Action scenes, most often, do not make
the best start to a book.
There, I said it.
Remember those seven books I pulled off
of my shelf and read the first 500 words of? Not one of them started
in the middle of a bar fight or an infiltration gone awry or a
battle.
One of the books I pulled is Larry
Correia's Monster Hunter International. I also peeked into
Monster Hunter Alpha. If you've ever read Mr. Correia's
novels, then you know they're packed with quirky humor, gratuitous
violence and just enough plot to make things very, very interesting.
The end of Alpha gave a few of my friends action fatigue—you
know, like the Transformers movies, where you just wanted them to
stop knocking down buildings and get back to why you should care.
Not even the Monster books
started with action. And if any of them should have, it would be
them.
This approach works great for a movie.
The director doesn't have to slow down to let the character have
inner dialogue or to describe the setting. A camera pans through the
jungle, settling on a single woman (blonde, beautiful and armed to
the teeth) crouched down behind a gigantic tree. Her eyes are riveted
on a spot we can't see, so the camera turns and follows her gaze. An
ancient temple is barely visible through the pouring rain, but we can
clearly see the army uniforms. The woman's eyes then swivel to her
right, where we see members of her faithful team—bright eyed and
ready to go—waiting for her orders. She jerks her head. The tall
guy raises his eyebrows and says through the radio, “You know we're
not all walking away from this.”. She gives him a flat stare, to
which he shrugs his shoulders and waves his hand for everyone to go
forward.
A film has the distinct advantage of
being able to set up a mood, a setting and characters through what we
see and hear. No one has to describe the oppressive heat or how the
pouring rain is going to hamper the upcoming fight, because we can
see it. Ten seconds of panning replaces a paragraph or two of
description. Then one line of dialogue as well as the character's
outer reactions set the stage for the stakes. We're going in no
matter what. The character is determined, her followers are loyal.
That tells us loads.
But what about the same scene described
in a book? I've read a few beginnings that are barely more
descriptive than what I wrote above. An outline of what is happening
rather than a scene being unfolded to a reader piece by piece.
Don't get me wrong, readers will fill
in blanks, there is no need to put the type of trees or the exact
brand of jacket someone is wearing (unless it's important) but after
too much ambiguity they'll get lost and stop reading. We've all got
other things to kill our time and emotional energy on.
As an author it's tempting to pull the
reader in with action. Resist. In a novel, action is no replacement
for getting the reader invested into the characters or the idea of
the story. We write novels, readers read novels, no one watches them
until they're made into movies.
And 99% of the time, the book is better
than the movie.
Pull a book or two off the shelf (or
fire up your Kindle) and read the first two pages. How does it start?
Why did you keep reading? I'm betting that very few will start in the
middle of danger or action. The story might go there in a few pages,
but first an author must hook the reader into caring enough to read
on.
What do you think? Action or not?
Next time: Pacing-Easy Tiger
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