Writing
Every Action Needs a Reaction
How to keep a story from falling flat
The other night I watched a remake of an action move from the late eighties.
I remembered the original being a fast-paced and fun ride so I was looking forward to a fresh take.
But twenty minutes in, I wasn’t invested in any of the characters and the story was… boring.
Being a developmental editor, I couldn’t let an opporutnity go to waste. I had to know what made this movie so bad when the premise was so good.
And when the movie finished, I rewatched the original to compare them fairly and not based on memory. What cropped up are some great lessons for storytellers across the board.
Pacing
The remake started with story setup, and once the action started at twenty minutes in, the explosions and shooting never stopped. But for the viewer, all that “action” was just stuff happening. *yawn*
Why was that?
Compared side-by-side, the original used very different pacing.
While the remake took more than twenty minutes for all the story pieces to come together and the action to begin, the original smacked the reader with forward movement within the first five minutes. (And that included credits!)
The viewer learned the context for that action along with the main characters.
This is not that different from a writer’s temptation to give their reader all the context (backstory) up front in a novel.
While we may think the reader needs to understand all the complex reasons why this opening situation is so challenging for the protagonist, it’s asking the reader to remember too many facts before they are invested.
Hit the reader with some forward momentum and let them discover the story along with the protagonist. They can learn the complexity as they go.
Emotional resonance
As the viewer watches these two movies, they get totally different experiences: one a “high-octane” nonstop ride, and the other more of a roller coaster.
You’d think a lull in action would break the tension, but, in fact, it only served to raise it.
In the original, when one of the main characters killed a person for the first time, as soon as the action let up and the characters could digest what just happened, that character struggled with the kill. They didn’t want to become hardened, but it became obvious to the viewer this character would lose that innocence and become somebody different. Somebody that character didn’t want to be.
That emotional tension only makes the viewer lean closer to see what happens the next time that character faces the choice of having to kill again.
In the remake, the same character has a brief moment of shock — we’re talking mere seconds of staring wide-eyed — before being thrust into the next action sequence. We viewers never get that moment to see how it affects that character.
Without that emotional resonance, the remake had no tension.
Which only goes to show constant action does not equal reader/viewer excitement. Readers and viewers want to know how the character interprets each action scene, and what they plan to do next time. We love to watch when a plan fails and a character must be resourceful and find another way through a challenge.
Instead of being melodramatic, a pause after emotion to show how characters react is a necessary hook to keep the reader reading, and looking forward to the next action scene.
In Dwight V. Swain’s incredible author resource “Techniques of the Selling Writer”, he calls these scene and sequel: the scene is where the action seems to happen in real time, and the sequel is the transition to the next scene.
Within that transition, the reader (or viewer) needs to understand what just happened, how the character feels about it, and how it might change the character’s behavior going forward.
A sequel, or a moment of reaction, lets us understand the character’s motivation before they enter the next challenge. Knowing that motivation makes us root for the character.
This is how we connect to characters and become immersed in stories.
No proper transition, and the reader loses that connection to the character and might do the worst thing for an author — put the book down.
Striking a balance
While pacing requires some of the action to start right away, like anything, it’s a matter of balance.
Starting off a novel at a breakneck speed with a car chase can be just as boring as dumping a bunch of facts on reader. Such an intro isn’t as gripping as one would think, because the reader has no idea who is doing the chasing, who is being chased, or why.
From watching these two takes on the same story, it’s clear the right balance is a rollercoaster approach: whisk the reader into a situation, give them just enough context to understand, and then proceed to give them a reaction moment following every action.
Backstory can come later as the reader needs more and more context, but only as it directly relates to the emotions at play in the plot.
That emotional reaction to action is what takes fiction from simple storytelling to a fully immersive experience.
Looking at reviews for the remake, I’m not the only one who found the new take boring compared to the old.
Strangely, that original action movie was less than 50% action, and yet it was a far more intense experience.
So what’s the takeaway?
If you’re going to have some gasoline explosions, you’d better back it up with who is lighting the fuse, who they are blowing up, and why we should care. Otherwise, I’m going to stick to the original.
