• Taking an action based on what was revealed
• Caught in a reflective space to muse on what came in the scene
Remember that dialogue should never be used to discuss mundane or quotidian topics, but always to reveal new information about plot and character. Dialogue can be stylized to match the personality of a character, and should sound realistic.
Finally, be careful with too many back-to-back dialogue scenes. Remember that dialogue feels like action to the reader, so you can break up action by following a dialogue-heavy scene with a suspenseful scene, a contemplative scene, or an epiphany scene. Even within a single scene, a lot of dialogue can start to feel rushed after a while, and should be grounded with physical gestures, setting details, or other brief snippets of exposition.
DIALOGUE SCENE MUSE POINTS_
• Dialogue should always reveal new information about either the characters or the plot.
• Dialogue feels like action to the reader and can be used to add energy to an otherwise slower-paced scene.
• Balance a dialogue scene with setting details to create foreshadowing, build subtext, and keep the pace even.
•Use dialogue to reveal plot information in a realistic, not convenient, way.
•When a character speaks, her dialogue should reveal intentions
• Use opposing forces, or tug-of-war, in dialogue to keep tension alive.
The American action movie has changed the way people think about action, and not necessarily for the better. We're taught to think that buildings must explode, well-muscled men must leap off crumbling scaffolding, and small children must be rescued at the last minute from near death, or it doesn't count as action. Actions can be smaller and more personal—the only requirement of an action scene is that it rely in part upon physical movement through the space you've created, and evoke a sense of time passing. In action scenes, the reader will feel like he is participating in action because:
•The events unfold in "real time," allowing the reader to feel he is participating in the events of the scene
•The pace is quick, and there is some kind of physical movement
•The protagonist is forced to make quick decisions or to react—to run on instinct rather than intellect
• Unexpected consequences for the protagonist heighten the drama
Action scenes are the ones in which your protagonist acts first and thinks later— in a rage, in passion, or with any other motive, she smashes in the windshield of her cheating boyfriend's car, drops that vengeful letter in the mail, or shows up on the doorstep of the father who never wanted her. Action scenes are also those in which forces catch your protagonist by surprise, thrusting her into motion: hurricanes, sinking boats, mistaken identities. An action scene in a literary novel might not seem as dramatic or big, but you will almost always find scenes in any type of fiction in which people move, react, and rely more on the physical aspects of life than they do on thinking or feeling.
Action scenes feel fast and often intense. Since they rely upon character reactions, they work best when there is something unexpected or surprising about the action—and that increases the reader's worry for the protagonist. (However, too many action scenes in a row can leave your reader overwrought.) Action scenes are a natural fit after a suspense scene, since suspense drives characters toward conflict and action. They're also great after an epiphany or contemplative scene in which the protagonist has digested some kind of important information and is now ready to do something about it.
This scene type will certainly drive the reader forward, but be warned that people have a tendency to skim action scenes, driven forward with their urgency, so you will want to balance them with other types of scenes.
OPENING AN ACTION SCENE
An action scene is so named because the majority of the scene is composed of action unfolding. Therefore, even if you want to start out slow and build toward the action, be thinking about how soon you're going to start the action.
Opening Mid-Action
In medias res is Latin for "in the middle of action"; beginning a scene in the middle of the action is a great way to open when you want to bypasses exposition. Opening in medias res forces the reader to dive in and read on to figure out what is happening. You might open a scene like this when the scene that came before it ended on a cliffhanger, essentially continuing the action that was left dangling in the scene prior, or you may just choose to use this technique to keep the momentum of your narrative up-tempo.
Here's an example from Neal Stephenson's science-fiction novel Snow Crash of a scene that opens with the protagonist already in action. Notice how the pace is quick right from the launch. In this future world, pizza delivery is controlled by the mafia, and delivering a pizza late means unemployment, possibly death. The scene before this one ends with the protagonist, Hiro (known as "the Deliverator") on a cliffhanger of tension: He has just learned that he has to get an already old pizza (not a good thing) twelve miles in a very short period of time. The next scene opens with him in action:
The Deliverator lets out an involuntary roar and puts the hammer down. His emotions tell him to go back and kill that manager, get his swords out of the trunk, dive in through the little sliding window like a ninja, track him down through the moiling chaos of the microwaved franchise and confront him in a climactic thick-crust apocalypse. But he thinks the same thing when someone cuts him off on the freeway, and he's never done it—yet.
He can handle this. This is doable. He cranks up the orange warning lights to maximum brilliance, puts his headlights on autoflash.
Opening in this manner allows the reader to feel the pressure that is on the protagonist. It also engages the reader's curiosity. What's going on? Why is the protagonist so upset? What would make him want to pull out his swords and kill the manager? The mid-action scene opening forces the reader to carry on and find out.
When you open an action scene mid-action, the reader should be able to follow the essential action. He should know if your protagonist is running down a street, or in the middle of a crime scene investigation. He doesn't have to know how, or why—but be sure you make what as clear as possible.
Opening With Foreshadowing
If your action scene does not open in the midst of action, then it must be set up to deliver action quickly. You can foreshadow the action that is coming through smaller actions or narrative summary without entirely giving it away. Vendela Vida's novel And Now You Can Go opens with Ellis, a young grad student in New York, being held at gunpoint by a man. An action scene toward the end of the book opens with foreshadowing of the related action that is about to ensue:
In the elevator, I watch the numbers as we descend. Sarah's standing with her back to the door, her legs planted and her arms out, as though she's protecting me from whatever I'm about to see.
What she's about to see is the man who held her at gunpoint—who was never caught by police. Two of Ellis's friends, including one particularly volatile guy who is itching for a fight, have brought him there for Ellis to identify so they can proceed to beat him up.
That moment in the elevator prepares the reader for the fact that something is coming. The action comes pretty quickly once she gets off.
"El," the ROTC boy says, "tell me if this is your guy, because if it is, he's a dead man." He's holding the man's arms behind his back. Everyone's eyes are on me, including the man's.
When you open an action scene with foreshadowing or narrative summary, try to keep it short, and simply set up the action that is coming with subtle hints—like the image of Ellis's friend protecting her—and then let the action take center stage. Over-preparing the reader for an action to come can suck the energy or surprise right out of the scene.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT AND PLOT IN ACTION
In a fiction narrative, action is one of the ways that you show the true nature of your protagonist without any of the dull work of exposition. Every scene should offer your protagonist a chance to intera
ct, react, and change, but action scenes take this further. The circumstances of an action scene should be just a bit more intense than those in other types of scenes, so that your characters can show what they're really made of, and even make mistakes. And the actions should also move your plot forward.
In William Golding's revered novel Lord of the Flies, the entire student population of a boys' school is shipwrecked on an island, and the boys must fend for themselves without any adult rules. In the following scene, the boys have splintered off into two factions: Those who follow the rough, violence-prone Jack, who acts more like a little dictator, and those who follow the gentler, consensus-minded Ralph.
Before the following excerpt, which takes place about two-thirds of the way through the book, Jack and Ralph have been butting heads more and more. Jack is tired of doing things civilly—he wants to take control and his desire for dominance infects the entire group of boys. Jack has figured out how to kill for meat, and this alone wins more boys over to him, inflating his already out-of-control sense of power. Now that he knows he can kill food, he realizes that he has a kind of leverage over the group that Ralph does not. He starts the boys in nothing more than a boyish ritual to show off their dominance, but it quickly descends into a frenzy of violence.
Jack leapt up on the sand.
"Do our dance! Come on! Dance!"
He ran stumbling through the thick sand to the open space of rock beyond the fire. Between the flashes of lightning the air was dark and terrible; and the boys followed him, clamorously. Roger became the pig, grunting and charging at Jack, who side-stepped. The hunters took their spears, the cooks took spits, and the rest clubs of firewood. A circling movement developed and a chant. While Roger mimed the terror of the pig, the littluns ran and jumped on the outside of the circle. Piggy and Ralph, under the threat of the sky, found themselves eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society. They were glad to touch the brown backs of the fence that hemmed in the terror and made it governable.
"Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!"
Caught up in the energy of the dance, the boys react by killing their classmate, Simon:
The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit tore.
Ralph is the only one whose conscience is troubled the next day. His only true remaining friend, Piggy, tries to assuage him saying they were scared, but Ralph knows better.
"It was dark. There was that—that bloody dance. There was lightning and thunder and rain. We was scared!"
"I wasn't scared," said Ralph slowly, "I was — I don't know what I was."
Ralph is changed. He knows now that every boy has within him the potential to be both bad and good, and that the hallmark of maturity is learning to choose the right path.
When you write an action scene, consider how you can challenge your protagonist to discover something unexpected about himself that he wouldn't necessarily know through his intellect. All people have instincts, but not many get the opportunity to act on them, so think about how, through actions, you can let your protagonist access his instincts.
In terms of plot, it's also good to have your character engage in actions that he can't take back so that you create new consequences for him to deal with. If your character, who has a fear of looking foolish, engages in the action of riding a horse for the very first time without telling anyone he's a novice, that's not very dramatic and has little room for conflict. But if that same character rides a horse for the first time and takes it down a forbidden path where the horse breaks a leg and must be put down—that can't be taken back, and it comes with consequences.
ENDING AN ACTION SCENE
There are multiple ways to end an action scene, and we'll look at several strong ways to do so in a moment, but no matter which way you select, an action scene's end should convey the following:
•That your protagonist's life has been altered by the action
•That the actions have created consequences the protagonist will have to deal with in future scenes
Endings can fall into three essential categories: those that slow down the pace and offer room for reflection; those that jack up the tension and suspense and leave the scene on a high note of anxiety that forces the reader to press on; and those that come with big revelations that will change your protagonist or the plot (or both).
Slow-Down Endings
After all that action, you may choose to close your scene with a quieter, slower pace to gives the reader an opportunity to breathe. Use exposition or reflection to bring the pace down for a feeling of conclusion. Notice how Neal Stephenson does it at the end of the Snow Crash scene. The protagonist—"the Deliverator," whose name is Hiro—did not, in fact, make his delivery, and he must now flee from the scene of his car crash—in a residential neighbor-hood—for his life. Stephenson uses exposition to bring the pace down, but he leaves the reader with an image that foreshadows how things are likely to get worse for Hiro.
Dad is emerging from the back door pulling on a jacket. It is a nice family, a safe family in a house full of light, like the family he was part of until thirty seconds ago.
When you taper an action scene to a quiet close, you still want to leave the reader with the feeling that your protagonist will suffer consequences for the actions in the scene. Even though this is not a typical cliffhanger, because the danger Hiro is in isn't immediate, it leaves the feeling of trouble on the horizon. You can use a foreshadowing image like Stephenson did, or you can allow your protagonist to have a thought or feeling in a brief moment of narrative summary.
Cliffhanger or Suspense Endings
If you want to keep the action alive at the end of the scene so that the reader must keep reading on to the next scene, do not conclude the action of the scene, but bring it to a place where it can hang—that is to say, where the action hasn't concluded or run its course. At the end of the scene from And Now You Can Go, Ellis's attacker is gagged and held captive in the elevator by her two friends—one who is holding a gun—who are begging her to identify him so they can beat him up.
I hear a bang. At first I think the gun's been fired.
"Jesus," Sarah says. She's been standing next to me, and now she grabs my elbow and thrusts her chin in the direction of the glass door to the lobby. The door is locked after 11 P.M. But the representative of the world is standing outside, in his green coat, knocking. He points to me. "Sorry about Melissa," he mouths. I try to wave him away. He presses his walnut-colored face to the glass and sees the ROTC boy and G.P. holding the man. He knocks on the glass door with a gloved hand. Then he takes off his glove and knocks harder, with his knuckles.
"Should I get rid of that guy?" Danny says, nodding toward the door. I hear a grunt. The ROTC boy has punched the man from the park in the stomach.
"Should I get rid of him?" Danny says again, thumbing toward the representative.
"Fucking freak," the ROTC boy says, looking at the door.
Now, even though they do punch the guy once—you might argue that's the action—it's only a test punch. The real pummeling they want to give the guy rests on whatever Ellis says. If she says it's him, the reader is pretty sure they'll beat him within an inch of his life, or worse—they do have a gun after all. But Ellis tells them to let him go, unwilling to perpetrate more violence, and the scene ends before the reader knows what happens:
No one knows what to do next. The elevator has stopped on the sixth floor. The only thing moving is the man's gagged mouth. "Please," I say. "It's not him. Let him go."
The cliffhanger or suspense ending requires only that you delay the conclusion of the action. It's that simple. It works best when you leave the scene literally in the middle of an action; or, if you use some narrative summary, that it reinforces a feeling of tension or drama about to unfold. This moment also shows the reader how Ellis has gone
from a person who wanted revenge, who liked the idea of letting this man get his comeuppance, to someone who feels she does not want to be responsible for perpetuating more violence.
Revelation Endings
When you want to convey that your protagonist is changed at the end of an action scene, a revelation ending is a powerful way to do so, and in the process, to set the stage for the next scene. In a revelation ending, you wait until the very final moments of the scene to reveal—to the reader and protagonist both—what the consequences of the action are. In the Lord of the Flies scene, the reader finally understands what happened in the wild dance where the boys were shouting "Kill the beast" at the end of the scene. The beast was, in fact, their classmate Simon:
The great wave of the tide moved farther along the island and the water
lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself
a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon's dead body
moved out toward the open sea.
Harking back to Ralph's earlier comment, in which he says that he wasn't scared, the reader sees that Ralph knew that he'd participated in something awful. What is revealed is that Ralph is the only character with a conscience.
Since action scenes don't leave much room for emotions, you can drop a powerful emotional note through a revelation in that final paragraph or page that will leave the reader reeling, or convey what will be at stake for the protagonist in the next scene. A revelation can come in a moment of reflection, an exchange of dialogue, a description of the carnage after a riot, etc. A revelation can take almost any form—but if you choose to use it, it should carry emotional significance for your protagonist.
ACTION SCENE MUSE POINTS_
•The protagonist's focus is on reaction—instinct before intellect.
•Action involves physical movement that conveys a sense of time.
•Action scenes have less need for reflective or emotional content.
•The protagonist and his plot should be changed by the action.
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