Today I’m going to finish talking about what makes great action scenes. In Part 1 of this double post, I covered stakes and variety. In this second part, I’ll finish with twists and consequences, and then provide a sample action scene using all four aspects. (If you’d like to view this post in video format, click here. It’s part of our “Advice from an Editor” series on YouTube.) 3) Twists Twists, within an action scene, at their most basic level are simply: The action scene does not go precisely as the reader expects. Now, you don’t have to have an enormous reversal; it doesn’t have to be that you thought Character X would win and then Character X lost, although that is a great and valid twist to have, and I recommend trying it out sometime. But it can be simply that two characters are fighting and you expect X, since he’s a great swordsman, to be able to win with a sword, but then he’s disarmed and he has to grab a gun to win. Again, twist. One of the great things about having twists within a single action scene is that it raises stakes and interest for future action scenes. Because the reader’s no longer thinking, “I know exactly how this is going to go” when they come to the next action scene. Instead, they’re thinking, “I’m not sure I know how this is going to go” or perhaps “I have absolutely no clue how this is going to go. But I really care.” For the most part, as long as they make sense, the bigger the twist, the better. “As long as they make sense” means don’t break your narrative promises over the twist. If you just had 400 pages in medieval England and you have a big fight-scene tournament, having your characters suddenly transported aboard the starship Enterprise—in addition to being a copyright violation—is not a good twist because it’s not what the reader was promised and it came out of nowhere. The biggest twist that makes sense within your universe and isn’t the same as the previous twists you had is, generally speaking, the most potent, especially if it brings old information into new light and makes the reader say, “So that’s what was going on! Oh dear.” . . . “Oh dear” is a great thing for your reader to say during an action scene because, unless it’s a curb-stomp battle just meant to show how awesome your protagonist is, having your protagonist spend a lot of time losing does tend to raise sympathy for the underdog. There is one other element, in addition to twists, that can raise the stakes enormously for the next action scene, and that is consequences. 4) Consequences By “consequences” here, I mean don’t make your action scene inconsequential. Don’t have an action scene that, if you removed it entirely and made a few minor cosmetic changes, your audience would basically not notice. Writers, both of books and of movies, tend to fall into this pit hole of thinking, “Well, I just need an action scene to get the adrenaline going, so I’ll just shove one in. Doesn’t matter.” This works at first, but what they’re ultimately doing is shooting themselves in the foot because near the end of the action scene, if your audience realizes it doesn’t matter: 1) they’ll stop caring, 2) on rereads, it will turn into a popcorn break, and 3) it will create an expectation in the readers that further action scenes also don’t matter—which basically erases the entire stakes. Even if they don’t know this but the action scene does matter, you’ve created an expectation in them that it doesn’t. And even if it did, if there’s no variety or twists, they’ll know exactly how it’s going to go, and why do we care? Why are we reading it? Where are the stakes? Oh, right, there aren’t any. Actions need to matter. Stakes need to matter. Twists need to give unexpected turns, and so does variety. And together, they can make great action scenes. Now I do want to put all four of these elements together to demonstrate how you can use them to build your own action scene. I thought about using a couple of really great action scenes I love, such as the end fight scene in the second arc of Bleach between Byakuya and Ichigo, but I decided not to because since one of the elements of a really great action scene is a massive twist that just makes the reader go “Aah!” and great action scenes have that, I don’t want to ruin them for you. Go watch Bleach. Go read The Dresden Files, and enjoy. Here’s an original action scene that you can use as sort of a model for building your own. I say “action scene,” but I actually mean “action sequence” because I’ll put two action scenes back-to-back so you can see the variety between action scenes. Let’s begin: Our protagonist’s name is Jane. We don’t know a lot about her backstory; she just showed up a couple of years ago, she was adopted by a family, and they’ve come to love her and she’s come to love them, and it’s clear that she has some quite unusually amazing fighting skills—and also that she hates the mad king who is the ruler, the evil overlord of the land. And then something happens. The evil overlord sends his lieutenant to go and track her down. And although she escapes, the lieutenant ends up killing a beloved member of her family, creating our first layer: setup for emotional stakes. In this time, he also releases a toxin that infiltrates the water and is slowly killing everyone in the town, everyone Jane has come to care about. And she knows that the only way to save their lives is to break into the mad king’s palace while he’s away and steal the magic healing stone from his vault. Initial stakes, both physical for the people in her town, but also physical stakes for her because this is dangerous, and we know that the lieutenant has already been after her, although hopefully he’s away at this point. So we have the first of our two action scenes, a breaking-into-the-place type of heist, an adventure-action scene. She is dodging around guards; she is hiding from the magical equivalent of security cameras; she’s going through obstacles and maybe she fights off a giant beast and loses her sword in the process, so, unarmed, she has to make a few booby traps; and finally she gets to the vault and . . . twist. It’s empty—save for the lieutenant. The thing she’s come for isn’t there, and now he’s after her and she tries to run, because she’s unarmed; she can’t fight him. As she runs and he gives chase and she’s ducking and rolling and swerving from side to side and maybe getting scratched by his sword, they’re talking back and forth. And in their conversation, it becomes clear that not only do they know each other, but they used to work closely together. But how can this be? The lieutenant works for the mad king, and Jane hates the mad king. Did she use to be in his employ? This is strange. But while she’s running, she realizes getting away isn’t enough; she can no longer save her family, but she can avenge them, and she’s a better fighter than the lieutenant—she just has to get a weapon. But where will she get a weapon? She runs, she doesn’t know the layout of the palace, and then she hears a teakettle singing. There’s a kitchen nearby. She bursts into the kitchen, pushing past the cook, pushing him out of the way, but because he was in the way, she didn’t see his cat—environmental variety; also changing room to room. She trips over his cat, hits the prep table, and rolls off and runs into a bag of lentils . . . also known as a weapon. She grabs the handle of the weapon, and just as the lieutenant’s stabbing down, throws it at his face, distracting him long enough that she can leap to her feet and reach behind her and grab the boiling hot kettle and swing it at him, with an arc of water coming out behind. He parries it, but she fights hard enough with it that he has to back up, and this gives her the space she needs—another environmental factor—to jump up onto the prep table, giving her the high ground and allowing her to grab an 8-inch chef’s knife, and now she’s armed and we know she’s a stronger fighter than he is, and furthermore because it’s in an enclosed space, there are advantages to having a shorter blade. They fight back and forth with a variety of footwork and techniques and perhaps a few exchanges of dialogue, but—twist—something is going terribly wrong. In the years she’s been away, the lieutenant has upped his fighting skills, and now he is better than she is, and he’s winning and pushing her back, and then he wins—he shoves his sword through her shoulder and pushes her back against a red-hot burner, and she can smell and hear her hair sizzling and she knows that any moment it’s going to light on fire, but she can’t get away with a sword through her shoulder, and it hurts and she’s in shock and she knows she’s going to die and then—twist—the grip slackens, she’s able to straighten, the lieutenant crumples to the ground, and behind him stands the mad king himself. She is horrified, and he says, “I’ve saved your life. You are now in debt to me. You will have to do what I say to pay it off.” And she says, “I’m not that sort of person anymore” and grabs the sword and (hopefully it’s a short enough sword she can do this) she pulls it out of her shoulder to fight him. And he says, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Not if you want to save your family’s lives. Work for me; obey me; do as I say, as you once did, and I will use my magical stone to heal them.” . . . Consequence. Whatever happens next, it’s going to take more than cosmetic differences to remove this action scene; everything has changed. Maybe she can still get the stone, but only if she works for him. If she turns around and leaves, her family dies. And of course she can try tricky things, back-and-forth cleverness—the point is this action scene, full of the variety and the stakes and the twists, it matters. And what happens next has been impacted by it in unpredictable ways to keep the reader engaged. And that is how you write a great action scene. Do you have any other advice, comments, or questions about writing great action scenes? Leave them in the comments! For more writing tips, check out our Advice from an Editor YouTube series, or this set of blog posts. As an Amazon associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
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