For the last stream, we tried a new exercise: going over how to write action scenes.
This all started when someone in the Discord mentioned that they were having difficulty turning a wrestling move into writing on the page. Here’s what they were trying to write about:
I know nothing about wrestling,
but I know that’s not an easy thing to pull off… in writing!
So to work on writing action scenes, we first went over how to write a good action scene. Then we did an example for the above video, and then another one that chat voted for.
Here’s what we came up with:
How to Write a Good Action Scene
THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE
1. Make sure that it fits the PLOT
2. Make sure there’s EMOTION behind it
3. Make sure that it feels REALISTICTHINGS TO CONSIDER DURING
– Have to find a balance between TOO MUCH description and TOO LITTLE description
– TOO MUCH and it’s ironically harder to follow
– TOO LITTLE and it becomes unimportant/bland
– Or it can read like a GROCERY LISTWAYS TO SPICE UP ACTION SCENES
– Vary sentence length (usually short=fast and long=slow)
– Vary word choice/sentence structure (no “and thens”)
– Zoom in and zoom out as necessary for emphasis (zoom in on important things, zoom out on not important things)LET’S WRITE AN ACTION SCENE FOR THE WRESTLING CLIP THAT WE JUST WATCHED
The crowd screamed in anticipation as I gripped my fallen opponent by his thick neck. I wrapped my arms around his head and heaved him into the air feet-first like hanging a slab of meat on a hook. My heart pounded against his screaming mouth as I gripped him tight toward my sweaty chest.
This match was over.
I slammed him to the floor of the ring. His massive body bounced. Groaned. Shook. Sizzled with pain until he stopped moving. My ears were ringing with the screams of the crowd, but the ding of the victory bell clanged loud and clear above it all.
LET’S WRITE AN ACTION SCENE ABOUT PAINT DRYING (Chat voted for this)
I gaze over my freshly-painted living room wall. Plastic sheets taped to the floor, the smell of hours of hard work lingering in the air. My old clothes that I’d saved just for this occasion covered in splatters of white, hardened drips sprinkled over my hair and face.
I let out a sigh of relief. Four hours of miserable labor, complete. Now I could finally relax, sit back and watch it dry, and–
My eyes latched onto an unfinished spot. Right in the center of the wall, where the photo of me and my ex-girlfriend Becky had been hanging, it was a lighter white than the rest. I picked up the paint roller, dunked it in the tray, and rolled it up and down, smearing another coat of white over the incomplete section. Incomplete just like how I felt now, living without her.
But as soon as I finished going over that one part, it stood out as too white compared to the rest. It was like a bright light against the cloudiness of the rest of the wall. Just like Becky had been in my life.
Furiously, I slammed the roller back into the tray and scraped another coat over the wall. Up. Down. Side to side. Dunk. Roll. Repeat. I grit my teeth. Stood back. No, still imperfect. No matter how many times I tried covering up the miserable parts, it just made the surrounding sections stick out even worse.
Just like Becky.
Both scenes have some flaws that could be smoothed out with editing, but they’re good starts. The wrestling scene focuses on the emotion and raw details rather than overwhelming the reader with specifics, and the “paint drying” scene certainly has a lot going on, uh, mentally.
Essentially, we want to make our action scenes as exciting to read on the page as they are when they’re playing in our head, and I think we succeeded here. Even for paint drying.
After that we did a writing prompt and chat voted for this one submitted by Jason-OCE: You control all of time and space, but can only channel your will through lame puns. Your tome of wizardry, a dollar store joke book.
Chat had a blast coming up with terrible puns to work into the story, and I loved figuring out how we could weave them all in.
In the end, I’m amazed that our final story works so well. It’s got a good buildup, payoff, climax, and even a twist. All the while sprinkled with groan-worthy puns, each worse than the last.
Or you can watch us read it out loud here.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 7:30pm-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch Rubbish to Published, the writing exercises, or the writing prompts on YouTube, or watch the full stream reruns until Twitch deletes them.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon,
forthcoming November 2018.