See you next time

That’s it for this lesson.

We’ve looked at types of action, including physical, environmental, internal and interpersonal.

We’ve looked at how you sequence actions, including simultaneous action.

We’ve looked at actions and reactions, describing the meaning of action, and the difference between summary and expanded description of actions.

Phew! You must be exhausted! Maybe your next action should be to take a rest!

What actions do you notice? Not just the obvious physical ones like walking, sitting, eating—but also the internal actions, thinking, feeling, judging. What’s going on?

Obviously the next time you read an action scene, stop and look at how the writer put it together. But even more importantly, look at the “non-action scenes”, like where characters are just talking or thinking. You’ll see there’s a lot happening that you might not notice as action.

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We used lots of snippets from Jason Reynolds’ Miles Morales Spiderman novel, because it has lots of action. It’s also a story that looks at what a young superhero’s life might be like if they were a Black-Latino teen.

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We used a few snippets from Jennifer McKissack’s Sanctuary, which is a beautiful and spooky book about a teenage girl going back to her creepy island-mansion home after her aunt dies.

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Finally, for the wrap-up piece, we used a snippet from Celia C. Pérez’ The First Rule of Punk, a fun story about a girl who starts a punk band at her new and otherwise conservative school.

Where did the inspiration images come from?

The two gifs featured in the introduction come from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It's a terrible title but OH MY GOD HAVE YOU SEEN THAT MOVIE? WHAT A WORK OF ART.

This is a photo of the King Charles Unicycle Troupe from 1967 (though we're not sure who the photographer was). The troupe is a group of young men out of the Southeast Bronx, New York, who play an unbelievable game of high-energy basketball on unicycles. The troupe has existed since the 1940s and is still going strong today!

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The image in the checkpoint piece comes from Park Pyeongjun, an illustrator from Korea.

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For the first example rewrite, we were looking at this photo from Tumblr user 573P5 who is a Moscow street photographer.

A snowy night in Moscow with people walking in the street

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For the second example, we were looking at this photo from Greg Girard, a pretty famous photographer who does documentary photos of Asian cities. This photo was taken in the Walled City of Kowloon, a truly crazy place that used to exist in Hong Kong. It's worth looking up!

An elderly Hong Kong Chinese man in his kitchen in the old Walled City of Kowloon with cats

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That's it for this lesson. See you next time!

Narrative Basics Lesson 2: Action