Action: Where Your Character Meets the Road (Scene Alchemy #2)
The single greatest way that speculative fiction authors can strengthen their novels is this:
Make sure your scenes follow the intoxicating rhythm your readers expect, flowing through the unbreakable chain of goal → action → obstacle → try/fail/try again → outcome → complication → new goal.
This is what keeps everything moving forward, and gives your stories a sense of identity and purpose.
Our characters either step onto the page with a goal (or at least have the makings of one), and it’s broken down into fragments that push the story through every single scene. That sort of scene structure is what makes a story come alive, and what keeps your readers invested.
But a goal alone isn’t enough. It’s a noun, and if it’s going to become the driving force of our novel, we need a verb.
The character’s goal has to become an action.
Keeping Your Hands on the Wheel—What Action Is, and What It’s Not
Action is what separates a story from description.
It’s the difference between an active protagonist and a passive lump that sits at the centre of the story and thinks about their problems.
Writers often get stuck here, because they think action is just the blockbuster stuff: explosions and fighting, foot chases and ticking time bombs. And those are the high points of tension—the action at its most actiony. But that’s not all action is.
Action is anything the character does in pursuit of their goal.
That’s it.
So, sure, it’s winning a fight or diffusing a bomb (or it can be). But it might also be:
baking a cake
finding a missing key
convincing a reluctant friend to help
climbing a wall
following leads
researching an important detail
reading a letter
Or any one of about a hundred thousand other things.
The goal is what the character wants, fine. But what do they actually do about it?
That’s what will set things in motion, and the starting place for every chapter. Too often, the scenes I work on as a developmental editor end up rooted in exposition, explanation, thinking, reflecting, or wandering around. And those scenes aren’t really scenes at all. They only become a scene when our character does something.
That’s what gives everything else its shape.
And it’s also how we show the readers who our protagonist actually is.
You Are the Route You Take
When it comes to our main character’s personality, new writers often tell far too much and show us far too little. They don’t understand that writing this way turns the character into a distraction from the story. Someone we leave the action to hear about, rather than the force that drives everything forward.
Action is how we adjust that balance. It’s the tool we use to show the reader who the protagonist is: their strengths and weaknesses, skills and flaws, what they value, and how their desires and traumas affect them.
Let’s return to Evelyn—our hypothetical protagonist from last time, who’s trying to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a knight. A character like that might have a mixture of skills and personality traits: swordsmanship, personal integrity, naivety, a deep inadequacy and desire to prove herself. If Evelyn’s goal is the compass of each scene, then the action is the route she follows to get there.
Say she’s taking her entrance exam for the order. How does she act during that exam? If there’s a chance to cheat, will she take it? Her integrity says no. What if the other person does cheat and Evelyn loses out? Her naivety might make her go to the instructor and explain the truth, shattering her illusions when that instructor is just as rotten as the cheater.
Evelyn’s skill with a sword might open a path to get back in when the instructor throws her out.
Her desire to prove herself means that she keeps fighting.
Suddenly, we have a whole host of smaller scenes and temporary goals, and Evelyn is no longer passively sitting in the story, waiting for something to happen—she’s pushing through every moment, showing the reader who she is through what she does.
Stalled Engines and Wrong Turns—The Vital Importance of Failure
As writers, we so often tie ourselves in knots: explaining why our character can’t do something, or can’t act a certain way. This usually happens because we have certain ideas about how the story will play out, or because we need it to play out a certain way for plot-related reasons. Sometimes, it happens because we’re scared (or hesitant) to do horrible things to our characters.
Whatever the case, it leaves us with sentences like:
She needed to get across the moor, but the blizzard showed no signs of letting up. There was no way. She’d freeze to death long before she reached the other side.
This drains a little more momentum out of the story. Our protagonist loses a little more agency, and everything drags to a halt. Things start to feel inevitable—like the character can only do whatever the story wants them to do, and everything will turn out the same way regardless.
As the writer, we know that the character can’t go across the moor. If they do, they won’t be here when an Important Plot Point™ arrives. But the character doesn’t know that, and neither does the reader. Throwing a blizzard in the way is like throwing up a wall: railroading the story into where we need it to go.
There’s no quicker way to lose our readers, and the solution is as simple as it is beautiful:
Have them do the thing. Make them fail.
Let the character try to cross the moor. She puts on all her warmest clothes and thickest coat, makes everything ready, and starts walking. First, the cold gets through her inadequate clothing. Then, she gets lost. Finally, she trips and falls, gashing open her arm and tearing her best winter coat. She turns back, barely makes it home alive. And when the Important Plot Point™ shows up, she’s shivering, bleeding, still trying to get warm again.
Because we allowed the character to take action, the tension positively sings off the page.
Our readers cannot get enough of it.
Action vs Activity
As always, your protagonist’s goal is the north star you need to keep everything on track.
Without it, there’s nothing on the line. Packing a bag has no dramatic tension. But if the character’s goal is taking them far away from home, and they can only bring a few things they might need? That has power.
Wandering a city with no destination lets the story go slack. Having the character searching that same city for something, choosing which direction to take, has life.
Their goal is their compass. Let them clutch it tightly, and make them take one step, and then another.
Before you even know it, you’ll have a story.
Asking the Alchemist—Questions & Answers
Does the action in a scene have to be physical? Can it be a decision? A conversation? Thinking about something?
It has to be something they do. A conversation can definitely fit the bill. Thinking or making decisions? Not so much.
We want to weave those things around the action. What if the character doesn’t have time to think or decide? What if something happens first, and they have to figure things out while also doing something? That’s what keeps things moving.
Can inaction be a form of action? What if my character chooses not to speak, or can’t act because they’re overwhelmed?
It can work. But we need to be very careful. If we aren’t, the character becomes passive and sits in the middle of the scene, doing nothing. The story stagnates. The reader wanders off to do something else.
The best way to make action from inaction is to make inaction the character’s goal, and then build tension and conflict around it. We’ll be digging into this more in the next post, but here’s an example of how it might work:
Cipher has been through a lot and he’s had enough. He locks himself in his quarters. The ship’s engineer buzzes him—there’s some unusual readings, can he come and check them out? Cipher resists. Increasingly frantic sounds come from the other side of the door. He ignores those too, but now he’s just getting more and more restless. He gets in the shower. Turns it up hot. The whole ship lurches and now alarms are going off everywhere.
His inaction becomes action because we challenged it at every turn—making it more and more difficult for him to do nothing.
How do I handle action in a scene where my character is imprisoned, trapped, or restrained?
Exactly the same way we handled the character trying to cross the snow-covered moor: let them try to get away. If the story needs them to say captive, then they fail. Have them try something else. Make them fail again. Have their attempts to escape make something tangibly worse.
The character doesn’t have to succeed to move the story forward. They just have to think that they can.
What if the action that’s needed uses a skill my character doesn’t have?
Then let them fail! Failure is one of the greatest gifts we can give to our story. It’s what drives the reader’s increasingly breathless desire to know what will happen next.
Having a character try to take action, fail, and making everything worse is far more compelling than finding some way to give them the exact skill they need to solve the problem.
How do I stop the action from feeling repetitive?
Vary it. Remember that action isn’t just chases and fight scenes. It can be careful negotiation, sneaking around, picking a lock, casually tricking someone into revealing a piece of information, crossing dangerous terrain, getting somewhere without being discovered...
Anything and everything they can do to get them closer to their goal.
Have more questions about action in your scenes? Drop them in the comments below, and I’ll answer them at the end of this series!
Conduct Your Own Experiments
If you want to check the action in your own stories, you can try this!
Choose a scene from your most recent WIP and ask:
What does the character want in this moment?
What do they actually do in this scene to get that thing?
Is something standing in their way?
If the character is thinking, reflecting, exploring, or having something explained to them—without really doing anything in pursuit of their goal—you have a place to start revising.
Consider how this character specifically would act. How would they deal with their problems? Is there a way that would actively show the reader who they are and what they value?
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I loved your advice about the importance of varying the action. As a longtime reader, it feels like writers can get into a rut of writing the same type of action scene: e.g. the character goes to a dangerous place, discovers startling information, has to fight their way out, gets yelled at by superiors....again and again and again!
Do you think writers have a secret preference for certain types of scenes and then just end up recreating them? Or can "the character's personality drives the action" be taken too far to the point where the character drives the same action over and over because they have the same personality?