hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2563.txt

Episode: 2563
Title: HPR2563: Action In Storytelling
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2563/hpr2563.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 05:40:06

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This is HPR Episode 2563 entitled Action in Storytelling.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and in about 18 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
The summary is Lost in Drunks looks at different uses of Action in Storytelling.
Today's show is licensed under a CC Neuro-license.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello, this is Lost in Drunks, and you'll have to forgive the audio quality I'm in the car right now.
Today, I would like to talk about Action in Storytelling.
Action is one of those words that can mean an awful lot of different things to different people,
and depending upon exactly what form of medium you are presenting your story in,
it can also mean something different.
For instance, Action could be in a film, it could be something like a car chase, it could be a gun battle,
it can be a martial arts fight, but it can also just be someone walking across a room,
and sometimes because it's a visual medium, Action isn't actually doing anything except
portraying some sort of movement, and yet all of these things will add to a particular moment
in a story. However, not all of them are doing the same job, so Action is a single word that has
multiple meanings and multiple uses. Now, I'm going to use the director Steven Spielberg as an example,
and I believe it was close encounters of a third kind, but he's repeated this over and over in
different films, it's part of his style. Steven Spielberg is very well known for
juicing up a scene and adding a tremendous amount of action to something that is effectively static,
where nothing is actually happening, in close encounters of the third kind there was a point where
someone was inside, I think it was, a vehicle of some sort, and there were dials moving.
It was just a bunch of quick shots of things that were going on, and one of them
was the dashboard of this vehicle, and the dial was moving back and forth because the engine was
revving. It might have been Indiana Jones, I'm not sure. Again, as I say, he's done it in many, many
films, and it's a signature move for him. It's a static shot, nothing is happening. We don't even
need to see this thing, right? We don't need to see the dashboard of this vehicle, because
the vehicle may not actually go anywhere at any point in that scene, but it is revving, and we do
hearing, but he gives us a quick close-up of maybe someone's face, maybe someone jogging across
the way there, some action, person's face is expressing an emotion, that's action. And then
we get a close-up of the dashboard with the engine revving, and we see the dials moving.
He has brought so much action to a moment where nothing is happening. That is something that I
am going to call static action. Now, there is probably a filmmaking term that covers exactly this
sort of thing that I'm talking about, but I'm not a filmmaker, and I don't know the terminology.
However, if you talk about this with any filmmaker, they will tell you they know exactly what you're
talking about. It is a technique, and it is used a lot. And because film is such a visual medium,
that is the place that probably most modern audiences are familiar with.
However, it can be used in almost any other kind of storytelling.
Static action can bring a sense of movement, and a sense of almost emergency, depending on how
it's used, to a moment where nothing is actually happening. We see everything is moving. Everything
is on edge, right? The people are running. The guy's face is expressive. The even the dials are
jittery. There's so much going on here, and it's because of that that we see this is an important
moment, and that there's a lot of tension in the air, and yet no one ever says, wow, I'm so tense.
Static action informs a moment, but it doesn't inform the story. Story action is your gunfights.
It's your car chase. It's your hand-to-hand combat. It's your walking across the room,
because perhaps in this story, under this particular example, you have to leave the room to continue
the story. If you stay in the room, that's it. The story doesn't go any further. So you have to
leave the room and go do something else. That makes it story action. But if you're pacing back
and forth because you're nervous, that's really static action. It's informing the moment, but not
the story. It doesn't push the story further. It only pushes that moment further. It helps
create the moment and the mood. Really, it's an emotional state. Now, again, film is one place
that we see it. It's a visual thing, but in storytelling of any sort, this sort of thing can come
forward. In a written story, a lot of times, depending on, of course, how the story is written,
but a lot of times, you get a great deal of action because we know what's going on inside
someone's head. They may be remembering something that happened. They may be talking in an
expressive tone that is to say talking about how they feel and how they feel is really, really
on edge. They might be as excited as that Steven Spielberg moment, yet their face is plastic. They
have to stay completely composed. This might be a Victorian drawing room where you can't show how
you're really feeling. Or perhaps there is something going on and we can't let the bad guy know
how we really feel because that's going to give them information they shouldn't have. They'll
know what's happening, right? In that kind of story, in a written story, say a novel where something
like that is happening, there is so much static action going on, but only the reader knows about it.
See, it's wherever our eyes are because static action is inherently visible. That is to say,
it's something that can be seen, but because in a book, we only see what the author lets us see
and in a film, we only see what the director lets us see. That's where the action is happening.
That's where it has to happen. Otherwise, we're hearing about it later. Now, in film, someone who
tells you about something that happens, that's not really action. The action might be in the telling
of the tale, but not what it is they're talking about. So, if someone later on is talking about how
they got into that big car chase, the action is them talking. That's what the action is in a novel
because we can see their thoughts, we can. It doesn't mean we are, but depending on how, again,
how it's written, we can see their thoughts, we can see what they saw, we get glimpses of their
memory, we get the whole thing in flashback. That can be either a static moment or an action moment,
and that's because the medium, as I said at the beginning, each medium is a little bit different,
or it can be a little bit different, yet these things can transpose over. In an audio story,
you can get a great deal of static action just by using a sound effect. If someone is nervous,
they can be pacing back and forth, and you're then walking back and forth. In that sense, it is a
visual moment. Granted, we're only hearing it, but the visual part is happening in your head,
because if you're listening to the story, you know and you picture this person walking back and
forth nervously, there is your visual moment. In many ways, audio is extremely visual. If it's
done in this fashion, if it's done in a more linear storyline, if it's something that's more
poetic, then it becomes a lot more expressive and open to interpretation, because symbology is
very, very common in poetry, saying that you're walking across the room doesn't necessarily mean
you are. It could represent something else. So, static action and story action in poetry,
it's probably the most complex and hardest to master of all the different types, depending on how
it's done, especially, especially truly expressive poetry as opposed to a ballad or something that's
actually telling a story only in verse. That's very hard to do, and it takes practice and
probably anybody can do it if they are motivated, but it's easy to fail it. It's much easier to
fail at than, say, putting in sound effects that you're walking back and forth. I mean, that's about
as easy as it gets. Again, an audio can also be in a book, could also be in a movie for that better.
You could just say, all right, we got to go, and then the scene cuts and you're somewhere else.
That cut, the editing of that moment, is an action moment, because we got to go, and then we're
there. That means there was travel, there was action, they moved, the fact that you cut
the story right there, the story jumps from one moment to another, and that implies action.
It could be static action, but in that particular moment, it's story action. We are advancing
the story simply by the way it's been cut. Action in stories is vital. Every story needs action
of some sort. It needs to be static, it needs to be story-based action. It can also be emotional
action. That internal life where someone is feeling so vibrant that in my little definition here,
I lumped that in with static action, because again, nothing is actually happening to push the
story forward, and yet it can. If we're talking about an internal dialogue, if we're talking about
the emotional state of a person, we can't move the story forward based on how they're feeling.
We'll go back to that Victorian drama where they can't actually say how they feel, and they're
in a drawing room, and these two people are in love, but they can't say it out loud. It would
cause a scandal, and the whole time they might look at each other and express incredible amounts
of emotion between the two of them, and by the end of that scene, though they've not said a word
or even moved, they have come to conclusions in this story. They've decided what they're going
to do with their relationship. That can happen. That was not a static moment, even though nothing
happened. That was story action. So how you approach these things, and how they're framed within
the story, and the medium, and what you're telling that story, all of these things come into play
when you're deciding what kind of action does this scene need, and trust me, every scene needs action.
Every single scene, if you don't have anything to move the story forward in this moment,
you need to fill it with something else because a dead moment is meaningless.
Now, you may have seen films, red books, heard audio stories, seen cartoons, especially
seen comic stories, comic book, graphic novels, where there's a moment where nothing seems to be
happening. It just seems to be setting a mood. Understand what I just said, mood, emotion.
That is inherently filled with action. Even if that action is a calming down,
even if that action is a pulling back where nothing seems to be happening, if you have nothing
happening, but it's an important story moment, it's almost always building up tension. Now,
that sounds weird, right? That sounds weird. You have nothing happening. It's intentionally designed
to create a sense of peace or a sense of immobility even, and yet it's building up tension,
and that's because it's a setup for something that's going to come later, a choice to be made,
actual story action to happen. They're calming their mind before they have to go into battle,
or maybe setting themselves up for the rest of their lives, setting themselves up for the rest
of the day, setting themselves up for that next cigarette. These are moments of action,
even though nothing seems to be happening. And if you read one where truly, literally,
nothing is happening, and you don't get a sense of movement of some sort of a sense of
something going on, that was a fail. They made a mistake there. That was a lost opportunity.
And you'll notice them if you're looking for them, and you'll feel them, you'll feel them there.
So, in my opinion, and again, all of this is just my opinion, every single scene needs to have
something going on. You need to have some element of progression, either within a story,
within a moment, within a character state, something has to be going on. Because if you don't have
some sort of action happening, you have a moment that is lost. Sometimes, especially, you'll see
them be films or poorly made films, people who didn't really know what they were doing when they
made the film, or especially what's worse, an editor who doesn't know how to cut a film,
that becomes increasingly obvious when you start looking for moments like these.
If you see a film that is like this, and I'm focusing on film because it is so visual,
a moment where nothing happens doesn't make anything go forward, and maybe it's only filled with
either static action, or nothing, nothing, or repetitious thing. If the repetition doesn't
bring us closer to an understanding of this character, and where this character's mindset is,
there's no point to it, and that's a wasted opportunity. And by repetition, we have a lazy
character who sleeps in the couch. If we see it again and again and again, it may have a storytelling
purpose, or it may just be really badly cut film. There's no way to distinguish this until you see
it in context when you see the entire story. And then if you don't feel like something has happened,
if we aren't closer to an understanding of the character, if that moment didn't help push the
character to that place in the story where they have to change themselves, where they have to
overcome what they were, then nothing much has happened. Do you know where you see poorly blocked
out action, or scenes that are of no value, empty value, when it comes to action, you often see
it in comedy. When they say comedy is hard, it really is hard. If you're doing that right,
it really is hard. And visual comedy is probably the hardest of them all. And I don't necessarily
mean sight gags, although they are a lot more difficult than people give them credit for.
But something like a comedic film, why are there so many bad ones out there?
In comedy, it's possible to have moments that seem to set up for a joke. And that's the problem
with comedy is the setup. Set up is inherently action-filled. And if the setup of a joke isn't filled
with some sort of action that then gets subverted, you've lost the joke. And that's the same with
actually telling verbal jokes, which are nothing but short stories, really, short, short,
short stories. But again, sticking with the visual concept, a bit where you have a lazy,
good for nothing, manchild who spends most of the day on the couch, and that's going to be subverted
later when he gets pushed into some sort of action role in this story, where he has to do something
that actually matters and has to overcome his sedentary lifestyle. That is the only function for
something like that. But if all you're doing is showing this fat slab lying on a couch,
you have lost a moment. That fat slab lying on the couch, we have to be setting something up,
but we also have to be building our tension. When we see that, we have to get a sense that this
isn't working for this guy. Otherwise, what happens later, we don't care. We don't care about
this. We didn't care about him before because there was nothing to care about. He was just lying
there. It was like he was a piece of furniture. It was like he was a rock on the side of the road.
It's nothing. You don't notice him. And if we don't get a sense of his emotion, his emotional state,
then there's no point to the scene, even though supposedly it's setting up for something else.
When you're talking about static action, you have to have a moment or a series of moments where we
see something building or something happening. You can also do another gag, a minor gag where he's
lying on the couch and the cat won't leave him alone. That's also a very common technique. And it
brings a little bit of action to another wise static moment. But that static moment, because it's
a setup for something else, it also has to seem emotionally involving because otherwise the
emotion of this guy later, when he has to overcome all of this without that earlier emotional struggle,
meaning action, we don't get the payoff later. We don't care about this guy's struggles because
we didn't care to begin with. We didn't seem struggling. There's no emotion to it. So anyway,
these are just some quick thoughts about action in storytelling. There's so, so, so much more to be
said about it. And there are different ways of looking at it, as I've said. And many people have
different views on the topic as well. I would like to hear your views on the topic. So please leave a
comment, if you'd like, under this episode at HPR, or better yet, make your own episode of HPR.
You have opinions, you have ideas, and we want to hear about them.
This has been Lost in Bronx. Thanks for listening. Take care.
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