TL;DR. Most fight scenes read like a training manual, because a story problem got treated as a choreography problem. Three things keep a fight from being noise. Somebody has to want something specific, and survival doesn't count. The reader has to be able to hold the room, which takes one or two concrete objects you then use. And winning has to cost the winner something we watch them pay. Get those right and the moves take care of themselves. The stunt coordinator will rewrite your moves anyway, and nobody is going to rewrite your reasons.

Why do most fight scenes read like a manual?

Left jab, right cross, parry, pivot, low kick, block. By the third line the reader has lost track of who was winning, what they wanted, and why any of it matters. The fight ends, the story continues, nothing has changed.

That's rarely a research problem. The writer usually knows plenty about fighting, and that's part of what went wrong, because the knowledge had somewhere to go and it went onto the page. Technical detail ended up doing the job that story was supposed to do.

It also doesn't survive production. Whatever you write will be re-blocked by a stunt coordinator working with the actual space, the actual actors and the actual insurance. The moves are the one part of your fight scene that is guaranteed to change.

What does a character have to want?

Something specific, and staying alive doesn't count, because everyone in every fight wants that and it tells us nothing about these two people.

The cliff duel in The Princess Bride is the cleanest case I know. William Goldman wrote it from his own novel and Rob Reiner directed. Inigo Montoya is hunting the six-fingered man who killed his father, and he's been waiting twenty years for the chance. The man in black is trying to get away with Buttercup. Neither one actually wants to hurt the other, and they're so courteous about it that the winner knocks the loser out instead of killing him.

The fencing is beautiful and it isn't what anybody remembers. What people remember is two men being polite to each other while trying to win, and finding out they like each other, which is a thing that could only happen because each of them wanted something the other one wasn't.

That's the test. If you swapped these two characters for two other competent fighters, would the scene change? If not, the wants aren't specific yet.

How much space does a reader need?

Less than you think, and more than most drafts give them.

One or two concrete things, named early, then used. The stairs behind her. The knife already on the counter. The door that opens inward. A reader who can see two objects can hold the whole room, and the action stops floating.

The failure mode is geography delivered as inventory. Four paragraphs describing a warehouse before anybody throws a punch is not spatial awareness, it's a location report, and the reader forgets it by the time it matters. Name the thing in the same breath as the action that uses it, and name it again right before it pays off.

The other failure mode is objects that never come back. If you put a knife on the counter and nobody touches it, you've spent the reader's attention on set dressing.

Why do emotional stakes decide whether the fight lands?

Because a fight with nothing after it is a fight nobody needs.

Casino Royale, directed by Martin Campbell and written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis. Bond kills two men in a stairwell and wins, violently and at close range. Then he finds Vesper sitting under the running shower in her dress, still in shock, and he sits down beside her in the water. Neither of them says much.

That scene is why the stairwell works. Winning cost him something, and we watch him pay, and the payment happens somewhere quiet after the violence is over. Cut the shower and the stairwell is just a well-staged kill.

So the question isn't whether your fight is exciting. It's what it costs the person who wins, and whether you've given yourself a scene in which to show that.

Where do writers put the detail instead?

In the moves, and there's a better place for it.

Put the specificity in what the fight reveals rather than in how it's performed. A character who fights efficiently, or dirty, or like someone who learned it somewhere institutional, is telling you about their life, and one line can carry it. A character who stops to check whether the other person can still breathe has told you something a page of dialogue couldn't.

Put it in the damage, too. Not gore, consequences. Somebody who gets hit in the ribs in act two should still be favoring that side in act three, and the audience will notice and believe the whole film a little more.

And put it in the pacing. Short paragraphs read fast. A fight written in long blocks reads slow no matter how violent it is, which is why the white space on the page is doing more work than the verbs.

What do you cut?

Any move that doesn't change the situation.

A fight is a sequence of reversals, not a sequence of strikes. Each beat should move the advantage, close an exit, break something, or tell us a new fact. If you can delete three lines and the next beat still follows, those three lines were choreography.

Then cut the second half of the fight if the outcome stopped being in doubt there. Most drafts keep going after the question is answered, because the writer is enjoying it. The reader isn't.

Before you move on, run this checklist

What does each character want, specifically, and would the scene change if I swapped in two different fighters?

Does anybody want something other than to survive?

Where are they, and have I named one or two objects a reader can hold?

Did I use those objects, or are they decoration?

What does winning cost the one who wins, and which scene shows the audience that cost?

Does the damage carry forward into later scenes?

Can I delete any three lines without breaking what follows?

Does the fight keep going after the outcome stopped being in doubt?

If I cut this scene entirely, what would the story lose?

If that last question has no answer, the problem was never the choreography, so cut it and put the pages somewhere else. Open your draft to the fight, write down what each person wants in one sentence each, and if the two sentences are the same sentence, you've found the work.

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Sources. The Princess Bride was written by William Goldman from his own novel and directed by Rob Reiner; Casino Royale was directed by Martin Campbell and written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis. Both films' credits and the scenes described are from their Wikipedia entries. Everything else here is how I work.