Writing Tips: Writing Action Adventure

When writing action adventure stories or just even scenes, you want to focus solely on the action that is taking place. It is very easy to find yourself getting side tracked during an action scene, so here are some things you want to watch out for.

Imagery: While Imagery is always an important factor to take into consideration when writing, you don’t want to go overboard on this when writing action adventure scenes. You don’t want to be in the middle of a really intense fight while going into extreme detail about the weather outside or the sweat on someone’s face.

Dialogue: While some dialogue is always needed, especially in fights, where dialogue is usually used to induce the fighting, you don’t really want to overdo the dialogue. You don’t want to get up to a point where you think your characters are about to fight and then just have to read a whole bunch of useless conversation about nothing. When characters start to throw insults at each other during the fights, you start to get on border line cheesy.

Another thing to watch out for with dialogue, is that if you’re writing a scene where you have an evil villain who has captured your hero, please don’t go off in a long monologue where the villain reveals all of his evil plans to the hero. Although this approach is often used, since it is used so often, it can get boring and predictable. If you want to really wow your readers, find a different way of releasing the information, like overhearing bits of a conversation or having him or her find out bits and pieces that are spread out throughout the course of the story and they put them all together at the end.

Character’s thoughts: Whether you’re writing in third or first person, the middle of a fight is not the place for a character to go off on an internal monologue or have some sort of flashback from the past. When someone is in a fight, they will realistically focus almost all of their attention on the fight. If you character is one of those characters who will feel time slow down will process what to do next in like the time period of a second, that’s fine, but just don’t make a huge deal out of it, and don’t go into unnecessary detail.

So to sum things up, the thing you really need to concentration on while writing action scenes, is the action. Action scenes will be in almost every kind of genre you encounter, so there is no way to avoid writing them. 

~K.M.D.