Speaker 1: Hey amazing authors. Today I'm gonna talk about four quick tips for writing action scenes, mostly fight scenes but also chase scenes, that can make your scenes a lot more exciting, which is exactly what you want in an action scene. I'm Bryn Donovan. I work in publishing during the day and at night I am an author myself. Go ahead and subscribe if you haven't already. I love to share all kinds of inspiration and encouragement to help you reach your writing goals. Now if you're doing the Blank Page to Final Draft program, you are getting so close to having your first draft done, which is very exciting. But let's get right into it and talk about writing action scenes. These are so important not only for an action-adventure novel or obviously a thriller, but also in most fantasy novels, in a lot of sci-fi, in a lot of mystery, and even in some kinds of romance. So I write paranormal romance. Those stories are full of action scenes. Okay, the first thing I want to say about writing an action scene is that you don't want to describe them blow-by-blow, literally. If you have an extended box match, an extended scuffle, or a sword fight, if you start describing every punch, every swing of the axe, whatever you've got going on there, it's actually gonna get really boring, which is the exact opposite of what you want. So in some places you're gonna have to consolidate and say they traded blows. You can describe the really distinctive and pivotal moves in the fight. Like if she takes a ballpoint pen and drives it through his eye and kills him, obviously you want to describe that. Maybe not in too much detail. Okay, but anyway, you're gonna want to do some consolidating and don't talk about every strike. Okay, the second thing I want to talk about is that you're gonna want to, in most cases, keep dialogue and internal monologue to a minimum. Now that may sound wrong to you because you may be thinking of sword fights in Hollywood movies like Princess Bride or Star Wars, where you actually have these very important long conversations going on as they sword fight. And this kind of thing actually hails back to older Hollywood movies, you know, old versions of The Three Musketeers and Errol Flynn and that kind of thing, where they would do this. And it can be a little bit farcical, and even when it's played seriously, like in the original Star Wars with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, I think you can get away with it if it's in a more fantasy type setting. But if you're going for a really realistic fight, even a sword fight, I think you're gonna want to keep that dialogue to the minimum. And the reason is that, first of all, they're gonna be out of breath. And second of all, the people in the fight are focused on subduing, beating, or killing the other person. They're completely focused on that, so they don't have time to discuss all these other things. And if they do, you want to keep those lines of dialogue pretty short. Okay. Also want to watch internal monologue. So if you have a character who's just walking down the street on a sunny day, he might be thinking about the color of the curtains in a house he passes. He might be thinking about how he had to call his cousin in a couple of days. Now, if that same character is in the middle of the fight, it's very likely that he's not thinking about any of that. Why? Because his primal fight-or-flight instincts have kicked in. He's focused on dominance. He's focused on survival. So you want to keep that internal monologue to a minimum, too. This brings me to point number three, which is that when you're writing these fight scenes, consider using shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs. So these two things, your prose, can really underscore the urgency and that primal feeling of being in a fight, trying to dominate, trying to survive. Kind of imitates the tunnel vision that you have when you're in those do-or-die situations. Okay, number four, and I think this is so important, is let us feel it. Feel everything that is going on in your point-of-view character's body when they're fighting. So what's happening? Probably their heart is racing. It's pounding hard because that adrenaline is kicked in. They might feel that adrenaline coursing through their veins. It might make them shake a little bit, right, when you have that adrenaline dump that can happen. They can feel the impact when they hit somebody. They can feel when they get hurt, but also keep in mind because of that adrenaline going on, they may not feel it as much as they feel it later, okay? But the more you can describe the shortness of breath, pounding hard, the impact of hitting someone else, the more you can describe what that's like to be in that person's body and feel those things, the more the readers are gonna go with it. They're gonna start imagining because of mirror neurons in our brain, we do this. They're going to start having almost that same physiological response. They'll almost feel it in their own body, and that's going to make the scene really intense for them. Okay, so that was my really quick four tips for writing action scenes, but if you have any other questions about it, please leave them in the comments. I love getting back to people. Go ahead and like the video if you liked it, and I will be back next week, I think, to talk about how to write sex scenes, which is very similar in some ways to writing fight scenes. I'll talk more about that later. Thanks for stopping by, you guys, and happy writing.