises you can do by yourself or even in groups. More importantly, Aiki explains the difference between how men and women think and react, which I wish had been explained to me years ago, it would have saved me a lot of confusion.

As someone who has trained in aikido, I found myself readily agreeing with Aiki’s comments and also where she’s critiqued book scenes and found fault with the credibility of the attack/defence used. But Aiki also takes it a step further and shows how and why to choose words, how to pace and when to add in emotion.

I found the book incredibly invaluable and looking back on old work, I can now see how I could have made female fight scenes more credible. I’ll be rereading sections before writing a female fight scene as a refresher. Since all books have conflict, even if your work in progress doesn’t have a female fight scene, this book will still help you make the conflict more realistic. It’s a book suitable for all ages.
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