Product Review

Do you want to create "water cooler moments" in your stories? Do you want readers to talk about how they were riveted action and scenes in your work?

Action and Scenes: How To Move Your Stories Forward, Beat by Beat, the fifth volume of The Elements of Writing Series, provides a simple but detailed strategy for producing the moments that people remember in stories.

Let’s face it. Action is an essential ingredient of all stories. Even stories about “nothing,” like Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, are chock-full of action words. Even the most abstract description and analysis benefit from using action scenes.

If you want to capture and hold your reader, you will give them action—and lots of it.

In Action and Scenes, we start by exploring how to create action. We identify the four key moments of action

• The decision to act
• Hesitation before the action
• The moment of action
• The followthrough

Give your readers every phase of action—even if only takes a few words—and you will get them physically involved. Seriously.

Along the way, we explain how to use speech is a form of action.

Then we turn our attention to constructions of whole scenes.

We begin with the simple imperative to make every scene a complete drama, with beginning, middle, and end. Then we show how to start at the end to build the most coherent scene. Finally, we show how to use beats to create whole scenes.

Each chapter includes case studies from great stories, including Shakespeare's Macbeth and Othello, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, Elizabeth Gilbert's"Lucky Jim," and the film Casablanca.

Each chapter also includes exercises for you to master action and scenes.

About the Author

Charles Euchner, an author and teacher, is the creator of The Elements of Writing.

Euchner is the author of books on the presidency (Losing the Peace, forthcoming), civil rights (Nobody Turn Me Around), baseball (The Last Nine Inningsand Little League, Big Dreams), urban affairs (Urban Policy Reconsidered and Playing the Field), and other topics.

A long time teacher—most recently at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation—Euchner has taught writing at seminars to corporate and education clients as well as author groups.

Euchner holds a B.A. from Vanderbilt University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University.