[From KMW: Since I am traveling this week, I’m offering up a shorter post today about how to write better action scenes. For my birthday, I gave myself a month-long “writing retreat” in the mountains! I’ll be posting regular content again next week, and you can check Instagram for some peeks into my adventures.] As […]
November 1, 2021 by 52 Comments CharactersHumanizing the Bad Guy (or, Some Thoughts on Violence in Fiction)
Our sense of story is almost like an extrasensory organ. It enables us to pick up on subtle signals in tone and intent and this allows us to interpret how we should respond when we encounter violence in fiction. These signals are more important than the actual act we are reading about or viewing. This […]
June 24, 2016 by 74 Comments Plotting Your NovelHow (Not) to Write Satisfying Action Scenes
Part 2 of The Do’s and Don’ts of Storytelling According to Marvel Imagine this. You sit down to write the biggest action scenes in your entire story. They’re gonna be epic. Giants will collide. Empires will topple. The conflict will be definitively decided once and for all–and readers will be glued to the page. This is, no doubt, exactly what the folks […]
January 27, 2016 by 70 Comments NarrativeHow to Write Realistic Fight Scenes
Writing realistic fight scenes can feel like being in one. Then again, being in a fight involves reaction, quick thinking, and intuition. A lot of times writing the scene takes the opposite: careful choreography, thinking, and re-thinking–and more. When I started writing fight scenes, I did it by feel. I had an advantage: I’m a […]
October 17, 2014 by 40 Comments Narrative5 Keys to Writing Epic Battle Scenes
If epic battle scenes make such exciting climaxes, then a whole book full of them would be like the most exciting story ever, right?! … Right? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve skimmed pages of pointless fighting in order to get back to the plot. Writing a book about a war promises excitement, […]
October 10, 2012 by 30 Comments Plotting Your NovelHow to Keep Your Fight Scenes Interesting
If you’re like me, you like nothing better than a good fictional fight scene. Aerial dogfights. Lightsaber duels. Gunfights at high noon. It’s all good. But this type of scene can be surprisingly difficult to write. How to keep your fight scenes interesting? The first problem, of course, is getting all your facts straight—because the […]
October 3, 2012 by 12 Comments Plotting Your NovelWhen Not to Show the Action in a Story
Action is given a lot of emphasis these days. It can manifest differently according to the needs of genre and the individual story, but the necessity for it never changes. However, within all this emphasis put upon showing action instead of telling it, we can sometimes lose sight of the fact that there are moments […]
May 22, 2011 by 45 Comments NarrativeThe Kung Fu Panda Guide to Writing Action Scenes
You don’t have to love kung fuuuuuuu to enjoy a good action scene, but you do need to understand the basics of the action scenes scene if you’re going to blind readers from overexposure to your action awesomeness. Fight scenes, chase scenes, and other action extravaganzas appear in stories of every genre, so consider the […]
