Take a look at this piece by author Kit Sun Cheah, readers:
Nipping at the Heels of Gods
By conventional standards, the action scenes I write are unconventional.
Many action scenes in pop culture follow the same tired formula. Lone hero picks up a machine gun, wades into a group of bad guys and blows them all away. Barbarian hefts his blade and cuts down a horde of lesser foes. Gongfu hero takes on 27 ninjas with his bare hands and defeats them all. I suppose to the intended audience it is exciting. I find it mindless. Boring, even.
And if I find it boring, my audience will.
About half a decade ago, I encountered a difficult problem in fiction. I could skip entire fight scenes without losing track of the story, without missing anything, without diminishing my experience of the story by one iota. Be it manga, films or prose, I found myself skipping past what were supposed to be intense battles and climactic duels.
They were mindless. They were boring. They did not hold true to what I knew of violence. I couldn’t bring myself to read those scenes. And when a significant chunk of the story is composed of nothing but mindless violence, reading the story is simply a waste of time and money.
A Song of Joy by Caroline Furlong 