Permit me to paint a picture for you: in an epic fight, your characters have overcome immense peril and defeated the villain. It’s the climax to your story, the work of months, if not years.
But you run into a hiccup. Your readers don’t enjoy the scene. They find it slow, directionless, confusing, or not interesting.
Your story is not alone in this plight. Many writers can write a compelling piece of dialogue or narrative, but struggle when it comes to action.
The reason, in my opinion, is that action scenes deserve a different style, in a sense, from regular prose. That involves four different elements: goals, pacing, clarity, and character.
Goals
Like any other scene, your action scene should fulfill two out of the three core story elements at once. It should show the reader the worldbuilding, move the plot along, or expand on the characters within the scene. Ideally, it should do all three.
To accomplish that, I find that having a goal in mind, with a clear beginning and end can help guide you through your scene. It can show a character’s badass traits (or lack thereof), introduce some worldbuilding elements, or further the plot.
For example, I have an action scene in the first chapter of my current project. It shows the world’s technology, the protagonist’s inventiveness, and its futility against the world’s magic.
You don’t have to use outlines to have a goal, by the way. This is something that can be done in your first draft or in later edits.
Making sure your action scene is goal-oriented can avoid the scene feeling like filler, like an action movie with excessive fistfights and explosions.
Pacing
To control the pacing of your action scene, it needs to be written differently than regular narrative. I’ll use an excerpt of my own writing, without formatting, for example:
The fireworks exploded with small pops, reverberating within the apartment and hallway, while Jaydon burst into the room across the hall. And not a moment too soon. The guards ran into the space, brushing past him.
“Find him!” A bruiser yelled, as the sound of wood breaking and crashing emanated from within the apartment. Jaydon reloaded his hand crossbow, took a deep breath, and fired into the doorway. A cry of pain answered. Lucky shot.
Reloading crossbows took far too long, even the weak-powered variant that he used. Pulling back the string, Jaydon loaded another bolt and snuck into the hall, heading toward the stairs. He hated the idea of failing his contract. But he couldn’t collect a bounty if he was dead. He made it to the end of the stairs, but a gust of wind picked up and blew into his face. The smoke dissipated as the breeze carried it to the end of the hallway into the mage’s outstretched hands. Jaydon turned to run, but the Mage gestured with a gnarled hand. The stairway collapsed into a ruin, wood twisting and cracking.
The scene feels slower than it should, because the paragraphs are denser and there’s less blank space.
To speed up pacing, I use two methods. The first uses a lot of blank space to make the reader’s eyes go down the page faster, and to make smaller paragraphs. This gives the impression that the story is moving at a fast pace. Here’s the same scene, written in that fashion:
The fireworks exploded with small pops, reverberating within the apartment and hallway, while Jaydon burst into the room across the hall. And not a moment too soon. The guards ran into the space, brushing past him.
“Find him!” A bruiser yelled, as the sound of wood breaking and crashing emanated from within the apartment.
Jaydon reloaded his hand crossbow, took a deep breath, and fired into the doorway.
A cry of pain answered. Lucky shot.
Reloading crossbows took far too long, even the weak-powered variant that he used. Pulling back the string, Jaydon loaded another bolt and snuck into the hall, heading toward the stairs. He hated the idea of failing his contract. But he couldn’t collect a bounty if he was dead.
He made it to the stairs, but a gust of wind picked up and blew into his face. The smoke dissipated as the breeze carried it to the end of the hallway into the Mage’s outstretched hands.
Jaydon turned to run, but the Mage gestured with a gnarled hand. The stairway collapsed into a ruin, wood twisting and cracking.
Reads a lot better, right?
Essentially, if you want to speed up your pacing and make the scene flow quicker, you can use more blank space, shorter sentences, and smaller paragraphs.
The second method for managing pacing is minimizing unnecessary detail. The reader doesn’t need to know all of the information you’d usually put in regular prose.
If you look at the excerpt above, there is only as much setting information as the reader needs to understand what the characters are doing. I already established the location detail earlier in the chapter, so all I need to do is remind the reader what’s around the character as they act.
This can also apply to internal thought and dialogue. The character isn’t going to have time to make a speech in the middle of a fight or chase anyway.
Clarity
An action scene can have the most epic fight or the most harrowing chase, but if the reader doesn’t understand it, then it’s all for nothing. Confusion derives, in my experience, from over-complicating your scene.
The reader doesn’t need to know every intricate detail of how your character is doing something. For example, in a sword fight I don’t need to explain every parry and strike. The reader doesn’t need to know every little thing that the character is seeing. In many cases, if it doesn’t either add to your scene or if it draws the reader out of the story, it may need to be cut. The reader will enjoy your scene more if they can understand it.
If you’re not sure if your scene has enough clarity, ask a friend to read the scene and then tell you what they think happened. If it’s similar enough to what you want them to envision, then it’s clear. But if it isn’t, then you can revise to make it clearer.
Character
Finally, I want to encourage you to lean into your characters’ emotions and experiences during action scenes. A rookie private is going to react very differently than a hardened veteran to a battle, for example. Showing those emotional reactions can ground your reader in the scene and humanize your characters.
Also, your characters’ experience should influence their decisions in the scene. Using the above example, the rookie is likely to forget a lot of their training in the heat of the moment, while a veteran will keep a cool head under stress (unless there’s character reasons why they wouldn’t). Someone who doesn’t know how to throw a punch might break their hand or wrist in a fistfight or have slow reactions to danger.
Action scenes are an opportunity to show readers fun aspects of your characters. It’s my favorite part of writing an action scene.
Conclusion
I want to encourage you to take these ideas and mess around with them. Nothing in our craft is set in stone, and the same goes for this. Writing is art, after all, and we all approach it differently. But hopefully you get something of value from this ramble, and it helps you to have more fun writing action scenes.
Noah Wilhelm would rather live in a fantasy world, but since that’s not an option, he decided to write about them. When he’s not writing, he’s likely playing games, hanging out with a friend, or reading another good book. He lives in western Wyoming with his enormous and mild mannered cat.