What happens when you translate a video clip into a short written story?
Let’s perform writing science together, using video clips suggested and voted on by YOU!
Category: Action
Action scenes might seem difficult to write.
How can you write an exciting scene without it being a boring list of actions to read?
Let’s find out by taking a look at THREE action scenes from very different books!
Writing a fight scene in a story might seem intimidating.
How can you possibly make a bout between two people as interesting as a movie or TV show?
Thankfully, it’s not actually that hard! And there’s some tips and tricks to help.
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:
Last week on Masterpiece Monday we looked at a character with a sexy voice (even though we never actually hear her say a word). This week I’d like to show off a great example of something that I find difficult to pull off well: writing action scenes.
Writing an action scene is tough. You have to keep tension high and fast-paced, but at the same time you need to provide enough details so your reader can follow what’s going on. But if you provide too many details, it just falls flat. It’s the writing equivalent of walking a tightrope… on a unicycle… taped to each foot.
One book that does action scenes very well is (unsurprisingly!) Harry Potter. Let’s take a look at one particularly great passage. It’s during Harry’s first broomstick-flying lesson, when Malfoy steals Neville’s Rememberall and is taunts Harry up in the air with it. Suddenly he throws it as far as he can, and we get this scene: