How to Escalate Your Attacks! #writer #author #books #publishing #writing

Every attack you will ever write in any scene, in any genre, comes down to just 3 things: physical, social, and ideological. Or if you wanted it even simpler, the attack is on your body, your belonging, or your beliefs. Physical is the obvious one. Someone grabs you, hits you, threatens your safety. Social is your belonging. Getting humiliated in front of a group, getting cast out, losing your standing. Ideological is your beliefs. Someone attacks the thing you hold to be true about the world or about yourself. Now, here's the part that will fix a broken scene in your draft right now. Once a beat starts on one of those planes, the escalation has to stay on that plane. If the antagonist grabs her wrist, that's physical, so the next beat has to raise the physical stakes. He twists it, he drags her. What he cannot do is suddenly sneer and call her worthless because now you've jumped from physical to social, and the reader feels the gear grind even if they can't name why. Pick a lane. Escalate inside that lane. If you wanna shift from physical to ideological, fine, but do it on purpose at a turning point, not by accident in the middle of a punch. So body, belonging, or beliefs. Name which one your scene is on and keep it there. This is one of the structural tests in my free scene writing checklist. So comment the word "checklist" down below and I'll send it to you. This is a fantastic tool to take what I taught you in this video and go much further. So put the word "checklist" down in the comments and I'll follow up with you.