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𝘼 𝙂𝙪𝙞𝙙𝙚 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝘼𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙡𝙙
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This book contains writing tips, advice, facts, and trivia about the Action genre.
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Action is anything that happens in a story. It can be an event, it can be dialogue, it can be reaction to an event or dialogue or even to another character's reaction.
One weakness of many new writers is that they shirk away from strong events or actions to open their stories.
They want to build up to something exciting rather than open with dialogue or action that will immediately capture the reader's attention.
While buildup is necessary for other parts of the story and is a potent tool for ratcheting up the tension and creating conflict, capturing readers from page one is almost a necessity in our day.
Books compete with many other forms of stories that start big and bold and move up from there. To ensure you've got the reader's attention, you have to give him something attention-worthy. And you don't get more than the first page or two to prove your story is worth reading.
Yes, some stories can begin slower than others. No, you don't need to kill someone or blow up a city to capture the reader. But you do need a compelling opening.
And you achieve a compelling story opening by introducing an unusual character or an eye-catching setting or by presenting a shocking action or dialogue rife with conflict.
Remember, readers, come to fiction to find something they can't get in their daily lives. Show them you've got a world for them to explore, characters to root for, a plot that will entice them.
And do that at the top of your story.
But don't stop there.
Something has to happen in your stories. Something that makes the reader think or feel. Something that can hold the reader's attention when other—real-world—events are pulling and pushing and prodding at him. Your story events and problems have to be more compelling, at least for a few hours, than job and family and hobbies. You have to create events and characters so entrancing and real, so engrossing, that a reader will give up other pursuits to play in your fictional world.
One method to engage readers is to entice them with action.
For this article, I'd like to divide action into two types.
There are major events, plot twists, and turns that direct the story into new paths and deeper developments.
And there are common actions, gestures and physical movements, and everyday actions that carry characters from one scene to the next.
You need both kinds of actions to make your stories read as if they're possible. And not only possible but true.
Readers know that novel events aren't real, but when they feel real, the reader is satisfied. Events and stories that are implausible don't create the same satisfaction in a reader. In fact, readers may quite likely toss aside books where the actions are implausible and the characters unbelievable.
≫ ──── ≪•◦ ❈ ◦•≫ ──── ≪ Web Resources: https://theeditorsblog.net/2011/09/05/you-got-my-attention-but-wheres-the-action/
