Mary-Sue: Who is She?

In a Fight

From a petty cat fight with slaps and hair pulling, to an action-packed superhero vs. super villain brawl, action scenes can start anywhere; however writing them effectively is harder than planning on who wins.  It isn’t just about writing down who hit who, and if you don’t describe how a character handles the situation, you can accidentally make him or her seem stronger or even weaker than they should be.  If the character seems too powerful without explanation, your audience will point the finger and label it a Mary-Sue, and you don’t want that (unless you’re purposefully writing a parody).  Action scenes, whether it’s important to the overall plot or not, are an effective tool to establish your characters’ strengths and weaknesses—weakness being just as essential to highlight, if not more so, than strengths, but first, you have to know how to write a fight scene in order to know where to insert these vital traits.

The most important rule that you need to know is that the action always comes before the reaction.  Of course, if there is no action there is no reason to react, but what I’m talking about is how you order it in your sentences.  You cannot use passive sentences in an active scene.  It forces your reader to slow down even though something is happening one after another.  The scene has to be fast paced, so you have to use active sentences.  Here’s an example of a passive sentence:

Passive:  Tenshi stepped back when the sword was swung by the enemy.

In this sentence, it starts off active, but is actually a passive sentence.  Tenshi stepped back is perfectly active, but everything after is passive, which will be made clear later in this entry.  Besides the passivity in this sentence, I do think that the ordering of the sentence is a problem.  Obviously, Tenshi reacted before there was an action, which doesn‘t make sense unless he was psychic and could predict what was going to happen next, but even so using an active voice is still better because the audience would be on the same wavelength as the character.  If I cut that sentence, “Tenshi stepped back,” your audience doesn’t know why Tenshi is stepping back.  There are other ways this could be rearranged, and it would still be passive, but what you should be aiming for is to have an active sentence:

Active:  The enemy swung his sword toward Tenshi’s neck.  He stepped back to avoid the singing blade.

Active doesn’t necessarily mean shorter, but it gets right to the point, and that’s what action scenes are.  They get right to the point in establishing who’s doing what and what affects are happening as they are happening.  The point is in this example is someone with a sword swung at Tenshi, he dodged, and the sword rang as it cut air.  Just because something is happening at a fast pace doesn’t mean there isn’t enough room to use description also.  It’s just that using a passive tone ruins the flow and breaks the action to reaction pattern.

Other ways to identify passive sentences is when the subject does not perform the act, but the act is performed on the subject.

Genna was hit with the crowbar.

Or when the subject or object is preceded by the word “by”.

Genna was hit with the crowbar by James.

Both of these happen in the first example.  While these sentences may not be so bad by themselves, they would be in the middle of an intense scene.

James slapped Genna, making a loud clap, and making Genna cry into the school sink.  One moment it was numb, the next, it stung.  She didn’t know what to do or how to escape from him.  Genna spied a broom leaning against the door behind him.  James tried to grab Genna’s arm, but she shoved him square in the chest.  He toppled over a desk.  She ran.  He sticks out his legs, tripping her to her hands and knees.  James gets up and gets the broom.  Genna was hit with the broom handle (by James).