As promised, this week we’ll be continuing our discussion on what makes a good action story. Last week we talked about the fundamentals: grounding the story, raising the stakes, and giving characters urgency. This week we’ll be talking a bit more about choice, as well as spectacle and slowing down.

Let’s start with choice:

5. Every Choice Has a Cost

There should be price to paid for every choice your characters make. Even the little choices. If a character has to move from point A to point B, show that it costs time and energy. If they have to lift something up, it takes effort. As the the story progresses make the choices more and more costly.

The Abyss is a great example of film that’s chock full of tough choices. From the beginning, there’s a price to be paid for every choice. When Bud tosses his wedding ring in the toilet, he has to retrieve it — staining his hand blue for the rest of the film. Later when Bud decides to try and stop Lt. Coffey, he must pay the price of holding his breath for an insane amount of time, while trying to swim to the Moon Pool, through near freezing water, to try and disarm a trained killer. By the end the costs get even bigger: Lindsey drowns and must be resuscitated; Bud has to dive to depths that are impossible for humans to survive in.

This gets to the heart of what makes a hero: they overcome obstacles.  That’s the whole point of an inciting incident. Make sure that for everything your characters do, they pay a price.

This is another fine mess you've gotten us into.

6. Complicate Action Through Choices

If you follow the previous suggestion, you should be okay on this. Choices are the best vehicle for raising the stakes. The best action stories begins with a choice that complicates things. This sets off a chain reaction that continues to escalate until a final resolution is reached.

There is the temptation to complicate the drama by throwing in challenges unrelated to choice.  Mission to Mars does this on several occasions. At one particular moment, a micro meteorite storm comes out of nowhere and punctures the hull, causing all sorts of emergency. It had nothing to do with the any choices the characters made, it was just a random bad thing that was chucked in to try and add drama.

In good action stories there may be moments that appear to be random, but pay close attention. Is it a random occurrence that happened as they were going about their regular business, or did the choices they make increase the risk of something bad happening? As I mentioned in the previous post, action stories are about choice and power. Complications are more meaningful when they are the direct result of a character’s choices.

7. Make Spectacle Matter

One of the great things I’ve learned from working in the game industry is the importance of using spectacle correctly. In gaming, visuals always support game-play. The character design should communicate what a player can expect from a character and spectacle should be used to emphasis a player’s status in the game. When a player does well, they get some sort of visual payoff. That could be a cool death animation of a bad-guy, a burst of confetti for solving a puzzle or breathtaking vista after passing through a difficult challenge. Spectacle can also be used in the same way to show danger, and failure. It’s all about enhancing the natural experience of game-play.

Spectacle can be used in the same way in action storytelling, but instead of supporting game-play it supports point of view. Use your biggest spectacle at the most important points of your story.  Kick off your inciting incident with a cool fight scene. Reveal your monster at the climax. Show all the new weapons right before you get ready for the final battle. Think about the point of view of the characters, what they are experiencing and how you can heighten that experience with the flashy details.

Victory!

8. Slow Down

This is the key to telling a really interesting action story. You don’t need to be going full bore the whole time. The slow moments create a contrast with the action moments, making the action more compelling. They also help build up to the action by creating anticipation, and mystery. As I mentioned in the previous article, the regrouping or planning moments are an essential part of the action film. If you were to ask anyone to name the most memorable moments of the A-Team, chances are they will choose the planning montages where the A-team welded together some awesome contraptions to use in the final battle. It creates anticipation for what’s to come, and it also creates a template for understanding the final action; you’ve explained the plan, so going into the final action there will be greater clarity about what’s going on, and extra drama when things don’t go according to plan (which always happens).

There is also something that happens when you just have non-stop action: you get sick of it. The explosions stop being so awesome, and the monsters get old. Take a break from the cool stuff for just a couple of minutes. Let your characters laugh a bit, or plan a bit. Then when you come back to the flashy stuff it’ll feel fresh again.

Please Don’t Be Stupid

At the end of the day, I want to be giving high-fives and pumping fists as much as any other fella when the credits roll. And it doesn’t take some sort of complex artistic back flips for a storyteller to do this, it just takes common sense. Take at least as much time to make the story understandable as you do designing the gears in Bumblebee’s elbow and you’ll be well on you way.

Really, it shouldn’t be that hard.

Pablo Picasso: “I paint objects as I think them not as I see them.”

The greatest challenge of anyone trying to tell a story visually is to try and figure how to tell the story. For a comic artist, it’s a question of what do I put in the frame, what is its relationship to other things around it, and how close am I going to be to my subject? For the writer, it’s a question of what do I describe, and which and how many words should I use to do so. For film makers and animators, the questions include motion, sound, and the manipulation of time.

So how do you make your choices? There are an infinite amount of possibilities at any moment of your story, and the human brain is physically incapable of analyzing all of those possibilities and selecting a candidate for the best idea. But the human brain is also very good at generalizing and finding simplified heuristic models to understand how any system works. For artists, this is called a theory.

The thing is, every artist operates on their own theory, whether they know it or not, and depending on their theory, their art will be shallow and unoriginal or deeply profound and unique.  Michael Bay’s theory of film making can be summed up in one question: “Is It Awesome?” It’s a theory based entirely on spectacle and resonance with pop-culture and is a common guide of the novice. The other two novice theories are the “make it different” and “do it like them” theories. Either, you are trying to come up with something that hasn’t been done before, or you are copying something cool you saw someone else do. None of these theories are bad theories, in fact I think the best storytellers follow them to a certain extent, but I also think the very best storytellers have a much more important underlying theory guiding what they do.

And here’s what it is: Empathy.

The best artists know, that at its root, storytelling is about understanding the experiences of someone else.

And the tool that the greats use to create empathy is point-of-view.

In 2002, I had the opportunity of participating in Orson Scott Card’s Writer’s Bootcamp. Previous to the Bootcamp, I was assigned to read Characters & Viewpoint by Mr. Card which discusses the importance of point-of-view and particularly the superiority of the 3rd-person-limited-omniscient-narrator in writing. Like most people I understood point-of-view at a surface level-1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person ect. It just means who is telling the story, right?  But it wasn’t until I was in the workshop that I really understood the importance of point-of-view to telling a story.

He gave us some writing samples to read. They were very descriptive passages of landscapes and sunsets and details of clothing, but they were boring as hell. Why? Because the descriptions were too objective. It was like a robot describing a photograph-there was no humanity to the words. Then we read some other passages that were vibrant, gritty and funny. The difference was point-of-view. The writing communicated an attitude, not just a description. That’s why the 3rd-person-limited-omniscient-narrator is such a powerful tool, because it communicates attitude so well. (For a masterful example of 3PLON, look no further than George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.)

So, point-of-view is not so much about who is telling the story, but how he sees the world. You don’t even have to limit the narrative to just the things a character thinks and sees, as long as the world you are showing is colored by his attitudes.

The textbook example of using point-of-view is Kurosawa’s Rashomon. You see the same event three different times, from three different perspectives. The details and the feeling of the story are widely different with each telling, depending on the attitudes of who is telling the story at the time.

When the Thief tells his version of the story, it’s all bravado and adventure. When the victim tells the story, it’s nightmarish thuggery, and when the guy hiding in the bush tells the story, we see a pathetic struggle for survival. (By the way, the third act of Rashomon includes the truest fight scene in the history of cinema.)

So, point-of-view is not only an important tool, it’s the most important thing to consider when telling a story, and can better help you decide what artistic decisions to make than any other rubric. If you want to do something awesome, unique or traditional go right ahead, but it’ll be a thousand times more powerful if you can also make it support a specific point-of-view.

Lastly, I want to point you to this clip by Improv Everywhere. If you have the means or the desire, contrast it with the subway scene in Borat. We are seeing the same thing through two very different attitudes. Neither one is “true”, they are simply choices. Ultimately you have the power to choose a point-of-view that will show others how you see the world.

Perhaps that’s the most important choice of all.