Michael Grant's Blog - Posts Tagged "action-scenes"
Writing Action Scenes
I don't want to shock my fans who are reading this, but I am good at some things and not as good at others. You want experimental, challenging prose? Not gettin' it from me. You want lyrical descriptions? Not here. Metaphors? I'm not entirely sure what those are.
But I can write the hell out of an action scene. So, for those interested, here are my rules. Or suggestions. Anyway, here's what works for me:
1) Live With The Setting.
By this I mean that you should not design a setting for the sole purpose of placing an action scene there. You must not design the set to fit the action by placing convenient objects in unrealistic ways solely to create a cool scene.
This rule is seldom obeyed in action-heavy movies where cars are constantly finding conveniently-placed ramps. Or where people leap out of windows and hey, guess what, there's a dumpster full of cardboard perfectly-positioned to let you land safely. The real world is not filled with perfectly-placed cables, ropes, ramps, landing pads, doors that can be blocked with beams handily placed nearby. Basically the world is not stocked with props.
Start with a realistic setting. Then, within that realistic setting, you carry out your action scene. The frame is not the enemy of the painting, the frame defines the painting's location in space.
2) Take Your Time
Even if you hate writing action scenes, take your time with it. If you're in a hurry to get done, the reader will sense your indifference. If you don't care enough to make the scene work, if you're in a hurry to move on to writing exposition or dialog, the reader will not take the scene seriously.
Action is choreography. Each move must make sense. Walk through it second-by-second, ensuring that C follows B follows A.
3) No Convenient Discoveries
Oh my God, crocodiles? What am I going to do? Oh, wait, now I remember: ejectum crocodilus! the convenient crocodile-killing spell!
Don't do that. It's a betrayal of the reader. It's the writer treating the reader like a fool.
4) Pain is. . . Painful.
You know how heroes can take a ten minute beat-down and all they have to show for it is a dribble of blood and a stiff shoulder? In real life a punch to the face from a dude who knows how to punch can break your teeth, smash your nose and give you a concussion. A serious beating puts you in the hospital for a week, eating through a tube.
I am a firm believer that violence without consequences is comedy, not action. You can drop an anvil on Bugs Bunny. If you drop one on a human you've either committed murder or you've severely crippled someone. If you want the reader to feel the violence then your characters have to feel it.
5) Signal Seriousness.
Right at the start of BZRK I introduce a character the reader will assume to be the hero. Then I killed him. That's a message to the reader: don't think I won't do it, because I just did.
You don't always have to kill someone in Chapter One, obviously, or kill anyone at all, but you want to push the limits of the story, you want to signal that you will not make things comfortable. You don't want to be predictable. Predictable is safe, and safe is the opposite of 'in danger.' If you're writing action you want the reader to feel the danger, and you don't want them to trust you not to do anything upsetting.
You want the reader to feel fear. You can't make her fear if she thinks you won't actually pull the trigger. I am sometimes accused (by parents, generally) of 'going too far;' I am never accused of writing a shitty action scene. If the reader knows you may 'go too far' they will feel the fear.
6)Detail.
There's a fine line between too much and too little detail. Too much and you're adding excess fat that'll slow the scene. Too little detail and the setting doesn't feel real. See everything in your head, describe enough to make it granular, real, specific. It can never be 'a room,' it's a specific room. It's not 'a riverbank' it's a specific river bank, maybe muddy, maybe concrete, maybe tangled tree roots.
When it comes to describing mayhem, again, detail. Your character isn't just stabbed, she's stabbed somewhere specific. The knife goes through her blue silk blouse. The blood oozes until the knife is pulled out and then it gushes. The blood stains the silk a different color. The blood drips from the blade. Pain comes later, what comes first is shock. The character claps a hand to the wound and it comes away smeared with her own blood. Detail.
7) Distort Consciousness.
I don't know how many of you have ever been in a fight, but danger distorts your senses and screws with your memory. A character in the middle of an action scene isn't seeing everything, he's picking out details he hopes will allow him to live. See the gun. See the finger tightening on the trigger. See the eyes of the shooter. Don't check the clock. Don't notice the shooter's shoes. Do notice the ding of a text as it distracts the shooter.
Play with time. Speed it up. Slow it down. Blur some things, show others in stark detail. Slow down to talk about heartbeat or breathing. Speed the bad guy up while your character seems to be moving through molasses. Slow down to take in an incredible scene. Turn hearing on and off. Have your character's hand move of its own volition, disconnected from consciousness.
Terror and the urge to survive alter your brain. You aren't a teacher or a librarian or a writer, you're an animal using all its senses and resources to stay alive. You are more focused than you have ever been in your life. You are not recalling the wise words your mother once told you. You are not thinking about your significant other, you are a cornered rat who will do anything - anything at all - to stay alive, and everything else is far, far away.
8)The Unexpected.
Use the unexpected cautiously and sparsely. Where you might want to have a bad guy say, "I'm going to enjoy killing you," have him say, "Don't struggle. Help me to kill you and you'll barely feel it." You can drop in bits of humor. You can use weird interruptions - a phone rings, a door opens, a passerby slips on the blood, a FedEx guy walks in with a package.
This throws the reader off. The reader thinks she knows how the scene will play out, she's read or seen hundreds of action scenes, and she can feel the beats. So mess with her. Throw her a curve ball. You don't want the reader knowing what's next, that drains the emotion.
And for fun you can subvert tropes, mess with the reader's know-it-all expectations. Remember the thing about the character who jumps out of a window and lands in a convenient dumpster? Have them jump, have the dumpster there. . . and have them miss and smash their head open on the steel wall of the dumpster. Hah! Fooled you.
9)Aftermath.
Show the consequences. Are you hurt? Where? How does it feel? Is there a dead body? If so, how does it lie, how does it smell, has it loosed its bowels? If you barely survived, are you elated? Exhausted? Sad? Jazzed?
It's also a useful trick to have the character take a beat to imagine how she will feel later, how this will sit in her memory, how she will justify it. This establishes a seriousness that will carry through into subsequent action scenes. Is there a secondary character watching and reacting? How do they see you now, with blood and gore all over you? Are they repelled?
TL;DR: Play fair with the reader, make the action fit the setting, use detail, show the reader you're unpredictable, play with distortion, surprise them and show consequences.
At least that's how I try to do it.
But I can write the hell out of an action scene. So, for those interested, here are my rules. Or suggestions. Anyway, here's what works for me:
1) Live With The Setting.
By this I mean that you should not design a setting for the sole purpose of placing an action scene there. You must not design the set to fit the action by placing convenient objects in unrealistic ways solely to create a cool scene.
This rule is seldom obeyed in action-heavy movies where cars are constantly finding conveniently-placed ramps. Or where people leap out of windows and hey, guess what, there's a dumpster full of cardboard perfectly-positioned to let you land safely. The real world is not filled with perfectly-placed cables, ropes, ramps, landing pads, doors that can be blocked with beams handily placed nearby. Basically the world is not stocked with props.
Start with a realistic setting. Then, within that realistic setting, you carry out your action scene. The frame is not the enemy of the painting, the frame defines the painting's location in space.
2) Take Your Time
Even if you hate writing action scenes, take your time with it. If you're in a hurry to get done, the reader will sense your indifference. If you don't care enough to make the scene work, if you're in a hurry to move on to writing exposition or dialog, the reader will not take the scene seriously.
Action is choreography. Each move must make sense. Walk through it second-by-second, ensuring that C follows B follows A.
3) No Convenient Discoveries
Oh my God, crocodiles? What am I going to do? Oh, wait, now I remember: ejectum crocodilus! the convenient crocodile-killing spell!
Don't do that. It's a betrayal of the reader. It's the writer treating the reader like a fool.
4) Pain is. . . Painful.
You know how heroes can take a ten minute beat-down and all they have to show for it is a dribble of blood and a stiff shoulder? In real life a punch to the face from a dude who knows how to punch can break your teeth, smash your nose and give you a concussion. A serious beating puts you in the hospital for a week, eating through a tube.
I am a firm believer that violence without consequences is comedy, not action. You can drop an anvil on Bugs Bunny. If you drop one on a human you've either committed murder or you've severely crippled someone. If you want the reader to feel the violence then your characters have to feel it.
5) Signal Seriousness.
Right at the start of BZRK I introduce a character the reader will assume to be the hero. Then I killed him. That's a message to the reader: don't think I won't do it, because I just did.
You don't always have to kill someone in Chapter One, obviously, or kill anyone at all, but you want to push the limits of the story, you want to signal that you will not make things comfortable. You don't want to be predictable. Predictable is safe, and safe is the opposite of 'in danger.' If you're writing action you want the reader to feel the danger, and you don't want them to trust you not to do anything upsetting.
You want the reader to feel fear. You can't make her fear if she thinks you won't actually pull the trigger. I am sometimes accused (by parents, generally) of 'going too far;' I am never accused of writing a shitty action scene. If the reader knows you may 'go too far' they will feel the fear.
6)Detail.
There's a fine line between too much and too little detail. Too much and you're adding excess fat that'll slow the scene. Too little detail and the setting doesn't feel real. See everything in your head, describe enough to make it granular, real, specific. It can never be 'a room,' it's a specific room. It's not 'a riverbank' it's a specific river bank, maybe muddy, maybe concrete, maybe tangled tree roots.
When it comes to describing mayhem, again, detail. Your character isn't just stabbed, she's stabbed somewhere specific. The knife goes through her blue silk blouse. The blood oozes until the knife is pulled out and then it gushes. The blood stains the silk a different color. The blood drips from the blade. Pain comes later, what comes first is shock. The character claps a hand to the wound and it comes away smeared with her own blood. Detail.
7) Distort Consciousness.
I don't know how many of you have ever been in a fight, but danger distorts your senses and screws with your memory. A character in the middle of an action scene isn't seeing everything, he's picking out details he hopes will allow him to live. See the gun. See the finger tightening on the trigger. See the eyes of the shooter. Don't check the clock. Don't notice the shooter's shoes. Do notice the ding of a text as it distracts the shooter.
Play with time. Speed it up. Slow it down. Blur some things, show others in stark detail. Slow down to talk about heartbeat or breathing. Speed the bad guy up while your character seems to be moving through molasses. Slow down to take in an incredible scene. Turn hearing on and off. Have your character's hand move of its own volition, disconnected from consciousness.
Terror and the urge to survive alter your brain. You aren't a teacher or a librarian or a writer, you're an animal using all its senses and resources to stay alive. You are more focused than you have ever been in your life. You are not recalling the wise words your mother once told you. You are not thinking about your significant other, you are a cornered rat who will do anything - anything at all - to stay alive, and everything else is far, far away.
8)The Unexpected.
Use the unexpected cautiously and sparsely. Where you might want to have a bad guy say, "I'm going to enjoy killing you," have him say, "Don't struggle. Help me to kill you and you'll barely feel it." You can drop in bits of humor. You can use weird interruptions - a phone rings, a door opens, a passerby slips on the blood, a FedEx guy walks in with a package.
This throws the reader off. The reader thinks she knows how the scene will play out, she's read or seen hundreds of action scenes, and she can feel the beats. So mess with her. Throw her a curve ball. You don't want the reader knowing what's next, that drains the emotion.
And for fun you can subvert tropes, mess with the reader's know-it-all expectations. Remember the thing about the character who jumps out of a window and lands in a convenient dumpster? Have them jump, have the dumpster there. . . and have them miss and smash their head open on the steel wall of the dumpster. Hah! Fooled you.
9)Aftermath.
Show the consequences. Are you hurt? Where? How does it feel? Is there a dead body? If so, how does it lie, how does it smell, has it loosed its bowels? If you barely survived, are you elated? Exhausted? Sad? Jazzed?
It's also a useful trick to have the character take a beat to imagine how she will feel later, how this will sit in her memory, how she will justify it. This establishes a seriousness that will carry through into subsequent action scenes. Is there a secondary character watching and reacting? How do they see you now, with blood and gore all over you? Are they repelled?
TL;DR: Play fair with the reader, make the action fit the setting, use detail, show the reader you're unpredictable, play with distortion, surprise them and show consequences.
At least that's how I try to do it.
