I talked earlier about some of the basic ways of writing a thriller, in this post, I'm going to focus on actual tools you can use to raise the tension in your audience. Each can be used in the right circumstances to put your audience on the edge of their seats and put that sick feeling of sympathetic tension in the pits of their stomachs. I think of them as "Does he know?", "Will they find out"?, "Hurry up" it's brother "Slow down", and "Will it break?" So, lets get right to it.
"Does he know" is the tension that happens when the person interrogating you seems to know what you're trying to hide from him and it's like he's just toying with you. Pacing is important here. For example, you're a Jew trying to escape Nazi Germany with forged papers. The train that can get you to neutral Switzerland is right there. It leaves in 3 minutes. The SS officer takes your papers. He looks at them. He looks at you. He ask you what the purpose of your trip is. You tell him you're visiting your sick mother in Geneva. He ask you a question only someone from Switzerland would know. You think you got it right. He looks at your paperwork again, and compares it to a list. The train gives the last all aboard call. The phone rings. The SS officer answers and looks at you. "Ja....Ja...Sehr Gut." He returns. "My apologies Herr Shmidt, we can't be too careful these days.
You turn to get on the train as it begins to move. "Herr Schmidt"! You freeze. "Don't forget your papers."
"Will they find out" is a fairly standard tension builder. It's that guilty feeling you get when you pass a cop car whether you've done something or not. An example would be you were on vacation in Mexico, and a drug cartel kidnapped your wife and made you mule drugs across the border. Now you've got 10 kilos of cocaine hidden in the seat of your car, and the border guards are heading towards you with the drug dogs. You know if they bust you, your wife dies. You're being watched. If you try to tell them, your wife dies. if you don't make the rendezvous in Texas your wife dies. Now the police are only one car away....
"Hurry up" and "Slow down " are related, and I'll handle them at once. Hurry up is the tension that happens when something isn't happening fast enough. You've broken into the Chinese consulate and you're decrypting files on his computer. Your decryption gadget in running as fast as it can and its only at 53%. Your handler warns you that the guards are coming over your earpiece, and you have to get out of there, but you know you'll only get one chance at this, and thousands might die if you don't get the information.You hear the elevator open in the hall, and you're only at 85%.....Slow down is the flip side of that tension. The Ambassador was supposed to be out of his office for the night, giving you time to work, but he realizes he forgot some paperwork and is coming back way too quickly. Your accomplice tries to delay him in the lobby, but they were only able to buy you a minute.
Finally, "Will it break" is the tension of thin ice and frayed rope. The answer is yes, it will break, but the tension is will it hold long enough to get you to safety. The bad guys are after you. You can hear them behind you with the guns and the dogs, in the woods, but you've made it to the river. Its frozen over. You've made it a couple of dozen steps onto the ice when you hear the first sharp crack. You can see the ice begin to fracture out in a spiderweb from where your foot is planted. You take another step and the ice cracks even further. The other side and safety is just 100 feet away, but you can hear the dogs getting louder and see the flashlights moving in the trees behind you. You drop to the ice and begin to crawl, spreading your weight out. One of your knees goes through the ice the next time you put it down.
There will be times when you are writing, when you seem to hit a brick wall. There will be a scene, or an important bit of dialogue, maybe just a sentence or two that just will not come out right. You'll beat your head against it for an hour or two, and then you'll reach a point where you'll be tempted to just say "It's not good, but it's good enough to get me to the next thing, so I'm just going to move on now". It can be very discouraging to get bogged down like that. You're making no progress, and all the people who read your stories are on the forums are emailing you; "When's the next chapter coming out", "Hey is the chapter done yet""Hey, remember that story you were writing a while back, is that still happening"? I hope that when that happens, you'll find the strength somewhere to clear your head, make a fresh cup of coffee, then go back for one or two more passes. Because "good enough" may finish the story, but "good" is what it takes to move people.
If you really think about it, for the stories, and the characters and "ships" that you love the most, there was a single moment that hooked you. Sure, there were a lot more since then that you like, and that you might post on Tumblr of make animated gifs or music video's of, but there was one moment, a bit of dialogue, a look, a touch, one scene that "had you at hello" and made you a fan.
I have to think that some of those scenes didn't come easily. The writers and artist and actors had to fight to get them where they needed to be. You put so much time and effort into writing these things. Isn't it worth just a little bit more to make your story unforgettable?
Chase scenes encompass a wide variety of action sequences, from car chases, to rooftop chases over the iconic rooftops of Istanbul, to evasive maneuvers through asteroid fields. A good action story will use a combination of combat sequences and chases to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. In general you will want to carefully position lulls in the action filled by dialogue, exposition, plot advancement, maybe character building or love scenes, then right back to the action. These lulls are to keep the audience from becoming numb to all the action you throw at them.
Questions you will want to consider, are does the story require the person being chased to get away or not? What are the physical abilities of the participants? A rooftop chase involving a physically fit Parkour enthusiast is going to play out differently that an out of shape cop chasing a purse snatcher up a fire escape. An expert driver will weave in and out of oncoming traffic a lot more effectively than the average driver, with a lot fewer collisions involved. A good chase will have a number of obstacles that the runner and the chaser will have to clear. This could include gaps that have to be jumped, busy intersections, space debris to be avoided and so on. Those are kind of the beats of the chase scene. Some of the obstacles are created by the runner to slow the pursuit down. He tips over a shelf to block the hallway, he shouts fire in a crowded theater to create a panicked mob that the pursuer has to fight his way through. Maybe he puts someone in jeopardy that the person chasing him has to stop to save.
If the runner is to get away, you need to employ some sort of chase breaker. It isn't dramatic if one or both of the runners just get tired, slows down and stops, then gets caught trying to catch his breath.
A chase breaker is something that interrupts the chase allowing the runner to get away. A classic example is the car chase where the runner gets across the train tracks just before the train comes through and the pursuer has to stop. Jumping off a high cliff into water where the guy chasing you is afraid to jump after you is another popular one. If the runner is meant to be caught, maybe he gets cut off by someone working with the chaser. He might try to run across a street and be hit by a car and too injured to continue. Maybe he tries to make a jump and dies.
So your basic chase scene is Initiate pursuit, throw in a few obstacles or location changes then have the runner get caught or employ a chase breaker. By location changes I mean you can't just have someone run up the road like he's running a marathon. For Instance, the police kick a suspects door in and he jumps out the window to the fire escape. The police chase him and radio ahead that he's on his way down the back alley. A patrol car pulls up and cuts him off. He turns and runs through the back door of a Chinese restaurant. The policeman chases him into the kitchen where he grabs up a butcher knife and throws it at the cop. The cop dodges behind a door. The runner turns and shoves his way through to the front of the restaurant and out into another street....
Try not to let your chases go for too long. If your story were filmed, you probably wouldn't want it to run for more than two or three minutes. Also when you're running from the police you can't outrun their radios. You have to break the chase and be out of sight before they can get roads cut off and helicopters in the air. Typically one might lose the first cop chasing him by causing him to crash, then duck quickly into a parking garage and steal a different car to get away in.
I'm going to take a quick break from the Writing Action thing to bring up something I ran into on Youtube the other day, that I never really thought of before which was the problem that can arise when you make up a rule for the universe of your story that works on a small scale, but looks ridiculous when your story calls for you to use that "rule" many times in a row.
Case in point. In the Twilight storyverse, you kill a vampire by tearing his head off and setting him on fire. I'm kind of a vampire lore purist, but in the first book when they kill the one vampire that's stalking Bella, it's pretty straight forwards. Tear his head off, burn his body, he's dead. Fast forwards a few years to the last book and the Big Vampire Clan Battle (with special guest Big Wolves).
I've never seen so many people get their heads pulled off in my life.
In games, they call these "universe rules" a mechanic. In chess you eliminate pieces by capturing(moving your piece onto their square) You win by trapping the king to where he is under threat and can't move out of threat. The mechanic works no matter how many times you do it in a row. Play a hundred games in a row and there is never the sense that this is getting ridiculous. Not so much with decapitation.
I guess the object lesson is when you're creating a fictional world, look into the future and imagine you story was wildly successful and what might come of that. Make sure the rules of your world can scale up.
Most people who have played First Person Shooters or are military lore buffs know all of this stuff, but for those few who might not know, a few terms to start out with;
Flanking/Outflanking : This is when a force maneuvers to attack an enemy from the sides or rear. Flanking allows you a better angle of attack on an enemy using cover, and forces them to divide their attention between two or more directions. In almost any extended firefight, someone will maneuver to outflank the enemy.
Covering Fire: This is shooting at the enemy not so much to hit them as to keep their heads down, usually while an ally moves to a better position. An example would be firing on a machine gun nest while someone gets close enough to throw grenades in.
Ambush: Basically a surprise attack. Usually at a time and place which gives the attacker a tactical advantage. A typical Ambush might be blowing up the front and back vehicles in a convoy with rockets to block the way forwards and back, then firing on the middle vehicles from the rooftops. Ambushes typically run parallel to an enemies line of travel, in an L shape, parallel with a short leg in a flanking position or V shaped. It is never advisable to attack from both sides in a way that might have your shooters hit each other. Conventional wisdom says if you are ambushed it is best to retreat immediately the way you came rather than try to push through or fight it out. The enemy will anticipate this, but you at least know whats behind you. The best you can do is get as many of your people out alive to fight another day. Fighting from the "Kill Zone" will likely get most of your unit killed. In a military ambush the targets, in order of importance are the radio/communications guy (he can call for reinforcements or artillery), the commanding officer (he will try to keep their force organized and moving when you want them panicked and disorganized) and the heavy weapons detail (they can inflict the most damage on you). Everyone else is a target of opportunity.
I was thinking of talking about weapons. Describing the specs of the guns seen most often in action scenes, but that's a lot of information that can already be found elsewhere. What I would suggest as far as firearms go, is to picture the scene you want to write in your head. Figure out what kind of armament the people involved would be carrying; Ak-47's like a drug cartel or communist army? Maybe silenced sub-machine guns for commando types. Perhaps the typical load out for an American police officer. Once you have a general idea, go online and look them up. Get a general idea of things like how far they can shoot accurately, how many bullets the standard magazine holds, what kind of stopping power they have and so on. Finally, go on Youtube and find a video of someone shooting the gun you want to use. Listen to how loud it is, see how much it kicks. Just have that visual reference floating around in the back of your brain while you write.
OK for the actual shootout, there are two kinds. Stationary and Moving. In a stationary shootout, the participants typically hide behind cover, exchanging gunfire til the dynamic changes in some way, IE someone gets hit, runs out of ammo, a gas line is ruptured and everyone gets out just ahead of the explosion. A moving gunfight is more dynamic. In this situation to stay in one place is death for one of the parties involved. Examples include the opening of Saving Private Ryan where the Nazi's had the beach zeroed in and trying to find cover and hunker down meant death for you and the people behind you. The famous Bank Heist in the movie Heat is another. Staying in one place meant dying at the hands of the police or being captured. With the moving gunfight you need to figure out a way to end it. The Bank Robbers make it to the getaway vehicle and the scene transitions to a chase. Or they get to a place where they can get out of site, get rid of their disguises and weapons and blend into the crowd. With either kind of shootout, any cover is better than no cover at all, but most furniture and a lot of walls will not stop bullets. This is a great reason to go antiquing with your wife. In the event of a shootout you want a nice 3 or 4 inch thick solid hardwood tabletop or desk between you and the bullets. Having a character wear body armor is a great way to maintain the realism of people getting hit when bullets are exchanged without necessarily having to kill your character. Although body armor is not a get out of injury free card. You'll still suffer bruising and perhaps broken ribs.
Which brings me to my next point. Guns are kind of an all or nothing proposition. You can't shoot someone and guarantee you won't kill them. You could try to shoot someone in the knee, miss by inches and hit them in the femoral artery causing them to bleed out before help could arrive. Size doesn't seem to correlate with gunshot wound survival. Sometimes big guys go down to one lucky bullet while much smaller guys have survived being shot half a dozen times. So exchanging bullets is serious business, every time. Therefore gunfights should be planned carefully. If your bad guys shoot it out with your heroes and hit nothing, you've devalued the threat they represent. They become the cliche storm troopers or bond bad guys who can't shoot straight. This may tempt you to include an expendable character with your heroes to take the bullet and demonstrate the high stakes, but be warned, your readers will always spot a "Red Shirt". If you are going to include a sacrificial red shirt character, plan ahead. Introduce him early, and pretend he's a real character. Give him dialogue that doesn't involve retiring in three days or having a new baby, sure fire signs that someones about to bite it. Let him make contributions to the good guys efforts. Maybe give him a subplot with a love interest who is not the main heroine, because that's another death omen. This way people might be surprised and actually care when he buys it. In fact, it's not a bad idea to have a guy like this on hand even if you never kill him. He's there if you need him, and until then he's a useful character.
One last thing, just a couple of pet peeves. Don't hold your gun sideways and shoot like a gangsta. You can't aim it that way and it ejects hot brass at your face when you shoot. If you're in an extended firefight and you kill a guy, for the love of god take his weapons and ammo. You'll need every bullet or grenade you can get, and it's one less thing for the bad guys to pick up and use against you. Also if someone on your side is shot, at least make the attempt at first aid. Put some pressure on the wound. Try some CPR. People often survive this sort of thing with a little help so long as people don't stand around just looking at his body. Even if the character is supposed to die for the story at least it doesn't look like your other characters just let him go. Also not a big fan of pistol whipping. If you're close enough to hit someone with your gun, he's close enough to take it away and shoot you with it. Especially if you stopped pointing it at him so you could hit him with it.
OK, that's it for gunfights. Next time I'll cover chase scenes, and that will be a wrap for this action scene series.
Okay, new plan. The topic of writing action is just too large to cover in one or two post, so I'm going to break it down further into categories. Today I'm going to talk about writing hand to hand combat. Later I'll cover shootouts and chase scenes. There are many more kinds of action scenes than those of course , but I think those are probably the most common.
So, hand to hand combat. The more of these blogs I do, the more I see that nearly every kind of scene comes with questions to be answered. For hand to hand combat, the first question is who do you need to win the fight in your story? When you know that, ask yourself, who wins on paper. By that I mean, when you tally up all the advantages and disadvantages of everyone involved who is still standing at the end of the fight? If a character is meant to win in the story, but loses on paper, you'll need to come up with some scenario that swings the odds in their favor, IE. they get their hands on a weapon or they manage to blind the other guy with chemicals, that sort of thing.
So what constitutes an advantage in hand to hand combat? Size for one. There's a reason combat sports have weight classes. A larger person has a advantage in mass. That means they can hit harder and absorb more punishment than a smaller person. They'll generally have a reach advantage meaning they can hit the other guy while staying just out of the other guys threat range. There's physical fitness. That's strength, endurance, speed and agility. A fighter who is smaller, but physically fit can cancel out some of the advantage a larger fighter has if it's mostly fat. There's training. A trained fighter is more efficient than a brawler. He waste less energy, his attacks are more accurate and hit more often. Depending on what he's trained in he may be a fighter who throws combinations to set up a knockout while the untrained fighter usually throws hay-makers. Any kind of weapon is an advantage. They increase a fighter reach and make any hit more damaging. Disadvantages include a lack of physical fitness, an exploitable injury or condition like bad knees or partial blindness, and a lack of training or experience. The average chartered accountant is less likely to have a killer instinct than a marine back from his second tour of duty in Tikrit. That lack of killer instinct can make you hesitate when you have a chance to finish an enemy, or be slow to realize a situation just escalated into a fight.
In general, I believe it's better to think of fight scenes in terms of stage by stage as opposed to blow by blow. Think where does the fight start? Where does the fight need to finish? How do I get there? A blow by blow description of a fight is going to be overlong and tiresome to read. IE.
Jake should have known better than to try to hustle pool in a skinhead bar. He sensed movement behind him and something told him to duck, as a pool cue whistled through the space his head had been moments before. He threw an elbow back and felt a satisfying crunch as the skinheads nose shattered. Now the big one with the swastika tattoo on his forehead moved in with a vicious right cross. Jake barely got his arm up to block, then countered with a left jab, then a right to the body and a left cross which swastika head barely seemed to feel. He smirked at Jake then grabbed his jacket and pulled him into a headbutt which left Jake seeing stars. Jake staggered back against the bar where his hand fell upon a empty beer bottle. Grabbing the neck Jake smashed it over the head of swastika face and backed away waving the jagged remains of the bottle menacingly....
All that for about 10 seconds of bar fight. It's a bit wordy. There isn't much room for imagination. What I meant by thinking in terms of stages in a fight, is what are the highlights? the transitions from one thing to the next in the fight. This fight from the Jason Bourne movies is a very dynamic fight between two highly trained master assassins. The first stage is fighting for control of the gun, then the disarm, then the transition to an exchange of empty handed blows and blocks, then another transition to getting hold of improvised weapons and using them, then another disarm, then a change of location into the bathroom and so on.
The use of weapons and environment to harm the enemy is a good way to make a fight very fast paced and visceral. Jason Bourne kicks killer in the head, good. Jason Bourne kicks killers head through ceramic toilet bowl, better. You just know that someone who takes a hit like that is badly hurt if not dead. In my experience, a short brutal fight scene plays better than a long drawn out fight with lots of descriptions of where and how guys hit each other.
I guess the last things to think about here is the mood of the fight, and whether or not the story calls for the fighters to become allies later.If the mood of the story is comical, the fight can't be vicious. If a character is going to become your heroes friend later in the story or series, your hero probably shouldn't maim him in a fight, even if it would make sense to do so at the time. This is running long, so I'll end it here. Next time we'll talk about shootouts.
The subject of action scene writing is a fairly large one, and I'll be adding multiple video's for illustration, so I'm going to split it into two post. The first will deal with my general philosophy of action writing and later I'll get into specifics. In brief, action scenes, should advance the plot in some way. There is pacing of course, any action scene will add energy to a story when it begins to lag, but that action scene should serve a purpose.
As with writing Love scenes, there are questions the writer should ask and answer when deciding how the scene should play out. The most basic of these is what kind of story are you telling? A funny Jackie Chan style fight where he beats up the bad guys with a priceless painting doesn't belong in a bloody Tarentino heist flick like Reservoir Dogs. A brutal fight club style beating doesn't belong in an action comedy where Jack Black is tapped as the new James Bond. Another question is what are the consequences of the action scene? Does the hero get hurt, and if so how bad? Will his or her injuries come into play later in the story like when Sherlocke Holmes injured shoulder put him at an untenable disadvantage to Moriarty? Does the action sequence lead to an advantage or disadvantage for the hero going into the next scene? For instance the car chase was a setup and the hero cop is led into an ambush. A hijacked garbage truck plows into his car and throws him over an embankment. When he comes to the witness he was protecting has been taken. Now the clock is ticking and he needs to find where they the bad guys took her. This leads to the next scene where he intimidates an informant into telling him about a ship leaving the docks at midnight. Also, does the action escalate from the last scene. It's a well known principle of action writing that the danger gets worse as the story goes on, and the greatest threat is generally the one at the climax of the story.
Another thing to think about, is whether the action sequence has a greater meaning? Is the fight a metaphor for something else? Or perhaps an act of catharsis? There are a lot of things that a fight can be beyond the exchanging of fist and bullets. For Example;
The Metaphor here is pretty much outright stated. The fight is a physical manifestation of his internal struggle to find the will to keep going after his wife died.
And this scene has an undercurrent of poetic justice. Alan Rickmans character from Quigley Down Under fancies himself an old west style gunfighter. But he doesn't get the epic Dodge City showdown with his nemesis that he thought he deserved. Quigley casually guns him and his cohorts down as easily and with as little glory as Rickman had killed the unarmed aborigines.
This one is simply a peace of art. The silence and the muted colors and rain belie the intense emotions here. Tom Hank's mob hitman Michael Sullivan has been driven to the point where he must kill the man who has been a father to him to avenge his family. Paul Newmans Irish mobster character is fully aware of the implications and accepts his fate.
I suppose the point is that everything in your story should have a reason for being there. If your instincts are telling you that your story needs a fight or a chase in this chapter or act, take the time to think it all out. Even a fight can be art. Figure out all the why's and hows and what it all means. Next time I'll talk about the actual writing of fights from melee to large scale battles.
