Programmed To Copy
One question I hear a lot from writers, and often find myself asking myself, is how to write realistic action. Because a lot of times, my brain somehow spits out sentences like "Johnny walked across the room," or "and suddenly, Lucy died," and I read it the next day and am like "what was that?!?!?!"
Ever feel the same way? You have an intense scene with guns and a storm brewing and multiple people being held hostage, and it should be so easy to write. . . but your sentences come out so mechanical.
Subject verb. Subject verb. Dialogue, verb. Subject verb.
Over and over again, and you know it's wrong and doesn't work, but you just can't seem to figure out another way to say it.
Or maybe that's not your problem at all and somehow you're a perfect writer and always produce beautiful, flowing, Tolkien-like sentences. Yet even with such crafted prose, you can't get a hold on making it exciting or driving home the intensity of the scene.
If this is you, fear not! Action is something a lot of writers struggle with because from the time we could open our eyes, our brains have been teaching us to copy, copy, copy. Copy what your mom says, copy what the TV said, copy what your older brother said, much to your mother's horror, and so forth.
Our brains are programmed to copy, and repeat, and mimic. It is far harder to create something new.
The Mimickery of Motion
And this is why writers have so much struggle creating action: they believe they're creating something new.
It's easy to look at a flower, and copy what has already been said about it: it's yellow, has flower-shaped leaves, and dances on a spindly green stem. Pretty and quaint and fairly easy, because our brains have been doing this since we could open our eyes.
But to take that flower, and make it do something that we can not watch it do, is considerably harder. Because we can not mimic what we have not seen.
Or at least, that's what a lot of people believe.
"Well, no one's ever jumped out of a train that's going through the air to save the princess they're supposed to be a bodyguard for," they say, and then take eons of time to figure out how to put that idea into words on a page because they think they are creating an action that has never been done before.
Which, I mean, yes, technically no one in real life has jumped out of a train that is going through the sky because obviously, that doesn't exist. But, people have jumped out of trains before, and they've jumped out of airplanes before. . . so just watch both of those things on like YouTube or something, and then combine them.
It's actually. . . not that hard.
Because we can teach our brains that writing an epic space battle, is really just mimicking one of the nautical battles of the Revolutionary War, or an aerial battle of WWII.
You have to realize this. There's nothing new under the sun.
There is no scene you can write that has never been written, or at least the idea of said scene. There is no idea that has never been explored.
So everything you write is just a mimicry - all action is a mimicry.
To Not Mimic Is Impossible
What I said earlier is true: you can not mimic what you have not seen. A baby can not say a word they've never heard before, just like you can't automatically speak Norwegian unless you have been surrounded by it your whole life and can mimic it.
But this does not apply to writing an action scene.
Because you are mimicking. You are copying.
Every single action you ever want to write into a scene has already been done in its base form, and can thus be copied. You do not create new actions when you're writing, you describe actions that have already been done.
It's like trying to come up with a new color. It's impossible.
Every "new" kind of color you can come up with is just a combination of the colors that already exist.
Or try to come up with a new species of animal. Impossible. Every "new" species is just a combination of other kinds of animals.
We could go on and on, but you get the idea: our brains were not made to create out of nothing. They are programmed to copy.
And when you're writing an action scene, all you're doing is combining a whole ton of actions that have already been performed.
How Do You Learn A Language?
And now you're probably wondering how in the world all of this can actually help you write a better action scene when all you can come up with at one in the morning is subject verb sequences, exclusively in that order.
It's the same way you learn a language: immerse yourself in it so that you copy it without blinking an eye.
Probably not what your college Spanish professor told you. But it's true. You spend a whole year taking Spanish classes, surrounded by English-speaking students, and most likely, an English-speaking professor. Everyone you talk to outside of class talks to you in English. And you probably don't have to use Spanish to order food at the McDonald's down the street.
It's glaringly obvious that you're not going to really be learning Spanish because there are not enough people to mimic. But say you go to Mexico for. . . two months.
You are surrounded by Spanish-speaking people on every level, from the people you talk to in the supermarket, to your host family. You never speak English to anyone other than your reflection in the mirror. You are constantly surrounded by people who talk, think, and dream in Spanish, and you have to use Spanish to survive.
By the time you get home, you're subconsciously going to answer si to every question, instead of yes, you're going to have a profoundly better Spanish accent that might even affect your English accent, and you might be talking to your reflection. . . in Spanish.
I can not drive this home enough: our brains have literally been programmed to copy what we see and hear.
And the more you immerse yourself in what you want to copy, the more easily you will be able to copy it, often without even thinking.
So immerse yourself in action, and train your brain to copy that action.
Kung Fu Panda
How do we do this effectively though? You obviously can't go to a country where people are constantly at war so that you can experience a battlefield and then copy that, because one, that would be impractical, and two, dangerous.
And it's highly improbably that you will go sky-diving, or scuba diving, or walking on the moon, just to be able to realistically copy those things.
Yet we know that we have to immerse ourselves in what we want to copy, to be able to copy it. So when we need to immerse ourselves in something we aren't realistically able to, what do we do?
First, you need to realize that anything we can observe, watch, listen to, or feel, can be used as material to copy. A baby might never have met a dog, or seen a dog, but they still know that a dog is a thing that barks. So when someone mentions a dog, they instantly make the connection, and bark. Even though they have never seen a dog, or heard one.
We can do this too, and on a more complex level than babies (I would hope). For example, say that you went and saw the old Top Gun, and then saw the new one with your friends, and then went and saw it again with your older brother, and then both again at your grandparents. You would probably be able to give a decently accurate description of pilots, how they interact on certain levels, and how their fly their fighter jets.
Not that you've ever been to an elite Naval flying school, or even talked to a pilot.
But you are able to copy their language, slang, and how it feels to fly a jet, because you've seen the movie a couple of times. This is how insane our brains are at mimicking. Watch Pirates of the Caribbean more than once, and you're already talking like Jack Sparrow, or quoting some of his infamous lines.
So if you need to mimic something you've never personally experienced yourself, all you need to do is a little bit of research. Need to know how to write a Martial Arts fight scene, go watch Kung Fu Panda, some fighting on TV, or read a sci-fi novel that has intense fighting scenes (I would highly recommend Keith A Robinson).
Or, you need to know how to describe an intense near-death scene in which your character nearly drowns. Go watch Breakthrough.
Or maybe you need to know what it looks like to escape through a downtown subway station having to jump off walls and flip over ticket counters. Look at some parkour videos on YouTube.
And don't get me wrong, I am not trying to give the impression that the more time you spend watching YouTube, the better a writer you will be. Not at all. There are a million other ways you can find information for your mind to mimic.
My point is this: with a little bit of time and effort, you can give your mind all the resources it needs to be able to mimic really anything you want it to. And once you give it what it needs, you will find that writing action scenes is really only putting into your own words sequences of motion that have already happened.
It's nothing new. It does not require hours upon hours of brainstorming. All you need is something for your mind to mimic, and you will be able to write whatever you want.
Aside From Writing
I want to make sure I touch on this point for just a minute because it affects not just your writing or your career, but your life, both here, and in Heaven.
And it's the fact that your brain doesn't just mimic things in a writing sense or a language sense. It mimics everything, from what you read, to who you hang out with.
Listen to songs with a lot of bad language, or questionable lyrics, your mind will involuntarily start to mimic that. Until it just becomes who you are, and what you say, and you don't even know it.
Or, hang out with people who talk a certain way, or do certain things, and once again your mind will, without you even knowing, start to copy those people.
So we have to be grounded in the Word of God. We need to immerse ourselves so fully in God's language, and God's words, and God's thoughts, and God's promises, that we start to become more like Him, instead of the people around us.
We need to surround ourselves with Godly, Christian people who we can mimic, and in mimicking them become more like Christ, instead of this world. Because this world doesn't matter. This life is merely a speck in the scope of eternity.
Shouldn't we be far more concerned about becoming more like our Heavenly Father Who will be with us for the rest of eternity, than that one group of popular high school kids who you won't even remember in five years?
And then you have to remember that you aren't just mimicking people, other people are mimicking you.
What you say and what you do affects not only your eternity but the eternity of the people around you. So you really have to be careful to be mimicking Jesus, so that the people mimicking you are also mimicking Jesus.
In Conclusion
The key to writing realistic action is to mimic. To copy what you see, because there's nothing new under the sun, and all that excitement and suspense you want, all it really is is creating something slightly different out of actions that have already been performed.
Start to observe the people around you and the actions they take, and you'll start to write with more realism and more heart. The next time you watch a movie, look at what gets you on the edge of your seat, or makes you jump off your seat, and figure out how to re-create that so that your readers are jumping off their seats.
And, most importantly, remember to surround yourself with God, and Godly people, and God's words, so that you mimic Him, and now this world. Because when the culture around us is constantly pressuring us to conform to its mold and be more like it, it is very easy to lose sight of Who we were called to be like.
It's often far easier to let the world carry us away in its current. But Jesus didn't promise us that this life would be easy. He promised that we would be aliens in our own country, and have troubles, and be tested.
But none of that matters because He's walking right next to us.