Action!

Dialogue has always been the easiest thing for me to write, and even though I was not writing descriptions previously, I had done enough in the past that I was okay with them. I may be using too many adverbs, but I’ll have to see how I feel about that on the rewrite.

One thing that has always been a little different for me, though, is writing action scenes. It’s not so much that I struggle with them— I have rough ideas for how they need to go and they are good ideas (I think)—but I need to write them a little differently. Often in the past that would maybe mean that I would need to stand up at one point and go through some motions. No, it was never acting the whole scene out (so far), but just getting a feel for the follow-through of a punch or a dodge. An action scene is something more physical, so I need a more physical sense.

Part of it for me is that I want things to be logical. You can just edit a bunch of cool moves together, and especially in a comic book you could get away with that, because you just have the panels and you don’t need to show the connection, but it feels like cheating to me. Even in movies I favor a gritty realism, where I don’t usually like wire work or jitter cam or bullet vision or all of those things to make it look super cool.  Make the action cool and then let me get a good look at it.

Anyway, I was having a harder time with some of these scenes at the beginning, until finally it ended up becoming this multi-stage process. First I drew a diagram of the layout of the scene, and then a list of the characters in it, and where they were all starting, and how they needed to end up, and then I wrote in my journal about how things needed to go, and I how I thought they would work, and then I wrote the scene.

I thought I might need to do this every time, but sometimes I am only using parts of it. For example, yesterday there was a very complicated scene, where 14 characters were attacked by 18 in a good-sized building. I still did the diagram, and wrote notes on where everyone was starting and how they needed to finish, but I did not have a journal session after that, because I felt ready to go. I use the journal for other things though, and maybe those first times part of it was just getting back into the swing of things.

One thing, and this is not necessarily true of me, but it goes back to my desire for logic to follow, is that the scene needs to have a point. Maybe you are just demonstrating how the rules or the relationships work, or maybe you are advancing the plot, but the scene has a purpose, and that purpose needs to be met, and the scene needs to be viable. After that, it is nice if the scene is also kind of cool.

A good example is the scene where Grace is taken. There are certain things that were needed with the scene. You don’t want any of the four main characters dead, but they all need to be incapacitated, or they would never let Grace go. Also, for the purposes of something that was going to happen later, there needed to be one dead Draculoid.

Some things came from the videos. In “Na Na Na” Ray gets hit in the head with a bottle. That’s the kind of thing that could lead to a concussion, and unconsciousness, so that incapacitates him. Also, in “Sing” he is wearing an eye patch, so an after effect of the injury ends up being the loss of vision in one eye (detached retina—they’re usually not injury-related but it’s not unheard of).

At the end of ”Na Na Na”, everyone else seems to be unconscious, but Gerard’s eyes are opened, and his breathing is a little labored. I could not get the phrase “sucking chest wound” out of my head, so I looked it up, and it sounded right. After all, sometimes it’s not enough just to have a hole in you, it needs to be a hole that threatens to collapse your lungs.

Mikey, for reasons that I cannot explain, totally had a dislocated shoulder. He just did! I had no say in the matter.

That left Frank, and I initially was not sure how he got injured, and so it changed a few times, because at the same time you are establishing a flow of action where all of those injuries make sense, and are happening in the right order and proximity that no one becomes conscious again before the right moment.

Also, that eventually required an explosion, but it had to be done in a way that the cars and the people did not get blown up, and then the other gas explosion was too repetitive so that needed to be changed, and there’s just a lot to it. Still, when I was able to do the scene with about triple the combatants, and it went easier, I had to feel like I was getting the hang of this.

I hope I’m right, because I really need to punch up that motorcycle chase.