I'm not thinking of action as in the thrills, chills, and spills sense, although I hope as a story teller I manage at least the occasional thrill. I'm more interested in what the character's actions say about them. I try to show more than tell. As I reader I find pages of unbroken description boring. So what do my characters reveal about them selves through their actions?
As I thought about this I came to a frightening conclusion: the way my characters behave may say less about them and more about me than I ever intended.
Through my imaginary friends I take action. I do things that I would never do in real life. More often than not they get caught. It is the nature of the mystery novel. But they pay the price, not me.
A professor from college put me through a semester of annoying make work. Relish those first two chapters Prof. You won't live to see the third. Your early morning "the only thing wrong with this school is the students" rant is about to be cut short. I think it is several tons of falling text books that will do for you. Your imaginary grad student takes the rap, I've blown off steam and no one ends up in a bell tower with a rifle. Everybody wins!
It takes my home loan two months to go through as the under writer nitpicks over cosmetic nonsense. You sir are about to meet a cold and lonely end, entombed in a snow man. Do you fell your blood crystallizing as it turns to ice? Call my hall floor unfinished will you? Ha! I haven't decided if he will survive the experience or not. We'll see how I fell when I get there.
So I live through my villains, using them to vent my less social acceptable emotions in an acceptable way. I'm not shy about my darker side. But what about my heroes. What actions do they take that I can't? The answer is not all that surprising.
Mysteries follow a relative simple pattern By the end of the story everything is put right. The guilty are caught. The unknown is explained. By the last page you know the why of the last two hundred pages. This is something that life rarely delivers.
A is for action. A also stands for alter ego. Hey who needs a shrink when you have an unfinished novel.
