Here's a first for the Bloc: I'm going to do an actual workshop about story-writing! Shocking, I know...
They Did What in the Where?!
I sometimes feel like I'm a fight choreographer at heart. At anime conventions I want to make movies of cosplayers fighting each other; when practicing martial arts I sometimes play around with movements from "other things I've watched or picked up". Most specifically for today, when I write action sequences (among other things), I tend to visualize sequences in my mind well before I put them into words.
Granted, my background in martial arts possibly gives me a bit of a leg-up in describing actions playing out between people. But to really get people's attention to an action sequence, it's not the blow-by-blow account of what's going on...
It's the geography.
Location, Location, Location:
If you're a gamer, think about every FPS map or Smash Bros. stage you've ever played. The truly defining aspects of them have nothing to do with what colour the maps are or what music is playing in the background: it's all about layout. Is there a high tower on the side? Is there a wide, flat, open area in the middle? Does it slowly scroll up while everyone tries to knock everyone away off the side of the screen?
Even if you don't clearly specify whether the lightsaber went through the battle droid's torso in a vertical swing or a horizontal one, you still know that the outnumbered Jedi are charging the droids from left to right and are pushing them back to a degree ("good guys on the left of the screen, bad guys on the right" was actually an intentional decision in "Attack of the Clones" to make following the action in the final battle sequences easier).
If you can give enough basic descriptions of where the action takes place and then go on to have your characters interact with that location, then you'll immediately have that much more of a connection between reader and story.
How Much Detail Is Enough?
There's a story trope known as "The Law of Conservation of Detail". Basically, if something is important enough to be worth mentioning, it's going to be important. Y'know, like in a video game RPG when you go around talking to random people who don't really say anything important, and then you get to the person who has a character portrait in his text bubble - clearly he's important.
In terms of action geography, this is very much also the case. Say (for sake of example) we have a fight sequence taking place in a high school classroom. Okay, classroom, we've all been to school, we all know what high school classrooms generally look like. Lines of desks in the main floor area, one big desk at the front of the room with a blackboard or whiteboard behind that. In general, people can get that far without you saying any more.
But these aren't desks like the little one-person desks. These are the longer "table-like" 2-person desks. Okay, why should we care about that detail?
Well, maybe someone is running/hopping across the tops of them later in the story (something he might not have done with the less-balanced one-seaters?), or maybe someone gets slammed directly on top of one and has most of his body sprawled (but "comfortably") across the top of it. Maybe one person starts crawling under a full line of them to escape something that in turn is just throwing the desks aside just as he clears them - not saying you couldn't do it with the smaller desks, but y'know . . . shoulders can sometimes feel larger than they need to be when you're panicking.
Here's another example:
In the last prompt I wrote, I described a fistfight on a beach. For all intents and purposes, it was a very standard kind of beach that should have been fairly easy to visualize for people:
- It was a beach, so there was sand - it kicks up and blows around as they fight.
- The beach has a seawall along it - character gets backed up and trapped against it (and is aided by it in the fight a little as well).
- The beach has logs along it, like cheap benches (one of which caused him to hurt his arm when he fell against it).
Beach setting, seawall, logs. That's all I really mention. We don't know how long the beach actually is, we don't know how high the wall is, and we never heard if it was white sand, black sand, or what have you. I easily could have, but for purposes of describing the action, it's not so necessary. Audience imagination can fill in the rest quite easily, I should think.
Moving Through The Geography:
Motion is what makes action interesting. I know, no-brainer. But in terms of fight geography, they can add a lot to both storytelling as well as make things just all the more exciting.
I'll use movie examples: Compare The Matrix: Reloaded with Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.
Now I won't take too much away from it, but "Matrix: Reloaded" had some amazing fight choreography and effects that kinda lost my interest, especially in the "Neo vs Agent Smiths" fight in the middle. Great looking, yes, but ultimately it's 5 minutes of a guy in a courtyard fighting other guys in the courtyard. Later on it's a guy with a pole fighting other guys in the courtyard. Despite the odd bouncing off walls and the like, this might as well have been a fight in a blank, white "demo" room. There's very little interesting geography in the fight; it's one guy running around while a mob keeps magnetically bouncing back towards him for five minutes straight.
(Video link for reference: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ0T59qKK-s)
Now in comparison, consider "Revenge of the Sith's" final fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin. Even without fight choreography descriptions, consider how the fight goes:
- Setting: aircraft landing platform high above fire and lava.
- Anakin attacks, Obi-Wan constantly backing up around the perimeter of the platform
- Anakin pushes Obi-Wan back across a bridge and then into a narrow corridor that their weapons keep hitting as they fight through it.
- Fight enters a control room with a large tabletop "holographic map" in the middle of the room.
- Weapons destroy a control panel; "holographic map" shuts off. Fight continues on top of table/map.
- Fight enters a different, larger control room. They break more equipment that comes into play later.
- Anakin still the aggressor, pushes Obi-Wan outside and forces him onto a long section of piping above the lava and fire...
And that's only half of the full duel!
(Video link for reference: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=pSwy412nttI)
Now obviously I'm not suggesting everyone write ridiculously detailed fight sequences with interactive environments everywhere. But you see how having a location and a pathway through it can lead to all kinds of interesting effects?
Wrapping Up:
Actually, I don't have any really definitive "summing it all up" things to say about this. I'll just say that if anyone has any questions about what I've just brought up, please feel free to ask - it's likely someone else might have that same question.
I guess I'll just say that yes, crazy, well-detailed action is good. Dynamic action where you know where the good guys and bad guys are, however, is even better.
