Action Scenes, or, Some Ninjas Came in the Window

When most people think of action scenes, they immediately go for the fast-paced ones with lots of drama and physical maneuvering, the kind one sees in action-adventure movies: fights, battles, hair-raising stunts, dramatic escapes, car chases, the final confrontation between the hero and the villain. But a lot more goes into an effective action scene than the physical action.

Not that the action isn’t important – it isn’t an action scene without it. And it is easy to define “action scene” purely in terms of the physical action: there’s a fistfight, a gun battle, a car chase, people leaping out of exploding buildings or off of cliffs. But as soon as one stops to think about a specific book and a specific scene, it becomes obvious that there’s more to it than that. Throwing random ninjas in through the window can generate lots of word count as the characters shriek and run and fight them off, but sooner or later the question arises as to why the ninjas showed up right then. There are very few stories in which it would work to have the head ninja apologize and explain that they intended to break in next door as part of their ninja training final exam, and then the ninjas disappear and never return to the story.

This is partly because when there is a huge dramatic action scene like ninjas leaping through the window, it acts like Chekov’s gun on the mantelpiece – the reader expects the event to have something to do with the central plotline. Readers are usually willing to wait until the initial confusion is over to get the explanation, but if the explanation for the specific incident is “Sorry, we got mixed up about where our final exam is,” readers usually make an unconscious assumption that the scene is there to establish the ninjas’ presence in the story, so that when they show up later, it won’t look like the author pulled some ninjas out of thin air to make sure the good guys could win. If the ninjas never show up again, the reader is likely to be dissatisfied, even if the central plot works out fine without them.

Every scene in a novel is there for a reason. Action scenes, in particular, move the characters along quickly. Sometimes it moves them forward – they have escaped with the jade relic; now all they have to do is translate it in order to find the lost city where the treasure is. Sometimes, an action scene moves them backward – they were captured, and now the villain has the jade relic and they are handcuffed in his/her dungeon.

“Moving the characters along” doesn’t necessarily mean moving them from one place or situation to another. Action scenes can also move a character quickly from one mindset or perspective to another. The gung-ho character gets their first taste of actual battle, and realizes that the real thing is significantly different from the heroic glory they’d been picturing. The determined loner who’s just been rescued by the team changes their view of cooperation.

These internal changes can happen in other ways, of course, but so can moving characters to a new location or situation. It’s the combination of speed, drama, physicality, and movement that makes something an action scene, not just a dramatic moment. Formally introducing one’s ninja next-door-neighbor at one’s tea part is likely to create drama, but it probably isn’t an action scene unless someone starts throwing china (or some other ninjas leap through the window to attack the neighbor).

In short, an action scene has to be connected to the rest of the story by more than chronology. “We were sitting in the den, trying to figure out how to finance a new children’s hospital when a bunch of ninjas leaped through the window. There was a bit of confusion; they left; and we went back to worrying about finances” tells the readers what happened, in order, but it doesn’t work unless the ninjas had a reason for doing what they did.

The stronger the reason for the action, and the more connected it is to the plot, the better. “We mistook the location” is a weak reason; so is “I’m your whacky neighbor playing a joke, ha, ha.” “The ninjas were hired to stop the hospital project” is a much better one (though it raises further questions about who hired them, why ninjas, and why their employer thinks such a dramatic break-in will actually stop a bunch of accountants from continuing to look at the numbers). “The ninjas want to take over the hospital project” is equally good, possibly better because it’s a little unexpected (but again, it will need more layers of reasons – why they want to take over, why they chose this method, etc.).

The exception is the aforementioned ninja-attack-as-setup-for-later. If the writer wants the wedding at the climax of the story to be interrupted by ninjas (so that the right couple can marry instead), it is perfectly reasonable to have ninjas break up the tea party early on by mistake to establish that a) there are ninjas around and b) they do this sort of thing more regularly than a reasonable person would expect. For ninjas, specifically, this would require the story to be more of a screwball comedy, but one can get a similar effect more believably by having Great-Uncle Jerry burst in periodically waving his service revolver because he’s having flashbacks to Vietnam.