The timing of actions in a scene

Ok, so I started out as a scriptwriter and, having been writing for various storytelling mediums for a decade now, I've found that the wider writing community has a problem that I've never run into with screenwriting. Nowhere else do I see such a lack of clarity on the timing of actions. So here's a short talk about how that works.<br><br>First up, let's get something straight. If you've written something along the lines of, "As he stepped into the room, he tripped. His arms shot out wide for balance, and he tumbled forward, landing in a seat. He muttered an apoloogy, and, as he glanced up, he was caught by a pair of intense red eyes." There's a big problem there.<br><br>"If you warm up a cold engine and take it straight to the redline, it's going to blow."<br><br>This is the problem you're running into. You're immediately accelerating the character, but they're not ready to move that fast. Your writing is a series of instructions that the reader follows in order, but your writing is describing events that can take place simultaneously in real life. <br><br>A better way to structure that, "He slipped into the room, and, as he had been running, his long legs carried him a few more steps. He tripped. His arms shot out wide for balance, and he tumbled forward, landing in a seat. He muttered an apology, and, as he glanced up, he was caught by a pair of intense red eyes."<br><br>See how that works? Now, the character is accelerated, but only after a slight warmup period. His legs carry him forward, but only after he's started to run, and his apology only comes after he's landed. This is a small difference, but it makes a big difference in how apparent the pacing of a scene is.<br><br>This is what you can refer to as the windows of actions. Imagine you're playing a car game, and you decide to take a left turn. This puts a buffer between when you decide to do something and when your character actually does it. In writing, we don't have to set that buffer explicitly, but it's still there, and it always works the same way.<br><br>To put this into graphical terms, imagine your story is a video game, and you've got a list of instructions that the computer is running. Your story is a stream of these instructions, where characters decide to do things in the story, and then the result of the action is this: he decided to kick the ball. Buffer. He lifts his leg. He kicks the ball. He is now kicking the ball. He is no longer kicking the ball. Your story should be run in the same way.