How to Write Action Adventure Novels

by Michael Newton

  Another useful weapon in your arsenal is that old movie stand-by, change of scene. Your hero’s getting tired from hot pursuit in three straight chapters? Never fear. Let’s give the guy (or gal) a break, and look around for someone else to play with. If your leading man is hiding out from mobsters or preparing to annihilate the Sandinistas, what’s his girlfriend doing? Is she thinking of him? Looking for him? Getting into trouble on her own? And what about the heavies? Are they conscious of the danger closing on their flank? Are they pursuing Mr. Clean? Inquiring minds want to know.

  The passage of time in a story is up to the author. A novel’s action may span hours or centuries, depending on the story and the writer’s natural ability to pull it off. The premiere Executioner encompassed two full months in something like 180 pages; most, since then, have limited their action to a period of days, to keep the hero hopping. Generally, more time means more deletions of material, in terms of trivial activities like eating, sleeping, warming up the family car, and so forth. You are not required to catalogue each movement made by every character throughout a given day. It’s boring, dig it?

  And within the action genre, boring readers is a capital offense.

  Tension and Suspense

  A second necessary element of plotting, tension, is connected inextricably with pacing. It arises naturally—or should—from complications your characters confront en route to the solution of a problem. Bear in mind, however, that if your protagonist is constantly in danger, if he never gets a break and his potential risks become a matter of routine, your story may begin to plod. (Check out your average, bargain-basement slasher movie, if you still have doubts. Assuming you can stay awake, you’ll notice how the carbon-copy “shocks” and “frights” all start to look alike as time goes by. If you’ve seen one guy jump out of a closet shouting “Boo!” you’ve seen them all.)

  There are varieties of tension, and they don’t all hinge upon a threat to life or limb. There may be tension in the interaction of your characters, beyond the root antagonisms of the story. Are they basically suspicious of each other, even though they seem to share a common goal? Have the adherents of two disparate religions or political beliefs been thrown together by a twist of circumstance? Is hero “A” attracted physically to lady “B,” and does she share his feelings, even though she cannot bring herself to let it show?

  Effective tension may be found within a single character, if we take time to look. Is your protagonist an alcoholic, terrified of falling off the wagon in the middle of his biggest mission ever? Is he sweating out results of diagnostic tests from his physician? Is his job in jeopardy from something he may be forced to do? Is your protagonist the victim of a phobia, compelled to overcome private demons in a bid to save loved ones?

  In The Liquidator, Boise Oakes is an assassin who has never murdered anybody in his life. Selected for the job capriciously, he carries on by farming out official contracts to a hit man, but, inevitably, he is forced to take the field alone. Will Graham, in Red Dragon, is a federal agent with a knack for tracking human monsters. He can “get inside” their twisted minds, by methods even he does not completely understand, and he is terrified when one of them suggests that he and those he stalks are “just alike.” In Child of Blood, with Tony Kieu, I drew the portrait of a boy whose longing for a family is overshadowed by his hatred for the father who abandoned him in Vietnam. Instead of reaching out for love, he is compelled to kill.

  We’re looking at the heart and soul of all adventure fiction, and the sad truth is that many working authors still don’t get it. One man running endlessly around a track is active, but there’s no adventure to it. No suspense. You need at least two runners, giving everything they’ve got in competition, striving for the finish line, before you have a race. And waiting for the outcome, cheering on our favorite athlete, we experience suspense.

  Remembering the standard definition of adventure, authors in the genre should invest their stories with the necessary elements of danger, risk, excitement, and surprise. I wouldn’t try to serve them up the same way every time, by any means, but if you’re working on a story that has none of the above, it’s simply not adventure. Sorry.

  There are probably as many ways to build suspense as there are authors working in the field. Again, there are no magic guidelines for construction of a good, suspenseful scene, but with some practice, you should find a way to build on the established methods used by other pros. And, who can say? You might come up with something new.

  In order to create suspense, your characters must obviously face some kind of jeopardy. A threat to life and limb will normally evolve at some point in the story, but it doesn’t have to start that way. In Mr. Majestyk, the title character is first threatened economically, by corrupt labor contractors, faced with the possible loss of his melon crop. Murder comes later, when he has resisted the opening moves of his enemies, building a mood of suspense as the jeopardy escalates.

  Suspense may have little or nothing to do with your story’s eventual outcome. We all know that Charles DeGaulle died of old age, but Day of the Jackal is still a suspense masterpiece, following his would-be assassin down the tortuous path to ultimate failure. Likewise, the protagonist in D.O.A. has only hours to live; there is no magic antidote to save him from the poison he’s ingested, but we’re rooting for him all the same, as he attempts to track down his killer before his time runs out. Series fans are confident their hero will survive, but they are interested in how he does it in the face of overwhelming odds.

  One tried-and-true technique of building up the mood is through foreshadowing. A skillful author lays the groundwork for a crisis situation by providing clues along the way: a chance remark, or something left unsaid; a pointed glance; the hero’s vague suspicion that he’s being followed. (Not-so-skillful authors use this method, too; they just don’t do it very well.)

  It’s not enough for you to know that trouble’s on the way; your readers should be able to deduce as much from indications in the story. If they can’t, they won’t be hanging on the edges of their seats to see what happens next. They’ll merely be surprised … assuming that they haven’t moved along, by then, to a more entertaining tale.

  Foreshadowing is frequently accomplished by insertion of mysterious, unexplained incidents throughout the story. A nondescript sedan follows our hero through midtown traffic, turning up outside his home by night. A lovely woman passes him a cryptic note while riding on the subway—and immediately disappears. An apartment is ransacked, but nothing appears to be missing. The protagonist’s wife/lover/best friend/business partner vanishes without a trace. (Please bear in mind that all your clues must be explained by the conclusion of the story,- otherwise, they just become embarrassing loose ends.)

  Suspense within an action scene derives from choreography. It’s more than dodging bullets in a firefight or evading hot pursuit, however. Once the action’s been engaged, remember that you can’t rely on twenty-five near-misses in a row to keep things moving. Even sudden death gets boring, if it always looks the same.

  Remember that your action scenes can be described from different points of view. We may be looking through the hero’s eyes as he ascends a flight of stairs, expecting an attack at any moment. When it comes, you might shift to the heavy’s perspective and learn how it feels to attack from the darkness, ferociously slashing away at your nemesis. Take that as far as it goes, then return to your primary viewpoint as “A” starts to fight for his life. If the action involves several characters, so much the better. They each have a viewpoint and feelings, remember. Why else are they there?

  You need not carry each and every action scene to an explicit climax. Action may be interrupted, in the interest of suspense, as when the villain closes Chapter 3 by whipping out his gun but doesn’t get to fire until the start of Chapter 5. Some other sequences may never be completed. When a psycho-killer locks the door behind his next intended victim and begins to smile, we know what’s on his mind. The subsequent discovery o
f a body or an empty, vandalized apartment may be all we need to make the scene complete. It isn’t blazing action, necessarily, but it’s effective if you handle it correctly. With a bit of luck, imagination does the rest.

  If you’ve paced yourself correctly, keeping all your goals in mind, the climax of your story should become its hottest action scene. It may not be a battle fielding armies; you can stage a one-on-one between your hero and his leading adversary just as well. Remember, as you plan the final scene, that readers have been rooting for your hero since page one, or thereabouts. They want to see him win, but no one likes the title bout to wind up as a one-punch knockout. Likewise, if the audience has come to hate your villain, they don’t want him getting off the hook too easily.

  That doesn’t mean you have to shoot him six or seven times; he simply needs an opportunity to die with style. Or, maybe not. A sampling of the daily news reminds us that the bad guys often get away—one-quarter of domestic murders go unsolved each year—and you may wish to leave the ending of your story flexible, as in the novel Road Kills. There, a vicious serial slayer disappears on Florida’s Alligator Alley, presumably winding up as ’gator bait. “Or maybe,” the author suggests, “some damned fool gave him a ride.”

  A final classic flaw sometimes emerges when an author strives too hard for final-page suspense and thereby blows his chance to make a good, clean kill. If you’re familiar with the television series “Batman,” you’ll recall the famous cliff-hanger scenes, invariably closing for the day with Batman and Robin attached to some Rube Goldberg device, intended to kill them slowly while the heavies make a leisurely escape. The problem was that no one ever stayed behind to verify the kill, and everyone (except the “brilliant” villains) knew that Batman would escape with seconds left to spare. This kind of ending works occasionally, as when James Bond runs a vicious gauntlet at the end of Dr. No, but it becomes a joke if overused.

  With all of the above in mind, it’s time to meet the people who will make your story come to life. I think you’ll find that some of them may look familiar. They’ve been with you all along.

  7. Heroes and Heavies

  Picture a deserted city. Streets are empty, shops and houses uninhabited. There is no sign of life, no sound. The very atmosphere is dusty, dead. You have to concentrate on breathing, and you get the feeling that a spoken word will shrivel up and die of loneliness before it leaves your lips.

  A ghost town makes the perfect introduction for a mystery … but let’s suppose the streets remain deserted, silent. No one ever comes on stage. From an intriguing hook, you’ve plummeted to instant tedium. You’re looking at an Andy Warhol snoozer, guaranteed.

  In short, until you populate the scenery, you’ve got no story. How you populate your fiction may determine whether you succeed as a professional or simply fade away with all the other hapless “wanna-bees.” Your characters can make or break a novel at the outset. Bring them vividly to life, for good or evil, and the best (or worst) of them can help you elevate a mediocre plot above its origins. Conversely, if you try to muddle through with cardboard characters, the greatest story in the world may come off sounding like a retread of the Hardy Boys.

  Okay, I grant you, everybody knows you’re dreaming up these characters, but they should still seem real, imbued with spirit, individuality, and style. Your readers want them to be real—or realistic, anyway—and it’s your job, as author and creator, to fulfill that wish. Before we’re finished, you should have a handle on the process of creating “life” on paper, and from there, it’s up to you.

  If you’ve been faithful with your homework, namely reading anything and everything that you can get your hands on, you will recognize the fact that some professionals possess more skill than others when it comes to the creation of their characters. A few are gifted artists, sketching characters in bold, imaginative strokes, injecting subtle colors to complete the portrait, bringing it to life. The rank and file are capable enough, like good mechanics; everything they put together works all right, but sometimes we can still see nuts and bolts exposed. Too many labor on like cut-rate Frankensteins, well-meaning but inept, producing clumsy monsters that inevitably turn upon their masters, trashing their careers.

  The cut-rate Frankensteins are also known as “hacks.” Some still get work, at bargain-basement rates, but no one takes their product seriously. As a group and individually, they’re going nowhere fast.

  For openers, we need to look beyond the trivia of good and evil, race and sex, to understand that there are basically two kinds of characters in modern fiction: some that work, and some that don’t. Don Pendleton once briefed me on the crucial difference, with a description of “created” versus “made-up” characters, and while the terminology is flexible, Don’s choice of labels neatly pins down the problem.

  Created characters, in simple terms, are those who have been “brought to life,” invested by their authors with the many traits of human personality that make them seem to live and breathe. By contrast, made-up characters are lifeless, two-dimensional clichés, whipped up on impulse by a lazy writer in the same way faceless extras are employed by film directors, to produce a body-count. You never really get to know a made-up character, but it’s a safe bet that you haven’t missed a thing.

  In Chapter 5, I mentioned “throwaways,” the sort of characters who generally die by violence shortly after their appearance in a novel. They are used, most often, to provide your major characters with cannon fodder as the story rolls along, progressing toward its climax. As a rule of thumb, development of throwaways, as “living” characters, should be proportionate to the amount of time they spend on stage. If Mr. X is nothing but a target in your villain’s shooting gallery, you may dismiss him with a line or two and go about your business. If, however, you expect your readers to feel sympathy—or anything—for Mr. X along the way, you’ll have to spend a bit more time developing his character before you kill him off.

  Profiles and Descriptions

  I like to have my people ready by the time I finish polishing an outline. Characters will normally suggest themselves as I begin to lay out a story—they are the story, after all—and I write profiles on the major actors as I go along. Before I try to make them walk and talk, or kiss and kill, I want to know these people inside-out, their likes and dislikes, quirks and kinky habits—all the things that separate a person from his peers.

  My profiles range in length from one or two short lines to half a page or more, depending on a character’s importance to the story. They will normally include a detailed physical description, habits, sexual proclivities, political persuasions, taste in cars and clothing: anything, in short, that I can think of at the time. I end up writing down a great deal more than I will ever use, from moles and scars to ancient childhood traumas, but I need it all, and more, if I intend to build a living, breathing character from scratch.

  The little things bring characters to life and make them memorable for your readers. Browse through Ian Fleming’s work, and notice how he “signed” his characters with quirks and traits that make each one unique. Ernst Blofeld’s lobeless ears and nostrils scarred by syphilis. Scaramanga’s third nipple. Honeychile Rider’s broken nose. The lethal hit man with a wart, in Diamonds Are Forever. (I forget his name, but I remember him, and what a brute he was.)

  In short, the skillful use of trivia can make a difference. Anyone who reads your profiles should be able to identify your people if they put on solid flesh and walked into the room, but you should not go overboard and lose your story line in the pursuit of tasty odds and ends.

  How much of a description is too much? Again, I’d say you ought to let the story be your guide. Don’t feel compelled to give us every scar or liver spot on each and every character. Remember that your readers have imaginations, too, and half the fun of reading genre fiction lies in putting faces with the people, making each one personal. You’ll recognize the feeling, if you’ve ever loved a novel and been blown away by sorry casting of
a movie made for same. Imagine Don Knotts as James Bond … but, please, not while you’re eating.

  Some examples may be helpful in defining the parameters of adequate descriptions. For a start, meet Butt Cut Cates, as lovingly described by William Bradford Huie in The Klansman:

  Butt Cut’s nickname was common in a county where the principal occupation was the growing and processing of pine trees, either for lumber or pulpwood. “Butt cut” means massive might close to the ground. The first log cut from the base of a felled tree—the butt cut—is the more massive, more noted for circumference than length. Twenty-nine years old, Butt Cut Cates was five-feet-six and weighed one-ninety. He was a human bulldozer. From the day he dropped out of the seventh grade until he was twenty-five he drove a pulpwood truck and learned “every pig trail in Atoka County.” This knowledge of terrain was one of the reasons why Big Track, in 1962, made him his only deputy.

  In Black Sunday, Thomas Harris introduces an Arab terrorist thus:

  Hafez Najeer, head of Al Fatah’s elite Jihaz al-Rasd (RASD) field intelligence unit, sat at a desk leaning his head back against the wall. He was a tall man with a small head. His subordinates secretly called him “The Praying Mantis.” To hold his full attention was to feel sick and frightened.

  Najeer was the commander of Black September. He did not believe in the concept of a “Middle East situation.” The restoration of Palestine to the Arabs would not have elated him. He believed in holocaust, the fire that purifies.

  Dashiell Hammett takes a different approach to the description of a character in “Too Many Have Lived”:

  The man’s tie was as orange as a sunset. He was a large man, tall and meaty, without softness. The dark hair parted in the middle, flattened to his scalp, his firm, full cheeks, the clothes that fit him with noticeable snugness, even the small pink ears flat against the sides of his head—each of these seemed but a differently colored part of one same, smooth surface. His age could have been thirty-five or forty-five.