Writing anything more than a piece of flash fiction usually requires that you flex several different tools in order to get the story over the finish line—description, dialogue, exposition, and, depending on the kind of story we’re talking about, action.
Action scenes can be a challenge. Just like a film director who edits the scene so frenetically the viewer has no understanding of the spatial relations, a writer can botch an action scene, rendering it confusing or, worse, unexciting. In fact, one of the easiest ways to screw up an action scene, whether it’s a gunfight, hand-to-hand combat, or a chase, is to model your scene mechanics on a visual medium. We’re all trained at this point in the 21st century to imagine our scenes as movies, but you have to take a more literary approach if you’re going to sell your action.
Ouch
The key here is to avoid the Superhero Problem. We’ve all seen action scenes in films where the hero takes a beating that would leave any normal human a smear on the floor, but the hero just shrugs it off and comes roaring back. Even in recent entertainments that have tried to introduce an element of realism—Atomic Blonde, say, or Netflix’s Daredevil with their out-of-breath heroes struggling to find the strength for one more go-round—still have the hero exhibiting ludicrous amounts of energy and strength, not to mention a tolerance for pain and injury beyond mere mortals.
That’s not really the problem, of course—these are superheros or superspies, after all, and the audience isn’t really looking for realism, I don’t think. The problem with this approach is really how it lowers the stakes. If your combatants can’t really be hurt, if no amount of exhaustion will stop your heroes, then why will your reader care?
The trick is to remember that you’re writing, not filming. Convey to your reader how it all feels, how it affects them. Make it personal. If your protagonist conveys agony and exhaustion, you’ll be better able to sell desperation and courage. And you’ll also seize better control over the blocking and staging of your scenes, because you’ll be ‘seeing’ everything through your characters’ eyes.
Plus, if you’re like me and walking up the stairs leaves you winded and nauseous, having your characters be exhausted all the time will feel more real, and thus you’ll be more invested in the writing.