by Ryan Edel
My thanks to Ryan for contributing “Writing Action, Parts 1 & 2,” which I’ll post on consecutive days. Enjoy…
The evil twin brother antagonist has triggered his plan for world domination. The schoolyard bully has just laid eyes on your plucky protagonist. A crew of drunken varsity frat boys has just mistaken your heroine for Miss December Last Year.
Now comes the action scene.
And you don’t dare skip it – you’ve raised the stakes too high for that. Death’s knocking at the door with a shotgun – readers need to know what happens. And they won’t settle for a summary.
A line like “little Lizzie scooped up the world-devouring nanodes and threw them into the bully’s face while convincing the frat boys to leave her alone” will kill the momentum you’ve built
So where to start?
First off, center your writing. Ignore the ending you want and focus on the beginning you already have. We have the twin-brother’s world-devouring nanodes (whatever those are), a bully, some varsity frat boys, and Lizzie. Let’s say Lizzie is sixteen and lives with her parents while attending high school. Will Lizzie reprogram the nanodes to save the Earth from Global Warming while applying lessons from Abnormal Psychology to convince the college boys to go home? Not likely….
Trying to write an ending like this will lead to frustration for you and boredom for the reader. Instead focus on Lizzie as she is. Is she small for her age and afraid of spiders? Then she’ll use her dog’s pooper-scooper to dig up the nanodes before flinging them in bully-boy’s face – she does that with spiders all the time.
This kind of detail not only humanizes your protagonist, it keeps the story credible.
Everyone knows that the good guys win, but it’s how they win that matters. If Super-Lizzie could have boiled the nuts off those frat guys from fifty yards off with her x-ray-power-vision, then where’s the conflict in that? Start with believable characters and write with their limitations in mind. Force your favorite characters take care of themselves, and they will. Even if it takes a pooper-scooper.
The next step is to ensure that the details you include are both specific and relevant. A specific detail might be that the Guatemalan Black Tarantula has three-inch long furry legs – so what? A relevant detail would be that Lizzie hates spiders – but doesn’t everyone? When the local bully pins Lizzie’s arms to a tree and then dangles a spider the size of her face right in front of her nose, you don’t even have to write in the scream. Especially when those big hairy legs brush against her eyelashes.
Once you’ve mastered these details, the trick is to keep the action going while maintaining reader interest.
One way to do this is through back-and-forth struggle. The antagonist delivers a punch, the protagonist kicks back, the antagonist reaches for a tarantula To maintain the tension, you must keep the outcome uncertain until the end. For example, Lizzie’s got that spider in her face. She lurches her head to the right and bite’s the bully’s hand – he drops the spider. But then the spider’s on her shirt. Omigod, she thinks, I have to get his thing off me!
One of the college boys grabs her arm – she kicks him in the shin. There’s another college guy – the big, chubby one. Lizzie grabs the spider off her own shirt and screams at the feel of those legs in her palm. She throws it at the college dude, and he falls back. But then the bully’s back up. His hand’s bleeding, and he wants blood-for-blood.
Lizzie breaks out that pooper scooper and threatens to smear some brown residue across his downy-fresh NBA jersey. In the background, her brother the evil scientist laughs – the flesh-eating nanocites have already surrounded the city. Lizzie smacks him in the face with the scooper. “I’m gonna tell Mom!” she threatens.
As you do this, maintain your pacing. The example I just gave was very summarized, and the sentences were very long. Long sentences read slow. To quicken the pace and heighten the tension, write short:
“You won’t tell Mom,” he said. “That’s lame.”
Lizzie remembered her dog. She grabbed her brother’s shirt. “Fluffy’s out there.”
Evil brother snickered. “Ever heard of a leash law?”
Lizzie punched him like she’d seen on TV – hard in the gut. He crumpled to the ground. Her knuckles hurt only a little.
Then hands grabbed her from behind. It was the frat boys. The chubby one held the spider on the end of a stick. “Now it’s your turn,” he said.
These techniques will keep your action scenes exciting, moment-for-moment. But finishing an action scene requires a bit of special finesse. We’ll look at that tomorrow.
Ryan Edel is a former student of Bill Henderson. In workshops, he’s best known for his insatiable lust for action. He has served in the U.S. Army as a paratrooper in 82nd Airborne, and he will begin MFA studies at Johns Hopkins this fall. He hopes that moving to Baltimore will provide more opportunities for hand-to-hand and street-to-street combat than Afghanistan did.
Check out Ryan’s world at http://www.12WritingWorkshopsOnline.com.
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