How can I write a panicked scene without it feeling like it was written in haste?

I've noticed something about many books and movies. Just as two characters are getting into a deep conversation, either sharing something important or showing emotion or leaning forward slowly to kiss, a random passerby will walk right between them. It totally throws them off and - you would think - breaks things up. But instead, it actually heightens the audience's anticipation. We can't wait until the interruption leaves so we can get back to what was about to happen.

This is part of pacing, and it's hard to get right, mostly because it's not always intuitive. Interrupting a tense scene can increase tension? Slowing down the sword fight can make it even more gripping?

Yes.

What readers need is variation. A section of panic and then a strangely quiet moment - the eye of the storm, as it were - before returning to the panic and ratcheting it up even higher.

Don't spam these moments. They need to happen naturally, just once or twice in the scene.

My recommendation is to pay special attention to tense, panicked, or dire situations in other books. You might be surprised to see that despite the heavy action, the author doesn't completely cut out all introspection. There has to be feeling even if there isn't conscious thought.

I recommend re-watching Inception. Literally the most gripping movie I've seen in theaters. Notice that Fischer, the rich son whose dream they enter, spends much of the dreamstate talking with his father. It's slow and emotional, and perfectly contrasts with the alpine chase scene and the shootouts.

Don't forget the emotional stakes during these scenes. That is often what makes a good action scene work, anyway.

UPDATE: Let me be clear: showing too much emotion and introspection during a scene will slow it to a crawl. That's not what you want. The trick is to use a balance of interruptions to the action: some will be thoughts and emotions, and some will be literal breaks in the action, like the characters barricading a door to buy themselves time. They can still hear the enemies pounding on the outside, and they can see the metal bending around the handle, but for a few brief moments they are safe enough to realize how much danger they're really in.

posted over 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

icanfathom‭

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You write slow. It is fine to put yourself into the character and see how you would react, but take your time describing that. Get into the details.

This isn't a "real time" exercise, the length of the writing does not have to reflect the length of the action. The only time that is true is during dialogue, people know that sentences take a certain amount of time to say. They know it is seldom true that anybody talks in long paragraphs or soliloquys or speeches or sermons.

But that does not hold for action or exposition that has no dialogue. Thoughts are on the borderline, but it is fair to describe several wordless thoughts or impressions that go through somebody's mind, and even though that took six paragraphs, the reader will still get this all happened in a single second.

Consider when you describe a scene the character sees. You can spend a page on something they "saw" in three seconds of scanning a room. We still get it, they didn't stand in the doorway for a full minute as they walked in, the exposition about the setting is not a "real time" description.

The same goes for your panic attack. Don't rush the prose to match the rushed mood. Describe what is going on, thoroughly but as always without getting repetitive or irrelevant. Don't worry about "real time" or getting through it quick.

The author's job is to aid the reader's imagination, so they "see" an image of what is going on and what happened and the consequences of that.

posted over 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Amadeus‭

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