Showing posts with label action. Show all posts
Showing posts with label action. Show all posts

Friday, September 17, 2021

Writing Action

To write solid action scenes, start by understanding humans. Action is almost always the result of overwhelming emotion. If inertia is the strongest force in the universe, you need something that shatters it. That something becomes the scene’s (and your character’s) DRIVER. Example: Breaking Bad. The US healthcare system failed Walter. Rage and desperation drove him and the series. Maybe you can see how that emotion also drove the rising arc of increasingly brutal action as the series progressed.

Once you have a driver, you take human physiology into account. It should be familiar. Fight, flight, or freeze. You must know your character(s) well enough to know what prompts would make them fight, which would make them run, and which would make them freeze. Characters can progress from one stage to another. For example, you hear a noise in the house at 2AM. You freeze. It’s in your bedroom! You throw off the freeze and run for your life. It’s a bat fluttering around the room. Now you slip into fight mode – not that you’re going to start swinging at the bat (unless you are – in that case, get on with your bad self) – you’re going to shift into action. You close the bedroom door to keep the bat contained, and you open your window so the bat can escape. Maybe you switch on a light to encourage the bat to land so you can grab it in a towel and yeet it from the window. The process can go in reverse, too. Fight first, run when fighting isn’t working, then freezing and playing dead when even running fails.

Finally, it helps to consider which kind of action scene you need.

  1. Active
  2. Reactive

An active scene is self-initiated. Action results from internal stimuli (emotion, desire, longing, etc.) Key identifier: A decision or choice is made.

A reactive scene is externally initiated. Action results from external stimuli or events (being pursued, being caught, someone throws a punch.) Key identifier: Surprise.

Active scenes tend to follow a galvanizing moment. Think of Star Wars: A New Hope. The Millennium Falcon gets tractored into the Death Star. Luke finds out Leia is on the station. She’s the reason he’s in this mess in the first place. His family was killed because of her droids. He makes the decision to rescue her. (It’s common for Active scenes to follow Reactive scenes – someone comes for you – now you’re going to decide your next action.)

Reactive scenes follow a shock or a surprise. Someone jumps out of a dark alley with a gun. At its purest, most primitive, this is the leopard chasing you across the savannah because it wants to invite you to lunch the hard way.

Driver. Fight, flight, or freeze. Active or Reactive Scene.

Next: Chemistry. The primitive portion of the human brain produces chemicals when it perceives danger. Those chemicals are primal – they are old – they are bound up in survival – they can be brutal. These chemicals shut down executive function. Thinking stops. Reaction and instinct take the wheel. For the most part, emotion – except for fear – stops. Time enough for that after you survive. This is especially true for reactive scenes. Active scenes offer more leeway around thinking and feeling because the character may never tip over into fight, flight, or freeze – even if they end up actually fighting. Because it was a decision, characters can retain executive function longer and may only lose it if their plans fail.

Now you need to know the purpose of the scene. You need to know what the protagonist and the antagonist stand to win and lose in the scene. How does the action serve the character arc and the story arc?

Next, sketch out the skeleton of the action beats in the scene. (Example: Vlad jumps out of the dark into Jenny’s path. She runs. Struggle at the doorway knocks free splinter of wood. When he hits her and she falls, she grabs the wood. He picks her up by the throat. She stabs him through the heart.) Now sketch in the dialogue if it’s necessary for the scene. Go back and fill in the POV character’s sensory and emotional detail. Use a light touch in a reactive scene (in the event that Jenny wasn’t looking for Vlad and this is a huge shocker.) Layer in more sensory and emotional detail if it’s an active scene (Jenny decided to go hunting Vlad, cause this girl is done.)  Finally, flesh out the action. Focus on crisp, clear stage directions. Pierce Jenny’s hand with the sharp wood and let the blood run so you can lead up to driving that stake into Vlad’s heart. You don’t need every single move. You do need to plug any ‘how did they get there’, ‘where did that wolf come from’ holes in the scene.

Your action scenes need to result in emotion and thought after the action dies down. They should change the character(s), drive the story arc, and the character arc. Also, once you've done this layer technique a time or two, you'll just write an action scene without having to block it out so technically. And wow, hasn’t this turned into a whole-ass treatise?

Which means it’s time for the standard disclaimer: This is only ONE way to write action. It’s a tool I find useful. Pick it up. See if it fits your hand. If it doesn’t, toss it like a hot rock. It’s only as good as the help it provides.

Friday, June 18, 2021

How I Hook

 Hooks? We don't need no stinkin' hooks. 

I'm reading over the list of seven hooks and either I don't understand them - entirely possible because this week is the first time I'd seen them. Seems to me they lack a little imagination because I don't see an action hook. And y'all, that's my favorite! 

Though I am in a class right now that's teaching me to hook via character. This is alien territory for me, but in a romance novel, it makes total sense that you'd want your readers to connect with the characters before, or as, the story action kicks off.

  • Enemy Within: Sun glinting off the barrel of a gun stopped Captain Ari Idylle dead in her tracks. (I'm calling this the Oh, shit hook.)
  • Enemy Games: The communications panel trilled, echoing the call in the confines of the tiny cockpit. (Uhm. I dunno? This is the point where everything changes for the hero. Does that make this a why hook? Or just a weak hook?)
  • Enemy Storm: Holy Gods, don’t know what I did to piss you off, but dropping a starship on my head is overkill. (Ah, Edie. I'd like to imagine this is action and character combined, but that could be wishful thinking.)
  • Enemy Deliverance: Even though her eyes were closed, even though she’d done her best to relax in the tiny barracks pod that qualified as a bunk, even though rainwater dripped on her mattress in a lulling plip, plip, plip, Ildri Bynovan wasn’t asleep. (Character and setting.)
  • Enemy Mine: Priority Two Alert. Assassination contract for Captain Xiao Zhong verified. Guild assassin Mekise Tolenga en route.(Definitely a why)

 You can see a major change between books 1 to 3 and book 4. Also, sneak peak. You're getting to look at an opening line for a book that hasn't been published yet.

Well okay, Marcella. That's the SFR. What about the others?

Look at the fantasies.

  • Blood Knife: The sweet scent of coffee spiked with caramel syrup preceded the shadow that obscured the golden October sunshine pouring into my office. (Setting I think.)
  • Emissary: When I walked out of the Red Desert into the thin strip of fertile land I’d left as a girl, I barely recognized it. (I have no idea what this is.)
Urban Fantasy
  • Nightmare Ink: Funny how longing for something you can’t have gets blown away in the first swirl of snowflakes heralding an oncoming blizzard. (No idea what this is.)
  • Bound by Ink: Isa hadn’t intended to end up in a crowd of people so soon after getting rid of a Living Tattoo who’d wanted to kill her and take over her body for his own use. (This must be the Why.) 
The paranormal.
  • Damned if He Does: The problem with being damned was that no one would meet your eye.(Character, I think.)

Huh. Look at that. I only thought that action was my preference. Looking through my first lines, it looks like I've done far more character hooks than action hooks.

My illusions are so shattered. What is writing even?