A Is for Action

by Dan Alatorre

  A Is For Action

  Tips For Writing Amazing Action Scenes

  A basic guide on why action scenes are different from other scenes,

  and ideas on how to write them.

  DAN ALATORRE

  A is for ACTION

  © This book is licensed for your personal use only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. © No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author. Copyright © 2018 by Dan Alatorre. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover by David Duanes Design

  Edited by Allison Maruska allisonmaruska.com

  If you enjoy this book, please stop by and say a few kind words at Amazon! 5 stars is always appreciated, too! Click HERE to leave a review.

  FORWARD

  When I created S is for Story, a handy reference guide for writers where they could jump to a topic of interest, Dan approached me with the idea of additional stand-alone books based on the concept. I was all for it. Written by a handful of best-selling contributing authors, the S is for Story companion books expand on and add to the book's topics, creating a comprehensive collection of best-practice writing advice. Writers can use any or all of the topics in whatever way will support their needs while getting a good laugh here and there along the way.

  - Allison Maruska, bestselling author of The Fourth Descendant

  Table Of Contents

  Who Am I And Why Should You Care What I Have To Say?

  Part 1: Where To Start?

  10 steps to getting your big action scene – regardless of size and epicness - from idea to written form.

  Part 1-A, The Pre-Action Scene. (It turns out the action scene starts before the action starts.)

  Part 2: Dissection Of A Classic Movie’s Medieval Battle Scene

  Part 3: Analysis Of The Battle We Are Dissecting

  Use Of Different Structure And Punctuation In Action Scenes (This is where everybody messes up!)

  Part 4: Other Parts Of An Action Scene Plus The Writing Technique

  Layering In A Car Chase Or Any Action Scene

  PART 5: Reaction Before Action, Adverbs, And Other Screw-Ups

  The Last Big Mistake

  About The Author

  Other Books By Dan Alatorre

  Who Am I And Why Should You Care What I Have To Say?

  Glad you asked.

  I have published 20+ titles

  I have been translated into 12 different languages

  I am read in more than 100 countries all over the world

  I’ve had a string of #1 bestsellers

  I’ve been a mentor to many first-time authors including one whose debut novel sold more than 20,000 copies in its first year

  I’ve been a featured presenter at the Florida Writer’s Association conference and other places

  My works include family humor, romance, action adventure, paranormal thriller, biography, cooking, and sci fi

  I have been a critique partner to authors of all skill levels and genres, including many bestselling authors and a New York Times bestselling author

  I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of critiques for authors of all skill levels, taking their stories to new heights

  Hmm. That list looks pretty impressive to me.

  I’ve probably done what you are trying to do.

  I have also helped a lot of other authors – new authors and veteran authors – write a better book. I have an eye for what works, what doesn’t, and what’s awesome. My input is sought and valued by top selling authors. (If you need a few names, click HERE.)

  This guide is a culmination of the lessons I’ve learned and the things I’ve applied to the writings of my bestselling author friends and others who hire me to do it for their manuscripts. It’s done in short, easy to follow segments that your story will benefit from. Fair enough?

  Your 8th grade teacher taught you to write stories.

  I can show you how to write great stories.

  Part 1: Where To Start? Map Out The Action

  Every new author (and a lot of veteran authors) have the same problem when it comes to action scenes. They have this idea for a big battle scene or car chase – but most don’t know where to start!

  I’ll show you.

  This won’t necessarily be THE way to do every action scene in every book you write, but it’s ONE way to do it. Discover a better way – go with that! I’m easy that way.

  One of the best action scenes I’ve ever seen or read was the big battle in the movie Braveheart. (I like to use movie references because if a book sells a million copies, it’s a runaway bestseller, but if a movie only sells a million tickets, it’s a big time flop. People tend to know movie references, so by using them I can reach an understanding of what we are trying to accomplish, and reach it with more people.)

  Using the movie Braveheart, we will make a complicated action scene easy to visualize, understand, and write.

  After the Braveheart example, we’ll lay out how other types of action scenes are done, like a car crash, and the writing style you can use in action scenes that isn’t utilized elsewhere in your story.

  Car chase or medieval battle, we can create a process to follow. I like to use Braveheart because pretty much everybody saw it and knows the big battle scene I’m referring to. While every action scene is different, many have similar foundations. Bullitt and The Blues Brothers contain car chases that are very different from each other, but many elements are the same. (I also tend to lean toward older movies because odds are people have seen them or know them.)

  The big battle scene in Braveheart may be one of the best action scenes of all time. Using it, we will see what a complicated action scene looks like – and how we can take it from inside our heads to written into one of our stories.

  First, here are the 10 steps to getting your big action scene – regardless of size and epicness - from idea to written form.

  1. Take what your scene is in your head and narrate it to yourself verbally. Tell yourself the scene as though it were a movie you saw and are telling it to a friend. Don’t even worry about getting it all in the right order.

  2. Record this somehow, on a talk-to-text message or on video.

  3. Transcribe your narrated scene so we have some words to work with. That is your initial outline.

  4. Break it into as many steps as necessary, the smaller the step, the better – initially.

  5. Don’t worry about point of view (POV) yet or even proper spelling. Let it flow. Anything good you think of, add it in. Cut-paste it to wherever it needs to go.

  6. Flesh each step out in small segments, called microscenes.

  7. Be sure to add tension via teasing – more on that later.

  8. Let it rest, then revise it. Take out unnecessary stuff and put in better stuff, like dramatic action verbs if appropriate, to paint in the scene as you need it.

  9. Send it to a trusted friend for input, preferably a critique partner (CP).

  10. Revise it again with the friend’s input and your own newly fresh eyes until it fits what you want in your story.

  That’s it!

  Now, that’s all easier said than done, and it will take time and effort, but it will work. There are also a lot of tips to go into each step, so let’s begin.

  Part 1-A, The Pre-Action Scene

  It turns out the action scene starts before the action starts.

  Usually we have a complex scene in
our head with lots of things happening. And of course, when you go to write your story, it may be hard to know where to start because you might envision ten different things happening at once.

  My prescription for that has always been: envision the scene in your head, then tell yourself out loud in some fashion what happens. Pick up your cell phone and talk to text, or leave a series of messages on your answering machine, but walk yourself through what you see happening in your action scene. You generally know what it looks like; just start telling it to yourself. As you do, you’ll get ideas and see gaps – oh, wait, this could happen! - but it’ll be the basis for an outline.

  In Braveheart, where Mill Gibson’s ragtag group of clan members crosses the big field to clash with the English army, it’s a big scene. But if you were to play it on video and narrate what you see, you would have lots and lots of little chunks of information. For starters, what do you remember from Braveheart? Mel Gibson gives a rousing speech and then his army runs across the field towards the other. The other army runs toward Mel’s. They meet in the middle for a giant clash.

  Then Mel grabs someone and slashes their throat open. Another man falls off a horse. Elsewhere an arrow flies into a shield. Things like that. You just pick moment after moment after moment and tell yourself what you see in the scenes of your story. I’ll use Braveheart to show how it’s done.

  When you’re finished, that is your outline for the scene.

  You take each sentence you wrote, and you make each one its own little mini scene. A scene segment. What happens there? Go back and flesh it out. You give specifics about what you see in each one of those little segments. Sweat. Yelling. Mud on the face. Whatever. Some parts will have more immediate detail than others.

  Let it rest*, and then attack again. Add detail and hone it. When you are looking at a segment, what’s happening behind a character or in front of a character?

  * What does it mean to let something rest? Write it for a while, then don’t write it. Let it sit untouched in a drawer or on your computer for a span of time. For a chapter or a scene, that might be a day. For a book, that might be a month. But during that time, you DO NOT LOOK AT IT.

  When you take some time off, you allow your personal writing foibles to become apparent to you again. You will read it with fresh eyes. If you read your stuff right away, you start to not see what you’re habitually doing wrong. Read the same paragraph five times in a row and nothing seems wrong, even though it may not even make sense. Put two weeks in between you and that draft, and you’ll wonder if you were drunk when you wrote it. Fresh eyes see rhythms and patterns that readers would see – and potentially find annoying. There is a smoothness that comes from a well edited piece, and you want that smoothness. A reader may not be able to articulate it, but they see it, and if there are missed opportunities to be smoother in a story, they come away feeling, “It was good, but…”

  The point is, you miss things because you wrote it. Things readers would see, that you can’t. And we all do it. Take that time off, whether it’s a day or a week or a month and approach your writing as though you’d never seen it before and have no idea what’s going on. Give yourself the benefit of fresh eyes. Your writing will improve as a result, and when you show it to someone else, they can focus on what you want them focused on: the story.

  Okay, back to writing the first big messy draft of our action scene or battle.

  When you’re done with that outline process, you will have lots and lots and lots of pieces of information that don’t necessarily fit well together – but you’re writing a scene about a battle or a car chase or something, not about a chorus line or synchronized swimming.

  When you read an outline, you are not reading the whole story. You’re reading basics, arranging pieces of the puzzle. After you arrange it how you want, you can polish – scroll through to see where to add emotion to characters or swap out your original verbs for more action-y ones.

  If you can’t decide where to start in your scene, find one that’s already been done, in books or movies, and see how they did it. Why reinvent the wheel? Use it as a guide, a template, not for plagiarism.

  Which, fortunately for you, I have done here, using one of the best action scenes ever created.

  Part 2: Dissection Of The Braveheart Battle Scene

  Let’s break down the famous battle scene from Braveheart. The one at Stirling, where Mel has half his face painted blue and has that crazy long hair.

  If we can see how that’s done, we can break down any action scene, see how they are constructed, and build ours from there.

  The scene is sixteen minutes long. That’s it. Find it on YouTube or rent it – but watch it. You have sixteen minutes to devote to learning how to write great scenes.

  By the way, sixteen minutes is a lot in a movie. (16 minutes in a 3-hour movie is nearly 10% of the running time, not counting the ending credits opening titles and stuff. If they can devote 10% of the movie to a single scene, you can devote 10% of your book to one and spend a few days to get it right.) In sixteen minutes they recreated an action scene – a battle - that probably went on for many, many hours.

  For that reason, you can probably dedicate a few thousand words to the action scene in your story. Write it over a few days – start to finish – and do it properly.

  Before the battle begins, before William Wallace (Mel Gibson’s character) even arrives, some of the gathered members of the other clans explain how it will work. A young man asks his older friend, “What are we going to do?” and the friend says, “We’re going to negotiate then we’re going to go home.” The Scottish nobles, who have allied themselves with Wallace, reinforce this idea. So do the English commanders, in a different way.

  Hmm. Mel was expecting a battle. So were we. Yeah – don’t let anything happen too easily in your story. Not even a fight.

  Another Scottish man, upon learning the English army is bigger, declares “I’m not going to die for these bastards (the nobles). Let’s go home.” And he starts to leave with his clan – part of the overall army gathered to confront the bigger, better armed English army.

  That is why Gibson has to give his famous speech from the movie.

  He rides casually into the clansmen without saying a word and observes the troops.

  Then he addresses them. “If this is your army, why does it go?”

  He gets answers. “The English are too many.” “We didn’t come to die for them (the Scottish nobles).”

  On the Internet, you will probably be able to find it to where you can just watch the big battle scene, but since I happen to have it on DVD, I will give you my play-by-play of that scene and break it down for you.

  It’s worth remembering that the reason we are sympathetic to Mel Gibson’s character is because he is wronged so many times throughout the movie, as are his people. At least from the perspective of this film. (The English may have seen it differently.)

  What is his big goal? Freedom. Goals don’t come much bigger than that. Life – that one may be bigger.

  There is a huge amount of tension before the big battle scene.

  A Scottish scout returns from the English side and tells them they are outnumbered 3 to 1, and the lords of the various clans react very, very scared by this information. They keep saying things like “Three hundred heavy horse!”

  And Wallace gives a speech that endears him to the soldiers. He says, “I can’t be William Wallace because that guy is seven feet tall and lightning bolts shoot out of his arse.” He tells the men you’re not fighting for these nobles, you’re fighting for yourself to have freedom – and he tells them to look down the road, that they will be proud, and by inference, they would be remembering this day in shame if they don’t follow his lead.

  When he tells them what he sees, he projects onto them with they could be, not necessarily what they are. That’s important. You want to hear that your leader thinks you have greatness within you.

  And he says what is probably perceived to be
the seminal lines of the movie. “Fight and you may die. Run and you will live. At least a while. And dying in your bed many years from now, would you trade every day from that day to this, for one chance – just one chance – to come back here and tell our enemies ‘You may take our lives, but you will never take our freedom.’”

  It’s a great speech!

  But . . .

  When you read the words here, you don’t feel it. That’s good acting – and if you write it properly with the right expressions, it will read very dramatically as well.

  He’s in front of his army. And what do they do when he delivers that line? The music swells and his army cheers.

  Had they not cheered, you as the audience would not know that this speech changed their minds from running away to fighting. In other words, the director had the characters react the way he wants the audience to react.*

  * I talk about this all the time. HAVE SOMEONE IN YOUR STORY ACT THE WAY YOU WANT THE READER TO (movies are good because you can describe what you are seeing, but also because the actor had to create the emotion first and display it for you). Think about Close Encounters, where Richard Dreyfus’ truck is stalled by the railroad crossing and all the mailboxes start flying open and shut. It’s the first time the aliens interact with him. The warning bells at the crossing start going crazy, there are strange lights from overhead, and the mailboxes are wham wham wham opening and shutting like they’re possessed.

  And Dreyfus’ character acts scared out of his mind. His reaction is what sells the scene – and he’s a great actor – so have one of your characters react the way you want the reader to react. As readers or as audience members in a theater, when we read or see somebody grabbing the railing of the rollercoaster and clenching their teeth and holding their breath and their heart is pounding, we hold the book a little tighter, too. It’s instinctive and involuntary, but we do it. Use that to your advantage.