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.

Where did the snippets come from?

The snippets in this lesson came from three pretty diverse sources.

Cover of 'Miles Morales' by Jason Reynolds

We used Jason Reynolds’ Miles Morales Spiderman novel a lot, 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.

Cover of 'Sanctuary' by Jennify McKissack

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.

Cover of 'The First Rule of Punk' by Celia C. Perez

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.

boys playing unicycle basketball We don’t know where this image comes from! It’s a photo of kids in 1960s Harlem, New York, playing basketball on unicycles.

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

A snowy night in Moscow with people walking in the street

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

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

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

Narrative Basics Lesson 2: Action

See you next time