Writers' Workshop

Execution Help: Writing Action Scenes

This chapter was requested by JSNoel

Okay, I'll be blunt. Writing Action scenes is hard, no matter the genre of your story. Actually, the more action scenes you have, the easier it gets to write them because you need to add less and less detail as you go along, but if the story is centered around action, you need to work really hard on the first ones.

I'm by no means an expert in writing action, but I have written my fair share of beat ups, shoot outs, and sword fights (Yes, I wrote sword fights).

So, with all my experience, I'm going to give you the following eye opening advice: there's no sure-fire way to write perfect action. So I can only give you a few tips.

Why writing action scenes is hard

One word: pacing. The pacing in action scenes is ridiculously hard to get right. If you describe too much, it slows the pace, if you do it too little, it's bland and choppy. Long sentences kill the pace, short ones make the prose choppy.

So you basically either go for boring or for telegraphic. And going between them is very hard.

Tips and Tricks

First tip: there is no such thing as a perfect action scene. Everyone's pacing is different so there will always be people who tell you it's either too fast or too slow or both.

Right, now that's out of the way, let's get down to some business:

💥 Action and sentence structure:

You'll get a lot of advice saying you should use short choppy sentences for action scenes. Yes and no.

Yes, because short sentences create a tense, urgent atmosphere.

No, because overusing short sentences makes the scene look like a telegram.

You shouldn't ever give up on variation and moderation. The only difference in action scenes is you can switch the balance of short vs long and use more of the short ones. Though you should really try to not use more than two consecutive short sentences.

💥 Action and description:

Yes, you need description during action scenes. But these descriptions should be mostly of the action. To make a scene come to life, you must:

💣Know your character: surprising, right? But it actually makes perfect sense. The amount of description of surroundings, reactions, blood and gore, depend entirely on your character's personality.

Are they an overthinker? Are they cold and calculated? Over emotional?

This is a mistake a lot of action scene writers tend to do. When they write a fight or explosion or whatever, they get so sucked up into the technical aspects that they forget to stay in character.

You can't have a whiny teen plunged into a fight and have them owning it like a boss with no fear, no regret, no horror. Just like you can't have a seasoned fighter suddenly break down because they missed their target.

💣Know how basic human beings work:

Action brings out the visceral in people. This goes beyond the character you've built. This is basic survival instinct. So no reader will tolerate a brief intermission to describe the room the scene takes place in or the color of the curtains. Environment description should be kept to a minimum.