How To Write Gripping Action Scenes - Fast Motion And Slow Motion

Action scenes mainly live from a high narrative speed. The reader has to have the feeling of running and fighting while reading. He should follow the action breathlessly and with an increased pulse.

The pace of a scene can be varied by changing the ratio of narrated time to narration time.

The narrated time is the time that passes in a scene. If a fight lasts five minutes, the narrated time is also five minutes.

The narration time is the time the author needs to depict an event.

Narrated time and narration time are the two concepts we work with when we use time-lapse or slow-motion techniques in our story.

Time-lapse technique

We can sum up a five-minute fight in a few words by writing: The next five minutes, Jack fought for his life.

Reading this sentence will only take a few seconds.

So the narrated time here is five minutes, while the narration time shrinks to a few seconds.

However, the use of the time-lapse technique in an action scene does not consist of accelerating individual action sequences. Unlike in films, time-lapse in a book does not create a time-lapse image in the reader's head.

We don't see the fight scene happening at multiple speed in front of our mind's eye, but not at all.

What is that good for? Let's imagine, for example, that our scene is to retell a battle.

A battle can last hours. For the reader, however, the only thing that matters is how the battle begins, what turning points it has and how it ends. We don't have to recount every shot and every maneuver individually.

So to narrate a battle that lasts several hours in an exciting and fast-paced way, we have to resort to time-lapse technology. The time-lapse is then always interrupted where something decisive happens.

Here is a shortened example:

David and his men stood behind the barricade and heard the droning footsteps of the approaching enemies.

The scout on the observation platform still hesitated to give the decisive signal. If they launched too early, their projectiles would miss the attackers. If they waited too long, the barricade could fall, and they would be lost.

The others had guns. David's troops, on the other hand, had to fight with the most primitive means.

"Light them up," he told his men. The signal was due any second now. When it came, they had to react immediately. He took a Molotov cocktail from the box at his feet and set fire to the petrol soaked rag.

All sixty men did the same to him. The roar of the combat boots on the asphalt beyond the barricade was now deafening. They all stared up at their scout with eyes wide open.

When David thought the man would be shot before he could give the signal, he turned to the men behind the barricade and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

That was the signal that had been agreed upon. David hurled his incendiary composition with all his strength in a high arc over the barricade, which was a good ten meters high. In the same second, the others hurled their deadly projectiles.

The screams that followed seconds later were nerve-racking. But David and his men were not to be impressed by this. This fight had just begun.

"To the barricades," he shouted and grabbed the box of Molotov cocktails. Then he climbed the barricade.

David and his men reached the top almost simultaneously and immediately began to hurl more firebombs at the attackers. They had to manage to beat back the enemy with their limited supplies.

These Molotov cocktails were all they had.

Ten minutes later, David had to give up all hope. His last firebomb was used up, and next to him, the comrades fell one after another in a hail of bullets.

Already the first men of the enemy troops climbed the barricade. Whoever was alive now would lose his freedom forever in a few moments.

David knew that he had no choice. "We surrender," he shouted, waving a white handkerchief over his head.

In this example, we skipped almost the entire course of the fight in fast motion. From the beginning of the desperate resistance to the defeat, only a few seconds of narration pass.

In other cases, it might be useful to tell the whole course of a fight, but here we assume that it helps the progress of the story more if we reveal the result to the reader as soon as possible.

We have now seen a practical example of how the time-lapse technique can tighten an action scene. In this case, we only skipped a few minutes.

But basically, we can skip centuries or millennia in one sentence with the same technique. It always depends on the requirements of the story and the plot whether and how we use this technique.

Slow-motion technique

The slow-motion technique pursues an entirely different goal than the time-lapse technique when narrating. The slow-motion serves as a pure effect - but as a mighty one, if used correctly.

The slow-motion effect is used particularly well in X-Men Days of future past. Here a fight scene is shown from the massively slowed-down view of The Flash.

For all who don't know this scene: Here you can watch it.

What works in the movie, we can also use in written scenes with a few tricks.

Here is an example from an old novel of mine:

Without waiting for an answer, David pounced on him. He switched his perception of time to slow motion, as he had learned from Rafael in his teaching at the time.

Time passed as quickly as ever, but David's consciousness was now in a mode that allowed him to perceive each second stretched tenfold. So no punch or kick would surprise him.

During his attack, David rotated around his own axis like a dervish, grabbing a beer mug from the next table with each hand as he whirled past.

Armed like this, he reached Spherewalker with the next turn. David tore the beer mugs up like a hammer thrower his sports equipment, and in the next split second, both of them would smash Spherewalker's face in lightning-fast succession before he could even blink an eyelid.

But Spherewalker had disappeared.

David stopped his rotation and looked around, confused. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he could detect a quick movement to his left, but before he could turn his head in that direction, a huge blow exploded at his head. David flew with a scream against the wall next to the door.

Immediately more blows and kicks flew at him, and he saw none of them coming, let alone that he could have avoided them.

A glass that fell from one of the tables and sailed leisurely to the floor told him that there was nothing wrong with his mode of consciousness.

In this scene, I used the slow-motion technique, but I modified it. The moment David changes his perception of time, it seems at first that it doesn't work. His opponent reacts so quickly to David's actions that he has to believe that the time distortion doesn't work.

Only when I show the reader the slowly falling beer glass do we realize that we are actually in slow motion. Spherewalker seems to be exempted from this by a secret power.

The effect I achieve here is not to make something very fast running in detail understandable, but to make the enormous power of the opponent clear.

So we see that slow motion is a stylistic device with numerous applications.

Conclusion

Action scenes can be enhanced in many ways by using fast motion and slow motion.

In the hands of an experienced author, the tools can create powerful effects and manipulate the narrative tempo as required.

Time-lapse and slow-motion belong to the repertoire of every author, just like the zoom effect and scene change from my previous articles.