Putting your characters under pressure

Why action matters in fiction

Putting your characters under pressure: why action matters in fiction

It’s a little bit embarrassing to admit as someone who has published four works of fiction, but the fact that a novel is made of scenes was a relatively recent discovery for me. Of course, now it seems obvious, but when I started writing I think my novels were filled with my character’s ruminations and I wondered why it was difficult to move my narratives forward or towards a resolution.

But when I started teaching writing, I came across the notion of the scene and suddenly writing novels, and why novels either worked or did not work made a lot more sense to me. One of the reasons that a novel works best when it is made out up of sequences of action that are linked together, is that forcing your character to act, reveals who they are on the page. Much as in real life, characters are ultimately not revealed so much by what they think, as by how they act and speak. John Gardiner says that fiction involves ‘a character in action’ and I try to remember this sometimes when I find myself spending too long in my character’s heads. To have any sort of fiction at all, there must be some sort of motion or unfolding.