To Suck or Not To Suck? [Writing Tips]

|27| Writing Matches

Requested by: @obey_nothing

Thanks for requesting!

This is not in the order I originally had planned, but I had a good majority of this already written and I love writing matches, so I figured why not post it already?

I see a lot people skip over matches and that's fine. I understand that you might not want to fail at writing one. Then I turn around and that the people that aren't skipping them are writing matches, but they're doing it completely wrong. Not to say there is a right way . . . okay, there is. And it's not by my standards, but wrestling standards themselves.

Some writers seem to think that writing matches are easy. That's not true. They're not awfully hard, but they're no walk in the park either. What I can't stand to see is this:

I stood across the ring from her and punched her in the face. I hit my finisher on her.

1..2..3! I won!

This makes my skin crawl and makes me want to go and drown myself in wrestling footage to re-educate myself on what an actual match should look like. And it's not just that the matches are unrealistic. No. It's the fact that they're written so dang one-dimensional, and that makes everything 100 times worse. Their characters are, 9 times out 10, one-dimensional, too. Most of the time they're writing for a face character, and she's always so freaking insecure, but just so happens to know every wrestling move in the book. She can win by flicking her opponent with her finger.

Then, if they're writing for a heel character, the heel acts like they're the greatest thing to ever walk the face of the earth. They rarely lose, they cut the best promos (not really), and they hold all the championships.

I came across this book the other day where the OC had won so many titles that it made my head hurt. Listen up guys: the amount of titles your character has held doesn't necessarily make them a good wrestler. Not in this day and age, anyway. I mean, look at Sami Zayn and Cesaro. You don't see them beating Charlotte for the Women's Championship while simultaneously being tag champs, and sharing the world title, do you? No, you don't, because that would be stupid. They've never been World Champions, but that doesn't mean they're not some of the best wrestlers Vince McMahon's god-forsaken company has ever seen.

Nowadays, people are just handed championships. That's not to say that they haven't paid their dues and earned it, but if you're high up on the company's radar, it won't matter. What I'm saying is, don't fool yourself into thinking your character's the stuff because they've held 23 titles and have punched Vince McMahon in the face. Show me how hard they've worked and their skills, and I might just believe they're worth reading about.

I digress. As you probably noticed chapters ago, I like to go off on tangents, so allow me to get back to the point at hand. Writing matches can be both fun and nerve-wracking. That all depends on what you want to accomplish in the match, however.

Do you want your character to play the underdog, or just be plain dominant throughout the whole thing? Well, that question leads into another one: are they a heel or face? If they're a heel, they'll more than likely rule a good majority of the action. They'll make rude retorts and shout at the audience, gloating for no reason at all. It's what heels do.

If they're a face, maybe they get jumped before the bell with a chair or something. They try to rally up a comeback only to get stopped in their tracks each time, until finally being able to hit said comeback. They don't technically have to play the underdog, just don't be all alpha.

I will now be breaking down the fundamentals of writing a wrestling match.

Starting a Match