Today’s guest post is by Remy Wilkins.
We all want our climaxes and battles, our chase scenes and explosions, to be as dynamic and blood pumping as the summer’s best blockbusters, but the difficulty is that the strengths of cinema—its visceral visuals—do not easily align with what’s exciting in a novel.
But this doesn’t mean our action sequences are relegated to flat descriptions that must wait for a movie adaptation before becoming exciting. There are plenty of evocative scenes that drag the reader through finger-biting excitement and fear, but it’s a tricky balance of details and space enough for the reader to flesh it out.
Many writers err on one side or the other; they either overload the scene with too many descriptions or speak so sparsely about the events that the reader misses the drama.
In considering these pitfalls, I sought inspiration from movies on how to write compelling action scenes, looking for tips that I could apply to prose. As I studied both good and bad action sequences I found three keys that separated the effective scenes from those that were ineffective. Continue Reading…
