Dramatic Action

I've been working really hard the last few months to craft plots with a lot of dramatic action, so I thought I'd share with you all and hopefully learn a few things from the collective intelligence I've been hearing so much about. This part is Writing 101, so please bear with me if you are, like, waaaaay past this in your work. :-)

Dramatic action describes the story beats that relate the plot. This is different from things that establish factual things about the character (e.g. he's married), or things that establish motivation or need (e.g. Reese's story in The Terminator confessing his reason for traveling through time). Dramatic action primarily concerns itself with conflict, specifically, conflict that generates action, i.e. plot.

For instance, in television, dramatic action is generally compressed (e.g. those short teasers in L&O that set up the crime), expressed in dialogue (like when characters talk about how angry so-and-so's off-screen behaviour makes them -- Aaron Sorkin is the master of this type of drama as I have yet to see anything actually happen during one of his shows), or elided (as in two characters prepare for the "Big Raid," then we cut to the aftermath of the raid).

In contrast, film stories are comprised of the most dramatic action you can find, bits that exemplify the protagonist's emotional journey. I'll go back to my favorite film LA CONFIDENTIAL for an example here. The open of the film establishes the main players and the film's themes through a jail riot (the Bloody Christmas scandal). From here on, the viewer can anticipate Exley's bulldog response when he discovers the inconsistencies in the Nite Owl murders and that he will be uncompromising in his pursuit of the truth, no matter the cost, as well as each of the other core cast members' emotional responses to the rising tide of shit that is at the heart of the film.

Dramatic action invests the viewer in the emotional journey of the story. It is the most difficult thing to master, and typically, the most dynamically evolving tool in the craft arsenal. It requires an attention to human psychology and a sense of spectacle. The writers who tend to make the biggest splash in the spec world are those who have an inherent sense of dramatic action -- not just what story to tell, but also the best way to show the story as they are telling it. These writers are adept at creating a voyeur out of the viewer (mmm, my literary criticism theory slip is showing here, sorry).

So, in short, I'm struggling to find some decent dramatic action to tell the story I'm writing. I like things that are visual, require the core cast to take dramatic action that will serve to reveal their motivations and strengths/weaknesses, and since I'm shoring up the bottom of the second act, I find that I've been going back into the first act to remove information that is revealed too soon, and planting "mini-beats" that foreshadow the big plot turn I have planned for my little people.

I'd love to hear alternate/opposing view points to all of the above, and, of course, anyone who wants to share their wisdom is welcome to do so. Toodles.

P.S. The pic is from the NY TIMES' excellent article on photojournalist Enrique Metinides, a Mexican photog who specialized in death, gore and other sensational images. I'm putting the coffee table book on my wish list today!