Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Writing action
The play and screenplay people want to watch
Long-form genres

Action is the most deceptively challenging element both on the stage and in Hollywood. What might seem simple and straightforward on the stage or movie screen actually requires careful planning and extremely creative solutions from the screenwriter.

Many people believe action works against character, plot, and theme, but that’s not the case. The best action sequences in plays or films possess deep stories, reveal the complexity of characters, and have a profound effect on the audience.

The challenge for the writer is to maintain compelling characters, surprising plots, and important themes within the limiting structure of an action sequence. Speed is the enemy of the action writer, despite the ongoing trend to increase the pacing of Hollywood films. Ironically, pure speed is not what thrills an audience, which is why good action writers actually try to slow down their play or film to make the action appear faster when it occurs.

The faster the pace of a story, the less chance you have for surprise, and surprise is the fundamental requirement of plot. As a writer, you take on the role of a magician. The audience looks to you for events they can’t predict, but thinking back, realize they should have seen coming. When you move characters down a single path at top speed, turns become difficult. The audience can see everything down the path, all the way to the obvious conclusion. If you slow the pacing, you give yourself the luxury of putting a few more twists and turns to work, so the audience can still be surprised and will continue to pay attention.

You can start your play or script with a big action scene if you want (some hit action films do and some don’t) but then back off. Give the character a personal problem he or she must solve simultaneously with overcoming the problem that came from the action earlier. You don’t need to take a lot of time with it, but do it. You have now set up the all-important double-track line, contrasting the personal with the action problem. The key then becomes making those two lines appear as one to the audience.

Action, by its very nature, pushes the envelope of believability, so you have to convince the audience early that your protagonist is quite capable of what he or she later performs. After all, in most cases, you’re showing someone whose ability to act is significantly above normal. It’s rare to see a successful action script where the hero learns to be good at physical action over the course of the story. (Films like Rocky constitute important exceptions.)

It’s a surprise when the chunky-bodied protagonist of Rocky is able to develop enough agility to finish his fight with boxing’s world heavyweight champion. By “surprise,” I mean surprise to the hero as well as to the audience. And that means you have to hide as much about your opposition as you can. In Rocky, the audience assumes the champ is great even though no one sees him fight up until the end of the movie, in his contest with the protagonist. The best action plays and scripts deal with deception and hidden information, especially about the true nature and identity of the opponent. Great action scripts are really a battle of wits—it’s about who can deceive best and who can think the best.

It’s often a good idea to make the protagonist strong but the opponent stronger (or at least appear stronger). Take the necessary time to figure out some special talents and tricks your opponent has that will give your hero fits. But don’t show them right away. Hold them back. When you do bring them on, bring them fast and furious. You want the hero reeling so he has to dip into all his skills and perhaps utilize toughness and resourcefulness even he didn’t know he had.

WATCH OUT!

Don’t make the opponent so strong that realistic victory is an impossibility for the protagonist. If there’s not enough evidence for a victory, the audience will reject it as implausible.