Dan and Howard are joined by Larry Correia and Robison Wells (Rob is the younger of the Wells brothers), and with the enthusiastic support of a live audience at LTUE they discuss writing action.

Larry’s books are made of action (and no small amount of gunplay.) Howard’s comics feature mercenaries (and sometimes elephants.) Robison’s latest book, Variant, doesn’t have any experienced fighters in it, but the characters still manage to get into action-oriented trouble. Dan’s action scenes are personal, visceral, and confusing. And so we talk about how we do it.

We also talk about how we’ve seen others do it in books and in film. We discuss the scene/sequel format, blocking, and how “write what you know” need not be an obstacle to writing about sword fighting against dragon. Or Howard’s dog.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia, narrated by Oliver Wyman

Writing Prompt: Write an action sequence that you can appropriately title “Flaming Slapfight.”

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: Action is a staple of genre fiction, but it needs to be good. Beware the dreaded checklist. Mix it up! Don’t forget the explosions. Use scene-sequel format — something happens, then stop, pause, and think about it. Action should have meaning, and be part of the plot. Look for iconic moments. Then make sure that the setup for them is there. Don’t be afraid to let the action be personal, visceral, and confusing. Filter the experience through the point of view character. Study your favorite action scenes — what did they do? Plausible fights also can involve ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Don’t hold back — write about sword-fighting a dragon! Dive in, and let the characters figure it out. Some characters are competent, too! Ask for advice — someone out there knows what you need.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses Season Five, Episode 30, Writing Action.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry.
[Dan] And we are getting shot at. I’m Dan.
[Howard] I’m Howard. And joining us here at Life, the Universe, and Everything, we have…
[Larry] Larry Correia.
[Dan] And…
[Rob] Rob Wells.
[Dan] Excellent. We are here at Life, the Universe, and Everything at Brigham Young University with a live audience full of highly attractive people. Let’s hear… make some noise.
[Noise]
[Dan] All right. We have with us, as we said, Larry Correia and Rob Wells. Why don’t you to introduce yourselves really quick? Tell us why people should care that you’re on our podcast. Because we do.
[Larry] I’m Larry Correia. I’m the New York Times best-selling novelist, author of the Monster Hunter International series by Baen Books. The Grimnoir Chronicles, Hard Magic is the first book which will probably be coming out about the time this airs. Four books this year and many more coming.
[Rob] I am Rob Wells. It’s Robison Wells. I have published three books in a regional market. Then I also have a three book deal upcoming with Harper Teen, YA dystopian.
[Dan] Coming out this September. Correct?
[Rob] Coming out October 18, and it’s available for pre-order at Amazon. Go there now.
[Dan] Title?
[Rob] We will wait.
[Dan] The title is?
[Rob] I’m sorry, the title is Variant.
[Dan] It’s very good. I have read it. And marked all the errors in it and ran out of pens.
[Howard] In the world.
[Dan] Every time you lose a pen, it’s because Rob has written something horrible. All right, we’re going to talk about writing action, because we have some…
[Rob] Can I interrupt for just a moment?
[Dan] Oh, for crying out loud.
[Rob] There has been a long running joke amongst Dan’s friends…
[Dan] Let’s preface this by saying, for anyone who doesn’t know, Rob is my younger brother.
[Rob] Younger and better looking. There’s been a long-running joke, where Brandon… Sanderson, in case you guys don’t know who Brandon is… suggested that he ought to register the domain, The Talented Wells Brother.
[Dan] Dot com.
[Rob] I want him to know that I did that about three months ago, and I own it.
[Dan] And it’s a fan site dedicated to me.

[Dan] OK. We are going to talk about writing action. OK? We’re going to start with Larry, because Larry, you, at this very conference, taught a whole class on how to write action. So, start us off. Where do we start? What do we talk about?
[Larry] Action is extremely important, especially if you’re writing genre fiction. It’s kind of a staple of the game, if you’re writing adventure, you’re writing fantasy, you’re writing sci-fi. The fans expect action, and it needs to be good if you’re going to do it. There’s a lot of really badly written action out there in genre fiction.
[Dan] There is a lot of badly written action. You can kind of tell when you get to the books that have done it wrong. It feels like someone was trying to write a storyboard for a movie instead of trying to actually entertain you with a novel.
[Larry] I call that the dreaded checklist. This is really obvious when you’re writing in first person. It’s, “I did this, I did that, I dodged left, I dodged right, I punched, I…” It’s just a gigantic list of boredom.
[Dan] OK. So how do you do it right?
[Larry] You need to mix it up. If you’re writing in first person, remember you don’t have to put everything through that narrator’s eyes. So you don’t have to say, “I saw an explosion.” There can just be an explosion. I like that…
[Dan] And there should be an explosion.
[Larry] Oh, my rule on explosions is every 40 pages. At least. Earlier, I was here while you guys recorded a podcast about editing. I have my explosion count.

[Dan] I don’t doubt that. Howard, you have a lot of action in Schlock. How do you go about writing that?
[Howard] I try and write it so that I have to draw as few elephants as possible. Every so often, my writing chops just let me down completely. All of a sudden, I’ve got six elephants fighting on one page. Such an idiot.
[Larry] And we love you for that. The elephants.
[Howard] I am an unknown, unwitting subscriber to the scene-sequel format. Something needs to happen, and then we need to stop and pause and think about it. Then something else needs to happen, and we need to stop and pause and think about it. So, what I do is exactly that. If I find that the pacing in the comic is a little bit slow, that’s because the sequel has run on a little too long, and it’s time for something to blow up. The nice thing about the format I’m working in his that I’ve got enough characters on the page that I can switch POVs and do something interesting. I’m discovery writing, and hopefully you can’t tell when I’ve suddenly decided I’m bored, and I need to blow something up. Hopefully, from your point of view, it seems pretty natural. But I recognize what Larry said, you’ve gotta stay away from the left, left, right, up, down, up, down, BA… your action scenes should read like action, not like a cheat code for the NES.

[Dan] Now, Rob, having read your book, which I actually did very much like, despite my jokes earlier. You have several scenes of action, several battle scenes in there. How did you go about writing those? What was your secret?
[Rob] My secret, if I had a secret? Two things. First one is that all of the action that I included in the books had meaning. None of the characters in my books were like professional fighters or anything like that. So I didn’t… I mean, I was very much trying to be realistic in that… I mean, fights wouldn’t go on long at all. It would end quickly. But the plots… the action would have meaning. It would be part of the plot. Whatever was going on, it would be part of the plot, it wouldn’t be a fight just to have a fight. The second thing is that I treated it more… I think that if there was more fighting, this wouldn’t work as well. But I mostly just blocked out the fights. I wouldn’t describe he punched, I punched, like you’re talking about with the list. It was more, “I went over here, we did this. I went over here, we did this.” So it’s more telling a… I don’t know how to describe it. It’s more just like I said, it’s plot, it’s not describing blow-by-blow.

[Howard] One of the things that I do is I look for those moments that are going to be iconic. I look for those moments that are going to be really cool to draw… or if I was just doing prose, those moments that are going to be really fun for you to imagine based on the words that have been written on the page. I look for those, and then I try to find ways to justify them through the course of the combat, through the course of the story. I try and make sure that the setup is all there. An example that I used in a discussion yesterday was, there’s this moment in… not from my own work, an example from someone else’s… there’s a moment in the Mistborn novels where a 5 foot tall girl leaps thousands of yards through the air with a sharpened surfboard-sized sword and cleaves an enemy in half. That moment, when it happened, was perfectly set up by the whole rest of the book. That’s why that action scene worked so well. We look at it and say, “Oh, that was so awesome. I could totally see that in the movie.” Of course, they’d totally screw it up, because they wouldn’t give you all the things that led up to it working. But… I don’t know if that was Brandon’s process, but if you start with, “I want to have a tiny girl wielding a sharpened surfboard against giant enemies, and I want her to jump a mile through the sky in order to do this…” All right. What do I need to do in order to set up this action scene so that that seems… wait for it… natural?
[Dan] Not just the scene, but the entire trilogy. I think he invented his magic system specifically for that sword cleaving moment.
[Larry] It was all worth it.

[Dan] It totally was. What I do, having got my start in horror, and now expanding out into doing some other things… I’m writing a science fiction book now. The more I do action, it always ends up being very personal and visceral and confusing. I like that. I actually see a lot of that in Larry’s action as well. Where something will happen and bullets are flying and the main character doesn’t necessarily know which gun they came out of or where they’re headed. He just sees the wall exploding and hears gunshots going off. Really getting into that main character. They are scared. Their heart is racing. They are slipping on rubble. Getting down into that gritty detail. One of my very favorite war movies is Apocalypse Now. That removes all of the glory from the combat, because you never know what’s going on. You’re just as confused as the soldiers are, and you’re terrified. That gives the action a very different flavor, and so that’s kind of what I try to reproduce when I write.

[Howard] Let’s take just a moment to plug our book of the week.
[Howard] Our book of the week this week is Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia. I loved this book, but then I love books in which mercenaries get to hunt monsters with great big guns. Sometimes, the monsters are the ones with the great big guns. The vampires in this book are not brooding, romantic people hiding out at a high school. They’re monsters that want to eat your face. Monster Hunter International is available at audible.com. You can get a free membership at audiblepodcast.com/excuse . Read… rather, listen to Monster Hunter International for free or listen to any other of the wonderful books that audible has online.

[Howard] And we’re back. Now, I want to say something about this that Dan just talked about, with the confusion. Show of hands, and for those of you not benefiting from the video, I’ll count hands. Show of hands. How many of you have been in an automobile accident before? That’s a freaking lot of hands. Wow.
[Dan] That’s pretty much… almost everybody.
[Larry] Do not drive in Provo. Oh, my gosh.
[Howard] Right. Lightning never strikes twice, but you people are a menace. OK. So if you’ve ever been in a car accident… now, ask yourself. During this car accident, were you thinking about what your automobile was made of? Is this bumper fiberglass or is it polymer? How fast are the vehicles moving? I mean, were you thinking about these things? What… the answer is supposed to be no. Now, if you’re Tom Clancy and you’re writing kind of an omniscient point of view, then what you’re going to say is, “The tensile strength of fiberglass is…” and then you’re going to describe a car shattering. All right? But if you’re Dan Wells or Larry Correia, you’re going to talk about this visceral experience of, “And all of a sudden, I was on my side and I didn’t know why. There’s this horrible noise, and I realize there’s a pickup truck on top of me. Then I’m upside down…” I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a car rollover, but…

[Larry] On what Howard said there, one of the things I like to do is I like to try to kind of filter the sequence through whoever the point of view character is. Because if you’ve got a character that’s kind of a cold-blooded killer, and that’s your character setup, and he shoots people like eating breakfast, it’s going to be a little different than your action sequence is your average person who when they get in a fight, looks like a flailing slapfest. OK? The emotions are going to be a little different.
[Dan] My ears are burning.

[Larry] Well, for example… I used an example once, if you’re in a fistfight with the average person, what’s going through their head is, “Oh, my hair. Ow, my eye. Oh!” That’s what’s going through their head. Now if you’re fighting Chuck Liddell, it’s going to be, “Well, I’m just beating this guy. Wow, this is pleasant. Wonder what we’ll have for lunch today? You know, I like butterflies. Butterflies are pretty.”
[Howard] There’s a scene in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, in which the main character has teamed up, at least for a short time, with a couple of people, one of whom is a sniper. There’s a speed boat full of armed men coming at them. The sniper is talking to the guys, looking at things through the scope. I love that action scene because it reads something like, “Yep, speedboat, five guys. CRACK. Four guys. CRACK. Three guys, boat’s turning around. CRACK. Boat’s on fire, one guy’s jumped out. CRACK. Boom. All right, I think we’re done.” It’s a brilliant scene. You, as you’re imagining it, you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, this guy. I want him to be on my team when we play Fallout.”
[Larry] You can develop characters in an action sequence. You can develop plot in an action sequence. It’s not character, plot, character, plot, action. It’s all kind of together.
[Dan] Now, we’ve already kind of mocked Tom Clancy a little bit, but one of my favorite action scenes is from Patriot Games. Where the counterterrorist unit arrives at a house on the edge of a cliff. It’s the middle of the night. He has not yet received orders of who he’s supposed to shoot or when. So there’s a fight going on inside the house, and he can see it through the windows, and he can see people with guns. He doesn’t know if he’s allowed to shoot at them yet. It makes it very tense. He’s kind of describing the action from the third person. How he would… I could take that guy out… can I? No, not yet. Again, filtering that action sequence through a unique character voice and situation. Rob, you haven’t said anything in a while.

[Rob] I haven’t said anything in a while. One point that kind of is a counter example to all of these. Like I said, in my book, the characters are… well, it’s YA, they’re teenagers. Even though some of them are kind of gang member guys, they’re all… I mean, no one has been trained in anything. I think that there are… I mean, I would say more common than not, when there is action in books, it is usually… I mean, it’s a fish out of the water, it’s the kind of ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances. I think that you have to treat it plausibly in that… while there definitely are characters who are these military guys who know exactly what they’re doing, a lot of the time, you don’t, you’re not prepared for it. You don’t have names for the moves that you’re using, you’re… it is a lot of a slapfight. I think that you can write a very plausible, very frightening slapfight if you’re the one who’s getting the crap beat out of you or if you’re in a fight for your life and you don’t know how to fight. I think that all of these are fun ways to write, and from a very different point of view than someone who really knows what they’re doing.

[Dan] One of my favorite action scenes, favorite fight scenes in a book is Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry where basically the Department Of Military Sciences has pulled all of the biggest, toughest dudes that they can from the various branches of the military. They get them together, they put them in a room, and say, “OK, which one of you is in charge?” One guy looks around and says, “OK, I’m in charge.” And proceeds to beat up everybody else in about 2 seconds, and just drops them all to the floor. It’s fantastic. Go read that.

[Larry] I’m just… I was looking at Howard’s timer here. 15 minutes?
[Howard] Oh, we’ve got a minute left.
[Larry] OK. It goes pretty quick. One thing I really recommend because a lot of people hesitate to write action because of that old rule about write what you know, but nobody here has ever sword-fought a dragon. OK? So don’t let that hold you back.
[Dan] Speak for yourself, Larry.
[Larry] OK. There was that one time Dan did that, but, I mean, it wasn’t a very big dragon.
[Dan] To be honest, that’s true.
[Howard] That was my dog!
[Dan] Well, you shouldn’t name your dog Dragon.
[Rob] If I can add something to what Larry’s saying… I don’t know if I’m interrupting you, because everyone else has, too…
[Larry] Go ahead.
[Rob] But the way that I write the first draft always is I will put the characters into a situation where the action ensues, and they will just have to figure it out as they’re in it. I don’t like to block things out, plan out the fight ahead of time. I think that it adds more of a scrambling, unknown element. Again, this is coming from the point of view of a character who doesn’t know what he’s doing. But, just write it, dive in, don’t plan it. Figure it out as you go, and… yeah, there you go.

[Howard] With regard to write what you know, I come under fire sometimes for having characters behave a little more competently than they should. Perhaps that grew out of the fact that the very first time I ever took my wife shooting, which was the very first time that she had ever fired a weapon. We were shooting at little tomato sauce cans full of water. She was using an iron sights 22… any of you not know what that is, I’m not going to bother explaining. She’s using an old iron sight 22. I’m explaining to her that the sweet spot on this can is about half an inch from the bottom, dead in the center. If you hit it in the sweet spot, you’ll know what happens. Two shots later, the can leaps up in the air about 4 feet and a column of water shoots about 10 feet up in the air. She goes, “Oh, my gosh, I did it. This is so much fun.” She proceeded for the next 10 minutes to murder tomato sauce cans. She’d never had any experience with firearms before. We spent 10 or 15 minutes training on it. That’s not unbelievable for me, because I’ve seen it.
[Larry] I’ve seen it about 3000 times.

[Dan] It helps to have… the odds are good that no matter where you live, if you live in America, you know someone who owns a gun. So you can go out and you can talk to people, you can find people. I know Larry, and so when I was writing a fight scene in a recent book, I sent him an e-mail and said, “I need to know some stuff about guns. Here’s the basic description of the character and the situation. Tell me what kind of guns they’d be using and what kind of tactics they’d use.” He sent me back like a 10 page description of all the stuff, and it’s great. There are resources you can draw on to get this kind of information.

[Howard] Well, we are out of time, so we’re going to turn to Mister Correia for a hopefully action-packed, violence laden, bullets flying writing prompt. Maybe that’s not what you had in mind? Go!
[Larry] I want you to write an action sequence that you can title “Flailing Slapfight.”
[Howard] So I appear to have been wrong.
[Dan] Well, you can have guns in your flailing slapfight.
[Larry] It will end very quickly.
[Dan] All right. You are out of excuses. Now go write.