Planning action sequences
Something I don't always understand when reading a book with any amount of action in it, or perhaps even a battle or a fight, is how some authors don't seem to have thought through exactly what it is that's happening in their fictional world. Too many times I’ve read books where one second a character is one side of the room, then the next he or she is at the other, and with no discernable reason for that sudden shift having taken place. Now I come to think about it, it reminds me very much of this approach a lot of films make nowadays to try and reduce their rating by using so many cuts you can’t actually tell what is physically going on other than get the appreciative sense that there’s a) some action, and b) that it’s quite intense.
Personally, I prefer something a bit more ‘planned out’. As a writer I like to use simple diagrams to plan out battles or action sequences so that at the very least, the reader gets a real sense of where things are, how they’ve happened, and that they’ve happened in a way that befits the fictional world created and the rules set out therein.
As an example of my approach to dynamic action scenes, here is a plan I made for a sequence in the third book of The Powers that be trilogy:
