Xjyuk

I normally try to place myself in my character's shoes and I think to myself, "how would I react if I were in this situation?" Well one of my beta-readers commented on my work, and he said the chapter sounds like it was written in haste to go along with the panic and dire of the situation at hand. He said that's not a good thing.

How can I write a panicked/dire scene without it feeling like it was written in haste?

Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks in advance!

I've noticed something about many books and movies. Just as two characters are getting into a deep conversation, either sharing something important or showing emotion or leaning forward slowly to kiss, a random passerby will walk right between them. It totally throws them off and - you would think - breaks things up. But instead, it actually heightens the audience's anticipation. We can't wait until the interruption leaves so we can get back to what was about to happen.

This is part of pacing, and it's hard to get right, mostly because it's not always intuitive. Interrupting a tense scene can increase tension? Slowing down the sword fight can make it even more gripping?

Yes.

What readers need is variation. A section of panic and then a strangely quiet moment - the eye of the storm, as it were - before returning to the panic and ratcheting it up even higher.

Don't spam these moments. They need to happen naturally, just once or twice in the scene.

My recommendation is to pay special attention to tense, panicked, or dire situations in other books. You might be surprised to see that despite the heavy action, the author doesn't completely cut out all introspection. There has to be feeling even if there isn't conscious thought.

I recommend re-watching Inception. Literally the most gripping movie I've seen in theaters. Notice that Fischer, the rich son whose dream they enter, spends much of the dreamstate talking with his father. It's slow and emotional, and perfectly contrasts with the alpine chase scene and the shootouts.

Don't forget the emotional stakes during these scenes. That is often what makes a good action scene work, anyway.

UPDATE: Let me be clear: showing too much emotion and introspection during a scene will slow it to a crawl. That's not what you want. The trick is to use a balance of interruptions to the action: some will be thoughts and emotions, and some will be literal breaks in the action, like the characters barricading a door to buy themselves time. They can still hear the enemies pounding on the outside, and they can see the metal bending around the handle, but for a few brief moments they are safe enough to realize how much danger they're really in.

Panic and dire situations do not necessarily make time seem to flow faster.

People frequently talk about adrenaline making time seem to slow down, and it's not a bad idea to let your writing reflect that. I once got hit by a car in the crosswalk (Spoiler alert, it was going slowly, stopped almost as soon as it hit me, and I was not permanently injured). When I turned my head and noticed that the car was going to hit me, I had basically no time to react. As I am not a parkour master or a stunt man, I didn't have time to make a conscious decision to jump or roll or dodge or anything that might have softened the blow. Instead, I looked at the car, stood there like a deer in the headlights, and the split-second seemed to stretch out to infinity, my brain echoing with the thoughts, "I'm about to be hit by a car. There's nothing I can do to stop it," as it rolled towards me.

Continuing forward about ten minutes, I took a test for a college course (because my panic somehow rolled into 'I'm going to be late for my test' and I did not make good decisions) -- I distinctly remember reading through the first question on the exam about a dozen times, and every time I got to the multiple choice options, I got distracted by overwhelming thoughts like "OMIGOD, I JUST GOT HIT BY A CAR", "My leg hurts" or "A CAR, A FREAKING CAR!" (No, I did not get this particular question correct)

The point I'm trying to make is that, just because your character has very streamlined actions or intentions, does not mean that their brain is shut down and only thinking about what they're doing. It might be imperative that they go chop down a tree. If that's just a simple chore, go ahead and say they went out back, chopped down the tree, gathered some firewood, and brought it inside.

If, on the other hand, chopping down this tree is going to save the world, they're going to be thinking about the weight of the axe in their hand, how heavy their footsteps are as they cross the yard, what this is going to mean for the rest of humanity. They'll pick the best angle to swing at the tree, so they don't have to work up the nerve to do it a second time, and they'll pull back their shoulders and swing with all their faith and resolution. The axe will slice through the air, and the sound it makes as it cuts into the bark will resound through their head in chorus with the reverberations of Newton's Third Law in their arms.

tl;dr During moments of extreme importance, be sure to express the character's thoughts and emotions, even if decisions/actions are made quickly.

You write slow. It is fine to put yourself into the character and see how you would react, but take your time describing that. Get into the details.

This isn't a "real time" exercise, the length of the writing does not have to reflect the length of the action. The only time that is true is during dialogue, people know that sentences take a certain amount of time to say. They know it is seldom true that anybody talks in long paragraphs or soliloquys or speeches or sermons.

But that does not hold for action or exposition that has no dialogue. Thoughts are on the borderline, but it is fair to describe several wordless thoughts or impressions that go through somebody's mind, and even though that took six paragraphs, the reader will still get this all happened in a single second.

Consider when you describe a scene the character sees. You can spend a page on something they "saw" in three seconds of scanning a room. We still get it, they didn't stand in the doorway for a full minute as they walked in, the exposition about the setting is not a "real time" description.

The same goes for your panic attack. Don't rush the prose to match the rushed mood. Describe what is going on, thoroughly but as always without getting repetitive or irrelevant. Don't worry about "real time" or getting through it quick.

The author's job is to aid the reader's imagination, so they "see" an image of what is going on and what happened and the consequences of that.