Do you have any advice for writing an intense, overwhelming chase scene?
So, this is a little unusual, in that it’s something I haven’t really thought a lot about.
For a real world situation, the process is to identify or create an opening, and escape. Usually this advice is more focused for situations for situations where someone’s cornered you.
Also, the real world advice is to avoid a chase if at all possible. You don’t want to get into a situation where you’re directly testing your endurance against your enemy.
As for writing a chase scene. This is one of those times when you want to be efficient with your words, keep things as concise as possible. When you get more verbose it “slows down” the scene because it is literally slowing your reader’s progress down.
Chases can be very logistically intensive for you, simply because you need a fairly coherent mental image of how the locations in your story fit together. Maps can be extremely helpful for this, whether you choose to share them or not.
I don’t think I’ve talked about this on the blog, maps can be very helpful for getting a concrete image of how your world is put together, though, they can also, easily, start soaking up more time than the value they offer. That said, even pretty crude maps could be very useful in planning a chase scene. This is one of the times when your world needs to lock together into a unified space, instead of being able to move characters between loosely connected locations.
If you want the reader to have a detailed mental image for the locations, then you should probably have them in those spaces before the chase. Though, this is a situation where some, “stock locations,” could work for you. Liminal spaces can work pretty well for this, because most of your readers are going to have a preexisting basis for understanding what those areas look like. For example: even if their image of an airport causeway is different from yours, you’ll both be close enough to the same space that you shouldn’t run into many problems where you need to define the entire area.
It’s also worth considering that as the chase progresses, it’s possible to get gradually more verbose. As mentioned above, this will slow the reader, and as a result the scene, but it can convey the loss of inertia as your character tires or finds themselves having to slow down because they’re now in unfamiliar (and possibly unsafe) territory, without being extremely direct about your character’s exhaustion. This is an area that can benefit from some pretty careful word selection to hint at fatigue without outright stating it.
I do apologize that this is all pretty high level, concept advice, and a lot of this can be applied in other contexts. And, a lot of the above advice are things to keep in mind for all of your writing, but chases do stress these specific parts of your writing and world building.
Beyond that, it’s the normal advice: Remember your world is a living place, so other people would be going about their daily lives while the chase rampages through. Remember persistence consequences, such as prior injuries, or injuries inflicted during the chase. Chases might lead into situations where other kinds of consequences might become unexpectedly relevant, such as your character being forced to run through the territory of a gang they angered earlier in the story. This is an opportunity to bring in unexpected consequences. Even if you don’t stick to it, at least have an initial idea for what you want from the chase, then let the sequence play out as you go. (Cleaning this up is what rewrites are for, but it is important to let the chase flow, before you go back and worry about cleaning it up.)
Like I said at the beginning, this is something I don’t generally think about, so it’s been a bit before I could get back to this question, and I hope this helps.
-Starke
