Action Sequences

The car rounded a sharp corner.  It swerved.  Its wheels skidded.  Rubber screeched.

Gunshots peppered the car's trunk.  The latch popped.

The car made another turn.  Its wheels lifted. The trunk cover waved. The car righted itself. The cover slammed.

Sirens sounded.  Hard concrete walls echoed the noise.  Shattered windows glared blue and red.

The car zoomed though a busy intersection.  Its window rolled down.  Wind blew.  A hooded figure leaned out.

What will this figure do?  What do you want him to do?  Do you feel the action?  The tension?

I do.  But, I'm the one who wrote it.  How can I be sure you feel it too?

I'm not.  This scene has a whole lot of things wrong with it, all of which I see clearly.  But I don't want to spend too much time writing it, because it's short.  And all of the problems I have with it are nitpicky.  They're things that bother me, a synestesiac.  They might not bother you so much.  I'll get deeper into explaining this in another post.

First off, a great starting point was given to me by the book "Techniques of a selling writer," by Dwight V Swain.  It's a great book overall, but this one piece of advice is the best thing I got from it.

Motivation Reaction Units  

I'll summarize here.  Motivation reaction units are parcels of text that contain an action by one party, and a reaction by another.  The action motivates the reaction.  A motivator must be clear.  It must come before the reaction.  The reactor can not feature syntactically before the motivator, as in an "I saw" or "He sees."  In other words, no nesting perceptions.  That makes for an unclear motivation-reaction-reaction-reaction-et cetera chain.

Example from the above sequence:  

The car made another turn.  (Motivator 1)  Its wheels lifted.  (Reaction 1, Motivator 2)  The trunk cover waved.  (Reaction 2)  The car righted itself.  (Motivator 3)  The cover slammed.  (Reaction 3)

This can be applied across any scope, along any time frame.  It's all relative, anyways.  

Now, to build on these with my own experience.

Associations 

What did you expect the man who leaned out of the window to do?  

Pull a gun?  Jump out, maybe?  Make a lewd gesture?  

Certainly not become a unicorn.  

Ok, maybe a unicorn would work.  I think it might flow.  There's not enough context, anyways.  Here's what really might stop a reader up:

The car barged through a tiny intersection.  

Do you feel it?  That subtle, ever-so slight difficulty that your mind has comprehending that statement?   

A car is normally large.  Intersections normally happen on streets--they're open.  A car wouldn't need to barge.  Tiny does not describe at all our experience of automobiles or traffic law.

But you would say that the sentence works on some level, yes?  It might make for good metaphor.  

But the associations are wrong.  Tiny and car do not fit together, though they are related to different subjects within the sentence.  You shouldn't have to barge through an intersection (maybe the word would work for a busy one).

Another example.  

The car zoomed onto a straight lifted highway.  The police followed close on its tail.  The car's window rolled down.  A figure leaned out.  He yanked at the steering wheel.  The car turned a sharp corner.  The chase continued.  The police tried to follow and spun out.  Only three cars righted themselves in time.  They gunned their engines. 

Did you see it?  I embedded it deep, so you could feel the disconnect that it caused for the later events.  

Truth be told, it's not that strong of an example.  I think it's too obvious, and it doesn't work as well as it should.  The car makes a turn that can't exist, and in so doing breaks the immersion that a reader would feel.  But the implication made by elevated highway is a little too weak for my taste--as in, the break from reality doesn't have as jarring of an effect as it would in real life.    

The point is, in your own writing, you should expect things that are at the same time more prominent, and harder to detect.  I simply hope that in making you aware that these things exist, I may be able to further your discovery of them, and your quest to ultimately become a better writer.  

Cutaways

Sirens sounded.  Hard concrete walls echoed the noise.  Shattered windows glared blue and red.  

That's a cutaway.  A point in the flow of writing where the focus shifts to something other than the main events.  Perhaps to reflect or distort them through the lens of another perception.  In a quick action sequence, a misplaced cutaway can be deadly.  

The car rounded a sharp corner.  It swerved.  Its wheels skidded.  Rubber screeched.

Gunshots peppered the car's trunk.  The latch popped.

The car made another turn.  Its wheels lifted. The trunk cover waved. The car righted itself. The cover slammed.  Shattered windows glared blue and red.  The car zoomed though a busy intersection.  Its window rolled down.  Wind blew.  A hooded figure leaned out.


Notice that when you read the word "shattered," after "slammed," you involuntarily pull away.

There are two reasons for that.

One: The motivation reaction cycle is interrupted.

Two:  The scene has not been set up to contain shattered windows.

Let's fix them in order.

One: The motivation reaction cycle is interrupted.

This one's pretty obvious.  The car didn't do anything to warrant blue and red flashes on a window.  (In the immediate sense.)  There is no reason for those flashes to occur.  While they can be easily integrated into the scene after the fact, by way of association (Red and blue--speeding car--high speed chase---police are in pursuit--they're the ones who are making the flashes) doing so takes the reader out of the immediacy of the moment.  They are forced to jump through mental hoops to make the connections that you should be giving them.  

Of course, there are far worse forms of this problem.  But, it's easy, because this problem scales in a logical fashion.  More hoops = more time spent thinking = a further disconnect.

Two: the scene has not been set up to contain shattered windows

This one is similar to the first problem, but different.  Whereas the first was a problem of mechanics, the second is a problem of association.  A big picture problem.  

But, like all problems, it can be approached in a methodical fashion.  

Imagine for a second a chase scene set in a desert.  There is sand, there is sun.  It's a flat, baking interstate.  

The car rounded a sharp corner.  It swerved.  Its wheels skidded.  Rubber screeched.

Gunshots peppered the car's trunk.  The latch popped.

The car made another turn.  Its wheels lifted. The trunk cover waved. The car righted itself. The cover slammed.  Shattered windows glared blue and red.  The car zoomed though a busy intersection.  Its window rolled down.  Wind blew.  A hooded figure leaned out.  

Did you catch that?  I did.  

There's nothing in the lines before the entrance of the windows to suggest anything but cars and guns.  They could be anywhere.  On a bridge, under the ocean, in space.  You, the writer, don't know that the reader just happened to spend all last week on a road trip across the western US desert, watching old movies featuring high-speed car chases across open interstate.  There are no shattered windows there.  (On the car, maybe, but then again, I don't want them to be there, so the problem is the same.)

This can be fixed by slow association.  Word creep.  Rubber leads to black asphalt leads to concrete leads to big buildings leads to broken windows where you want them.  Ease the reader into the scene.

Or, stop the action and make the scene explicit.  Your choice.   

The car rounded a sharp corner.  It swerved.  Its wheels skidded.  Rubber screeched.

Gunshots peppered the car's trunk.  The latch popped.

The car made another turn.  Its wheels lifted. The trunk cover waved. The car righted itself. The cover slammed.

Sirens sounded.  Hard concrete walls echoed the noise.  Shattered windows glared blue and red.

The car zoomed though a busy intersection.  Its window rolled down.  Wind blew.  A hooded figure leaned out.

This one's a bit arbitrary.  The word "hard" has a soft tone, and the word concrete can still be associated with open interstate, or any road, really.  But hard concrete is not something usually used to describe roads.  It's used to describe walls.  But, it's not explicit.  It's a duality.  Hard desert.  Desert concrete.  Hard concrete.   Hard concrete walls.

Summary (TLDR):

1: Motivation reaction units are chains of nouns that do causing, to each other.  Each action has a reaction.  Each motivator must be declared, explicit, and concise.  No "I saw X do Y to Z."  X did Y to Z.  

2:The moving parts in your story must conform to popular societal norms.  Sorry.  If people don't expect it, they won't believe it.  Unless you give them a reason to.  

3:When changing perspectives in a hot action sequence, always be sure to ease the reader into your change of frame.  Otherwise, they'll get disoriented.  And who wants to be disoriented when they would rather see characters being shot, stabbed, gunned down, run over, run through, run into, run down, running around, and just plain running?

I hope you enjoyed my post on writing mechanics!  I'll be here all week!  

New writing mechanics on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  New story updates on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. 

Come back next time!