Sixth blog, where’s the action?
Action scenes are a mainstay of most books, now what that action entails is different for each genre. Most action scenes can be grouped into combat scenes, chase scenes, or dialogue scenes. Anyone who says dialogue can’t be used as a weapon has never tried to argue with a zealot. Chase scenes are pretty self-explanatory, something is being chased or chasing something. As the meme states, if you are running away from a murderer you are both running for your life. Combat scenes seem like they are what they say on the tin, but combat scenes aren’t just fight scenes. A volleyball game where you are narrating the plays is just as much a combat scene as when narrating a war zone, the only difference is in the stakes.
Dialogue based combat is not something I engage with in my stories, primarily because figuring out what people will say is harder for me than figuring out what they’d do. Dialogue based combat you would generally find in courts, courtrooms, and police procedurals. Any time a character heads into an interrogation room, the coliseum has been set. The goal of this type of combat is to get information, spread disinformation, or get a confession. When the courtroom is involved you get the back and forth where evidence is presented, and the prosecution and the defence attempt to sway a jury to their point of view. I actually really enjoy watching this type of combat, even if the evidence and arguments given aren’t necessarily true. It’s why I watched things like JAG or Perry Mason. It has been a long time since I watched Perry Mason.
Chase scene combat is thrilling high octane action that usually ends quite abruptly. I enjoy reading about these kinds of combats when the writer is able to keep me on the edge of my seat, when the characters’ shortness of breath, makes my own breathing erratic. This can either be a footrace, a car chase, or a horse pursuit. Whenever the chase involves animals or people, I find that when done well, gives me that lung heaving feeling more than a mechanical chase. On the flipside, for whatever reason, when the chase is mechanical I get more of that white knuckled feeling where I need to hold something as tight as possible. Each of the chase scenes that I outlined bring me the same hit of adrenaline though.
As for straight on combat scenes, things get interesting. I am not much of a person for gun play or firearms in general. I have no problem with other people being for them, but I find them less interesting to write about and read about on a personal level. This isn’t to say that combat scenes with them are uninteresting, just not my favourite. Modern warfare is both very clinical and hysteria-inducing chaotic. To truly capture such an event involves a capability I’m not sure I have, the amount of onomatopoeia along with descriptive phrasing does not lend itself well to the written word of modern warfare. This could simply be my biases talking, as I prefer physical combat measured in metres and hundreds of lives, over one measured in tens of kilometres and tens of thousands of lives. Even when magic is brought into the fray, I still prefer smaller combat situations as it allows for more descriptive writing.
Now to what spawned this thought process for me. I came across an opinion that I both agree and disagree with. This opinion in regards to describing action scenes and how in depth one should go. Should one discuss how a takedown occurred? Or perhaps it should be glossed over to get to the meat of the story. Maybe you can be relatively non-descriptive in a sword parry. Or instead you can talk about how the stance was indicative of a parry used with a paired weapon, and how the blade passed harmlessly by. There are times where it makes sense to gloss over actions and how they occurred, simply getting to the consequences of said action. This I would say should happen a fair amount of the time, simply to keep the story going and the reader’s interest. However there are times when an in depth description relays either the skill or lack thereof of the character. These are character growth opportunities, where you can build upon an existing skill set or show a character’s weakness. These types of combats should be generally infrequent but also quite in depth. An action sequence is not there just because. It should be there as a vehicle to move the story.
I have more thoughts on this but I’m trying to keep my word count relatively consistent. Have a good day. Also, have an unimpressed kitty.
