Sat, May 19 2012
Action Workshop!
Well, it's been long enough to recover from the last workshop . . . oh, yeah, Jammies and Cocoa. I'm almost recovered. Let's have an action workshop!
These could be the Rules: The action in your scene should be primarily non-verbal -- people can yell and speak and so forth, but you're not moving the plot on dialog, you're moving the plot on physical action. It should be a particular sort of physical action as well: direct, emphatic physical confrontation. (Writing a scene in which Passepartout is skating down a frozen river hauling a sled filled with fireworks would be an action scene, but not the sort of action scene I have in mind.)
This workshop will be for people who need to throw someone out of a window and are not quite sure how to approach it; for a fist-fight on a barge heading for water-gate that has been left open; for a rumble in the street between the Ungodly and the Just and Righteous (When you're a Fogg, you're a Fogg all the way from your first cup of tea to your last dying day . . .); for the situation in which Jules has successfully snuck into the villainess' boidoir to retrieve Fogg's gambling chits but been discovered by some of the large persons who concern themselves about her personal safety and who has to make a run for it running into and through and around and between and such-like.
Action scenes that I have in mind would include the massive Manchu melee at the end of "Black Glove," or the fight scene(s) at the end of "The Cardinal's Revenge" but before the russian-roulette scene; or what the Phileas-and-Rebecca-break-in-to-rescue-Jules-and- Amaterasu scene might have looked like with more of a budget; or the fistfight between Phileas and that tall guy in "Strange Death;" that sort of action scene.
At least three people; physical movement; resisted action; let's take this opportunity to get physical . . . and active . . .
Susan's Rules are that people who post a challenge or a workshop are obliged to lead off with their own example. I have to do homework all weekend, so I propose this as my example: send your suggestions for an action scene to the board, and on Monday I will print them out, put them into a Welsh country-woman's costume hat that I happen to have, pull one out, and write it, posting it on Wednesday to kick off our action workshop.
Then everybody else gets three or four weeks to write theirs, I collect 'em all, and we post them all in a lovely bouquet around the later part of July. You may elect to write an existing action scene from an SAJV episode or write a new scene of your own devising.
If this sounds like a fun thing to do, please so signify by posting an idea for an action scene for me to use, and I'll get started!
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