Don’t Come In, Guns Blazing

by

In Today’s Journal

* My Quote of the Day
* You Have to Write What Is
* Don’t Just Come In, Guns Blazing
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

My Quote of the Day

“When I’m writing an intense scene and I have to get up to do something else, I often release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. When I sit down again and return to the story I’m back inside it, and I don’t know whether I’m breathing or not.” HS

You Have to Write What Is

If you’re going to write an authentic story, you have to write what is. Or as Stephen King and Bradbury have both said, write what scares you.

Or what turns your stomach. Or what annoys you. Write whatever happens in the story as you run through it with your characters. Anything less is a conscious-mind author intrusion.

I ended yesterday and began this morning by writing the most difficult scene and chapter, emotionally, I’ve ever written, and that’s going some.

I’ve never written any passage I dislike more. I’m glad it’s over so I can get back to the rest of the story and see what happens next.

Don’t Just Come In, Guns Blazing

Some famous writer, maybe Ray Chandler, said when the story slows you should have men with guns come through the door. WITD aside, that’s good advice.

There are all kinds of action scenes. But what matters isn’t so much the action itself as capturing and conveying the intensity.

Conveying intensity goes to pacing. So this post, also and finally, is the ‘pacing in narrative’ post I promised you a couple of months ago. (For my recent posts on Pacing in Dialogue, in order, click

Even in a thriller or action-adventure, it isn’t all guns blazing.

You still have to ground the reader. You still have to pull the reader into the scene with the POV character.

Note that this pacing technique will work in any genre. (Even Romance, DD. [grin])

Below is how I conveyed intensity through pacing in a transition scene. This is the lead-up to an actual assassination with multiple targets.

I recommend you pay particular attention to the paragraphing and, secondarily, to the sentence fragments and sentence lengths and also (always) to the nuances.

For one example of a nuance, “Yes. I think so” conveys a slightly different attitude or thought or tone or intent than “Yes, I think so.”

Okay, here’s the excerpt:

It was a quick trip in the elevator, only three floors.

As the car settled, the elevator dinged.

I closed my eyes, pictured the floorplan:

The ice-machine alcove is down the hall to the right, 50 or 60 feet. He’ll have a man there. I know I would. Then:

The suite. The third door across the hall to the left. No more than 30 feet. Then:

Inside, the living room, the kitchen to the left, the hallway to the bedroom beyond. The living room, the kitchen to the left, the hallway to the bedroom beyond. The living room, the kitchen—

The doors shifted, started to open.

I opened my eyes, took a deep breath, released it quietly: “Room 306.” But the alcove first.

As the doors opened, I took another breath, released it, and raised the Beretta in my right hand. I stepped out and walked to the right.

At the corner of the alcove a face poked out low, staring, eyes wide, mouth open. A hand brought a device to his right ear and—Why didn’t he duck back?—I fired.

The head shattered, dropped, a black rectangle flopping to the carpet near his right hand, and—

Nobody else at the alcove.

I pulled the second Beretta as I turned around and angled across the hall, past the maw of the elevator on the left, and pictured the suite again: The living room, the kitchen to the left, the hallway to the bedroom beyond.

I stopped just short of the door. The hinges were toward me.

The door opens to the right.

I looked at the number, verified it was 306, then reached with the right Beretta: tap-tap-tap. I tightened my grip on the left Beretta let it hang loose at my hip.

Nothing.

I frowned. What the hell? I brought up the right Beretta and turned it. I used the heel of my hand to thud-thud-thud and stage-whispered “Ayuda! Help!”

As I adjusted my grip on the left Beretta, the doorknob turned and the door opened a crack and a slit of light spilled through and someone growled “Qué quieres? Whaddayou want?”

It was like a starter’s pistol.

The transition scene above is only 355 words.

If it drew you in as a reader and made you want to read what happened next, all of that is due to the

  • paragraphing,
  • sentence lengths,
  • the use of sentence fragments, and again
  • the tiny nuances (I closed/opened my eyes, I took/released a breath, etc.)

Note: Sometimes the closed/opened eyes thing is only a blink in real time. In those cases, detail what happens during the blink. That’s also a great time to bring in the other physical senses: smell, taste, touch, a memory, etc.

If the passage above seems detailed, it is. It’s very detailed. But if it seems difficult, it isn’t.

Everything in the excerpt is exactly as it happened in the hotel on that late evening/early morning.

Note that as a recorder, I simply wrote what happened and how the character reacted.

Then, as the presenter during cycling (and copyediting But Remaining Always In the Creative Voice), I let the character touch the paragraphing of the scene as I read through it.

As I said, this technique isn’t difficult to do, and it also isn’t difficult to learn. You only have to trust yourself and your characters.

There are only two steps to learning the technique:

  1. Read for pleasure and then study the works of your favorite fiction writers (as I said, you will find this technique is used across the genres).
  2. Practice pacing: Practice applying paragraphing, sentence lengths, sentence fragments, and nuances to your own work in progress.

You might even pull a favorite chapter or scene from one of your previously published novels and use it to practice pacing so you can see it in action without risk.

Finally, feel free to ‘type in’ the excerpt above on your own if you want (not for publication, of course) to get a feel for the rhythm and flow. You’ll be amazed at the difference doing that will make in your own work.

Any questions on this at all, email me at harveystanbrough@gmail.com.

Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

Finding and Sharing Joy as a Writer

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………… 1130

Writing of Blackwell Ops 36: Temple’s Dream

Day 1…… 2476 words. To date…… 2476
Day 2…… 1484 words. To date…… 3960
Day 3…… 2837 words. To date…… 6797
Day 4…… 4223 words. To date…… 11020
Day 5…… 3366 words. To date…… 14386
Day 6…… 3123 words. To date…… 17509
Day 7…… 1289 words. To date…… 18798
Day 8…… 3609 words. To date…… 22407

Fiction for January…………………… 109600
Fiction for 2025………………………. 109600
Nonfiction for January……………….. 30660
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 30660
2025 consumable words…………….. 140260

Average Fiction WPD (January)…….. 3779

2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 2
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 3
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 106
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 274
Short story collections……………………. 29

Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.

Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.