By John Gilstrap

We’ve discussed in this space before the burden of the Muddled Middle or Page 200 Syndrome, where the writing process gets hopelessly bogged down in critical exposition that is strikingly un-fun. Today, let’s talk about other un-fun writing: I call them transitional scenes.

Say Detective Jones has discovered what he thinks he will turn out to be a key piece of evidence, and he needs to hand deliver it to Dr. Parker to get his input. The transitional scene in this circumstance would be the process by which Jones gets to Parker’s office.

You could just cut to a new scene where the detective and the doc are in mid-conversation, but if this is their first interaction, in medias res could leave the reader unsatisfied. In my style of writing, the reader needs to know the nature of characters’ relationships. Did they go to school together? Do they like each other? What is Detective Jones’s mode of transportation?

Here comes the balance of backstory and data dump. I’ve got to set up the scene without boring the reader. This means doing the reveal in the midst of some kind of intriguing action. I’ve got to reveal backstory without losing momentum on the front story.

Dr. Oscar Parker knew more about art and art thievery than anyone Flannery Jones had ever encountered. The professor’s tastes had always run toward the modern stuff–the random splashes of color and shapes and mis-assigned anatomy that Jones believed were practical jokes inflicted on the snooty rich. Judging from the ornateness of the gold-tipped iron gates that blocked access to his driveway, his expertise had elevated him from geeky eighth grade nose picker to a gentleman of means and influence. As Jones drove into the frame of the CCTV and pushed the button on the intercom, he wondered if he should start with an apology for the swirlies he’d administered back in the day.

The pacing of some stories require that the reader perceive the passage of time. Early in Nathan’s Run, there’s a section where 12-year-old Nathan decides in the morning that he’s going to execute the next part of his plan that night after the sun goes down. Following that decision comes a chapter about the parallel story of the police who are chasing him, but at this point, the cops don’t have a lot to go on, so the plot is dependent upon them acting on what Nathan does, so there’s not a lot for them to do, either. The trick is to keep these characters alive on the page even when they don’t yet have meaningful tasks to perform. Herein lies the beauty of sub-subplots. In the absence of real action, I inserted political turmoil within the police department itself.

Great. Now, that has to somehow payoff later.

Next came a short scene that might have felt like a non-sequitur at first because it introduces an important character who has exactly one very important task to perform within the story. But he can’t just walk onto the page, do his thing, and disappear. He has to feel real. So, Todd first joins the story as a stressed out professional (I forget what his job is) who’s sweating over a very important presentation that he needs to make the next morning. The reader needs to like him, and he needs to have a reason to be awake at a certain hour the next morning to see the thing that then sets the third act in motion.

Back to Nathan. It’s finally time to pull the trigger on him executing his plan. As the eponymous character, though, people want to know what he’s been doing for the past fifteen or twenty pages.

Now, finally, it was time to get the true action of the story moving again.

As I write this blog post, I am in the middle of a multifaceted transition for Scorched Earth, the Jonathan Grave book for 2026. I’ve got a good guy dead, another good guy wounded and in the hospital, a bad guy in a different hospital, while Jonathan and his team are just now in the process of unpacking who is the power behind all of this. In thirty pages or so, the story valve will open wide for about 50 pages.

And then, I’ll arrive at the Muddled Middle and the joy of writing will once again become less joyful. But only for a little while.

What say you, TKZ family? Have you all walked this same walk? Got any tricks to share?

By John Gilstrap

Maybe I’m losing my edge. Maybe I’m just getting soft and doddering in my old age, but it’s not the kind of thing that happens to me. I let the character live.

Actually, it’s worse than that. I couldn’t bring myself to kill him. I mean, he was supposed to die. The next chapters were going to work because Jason was dead. I’d made him a point of view character for a couple of chapters so readers would feel pain with his loss–we call that drama in my line of work–and I’d given him a fine, heroic final few moments.

But when the paragraph came that Jonathan Grave was supposed to witness him die, he instead discovered a pulse. Which is a real pain in my butt because instead of just walking away from the body and moving on with the story, Jonathan and his team have to figure out what to do with a critically wounded innocent.

Did I mention that Jason was fourteen years old? Okay, that played into my decision.

Here’s the thing, though: Actions have consequences. Not only have I stumbled into an unexpected twenty-page diversion and new plot point, but that plot point somehow has to pay off down the road as I race toward my April 15 deadline. That’s a lot more work.

And, now that I look back, that looming prospect of a lot more work might have been pushing me to lean more on the side of letting the kid die. Yes, it would have been dramatic, but it also would have felt like a bit of a betrayal of my brand. Fictional heroes save lives, they don’t walk away from corpses. Readers don’t buy my books with the anticipation that I’m going to take the easiest route for myself as an author, but rather with the anticipation that I’m going to squeeze as much drama and excitement out of as many scenes as I can create.

These past few weeks, I have been tired, conflicted, and way too busy. It’s been hard to concentrate on my writing–or anything else for that matter–for more than just an hour or two at a time. When that happens, it’s easy to become tempted by shortcuts. I know I’m preaching to the choir here because many of you have jobs and kids and a dozen simultaneous obligations that make your writing time difficult and fleeting.

When those times come, I urge you to remember to trust your creative gut and do the right thing.

I started this post by lamenting that maybe I had lost my edge, but now I know that’s not at all the case. Quite the opposite is true, in fact. I discovered that my edge is sharp enough to not let me make a mistake that I would regret later.

By John Gilstrap

The crazy lady held a carving blade from the knife block on the kitchen counter, and she vehemently expressed her desire to hurt me with it. The year was 1990, plus or minus three. We were in her double-wide. The driver of my ambulance was in urgent communication with the EOC–emergency operations center–police were on the way, and the crazy lady (you got the CRAZY part, right?) stood between me and the door. I was armed with a radio and maybe a stethoscope. I suspect that drugs may have been involved because the crazy lady repeatedly sought counsel from someone only she could see. And apparently hear.

This was not my wheelhouse. We volunteers had no training for talking unstable people out of their murder weapons. While she seemed moved by my arguments that I had a young boy at home who needed me, the invisible sonofabitch had a convincing counterargument.

The confrontation ended without nuance. Crazy Lady had left the door open and when a critical mass of cops had arrived–I’ll stipulate that it took less than the seven hours that it felt–they hit her with the subtlety shown to a quarterback who fumbles the snap.

Happy ending. For me. I don’t know how it ended for her. Or her imaginary friend.

I’ve never written of this incident until right now, largely because it exposes me as a moron. Can you articulate the error that nearly got me killed? Read to the end for the reveal.*

Let’s turn this into a writing lesson.

For me, action scenes–fight scenes–are the hardest scenes to write. They’re also the easiest scenes to screw up.

My interaction with Crazy Lady involved countless thoughts, decisions and observations, all of which transpired simultaneously and in the space of a heartbeat.

In fiction, a heartbeat on the page can be a paragraph or a chapter. In Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” that length of time takes up a whole short story.

The secret to fast action is to write slow.

Let’s imagine a scene we all know: The Old West duel in the street. For my example, imagine that we’re past the build-up and the dread–think “High Noon” or “Firecreek”–and dial straight into the ditry deed of draw-and-fire.

The reality of the action will transpire over the course of a few seconds–five, at the most–but a one-sentence gunfight squanders drama and cheats your reader out of and exciting, engaging scene. So, how do we make it engaging?

Choose your POV Characters carefully, remembering that both shooters have something to prove or defend.

Arguably, the easiest POV characters for the scene are the shooters themselves–the guys (it’s always guys, right?) who are presenting their hearts and spines for penetration at 900 feet per second.

Are they concentrating on not being killed, or on killing the other guy? There’s a huge difference. Think about it: The best chance to score a kill shot means squaring your body across the target for a stronger stance that allows for better aim and trigger control. That also means making yourself a bigger target. Alternatively, you could blade your body to the target to make yourself harder to hit, but also creating a less stable shooting platform. What does it say of a character who thinks this way?

Are you presenting both POVs or just one? What are they thinking? What are they looking for?

Now, suppose that (one of) the POV character(s) is the 12-year-old child of one of the shooters. What does that do to your narrative? Okay, and the 12-year-old’s best friend is the child of the other shooter. Are they watching the duel together? What are their older or younger siblings doing?

Every element of story is about character.

If you write thrillers, your job is to make your audience scream for mercy. That means setting up seemingly irreversible collision courses for your characters. If one of my stories presents a comfortable moment for you to go to bed–or go to the bathroom, for that matter–I have failed.

In our street duel example, why didn’t Good Guy Greg just pop Bad Guy Bart in the back of the head and be done with it? Or the other way around? Did they consider it? Are their hands shaking?

In the real world, all of these thoughts and feelings and considerations whirl at the speed of synapse, but as the recorder of fact in the fictional world, it falls upon you to reveal these instinctive reactions in a way that feels fast yet is still discernable.

*Humiliating tactical error: I allowed Crazy Lady to block my access to the exit. If I could have left and gone to safety, the police response (God bless them!) could have been far less kinetic.

By John Gilstrap

One of the great cliches of writing seminars is that prologues are a mistake. For new writers in particular, prologues are purportedly seen as solid evidence that an editor or agent should reject the story out of hand. To include a prologue, it is said, is to doom your chances of selling your book. Is there any truth in this trope? Of course there is. That’s how tropes are born.

Yet, when I go to conferences and agree to critique the first few pages of a manuscript, a solid double-digit percentage of the submissions are prologues, and they fall into two broad categories: the teaser and the backstory dump. The teaser prologue typically presents a character in crisis only to break away at a cliffhanger moment before we turn the page to Chapter One. The backstory prologue often presents a scene from our character’s past by way of explanation of the events that will be revealed beginning at chapter one.

The teaser prologue more often than not presents itself as an exciting coming attraction, as if to tell the reader, Honestly, don’t be turned off by the first five boring chapters. It’ll get interesting, I promise. Maybe it will, but even in the best case, the writer has tipped their hand to peril that we, as readers, know is coming. The prologue squanders drama, and there is no greater sin. The better solution would be to rewrite the boring chapters so that the exciting story builds consistently.

The backstory prologue screams to me of a structural issue with the story. Relevant events from a character’s past are better revealed as references during the front story. An example I like to use when I teach deals with Harry Potter–specifically with regard to the need to start a story in the right spot. When I ask the class when Harry’s story begins–not where the book begins, but when the story begins–ten out of ten students will agree that it begins with Hagrid delivering infant Harry to the Dursley’s doorstep. And they are wrong. Harry’s story begins when his parents were themselves students at Hogwarts and giving Snape a hard time. I personally believe that JK Rowling was a genius to start the story in the middle and bleed off the details of backstory as the front story progressed.

“But I really, really, really need to reveal events from the past in order for the book to make sense.”

It happens. This is why tropes are not rules. Some prologues are, in fact, necessary and work well. It’s all in the execution. My upcoming Irene Rivers series debut, Burned Bridges, opens with two teenagers disposing of the body of another teenager. I call that scene Chapter One. Chapter Two opens with “Thirty-five years later.”

See what I did there? I could legitimately have called that opening sequence a prologue but I chose not to because I didn’t see the need. The P-word has enough of a bad rep that I chose to avoid it. To be really honest, I waffled back and forth on whether I should cut the scene altogether, but I chose to keep it because a) it’s a cool, very relevant scene that b) helps with a future reveal and there was no other place to put it but at the beginning.

Here’s my advice, then:

1. Make sure that every scene in every chapter is engaging;
2. If prologue feels necessary, consider the possibility that you’re starting your story in the wrong place;
3. When possible, reveal backstory judiciously via the front story; and
4. If you cannot avoid including a prologue, consider calling it Chapter One instead.

Did I miss anything? Do you think I’m way off base here? Please leave a comment.

Oh. Any Happy New Year!

By John Gilstrap

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has known me for more than a minute or two that I am a social creature. I am a Type-A extrovert all the way–ENTP for you Myers-Briggs afficionados. There’s nothing I enjoy more than a good party. Which is why, beyond the glorious religious reasons, the Christmas season is the highlight of my year. We love to host parties. In fact, when we designed our stone cabin in the woods, we included extra wide hallways specifically for the purpose of accommodating large-scale parties.

This past weekend, on December 7, was the annual big one for local folks, about 70 people in all. It’s our Christmas present to each other, so the whole thing is catered, complete with open bar and valet parking. (The valet parking is necessary because it gets REALLY dark out here, and parking is in a field.) Thanks to my involvement with the local radio station, we’ve gotten to know far more local people in the two and a half years we’ve been West Virginians than we met in our lifetimes outside Washington, from down-the-street neighbors to politicians to judges and prosecutors. Kurt and Annie Muse (subjects and co-author of Six Minutes to Freedom) were able to join us as well.

On December 14th, there’ll be another party for 16 people, for which I’ll do the cooking, though I’m not yet sure what we’ll have. Soft plans are forming for a y’all come open house event on December 22 for the broad spectrum of friends from today and yesteryear–firehouse buds, high school and college friends and old neighbors. If it happens (I guess we really need to decide), that get-together will be the very definition of informal–think pizza, sides and maybe burgers if the weather is nice enough.

Then, on December 27, we’ll host the daylight version of the extended family party that used to be a Christmas evening party before we moved to West Virginia. (Did I mention it gets dark out here at night? Apparently, Washingtonians’ retinal rods and cones don’t function without the assistance of street lights.) Cooking assignments for this party were established decades ago. Barbie brings the apple pie (actually she’s not allowed to cross the threshold without it), Nan brings her cheesy grits, Jim brings cranberry relish, Donna brings sugar cookies (another prerequisite for entry), and I bring the old school green bean casserole that everyone makes fun of but somehow manages to choke down without leaving leftovers.

With all the entertaining, this is my season for extravagant decoration. I’ve been told that my Holiday decorating aesthetic is best described as “hotel lobby.” He who said that was not being entirely complimentary, but he may have had a point. For this one annual slice of time, more is more, right? For one-twelfth of every year, we turn what I think is a fairly staid, conservatively outfitted home into our wonderland. I have regular late-summer nightmares about having missed the holiday decorating season. I hope we do it without tipping into tacky, but if there’s ever a season when you get get away with crossing that line, I think this is it.

Because of a very sad story that happened when I was young, and then was reinforced through many years in the fire service, we don’t put up any real Christmas trees. I don’t even allow any real greens near a fireplace or a candle (it was a VERY sad story when I was young). So, we do artificial trees, the technology for which has seen amazing advances year over year. Remember “more is more?” I confess I have a self control problem, however, when it comes to Christmas trees. We have six of them this year. I already know where I want to put the 7th next year.

Of the six trees, though, only one is the true Christmas tree for the house, and it’s the one in what we call the family room. This is the one that is, quite frankly, the most boring to look at, but it’s the one that I’ll sneak down at night to look at to bring peace to my soul. Here, you’ll find the God-awful (priceless) toilet paper dowel wrapped in crepe paper made by our son in kindergarten in 1989. You’ll find the ornaments bought on every family vacation, and Bernard and Bianca from “The Rescuers Down Under” (1990), who must always be holding hands. Even a few nicotine-stained Shiny-Brite glass ornaments from my youth remain intact. One stocking over the mantle reads “Johnny” and it was handmade by my Mom-Mom when I was an infant. When our son Chris was born in 1986, I transferred the two silver dollars my Uncle Henny gave to me when I was 5 or 6 years old from the toe of my stocking to the toe of his.

The book tree in the library is the newest addition to the collection. It is by far the most self-indulgent (and self-congratulatory) of the decorations, and I won’t even pretend that there was an effort at subtlety. Much of the detail was lost in the formatting to blogger, but in addition to a few regular ornaments, the branches of the tree are decorated with open and closed editions of my various books. The dangling yellow bits are bookmarks I had made for Zero Sum. We used a standard hole punch near the top to make room for a standard ornament hanger. Finally, instead of a tree skirt, we scattered more books around the base of the tree stand. At last, a practical use for all those author’s copies that have been gathering dust in the basement!

One of the great pleasures of designing your home from scratch is that you get to design it to your own lifestyle. This is Joy’s and my fifth house since we’ve been married, and each previous iteration came burdened with a space called a “living room” which went entirely unlived in. So, for our dream home, upon entering the foyer a glance to the right reveals the “tavern.” (Hey, I’m Irish. Gimme a break.)

Next to the back porch during 8 months of the year, the tavern is probably the room we use more than any other, and not just for the bar–though for that, too.

Of course, a tavern Christmas tree must have special ornaments. When I went to the liquor store and told the clerk why I was buying a couple dozen airline-size bottles of a variety of boozes, she really got into it. Wrap some ribbons around the necks and voila! You’ve got a tree bauble, to which we added more than a few used wine corks. For the record, that tiny bottle you see is the only bit of Jägermeister to be found in our house. I am confident that anyone who has ever been among the last to leave a bar will agree that in the history of time, nothing good has ever happened after the Jägermeister came out.

If you’ve read this far, it is entirely reasonable to ask what does any of this have to do with writing? Well, I’ll tell you: This being December 10th, I owe a short story to an anthology by December 15th, and I’ve been having trouble carving out the time to get it done. It seems like deadlines are a constant in my life, and somehow, I always meet them. But Christmas comes but once a year.

Killzone family, this is my last post before we hit our end-of year hiatus, so let me take this opportunity to wish you the very best for this holiday season and the coming year. May every challenge be surmountable! See you on the flip in ’25!

By John Gilstrap

Finally! I no longer have to keep the secret: my nonfiction book, Six Minutes to Freedom, has been set up at Netflix to be a feature film with a projected release in 2026. I’ve known for at least two months now, but I had to wait for the announcement in Variety before I could go public. Jared Rosenberg will write the script and Toby Jaffe will produce. More on them later.

A romantic beginning.

Back in April, Joy and I were in Greece, celebrating her birthday with an al fresco dinner at the base of the Acropolis when my cell phone rang. Normally, a romantic dinner trumps a phone call, but not when the caller I.D. shows your Hollywood agent’s name, and there was no way he could be bringing anything but good news. With no current film projects in the pipeline, there was no conceivable bad news to deliver.

Good news indeed! One of the hottest new screenwriters in Hollywood–Jared Rosenberg, whose film Flight Risk, directed by and starring Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg, will be released in January, 2025–loves SixMin and wanted to sign an 18-month shopping agreement to turn it into either a feature or a long form series.

“Great news!” I said. “How much?”

“Well, nothing. It’s a shopping agreement. It gives him exclusive rights to package the property and shop it around and see if there’s interest. Maybe he’ll write a treatment, put together a production team, get actors excited.”

I was confused. “Aren’t you the person who told me that no one gets to do anything with my book without paying for the right? Pay to play?”

“That was before the writers’ strike,” he explained. “All the rules have changed. I think you should do it. This guy’s got horsepower now. He can open doors.”

I still wasn’t ready to leave the world I thought I understood. “How can he sell something he doesn’t yet own?”

“That’s the beauty of the shopping agreement,” my agent explained. With so much of the legwork already accomplished by the shopping entity, the author is in a stronger position than ever before.

Not insignificantly, let’s remember that the book came out in 2006. The opportunity cost of a potential mistake was pretty low.

“Let’s do it!”

Then Comes September . . .

. . . and word that 20th Century is very interested in doing a deal for SixMin. While I was busy not paying attention, Jared Rosenberg had joined forces with producer Toby Jaffe and together had been drumming up excitement for this great movie project. It was time for the agents to go to work.

And here’s where it got interesting because we’re all repped by different agents, each of whom is jockeying for the best deal for their client. Over the course of the next few days, we received, rejected, tweaked, countered, and tweaked again various dollar values and deal points, as I presume the other players were likewise doing. It felt to me that we were coming very close to a deal we could live with when . . .

Wait! Netflix wants to make the movie! The negotiation chess game just became three dimensional, with three agents negotiating deals with two studios, with no one knowing the details of what the others are asking for/demanding. This was the first time when I really understood the value of good representation.

Now it’s time for me to be a bit coy so as not to step on toes. When the dust finally settled, the production team was happiest with the deal they hammered out with Studio A, while the Studio B terms were far more favorable for me. I won’t say which player was A or B, but it’s rare in the movie business when the author of the source material is in able to negotiate from a position of power. The best terms for the production folks don’t mean much if they don’t own the rights to the story they want to produce.

Stuff happened behind the scenes, and now we’re set up at Netflix. Cool beans. And as far as I can tell, nobody’s feathers got singed during the back-and-forth.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a hand to play in Tinseltown. It feels good to be back. And for now–for this brief, shining moment in time–it looks like the movie will actually be made. (Everyone please do me a favor and knock wood now.)

By John Gilstrap

Big Brother breathed on my neck yesterday, and I confess it gave me a serious case of the willies. There’s some movie stuff going on that can can’t discuss in detail yet, but it all looks very promising. Extended email exchanges last week culminated in a 4-person Zoom call yesterday afternoon (for me, morning for the other three) that was essentially an opportunity for us all to get to know each other and share some creative ideas.

I’m old school about timeliness (on time is five minutes too late), so at 12:55 I follow the Zoom link and I wait in the virtual waiting room until our host, Cory, opens the meeting. At the top of the hour, the screen blinks, and there’s the Brady Bunch Zoom screen with my face, plus three others from the production team. As we’re about to say hello, a fifth window opens, announcing itself to be me and saying, “Recording.”

“Whoa,” I said. “What’s that?”

“It says it’s you, so I let it in,” Cory said. “I figured you wanted to record the conversation.”

“I don’t mind if you want to record,” said Josh, the director. “I’ve never done that, but I don’t mind.”

“It’s not me,” I said. “I have no idea where it came from. Can you dump it from the meeting?”

“Maybe it’s the Russians,” Adrian, the producer, joked.

After some more cross-talk, Cory found the dump button, and the intruder was excluded from the call. The meeting went well.

That would be creepy enough. But then, I found this in my email, sent to me by Otter.AI:

During a Zoom call, Cory XXX and others discuss an unexpected recording request, initially thought to be from John. There is concern about the presence of Russian hackers and the privacy implications of the recording. Cory suggests exiting and rejoining the meeting to address these concerns. Despite the unease, they decide to proceed, as there are no significant secrets to protect. Cory then instructs to remove an AI note-taker associated with John from the meeting, indicating a preference for transparency and control over the recording process.

But that’s not all. The email goes on to present a more detailed summary of the part of the discussion it listened to, and then there’s a link to the actual recording.

Has anyone else experienced the uninvited arrival of AI bots in their business lives? At least this one had the decency to announce itself before recording, but when I put on my thriller writer hat, it’s easy to see a world where that won’t be necessary.

The creepiest part of it all isn’t the recording, actually. It’s the narrative summary of the recording that freaks me out. Now I have to figure out how to make sure that Otter.AI doesn’t bother me again.

By John Gilstrap

I spent last week in Nashville, Tennessee, at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, where I got to commune with dozens of writer buddies, many of whom I had not seen since the pandemic. In case you’re not familiar with how these conferences work, the official program is filled with various speeches and panels, where writers pretend to understand this thing we do, and the evenings are spent in the bar, where all real business is conducted. I had a wonderful time.

One of the panels I served on was called “Shoot to Thrill,” where I had the honor to share the stage with Brad Thor, Andrew Child, Marc Cameron, and Boyd Morrison, with the mission of discussing how to write action scenes. I shared that I find the choreography of fight scenes to be some of the most tedious writing I do, and Andrew Child was on the opposite end of the spectrum, professing to enjoy writing those scenes.

One of the most interesting questions of the session came from an audience member, who brought up the iconic chase scene from the 1968 movie, Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen and a Ford Mustang. While a bit dated now–in part because I’ve watched it dozens of times–it’s a riveting sequence, featuring great camera work and lots of squealing tires and exciting engine noise. The questioner asked how one would write that sequence for the page and achieve that same level of excitement.

I had never thought about writing in those terms before, but as I thought through my answer, I realized that I had stumbled on the topic of my blog post for this week.

First, to get yourself oriented to the topic, here’s the sequence I’m talking about.

Notice how little storytelling occurs in that chase scene. Lots of adrenaline pumping camera work plus an outstanding sound track, but not much else. This is where writing for the page trumps writing for the screen.

I’m not going to attempt to write the sequence here, but consider all the opportunities for drama if you were to decide to do so:

• What do those aerial hijinks feel like to the driver’s spine?
• What is he thinking as be blasts through stop signs?
• How intent is he on keeping track of pedestrians and other vehicles as he speeds through the streets of San Francisco?
• What are his intentions if he catches up with the fleeing car?
• What do those downshifts feel like?
• How does he keep control when he loses the back end in a turn?
• What does all that burning rubber smell like?

The list goes on and on. The trick in writing an action scene for the page is to bring the reader into the protagonist’s head and body. Every action has a reaction–Newton’s Third Law of Writing. Focus on those reactions because that’s where the humanity of your character resides.

I wrote above that I find it tedious to write action sequences, and the reason is the delicate choreography of the action and the humanity, while still advancing the plot and not breaking the rhythm of the storytelling. After clearing a room and shooting bad guys, Jonathan Grave may change out a magazine before moving to the next room, even though the mag is half-full because, as he says, you never bring old bullets to a new gunfight. (More bullets are always preferred to fewer bullets.) That mag change would be just a few hand motions on the screen, but that sentence on the page provides an opportunity for characterization that advances the storytelling.

What say you, TKZ family? What’s your secret to writing effective action scenes?

By John Gilstrap

It seems that my writing process, if I have one at all, is to stack as many odds against myself as I can. I overcommit to too many real-life projects at the same time, I don’t outline, and I push my writing schedule way too close to deadlines. The net result is to live in a world that is far more stressful than it needs to be.

Somehow, it works. It just doesn’t always feel that way.

Sometimes, when I’m pantsing along without benefit of an outline–pretty much the definition of pantsing (as opposed to plotting, or outlining)–I can find myself in the middle of a plot twist that seemed like a really great idea when I first made the turn, but now that my character is in the middle of great peril, I have no clue how I’m going to get him out of it. Or, perhaps she made a bold courageous choice, and I now have to figure out why she would have done such a self-destructive thing instead of making the safer, more logical choice.

Tick-tock. Deadline’s coming.

The coward’s way out is to go back and change the story to relieve the pain on the story’s pressure pressure point. I resist doing that for several reasons. First of all, I’ve learned over the decades that my imagination takes me to places for a reason. If the choice that got me in trouble seemed like a good idea when I made it, I’ve got to trust that it was, indeed a good idea. If I stay with it long enough, a solution will emerge.

Too many inexperienced writers, I believe, punt early and take the coward’s way out. They find themselves in a creative corner, claim “writer’s block”, and then either abandon the project or start over. Don’t do it, folks. Stay the course.

But if you do go back and undo the troublesome plot twist, beware the ripple effect. If you’ve written for anytime at all, you’ve been there: where a single change to a plot point makes another plot point no longer relevant, and by the time the secondary and tertiary effects are calculated that tiny change has created major headaches.

Another reason I rarely go back and make changes (never say “never,” right?) is purely logistical: I typically don’t have time left in the schedule for long rewrites. Since I’m always screaming, face on fire, to make my deadlines, I’m lucky if I’ve got a week left over after typing The End to do the clean up rewrite. I most definitely don’t have time to rewrite the entire third act. So, damn the torpedoes, my course is set.

Finally, logistics aside, here’s the most important reason not to take the coward’s way out and punt to the rewrite: hubris. old fashioned pride. My characters aren’t cowards, so I can’t be one either. If I put them in a tough situation, I can get them out. And you know what? I always can! Sometimes it takes the application of a little more imaginary explosives, other times it takes an additional character with a few lines of dialogue.

There’s a weird thing that happens in every book, and it always comes about in the third act. I call it the unexpected shortcut. I’ll have planned this elaborate set piece with multiple points of view that’s going to take ages to write, and then out of nowhere, I’ll get smacked with the realization that I’ve provided myself with a much more streamlined, elegant and effective route to the conclusion that I didn’t even know I’d written.

In my most recently completed book, Burned Bridges, the first of the Irene Rivers series, to be released next year, I found myself buried up to my neck in the third act with the action scenes clear in my mind, but I didn’t have a way to reveal to the good guys the secrets that justified killing the bad guys. Once the bad guys died, their secrets would die with them, but I didn’t have a believable motivation for them to confess. I knew there had to be a way.

Then it hit me. I had introduced a character way back in the second chapter whose original purpose was to be a walk-on catalyst for an entirely different scene. All Irene Rivers had to do was place a phone call to this character (no longer just a walk-on, and likely destined to return i future books), and the rest would fall into place.

Whether you’re new to this writing game or wizened and gristly with war stories from the storytelling trenches, you need to remind yourself from time to time that you’ve got this. You know what you’re doing. The story that seemed like a great idea when you first started writing it is no less a good idea just because the telling of it is getting frustrating. It’s supposed to be a little bit hard all the time.

Okay, it’s your turn, TKZ family. How do you hack your way out of plot corners?