Describing the big fight

 I've got to the place in my rewrite of my novel where I have a big fight scene.  And as usual, I'm struggling my way through it.

There are some writers who revel in writing long and complicated fight scenes.  I'm not one of them.  I always find them difficult to do.  Which is a bit of a problem, as nearly every book I write ends up having ine

The scene I've just written has one of my main characters helping to stop a group of men harming women.  He's aided by twenty troops, and there are ten other men involved, all contained in one room.  I've managed to choreograph all the baddies from that group getting shot, but then I complicated matters.  I then brought in another half-dozen hostiles, and these are better armed.  Instead of the pistols of the first group, these men are armed with assault rifles.

I wanted my civilian main character to play a part in defending and rescuing a group of women, so I had him take down a couple of men as the troops deal with the others.  At the point where the extra six armed men arrive, the troops are actually outnumbered.

The choreography for this fight scene was complex, because the fight evolved in several stages, and I'd split my group of troops into two squads to deal with two different groups of men.  

My civilian character is wearing armour, but he isn't combat trained, so it only made sense to get him involved in the fight when nobody else was free to stop someone getting hurt.  He stops an attack on one woman, then prevents another man with an assault rifle from shooting a group of them who've huddled together.

I've written the first pass of the scene, but I know it will need more revision.  I always need to write and re-write fight scenes three or four times before I get them right.

And when I have one as complex as this, there's always something that I describe in the wrong order in the first draft.   It's usually something like describing a character shooting a weapon, then half a page later describing him taking that weapon from his pocket.

I'm not an enthusiastic fan of fight scenes, which is probably why they take me so many attempts to get right.  I've never suffered from writer's block, but I can certainly procrastinate and put off writing a fight scene for a couple of days because I'm not looking forward to it.  

I'm on my second revision of this scene already, and my task tomorrow will be to read over what I've done and decide whether it works this time.

I'm hoping it does work now, so that I can move the writing on to something I enjoy doing more.