Keep it Tense: Action Scenes

Have you ever been frustrated writing a tense action sequence? What should be tense and immediate wanders slowly to an ending like an explosion in slow-motion. The truth is it’s not difficult to make your action scenes stand out, if you keep a few things in mind.

Length

Long action scenes are boring. Action scenes are often packed with information, move and counter-moves that will leave the reader breathless. The longer you drag out the sequence, the more likely your reader is going to lose that sense of immediacy and just move on.

Description

This is not the time for flowery prose. Wax philosophical about the moon some other time, right now all your character knows is he’s in trouble and he needs to act now.

MRUs

For me, the discovery of the concept of the MRU improved my action scenes significantly. The idea of the MRU is that you break up the action of your story into two-beat units of motivation followed by reaction. This is a deep point of view trick that is even more important for action scenes. The basics are simple: Something happens, and the character responds.

Motivation

Keep the danger immediate and real. Don’t bother with the motivations of the scene’s antagonists, just describe their actions so that the reader knows the threat presented to the protagonist.

Reaction

In fight scenes, the reaction will be active. Movements and immediate decisions make for realistic responses. Thoughts should be short, feelings should be displayed through their action, and dialogue needs to be even more crisp than normal.

Tie all of these together and you’ve got a fight scene that should be well liked by your reader. Just don’t go overboard, too much of a good thing can spoil.

Burnout

Everyone experiences burnout eventually. As a blogger, I experience burnout whenever I constrain myself to a tight little circle of subjects. For example, my gaming blog only kept up as long as it did because I wasn't focused on just games, but on game design, running and playing games, and general game theory. That's a lot of ground to cover even if it all falls under 'games.'

In writing, I've always experienced burnout eventually, since blogging about writing is a very solitary thing. Every person who writes about writing puts out information only from their point of view, a highly draining exercise for an introvert (I'm generally introverted, don't let my blog or twitter presence fool you!).

So how do you overcome that problem?

First, don't get tied down to a single concept of what you're talking about! Seriously, if you start with writing, get more specific. Are you talking about copywriting? Blogging? Grammar? Make sure it has enough depth to talk about for a long while!

Then, spread out. Pick some related topics, things that tie into the core of your content, but are interesting and give you room to explore. A number of people I know who blog about writing also blog about movies (As an audience member). This is a great relationship of topics since a stronger understanding of the one helps the other!

The last tip only works if you're blogging for branding purposes (Meaning your blog is about you, not about a topic), don't worry if you change up to other things that interest you once in a while!

Getting it out

I have a confession.

I'm a perfectionist.

No, seriously, I'm that horrid type of perfectionist that if I can't get it RIGHT I won't do it at all! It's horrible.

Over the years, this has affected how I write. I now outline. Very detailed, scene by scene breakdowns of everything that should happen to make the story work. I also play with the characters in my head for a long while before starting that outline.

Then I start writing, often editing as I go. This always produces the same issue: I produce a damn fine scene. . . and then I burn out. It's hard to be 'done' all the time.

On my current WIP, I changed my pattern. I wrote down the cool ideas and made a scene, and I'll get back later to firm it up, add where it has holes, and will make it like the first scene (Oh, yeah, I still 'perfected' the first scene. Old habits and all that!) and present it to betas then.

So I'm here with a plea: Get it on paper. You have all the time in the world to fix what's already written, but ideas are often fleeting.

The Profit Motive Is Good For You

I’m kind of a late comer to the party of the ‘e-book pricing debate’ but it’s really getting out of hand. One side literally is racing for the bottom. Make it as cheap as possible; more people buy it that way. The other thinks that the price each individual buys a book for somehow denotes its worth. Both groups are dead wrong!

The race for the bottom group thinks pure numbers are the key to worth. They think every person who buys into their book boosts them up some imaginary totem pole of writing. Good for them. Unfortunately, numbers don’t denote value in the world of art, and generally the wider the appeal, the lower the literary merit.

The ‘price for its value’ crowd isn’t likely to live off their writing either, though. If you think your book is worth 20 dollars, ask for that, and the numbers fall where they may. But don’t tell me that you priced it based on its value. You, as the author, don’t get to make that claim.

So, if it’s not the ‘ask for its worth’ and not ‘how low can you go?’ where is the real price we, as artists and craftsmen, should be asking for?

The obvious answer is ‘that depends.’ I don’t like that answer, but it’s the truth. But it doesn’t depend as much as you think!

There’s a concept called elasticity of demand. It’s a basic measure of how many fewer customers you’ll reach by increasing the price a certain percentage. It’s a useful tool for clipping in to an equation to find your ‘one true price.’

The problem? That value is always an estimate. You can’t guarantee the elasticity of demand on any product, but you can do your research and ball park it. So in the e-book market, which factors should you be considering before settling on your price?

Competition

Look at your genre. What are other authors putting out, and at what prices? Don’t look at the bottom: look at the range, look at how well they’re selling (Especially if you have competitors like J.A. Konrath who so kindly shares his sales numbers), look at the standard deviation of the group.

These numbers are all important. They tell you what the market is allowing people to price at.

Uniqueness

All right, serious discussion here: Anything they can get from you, they can get from another author. Except for you. So how much of a brand are you? Do you know you have 10,000 people willing to buy what you wrote? 100,000? Only 1000? These are all things to consider when you start thinking price.

Not sure what I mean by becoming a brand? Check out Kristen Lamb’s blog on social media for writers.

Royalties

Money, folks, it makes the world go round. And royalty rates can run a very interesting scale. Especially if you’re an indie publishing using Amazon’s kindle Direct Publishing. The basic idea here is you need to compare your potential reader base with how much profit you can make from them.

That’s right, folks, profit motive. It’s the greatest thing we have in this new digital age. Our books are as valuable to us as we can make monetarily in putting them into the world. So be smart, do your research, and run a few calculations. You’d be surprised some times.

Just because I know someone out there is going to ask me to put my price out there, based on some baseline assumptions (Straight line loss of readers as price increases, floors at approximately 10% of readership somewhere around the 10+ dollar range.) the optimal price in a vacuum is approximately $3.99. Of course, that’s my baseline, there’s room for movement both ways in the scale.

Live and Share

Readers just want a powerful emotional experience.

Give it to them.

You’re human, too. Push the buttons you know work so well. If you have siblings, you know precisely which buttons to push; you’ve been doing it for years.

You’ve got dreams. Hell, if you write, your dreams are probably grander than most people. Invite them on a journey they’ll only take in their dreams. Let your characters do the thing your reader wants them to do.

You understand set-backs. Again, you’re a writer; you know what it’s like to get frustrated in your goals. Share it.

My point is: Go out and live life, then show that life to your readers. They’ll thank you.

When We Should Settle

As any artist, of any discipline, will tell you that in order to really excel, you have to take the craft seriously. Pride in their work is what makes the greats great. And yet, there’s a group who still believe that because perfection can’t be reached, we should just accept it.

Why?

Why do we allow ourselves to settle for imperfection?

Learning writing is a long road. I set out long before I understood what it meant to become a professional. It’s good I did! If we understood the road before us before we had the passion for it, most of us would have given up.

After we have that passion, we need to take it seriously. We need to learn what it is that makes us the best we can be. That takes study and vision. We need to know we want to be the best we can be. We have to take the steps to get us there.

For writers, the editing and rewriting process is part and parcel of the task. Nothing goes without some form of tweaking. If you can rewrite it one hundred times and keep improving it, do it.

With that understood we have to remember: we’re business people, too. Eventually, we have to push the product. We have to give up and let it stand. At that point, and only then, we can settle for imperfection. We have to settle or we’ll drive ourselves crazy with the mistakes!

After that, though, we need to move on. We need to be better the next time.

We’re consumers, too, though. As consumers we shouldn’t settle either. We need to hold those we give our patronage to as high a standard as possible. Tell them where they can improve. We can encourage our craftsman to better heights merely by demanding they hold themselves to a higher standard. The adage is true. Nothing is ever perfect. That shouldn’t stop us from giving it our best.

You Need Twitter

Or Facebook, or Digg, or Reddit, or LinkedIn, or. . .

As writers, we need social media.

You don’t believe me.

I can hear you out there, telling me I’m wrong.

Look, I know it’s hip to hate the revolution. Really, I understand. I was that guy once. Wouldn’t sign up to Facebook, you can’t make me! I got better. Now, I still don’t like Facebook, specifically, but I’m on Twitter.

You think “I’m a writer, hermit life is the way,” right? Wrong. Increasingly, you need to be a leader of a group of devoted followers. You need people who want to hear what you have to say. Where do you make these connections?

Not as a hermit, that’s for damn sure.

There is good news. You can have the best of both worlds! Get to know people in your underwear, with a cup of your favorite caffeinated beverage next to you. Social media offers a way to live your own life, and connect with real people.

Now, I’m not going to say learning social media is easy. In fact, it’s chaos! Let me show you a picture.

Lies and Truth

This is a great talk on the idea of wrongness. The important part for us, as writers, starts at 11:30.

“Miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is, but that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can remember the past, we can think about the future. And we can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place.”

This is a remarkable idea.

Since we can get things wrong, we can produce remarkable other worlds, and times, and people. It’s what, for all intents and purposes, allows us to be writers. But she doesn’t stop there!

“As readers, we eat this stuff up. We love things like plot twists, and red herrings, and surprise endings. When it comes to our stories, we love being wrong. But you know, our stories are like this, because our lives are like this. I thought this one thing was going to happen, but something else happens instead.”

This is an important point in my mind. We can imagine the most impossible as possible, write it all down, and we can sell it, but only if the impossible is tempered by those same beats that we know as life. People know that we do things because of drive, even if they can’t express it. People know that things rarely happen like we plan. People know that even if your characters can warp reality on a whim, they’re still human.

And that’s the key to a great story, isn’t it? Using a couple lies to tell the truth.

Passion of the Writer

So, I was struggling to find a topic after economic fiction. No, really. I ran out of ideas. I mean, I really only had one.

So I thought about it.

I watched some TED videos.

I researched a major corporation.

I watched some more TED videos.

I wrote a six page research paper.

Through it I kept reading my blogs.

I found one idea. I have a habit of talking about fear and failure. Basically every blog I start has a discussion on failure eventually, so why not talk about a topic that I continue to learn more about. It’s an interesting topic.

Then I found a blog post. Michael Hyatt discussed finding your passion, that which drives us.

So I thought about it.

A number of things come to mind: writing, books, religion, games, politics, people.

Then I realized, it’s more abstract than that. What drives me is ideas. I love ideas. I like thinking about them, I like talking about them, I love the camaraderie that develops around them.

I also realized that what I consider a good idea is a bit different than most.

Why, yes, I am the artist. Why do you think I write?

That terrible piece of spec drawing? That’s a fan powered Viking longboat. Completely ridiculous, right? Also impossible. But to my friends and me, it was a project. Something to bond over.

That’s all a good idea really is, though, isn’t it? Something that brings humanity into a closer knit community. An idea builds people up and makes them try something they have never tried before.

Here’s the great part about crazy, unrealistic, and visionary ideas: they can always work in print. We’re writers. That tiny voice in us all that drives us into an art where we are reviled and disrespected at every turn tells us we have great ideas, and they need to be shared. People all around us like ideas. They crave imagination and stories. They want to see this world in different ways. We’re taking our own unique and wonderful vision, and presenting it to them.

What’s your passion? What idea can you give to your readers that is so uniquely you that it drives everything you do? Let me know!

Economic Fiction: Opportunity and Outward Effects

This week, we keep the focus on the character and define a bit more clearly what a choice needs to mean. Every time a character makes a choice, they give up the alternate. They can’t go left and right.

In economics, they call this opportunity cost. You lose your alternate options by picking one. This is important to fiction because your characters should be feeling the effects of the road less traveled. You should have them acutely aware of the option they gave up.

Economic Fiction: Incentives and Disincentives

So, we understand that characters make choices with how to use limited resources. We also understand that those characters need drive, and they need values.

Once they have these things, how do they decide between two courses of action?

Obviously, the first factor is deciding if their choice helps them with their goal or not. But what about choosing between two likely paths?

Economic Fiction: Purpose and Principles

Last week I introduced you to economics as a subject. I also promised you I'd explain how to use economics to improve your fiction.

We begin with behavior. Have you ever done anything completely randomly? If you said yes, I'd question you.

'Well, I went to the movie just because I felt like it!'

Of course. You felt like it. It wasn't random, even if it wasn't preplanned.

Economic Fiction: What is Economics?

So, I introduced myself, but I'll get a little bit more specific about my interests. In addition to writing and blogging, which I love, I'm interested in business. As my partners in crime here will attest, I'm very business focused and treat everything like a combination of a game and a business. It's all serious, and it's all fun.

One subject I took for my business degree is economics, and I can't even begin to describe how useful that class is. Seriously, if you've never taken economics courses, you should try them! But you don't have to take my word on it, I'll give you a quick introduction to using economic principles in fiction.

Writing Contest 'Prizes'

So, I'm a twitter fan, just for the record. You can follow me if you'd like. This week, in the #amwriting and #writing hashtags, there is a sponsored tweet from inkpop for a writing contest.

Neat prompt: rewrite a scene or act from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Great prompt, my favorite of Shakespeare's comedies. So, of course, I'm a bit interested, just for the emotion.

Then I began checking out the contest. The prize? Why, you get your work in a real book! From a real publisher! Wowee! (Is the sarcasm too much?)

It's HarperCollins vetting these contest winners and the book is the 'Teen Classics Edition' of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I nearly choked. Really.

Look, folks, any writer who's put in the effort knows what it takes to get published. This contest is no easier than the real deal. And the real deal offers much better prestige and personal fulfillment. At least then the work will be associated with you and not one of the greatest English writers of all time.

I love the prompt, though, so here's my challenge: everyone take a shot at the prompt and link to it in the comments below. Let's see what a bunch of writers rewriting Shakespeare for our own amusement can do!

Introducing Patrick Thunstrom

I'm a student.

Formally, I'm studying Management Information Systems, and having fun learning programming and business management. In the future I'm hoping to go for an economics degree as I find economics as a subject fascinating.

I'm studying game design in my spare time and applying it through my own independent projects in the roleplaying market. My gaming blog is available at Thunderstorm Game Design.

Less formally, I'm learning the craft of writing damn good fiction. In that effort, I've bought many books and follow many blogs in an effort to improve my skills as a storyteller and writer.

Finally, I'm a father of two great kids.

LOLWHAT blog is actually something I suggested, and am glad to be working with this great group of folks on a focused blog. My subjects will be on the structure of writing and how to use theoretical tools to improve your stories.