Young Writers Society

I haven't been writing for very long, well, at least compared to many writers. So I haven't sat down and really worked on my action scenes. I sit there at the laptoporado, and am just stumped. Writing an action scene either takes hours upon hours, or it ends up as a thought session, where the action is in slow motion, being played out for as long as the sun shines, never mounting up with suspense. Ever.

How do I make my action suspenseful? How do I make the reader on the edge of their seat? And, really, how do I put any on paper? That is my main concern.

A sample of my writing, so you see what my style is like.

Behind her ran the scrolvs. Ten of them, armed to the teeth, waving axes about like they were as light as toothpicks. If she was going to survive, there was only one place she could go. Out of the auditorium.

Through the maze of tables and tile she ran—jumping, rolling, and ducking. The scrolvs were incessant, but at least her reflexes were more acute. By the time the scrolvs reacted, she was way ahead.

The door was ahead of her. Glass cracked, hanging on one hinge. The culprit table lay on the ground nearby, corner smashed. But it had done its work.

She pushed, shoving against the bent frame. The metal screeched against the concrete, scratching it as it crept open. And then stopped against a rise in the concrete, refusing to budge.

Before she could move from the place, a scrolv loomed over her. His axe poised to split her to the waist.

Thank you so much, guys! I really appreciate the help!

The sample you've given is pretty good! The hardest part is getting over the step-by-step record of a fight, and you've got that covered.

Make the threat real

There are two kinds of fight scenes- the raw ones and the movie ones. In movies there's lots of punches and hits. The good guys take twenty hits and get back up, unlike the bad guys who each patiently wait their turn to attack and then go down in one hit. In real life people are much more fragile, and violence is less predictable- you never know what will happen.

If you want to create suspense then you have to make fight scenes more realistic. Let your characters get thrown about, make the bad guys strong, and create the belief that your MC actually might not make it out of here unscathed.

Add something of randomly obvious significance

Foreshadowing is my personal favourite when-all-else-fails option. You don't have to slow down the main action, but you can have something slow developing in the background. For example, a random splodge of blood on the floor- enough of a hint for your reader to know that your MC is bleeding, but not for the MC to realise it's their own. As your MC gets weaker, the threat gets greater and the tension builds.

There's also the imagination part. Sometimes saying that someone had their hand chopped off is one thing- talking about the hand lying on the floor sets the imagination going of who it came from and how it got there. Your readers imagination will fill in all the action.

Take advantage of pace

Don't be scared to slow things down suddenly- it's a great effect if you can pull it off. Let's say, mid fight scene, your MC is beating the beatlejuice out of some badguy, relishing the chance to finally do so, feeling the rush and pride of no longer feeling powerless. Then they turn to see the person they love and everything switches to slow motion. In the rush of it all they forgot to protect the thing that mattered most.

Then speed things up and let the panic hang in the air for a while.

Think it through first

The best advice I can give about action scenes is to imagine them in your head before you put pen to paper. You can work faster that way to spin things around, edit the actual events, figure out which ones are important enough to write about, before you get to the writing. Action scenes take a little longer to compose in your head than others since there's so much going on, so allow yourself that extra time to daydream.

You are so incredible amazing. That has helped me sooo much.
Thank you for all of this wonder. I have read it like fourteen thousand times already. xD

Anytime =]

I would also check out How to Fight Write, a very good tumblr run by people who know how fighting works. They do take questions and you can learn a lot from the answers, even if they don't exactly pertain to you.

I know a site has already been mentioned but this site has some good tips: Action Scenes: How to Write
I'll just mention a couple of points.
Point 1: Depending on your characters skills, remember to keep bring up that skill; for example, Judo. If your character is a normal school girl and when she comes across a gangster in an alley way, your not going to say 'and she used Uchimata, where she threw the gangster over her hip'. You'd obviously mention that she goes to Judo class.
Point 2: Additionally, you wouldn't make your character have numerous fighting skills, like Taekwondo, and boxing, and Judo and... It wouldn't be right. So you need to give your character a fair amount of qualities.
Point 3: Keep it simple. If your reader can't follow they will lose interest. Say, if you did mention technique like I did, make sure you research the move and explain what it does. The more understandable - the more enjoyable.

I hope this helped