Combat Writing I - Action Beats

Introduction

Welcome to the September edition of Zen Thoughts, where, as the Professor of Writing, I break down some fiction writing techniques that might help people improve their writing beyond what the Shadow Academy courses offer. This is the first in a series called ‘Combat Writing’ and is focusing on pacing, but first I’d like to congratulate Arch on his appointment as HM. Arch is a very experienced and talented writer and I’m looking forward to working with him on developing the Brotherhood’s writing tuition.

A good fight scene has a lot of different elements: setting it up, balancing action with thought and dialogue, making the stakes clear and meaningful, making sure there’s progression through the scene… but in the first part of the series I’m going to focus on the sentence level structure and introduce the concept of action beats, and will be a fairly short one as the concept is fairly simple.

Short or Long Sentences?

“Write shorter sentences.” - Everyone

It’s probably the first bit of advice you get on making fight scenes exciting. Make your sentences as short as possible, so they’re faster to read and more dramatic and punchy. There’s an element of truth to it, and some writers use this effectively, but if you actually pick up a published novel and scan the fight scenes, you’ll realise authors don’t shorten their sentences nearly enough for this to be some immutable rule of the universe.

Far more important than short sentences are how short your action beats are. Short sentences can feel fast because they usually have short action beats, especially if they don’t have many adjectives or other framing. The percentage of words that are active, dynamic verbs (hit, slashed, ran, jumped, struck, etc) are high. Lots of actions take place in a short span of words. That’s the key to making the fight fast-paced – not how long / short your sentences are.

A long sentence can be fast-paced

‘Dumbledore brandished his wand in one long, fluid movement – the snake, which had been an instant from sinking its fangs into him, flew high into the air and vanished in a wisp of dark smoke; the water in the pool rose up and covered Voldemort like a cocoon of broken glass.’ - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling

That’s a 52-word sentence. 52 words is HUGE. But it feels fast-paced because of how quickly the action beats happen. Every word in bold is an active verb. Rowling could easily have replaced the em-dash and the semicolon with full stops. But in this case, keeping it one sentence makes it feel more fluid, like all the actions are connected with each other.

Despite being an extremely long sentence, this scene is so fast-paced that it is actually quicker to read out loud (~10-15 seconds) than it takes to happen in the movie (~20 seconds).

The key to making this work is really in the set up. When you get to the fight scene, most of your description should already be done. You don’t need to waste words or time replacing Dumbledore with ‘the old wizard’ or describe his hair colour or robes, or the environment. The fight takes place between characters we already know in a place we’ve already seen, so when the fight takes place, the focus is entirely on the action, without fluff slowing stuff down.

Closing Thoughts

The point here isn’t to say use longer sentences or don’t use short sentences. Have your sentences short, or long, or use a mixture, but whatever you do, keep your action beats short. Once you’re in a fight scene, trim unnecessary words, description, introspection, etc. and focus pm the action.

For further reading, our new Headmaster recommends Violence: A Writer's Guide by Rory Miller, as a cheap and interesting read on the topic.

Thank you for reading!

Professor Zentru'la

Previous Lectures

• May 2020 - Writing Engaging Dialogue

• July 2020 - Show, Don’t Tell I - An Introduction