Writing Action Scenes
An action scene is a section of a story where physicality and/or movement becomes a focus and the flow of events in the story becomes fast-paced. A lot of the time, this takes the form of some sort of fight or battle. But a chase scene, race or a game of football can all be action scenes as well. Action isn’t an integral part of all stories by any means, but it is a big part of a lot of stories. Many adventure, fantasy, sci-fi and even thriller and horror stories are built on action scenes and they can certainly show up elsewhere too.
Action scenes are also widely regarded as one of the hardest things to put to prose. In a book or short story, you don’t necessarily have the advantage of visuals to convey an action sequence. That means you have to rely on your writing to make the action scene gripping, which can feel a little daunting. It’s not an uncommon complaint for someone to say that they wished they could make such a scene feel as dynamic and cool in writing as it does in their head.
With that being said, I want to take a look at how you can create an engaging action scene in your story. Both in the sense of the actual mechanics of your writing, and your narrative choices.
As far as the actual writing of the scene goes, there are some methods you can employ to manipulate the flow of the writing to feel more dynamic to the reader. You can play with sentence length, use empty space to your advantage and make specific and meaningful word choices.
Chances are pretty good you’ve heard the advice that if you’re writing an action scene, you’re going to want to use short and sharp sentences instead of going into long descriptive paragraphs. This is pretty solid advice. The shorter sentences make it feel like the scene is playing out faster. However, I don’t think you should completely abandon descriptive language in doing this. It helps to visualize the scene and puts words to how the sequence feels to the characters involved. As a step further, I would suggest that you play with sentence length even more and make a point of having your sentences be more varied. The short and sharp sentences are important but, if every sentence has the same rhythmic flow and little description, the scene starts to feel less like an action sequence and more like a list of events. Making a point of varying your sentence structure and sprinkling in some properly descriptive language (within reason) gives the prose a more dynamic feel. You keep the advantages of short, snappy sentences but make things even more engaging still.
On top of this, what you choose to describe or not describe during an action scene is important too. This is what I mean when I talk about using empty space. Readers are an imaginative bunch. That means if you don’t describe every detail of a scene, they will fill in the blanks for you. You can use this to your advantage by choosing to describe only specific important details that have a physical relevance to the events playing out in the scene or that conjure the kind of imagery you want for your setting. By trimming out extraneous details, you make it easier to fall back on the writing strategy I outlined in the previous paragraph. As a general rule, it makes sense too. During an action sequence, your characters are not going to be capable of taking in everything around them in detail. They’ll be focused on their objective and on the things that are immediately relevant to them.
The words you choose to use when writing these scenarios can also add a lot to a scene. Just like you want to use a lot of shorter sentences, you also want to use simple, punchy language. This can be a little tricky to quantify. I don’t think there’s necessarily a hard cap on the number of syllables you can use in an action scene but, as a general rule, shorter words with strong sounds are what you want to go for. Furthermore, certain words just hit different and it’s hard to really explain why. If you’re describing pain, as an example, you could describe it as intense or sharp and the audience will have an idea of what you mean. But if you describe it as stabbing, then it feels a lot more visceral and violent. We all know what stabbing is. If you describe two things as smacking into each other, describing it as an impact carries weight. The connotations of different words definitely plays a part in this but, honestly, some of it just comes down to feel. I don’t think this one is an exact science, but I would recommend substituting different words in and out to see how they affect the feel of what you’re writing.
That’s the mechanical, physical aspects of writing that can be of use in writing an action scene. However, the narrative choices and techniques you make use of can also have a big impact on how engaging your action scenes are. The primary ways your storytelling can improve the feel of your action scenes are by making your audience care about the outcome of the scene and by making them uncertain what the outcome will be.
How do you make your audience care about the outcome of the action? Well, at risk of sounding like a broken record, the first way is to give them a reason to. The biggest reason to care, of course, is creating interesting and engaging characters. If your audience likes, hates or is otherwise invested in the characters involved in the action, they will naturally also care about the action itself and how it pertains to those characters.
The other big way to get your audience invested in the action is stakes. I just recently talked a lot about high and low stakes and how to keep them interesting for an audience in this article, so I won’t go into too much detail about it here. In terms of how this applies to action, general or personal stakes - or a mix of both - can be applicable. However, tying back into the previous point, if you can link the stakes personally to the characters involved in some way, it will definitely help invest your audience in the events of the story. Stakes create consequences for the outcome of the action which can have an impact on the characters and/or the story at large. This is a lot more gripping than action for action’s sake because it gives your characters and audience both a reason to care about what is happening.
Finally, uncertainty of outcome is the icing on the cake. It isn’t inherently necessary to give your audience a reason to be invested in your action but, as a general rule, it is going to add a lot to any given action scene. Uncertainty is a powerful tool for a writer. It makes your audience curious, so they keep reading because they want to see what happens next. It also greatly adds to the suspense and tension of any given scene, especially if your audience already cares about what the outcome will be. If they have this investment, but it is unclear how the action will actually play out, your audience will feel the tension and will be greedily turning pages in the hopes of getting to the outcome they want. This is why so many of the best action sequences have an ebb and flow to them. The hero will get closer to success one moment, then something will go wrong and they’ll lose ground the next. The objective is always in sight, but always just out of reach until - for better or worse - the action ends and an outcome is landed on. It can be satisfying to see a curbstomp victory or horrifying to see an unequivocable defeat, but this element of uncertainty adds a lot of excitement to an action scene.
As with all things when it comes to writing, these aren’t necessarily hard rules that have to be obeyed to the letter when writing action scenes. There’s almost certainly other methods out there for making your action scenes more exciting or engaging. However, I do think that if you find yourself having trouble with writing such elements of your stories, these are good fundamental ideas to keep in mind. Action scenes have developed their reputation for being one of the harder things to write for good reason, but breaking action down into these simple elements to see what gets an audience invested in it and then applying it to your own writing is a good start to getting the thrilling action sequence you’re aiming for.
