I don't know about you, but I hate novels that have anticlimatic fight scenes. My husband says it's like having the foreplay but no climax. For example, did anyone else hate the fight scene at the end of Twilight (the novel, not the movie) when she doesn't give any details about the fight? It really bothered me.

For lack of a better example (because I have only one example published) I'm going back to Prophecy. Sorry if this bothers anyone else, but when Forbidden and Legacy are published, I'll have more to go from without giving stuff away. In Prophecy, my hero and my villain meet up twice. I wanted big blowup fight scenes for both with the second being the biggest of the two. To make this more believable, I got out wooden spoons and a fly swatter (I'm not kidding either. Just picture it in your mind) and I played both sides of the fight. I wanted to see what the body would actually look like in battle. It was so much fun.

It was like choreographing a dance. Every movement had to be planned out, each counter movement slid into place alongside it. I wanted to know how the body looked when a wrist was bent with a sword (spoon, fly swatter, whatever) or how someone would stand when counterattacking. By making my body move like that (or as close to that as I could manage) I could describe it accurately.

What would you do to make a fight scene believable? How would you prepare for it? Would you just write it out and then edit later? Or would you choreograph it to make sure it all fit together?