The Veronica Mars post. (Spoilers)

Storywonk Sunday talked a lot about the Veronica Mars movie on this week’s episode, and when I checked my archives for the last week of March, I was surprised to find out that I actually hadn’t talked much about the movie, just gave it a brief shout-out in a ‘What’s up Wednesday’ post. So here is where I ramble at length about the film. As stated in the title, beware the spoilers.

Six Sentence Sunday – climax of ‘Un-brotherly love’

Hi everybody! This time, I just had to share a bit from a Roswell fanfiction story that I’ve been working on, just because I was getting to the big moment on Friday evening and having so much fun writing it!

He charged blindly on, but could feel the alien ooze covering him from head to toe, sealing him in – he couldn’t breathe through it, couldn’t open his eyes without the Gandarium blinding him, and that meant…

“Oooh, gross.” As Kyle collapsed, somebody else’s hands gently rubbed the worst of the ooze off his face, as his own badly tainted fingers wouldn’t have been able to do. That wasn’t enough, but a little bit at a time water was applied to wash away the rest of the residue over his eyes, and Kyle looked up gratefully at Liz Parker, his savior.

“Tess?” he croaked, and got something slimy inside his mouth, and gagged instinctively. He tried to spit, but couldn’t as long as his head was pointing up, so he turned over, and immediately felt more goo oozing onto his forehead, and his flesh crawled anew.

Action scenes.

A is for Action, as in writing action scenes. Fights, stunts, anything that has your characters moving, struggling, in fear for their lives. Writing for some genres can do without the action scenes, but they can add a lot to fantasy, science fiction, and thriller genres, and of course, for adventure writing it’s just unavoidable. Action and adventure just naturally go together, don’t they?

I’ve had a bit of a knack for writing action scenes for a long time now, and found it a bit surprising when I first heard other writers saying that they had a hard time with them. They say that when you can do something well naturally, it’s a bit hard to dissect it and figure out just HOW to do it in a way that you can teach to someone else, but I think that I’ve come up with some useful tips for writing action scenes. By the way, a lot of these are phrased for fight sequences, because that’s the way a lot of them seem to go in my stories, but you can probably apply the same ideas to death-defying rescues or horrible accidents or what have you, with a little tweaking.

1. Start from motivation. Figure out what each character wants in the scene. Does the hero just want to stay alive, is he dead-set on getting the amulet back, or does he want more than anything, to beat the shit out of the bad guy? Is the bad guy out to kill your hero, or is he play-acting to further some deep scheme of his own, or creating a diversion so that his henchmen can trash the hero’s house? Figuring out what’s motivating the actors in the scene, and how they tend to react in tense situations, will inform all of the action.
2. Sort out the space, where the characters are, where they go. If you have trouble visualizing this mentally, then sketching it out in a graphics file or on paper can help.