Is Your Story A Bit Lazy? 5 Ways to Improve the Action in your Story

Improve the action and get your characters moving! 

by Meghan Ward

Page-turners aren’t the only books that employ action. In every story the characters’ actions drive the narrative forward. Without action, a book would be a series of scenes full of dialogue and description, a literary Dinner with Andre that would put the reader straight to sleep. Writing Action, a book I co-wrote with my colleagues at the Writers Grotto, outlines several ways to infuse your short story or novel with action:

1) Evocative Verbs Improve the Action

The easiest way to improve the action in your story is through verb selection. Forget is and does and seems and feels. How about rattles and shakes and leaps and destroys? Forget was and did and appears and smells. How about hobbles and shimmers and carouses and spins?

You can even make verbs up, like “He drawered the manuscript,” “Her hair waterfalled across her face,” and “I watched the sand delta by the shore.”

We all know that active verbs are better than passive verbs, so try replacing “The book was passed down the row” with something like “The book jumped down the row from hand to hand.” Replace “The package was delivered to her house” with “The delivery man jettisoned her package from the truck before careening back down the street.”

Start by making a list of your favorite verbs. Think jitter, spew, fester, swagger, glimmer, squawk…if you run out of ideas try your thesaurus.

2) Find a Balance Between Scene and Summary

Every good novel needs the right balance between scene and summary. When you want to show the passage of time, or share a lot of information in a few paragraphs, you use SUMMARY. When you want to slow the action down in order to zoom in on the characters’ actions, you use SCENE. Scene is usually written in real-time with dialogue and descriptions of the setting and the characters.

While characters’ thoughts may be revealed during both SCENE and SUMMARY, an intense scene followed by less-intense SUMMARY gives the reader a chance to slow down and reflect on what just happened. Without SUMMARY, a book can feel like a series of punches, leaving the reader feeling exhausted and emotionally depleted.

Consider how Tara Westover, in her bestselling memoir Educated, manages to weave so many dynamic verbs into the first paragraph of her book, which describes, in SUMMARY, the landscape where she grew up (verb emphasis is mine):

“I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the bar. The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt. The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling. Down below, the valley is peaceful, undisturbed. Meanwhile our farm dances: the heavy conifer trees sway slowly, while the sagebrush and thistles quiver, bowing before every puff and pocket of air. Behind me a gentle hill slopes upward and stitches itself to the mountain base. If I look up, I can see the dark form of the Indian Princess.”

3) Engage the Senses

Don’t confuse static “sensing verbs” (I feel sad, It smells good, You sound angry, She looks tired) with their dynamic counterparts (I feel the scalding water on my feet, I smell the loamy earth, The siren sounded throughout the town). And don’t confuse the use of sensing verbs with the use of sensory details in your writing. You should always aim to engage the senses in your writing.

Note how Sonali Deraniyagala uses dynamic verbs like hissed and rustled to engage the sense of sound in this passage from her memoir Wave:

“I moved on to make sinister noises when the phone was answered. I hissed, I rustled, I made ghostly sounds. The Dutch man spoke with more urgency now. ‘What is it you want?’ he said time and again. ‘Tell me, please. What is it you want?’”

Here’s a line from an LA Times article by Philip Caputo that engages the sense of smell. Note the use of the dynamic verbs overwhelmed and burned to convey the putrid odor of war:

“Their putrefying flesh overwhelmed the odors of smoke and diesel fuel and burned tanks, trucks and armored personnel carriers.”

4) Animate the Inanimate

You can infuse action into any setting, or any inanimate object within that setting, in order to convey the feelings of a character. For example, in this passage from Stephen King’s novella Sun Dog, the reader can feel Kevin’s fear without being told he is afraid:

“He punched the glove-compartment button and threw the picture inside and then closed it so hard and fast that he tore his thumbnail all the way down to the tender quick.

He pulled out jerkily, almost stalling, then almost hitting one of the hoary old spruces which flanked the house end of the long Chaffee driveway…”

Similarly, in Writing Action, Bonnie Tuis references Lauren Groff’s “The Midnight Zone,” a short story in which the wind plays at being the grim reaper:

“It rubbed itself against a little cabin and played at the corners of broke sticks off the trees and tossed them at the roof so they jigged down like creatures with strange and scrabbling claws.”

5) Withholding Information Will Improve the Action and Create Mystery

A classic method mystery and thriller writers use to keep their readers turning pages is to withhold information. Think about how much information Gillian Flynn withholds in Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins keeps from her readers in The Girl on a Train. And in Delia Owens’s bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing, we don’t learn who killed Chase Andrews until the end of the book.

You probably know Dan Brown as the author of The DaVinci Code, Inferno, Angels & Demons and other bestselling novels. Brown is a master at withholding information. In fact, in the introduction to his MasterClass, he declares, “At the end of this MasterClass, I’m going to admit to something to you that I have never admitted to anyone on Earth. I’m also going to show you an artifact that nobody but me has ever seen. And that is your first lesson in suspense.”

But you don’t have to be a genre writer to improve the action by creating suspense. You can amp up the intrigue and drama in any story by keeping the reader in the dark about a few important details. Who’s the father of the baby? Why don’t the brothers get along? Why does the girl hate oranges so much? What caused the mother to abandon her children?

Be careful not to overdo it. Your readers will toss your book in the trash if they feel tricked or betrayed. But withholding just the right amount of information can keep the action of your story moving, and your reader engaged, until the reader reaches The End.

by Meghan Ward (@MeghanCWard) May 24, 2020

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What about you, scriveners? Do you have trouble getting action into your stories? What do you find is the best way to improve the action in your fiction? Do you have a list of favorite verbs?

MEGHAN WARD is the author of Runway: Confessions of a not-so-supermodel and the co-author and project manager of the Writers Grotto’s series of books about writing, Lit Starts, including Writing Character, Writing Dialogue, Writing Action, Writing Memoir, Writing Sci-Fi & Fantasy, and Writing Humor.

Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Mutha, San Francisco Magazine, 7×7, the San Francisco Chronicle, It’s So You: 35 Women Write About Personal Expression Through Fashion and Style, and Wake Up and Smell the Shit: Hilarious Travel Disasters, Monstrous Toilets and Demon Dildos. Find her at meghanward.com, on Twitter @meghancward, on Instagram @meghancward, and on Facebook @meghanwardauthor.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

From Meghan Ward and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Writing Action offers prompts and space to write, providing opportunities to explore how both high-stakes and low-key moments can be action-packed. Among other ideas, you’ll be asked to write an account of:

• a highly competitive game of hopscotch
• an orange being peeled as if it were the last one on earth
• a car ride with an overly confident student driver
• a meal prepared by a cook who is really depressed
• the step-by-step process of opening a long-awaited piece of mail

Perfectly sized to take to a café, on vacation, or on your morning commute, this book is designed for practicing your creative writing a little bit at a time. Available at Amazon.

OPPORTUNITY ALERTS

The Golden Quill Award. Theme: The Unexpected. Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Memoir up to 1000 words. Poems up to 40 lines. Prize determined by number of entries. $10 Entry Fee. Deadline August 1.

100 Word Blurb Competition NO FEE! $500 prize for the most compelling blurb. Deadline September 1.

Ink and Insights Novel contest. ALL entries get written critiques from 4 judges. 2 Categories—Apprentice Novel and Master Novel.  Master Novel winners also reviewed by agents.  $45 Fee until May 31. $50 until June 30.

LITERARY TAXIDERMY SHORT STORY COMPETITION$10 ENTRY FEE. Prize $500 as well as publication. Write an original story of up to 2,500 words in any genre. The catch: We provide your opening and closing lines from a classic work of literature. You provide the rest. Deadline June 4, 2020.

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Featured image via Flickr