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"The harijans up top [of the bus], who neither got to see that girl's incredible breasts, nor understand why they were flying through the air as the driver slammed the brakes at the edge of the ravine, which the bus did not go over, but the refrigerator did, taking all those chickens and bananas and rice sacks and wedding and funeral girts with it, and leaving behind it on the slope it door down sixteen shirtless brown men without an ounce of body fat between them but plenty, now, of broken bones."

That's a chaotic, hilarious set piece from novelist Tony D'Souza's new book, The Konkans.

This second-time novelist and freelance writer has been our guest all week, discussing everything from working with a literary agent to researching your novel.

For the conclusion of his interview, D'Souza discusses the fine art of writing action scenes. Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:

You have a real knack for describing how crazy events unfold in physical space-- a mix of propulsive sentences and slapstick. How do you write and re-write your climactic action scenes (like the escaped pig in The Konkans or the hero chasing a girl through a cornfield in Whiteman)? What's your advice for writers looking to write more action-packed prose?

But I think that when the action heats up in a scene, that first of all you have to be naturally lucky in that the scene is beginning to lend itself to increasing and heightened action and that's organic and sort of just happens; i.e. The Muse comes calling.

If you have invested in good characters and the story is unfolding and you are letting the story move itself and the characters are worth following--meaning they are rich characters and complex, not morally good or bad, hey maybe they are pure evil, but that's good--and something is at stake in the piece and it is not silly or theoretical or fluff or frivolous, then something good will happen because you've put all the good ingredients into it.

So you come to that place in the story where the action heats up, things begin to spin out of control, the car race you've been writing about is about to collapse into a huge accident with cars hurtling through the audience and a kid wearing a silver sombrero and eating an ice cream cone gets his head sliced in two by a flying hubcap; what is important to understand about these sorts of scenes is that the writing should reflect closely the time frame of the actual events.

Bullets fly and hit their targets and everything changes in the snap of the fingers. It should happen that way in the story. Things explode, and everyone instantly falls down. They have to fall down that way in the story too.

So what's important about these action scenes is for the writer to get sharper, to make your eye sharper, to amplify the microscope of your eye and to stick those things that you seen in the scene in their close detail in the story. Because action has to move fast and to capture the whole of a scene you need quick specific details.

You might find yourself revealing the scene in short sentences or in a long and rambling sentence. But the details have to be delivered quickly and efficiently. There is no room for any flab at all in good action scenes.

Use dialogue to punctuate it the way that dialogue does accompany catastrophe in real life. Like the scene in The Konkans where an overloaded bus nearly plunges over a cliff and all the baggage on top and the people riding up there are actually thrown over the edge of the cliff.

Well there was a refrigerator up there as well and so when the refrigerator goes plunging over the edge and we see the carnage among the people and whatnot, there I added the line: The man in the suit yelled, "My fridge!"

All of that said, I just let myself go in my action scenes and don't overthink them.  I understand now how rare and wonderful they are, and when I'm in a piece and I realize a moment of great action is about to happen, I often take a break and smoke a cigarette because I really want to enjoy and savor the writing of that scene.

The writers I looked to learn how to write action scenes include Chaucer (The climax of the Miller's Tale), Twain (Jumping Frog, the snakebite scene in Huck Finn among others), London (the falling snow scene in To Build a Fire), Bierce (the dream sequence in Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge), Carver (the end of Cathedral), O'Brein (the Curtis Lemon killing in Things They Carried), Orwell (the leopard scene in Burma Days). Hemmingway of course.

The vignettes in In Our Time are a veritable tutorial on how to capture specific detail and write crisp action. But Hemingway is so spare; in Chaucer you can see how rich and lush and colorful action can be when offered in the right tone.

Cormac McCarthy's action scenes are second to no one. Things happened and have already become part of the past even before you have been able to fully digest what has happened, and such is life.

The action scenes in The Sopranos were very stirring, elegant, inventive, at times ornate and other times spare. But the close details of each one are what made them great, like Silvio getting sprayed by the whacked guys brains, or the Ukrainian goomah taking one in the stomach and falling all-the-way-down the stairs.

Any time they chased down someone in the snow, you saw the contrast of the stillness of the woods with the running and breathing, you have to capture that in your writing.