Writing: Writing Action

Another panel I attended during the 2015 SLC Comic Con FanX was all about writing action, and was hosted by Larry Correia.  I had to wait, like, six hours between the last panel and this one, but this interested me the most, because crafting action-packed stories is my forte.  I am finding out little by little that there are right and wrong ways to do it, and this discussion pretty much confirmed everything I had learned or considered.

Action exists in books because there's an audience for it.  It engages people.  There's something alluring about extraordinary situations, and if done right, action scenes in writing can captivate a reader just as much as any other kind of text.

They key to action writing is that it needs to flux.  Like a roller coaster ride, the action needs to rise and fall periodically.  If your text is nothing but action, it will get boring really fast, because you set the pacing so high that everything becomes bland, repetitive, or numbing.  Of course, if you have too little action, things will get boring and readers may give up.  If you start with a lot of action and deescalate, you'll have nothing but a downward slope, which may leave readers disappointed.  If you have too slow a build-up, or nothing but build-up, then you'll have an upward slope, which can be tiresome in itself.  You need to balance it all out by having a lot of ups and downs - scenes of action interspaced with slower scenes in-between.

That being said, there are other ways to do this.  Some stories will have more than one plotline running, so while one plot has falling action the other rises, so you have a kind of double-helix plot pattern going, which will be constantly entertaining.  If you do this, you can wrap up all the plot strings together in the end, which gives the climax more oomph and provides a satisfying ending.  One perfect example of this is the movie The Matrix, which had a simultaneous struggle in the virtual world and real world, which were wrapped up all at once in the climax.  On the other hand, if you look at a movie like Olympus Has Fallen, you'll find that there's a bunch of mini-conflicts that pop up and get resolved one after the other; you wind up getting audiences pump up just briefly, but then you cut off the tension; the movie White House Down was far more successful at introducing a number of conflicts and wrapping them all up in the finale. 

Also, keep in mind that you can have a story that's all action, it just can't be the same all the time.  If your characters are always on the move, your plot doesn't have to rise or fall, it can go sideways or diagonally or loop around in other crazy ways.  Stories where one thing leads to another, and there's always some new challenge before the slowdown, can be awesome in their own right.  JRR Tolkein's The Hobbit did this fairly well, with the whole "out of the frying pan and into the fire" theme.  In movies, the movie The Raid is nonstop action, and it is an exhausting experience for most viewers; I personally found it perfectly enthralling, because every new fight scene was something different (they go from fighting in the hall to hiding in a wall to showing bad guys hunting the cops down, and so on).

No matter how you structure your story, it won't mean much if the action drowns out the character-building or plotting.  If your action scenes can be excised from the story without leaving an impact, then it's probably not necessary, and unnecessary action is not the way to go.  Like any other scene, an action scene can be an ample opportunity to reveal something new to the plot, or characters, or even the themes.  There can be intense emotions in the heat of the scene that will give it the necessary weight.  Look at The Empire Strikes Back, and how the famous reveal about Darth Vader occurs right at the climax of the lightsaber duel.  And even though I praise The Raid so much, I have to give the edge to Dredd, which is pretty much the same kind of movie, but has a lot more room for characterization and world-building (not to mention more ups and downs than The Raid, which has a flatter plotline).  On top of that, some scenes can reveal much about the characters; reading The Hunger Games and seeing how Katniss reacts to each new situation reveals much about her character.  Same can be said for classics like Homer's The Odyssey, in which each new episode reveals more heroic traits of Odysseus.

When it comes to actually writing the scenes, you do need to keep your prose just as interesting as everything else.  Things can get boring really fast if you over-describe the action and explain every little move or sensation step-by-step.  An action scenes must not be a checklist or a described storyboard.  From experience, I can affirm that this type of writing is very dry and dull to write, and it is equally dull to read.  At the same time, you shouldn't be skimpy; I'm sure we've all read text that's been so confusing that you have to re-read a paragraph to understand what's happening.  You should explain just enough to understand what's happening in the scene.  If you skimp out on that, it's the literary equivalent to the shakey-cam effect in movies (and I hate too much shakey-cam).  In the end though, your wordiness depends on your target audience and writing style.  Guys like Clive Cussler have pretty lengthy action scenes, but they are brisk and breezy.  JRR Tolkein wrote maybe a few sentences to describe the Battle of the Five Armies in The Hobbit, but he describes the hell out of every rock and tree the characters see in Middle Earth.

There are naturally all different types of action:  you can have gun fights, fist fights, kung-fu, car chases, duels, huge battles, and so much more.  A book that nothing but gun fights would be rather boring.  You have to mix it up, varying your fight scenes, and varying settings so that each scene is something new.  These things can also affect how you block or stage a scene, and it may even have an impact on the plot.

No matter what your action is, you can keep it constantly flowing through the use of tension and suspense.  You do so by using cliffhangers; you can really make the readers keep turning the pages by ending your chapters in cliffhangers.  But you got to be sure to resolve those cliffhangers, so readers don't feel cheated, and you shouldn't do it too often, because then it becomes tiresome or ridiculous.  On top of that, making characters suffer is a necessity; invincible characters are inherently boring, because they have no challenges.  Superman needed Kryptonite, family drama, and really incredible villains to make his stories compelling.  The movie Lucy would have run into this issue with having a character way too overpowered, but I think the film mitigated that issue by making the character fight with her own body, which kept wanting to break down or over-evolve in weird ways.  Whether your characters suffer through an emotional issue, physical defeat, or failure in general, these are perfect ways to keep the plot going and make it weighty; it's always compelling to watch a character stumble and then rise above adversity in the end.

Point of view also factors into action scenes.  The way the action is perceived by your POV protagonist will affect how the scene reads.  However, it is possible to switch POVs if you need to, giving a more well-rounded view of everything.  Using one or multiple POVs can really help in big-scale battles, where one person's POV can help focus on specific aspects, while other POVs can give the bigger picture.  In a huge battle, it's ideal to place the POV character at a vantage point where they can see something incredible, which can therefore be translated to the prose.  If you know your POV characters, you will be able to craft a compelling action scene.

To give your story more creditability, it's ideal to do your research.  If you write about gun battles, you may want to try firing one at a shooting range, to understand how a gun works and how it feels.  Studying swordsmanship and sword fights may help you understand the nuances of a sword duel.  A google search on gun fails or gunshot ballistics can help you understand more about what a gun can do to the human body (which is gruesome, but may be necessary for writing a more realistic action scene).  Like anything, you shouldn't need to be an expert in any of these areas, but you should at least research enough to make it creditable.

When you have your story written out, critiques will help you figure out whether your action scenes are working or not.  If readers get bored too quickly, the action may need to be toned down or re-worked.  Basically, if it does work, you should keep it in; if not, remove it.

It may seem overwhelming, but writing good action scenes is a fine balance that can be really awesome if done right.  I've personally made the mistake of writing too much action or over-describing action, but I've always been cognizant of making the action work with the story to reinforce character and plotting.  It follows after watching a lot of my favorite movies, because in turn, my stories play out like movies in my head.  My favorite books - such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, the works of Clive Cussler, Michael Crichton, Ian Fleming, and more - do the same thing in their own ways.  Drawing inspiration from your favorite films and writers can help hone your abilities in writing action, and with the tips described above, you can make it one awesome adventure.