Over the years, I have noticed that most of these folks have one thing in common: they’re starting with the small picture, with what their viewpoint character sees and experiences. This is not necessarily a bad thing (for a character-centered writer, it is the obvious, logical, most comfortable way to do it), but the folks who have the most difficulty seem to me to be the ones who really don’t want to consider the larger picture at all. They’re so focused on what happens to Jane or John and how it affects them physically and emotionally that they don’t want to think about practical aspects like the choreography of a fight scene or the strategy and tactics of a battle.

And choreography is exactly what it is. Action scenes in a story are among the least random scenes one can write. They have to be, precisely because they often involve a larger-than-usual cast of characters, a bigger-than-normal amount of space, and a lot of confusion and many possible outcomes.

When you have six characters sitting around a table in a bar and talking, the rest of the bar and the patrons and bartender are background – they’re present, but they’re a sort of shadowy backdrop to what’s important in the scene. The minute one of those six characters throws a punch and knocks one of the other characters over the next table, all the rest of the space in the bar and the other people in it become important, because their actions and reactions are going to have as much impact on the way the rest of the scene develops as the actions of the six characters you started with. You can’t have a character jump off a balcony if you don’t know the balcony is there to begin with.

There are a lot of things one needs to know in order to choreograph an action scene, some of which won’t actually get into the story at all. The first thing that comes to mind is where the scene takes place, and under what conditions. If your main character is on a broad plain on a clear day, the action will play out very differently that it would if she’s in the dank network of caves under the city, whether the action is a chase, a fight, a battle, or an attempt to sneak past a sentry.

The writer also probably needs to have some idea what the action scene is about, how many other people are involved, and how many of the people involved are actually going to interact with the main character. If Janet is running through a string of deserted back alleys, being chased by two city guards, what the action is and how it’s presented will be very different from a scene where George is one of two thousand archers defending the city walls against the invaders’ army.

This is one of the spots where people go wrong. They think that they don’t need to know any more about what’s going on than their viewpoint character does. The trouble is that if the author wants the dragon to come swooping unexpectedly out of the mist in front of the viewpoint character, he/she has to have some idea how that dragon found and followed that character in all that fog, and whether it’s plausible that a large, reasonably intelligent flying creature would go swooping around in a forest or city when it can’t see where obstacles or the ground is. (If the dragon has the kind of sonar bats do, fine…but if the author doesn’t think about it, there are likely to be inconsistencies over the course of the story that undermine the author’s credibility with the reader.)

Planning and choreographing an action scene doesn’t have to be done in a lot of detail, except for the bits that directly affect the viewpoint character. You want more than “The invaders attack and are beaten back,” but you don’t necessarily need every detail of the fire-fight that takes place around the main city gates if George is stationed on the opposite side of the city.

It’s especially important for writers who are deeply character-centered and seriously focused on their characters’ interior experiences to figure out what the exterior, physical environment is like and what the actual physical moves are that the character makes, and then make sure that enough of that gets into the scene. It is far too easy to write something like “George looked on in anguish as the king died” without bothering to mention that the king has just had his head cut off by the ogre that George’s arrow missed a few seconds earlier (hence George’s extra anguish and guilt about it).

Once you have a good idea how things go and what’s happening overall, you have the problem of presenting it to the reader. For big, sweeping, complicated things like battles, one common method is for the author to drop into an omniscient narrative summary, especially if the viewpoint character is an officer or commander who’d presumably have to be aware of the overall sweep of events. The obvious alternative is to stick to the confusing man-in-the-front-lines viewpoint for the main fight, and fill in the Big Picture stuff after everything is over, as the viewpoint character finds out from other people that the reason the reinforcements were late was because of the explosion that took out a section of the eastern wall. In a novel, especially if there are multiple viewpoints, authors often cut back and forth between various viewpoint character moments and an omniscient overview of the way the whole battle is going.

The fewer characters who are involved in an action scene and the smaller the space in which it takes place, the less useful the omniscient narrative summary technique becomes, because the fewer the characters and the smaller the space, the easier it is for the viewpoint character (and the reader) to comprehend all of the action at once. A scene in which two sailors struggle to keep a small boat from capsizing in a violent storm can be as gripping an action scene as a major battle, but the boat scene is more likely to be clear and comprehensible to the reader without the writer having to back off and explain the Big Picture.

I was reminded of this last week when a good friend started panicking over her first battle scene. So I thought I’d do a post on How To Write Battles When You Don’t Know Anything About Battles.

The first thing you do is to learn something about strategy and tactics. This means hitting the library; there are tons of good books on the subject. However, when I hit the library, back when, I read several books on strategy and tactics and emerged no wiser than before, because even the basic ones were too advanced for my meager level of knowledge on the subject.

So I hit the children’s section.

Seriously, if you really, truly don’t understand basics terminology (which was at least half my problem with the adult-level “beginner” books), the children’s section is the place to go. I think I worked my way down to middle-grade books before I found something comprehensible, and then started working my way back up the age groups. It was exceedingly useful.

The second thing I did, which I also highly recommend if you can manage it, is to find someone who actually knows something about military strategy – a wargamer, a military history buff, someone who’s actually been in the army or navy. Then you ask them to help you plan the battle, and take copious notes on what sorts of questions they ask you, because those are all the things you need to know in order to figure out what the battle is going to look like.

The very first thing my military consultant asked was “What kind of terrain are they going to be fighting in?” And he didn’t mean “plains” or “hills” or other general descriptors; he wanted a map showing the rivers, woods, hills, city walls, etc. in the immediate vicinity of the battle, along with basics like what the weather had been like and where the sun would rise and set.

The next thing he asked was “What kind of forces does each side have?” This included numbers, equipment, and capabilities for every segment of the armies from cavalry and infantry to archers and magicians. This is moderately complex even if the armies are all “regular” troops of the sort you’d find in real life, because you have to decide whether the army is balanced between infantry, ranged attackers, and cavalry, or whether it’s predominately one kind of troops with few or none of the others. When you have multiple species involved – aliens, elves, dwarves, etc. – or futuristic technologies, it goes from moderately complex to insane.

Which is why most writers, especially those of us for whom the military stuff is not a major interest (to put it mildly), have to plan things out in advance.

For writers, the next thing you want to know is how you want the battle to come out. Is it a clear win for one side or the other? A win, but with major casualties to some portion (or all) of the winner’s army? Indecisive? You also want to know where you want your heroes/protagonists to end up, plot-wise, at the end of the battle, so that you can design the fight to put them where they need to be.

As regards that last, battles are usually a lot easier to manipulate than bar fights, because, as the author, you have a lot more ways to make things go the way you want them to. You can manipulate the size of the armies, their composition, the supplies and training each side has, the communications they have, how well each side knows the terrain they’ll be fighting on, whether it’s been raining or not. You can turn the battlefield into a sea of mud that will bog down the attackers’ cavalry or provide strong, gusty winds that play hob with the defenders’ archers. You can arrange for reinforcements to arrive early, late, or not at all. And so on.

Once you know what you have to work with and where you want to go, you get to sit down and design two battle plans, one that makes sense for the attackers and one that makes sense for the defenders, given the kinds of forces each of them has and what they know about the terrain and the troops that are facing them. The thing to bear in mind here is that neither commander is going to have any idea what the other intends to do unless there are spies of some sort involved, so it’s really unlikely that at this point, the two plans will fit together neatly.

In fact, you don’t want the two plans to fit together neatly. Each commander is going to be trying to do things the other one isn’t going to expect and be ready for, and they each ought to succeed at least some of the time.

That’s the next bit – when you set the battle in motion and work out how things happen on the macro level all along the line of battle. Diagrams are REALLY useful for this part.

Then you figure out where in the fighting your character(s) are going to be, and how much of this they’re going to know as it happens. If one of your viewpoints is a general, standing on a hill or a battlement trying to get an overview of the battle so he/she can order troop movements, then you’ll probably get to explain a lot of the macro-level movements; if your only viewpoint is a grunt down in the trenches, the battle scene will have to be limited to the grunt’s actual experiences, and your reader won’t find out how things played out overall until afterward, when the grunt finds out what happened. But if you don’t know that the left flank was under heavy attack and nearly collapsed before reinforcements came up from behind and scattered the attackers, the grunt’s experience of the battle more than likely will not fit properly when the big picture story comes out.

Which is why you want to go through all this planning, because unintentional stupid military mistakes on the part of the author really, really annoy a lot of readers. (This is not a problem when it’s obvious that the commander is supposed to be an idiot, but you still have to do all the planning, because there are some varieties of stupid military mistakes that simply will not be made by even a very stupid commander, so long as that commander has any military experience at all. The writer needs to know what these are and how not to do them, so that the fictional stupid commander can be realistically stupid in all the right ways.)

It is amazingly easy to forget this, when we are constantly bombarded with visuals in our everyday lives, from movies and TV, to YouTube and those animated ads that are all over the Internet, to the photo of Cousin Greg’s new puppy that he emailed everyone. We’re conditioned to think visually.

This can become a problem for writers, most especially for the sort of writer who gets a strong mental image of a place or scene that they want to convey to the reader exactly as it appears to them. Unfortunately, writing is a highly imperfect form of telepathy. Furthermore, it is inherently linear: it arrives in the reader’s brain one word at a time, one sentence at a time. A three-page description of the view from a mountaintop or the chaos of a battle is never, ever going to have the same instant impact as a three-second shot in a movie.

So what do you do if you want that kind of impact in your story?

First, you have to accept that you aren’t going to get the same effect, and what you do get is going to have to build up, rather than arriving instantly. What the camera does is different from what words do; trying to imitate the camera with words is never going to be really satisfactory. Second, you remember that what you are after is the impact; the actual description is simply the means to an end. So, third, you look at all the things words can do that a camera can’t do, and you focus on getting the impact you want through them. In other words, you play to the strengths of the written word.

Smells, textures, and sensations are not things that are easily conveyed by a photograph or movie. A written description of a mountaintop view that includes only the sharp peaks and sweeping vistas is missing a bet. Oh, you want the peaks and so on, but sketching them with a light hand and then mentioning the snow-cooled breeze and the scent of the pines, or the cold damp seeping through the POV character’s boots as the snow melts, or the slip of stones or crunch of snow underfoot, will make the scene more vivid and personal in a way the camera can’t.

Which brings me to my second point: writing can be personal in a way the camera isn’t. Cold water seeping through boots, the gag reflex triggered by a nasty smell, the sting and itch of a mosquitoe bite – all can make prose more immediate, because seeing someone else get bitten by a mosquito isn’t the same as putting the reader in the head of the character who’s just been bitten.  Two of the most commonly used viewpoints, first-person and tight-third person, let the writer give the thoughts and feelings of the viewpoint character; omniscient allows for the thoughts and feelings of anyone who is present. And since the whole point of describing a majestic view or a chaotic fight is usually to make the reader feel the way they’d feel if they were there, this is a huge advantage. Showing the reader both the scene and the viewpoint character’s emotions/reactions can go a long way toward making a scene feel overwhelming or confusing to the reader, as well as to the character.

In first-person, and to some extent in tight-third person, one can sometimes slip into stream-of-consciousness writing for a paragraph or two, to really get the viewpoint character’s feelings and reactions across. This is particular useful during battle scenes, disasters, and at other times when the character is getting a confusing amount of information all at once. It’s also fun to write, which means that one has to keep an eye out for doing too much of it at once and ending up with a confused reader.

The history of a place or the background behind some action is another thing that the written word can do more easily than the camera, though this is something that the writer needs to handle carefully. It’s easiest to slip in smoothly in omniscient; in tight-third and first-person, getting this kind of backstory in depends on the knowledge and personality of the viewpoint character – what they know and what they would think about when faced with the particular situation. Knowing that the peaceful valley the character is looking at has been the site of key battles for centuries can create a lot of emotional resonance; on the other hand, one has to be careful that one doesn’t end up with a boring history lecture rather than something that actually deepens the effect of the scene.

When it comes to the actual visual description itself, less is more. It’s tempting to spend three or four pages waxing lyrical about every detail, but frankly, most readers these days are going to skim or skip any chunk of straight description that goes on that long. Also, two people looking at the same majestic view may both be deeply moved, but it will be different things that move them; consequently, getting too detailed usually means losing more and more of the impact on every reader who does not happen to find the same things moving as the writer does.

On the other hand, if the writer provides a few of the right visual details, plus some sounds, smells, and sensations, plus the viewpoint character’s reaction, the reader will generally fill in what’s missing with his/her own details…and the resulting image will be more powerful because it’s tailored to fit each reader by the readers themselves.

The truth underneath that bit of word play is that which you have – sex and violence, or love and death – depends a lot on both the way the writer handles them and on the eye of the beholder. There’s not much the writer can do about the eye of the beholder, unfortunately, but the content and tone are all ours. And the first and most important choice in both cases is whether a particular scene is going to be merely explicit, or whether it’s going all the way to graphic.

Explicit covers a lot more ground and is a lot more flexible than graphic, because explicit just means that it’s clear that it happened. You can be very explicit without being at all graphic, but I don’t think it’s possible to be graphic without being explicit. “The battle lasted three days in the rain” is explicit without getting into the details of mud and sweat and blood and who wounded whom how badly. It’s explicit without being graphic. “The knife cut through the muscles of his back and into his kidney” is both graphic and explicit, and it’s hard to see how it could be the one without also being the other.

The real problem is that American society is an awkward combination of prudish and obsessed when it comes to sex, while when it comes to violence, it’s pretty much just obsessed. What this means is that there is a bias in most published fiction toward explicit-but-not-graphic sex on the one hand, and graphic violence on the other. It also means that most readers are sensitized enough to sex that the traditional “stopping at the bedroom door” is considered explicit – think of the old movies where the couple kiss, fade to black, and then there’s a picture of two pairs of shoes next to a bed, and that was plenty enough to let the viewers know what happened. Using a similar technique to avoid a fight scene is problematic, unsatisfying, and rarely done.

The interesting thing is that an awful lot of the time, the writer has no real story-related need to be graphic. All the reader needs to know is that the sex or violence happened, not every tingly or gory detail. And a lot of time, the writer doesn’t get graphic…but the techniques are different. It’s far more common to imply that sex happened and entirely skip any description that goes past a kiss, going straight to both parties looking/feeling happy and smug next morning, than it is to imply a fight scene and make do with a description of the loser’s bruises later on.

“Graphic” for sex scenes starts fairly early in the process of simply describing the actions the characters are taking. When writers go for explicit-not-graphic, they often do so by describing the emotional impact of the characters’ actions, rather than the actions themselves.

On the other hand, fight scenes don’t start being considered “graphic” in most cases until the writer gets into painful or bloody description of the effects of the violence. The actions themselves are fair game. Shooting, stabbing, or punching someone isn’t considered graphic until the writer starts talking about blood spatters, torn flesh, and broken teeth.

There isn’t an exact line between explicit and graphic, of course, but it helps to be aware of the difference…and of the difference between where explicit sex starts and where explicit violence starts. You’ll notice that all the graphic details in this post are from the “violence” side of things. It is supposed to be a family-friendly blog, after all.

People who think this have obviously never been to one of those martial arts movies where half the action scenes are filmed in slow motion…and still work perfectly well (sometimes brilliantly).

Now, using mainly short sentences, sentence fragments, and short paragraphs is very often an effective technique for writing action scenes. They do read fast, and they tend to be focused and physical because there isn’t room for more than the basic subject-verb-object if the sentence is to stay short. So using a lot of short sentences, etc. forces the writer to stay focused on the action – who did what – which is often very useful.

Unfortunately, too many writers take the short-sentence thing much too far. They’ll have a page of one-short-sentence paragraphs:  The soldier leaped./Max ducked./The bomb exploded./A huge bang!/Max fell back./As debris rained down./The soldier screamed. (This is closely based on a real example, BTW, but I didn’t feel right holding the poor beginner up to ridicule directly, so I changed the topic.) And it doesn’t work, because it’s too much.

Any technique wears out very quickly if it is the only one you use. Even as a single paragraph, the above list feels choppy and rushed, rather than fast and immediate; as a page of one-line paragraphs…well. What works with action, as with pretty much anything else in writing, is variation. You can see the variation trying to come out in the above sentences – by the time the sequence gets to “The bomb exploded,” the writer is feeling the need for a longer sentence (“The bomb exploded with a huge bang!”) but forces him/herself to slavishly follow the “short sentences, short paragraphs, sentence fragments” dictum. It’s even more obvious that ”Max fell back as debris rained down” wants to be a single, complete sentence…and the whole sequence would read more smoothly if the writer had trusted his/her instincts and just written it that way.

Matching the sentence length to the action itself is a sneaky writer trick that few people notice consciously, but it often works really, really well. By this I mean using short sentences when the action is snappy or abrupt, then moving to longer sentences when something falls into a longer rhythm:  She struck once. Twice. A third time, and her opponent fell. She kicked him away and spun like a dancer, looking for another victim. The first two sentences (OK, sentence and fragment) are short, and thus give the impression that she’s moving fast. The longer third sentence mirrors the fact that the opponent is out of the fight and falling over, which takes longer than a couple of jabs; the last sentence is much longer, and the way it flows is supposed to imitate the smoothness and grace of the protagonist’s movements. It also gives both protagonist and reader a moment of breathing space before everything starts moving fast again.

Grammar and punctuation are excruciatingly important in action scenes. Mistakes stick out more (at least, they do for me) when things are supposed to be moving fast. Random Comma Syndrome seems particularly prevalent among writers who use lots of sentence fragments, possibly because they can’t figure out proper comma placement without the structure of a full sentence.

Reversing causality can be a useful technique for heightening drama, but it’s another thing that too many people overdo without thinking about it enough. What I’m talking about are things like “He screamed in pain. The sword entered his side, and he fell.”  The cause – getting wounded by the sword – comes after the effect (screaming in pain), instead of before, the way it ought to. This can be tricky to spot, because “He screamed in terror” would work fine (he’s presumably afraid of the sword), which means that it’s not always clear whether “He screamed. The sword entered his side…” has cause and effect reversed or not.

The next question is what to describe. More than any other type of description, action lives or dies by the telling detail…the right telling detail. Some writers concentrate so hard on being clear about exactly what is happening that they describe every fleck of paint falling off the wall the hero has just been thrown into; others, in the interest of giving the reader a close-up-and-personal “feel” for the action, provide no details at all (save perhaps generalities about what was going on in the character’s head – Pain! Fear! She felt confused, and she’d lost track of George. Something slammed into her shoulder. OW!). The sweet spot is usually somewhere in the middle – exactly where will depend largely on the writer’s personal style and on the chosen narrator. A cool-headed, highly trained, experienced soldier will likely notice a lot more key details than a sheltered, confused, and inexperienced babysitter.

The minimum you need to describe are those details that a) are necessary to current action (“He tripped over the ottoman” is rather different from “He tripped over the dead cat”) or b) you want in order to set something up for a few paragraphs later (i.e., you need to mention the gun on the mantelpiece if one of the characters is going to grab it in a few more lines). Most action scenes work best if the verbal “camera” is at a middle distance – not so close that all the reader “sees” are flying fists and blurred scenery, but not so far away that a lot of distracting and irrelevant detail is visible. You usually do want some additional detail, though – enough so your characters aren’t running or sneaking or fighting in an unvisualized fog.

It all sounds horribly difficult when you break it down like this, but so does riding a bicycle. Most writers get the balance right via instinct and practice, but I do think it helps to look at the different parts of the juggling act if one knows there’s something off about the scene.

What you need to know up front (unless you are a total “surprise me” writer, who can’t know anything up front) is 1) what the setting is like, 2)who the actors are in the scene, 3) where each of them is at any given time and what each of them is doing, 4) what you (and they) expect to get out of this, and 5) how all this interacts with the larger picture, at least to some extent.

The setting determines what you (and your characters) have available to work with. If your action scene is a car chase through San Francisco, you have different options that you would if it’s a chase on skis through the Alps; if it’s a brawl in a bar, you have different options than if your characters a dueling with lightsabers on a spaceship. 

Knowing who the actors are means knowing who all is present and watching, as well as knowing which characters are actually going to be doing the punching, running, shooting, or whatever. It should be pretty obvious why you need to know who is supposed to be actively involved – which characters are acting determines what skills, weapons, etc. they’ll use , and to a large extent how they will approach what they’re doing (as well as the details of what they’ll do).

Bystanders, on the other hand, are not so obvious.  They’re also not as necessary to know about in advance, though I find it often helps a lot. Sometimes bystanders will pitch in as opportunity presents itself, or do or say something that accidentally (or on purpose) affects the main action, so it’s good to know who’s watching. This is also an area where surprise frequently comes in – someone the writer didn’t expect shows up, and it changes the way the action plays.

Where each character is and what each character does during an action scene are inextricably intertwined. If A is sitting behind a desk and B is leaning against the wall by the fireplace, neither is in position to suddenly haul off and slug the other. On the other hand, B is perfectly placed to grab the antique sword hanging over the fireplace and charge…but if you don’t know he’s standing beside a fireplace, you won’t think of the sword.

Choreographing an action scene can be done in a bunch of ways. You can get a bunch of friends together and actually role-play the whole thing (which I find a bit extreme, but which I know has been done to very good effect by a number of writers). Or you can act out the whole scene yourself, playing all the parts in turn (this is particularly helpful for writers who are strongly kinesthetic and need to feel the way the characters move and stand). You can get some action figures and play out the movement of the scene. Or you can diagram it on paper, like a series of football plays, with circles and crosses and little arrows to show who is supposed to be moving where, and maybe asterisks to show thrusts or punches and figure 8s to show tripping over barrels, or whatever diagram codes you come up with. Storyboarding (drawing a series of sketches to illustrate the action) works well for some artistically inclined writers (and even for some who can only draw stick figures).

What your characters want out of the scene, and what you want out of it, determines where it’s going. You need to know both; if your characters want to capture the traitor, but you need him to escape in order to move the plot to the next phase, then you arrange the choreography so the bad guy escapes, even though the good guys are trying really hard. If you need the traitor to be captured, you stack the deck in favor of the heroes.

The fifth thing the writer usually needs to know is what the Big Picture is and how all the local, character-on-character action fits in. If we’re talking about a battle scene, the writer often plans out the overall battle first, then figures out which characters will be there and what will happen to them based on the ebb and flow of the larger battle (even though the reader may not find out how the larger battle went until a chapter or two after the big action scene. Sometimes, though, the writer knows he wants the hero run down during an enemy cavalry charge, so the big battle has to be planned so that there is an enemy cavalry charge that makes tactical and strategic sense.

In other words, very little of this has to be done in any particular order (though it’s a little hard to figure out what your characters are doing if you don’t already know which of them are in the scene).  And none of it is set in stone. If you get a better idea, jump on it, even if it means junking your last two hours of work.

Finally, if you look at your action plan, and it just looks too easy for one side or the other, there are two things to remember: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” and Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will. Murphy is a writer’s best friend; bad luck and other people messing up (and consequently derailing the plan) are always more plausible in fiction than good luck and everything going right.

And a final reminder: some writers can’t plan in advance; if you are one of them, you’ll probably need to do at least some of this stuff in revision, retro-fitting your battle to fit your action scene, for instance. If you can’t plan without destroying your need to write, don’t worry about it. But don’t kid yourself, either; if it’s just that you don’t want to plan…tough. Nobody said this job was going to be easy.

Action can be “seen” by the reader from lots of different levels. A bird’s eye view is a Big Picture description that is most often employed when describing a full-scale battle (but it can work quite well for smaller fights); a general’s view is closer in, but still fairly Big Picture, and allows for more surprises because the general can’t see everything the way a bird could. A participant’s view is restricted to his/her own experiences, but it can make the action feel more personal and involving. If the writer is telling a story in omniscient viewpoint, as a memoir written long after the fact, or in multiple tight-third, she can think about which of these levels to employ and when, and how to mix them to get the best effect.

(Georgette Heyer’s description of the Battle of Waterloo in her novel An Infamous Armyis primarily an omniscient Big Picture description of the action, but she occasionally drops into a closer, more personal view of characters we’ve heard of or met earlier in the novel. The result is a masterpiece, which was actually used at Sandhurst Military Academy in England to teach the Battle of Waterloo. It is also an excellent example for writers to study.)

Except for omniscient, memoir, or multiple-tight-third-person, the viewpoint the writer is using for the story pretty much determines the level from which the action is going to be described. A first person narrator who is telling the story as it happens is not likely to know anything that is happening on the other side of a battle unless he’s an observer with binoculars rather than a participant; the same goes for a single tight-third-person viewpoint. The writer, however, quite often needs to know the whole Big Picture, whether we’re talking about a full-scale battle, a smallish bandit attack, or a one-on-one duel.

Which brings us to my next point, planning. The larger the scale of the action, the more planning is a good idea for most writers. (Note that “most”; this is yet another area where personal process trumps how-to-write advice. Some people just can’t plan ahead, because it wrecks their ability to continue on. These folks have to “plan” in retrospect, working out how the close-up scenes they’ve written can be retro-fitted into a Big Picture that makes sense.)

Anyway, for the rest of us: Even if your hero or heroine is only going to see one small part of a battle, it’s usually a good idea to have some idea of the overall strategy for each side, and how their specific plans do or don’t work out in practice. The flanking move by the enemy cavalry on the other side of the hill may make things suddenly more intense around your heroine, even if she doesn’t know why. The return of the foraging party may be enough to route the bandits, though your hero doesn’t immediately know why they’ve started running. And I have personally found it exceedingly helpful to go through parts of a fight in slow motion with a colleague who knows something about martial arts, so that I can find out in advance whether particular moves I have in mind will work as I envision them (and so I can get ideas for even better things to happen).

Plans should be flexible. (“The writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.” – Lois McMaster Bujold) Action scenes are often most effective when the things that happen are as unexpected as they would be in a real battle or fight or chase, and a writer who has managed to surprise herself has a greater chance of surprising the reader than she otherwise would. I’m not talking about big surprises here, though that can happen; I’m talking about little things that may or may not change the outcome of the action: the horse that throws a shoe, the gun that jams, the opponent who drops his knife and bites…the things that come up without warning during the process of putting words down on the page. (If that’s not how it works for you, don’t worry about it. It’s not something you can train or force; it’s just how some – some, not all – writers’ heads work.)

At this point, it’s time to really start talking about nuts and bolts…and I’m out of space for today. Looks like this will be a three-parter, at least.

I think part of the reason for this is that action scenes don’t get much respect. They aren’t very intellectual; they’re lowest-common-denominator. Everybody knows what an action scene is, and everybody can spot a bad one at twenty paces. So they should be easy, right?

Yeah, right.

Another part of the problem is, I think, that as usual, “action” can mean more than one thing. There’s “the action of the story,” which usually means the events that make up the plot, even if those events are all conversations and social encounters, and there’s “the story has no action,” which usually means that the plot does not involve car chases, gun battles, or other physically demanding activities.

For purposes of this discussion, which is going to cover several posts, I am going to define action scenes as scenes of physical action:  people attacking each other with fists or weapons, chase scenes, avalanches or trains barreling down toward people, escapes, and so on. Suspense alone is not enough; a ticking time bomb is not enough. A formal tea party can be suspense-filled and full of all sorts of emotional time bombs, but it’s not an action scene until the ninjas break in through the window to hold everyone hostage.

By that definition, the first key thing to remember about writing an action scene is that there is movement. People are doing something – running, fighting, sneaking, throwing, searching, blowing things up, whatever. Something physical (besides talking) is going on. In addition, whatever is happening often doesn’t take much elapsed time (a fight scene is more likely to cover a minute or two than an hour). Action scenes generally move fast; more to the point, they read fast. If the action starts to drag or the scene feels like it’s going on forever, something is wrong.

Note that this does not mean an action scene has to be short. As long as the tension and the pace remain high, an action scene can take pages or even chapters to cover a few minutes or an hour.

Action scenes are actually a subset of description, but instead of describing a static setting or backstory, the writer is describing movement…which means paying a lot of attention to verbs. Anyone who remembers Schoolhouse Rock should be unsurprised to hear this.   :-)

This leads me to one of the first big mistakes some people make with action scenes: dropping in some “action” to fill time or “liven up” a boring stretch of story. Action, like static description, needs a reason to be in the story. Readers will usually cut you some slack in this regard – they don’t expect to find out why the ninjas are attacking the tea party right away. But random encounters seldom work well in fiction, so readers do expect there to be a reason for the ninja attack, they expect it to have something to do with the story, and they expect it to be explained eventually.

To put it another way, whatever action sequence the characters are engaged in needs two goals. The first one is the goal the writer has for the scene. It may be that the structure or pacing of the story requires some action at this point; it may be the way to reveal some plot-critical information, or set up for a later revelation or plot twist; it may be a way to expose some aspect of the particular characters. Unless this goal is related to pacing or structure, it may not actually require an action scene to achieve, so the writer needs to at least consider the possibility that the most effective way of achieving his/her goal may be some other sort of scene entirely.

The second, and possibly more important, goal for an action scene is the one the characters have. In fiction, characters usually act to achieve something, and it’s usually plot-related in some way. The ninjas attack the tea party in order to kidnap the heroine; the bandits attack the caravan because they want the jade idol in the second wagon; the wolves attack the farm because they are starving, and they’re starving because the recently-arrived dragon has eaten all their usual prey. If none of the characters have a reason for doing whatever they’re doing, the scene probably doesn’t belong in this story.

And that’s it for today; I still have a thousand words to write tonight, and it’s already nearly 7:30 pm. More on action in a day or two.