The Key to Writing Good Action Scenes (Hint: It’s Not Just the Action)

This week’s video shows you how you can mimic Jurassic Park in streamlining your narrative and keeping your action scenes tight.

Video Transcript:

Two admissions to start off with today.

First, I admit the title is slightly misleading. The key to writing good action scenes isn’t action? What’s up with that? Because if action is the point of the scene, then obviously the action is important. I titled it that because we’re going to talk about an all-important aspect of action scenes that, indeed, has nothing to do with action.

Second admission: I really, really wanted to title this using Po’s great line from Kung-Fu Panda:

Enough talk, let’s fight.

But as apropos as that might be—as you’ll see—this isn’t about Po. It’s yet another example of fabulous storytelling from Jurassic Park.

The lesson we’re going to take away from this today is one about keeping the action tight by first and foremost keeping the narrative tight. By the time we get to our action scenes, we need to make sure all our working pieces are in place. We don’t want to bring the build-up of tension to a screeching halt in order to explain important aspects of the story. What we want to do is either get all that stuff out of the way far earlier or work it seamlessly into the action scene itself.

In the always high-tension Jurassic Park, we’ve got the Third Act opening with Ellie Sattler headed out into the wilds of the park to reboot the power system.

Now, perhaps it would have made more sense for park owner Mr. Hammond to explain the technicalities of finding and operating the system before she went out. But for the sake of the narrative flow and the overall tension within this scene, the movie made the admirable choice to have him walk her through the process in real time—with the raptors breathing down her neck.

The next time your characters are enacting a complicated plan, evaluate whether you can keep the pacing tighter by showing readers the plan in real time rather than stopping to explain it all to them beforehand.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! What information do you need to explain before you get to your important action scenes? Tell me in the comments!