 Action/Adventure: March 29, 2017 Issue [#8162] |
  Action/Adventure
This week: Action versus Adventure Edited by: NaNoNette  
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Hello writers and readers of action and adventure, I am NaNoNette , your guest editor for this issue.
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Action versus Adventure
Is all that action hijacking your adventure?
What to do when your action gets out of hand.
You have heard and read it many times over: write in an active voice. And that is how you write, but sometimes it ends up creating a lot of senseless action while there is precious little adventure.
Your adventure has to have some story or even plot to keep it all together. Lengthy descriptions of epic battles have worked for some authors of old. Pages upon pages of detailed battle descriptions. Or several chapters of one hero overcoming constant new hurdles.
Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom series, widely known as the John Carter of Mars Chronicles is an example where action has all but overtaken the story. While the first book "A Princess of Mars" has loads of action, there are so many descriptions of the people of Mars and the relationships John Carter forges that the book is highly entertaining in the adventurous aspect and also in the story telling aspect. In the third book "The Warlord of Mars" John Carter spends 90% of his time fighting something, clawing his way out of prison cells, or finding his way into forbidden places. This book is completely choked out with action. Each time you hope that the story will now be driven forward, Edgar Rice Burroughs simply adds another foe to overcome. Reading the book becomes tedious because there is literally nothing happening. All the while John Carter is hacking and slashing his way across Mars, but that's it. The final payoff for reading through all this fighting is one or two pages of denouement in the end. (There are more books in the series. I gave up after the third because all that action writing was too boring for me.)
As you write your action adventure, don't forget the adventure. Action is good and needed, but without an adventure, without people along the way, without even the faintest hint of a plot, it's just not going to keep modern audiences interested long enough. I like a good action scene as much as the next person, but is has to do more than glorify the hero. The action scene has to have a payoff for the story.
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For my last Action/Adventure Newsletter "Plot Versus Story" , I got the following replies:
brom21  wrote: Thank you for the enlightening newsletter. I'm working on a story where I am trying to balance out my premise. My protagonist goes through many side adventures that I just connect together. I feel that some of my occurrences need explaining but I'll see when I finish it and edit it. I truly thank you or this piece of knowledge. I will use it.
I am glad I was able to help. I hope today's newsletter, which builds on the same topic is useful to you also.
Monty  wrote: I am an then and plot too, what ever I am thinking or perhaps not thinking.
I thank you for the highlight of my Action poem.
Some of both seems best to me too. One of them alone quickly gets boring or ends up being way too tedious to read. |
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