New Writers Ask: What Counts as Action?
Back when my full time day job was ghostwriting and editing, I’d sometimes get clients who wanted to learn craft and who were intensely concerned about the amount of action in their books. Often they were not readers themselves. They almost universally drew their ideas about writing a novel from movies they’d seen. Movies like 300 or Gladiator or Return of the King or Star Wars had led them to decide that acing the pacing in their book meant making sure that action sequences—be it sword fights, fisticuffs, car chases or fleeing existential terror—were liberally sprinkled throughout the story.
One such aspiring author, Rocky, complained that between chapters six and eighteen of the book we were working on, there was “hardly any action”. “We need to add some action that Our Hero is central to that will drive the plot,” he told me. “If his Arch Nemesis is also involved somehow that would be great. What if we added in a particularly violent game of football? Pitting Our Hero’s cohort against his nemesis’ cohort? Maybe it comes about through a machismo-driven wager.”
My response was that action in a novel isn’t just people fighting, or playing ball, or having car or chariot chases, and that throwing a physical action scene into a novel for the sake of improving pacing is likely to have the opposite effect. You will not thrill readers; you may bore them, and possibly cause them to lose the emotional momentum you’ve built up in prior scenes.
Fight scenes and battles—especially big Pelennor Fields style battles as in Return of the King—are great on screen and not so great on the page simply because the sort of battlefield overview that a movie-goer can take in at once, must be described bit by bit using words that, well, take time to read and envision. Fights and battle scenes can also distract from the characters and their stories unless something truly significant takes place between individual characters in a microcosm of the battlefield.
I mention the Battle of Pelennor Fields because Tolkien manages to keep the battle from becoming a chaotic suspension of the real story. He does this by featuring and focusing on massively pivotal moments, which Peter Jackson carried into his movie. The capstone of these is the moment in which Eowyn and Merry defeat the King of Angmar. Tolkien’s focus on this intimate moment between three characters demonstrates precisely how to craft a scene that is as beautiful, impactful, and dramatic on the page as it is on film. The action, at this crisis point, does a callback to prophecy (the Wraith King cannot be killed by any man) and creates a sensory explosion when Eowyn rips off her war helm and announces, “I am no man!” She follows this with a single thrust of her sword.
Poof! Problem solved … by one line of dialogue and a single sword thrust. Who would argue the potency of that truly minimal physical action?
The two major battle scenes between which Rocky wanted to add a “particularly violent game”, contained just such significant moments that devastated the protagonist and shaped everything that happened in the remainder of the book.
I asked Rocky not to look at those chapters in terms of how much physical activity they held, but in terms of how many key reveals occurred or how many decisions were made or how many steps our characters took toward, or directly into, a transformative moment. Big story arc Moments rarely happen in the middle of random physical action; they happen in scenes in which a character learns or says or does something that changes their world or their perception of it. In this specific case, one chapter ends with the beloved sister of a pivotal character being captured by a tribe he assumed would fight on his side in a war for the whole Megillah; the next ends with this character being told that his sister is dead. These were both emotionally charged and suspenseful scenes in which most readers would be invested because they’d followed these siblings throughout the book.
The chapters Rocky described as having hardly any action were full of mounting tension, paced reveals, and cliff hanging moments. I pointed out to him that this mounting suspense, uncertainty, and sense of betrayal laid the groundwork for the climactic scenes at the end of the book. Sticking a random ball game in the midst of it all would defuse the tension we’d so carefully built. Besides, I told Rocky, what would-be ruler of the known world would put himself and his forces in danger of being injured in a ball game on the eve of a major military encounter?
So, here’s a word for any aspiring writers out there about the use of “action scenes”: Please resist throwing a fight, battle or chase scene in just ‘cause. They can suspend the flow of the story and a lot of readers will skip over them to get to the next dialogue. While I love writing action sequences, and have been told I write them well, I learned that they’re not the answer to making a story more exciting. I learned this when an editor who was interested in buying my novel Laldasa: Beloved Slave, told me there was too much unnecessary action in it. He pointed out scenes in which the characters seemed to be running to and fro just to be running to and fro and requested that I replace that with more of the political intrigue that he found so engaging. This, I gladly did. Ironically, my agent at the time had asked for less intrigue and more pure action and I’d reworked the manuscript to his specs before he sent it to publishers.
If you want an explosive scene between two characters that absolutely fear or detest each other, find and read the scene in Dune in which Feyd-Rautha and Paul Atreides circle each other, knives out. Unbeknownst to Paul, Feyd-Rautha’s knife has been treated with a soporific poison. That is one of the most riveting and pivotal scenes in genre fiction. In the 1984 movie, director Dino de Laurentis boiled it down to Sting (as Feyd-Rautha) saying repeatedly, “I will kill him”. This was disappointing because I’d always thought that scene and its dialogue were perfect for cinema just as they dropped from Frank Herbert’s keyboard. I suggested to Rocky that a tense dialogue between Our Hero and Arch Nemesis, with the threat of physical violence, would do far more for the story than a macho-driven ball game.
How does dialogue become pivotal action? The trick, I think, is to stage the dialogue in way that 1) builds tension, 2) reveals something about one or both characters, 3) subtly guides the readers’ perceptions of what’s happening. In Rocky’s book it was important that Arch Nemesis come away from the dialogue believing that Our Hero wanted to rule the world as much as he did. We needed to do that without 1) having Our Hero say misleading things to give the false impression that he wanted the Whole Megillah, 2) having him not say what he would if Arch Nemesis asked the right questions, 3) allowing Arch Nemesis to ask the right questions.
In the scene we eventually crafted, the dialogue was the action. If it helps you can think of it as a fight scene in which the participants are trying to land blows that alter their opponent’s trajectory through the story—knock them off balance, so to speak, or send them charging off in the wrong direction. The weapons the characters wield are words. They can be direct and deadly like the thrust of a knife, or sly and insidious like a drop of poison on the blade.
oOo
