Ah, a near and dear topic.
First off, point of distinction: I tend to divide up my fight-scene writers into two categories: detail (or choreogrpahy, if you will)-oriented, and flavor-oriented. Here's a grossly dumbed-down version of each:
Detail:
Bob parried Steve's thrust with a parry that brought Steve's blade out to the side, and Bob used the opportunity to lunge in with a high slash. Steve swept his blade up in a high circling block that caught Bob's blade, and then Steve was rolling out from under the attack and whipping his knife out into throwing position...
Flavor:
Steve lunged in, but Bob countered with crisp efficiency, his face never losing its calm even as his blade knocked Steve's strikes away and then slashed in with brutal strikes that sent Steve dancing back to avoid them...
Flavor tends to move a lot faster than Detail, but Detail is a lot more, well, detailed.
The biggest mistakes I've seen are:
Detail:
a) Writing a ten-second fight that takes five minutes to read
b) Writing a fight that only somebody from your martial arts school can understand
c) Getting the details wrong enough that people who know what they're doing will get annoyed with you
Flavor:
a) Oversimplifying it, to the point where it's possible to miss the fight scene utterly by skimming
b) Having the fight scene depend waaaaay too much on the state of mind of the fighter (such that the hero is losing until he sees his true love, which gives him hope, and then he wins -- over and over again in every fight)
c) Choosing which details to use incorrectly
My personal likes:
Flavor: Peter David. I have no idea if he's studied any real fighting art, but dang, I love his fights. They're good and fast and emotional, and he really understands how to make it exciting and involved. When he puts in little details, they seem to be the right ones -- I understand enough of what's going on to imagine how it'd look in a graphic novel (which he writes a fair number of, so that makes sense).
Flavor: David Eddings, although it's been a LONG time since I've read him, and I could really hate him now. I liked the way that he used a quick description to give us the flavor of each fighting style, and then pretty much let us envision the rest -- Hettar uses light slashing strikes, Barak uses hacking strikes, Mandorallen(sp? on all, btw) uses crisp large-blade techniques, and so on.
Detail-Flavor mix: Early R.A. Salvatore. I loved the first few books. I imagined great fights. I loved how it all fit together, how it managed to convey the slashes and parries and blocks and dodges without getting terribly bogged down. Sure, a big fight could take a long time to read, but it felt like it took about as long to read as it would to watch it on-screen.
Detail: Stephen Barnes. He usually does a pretty good job of explaining the martial system he's using in each book as he starts the book up, so that you eventually understand the system that you're reading about well enough to understand a climactic fight that you wouldn't have understood at the beginning of the novel.
Detail: GRRM. Love how he manages to convey a lot about the different fight scenes with just the right number of words -- and how he varies the fighting styles so well but always seems true to the fighter at the time.
Flavor: Early Jordan. Loved Jordan's fights up through, I dunno, book four or so. I liked the fighting style, which was never overexplained -- or at least, was only as overexplained as anything else in the books.
Least favorite fight-scene writers:
Later R.A. Salvatore -- I feel as though he got bogged down, saw that people really didn't want magic as much as they wanted fighting, and so added a ton of fighting, WITH magic, and ended up getting this big gloppy mess that never really felt as swashbuckling and cool as his other stuff. It manages to be vague AND slow, which is tough.
Goodkind: Feh. I have a ton of problems with Goodkind, but in terms of his fights... He doesn't seem to actually have them. The first book did not, as far as I can recall, contain a fight between two people with swords. The fight scenes that did happen were not really all that good. It's all muddled. I get the sense that Goodkind has never actually studied any kind of martial art or even watched a good swashbuckling movie. His fights are awful, which would be forgivable were his big honking series not CALLED "The Sword of Truth", which really implies some kind of swordplay at some point, no? The few times he actually shows details, he gets them wrong, to the point where I start muttering aloud about how, yes, it's all a metaphor for moral growth, but maybe if you could have bothered to even tell me what KIND of bloody sword it is...
I find that I usually enjoy Flavor writers more than Detail writers, even though I do enough martial arts to get most of the Detail stuff. This is often because the Detail people are all about the Detail and not about, say, characters.
Some of the military SF people write these incredibly detailed fight scenes that you need a sextant and a sliderule to figure out, and the people are just cardboard cutouts. And, of course, there's the technoporn -- the action-thriller novels that are the guy equivalent of bodice-rippers -- the guilty pleasure stuff on the garbage shelf at Target. Those things always have somebody who breaks people's necks with "bone-shattering Aikido kicks", or something about as reasonable.
There was an article in Strange Horizons about martial arts in fantasy -- it raised a really neat point about how fantasy has come a long ways. We used to have heroes who were just naturally good -- the hero, who has never held a sword before, gets a magical sword and, because of his sheer virtue, kills eight evil knights and a dragon. Now, we at least have training sequences and sections of the hero learning how to fight. The article ended by asking about a next stage of martial arts (either Asian, European, or Elven) in fantasy, one in which the fighting is no longer just flavor for the story, but so integrated that the story would utterly collapse if the fighting were removed -- with the story still being good.
