GO FOR IT!
Action is not easy to write because what you leave out is as important as what you put in. It’s a delicate balance between providing enough information to visualise the scene but not so much that the pace slows as a result. Description paints a picture; dialogue allows us to listen. But action has to put us right inside a scene so that we feel everything as the characters feel it, apparently in real time.
Percussive punctuation
Punctuation is your friend with action writing. It’s an opportunity for you to use the full range of punctuation to give your sentences more movement. That could mean chopping phrases up small with full stops, or using semi-colons to connect breathless chains of occurrences, or using dashes to focus the attention on specific images or thoughts. Commas, too, can be used to let a sentence run on and on. The trick is to
