Paying Attention to Action — or Is It Character?

I’ve written here before (here and here) about the terrors of newly-published-authordom — particularly, when the bad reviews land in your mailbox.

But sometimes, even a bad review contains a nugget you cling to when the whole damned thing threatens to come unraveled, when your spirit sags and you wonder why you’re even bothering to continue.

In my case, that nugget for Crossed Wires appeared in a review which on the whole was not particularly flattering. (This was the review referring to “occasional patches of arty prose.” Which was true — which was why it rankled so much!) Specifically — I’m going on memory here but think it’s pretty close to the real wording — it said: “The action scenes are winners, some of them quite funny.”

The reason this comment stuck with me wasn’t the “quite funny” part. That’s something people had been telling me for years about (much of) my writing; while it was nice to know that a stranger concurred, I more or less just nodded to myself at that point — because I was still savoring the first half of the sentence.

Now, on one hand, I know (and knew then), like, common sense, right? This was a murder mystery, after all. Of course there were “action scenes” scattered throughout.

But I hadn’t thought about the writing of them, particularly. I knew what had to happen in such scenes, both in terms of the action itself and also in terms of the style in which the action was described. But it didn’t require thought. I didn’t, y’know, script or choreograph the action scenes. I just got through them.

(At this point, I glimpse early signs of the post-Crossed Wires relaxation that I mentioned toward the end of this post: “I was going to do [the Crossed Wires sequel] my way. I was going to write a book that I enjoyed writing, and the hell with whether it fit what I thought An Author (especially The Author of my first book) would write… I didn’t care anymore about my success as a mystery author (even a lowercase one).”)

It came as a simple pleasant surprise: apparently I could, without thinking about it, write action scenes well enough to earn the praise of an outside observer.

Even now I don’t think about action scenes in advance, really. Often I’ll just know generally that (as I think of it) “a key scene is coming up and X and Y have to happen there so that Z can happen later.” The Missus might ask me how the day’s writing went and I’ll say something like, Not bad. Working on a key scene, kinda fun. Not bad. Which means, most often, that I sat at the keyboard and pounded away for a few hours and a certain amount of stuff happened more or less of its own accord and I probably won’t need to change too much about it except to correct typos, awkward construction, and so on.

To date, in the more than fifteen years since Crossed Wires came out, of course, I’ve published no fiction at all, anywhere. I’ve kept writing it, though.

And throughout that time, looking back on individual stories, chapters, sections, I find myself thinking about action scenes.

There are pure action scenes, sure, which can serve many specific purposes as well as generally moving the plot along. People get shot, newborn babies greet the world for the first time. Cars crash. Lives change in the course of a few moments of story time. The reader’s pulse (ideally) quickens, even just a little.

But there’s also a quieter sort of action scene, sometimes even occurring when the principal is most alone, in a confined physical space of no more than a few feet square. A lot can still “happen” in such circumstances. And some of those are my favorite action scenes of all — to write, and (whether I’ve written them or not) to read.

Best of all — funny or not — is when the scene which takes place reveals something(s) important about a character.

In preparing this post, I ran through several possibilities to excerpt. They included crime-in-the-happening scenes, crowd scenes, “suspense” scenes. Ultimately, though, I selected the following: one of my favorite quiet action scenes among the ones I’ve written. It’s Chapter 1 of a novella called The Dark, and it’s about my most persistent short-fiction character — the fellow known only as Webster. The two to three thousand words of the chapter (throughout which the action scene twines, like a sick vine) appear here.

Enjoy!