1. Read several action scenes to study the structure and language used, and meditate on how difference in style and structure stirs your emotions differently.

2. Watch a few action scenes in your favorite movies. Then try to picture your scene in your head. Watch it in your imagination as if you were watching a movie.

3. Make simple notes on scene structure. I call it blocking, or staging the scene. Put the characters in their places. As if you were directing a play.

4. Sit down and write it. And then rewrite it, and then rewrite it again, and again... There's nothing like practice to get your scene perfected. Plus, it helps you to see it from several different angles.

5. Then when you think you've got it nailed, have someone read it and tell you what they think.

Know thy enemy.

Without doing the cheesy movie, attack one at a time, trick, it would take one heck of a bit of writing to make it believable.

Make sure that the scene is necessary to your story and not just a diversion to fill pages. Ensure that aspects of your characters are developed that are important later in the story.

The few actions scenes I've written, I gave a pretty detailed account. For instance:

Rakk ties her shoe. The guards poke at her with their swords to move along. She jumps over them (she's pretty strong). She lands in the tuck-and-roll and runs into the castle. Knocking over a guard, she dashes into the courtyard. She sees some boards and grabs one, using it to keep back the circle of guards surrounding her. She hits one, knocking him out. She rushes through the gap in the guards to escape the circle...

You need to provide enough detail so that the reader can imagine the scene in his mind.

Of course, too much detail can ruin the story. As Elan said, "she hit him once, she hit him again, she hit him again"...[yawn]. "She hit him three times" is quite good enough.

The alternative (that I've seen) is to summarize the action. "He pummeled the guy with three quick jabs and walked in" is also workable. Depends on how important the action is.

So cut the description down as much as you can without loosing the reader. Be original. Tell it from the character's POV if possible. Seeing the character run for a tree from the wolves at a distance is fine. Putting the reader in the shoes of the guy running for tree is much better.

And, most important, as Elan said, make sure the reader has an emotional connection to the character. When the reader cares and sees that the character might die or be hurt, then the action is important and they want to know every salient detail.

If you don't mind, using your example, here is how I would edit to add some emotional content:

Rakk bent over to tie her shoe, keeping a wary eye on the guards. The ugly guard poked at her with his sword.

"Move along!" he snarled.

With her heart in her throat, she sprang upward and rammed him in the chest. He staggered backward and she jumped over his prone body.

'Don't look back,' she thought as she ran toward the castle. 'If he gets to his bow before I get to the gate, I'm dead.' She sprinted the distance, her heart pounding wildly.

She grabbed one of the boards stacked near the gate and swung it in a wild circle, clearing a path through the knot of guards before her. She felt like cheering when it connected with the captain's skull, knocking him out. She rushed through the gap, leaving the rest of the louts to eat her dust. 'I'm free!' she thought with grim satisfaction.

What I mean is this: your wolves are obviously smart, because they send multiple wolves against individual people. If your people split up, then I (as a reader) will immediately think they are morons. If they are studying the art of combat, would they really split up when they might stand a chance if they bond together?

quote:

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pack gets wind of the humans' presence

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Do you realize what "gets wind" actually means?

The humans can only avoid being detected by the wolves if they can magically get rid of their scents so the wolves won't smell them (as Inkwell pointed out) of if they can control the wind so it doesn't carry their scents to the wolves.

quote:

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I've ended up having my whole idea shown how illogical it was

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Browbeat?

Sorry, I had no intention of doing that.

While the wolves are instinctive pack hunters, we can assume that they all have similar abilities (i.e. being dire wolves) and are not as individually powerful as your warrior-trainees (particularly if the latter are armed and alert). If the various warrior-trainees specialize in slightly diverse fields (say one is a standard line swordsman, another is an archerer, a third is a ninja, and the last is a sapper of some kind), they could probably evolve a plan that would allow them to pool their various talents in a way that could be highly effective.

Just for instance, the ninja could act as bait, moving through the tree-tops to both wear down the dire wolves by inflicting a few injuries and to engage their attention so that they can be led into an ambush, a killing field set up by the sapper and covered by the archerer (with some support from the ninja once the dire wolves get there) with the line swordsman covering the close combat once the surviving wolves break through (perhaps helped by some prepared defenses devised by the sapper, as well as whatever close combat skills the other team members can lend in the final pinch).

Or perhaps the order would be different, the archerer pulling the wolves in with long range shots so that they pass through various traps, then are surprised by the ninja and sapper, both of whom have been held in concealed reserve. There are ways to defeat the canine sense of smell, after all, particularly if you have a really great distraction. If this is a fantasy milieu, perhaps a couple of the members could be mages, and they might have enchanted weapons.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, the hunters could split up in a limited sense as part of an overall plan, perhaps taking deliberate advantage of the wolves tendancy to gang up on solitary prey. You can still do great stuff with that, even more so as not only does the bait have to worry about getting killed, but also about screwing up the overall plan. It's true that there is a lot of need for refinement of your essential idea before it can become remotely useable, but that's true of all ideas.

Wolves travel in packs and those packs have a very strict heirarchy to them. There are alpha or dominant males and females (you will want to research this a bit more since I'm vague on the details). As I understand it, a newcomer or intruder to the pack can gain dominance or respect by defeating the dominant leader.

Maybe your characters don't need to take out the whole pack, but only a single fighter needs to outwit and kill/subdue the pack leader, possibly while the others hold off the remaining pack if wolf "protocol" is broken and they charge. The leader will show submission by rolling over and exposing his or her belly and neck to your fighter.

By the way, I'm a big fan of William Horwood (Duncton Chronicles, animal books, mole POV, which I have read) and he has what seems like a great series called The Wolves of Time (which I have partially read, thanks for reminding me to pick this up again!). I'm sure some the wolf behaviour is quite romanticized, but he brings the animals to vivid life.

Strictly my opinion, the best predator/prey type of thing was the original Alien movie. Limited space to roam but a dump truck load of hiding places. What made it so damn scary for me was the setting. Here are these people on a space ship and suddenly this "thing" gets lose and while they are hunting it the tables get turned on them and you realize that this thing just isn't hiding but is stalking them as well. What also helps is that the crew and the movie goers make a critical mistake... they think this thing is stupid, just acting on instinct but rather, it is thinking and plotting and stalking and hunting....

Maybe if you take that viewpoint it might be easier. An animal that thinks, and rationalizes, stratigizes like a human or a higher form of animal but yet still retains its primal instinct.

The film Rambo (just the first one) great examples of visual hunting and prey/predator tactics. THe author that wrote Rambo David Morrell also rights action very well. In his book Brotherhood of the Rose, they is a scene of 2 knife fighters going after each other in a completely black room, he pulls it off masterfully.

Don't anthropomorphize the wolves, they are animals and act instinctually. There instincts are to attack from strength. If you group splits up, the entire pack will go for the perceived weakest or most vulnerable member. This can be exploited by the characters, which inmho is the only way they would survive, if they attempted a straight up fight against that many wolves, much less Dire Wolves, they would lose and lose badly.

I strongly recommend reading up on wolves before revisiting the scene. Also the bite force for wolves is more than sufficent to break bones, so only rigid armor would provide much protection, leather, padded or chain/padded, would stop the wolves from ripping them open, but would do little to prevent cruched bones.