 Action/Adventure: August 11, 2010 Issue [#3910] |
  Action/Adventure
This week: All About the Action Edited by: NanoWriMo2018 Into the Earth  
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Hiking. It's MY Action/Adventure! |
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Creating solid action scenes requires a balance of description, and dialogue presented in a 'show more than tell' fashion. Add lots of verbs, and boom! you've got yourself am action scene. Okay, so yeah, there's a little more to writing than that; but, boiled down to it's simplest form, action-in the form of verbs, + description + dialogue = action scene.
How?
Action is the star - Don't be afraid to let action steal the show. Deep in the middle of a fight where the characters are duking it out on the rooftop of a Manhattan 55 story apartment building, readers don't want to hear what the hero ate for breakfast. Furthermore, now's not the time to go into surrounding detail. The tighter the writing, the faster the pace will come off to the reader. Readers do want to know; who threw the first blow? Where did it land? Did the aggressor crack a knuckle? Did he draw blood?
Involve the senses - the thud the villain's body makes when he falls on the ground. The screech of the wheels the car makes as it's backing out of the driveway...the splash heard when the antagonist tosses important evidence into the river....
Dialogue to a minimum - like description, the quicker you put something down, the faster pace it seems to the reader. Wordy dialogues slow down action scenes. Keep things as short as possible. In other words...now's not the time for a Sunday-type sermon.
Up close and personal - Zoom in on your description. Instead of giving the reader the big picture, give him several enlargements of pieces of that picture.
Before you begin
Study your scene. Read your favorite authors. If your action scene shows a huge fire, and how people were rescued then grab a few books, thumb through the pages, (read and study) the ones similar to what you're after. Even if it's not a fire scene...you can look at style and format of your favorite authors. How do they move from back-story to action scene?
Watch your favorite movies and TV shows. With DVR's you can slow down scenes frame by frame, thus giving you more insight on what makes a great action sequence pop.
Write your rough draft.
Write your scene quickly. During the rough draft stage, don't concern yourself with grammar, punctuation, or repetitive words. Use as many verbs as you can...even if you repeat them.
Revise, revise, revise
Remember, the goal is short, even choppy type sentences...description with lots of verbs(pull out the thesaurus)...dialogue without long-winded sermons. Read your work out loud. |
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A Ravenclaw bookworm discovers a white knight of a different sort. HP fanfic; pre-DH.
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