Hey! Wanted to thank all of you who came out last
weekend to the Writers Coffeehouse. Hopefully hearing me talk about writing in
the real world was at least as semi-useful as all of this.
Also—shameful
capitalist plug—my new book, Ex-Isle comes out next week from
Broadway Paperbacks. Check out that
fantastic cover over there on the right.
It’s book five in the ongoing Ex-Heroes series, and I happen to think it’s
pretty cool. Granted, I might be a bit
biased...
(the
audiobook’s still three weeks out but it is coming, I promise)
Anyway,
enough about that. Now... story time.
About
fourteen years ago some friends and I were in a pretty serious car crash. Someone sideswiped us as we were pulling onto
the freeway and then sped off. My friend’s SUV was slammed into the concrete
wall, bounced off, then slammed into the wall again because the wheels had twisted around to send us right back into it. We skidded ten or twenty feet scraping against the wall. The first impact was so hard that the
passenger side door crumpled in, hit me, and fractured my ribs on that
side. I also caught half the windshield
with my face. I
remember clenching my eyes shut on instinct, what felt like gravel hitting my
cheeks and mouth and forehead. While part of me knew (in the greater sense)
that we were in the middle of a collision of some kind, another part of me was
still trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And there was so much noise. Screams and hollering from friends, metal on
concrete, metal bending, glass breaking, highway noise because the windows were
gone. It wasn’t until everything stopped
that I realized how loud it had been.
Now, I took
a while to write that out, and a while for you to read it, but the truth is, it
took seconds. Six or seven seconds,
tops. Really, at the moment, it was just a blur of sensations. I didn’t piece
together what had happened—and what I’d experienced—until afterwards.
Action, by
its very nature, is fast. It’s a
blur. If you’ve ever been part of an
accident of some kind, a fight, a collision, or any other kind of really
dynamic moment, you know what I’m talking about. A huge amount of action is stuff we figure
out after the fact. In the moment, I’m
not quite sure how my shirt got ripped or why my arm’s bleeding or... oh, geez,
I think I whacked my head a lot harder that I thought.
Here are a
couple of tips on how I try to make my action scenes seem fun and cool.
Keep
it fast--Action can’t drag. If it takes a full page for someone to
throw a punch and connect, things are happening in slow motion. Even a paragraph can seem like a long time,
especially once multiple punches are thrown.
My personal preference is to try to not have action take much longer to read
then it would to experience. I trim fight scenes and action moments down to the bare minimum to give them
(pardon the phrase) a lot of punch. One way I do this is to clump some actions
together and let the reader figure out what happened on their own.
He slammed
three fast punches into the other man’s kidney.
Karen did
something quick with her hands, and now she held the pistol while the mugger wailed and held his wrist.
Keep
it simple—I practiced martial arts for a while and I also have a lot of
experience with weapons thanks to my time in the film industry. Even though I
know lots and lots of terminology, I try not to use it. That kind of thing can clutter up an action
scene, especially when I’m using a lot of foreign languages or obscure terms. I want this to move fast, and if my reader
has to stop to sound out words and parse meanings from context... that’s
breaking the flow. If they need to
figure out if a P-90 TR is a rifle, a pistol, or a fitness program... well,
maybe they’ll come back to it after lunch.
Remember,
there’s nothing wrong with terminology, but there’s a time and a place for
everything. That time is rarely when
someone’s swinging a baseball bat at your head.
Keep it sensory—Kind of related to the above, and something I touched on in my story. Action is instinctive, with a certain subtlety to it. There isn’t a lot of thought involved, definitely not a lot of analysis or pretty imagery. Keeping in mind the fast, simple nature I’ve been talking about, I try to keep action to sounds, sights, and physical sensations. I can talk to you about a knife going deep into someone’s arm, severing arteries and veins as it goes... or I can just tell you about the hot, wet smell of blood and the scrape of metal on bone. Which gets a faster reaction?
Granted, writing this way does make it hard to describe some things, but a lot of that gets figured out after the fact anyway. My characters will have a chance to sort things out once things cool down.
Keep it sensory—Kind of related to the above, and something I touched on in my story. Action is instinctive, with a certain subtlety to it. There isn’t a lot of thought involved, definitely not a lot of analysis or pretty imagery. Keeping in mind the fast, simple nature I’ve been talking about, I try to keep action to sounds, sights, and physical sensations. I can talk to you about a knife going deep into someone’s arm, severing arteries and veins as it goes... or I can just tell you about the hot, wet smell of blood and the scrape of metal on bone. Which gets a faster reaction?
Granted, writing this way does make it hard to describe some things, but a lot of that gets figured out after the fact anyway. My characters will have a chance to sort things out once things cool down.
Keep
it real—Like so many things in fiction, it all comes down to
characters. There’s a reason we can zone
out dozens of attacks on the news but be gripped by a single one in a book. Action needs to be based in real characters because my readers need to care about the people involved. A stranger in a car crash is kind of sad in
an abstract way, but Wakko in a car crash is a tragedy and we want constant
updates.
This also
kind of works against the idea of “always start with action,” which is
something I’ve talked about before.
It’s tough for readers to be invested in action when we don’t know the
people involved. If I start with an
action scene it has to be twice as big to compensate for the fact that we don’t
know the characters, and once it’s that big it’s going to effect the level of everything that comes after it.
Now, as
always, it’s pretty easy to find exceptions to these. As I said, these are more tips than
rules. But there’s one particular
exception I want to talk about.
A pretty
common character is, for lack of a better term, the fighting savant. Batman, Jack Reacher, Melinda May, Ethan
Hunt, Sarah Walker, Joe Ledger, Stealth—characters who’ve taken physical action
to an art form through years of study and experience.
For these people to not use precise terminology for weapons or moves
could seem a little odd. It makes sense
they’d be able to dissect action, picking out the beats and planning out
responses like a painter reviewing their palette.
But...
Keep in
mind, these characters by their very nature should be rare. If I have a dozen utterly badass characters
who all have badass moves with badass weapons... that’s going to get boring
real quick. It’s monotone.
Also, keep
the point of view in mind while writing.
Stealth may be a trained master of unarmed combat, but St. George gets
by with his invulnerability and raw strength.
Whose narrative this is will affect how her actions are seen by the
reader.
And that’s
that. A handful of tips for writing
killer action.
Next time,
I’d like to talk about, arguably, one of the finest episodes of Star Trek:
The Next Generation that was ever produced.
Oh, and next Thursday I’ll be at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego,
blabbing away and signing copies of Ex-Isle. If you’re in the area, please stop by and say
“hullo."
Until then... go write.
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