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+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
+
+---
+
+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.
+You've been listening to Hecker Public Radio at Hecker Public Radio dot org.
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