Last week I talked a little bit about how you can improve dialogue in your stories, but i've gotten a few questions about writing dynamic action and how to express that in a script, so I thought I would cover some ways that is done in scripts, and how to try to make your scenes better. Action isn't just the stuff that happens between plot points, but how you actually describe what the characters do in the story. It must be clearly expressed, and in detailed enough manner as to paint a deeper picture of the scene. So for this, I won't just be talking about how to write actual action scenes, but also how to make your descriptions of the characters actions more to the point to better express story elements.
SHOW, DON'T TELL
This is a platitude that you'll hear time and time again in a large variety of writing literature, and it's right, you want to try to show the audience what is happening rather than telling them. A large component of film is it's visualness, so you have to remember you can SHOW the audience things, that's why films can get by without a narrator at all, in fact a narrator, or exposition are totally unnecessary and just there to condense things. Exposition and narration (Telling), is far more efficient, as you can come out and say directly to the audience, "Sandy was an unhappy woman", which can be completed a bit more quickly than doing a pan of pictures on her mantle showing how she used to be happy, then going to a shot of her doing her laundry while frowning, then sitting and eating breakfast alone, and showing her going to work and working a boring souless job, all while lighting it bleakly, and playing sad music (Showing).
So you have to remember that actions your characters do, and HOW they do these actions all convey meaning, for instance...
"GREG walked across the room and drinks the orange juice, he this exits the room."
OR...
"GREG races across the room, skipping over piles of notebooks and papers covering his crowded office, snatching up the orange juice and chugging it down, before grabbing his briefcase and dashing out the door."
Greg has different motivations and a totally different emotional state, but does the same thing, walks across a room, drinks some juice, then exits the scene. HOW a chracter moves across a room, how a character picks something up, and how a chracter acts should be expressed, because you want to constantly be painting a picture of your characters states, and what they are doing.
Be wary if overdoing this though, you don't need to paint the most vivid picture in the world, screenplays give you a lot of room to write very minimally because you can hammer out additional details (if you're making the film yourself), during the storyboarding stage, and over read-throughs with your actors. So you have to keep it in mind that you have to write visually, and in a detailed manner, but not to over-do it, and that if you're writing a screenplay it offers you a little more leeway.
STRUCTURE & MOTIVATION
All actions in the story are based on motivation, so you have to keep that in mind. If you have characters doing things without motivation, it's confusing or unrealistic to the audience. (RULE BREAKER: It's totally fine to have a character that lacks real direction, and that can be the thing they have to change during their character arc. Or if you have a character that is crazy in some way, it's fine for his motivations and actions to not quite sync up. You can have characters without a definite logic behind their motivations and actions, but those characters are rarer.) So when you're writing actions for them to take, you have to think about what they want, what their personality is, what kind of state they are in, and what kind of action those factors are going to inspire certain action. So the actions should be organized pretty easily between wants, actions, and reactions.
So just remember when you're writing anything, your character has a want, their personality is going to influence their action, they will take action, and then others will react to it. If for instance your character is hungry, they may be a lazy character (or just tired) and order take-out, if your character who is lazy or tired whips up a huge meal, that's an action that seems contradictory to what kind of character or state they are in, so just remember (even though that was a vastly simplistic example) that there is a constant connection between your characters personality, their state, and the actions they are willing and capable of taking.
KEEP THE STORY MOVING
This is connected to the concept of "SHOW, DON'T TELL", but you have to remember this, make sure the actions are moving the story forward. If your character is just doing normal things the whole story without purpose, it'll be boring, you have actual objectives to accomplish in the story, but your character's actions must be guided towards your means. So remember to try to condense meaning into actions as often as possible, you must strive to balance the interactions of the characters in a semi-realistic manner, with fitting the actions to your means and purposes.
So remember, each scene of action should have a purpose of moving your story along, telling you something about the characters, or changing the direction of the plot. A character washing dishes tells us nothing, a character looking out the window wistfully as they slowly scrub dishes in a distracted manner tells us a lot more, so don't let a mundance action go by without movie the story forward and telling us something.
Good luck, if you have any questions, or want to request topics, check out the writeHOW thread in Mogulville.
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