Break your action into
beats. For each beat, have one adversary try to do something and the other adversary respond. In general the kinds of actions you can have are attack, retreat, block or distract. If it's a car chase then:
Attack: might include trying to overtake, ram or run another vehicle off the road, or shooting at the other vehicle;
Retreat: might include accelerating away, veering off down a side-street, or the rear vehicle breaking off the chase;
Block: might include road-blocks, tyre-spikes, swerving to cut off overtaking, using other traffic or terrain to impede the other vehicle
Distract: might include creating obstacles on the road, shining lights at the driver, covering the other driver's windscreen, harrying one vehicle with another vehicle (e.g. a chopper), hiding your vehicle from view, or doing a hand-brake turn and trying to retreat in the opposite direction
For any attempt there can be any of four outcomes:
- Yes: the attempt succeeds;
- Yes, but: the attempt succeeds but there are problems or complications;
- No: the attempt fails;
- No and furthermore: the attempts fails and creates additional problems or complications.
From the perspective of the viewpoint character, tension is sustained by any of the outcomes except for 1).
Significant in action scenes is who has the
initiative. The character with the initiative gets to try stuff; the character who doesn't have initiative gets to react. Initiative can flow back and forth between the adversaries depending on the outcome. This contributes to
suspense. You can also create suspense by leaving the outcome of some attempt unresolved for a while (e.g. the car catches fire and the hero can't drive and put it out at the same time).
Hopefully this supplies an anatomy for a car-chase (or really, any other physical action scene). Now let's talk about how to write a
good one.
The good chases will have tension and suspense but they'll also be
personal. There will be personal stakes, and personalities revealed through action. A good action scene strips the masks from its participants, showing us something about them that might surprise us.
In an episode of
The Shield for instance, there's a foot-chase between the police and a fleeing criminal. The criminal is light and quick, and at the climax of the chase, climbs up over a fence (a distraction attempt that succeeds); the main character Vic is heavy-set and goes
through the fence to bring him down (an attack attempt that
also succeeds). What makes this scene exciting isn't just the spectacle of a burly policeman charging through a fence, but what it tells us about that
particular burly policeman.
So to make your major action scenes sing:
- Make the stakes personal;
- Vary the stakes as the scene develops;
- Reveal something about the major characters;
- Resolve the scene with character consequences, not just a result.
Hope this helps.
