I love reading books and watching films across genres. I also like seeing how action / violence is portrayed or used in a story to move along plot and develop a character. To me, action and violence should exist within a story for a reason. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes you just want a fun, shut the brain off action flick for the sake of it. But the stories that stand out, the ones you return to over and over, use action/violence as a means of developing a character and/or give it purpose other than just being violent for the sake of it. When writing action/violence looking at the genre the story lives within is a great starting point for what the audience might expect. My first and second novels are squarely in the techno-thriller genre. Action and a level of violence is expected, but how much? Something I’ve been thinking more about with my second novel where the level of violence is higher than my first. A main character is a hitman – he’s violent in his job and nature. When writing the action/violent scenes I don’t want to glorify it, but it’s a part of who the character is, and the approach I’m taking is their battle with being violent in nature and thinking what they’re doing is the right thing. A repeated theme throughout the story that a few characters battle with.
When I write an action scene, I visualize it then write it two ways. Typically, the more violent display first, then I’ll pare it down. For me, what we don’t see or read but instead infer builds greater tension versus explicitly showing or stating it. Leaner action to move the scene along, leaner violence to leave the reader to fill in the blanks, and focusing on what these moments share about the character, is more important to me. We’ll see if I pull that off, while maintaining genre expectations, and maybe subverting them a bit to create something new.
In a recent episode of Writer Syndrome, Tim and I dive into violence in writing, genre expectations, and how we approached violence in our own stories. Check it out below!
