Fans of “action” like to watch their hero tested by many long scenes of
biff-bang-pow. Action violence inhabits a narrow range of physical
force–where our hero can show some
impressive courage/endurance, but without sustaining any longterm damage.
In real life, a non-brain-dead villain would shoot the hero rather than to try
to maul him at close range. In real life, human bodies don’t
stand up well against explosions, Uzis, or kicks in the balls, so any
deadly conflict would be over quickly–leaving even the winner with
serious injuries. In fiction, a one-eyed hero with fingers missing
doesn’t satisfy reader hopes for a happy ending.
Dick Francis, whose audience must love marathon suffering,
has used just about every plausible reason (and several implausible
ones too) for a hero to be roughed up but un-murdered by one or more
tough guys. Hoods use fists and feet for “teaching him a lesson.”
Villains abandon him to die in the ocean or a desert or a mine
explosion but he escapes. Someone flies into a murderous rage and
tries to kill him with bare hands or a snatched-up club but he knocks
the attacker unconscious with his fists. Someone trying to kill
him (with a knife or ax) is forestalled by a third party’s entry or by
a gruesome industrial accident.
Romance plots, like action plots, work hard to dodge the very, very
obvious
outcomes. Page after page, romance protagonists quiver with unslaked
love and/or lust (luvst?), while chapter after chapter erects (ha ha) new
barriers to bedtime.
Each obstacle must be credible, interesting, serious, hopeless, and something
the author can break down completely in one tumultuous scene near the end of
Chapter 16. Oh, yes, and the barrier should be fresh, not some stale
re-cycling of the “misunderstanding” that could have been cleared up in
Chapter 3 if the hero or heroine had more brains than a bug. (Dick
Francis came up with a novel one in Nerve, where the heroine considers
her first cousin incest-bait.)
How about this solution to both dilemmas: the frustrated romance
heroine finally hauls off and punches the action hero? This
overcomes all previous plot points, so he–but use your own
imagination. Biff, blam, zowie!