Readers love action-adventure novels. It doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to read, and they’re a great way to pass the time while you’re sitting on a long, boring flight somewhere. Writers like Clive Cussler have a very lucrative business writing action-adventure novels: there are nearly 100 million copies of Cussler’s books in print.
Here are five tips to give you something to think about when you’re writing your own action scenes.
Action sequences must be fast paced
Good action sequences are never slow. They grab the reader by the throat and force them to hold on white-knuckles until you decide to slack off. The best way to achieve this is to use short sentences and often short paragraphs, using as many action words as you can think of. Words like “zipped,” “snapped,” “whizzed,” and “punched” are great choices. In a fight scene, your hero shouldn’t have time to think, and any dialogue should be short, sharp, and punchy—usually just a few words that can be shouted across the room.
The only exception to this would be if you are trying to do a John Woo style slow motion sequence for a short part of the scene. Here it can take much longer to describe the action in detail, such as the way the bullet casing forms an arc, twisting from one end to the other as it passes through the cloud of smoke. But don’t overdo it and get back into rapid fire action as fast as you can.
Push the characters to the limit
The characters need to be tested in your action scenes. There’s no point in writing something that’s easy for them to get over, because it won’t create the right level of tension in your story. Instead, your heroes need to be thrust into situations where there’s a real chance they won’t come out unscathed. In fact, it’s better if they don’t do it often because it means that the bets they are playing for are real and not just jokes.
Don’t be afraid to hit or shoot your characters. Matthew Reilly, the Australian action writer, believes that if a character slows down the action too much, he has to die. While that might be a bit extreme for your story, killing off a character or two might well show your reader that you’re serious about what’s at stake.
Make the most of the environment
Which is more exciting: a kung-fu fight in an empty apartment or one in a crowded china shop? If you’re like me, you’d rather see the action tearing the stage apart as fists and feet go flying. When you’re creating your action scenes, try to set things up to take place in an environment that can add to the excitement of the scene, where one wrong move could make things that much more difficult for your heroes.
So it’s better to have a fight on the roof of a skyscraper, or in the heat of an iron foundry, than in an empty warehouse, or in the desert. The more you can stock your scene with usable props for your heroes to wear, the more interesting your scenes will be.
Make the action scenes relevant to the story.
Action sequences should not stop the development of the plot. Instead, they should be an integral part of driving your story forward. If you find that you’re adding an action sequence just to spice things up again, then you’ll need to re-examine the stakes of the scene and find another way to help you link the scene to the ones that precede and follow. he. The reason for having an action sequence in your story should make sense in terms of the flow of the story; if not, you need to rewrite it or delete it entirely.
Write your action sequences as suspense scenes
Suspense in a scene is vital if you want your reader to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next. Your action sequence should ask the hero a lot of questions, instead of just being a description of what’s going on. John Rogers, in his kung fu monkey blog – said, “Don’t write action scenes. Write suspenseful scenes that require action to resolve.” When working on the main question of your scene, don’t ask “Will the hero beat the bad guy?” Instead, find a question that brings into play a problem your hero has that is important for him to learn. If he learns it, he can win the scene, otherwise he should lose. This way, the reader can see how the action sequence makes the character grow and change, rather than just another free fight.
If you keep these points in mind when writing your action scenes, then your hero will have an exciting journey and your readers will turn the pages as fast as they can to see what happens next.
And that is precisely what you want to happen.