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Apr 2024

My best genres are Romance, Drama, slice of life. All things character building and emotion based. So if you use the @ for your questions, i'm willing to do my best to answer them.

I struggle writing action scenes. What methods do you guys use to make action scenes actually FEEL dangerous? I don't have trouble explaining what's going on, but making the action scenes feel as high stakes as they are, and keeping the pacing feeling fast enough is a bit of a struggle.

I'm open for any tips on writing action scenes though, so please do share away.

My preferred genre is fantasy! I really enjoy worldbuilding and coming up with cool magic systems.

Re: action scenes, that's something I've struggled with for a long time, and it's only after many years of writing that I've started to feel semi-decent at it, lol. A few tips I've picked up that might help you (or anyone else with similar problems):

  • Don't overcomplicate it. I used to stress a lot about characters just doing the same things over and over, but that doesn't mean you always need to try and come up with something new and innovative for every scene.

  • You don't actually need to narrate every single action. Again, like I said above, I used to get really bogged down in the details, and found a lot of mileage from glossing over the repetitive stuff and just focusing on key moments.

  • The characters' personalities can affect what they do in a fight! e.g. A confident character might be more aggressive, or someone might act more defensive when they know they're outmatched, or my personal favorite "character gets noticeably more aggressive when their loved ones are in danger." Good stuff!

Me too actually! Both of my current stories are fantasy romance although I've written some short stories that were a bit more contemporary fiction.

I also struggle with these, I feel like it is so hard to do the dangers of the situation justice without actually doing any action. My action scenes always feel very short, but I never said my novel was an action novel, lol
I've got a spoiler here from Chapter 13 of my main novel:
The expressions of the soldiers were enough to determine who was on her side and who would side with her uncle. Surprisingly the majority of them seemed to be on her side. Giving the signal to Aza, she immediately jumped into action calling the soldiers to arms.
“You see, I have a good part of your army on my side and I intend to treat my people as they deserve to be treated. Your tyranny ends today!” Alice said as she commanded her animals to join the fray.
They were biting, kicking and distracting any soldier who dared to resist. Per Alice’s order, not a single soldier was to be intentionally killed. Any injuries dealt to her uncle’s soldiers in self defense were okay, but she preferred they were all restrained instead.

yeah, i'm working on an adventure story for a competition rn, and since it has to be under 3k words, that means i'll have to bring a lot of action to make it feel adventurous (at least that's how I see it) it's a struggle.

@AmysGames

thanks for the advice!

My preferred genre is anything to do with philosophy / spirituality... and politics and religion.

As well as action scenes.

My weakness is making characters small talk.

did you want advice on writing small talk lol? it's one of my strong points

One thing about writing small talk is to keep in mind your character's personalities. They may be talking about something boring like work, but their personalities will most likely still come through in the scenes. Even if your story is written from a third person perspective, it gives you an opportunity to use little details in the dialog as a way to hint toward what the characters are thinking.

If they are angry at the person they are talking to, it might subtly come through in statements they make while feigning to be polite. If they are romantically interested in a person, but talking in a group setting, they might try to lead the conversation back toward the person they actually want to be talking to.

I think the biggest piece of advice I have is not to write in small talk if it doesn't serve a purpose. I usually use small talk and subtly weave it up to a more important conversation by putting little verbal triggers in the small talk that make the character's gradually change the topic, other times you can use the conversation to hint toward something more important, or have their thoughts playing in the background while meaningless dialog takes place. I use all these methods for incorporating small talk into my stories.

My best genre is probably similar to yours! I always include Romance in every story I make! :smile:
I tried making Horror comics before, they weren't my best works but I think I did pretty well creating light suspense, haha!

As for my struggles, definitely something with Mystery and Twists involved! I haven't tried making Actions stories, but I think I can do it if I have a specific plot idea!

what kind of twists do you mean?

I don't really have a specialty. I think my dialogue is pretty good as well as my layouts for panels. I'm doing a romance style comics now so there is lots of talking, but there is still a fair bit of action when called for. I'm still learning color as all my normal artwork was black and white, so I would say that is still my weakness in my comics.

Well it's good to be well rounded too. Maybe you'll find a specialty, or maybe what you do will grow evenly all around

I prefer writing comedy and slice-of-life.

I guess I struggle with action scenes. Action scenes in media tends to bore me in general so I don't really understand what about it excites people.

Erotic / humour / antiheros and short autobiographic stories which are mainly
about making music.

I would not be able to write fantasy, violenct stories or an action scene / car chase because I´m not
really interested in it.

I don´t feel like I struggle with a certain genre because I only write the genres that
I like but I start struggling when I have to write longer stories. I guess my ideas and
characters are not suited for long stories

so did you want advice I on wanting longer stories or no?

I would like advice for longer stories.

I´m not sure what the problem is though. I usually hate the main character when
I finished the story and they always change during the writing

So you like the initial character designs but you find that over the course of long stories your characters change into a character you hate?

(asking for clarity so I can answer the question/offer help)

Yes, that happened to me a couple of times. It works for short stories but it´s really
hard for me to make longer stories with antiheros

Is it possibe you don't have your character's growth planned out? Or maybe they don't have enough flaws to start with, so they gain some as the story progesses to make them more rounded? Usually the image I have for my characters at then end is very different from the one in the beginning. They end up growing out or into some of their flaws and even their personalities are a little different. More confidence, more acceptance, etc. I get a little angry at my character's from the beginning because I know how much potential they have and where they're heading, it lets me look forward to their future.

I think having a character that grows is a sign of good writing. It's also very possible that if you're character wasn't the most well rounded person before, them gaining flaws or growing in ways you didn't expect is just a sign that your writing is improving because you're writing more realistic characters. But then you have to balance the fine line of a realisitic character and one that isn't dislikable. My only advice is really just to plan it out a little, don't just have an end goal for the story but also your character's emotional arc as well.

My specialties are Fantasy, YA, Coming of age and I dabble in historic fiction. Themes that I often play with are enviromentalism, human ethics, healing from trauma, and I don't really know what else.

I'm pretty a bad at sci-fi. I've been trying to get more into it but it's hard for me to write the settings that are soo different from our own. I'm also not great at shorter stories. It's hard for me to fit a plot into just a few pages.

One thing that would probably help this process is to clearly define the emotional arc/change you want your character to go through. Then you can orchestrate all the chapters and events that take place between the beginning and the end to make sure you never deviate too far from your intended direction. It also helps to have a character reference sheet to refer to.

Sometimes you don't have to plan out your characters' evolutions ahead of time, though it's usually helpful, but there should always be factors of who they are that remain consistent no matter how much they change otherwise, that allows them to remain the character you love.

These are the center points of your character, and you can change other things around them, but never the actual basis of their personality.

I also find that if you WANT to write longer stories, then developing backstory is super helpful. One, it helps you to have a stronger understanding of your characters so they can remain consistent, and also the more you know about their backstories, the more details you will find to expand upon, to keep the story from feeling like it's length is unnecessary.

The biggest thing about writing short stories (I've actually done this professionally) I've learned is to focus on either one scene, or one train of thought, that is, events that directly stem off of each other leading toward a clear end.

For instance:

  1. A whole story set in one scene where someone is getting their hair done talking to the stylist, who is making fun of them behind their back in another language because their hair is so short, saying she looks like a boy.

  2. A short story that revolves around a character focusing all their time on trying to finish a book for a competition and paying no attention to the people around them or having time for them.


Making a point to end on the climax of the story also helps. Because of the length of the story, you don't really want to allow the story to fade out, or have a falling action. Sometimes don't even state what people expect the climax to be, and end right before the part that everybody is waiting for, just implying what happens next.

You can make all sorts of things the climax of the story.

  1. continuing example one. the stylists make fun of the woman, only for them to shock them by replying to them in their language, that she had cancer. You end the story directly after the reveal.

  2. The person who was working so hard on the book and ignoring everyone, finally finishes the manuscript and goes to submit it just to realize that the competition received so many entries, it closed early. And now they are just standing at the location alone with nothing to do, because they'd already turned down a friends invitation to some sort of event (say a birthday party etc.)


These are just the tips and things that I've found work for me, but I hope they help you.

BL! If there was a genre for it on Tapas, I would also say tragedy.

For tragic/gory/fighting scenes, I would just imagine the scene in my head how I would personally want to see in a novel, and try to translate that as best as I can with my ability.

I could never write sci-fi, I don't have the technology knowledge to put something together that makes sense lol. Also, war-based stories.

scifi is all about watching science videos and reading science books and then taking what you know to create a fake science theory that sounds like it could be real even if it really makes no sense.

Ex: there are no other planets in this solar system that humans can live on. What if pieces of the other planets were combined, using Mars because it's terrestrial and collecting gases from the gas giants to make artificial air like that of earth? then the entire planet can be encased in a force field to simulate an atmosphere.

Tada. science fiction.

That's such a reductionist take of what scifi is and can be as a genre. It's so much more than just "making up a fake science theory".

At it's best the genre serves as a thought experiment about the impact of technology on the human condition and society. It's very philisophical in that regard.

Knowing this, you can see why Star Trek is science fiction, while Star Wars is not (it's a space opera more akin to fantasy).
In the same vein I'm also loathe to call my own story, Trespasser, true science fiction. It mearly has the set dressing of the genre without the subject matter.

Thanks for the advice

Character growth is definitely something to consider.
I don´t worry about them not having enough flaws because they are antihero
protagonists with a lot of flaws. Maybe I need to consider making their flaws
even worse towards the end of story

The genre I was so specialized in is Fantasy, sure there might be a few drama, romance but fantasy with action is what I'm good at.

I pay attention to world-building, established ground rules, lore, and make sure I didn't do anything that is considered a retcon.

But right now, I am preparing a science fiction comic and trying to be good at it. I might publish it on Tapas next early next year.

What I struggle with is horror, though I never tried it but I'm not sure how to make it scary for the readers. Some day, I'll try it on a sci-fi comic.

I think people confuse setting with genre. In Star Wars it's a setting. It just happens to take place in a futuristic looking setting (I know it's in the past). But the sci fi part is just background noise. It's not a needed part of the story really. As you said it can be easily a story about knights and wizards. Star Trek is more a genre as it's part of the story. You could make the Enterprise a naval ship, but it would lose something in the storytelling. The science fiction huge part of the stories.

I would also say there is a spectrum of science fiction. That is why people came up with sci-fi and science fiction. People argue stuff like star trek is sci-fi while 2001: a Space Odyssey is science fiction. More grounded in reality, where Trek literally just combines science sounding words to explain things.

I love Scifi as a genre but I feel like a lot of people don't really understand what it is. It's not just science mumbo jumbo.

Scifi is about creating an alternate world, be it on another planet, alternative earth, or the future, and use that to tell an allegory. Because of the setting, you can push elements to an extreme.

A lot of scifi is very political and talk about government, ethics, human rights, identity, etc.

Scifi can be very heavy in it's world building like Star Wars or it can be more subtle like Get Out.

I've heard the term for series that focus more on the worldbuilding that isn't necessarily grounded in real science is "Science Fantasy" rather than "Science Fiction," take that as you will lol.

I think explaining every theory means breaking it down to it's core lol. But everyone has a different idea on what makes a genre a genre. Me and my fellow writers I know create a lot of science fiction, and it's 80% a breeding ground for our theories on pseudo science and creating new worlds. Teleportation, creating new worlds from pieces of other words, impossible surgeries, fake gravity etc. We love using science fiction as a way to imagine how the world or new worlds could exist differently, and stemming from these world ideas, we create plots, drama etc.

@NickRowler

I was largely joking with HOW over simplified I made the tip. I actually write a lot of sci-fi and sci-fantasy (was planning as release one of my sci-fi books as one of my next Tapas projects actually) so I'm not making fun of it, that's just how my personal writing process actually works for it. Regardless of how you create the setting, I think most science fiction isn't based in "science" that checks out. Hence why I was explaining creating the concepts that way.

Let's all please not make this into an angry genre fight. These stories are fiction, and open to interpretation to what it means to everyone reading AND writing it

No one was doing that?

People were just sharing their thoughts on what makes scifi, scifi. It just happened to stem from your oversimplification, joke or not. Open discussion =/= fighting.

And just to add, you have this thread to be about genre, genre writing and giving advice to others. To then give some reductionist take on one, even as a joke, kinda flies against that idea. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that there's some pushback against it.

I would venture to say that most tips by nature have to be simplifications because there are infinite details to any craft.

Giving a reductionist "step 1 step 2 step 3" vantage to a genre may be an over-simplification, but it also doesn't make the tip invalid. Writing a genre works differently for everyone who writes it, and the tip I gave is a simplified way of how I create my science fiction stories. I could post an essay, but that wasn't really the point.

Nor did I say any specific person is or was fighting, I am also just reminding people that everyone has a different interpretation of what counts as "sci-fi or science fiction." It is too easy to begin writing off stories or creating rules as to how you should or shouldn't write a genre. There are people who will consider "Star Wars" sci-fi and others who won't. Some may dispute whether or not "Doctor Who" is science fiction, or whether a story like "Frankenstein" is horror or science fiction. When I write science fiction, it is largely about pseudo science more than it is philosophical, but I still wouldn't consider it science-fantasy. The point of writing is creative expression, and can be interpreted differently by each individual doing it.

My specialties are dialogue and slice of life. I'm told my weakness is grounding the characters in a scene with some background details. My movie-like story building is great for dialogue, but I forget to describe, say, that A is fidgeting with a coffee cup while he talks.

I struggled with that at the beginning of my novel too lol.

My best tip for that is that you can use everything to come full circle back to your dialog. Sometimes it's easy to worry about the action descriptions breaking up the dialog, so I've taught myself to use setting as a simile or analogy I tie back into dialog so it never seems to stray away too far.

Example: MC is talking to her crush during a picnic at the park. She starts to unpack the basket but he tells her he'll do it, so she just looks down at the dizzy, swirling pattern of the picnic blanket, that seems to mirror the confounded way she's feeling, trying to find the right words to say.

And then you go back to dialog again.

This is just what works for me, but I hope it helps lol.

23 days later

@Leyelle I like writing mysteries! Although I don’t think they’re the typical murder mystery, there is something the protagonists are trying to discover, but usually it’s a hidden secret or history. But I use the same formula of having them find clues and try to connect dots to figure it out, and I love having everything fall together. I look at my stories like big puzzles and it’s very rewarding when I do find that perfect ending :sparkles:

If only I could actually stick to a story lol although with Butter Bee I think I’ve finally been able to stick to that as a long term project.

I sort of have a hard time fitting into the genres here but I think most of my stories can broadly be put under the category of Surrealism and Speculative Fiction, but I tend to mix alot of elements of other ones with it depending on the story. (I have way too many half finished stories)

Honestly, I have a lot that don't even manage to get halfway finished lol. Their more like a whole bunch of notes and one paragraph of one chapter XD.

I do the mystery elements in my plots a lot too, but I don't know how to write a full on, Sherlock Holmes type mystery. I also like Sci-fi a lot tho too, though I also write a ton of other genres. Do you have any stories outside of sci-fi and surrealism?

Ooh I have many stories that I just outlines too I get you lol. I wish I could have more focus though, if I stayed with one story I’d probably have a whole story and half maybe even two written by now! Because I’ve written about 80,000 words since last fall but they’re split between 3 different stories :sob: I’m trying hard to stick to one but it’s making me go slower the longer I go with it so I think the hardest thing for me to write is ACTUALLY writing it’s so sad :sob: My attention and focus is very fickle.

And yeah! I think a lot of writers mix different genres together :slight_smile: And I really only write what I love, which is surrealist and science fiction, although I think the stories have very different appearances despite this. I sort of have a different genre I’ve worked with before? But I think it can still be counted as speculative and surreal. But it’s basically a romantic comedy lmao yeah that’s right I wrote a romance story :sob: I need to rewrite it though because the old script is very old! It was actually really fun to write though I hadn’t realized romance was fun because it’s not a huge focus in my other stories as much or at all sometimes.

But here are the main characters for that story idea lol. Their names are Kay and Theo. These are all more recent artworks.

There’s two other janky characters in the last one that are other characters in the same story btw forgot to mention :sweat_smile:

Lol, are those lizards or salamanders?

"Damsel in the Red Dress" was my first romance novel, but I found that it was actually really fun to write, and I write a lot of couples even in my other stories that aren't romance haha. I love writing romances, but sometimes my stories aren't mixed genres, (pure romance, mostly just comedy, sci-fi) and so on.

Is Kay short for something?

One thing that helps me with this, though it might not work for everyone, is to intentionally work on a like two or three stories primarily, so that I don't burn my brain out just focusing on one thing, but I can cycle between those things to help me actually finish them all, albeit slowly.