5 Ways to Improve Your Action Sequences

During the NaNoWriMo Now What? Months, we’re focused on helping you revise, edit, and publish your story. Today, NaNoWriMo writer Bethany Nolan shares some editing advice on improving action scenes in your novel:

Here’s my thought process: if you’re good at editing, what does it matter how your first drafts look?

With NaNoWriMo behind us, many of you might be picking your novel back up, dusting it off, and giving it its first real read. And some of you might be finding that those pesky action scenes just don’t play out how you imagined them. Here are five things to keep in mind when you’re trying to make your action scenes come to life on the page the way they did in your head:

1. Short sentences are key.

Action relies on pacing, so things need to happen. Your characters are dodging and ducking, they’re throwing punches, they’re running—they need to keep moving, so your text does, too.

In a fight, there isn’t time to think long thoughts; so short, to-the-point sentences will pick up the pace and keep the scene grounded in the action.

2. Action words for action sequences.

Consider your verbs.

You don’t need to say that Person A took one punch and another and another, when you can say that Person A is being pummeled. Pummeled is a harder word than hit over and over.

What sounds more like how a gunshot feels to you? The bullet entered their shoulder, or the bullet slammed into their shoulder? Which gives the image of the victim falling back with the force? Which one makes you feel like you’re there, watching the bullet fly?

The harder the word, the harder the punch.

3. What’s important?

I get it, your action hero has just entered a warehouse and the gunfire has been raining down for about three sentences now. Do I need to know the exact layout of the warehouse? Or do I need to know about the atmosphere; the flickering lights, the blood-splattered floor, the thumping footsteps? Or, better yet, should we know about this before the gunfire even starts up?

We want to propel the action forward, so we need to keep the information relevant. Your character has spotted the figure in the window to the office, watching the battle. We need to know about that more than we do about how many crates are lining the shelves.

What’s going to push your action forward? What’s going to raise the threat?

4. Who’s your writing hero?

Who has written action before you? What did you like about it? Did they outline every hit, or did they focus on the roundhouse kick at the end? Did they acknowledge the bullet piercing the skin as it happened, or two minutes later, as an afterthought? Did they describe their fights like a prose poem, or with the least amount of words possible?

You have your action sequence in front of you, but maybe it needs an injection of influence from someone else’s hero. What makes Lee Child’s Jack Reacher fights so effective? Where did the action in The Hunger Games hit you hardest? How can you make your hero as effective as theirs?

(If you need extra help with this, Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer might be up your alley.)

5. Does it read like an action movie?

It’s all well and good speeding up the pace by shortening your sentences, finding punchier verbs and cutting out filler words, propelling your action forward and writing a fight that Lee Child would be proud of—but it needs to read that way for other people, too.

So, if you’re stuck or lost, or you’ve taken it as far as you think you can go, don’t be afraid to show it to someone else and ask questions. Provide questions, even; give them things to look out for and ask follow ups for a deeper understanding of their feelings.

And don’t worry, as with all writing, rules have exceptions. Maybe your action sequence might work best with a Sherlock Holmes-esque analysis of the battleground, or maybe finding weaker words will show how poor someone is at hand-to-hand combat.

Just keep writing and editing, and you’ll find that every draft is better than the last.

Bethany Nolan is a Creative and Professional Writing bachelor’s student and a lover of ghosts, magic and space adventures. She’s also biding her time until the inevitable zombie apocalypse, when she can take on the zombie-killing role she was born to play. Her poetry chapbook about Greek mythology is called LEGENDS and her twitter, where she often rambles about said Greek mythology, is @tempestaurora.

Top photo by Thao Le Hoang on Unsplash.