Anyway, since I’m now in the vicinity of Hollywood, I thought I’d talk a bit about “Hollywood science” and its uses and abuses.

Hollywood science is the term many folks use to refer to the improbable, outlandish, and just-plain-wrong “science” that appears in a lot of Hollywood films and TV. The attitude often appears to be that it’s only a movie (or worse yet, only a science-fiction movie) and therefore things don’t have to be accurate. This annoys those of us who feel that even if it is only a something, it’s still science, and ought to be as accurate as possible (and, at the least, ought not to be significantly INaccurate).

Unfortunately, this is one of those areas where opinions differ as to how accurate things need to be, and how accurate they can be, given the constraints of whatever medium the writer is working with and the type of story the writer is telling. There are also differences of opinion when it comes to projecting the possibilities, which is always some aspect of science fiction. Nearly every science fiction writer I know has at some point been approached by someone who’s said “I don’t think X thing you have in your book is possible,” and then, on being told what science the author based it on and why, has said “I still don’t believe it.”

Such differences of opinion about what is and isn’t possible often lead to accusations of Hollywood science, and it’s impossible to say who is right or wrong. I choose to think that if the author did his/her homework and has a logical chain of arguments in favor of his/her projected science, then even if I don’t think it works, it doesn’t qualify as Hollywood science. But that’s me.

Where I think the line goes is when an author gets the easy stuff wrong. Confusing star systems with galaxies (or vice versa), using “lightyear” or “parsec” as a measure of time, rather than distance…those sorts of things are Hollywood science at its worst, and there’s no excuse for them. They’re pure laziness on somebody’s part.

And getting the easy stuff wrong to no purpose weakens the story. It gives the reader a reason to disbelieve, and at least some of them will take advantage of that (and then quit reading). Which is why ignoring reality, and especially ignoring real things that can be easily checked via Google, is not the best idea for most authors.

Sometimes, however, sticking to real science (and real reality) is detrimental to the story, and when that is true, the story comes first. This is, after all, fiction; by definition, it ignores reality on some basic level. There are two obvious ways I can think of for sticking too closely to real science to be detrimental to the story: 1) when doing so requires more skill in explaining than the writer possesses or the medium can bear, and 2) when the basic premise of the story is contrary to what we currently know of reality, as with fantasy or faster-than-light travel.

#1 is to some extent a judgment call, I admit. It also varies by media; what is an acceptable one-page explanation in a novel can be impossible to translate to a movie screen without slowing the story to a crawl and/or boring the audience to tears. This, I think, is one of the reasons hard SF (which SF practically requires all the whizzy science-fictional gadgets to have some solid foundation in physics-as-we-know-it-to-date) is so difficult to turn into movies or TV without warping totally out of shape. Space opera usually fares much better.

It is, however, also true that the ability to write an interesting infodump is a learned skill, and learning to do it can take a while. A writer who hasn’t yet developed that skill, and who knows he hasn’t developed it yet may be better off using handwavium that does exactly what the story requires, rather than embarking on a two-page infodump detailing why cesium, when subject to the proper pressures, behaves in exactly the same way.

#2 is also to some extent a judgment call, though it seems more obvious than #1. A lot of fantasy is intended to mimic reality in many ways except for the existence of magic or magical creatures. Where it’s supposed to seem real, the author has to stick with reality or start losing readers. Horses have to act like horses, not bicycles or motorcycles. But there are also totally surreal fantasies where the whole point is that anything is possible: flowers talk, china dolls move, monkeys can have wings and fly, woodland streams taste of lemons, etc. For those, sticking too closely to reality can ruin the fun.

What it comes down to is, as usual, not to make careless mistakes. If one is going to break the “rules” of reality, one ought to have a good idea what they are and why the particular story needs those rules to be broken. It is also a good idea to have a backup explanation for use when cornered by a fan who objects to whatever liberties one has taken with the laws of science.

There are two potential problems with this approach, from a writing perspective. The first is that the visually oriented writer often doesn’t realize that not all readers work the way she does, resulting in bewilderment when their work is criticized for things like grammar, style, or syntax. For an extremely visual writer, the sentences are not important. Sentences are a means to an end, the vehicle that creates mental pictures, like the pigments in a painting or the tints on a strip of film. Unfortunately, neglecting sentences in favor of the mental movie often means neglecting all those readers who do not “see a movie” when they read.

The other, more insidious problem is that writing is not telepathy. No matter how clearly the writer visualizes a scene and how minutely he describes it, his readers are not going to construct exactly the same scene in their own heads. Many, if not most, of them will come close, but even those who read visually will not construct exactly the same mental picture from the same set of words.

This is because words are more than their meanings. Words have personal resonances that depend on the life experiences of individuals. For instance: I grew up in Chicago. My idea of a river is the Chicago River or the Mississippi. When I read the word “river” in a story, I picture something that can handle steamboats and barge traffic. I’ve been to places, however, where the local waterway was five feet wide and maybe three feet deep, barely able to handle a string of canoes traveling single file…and they still name it a river, and I have to believe that that narrow channel is what they picture when they read the word “river” in the same story I read. Which is more than enough to result in major differences in the mental pictures each of us construct of the landscape, even if we (and the author) agree on the images that are evoked by every other description and phrase in the story.

There is no possible way for a writer to control this. A visual author who gets hung up on the reader getting exactly the same “mental movie” as the one he has in his own head is courting madness. Even if you get a group of intelligent, articulate beta-readers, you won’t hear the same things from each one, because they’ll each bes interpreting your words according to slightly (or majorly) different mental biases. 

This is especially true because a lot of readers these days don’t have the patience for the long descriptive passages that are necessary if a writer wants every detail of a scene clear in the reader’s mind. It may matter to you that there is a pencil sketch of Abraham Lincoln on the wall, a decorative porcelain egg in the middle of the table (just slightly off-center under the brass chandelier), etc., but unless the sketch and the egg tell the reader something useful about the characters or the plot, a lot of them will tire of such details very rapidly. Hence the emphasis, in writing advice, on the “telling detail” – the one thing about this person or place that’s unusual, that packs a whole lot of information and “feel” into a very small amount of description.

Writers have to accept (or at least learn to ignore) the fact that their readers are not going to produce exactly the same image from the words-on-the-page that the writer has (or wants them to have). We try, certainly, but it’s never going to be perfect.

You can’t give a reader the experience in your head unless you really are a telepath and can somehow broadcast your thoughts every time someone reads what you’ve written. What you are doing, as a writer, is giving the reader a whole bunch of building blocks and telling them to build a house or a skyscraper or a castle. They won’t build the exact same house or skyscraper or castle that you were picturing in your head, but as long as what they build pleases them, they’ll be happy. If that’s not good enough for you – if it’s really that critically important for your visually-inclined readers to “see” exactly what you “see” – you’re in the wrong field; you need to be making movies instead.

Readers are, in a sense, collaborating with writers in creating the story experience. Neil Gaiman has several times told the story of a particularly memorable scene from a childhood favorite book, in which the protagonist rode through the night, unable to see far in the dark, with the wind whipping his cape and the snow swirling about and his fingers slowly growing cold and stiff on the reins. And then he finally found the book and turned to his favorite scene and read “They rode all night in a snow storm.”

You can’t predict when a simple sentence like this will strike that kind of chord in a reader, evoking a vivid mental picture of an dramatic multi-page scene that never existed. You can only be pleased when it happens, and glad that you have such excellent collaborators.

As a result, some writers find it difficult to move beyond the code. They don’t stop to think about all the little things real people really do when they’re listening or fidgeting or concentrating or bored, because they have these basic code phrases already occupying that slot in their minds. And they especially don’t think about how body language can reflect characterization, because really, how much characterization do you get out of a shrug or a sigh or a smile?

But if you stop to think for a minute, body language is about the whole body. It’s not just a couple of gestures; it’s about how individuals move and stand and use every single part of themselves, from hair to toes. People slouch and slump and stiffen; they cough and swallow visibly and sneeze; they tense up, relax, turn red, go pale. Sometimes, the body language is under their control (as with raising her chin or crossing his legs); other times, it isn’t (few people can control their blush reflex). But no matter what else is happening, every single person in the scene is doing something with his or her body (unless they’re dead, and sometimes, even then).

So how do you get at all that stuff, if you’re not used to thinking about it this way?

Well, I suggest beginning with what you have to work with, i.e., what are all the various parts of a body, and what can be done with or to them?

Starting with the head, there’s hair, eyes, eyebrows, ears, nose, cheeks, forehead, mouth, teeth, tongue, lips…and then there are things that go on the head: hats and scarves, eyeglasses and monocles, earrings, nose rings, tiaras, necklaces. And that’s just the head, and I didn’t even try for a total and complete inventory.

So what can a person do with all these bits and pieces? Hair: comb one’s fingers through it, twist it (if it’s long enough), scratch at it (front, back, top, or sides), pull at it (or even pull out a bit of it), braid it (again, if it’s long enough), stroke or smooth it into place, toss it, shake it, hide behind it. Eyes: widen, narrow, squint, flick in one direction or another, close, blink, wink, rub at, tear up, roll, stare intently, glaze over. Eyebrows: raise one or both, bring or draw together, lower, wiggle. Hat: take off, tip, raise, put on, push back/forward, scratch under, use as fan…

You get the point. Each and every part of the body has multiple motions that it can make, and multiple things that can be done to or with it in combination with other parts. Every one of those movements can be used to indicate a feeling, a reaction, or a thought. You can add even more information by describing the way in which those motions are made; “slowly winding a lock of hair around a finger” gives a different impression from “madly winding and unwinding a lock of hair around a finger.”

Some bits of body language are involuntary, like blushing or shivering, but most of them are habits or expressions of an individual’s personality. So the next question is, what is each of the characters like? Who they are affects how they act and react on multiple levels. The guy who reacts aggressively to any criticism may consciously be making a fist, but narrowing his eyes and tightening his lips out of habit, and turning red because of his involuntary physical reaction to becoming angry. The more thoughtful character next to him, who’s a bit more controlled but just as angry, may do the same narrowing of his eyes, but without the red face, and his conscious physical response may be to tap a finger against his lips instead of making a fist.

Habits, in particular, can tell the reader something about both the character’s personality and the character’s past (the habit had to come from somewhere). Whether it’s the little dip and swing of the character’s head whenever she turns it (obviously, she used to wear her hair long and loose, and hasn’t yet lost the habitual motion she needed to toss it over her shoulder as she turns), or the way he half-reaches for his breast pocket every few minutes but stops midway (gave up smoking recently, didn’t he?), little non-standard habitual movements can make the characters feel more like real individuals than like standard roles (The Hero, The Ingénue, The Sidekick, The Comic Relief). Even characters who make a point of not showing emotional reactions can have habits that betray them in small, unconscious ways.

Obviously, the writer does not need or want to describe every twitch and wiggle that every character makes. And there’s certainly a place for simplified body-language-as-punctuation code like “he smiled” or “she shrugged.” But if all you’re using are the compressed code phrases, you might want to take another look for places where you can take things one step deeper by describing the narrow eyes, tight lips, and slowly tapping finger instead of saying “he looked angry.”

In a sense, the definition of “well-written description” is “a collection of telling details.” But what, exactly, is a telling detail? I’d say it’s something that does double or triple duty; something that points to things beyond itself. Often, it’s the unexpected or unique item or action that, just by existing in that place, at that time, says something or implies a whole lot of other things.

A telling detail grabs your attention. Too many of them, all piled up, become overwhelming. A single Lalique figurine displayed in the center of a marble table can be a dramatic statement; forty figurines covering the whole tabletop looks like a yard sale. The difficulty comes with where one draws the line. A grouping of two figurines may work just as well as the single one; three may be less dramatic but more symmetrical or more graceful; four…well, you get the idea. At some point, things go from “an attractive display of items” to “a mountain of clutter.”

Say I have a character who walks into a bar. I haven’t thought much about the bar, so in my head, they walk into a generic gray mist labeled “bar,” with whatever default bar-stuff in it that my head comes up with: tables, bar stools, a counter, kegs of beer behind.

Now, I can describe all that and maybe even make it interesting, but it’s all generic, default, just the stuff I’d expect to find in a bar (and so would a reader). What I want is the thing that’s different. What’s the one thing in this bar that, if I mention it, every reader who walks into this bar will instantly know they’re in the place I’m talking about?

I could put a collection of antique beer mugs on a shelf over the bar, if they’re strange enough or eye-catching enough. I could try to come up with unique tables or stools. But for this bar, in this story, what presents itself – the thing that instantly attracts my mental attention – is the mosaic depiction of a winery over the fireplace with the starburst of cracks in the corner where the stray bullet hit during a fight last year.

I’d call that cracked mosaic a very telling detail, because it not only what the mosaic looks like; it implies a lot about the bar. It’s the sort of place where fights break out, where someone might pull a gun. It probably used to be more upscale (mosaics are fairly expensive), but it isn’t any more – either the owners can’t afford to fix the bullet hole or they haven’t bothered, and either way, they’re probably not doing a lot of maintenance on the rest of the bar, either.

The mosaic and the bullet hole don’t have anything to do with the plot (at least, not right now, when I’m making them up. Maybe they’ll turn out to be important later on, or maybe not. I don’t have to know whether I’m going to use them later, or why they might be important. All I have to know is that this is something that grabbed my attention, that is a cool detail about this bar…and if I say “From where he stood, he could just make out the starburst of cracks where a bullet had hit the mosaic…” I can let the reader fill in the tables and stools and counter.

Or, I could come up with some more details to expand and modify the impression of the bar: the beer mugs that are lopsided amateur pottery with crooked smiley faces on the side; the giant Elvis-on-black-velvet paintings that are being used as curtains on the back windows; the dusty disco ball that’s off-center in the ceiling; the jazz-rock version of “West Side Story” that’s playing on the Muzak. After a bit, they start to meld into an overall impression of “old, odd, maybe a little tacky, maybe a little rough.” If I go on too long, the impression will change again, to this-writer-talks-to-much-I’m-skippping-straight-to-the-action.

Exactly where the line is depends on the writer, the story, the style the writer has chosen, the reader, and maybe the phase of the moon. There isn’t a clear-cut, unchanging rule for this stuff. It’s like riding a bicycle – you can describe mass and force and momentum with equations, but what you really need is the feel for doing it.

And yes, in order to get that feel, you fall off a lot at first and skin your knees and bang your elbows. But that’s what it takes for most of us to get that sense of balance. Once you have it, you don’t have to think about what you’re doing any more, unless you’re navigating a particularly tricky stretch of road (and even then, it’s not so much thinking about what you’re doing and controlling every aspect as it is about paying attention and concentrating and keeping that feel of balance).

Basically, narrative summary is just telling some of the story in whatever way seems to make the most sense. It gets used for everything from brief transitions between scenes (“He left the office and went down to the coffee shop.”) to longer summaries of what’s been happening (“The next six months were hard on everyone. Even after George found the whatchamacallit and Celia figured out where it fit into the alien machine, nobody could get it working. They almost ran out of air twice when the electrolysis machine broke. Etc.”).

Infodumps are chunks of narrative summary; so are most historical prologues, appendices, and those plot summaries of what happened in the previous two books of a series that crop up occasionally. Narrative summary can even crop up in dialog, as when the detective is presenting the case against the murderer, or when the guy who’s been missing for a week finally shows up and fills everyone in on where he’s been and what he’s been doing. Bits of narrative summary can be embedded in the middle of dramatized scenes to provide backstory or widen the scope. Traditional fairy tales are almost nothing but narrative summary, with maybe a few lines of dialog.

All these possibilities can make it a little hard to get a handle on narrative summary, and it’s complicated even more by the possibilities for stylistic variation. The style for narrative summary ranges from what’s referred to as plain, simple, or invisible to detailed or even elaborate. “The elders took their places on the dais. Elder Morgan stepped forward and presented Janet’s plan; after much discussion, the villagers voted in favor.” is plain narrative summary; “The elders filed in and seated themselves, one by one, on the dais, their white hair gleaming in the lamplight. Elder Morgan hobbled forward, and in a creaky voice that barely carried to the rear of the hall, read the plan that Janet had cooked up. When he finished, the villagers began talking…and talking…and talking. When the elder finally called for a vote two hours later, three-quarters of the men raised their spears in favor.” is more detailed and colorful, but it’s still narrative summary.

When you have a brief transition or a bit of narrative summary that’s embedded in a dramatized scene, it’s usually (not always) most effective to stick to the plain style of narrative summary. If all you need is a brief transition to get the characters from Time-and-Place A to Time-and-Place B, “He left the office and went down to the coffee shop” will do the job. Within a scene, one generally doesn’t want to bring the action to a screeching halt by suddenly calling attention to a bit of backstory, and a plain style (or one that matches the level of description in the scene, anyway) is likely to be the least noticeable.

The more lengthy the narrative summary section, however, the more interesting and memorable it needs to be in order to hold the reader’s attention. “Interesting and memorable” can come from content or from providing more concrete details and making stronger word choices than one would for a plain/invisible style (and really, trying to write three pages, or even three paragraphs, of narrative summary “invisibly” is just asking for readers to skip over them). Ideally, one would do both.

For example, “Sorry, Robert,” Jane said. She’d been there when Robert murdered Sam, and she wasn’t about to give him reason to make her his second victim” is plain style, but if this is the first we’ve heard about Robert murdering someone or Jane being there, the revelation alone is plenty dramatic enough to be memorable. On the other hand, “She’d been crouched behind the sofa when Robert cut Sam’s throat two years before…” isn’t much longer, but it’s considerably more specific and dramatic. Possibly too dramatic; if I don’t want the murder and Jane’s presence to overshadow what’s going on in the rest of the scene, I’ll stick to the plain version. If I do want this revelation to cast a long shadow, I’ll opt for the second.

The plain-vs.-detail decision also applies when the writer is using narrative summary as a third alternative to the usual “show it or skip it” system that writers are so often encouraged to adopt. “For six months, they worked on the gizmo, to no avail. Finally in April, they…” makes a very fine, plain, simple transition if nothing interesting or story-relevant happens during those six months. There are at least three times when a writer may want a lot more than this single sentence, however: first, when things happen during that six-month period that are interesting and story-relevant, but not quite important enough to show in detail; second, when the writer wants the reader to have more of a sense that six months have actually gone by and the next scene can’t possibly be happening two or three hours after the previous one; and third, when the writer isn’t actually sure whether anything interesting or story-relevant happens in that six months and can’t find out without writing more of a summary than “For six months, they worked on the gizmo.”

That last is, I think, more common than a lot of writers want to admit, and the biggest problem with it is that if one writes the six-month summary and discovers that nothing really interesting or story-relevant happens after all, one has to cut it. Lots of us really, really hate doing that. When one has made up several pages of details, there are nearly always cool bits that the writer loves somewhere in there, and it is extremely hard to be clear-eyed about which of them are really needed in the story and which aren’t. It’s even harder to be ruthless enough to cut the ones that one dearly loves (and spent hours figuring out), even after it’s become obvious that they just don’t belong in this book.

This is one of those too-obvious-to-mention things that a lot of writers seem to forget on occasion. In at least some cases, I think the cause is related to the intensely media-heavy world we live in – when one is used to seeing what everything looks like, all at once, the way one does in a movie or a picture, it can be difficult to slow down and describe things one at a time, the way one must when one is working with words and sentences and paragraphs. In other cases, I suspect the problem is that the author is so familiar with the setting that, for them, one word or a short phrase is enough to evoke it: “Chicago,” “New York,” “D.C.” In still other cases, the author is so afraid of making a mistake that they leave out everything that is not absolutely essential, resulting in a story where they characters might as well be wandering around in a thick gray fog.  And sometimes, the author wants to use a setting that is imaginary, or at least unfamiliar to them, but they’re too busy or in too much of a hurry to do the work of making or looking it up in as much depth as they need.

Yet setting is something that affects nearly every aspect of a story, one way or another. Accurate portrayals of a real-life place will please or delight readers who are familiar with that place already, and often impress readers who haven’t yet been there. The first time I saw the movie “The Sting” (set in Chicago in the 1930s), I was utterly delighted by the fact that periodically there would be this loud rumbling and all of the characters would have to stop talking for a minute. I’d never seen anything set in Chicago that included the effect of the El on conversation (the El = elevated trains – that’s what made the rumbling). My first real job, the summer after high school, was a block from the El, and that’s exactly what happened.

There are two parts to writing a setting, whether it’s a real place or an imaginary one: 1) Putting in the key things that make this place different from any other, and 2) Not putting in anything that doesn’t fit. This applies to both on-stage and off-stage settings. (By “off-stage setting” I mean any places that affect the characters or story that aren’t actually shown. For instance, if your story takes place in San Diego, but one of the characters grew up in Wisconsin, that character had better have seen snow and know about tornado sirens and the wind chill factor. You don’t have to mention those details specifically unless they’re important to the story, but that Wisconsin-raised character had better not look ignorant or surprised if the subject of snow comes up.)

The key things that you put into your descriptions will differ from story to story. If a character works or shops in the Loop in downtown Chicago, the El and its effects are probably worth mentioning (especially if they’re working in an older building without modern sound-proofing). If they work four or five blocks from the train lines and shop in the suburban malls, not so much. It’s seldom worth making a point of the odd ways Chicagoans have of pronouncing certain street names (Devon as de-VOHN, for instance), but if one needs a quick way of showing that someone is from out-of-town, it could work.

Not putting in stuff that doesn’t fit is just as important, and this is where the writer has to really be aware of his/her assumptions. If all you know is the climate and geography of the mid-continental plains, and you’re writing about mountains or the coast, or in some cases even forests, you want to do a bunch of research and maybe even get some things checked out by friends who live in places like the ones you’re writing about. A San Diego native who does NOT have trouble adjusting to his first winter in Winnepeg isn’t going to be any more believable than the Wisconsin guy who has never heard of wind chill.

And all of this is strongly affected by the viewpoint and viewpoint character you’re using. An omniscient viewpoint can describe whatever the author wants, however he wants. In a tight-third-person or first-person viewpoint, it will break the viewpoint if the author describes things the viewpoint character can’t see, doesn’t know, or doesn’t care about. The Frontier Magic series I’m working on doesn’t have a lot of physical description of places or people, and it drives some of my readers crazy. But the memoir form I’m using for those books isn’t suited to much description, and Eff isn’t the sort to describe things she’s really familiar with (and the one time I did it, the editor very wisely cut that paragraph). The point is, I still have to know what all those things she doesn’t describe actually look like, so that when I get a chance to slip something in, I can slip in the right thing.

Since the first way obviously doesn’t take much doing, I’m going to talk mainly about the second. In my experience, readers want to have height, general age, hair color, and any instantly-striking unique aspect of the character’s physical appearance (wears an eye patch, has portwine birthmark over half of left cheek) as soon as they possibly can get them. Most of them are willing to wait at least a little for other things (but probably not all the way until the last half of the book), though some will still grumble. A few prefer to get a large lump of detailed physical description the moment a new character walks onstage, and with the right story and style, this can work fine. Usually, though, you’re better off working details in a few at a time over the course of the first few pages after the character appears, especially if he/she shows up in the middle of a conversation or a battle that you really don’t want to slow down.

Assuming that you know basic stuff like hair color/eye color/height/build/birthmarks/etc., the problem is getting them across to the reader. For non-viewpoint characters, this isn’t too difficult; you can just mention particular features as they come to the viewpoint character’s attention. This has the added advantage that the most striking features, like unusual height, strange hair/eye color, visible scars, etc., are likely to be the things the viewpoint character notices first.

The real problem for a lot of writers comes in describing the viewpoint character. If you’re doing the kind of viewpoint that zooms in on the character, you may be able to get away with a straight descriptive paragraph right before the viewpoint settles into tight-third-person, but that tends to be most effective if there’s nothing else interesting going on. If you’re zooming in on a character in mid-battle, or even just one in the middle of painting the living room, the block-o’-description tends to be more like a stumbling block than anything else.

That leaves working the description in as you go along. That means things like implying the character’s height by what he can reach or what she has to duck under. You can get hair length and color out of having it fall in the character’s eyes, or by way of comparison to other people (“his hair was about two shades darker than mine, but with streaks of pale blond lightening the brown”), or by the kind of adaptation he/she has to make (or doesn’t) to circumstances (pulling very long hair back into braids for a workout or to keep it out of the cookie dough, for instance). Clothing styles and fabrics can come out in the same way – most people who can afford to wear silk will be either worried or annoyed by the likelihood of having it ruined by rain or a spilled drink, for instance. And if they’re not wearing silk, they can be glad they’re in their gardening gear and not wearing anything good when the car splashes mud all over them.

You can also sometimes get other characters to provide descriptive details, ranging from a squeal of “Darling! You’ve grown six inches since I saw you last…and when did you grow that beard?” to sneers about old clothes or glasses to evidently well-meant comments about fashion sense, inappropriate dress, haircuts, and so on from parents, siblings, significant others, or plain old busybodies. Introducing such a character purely to provide description is not generally advisable, but if you happen to have one already to hand, by all means make use of them.

When you’re working with a first-person or tight-third-person viewpoint character, their self-description can become as much about their self-image as it is about what they look like. This is especially true if you’re describing your viewpoint character through comparisons with other characters (whether those others are present or whether they’re just memories). You can get some really interesting mileage out of having the character’s internal self-image not jibe with the way other people see them.  It can be quite a jolt when the character who has been thinking of herself as grotesquely overweight, for ten chapters is described by someone else as “solid” or “stocky and well-muscled.”  You can’t, however, get away with having a character think of herself as blonde for ten chapters and then have someone else describe her ebony hair — not unless there’s been a dye job in there somewhere.

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.

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.

For those of us who write fantasy and science fiction, worldbuilding is even more of a necessity. The places our stories occur often have no real-life analogs; one cannot travel to Edoras or Cair Paravel to check out the sights and sounds and smells. One cannot look up the fashions of the Galactic Empire or the social customs of the kzinti or Klingons. The writer makes them up.

One of the first things you find out when you start paying serious attention to this is that every detail you invent implies other things, large and small. A codfish dinner served in a town far inland implies not only a fishing industry, but fast and reliable transportation (or the fish would spoil before they got to the table). The existance of such fast and reliable transportation means news will move as quickly as the fish do, so if you want it to be three weeks before they find out about the magical thunderstorm on the south coast, you suddenly need to come up with a really good reason why they wouldn’t hear about it a day later like everyone else. And so on.

Back when I was still getting the hang of all this, I discovered that one of my biggest problems with making forward progress was that I’d forgotten to make up some aspect of my imaginary world that I suddenly needed. The heroine arrived in a new town, and I’d forgotten to make up the architecture; the city guard showed up and I had no idea how they worked; a foreign diplomat arrived and I had no idea what he considered a proper, respectful greeting and what he considered an insult.

So I started keeping track. Fast-forward ten years or so. I had a twenty-plus-page list of things to think about, and it was still growing. I mentioned this on the Fidonet echo I was on, and people talked me into posting the list. One thing led to another, and my fantasy worldbuilding questions have been up on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ of America web site for … I think it’s getting on for fifteen years now.

Every so often, I get complaints about them. Interestingly, the complaints are always that I left something out, not that X or Y is not really important to worldbuilding. I always tell the complainers the same thing:  The fantasy worldbuilding questions are my list of things I have a tendency to forget to think about. Stuff that I always remember to think about is not on my list. If they forget different things, they should make their own list of reminders.

But people persist in trying to make the questions into a prescription or a recipe. And of course, once again, there is no  one recipe or set of rules that work for this aspect of writing, any more than any other. I know quite a few writers who do little or no worldbuilding in advance – they have the sort of brain that needs to not be tied down to a previous decision (and they also seem to have a gift for making everything tie together, even if it was made up on the fly).