Action sequences
It occurred to me just now, while thinking about something else, that I still don't really have any idea about how to write an action scene.
How, at the sentence-structure level, do you achieve that sense of vivid fast-moving physical activity? Combat, chase scenes—I'm tempted to throw in sex scenes, but I think that generally calls for a rather different approach.
We did an exercise at the SH workshop two weekends ago about sentence length; that can be pretty effective in establishing rhythms. But I think it's not the whole story.
Mark Hoover's "Slugball" was probably the first story we received in which the action sequences really grabbed us—the story moves right along, bam bam bam, and kept our attention the whole way through. You'd think that after line-editing it I'd have a better grasp on the details of what makes it tick, but I don't think I do.
Part of it, I'm pretty sure, is verb choice. A lot of good active-sounding verbs—tumbled, exploding, screaming, burst, streaked, shattering, ripping, lurched, barking, yelping, skittered, leapt; and that's all in the first six paragraphs of the real action starting. But they're not just action verbs, they're the right action verbs; it's very easy to overdo it, throwing in lots of frenetic verbs that only serve to make the writing sound goofy.
Sentence length doesn't seem to have much to do with it. But maybe sentence complexity does; the more convoluted a sentence, the more sentence structure the reader has to hold in their head as they wade through the sentence, the more extra clauses and phrases and circuitous circumlocutions and unnecessary verbiage the author has provided, the slower (in general) the sentence may seem, until at a certain point the reader finds that they have ground entirely to a halt, losing all forward momentum in a welter of words.
And of course level of diction is part of that too—though you'd think using brief simple Anglo-Saxon words would lead to faster action, but Mark uses words like "oscillating" and "gyration" and gets away with it.
I thought paragraph length might be relevant; Mark has a lot of short paragraphs. But he also has a fair number of longer ones, and those don't impede the action.
The few times I've tried to write action scenes, I've generally gotten mired in the mechanics and blocking of what the characters were doing. I can picture the still images, I can describe the discrete actions, but getting the sense of flow, of momentum, is tough.
I've talked with a couple of martial-artist writers recently about related stuff: how to describe a martial-arts scene in a way that's true to the art (and that practitioners of the art will appreciate) but that doesn't get bogged down in describing in intricate detail every last motion. One of them said something to the effect that an action scene shouldn't take longer to read than the action would take to occur.
Any thoughts?
