Writing fight scenes must be hard, I wouldn’t know but trust me anyway. One day I realized, “Polearms, my favored weapons, must also be hard to write.” This has given me a bad idea: I must tell people how to write good, despite my own abilities! With this in mind, welcome to my Five Step Plan to Polearms!

    Step one: What counts as a polearm?

  To write about people fighting with weapons, you must first understand the weapons being used. A polearm is a pole with a dangerous bit at the end. The pole is most commonly wood, but metal will sometimes be used despite its weight. The material used for the head of the polearm is mostly dependent on the time period. If it’s prehistoric, their spears will be wood, bone, or rock, but as soon as you get past the bronze age, use whatever metal you want to be the newest.

  Once you have the material or have stopped caring about that, you have to move onto shape. This is the most important step that everything else hinges on. The head shape of the polearm can be almost anything, but you have to determine its damage type. Option 1: Pierce. It’s the simplest out of the four, simply a sharp part on a stick. Option B: Slash. This is where things get a bit harder to hash out. For one, “polearm” is a big category, you know one when you see it. Unfortunately, when things get more complicated than “sharp point on stick,” the exact lines start to blur. The difference between glaives and naginatas, guandaos, woldos, or sovnyas often just comes down to where they are from, so I’m just calling most slashy polearms glaives. Type C: Bludgeon. What draws the line between hammers and polearms? ME! And I say if it has at least both a hammer and a spike, it's a polearm. Choice 4: Hook. Look at you, being all fancy, placing a hook on your polearm. While Pierce and Slash are for flesh and Bludgeon is for armor, the Hook is used to catch and pull other people’s weapons. This also lets you add a little bit of free worldbuilding: if someone has a hooked polearm, they aren't there to just kill beasties.

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  Finalize your design at this point. Place all of your engravings and dot all your i’s. There are a few finishing touches to think about. How sleek is the weapon? Does it have extra protrusions that could get caught on something? Do you want an extra little dagger on the bottom? Great! This is only really necessary if you want your audience to know how cool your OC is, but hey, who cares.

    Step two: Writing words

  Remember that choice from a few paragraphs ago? It's important now! I feel sad when I see people say their spear has extra guards at the top, and their eight year old child warrior is able to instantly gauge the distance and use it to do an overhand slash. Please, just think about the weapons. If you choose pierce, you can stab, penetrate, puncture, impale, and skewer, but please don’t try to hack. When you have to slash, don’t try to clobber people. You don’t need a polearm to do that, use a pole.

    Step three: Profit

  How you use this bad advice is not my problem, but if you do make money off of it, give me royalties. I deserve composition for the hour spent on this.