Category: action

            Hey!  Wanted to thank all of you who came out last weekend to the Writers Coffeehouse. Hopefully hearing me talk about writing in the real world was at least as semi-useful as all of this.

            Also—shameful capitalist plug—my new book, Ex-Isle comes out next week from Broadway Paperbacks.  Check out that fantastic cover over there on the right.  It’s book five in the ongoing Ex-Heroes series, and I happen to think it’s pretty cool.  Granted, I might be a bit biased…

            (the audiobook’s still three weeks out but it is coming, I promise)

            Anyway, enough about that. Now… story time.

            About fourteen years ago some friends and I were in a pretty serious car crash.  Someone sideswiped us as we were pulling onto the freeway and then sped off.  My friend’s SUV was slammed into the concrete wall, bounced off, then slammed into the wall again because the wheels had twisted around to send us right back into it.  We skidded ten or twenty feet scraping against the wall.  The first impact was so hard that the passenger side door crumpled in, hit me, and fractured my ribs on that side.  I also caught half the windshield with my face.  I remember clenching my eyes shut on instinct, what felt like gravel hitting my cheeks and mouth and forehead. While part of me knew (in the greater sense) that we were in the middle of a collision of some kind, another part of me was still trying to figure out what the hell was going on.  And there was so much noise.  Screams and hollering from friends, metal on concrete, metal bending, glass breaking, highway noise because the windows were gone.  It wasn’t until everything stopped that I realized how loud it had been.

            Now, I took a while to write that out, and a while for you to read it, but the truth is, it took seconds.  Six or seven seconds, tops. Really, at the moment, it was just a blur of sensations. I didn’t piece together what had happened—and what I’d experienced—until afterwards.

            Action, by its very nature, is fast.  It’s a blur.  If you’ve ever been part of an accident of some kind, a fight, a collision, or any other kind of really dynamic moment, you know what I’m talking about.  A huge amount of action is stuff we figure out after the fact.  In the moment, I’m not quite sure how my shirt got ripped or why my arm’s bleeding or… oh, geez, I think I whacked my head a lot harder that I thought.

            Here are a couple of tips on how I try to make my action scenes seem fun and cool.

            Keep it fast–Action can’t drag. If it takes a full page for someone to throw a punch and connect, things are happening in slow motion.  Even a paragraph can seem like a long time, especially once multiple punches are thrown.

            My personal preference is to try to not have action take much longer to read then it would to experience.  I trim fight scenes and action moments down to the bare minimum to give them (pardon the phrase) a lot of punch. One way I do this is to clump some actions together and let the reader figure out what happened on their own. 

            He slammed three fast punches into the other man’s kidney.

            Karen did something quick with her hands, and now she held the pistol while the mugger wailed and held his wrist.

            Keep it simple—I practiced martial arts for a while and I also have a lot of experience with  weapons thanks to my time in the film industry.  Even though I know lots and lots of terminology, I try not to use it.  That kind of thing can clutter up an action scene, especially when I’m using a lot of foreign languages or obscure terms.  I want this to move fast, and if my reader has to stop to sound out words and parse meanings from context… that’s breaking the flow.  If they need to figure out if a P-90 TR is a rifle, a pistol, or a fitness program… well, maybe they’ll come back to it after lunch.

            Remember, there’s nothing wrong with terminology, but there’s a time and a place for everything.  That time is rarely when someone’s swinging a baseball bat at your head.

            Keep it sensory—Kind of related to the above, and something I touched on in my story.  Action is instinctive, with a certain subtlety to it. There isn’t a lot of thought involved, definitely not a lot of analysis or pretty imagery.  Keeping in mind the fast, simple nature I’ve been talking about, I try to keep action to sounds, sights, and physical sensations.  I can talk to you about a knife going deep into someone’s arm, severing arteries and veins as it goes… or I can just tell you about the hot, wet smell of blood and the scrape of metal on bone.  Which gets a faster reaction?
            Granted, writing this way does make it hard to describe some things, but a lot of that gets figured out after the fact anyway.  My characters will have a chance to sort things out once things cool down.

            Keep it real—Like so many things in fiction, it all comes down to characters.  There’s a reason we can zone out dozens of attacks on the news but be gripped by a single one in a book.  Action needs to be based in real characters because my readers need to care about the people involved.  A stranger in a car crash is kind of sad in an abstract way, but Wakko in a car crash is a tragedy and we want constant updates.

            This also kind of works against the idea of “always start with action,” which is something I’ve talked about before.  It’s tough for readers to be invested in action when we don’t know the people involved.  If I start with an action scene it has to be twice as big to compensate for the fact that we don’t know the characters, and once it’s that big it’s going to effect the level of everything that comes after it.

            Now, as always, it’s pretty easy to find exceptions to these.  As I said, these are more tips than rules.  But there’s one particular exception I want to talk about.

            A pretty common character is, for lack of a better term, the fighting savant.  Batman, Jack Reacher, Melinda May, Ethan Hunt, Sarah Walker, Joe Ledger, Stealth—characters who’ve taken physical action to an art form through years of study and experience.  For these people to not use precise terminology for weapons or moves could seem a little odd.  It makes sense they’d be able to dissect action, picking out the beats and planning out responses like a painter reviewing their palette.

            But…

            Keep in mind, these characters by their very nature should be rare.  If I have a dozen utterly badass characters who all have badass moves with badass weapons… that’s going to get boring real quick.  It’s monotone.

            Also, keep the point of view in mind while writing.  Stealth may be a trained master of unarmed combat, but St. George gets by with his invulnerability and raw strength.  Whose narrative this is will affect how her actions are seen by the reader.

            And that’s that.  A handful of tips for writing killer action.

            Next time, I’d like to talk about, arguably, one of the finest episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that was ever produced.

            Oh, and  next Thursday I’ll be at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, blabbing away and signing copies of Ex-Isle.  If you’re in the area, please stop by and say “hullo.”

            Until then… go write.

             Remember, remember, the fifth of November…

            So, at the risk of possibly getting some grumbly comments, I wanted to talk for a little bit about a new buzzword I see popping up more and more often.  Agency.  Journalists and critics are latching onto it to talk about characters (often women and people of color, but I’ve seen it applied to characters of all genders and races). Like so many buzzwords, though, I rarely see it defined by the folks using it.

            Which, of course, makes it easier for them to use…

            This is a bit misleading, though. Agency isn’t a new word. It’s actually a fairly old sociology term (from the Enlightenment) that’s migrated into literature.  Well, migrated’s a bit misleading, too.  Maybe it was chloroformed and woke up tied to a chair, unsure what it was doing here.

            In a sociological and philosophical sense, agency refers, in simple terms, to free will. Can a person make their own choices and affect the world around them?  How much does the world or society they exist in constrain that ability to make choices? Does it cancel out free will altogether, or just the appearance of free will?  Is there a point where I no longer have free will?

            While this is fascinating stuff to debate over drinks, it doesn’t really have anything to do with literature.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, when I’m writing, I’m more or less the god of this little world I’m creating.  And I’m a micro-managing god, too.  None of the characters move, speak, or have a single thought without my say-so.  There is no free will. Zero.  Because I’m creating all of it.  Every sentence, every idea, every word, every punctuation mark.  It all comes from me.

            Okay, in all fairness, some of the punctuation comes from my beta-readers and copyeditor.

            When critics and literary pundits talk about characters having agency, at the core they’re talking about something we’ve addressed here many times. A a writer, I need to make my readers believe these characters are people who are having an actual effect on the story.  My characters shouldn’t be window dressing, they need to do things.  If I’m going to make a point of Wakko or Yakko or Dot being in my story, then there should be an actual reason they’re in the story.

            I read a book a while back that was your standard “chosen one shall save us” sort of thing.  A young girl—we’ll call her Phoebe—discovers her birthright and powers, must go into hiding, has to fight off enemies she didn’t know she had, needs to learn how to harness and direct her abilities.  We’ve all seen this a few dozen times at this point, right?

            Except… well, Phoebe didn’t really do anything.  She didn’t discover her powers, she learned about them from her parents.  She didn’t decide to go into hiding, she was told to go—pretty much forced.  There were two guardians who fought off the enemies for her (one actually sacrificed himself so she could get away).  Hell, when Phoebe finally got to the Tabernacle and began to train, people were even walking her through that.  She just kind of stood around looking dazed and confused.  Phoebe didn’t make an actual, independent decision about something until page 114.

            Not exactly inspirational, that chosen one.  In fact, for those first 113 pages Phoebe could’ve been a duffelbag full of towels all the other characters were handing off to one another.  She just didn’t do anything.

            Y’see, Timmy, my characters need to face challenges and need to respond to them.  They should make choices—ones that are consistent with who they are.  They need to be active, with their own thoughts and opinions.  And they should have a real affect on how the story plays out.

            Here’s a simple test we can perform.  Let’s say I scribble out a two or three page summary of my current novel or story or screenplay (choose which one applies to you).  I want to be as thorough as possible without changing how I’m telling the story.  So I put all the introductions, reveals, explanations, and so on in the same order they appear in the book.  Make sense?

            Okay, so let’s look at this.  What characters did I mention? Which ones did I skip over?  Reading through my summary, I mention Eli, Harry, Zeke, Theo, and Fifteen.  I don’t mention Eli’s childhood friends by name, the bus driver, the cashier, or the cigarette man.  That’s because they’re all supporting and background characters.  By nature of the beast, they should be a little more… well, two dimensional.  They’re the stepping stones and redshirts of our story, so we’re not going to focus on them too much.

           So let’s look at the characters we made a point of mentioning and naming.  These should all be important to the story, right?  Every one of them is key somehow.

            Now, take one of them out.

            If these are actual characters who are supporting the plot and making things happen, my story should fall apart without them.  If Dot can step in and immediately pick up the slack from Wakko’s absence… well, he can’t have been that important to things.  If nothing at all changes when Yakko vanishes, he definitely wasn’t important.  And if they’re not important, if they’re not having an effect… I really need to ask myself why they’re here.

            So do great stuff with your characters.  By having them do stuff.

            Next time… I’d like to talk about the bug problem.

            Sorry about last week.  Still juggling a few things and the ranty blog drew the short straw.  It happens.  Many thanks for your patience.

            It’s not that I didn’t have an idea.  There was a solid idea.  And there was enough to fill a regular post (about three and a half pages).

            Sometimes I don’t have as much, though, and that’s okay, too.  There’s been more than a few times that I’ve jotted off a quick page or so and called it good.  It’s not like the ranty blog has any guidelines about length.

            A lot of markets do, though.  Anthologies, magazines, and journals often have specific minimums and maximums in mind.  Most publishers (big and small) are going to have pretty firm ideas about what counts as a novella or a novel.  And what doesn’t.

            The catch, of course, is that sometimes my story just doesn’t fit with a certain market.  This isn’t a judgment, just a simple fact.  Sometimes SUVs are too big for garages.  Sometimes my car is too small for the bookshelf I’m trying to move.  If I try to claim the people who make bookshelves are biased against my car… well, I’ll look pretty silly.

            But you’re not here to listen to me blab about bookshelves.  I’m supposed to talk about what goes on the bookshelves.

            Sometimes I might really want to place a story somewhere and it just isn’t the right size.  Even if it’s my choice to self publish, it’s safe to say most folks are going to feel cheated if my “book” is only 40,000 words.  What I used to do in this case, and what I’ve seen a few people do recently, is to artificially inflate things.

            Inflation is, no big surprise, when I try to make something bigger by adding more of the same.  It’s when I come up with ways to make every ten word sentence reach fifteen or twenty words.  Or when a two page conversation stretches out to a whole chapter.  Or when I segue away from the main plot for a while and just kind of put it on hold until I get back.  

           These things aren’t happening because of poor editing.  Well, okay, a bit because of poor editing.  Really, they’re happening because I’m stretching to reach a goal that my story really wasn’t intended to reach.  At least, not in it’s current form.  So the story starts to lose its flow and spin its wheels a bit as the reader waits for… well, things to happen.

            Let me give you an example…

            Monday is the tenth anniversary of the premiere of LOST.  Yep, on September 22, 2004, Oceanic Flight 815 broke up in the air and crashed on an uncharted island in the South Pacific.  The thing is, they were only supposed to be there for three years.  Four tops.  But LOST was a huge show for ratings and the network didn’t want it to end.  So, the story started to inflate.  And inflate a little more.  And a little more.  And it started to flail because it was clear to even the most devoted fans of the show that a number of these third and fourth season stories were just… well, filler.  And once the end was in sight it all started to tighten up again.

            I used to do this a lot.  It was a standard part of my storytelling, to have pointlessly long conversations or needlessly elaborate descriptions.  But I eventually figured out this was all just fat on the meat of my story (sorry, vegetarian readers).  Now I cut all of that, and I can’t help but notice my success rate with placing stories and books has gone quite a bit higher since I did this.

            It also made me more aware of what my stories were.  Some of my ideas were executed in a way that pretty solidly made them short stories.  One or two of them were novellas.  Many of them were novels.  And there were one or two I thought were novels that, well, they were novellas at best.  The number of characters and plot points, the way I’d structured the whole tale… it really didn’t work for a larger format.  But I forced them into that format by inflating them rather than expanding them.

            Here’s a couple of things I learned to look for that could be signs of inflation…

            Repeating information—This can take many forms, and in a way I’d guess more than half the cases of inflation I’ve seen burn down to this.  Sometimes it’s revisiting the same information with no variation.  Sometimes it’s characters repeating a certain phrase again and again for no real reason.  I just finished one book where a woman keeps reminding everyone again and again and again that  “I have a schedule to keep.”  Honestly, I could’ve cut two solid pages out of the book just by removing half the instances of that phrase.

            There’s a writing idea I’ve mentioned before—something we don’t know is information, something we already know is noise.  This method of padding means a manuscript full of noise.

            Overly detailed descriptions—There’s two common versions of this.  One is a massive over-description of characters or objects or locations.  Two pages of irrelevant details about someone’s suitcase or the inside of a diner—no matter what some folks try to say, that’s just an attempt to stretch things out and it’s putting the plot and story on hold while I do.

            The other version is when I have a very complex set of actions like baking a cake or fixing a car or performing an operation and I describe every single step.  Every teaspoon, every bolt, every cut.  Granted, there are times I want to describe all this because I’m trying to build tension.  If I need to seal four bolts to keep the charging insurgents on the other side of this hatch, I’m going to describe every turn of the wrench and every time the threads catch.  But if there isn’t a need for such immediate tension, odds are this is just filler.

            Elaborate Action—This kind of ties to the above.  Some folks write the most over-detailed action scenes ever.  Each and every punch is described in painstaking anatomical detail.  Every time my pistol fires involves a list of facts about the action, the ammunition, and the sensation of recoil in exact foot-pounds.  As above, there are moments for this sort of thing.  A trained NSA agent probably isn’t going to have the same thoughts about firing a weapon that a suburban house-husband does.  But if it’s every moment, it’s just padding and it’s monotone.

            Overuse of names–Repeating names flattens out dialogue.  I’ve mentioned in the past that it’s just not natural to use someone’s name in every other response of a conversation.  So this is artificially adding to the word count and ruining the dialogue at the same time.

            There’s a corollary to this, too.  One book I read recently had a  character named Catherine, which is how she was described in all the text.  Except her friends called her Cathy in dialogue.  And the guy in her office always called her “system lord” for her computer skills and network access.   And her boss called her “Red” (for her hair).  And the semi love interest called her “surfer girl” (how they met).  And every one of these characters used their own name for her in every second or third line of dialogue.  So now, not only was it excess words and flat dialogue, it was also confusing as hell.

           Granted, these aren’t the only signs of things going wrong, but there ones I’ve learned to watch for in my own writing.

            This isn’t to say that a short story can’t be expanded into a novella or a full novel.  But if I’m going to do this, I need to actually add material.  Characters, plot points, story points… something.  I can’t just swell my story with empty words that don’t contribute anything.

            Because that’s the kind of thing that bursts apart with just the slightest prick.

            Next time I’d like to talk about Clint Eastwood.

            Until then, go write.

             Pop culture reference.  Huge one.

            I wanted to mention something that ties back to last week’s rant.  It’s about how I choose to begin a story.  I almost included it then, but I figured it worked as a stand-alone, and I’m trying to get away from the posts where I just blab on and on.

            Unless I really need to.

            Anyway…

            One piece of writing advice that people keep repeating is “start with action.”  It started cropping up in Hollywood as development people became more and more involved in shaping a story, mostly because it’s a very simple rule.  And from there it spread out to television, books, and other forms of storytelling.  I’m tempted to say this isn’t so much advice as a good solid rule.

            Now the catch (yeah there’s always a catch—if there wasn’t, I’d have nothing to write about on Thursdays) is that somewhere along the way a lot of people started pushing this rule when they didn’t really understand it.  Some folks hear “action” and immediately think explosions, ninjas, car chases, and giant monsters fighting giant robots.  So that’s what they tell people.

            Thing is, there are lots of issues if I’m going to start with Action (capital A).  One of the biggest is that I can’t start at big.  If I start at big, I’ve got nowhere to go.  Granted, the tension level in my stories should go up and down.  But if my first point is 9.5 out of ten, it means everything after this either has to be a huge drop or it can only squeak half a point higher.  Starting at 9.5 to 10  means every character arc, every bit of tension, every moment of action has pretty much topped out on page one.  There’s nowhere else to go.

            Also, let’s be honest… some stories just aren’t conducive to Action.  What kind of great action scene could I begin To Kill A Mockingbird with?  Or (500) Days of Summer?   The Notebook?  Heck, how many romantic comedies begin with a big action scene?  Action (still capital A) is great for… well, action tales and some genre stuff, but there’s tons of stories that this advice just will not work for.

            And because of that last issue, sometimes writers will force action into a story that doesn’t really need it.  Or shouldn’t have it.  But they’ve been told they need to start with action, so they come up with a way to cram it in.

            Y’see, Timmy, when I say starting with action should be considered a rule, I’m not talking about martial arts or gunfire or high speed bank robberies.  I just mean action in the classic definition of the word.  I need to start with something happening.  Because if  there isn’t something happening, what’s the point of this?

            For the record, this is why I usually shouldn’t begin with five pages of backstory or a random character moment.  I don’t want to hear about what happened before—that’s starting in reverse.  I want to begin with my story already on the move, heading forward.  As I’ve mentioned before, stories are like sharks.  If they’re not moving, they die.

            “Something happening” can mean anything.  Washing a car is action.  Cooking dinner is action.  Hurrying to make it to the meeting I’m late for is action.

            I mentioned last week that most Jack Reacher books begin with the main character in very subdued, quiet settings.  The show Orphan Black begins with a woman on a train and offending some people with her free use of profanity.  Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep starts with a little boy who refuses to use the bathroom.  Most episodes of Castle and Elementarybegin with someone discovering a body, but rarely with the actual murder.

            One of my own books, Ex-Heroes, begins with a woman on guard duty watching a zombie walk into a wall.  Then another character shows up, they talk for a bit, and she goes back to watching the zombie.  That’s all of chapter one.   The sequel begins with a Fourth of July party.  The latest book begins with a girl talking to her therapist about her dreams.

            Want a better example?  A bigger one, perhaps…?

            Captain America: The Winter Soldier has pretty much been the smash hit of the year so far.  It’s a Marvel movie, it has a huge cast of established and new superhero characters.  It even (arguably) has a trio of giant killer robots.  It’s pretty much the definition of a summer action blockbuster.

            How does it begin?

            The Winter Soldier begins with two men doing laps around the National Mall in Washington.  That’s it.  Two guys out for their morning run.  One’s a bit faster than the other, but it’s not exactly a high-tension scene.  And that’s almost the first five minutes of the movie.

            But they’re doing something.  So it’s starting with action.

            Next time… well, I have limited ideas for next time.

            Until then, go do something.

            Maybe write.