creative-writing

Elevating Action Scenes with Second Order Thought

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

I’ve always had a problem with action scenes. Books, movies, plays, all of them. If an action scene goes longer than a minute, it starts to feel vapid. Thing after thing after thing happens, but none of it means anything. My mind jumps to the end. Will the hero live? Will they accomplish their goals? Cool, let’s get this scene over with and continue with the real plot.

The thing is, these thoughts only occur to me in certain action scenes. Why can I watch a fifteen minute shootout in The Hateful Eight, but four minutes of John Wick puts me to sleep?

When I wrote my own book, I ran into the same problem. Action scenes that felt like a bunch of set pieces strung together. A meaningless ebb and flow. Then I found the solution.

Depth of thought.

Ingredients of an Action Scene

Truth is, any scene can be an action scene. A climber scaling a mountain, two street cleaners rushing to get the most trash, a firefighter in a burning house. So long as the scene has a few key ingredients: A character with a goal, an adversary (person or otherwise), and the rhythm of the action/reaction cycle.

A good action scene is kind of like a turn-based game. The hero chases, the adversary flees. The adversary locks a door, the hero kicks it down. Even when the adversary isn’t a person, we can still hit the same rhythm. In the example of a climber scaling a mountain, the mountain is the adversary. It drops an icicle towards the climber, the climber dodges. The climber clears some grime from a handhold, the mountain answers with rain.

This is all an action scene needs. But if this is all you’re doing, you end up with a feeling of meaningless conflict, an empty to-and-fro that’s only resolved when our hero succeeds or fails.

The Hierarchy of Character Action

What’s missing from action scenes is deep thought. Mind you, it’s hard for a protagonist to spend much time thinking in the middle of the action, but landing a great, cerebral action scene requires it. 

It’s a hierarchy of priorities. A pyramid.

Laying the foundation of action scenes is reaction. Every time the adversary does something, we need a reaction from the hero. The state of the scene is changing, and that needs to change how our protagonist approaches their goals. If the protagonist doesn’t react, it either means they aren’t paying attention, or what the antagonist did doesn’t matter, and if it didn’t matter, why write it?

Without reaction, all our protagonist is doing is making plans and executing them. A story without conflict is no story at all.

Of course, if all a character does is react, then the scene is being defined for them. They’re not chasing their goals, they’re not being proactive, and if the hero somehow wins, it won’t feel earned. It’ll feel like the antagonist failed rather than the hero succeeding. When a reader enters a scene, they want to imagine what they’d do in the same situation. They want to picture themselves facing obstacles and overcoming them. The one thing they wouldn’t do is nothing.

Second Order Thinking

Second Order Thinking is the process of imagining an action, then considering its consequences. It’s making a plan that sees more than one step into the future, and it’s the secret to turning a messy action scene into something more cerebral.

Let’s imagine a firefighter crashed into a burning house. He sees a few people injured around the room and fire creeping toward a propane tank. The first order move is to pick someone up and get out of there. Save a life, maybe two. But what happens thirty seconds later? The tank detonates.

So our firefighter pauses to think, maybe just a second. If he fights the fire, all it’ll do is buy time, and if he’s alone, time is a scarce resource. So the two obvious moves, fight the fire or save the people, will both end up failing. Instead he goes for the second order move, the one that isn’t so obvious at first glance. Disconnect the propane tank and get it out of the house.

Second order thought is about seeing what’s coming and adjusting your plans to take them into account.

In a gunfight, the hero is running from cover to cover while the hard-to-hit enemy moves to get an angle. Our protagonist can keep running, evading their way to an escape, or they can recognize the enemy’s pattern and exploit their predictability. Toss a rock to another bit of cover and wait for the enemy to chase a ghost.

It’s a great tool for breaking up the action/reaction cycle. A chance to pivot the scene in a new direction. A climber looks up and spots a potential rockfall, so they change their plans. Instead of scaling a flat face, they hike the switchbacks. Even the antagonist can use it, one clever move that changes the sense of power in the scene, putting our hero on the back foot.

Third Order Thinking

If second order thinking represents a pivot in the action, third order thinking represents the big finish. This is the process of taking actions whose benefits aren’t immediately clear, but serve a larger purpose in helping one side or the other ‘win’ the scene. A campaign of actions.

Let’s say the villain is in a gigantic mech while our hero is running for their life through a cavern. Someone’s in the hero’s ear telling them to get the nearest exit, that there’s no way to win. Instead, the hero keeps on taking huge risks, hiding behind a stone column until the villain blasts it, running up an exposed set of stairs while an iron fist punches it into dust. Right when it looks like the hero is doomed, the cavern ceiling collapses on the mech’s head.

Our hero had a special plan. One that wasn’t obvious in the moment, or even after four or five close calls.

The fun part about third order thinking is that you don’t have to spell it out for the audience. They see the hero taking unnecessary risks and unexplainable actions, and they instinctively sense there’s a scheme behind it all.

Third order thinking doesn’t just apply to action scenes, it can manifest in a million different ways. It’s what makes real-life professionals so good at their job, they aren’t just taking an action in the moment, they’re taking action as a part of a long-term strategy to achieve a goal.

Be aware, it can be hard for an audience to track third order thinking. It’s a tool best used to cap a scene or describe the long-term motivations of a character.

Fourth Order Thinking and Beyond

Second and Third order thinking give the story a thoughtful quality. Characters aren’t just puppets reacting in the moment, they consider their circumstances and shape the world around them. An audience can understand this.

Fourth-order thinking is the kind of thought an audience can’t understand. It’s the sort of twist a reader won’t see coming because it’s too complicated. Imagine at the end of a book, the antagonist reveals all the battles the hero fought actually served to hurt the hero’s cause more than help. This is the moment in Ocean’s Eleven when it looks like the heroes are caught, but it turns out it was all a part of the plan.

Fourth-order plans must be handled with care. Done right, it can be the keystone of a book. Done wrong, and you end up with the poison scene from Princess Bride. You know the one: I’d switch the cups so you switched the cups so I switched the cups so you switched the cups.

If you’re doing a fourth-order scheme, review the individual components. Make sure every individual action holds up to scrutiny, or point out incongruities so our reader gets the sense there’s something bigger at play.

The hierarchy of actions matters. Too many second order thoughts from a beat-cop and he starts to feel like Sherlock Holmes. Too many third order thoughts and your action scene is hijacked by a weird battle of the minds.

Of course, you should understand your genre too. My debut novel, The Human Countermove, is a book all about strategy and beating a cognitively superior opponent. In a story like that it was appropriate, even necessary, for my protagonist to regularly invent new third order strategies.

Depth of Emotion and Conclusion

Everything in this post is about how to give each action in the scene more meaning. There’s a second approach to fixing this problem. Deep understanding of character. If every action a character takes is soaked in their background and motivations, the audience will give you a lot more leeway. An example of this is Spiderman. The Green Goblin drops a bus full of people and Mary Jane. Spiderman has to decide which to save. In an example like this, the depth comes from the emotion, rather than the logic of the scene.

If you ever feel like your action scene is just a bunch of stuff happening in sequence, take another look at your depth of thought and character. It could be the case your scenes just need a little more scheming and a little less doing.

Three Years Later… I Have a Novel

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

On September 1st, my debut novel is being released. The Human Countermove. Getting it released is incredibly exciting, and knowing it took three years fills me with a quiet dread. The journey has been incredibly long. Two years to write it. One year to decide what to do with it, and now it’s available for sale. I’m counting every pre-order on a little calendar, crossing off a square with every sale.

Not that you can trust me, but it’s my opinion I’ve written a compelling book. My mom liked it for one. That’s a big improvement over my practice novel. My beta readers liked it, I even managed to convince one of my readers to review two different drafts, which is unheard of in the beta reader space. Usually you only get one chance to impress someone.

But it’s here. It’s been professionally edited, copy-edited, and gone over again and again. Ready for scrutinizing eyes.

The Journey

They say the first one million words are practice. I believe I hit the equivalent of one million words somewhere near the end of my first draft. There was a day when a switch flipped in my head. From then on, my understanding of scene composition, dialog, and character motivations was just, clearer.

For someone editing their first book, a sudden jump in skill is very bad news. It meant I had to face my rough, rough, rough first draft and clean it up with a newfound understanding of storytelling. That’s a lot of work for a single broom.

I lost momentum a couple of times. My systems for reliably writing weren’t in place yet. One weekend I’d pump out 13,000 words, then nothing for a month.

Even the soul of the story wasn’t there on the first go-around. I found it partway into the second draft. A great idea that really clarified the narrative. Funny enough, I wanted to put that heart in the sequel. My editor talked me out of it, convinced me that good ideas are meant to be spent, and that my debut should be as strong as it can be.

In my opinion the back third of this book is where it excels, a final arc that imbues the whole story with purpose. The place where all those funny little ideas were vacuumed out of a hypothetical sequel and pulled into the original.

Choosing to Self Publish

I’m an impatient man. It’s silly of me to be impatient after spending two years writing up a draft, but I was ready for this project to be out there. I’ve met plenty of writers sitting on twelve novels just waiting for the right agent to turn them into stars, that’s not the path for me.

The scariest part of self-publishing is knowing that every inch of success is entirely on you. That also means if the book only sells a dozen copies, it’s your fault. For me, that didn’t seem so bad. I’d rather improve by releasing my work and letting people give me honest feedback than hide away and write book after book on my own. I’ve never worked on something that didn’t get released to the public within four months of being finished before, so a year of waiting was an eternity.

Now that the time is here, I’m really enjoying the process. Soon there will be something out in the world that I’m proud of, something I made, something I’m eager to share. Lately I’ve been attending a lot of farmer’s markets. I haven’t made a single sale, but the experience has been a blast. I get to spend time speaking to real people, giving advice to novice writers, learning what different readers like reading. After all this time on my own pushing to finish a product, getting to know someone else’s story is sort of, healing.

My review of self-publishing so far: Owning my own book and owning my own success is hard work and an absolute joy.

The Novel

I can’t write this whole thing up without talking about my novel! The book is titled “The Human Countermove”, there’ll be a link and description down at the end. But here, in this little blog, I want to give a more informal description.

The book tells the story of Zouk, a washed up strategy game grandmaster who challenges the three AI rulers of his society to determine society’s future.

It’s a cerebral near-future sci-fi, inspired by my love of chess and strategy games. The premise is drawn from the famous chess match Kasparov vs Deep Blue (1997), where mankind’s best chess player was soundly defeated by an algorithm.

I wrote this thing on the hunt for some narrative payback. In real life, we got our butt handed to us. In The Human Countermove, the big question at the start of the book is, ‘What can a person do to out-think something that is cognitively superior’? Zouk Solinsen is my very own John Henry the steel-driving man, except this time instead of trying to beat the machine by brute-force, Zouk pulls every trick in the book to get an advantage.

One thing I fought hard to keep in the book was a rejection of the normal dystopian tropes. So often in these things society is irredeemable, and it all descends into war and destruction. The reader watches the conflict between robots and humans pave a fiery trail for centuries, they see the last few untracked humans turn into a rebellion. I’m ready for something new.

Our main character is a victim of a broken system. A system that demands efficiency in every act. Work and play and rest, all measured, all prescribed in particular doses. It’s not unreasonable to be angry. A broken system needs change. But at the heart of the story is one issue, does the system need to be burned down, or do we not yet understand it? Is there something inherently wrong with a society run by AI Minds? Maybe. Or maybe there’s just a separation between what mankind asks for and what we really want.

Conclusion

As silly as it is, I’ve often defined whether or not I’m a writer by the absence of a published book. I’ve worked professionally in the field, I’ve written for graphics teams, voice actors, education companies, by all means, I am a writer. But this was the last hurdle. As soon as this book comes out, I get to say it to myself and mean every word.

Next week, I will be a novelist.

My debut novel is now available for pre-order. Release Date September 1st. I’m still working out the last few kinks on the paperback side, but that option should be made available soon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FM9R7T5F

In a nation ruled by AI Minds, productivity is everything—even play.

Once a legend in the world of strategy games, Zouk Solinsen is now just another burnout in a society obsessed with efficiency. But when the Minds announce a high-stakes tournament—with a seat on the ruling council as the prize—Zouk is drawn back into the fray, determined to reshape the future.

With help from the enigmatic Torrez Institute, Zouk racks up early victories against the Minds. But when Maya Torrez reveals the cost of her support—a violent coup against the Minds—he rejects it and strikes out alone.

Now, with no allies, dwindling resources, and a nation on the brink, Zouk faces the biggest game of his life—and a final, impossible choice: reform the system from within, or burn it all down.

My First Draft Took 7 months, Here’s What I Learned

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

I just finished the first draft of my second book. It took 7 months. The final word count was about 87,000 words. That averages out to about 410 words per day. But that’s not the reality.

The reality is half my book was written across 7 very productive weeks, and half my book was written across 5 very unproductive months. Here’s what I learned.

Find The Process

Last week I wrote a post about my writing process. On days I wrote, I always hit my wordcount goal of 1,200 words. But for a long time, getting my butt in the chair and focussing enough to work proved impossible. Then I started pre-writing with a pen and paper, and I put a time on my phone each day for writing and everything got easier.

From the moment I found my process, my average word-count per week shot up to 6,000. About 5.5 days per week on and off. If I had hit that number from the start, the book would have been done in 2 and a half months.

Momentum is Everything

Forming a consistent rhythm is hard. And sometimes life forces us to make exceptions. Here’s what I’ve learned about myself.

If I take a one day break from writing, I can get back to writing the next day without any issue.

If I take a two day break, I get kinda anxious and starting again becomes a challenge.

After three days, the momentum is gone, and I have to start cold.

The next time I’m writing the first draft of a book, I plan on allocating three dedicated months, with only brief weekend retreats to break things up. Once the habit is formed, it’s harder to break it than to fulfill it. But if I give myself too many excuses, too many easy outs, the habit dies before it’s formed.

Love (With Your Novel) is Fleeting

It’s easy to fall in love with a book. It’s much harder to stay in love. You can only work on the same task for so long before you start to hate it. A terrible kind of insecurity bubbles up, a voice in your ear whispers that your story is terrible.

About 3 months into my drafting, I stopped loving my book. Worse, I stopped liking it. And once that happened, getting words on the page was almost impossible.

The good news is: It’s fixable. It took a little wine and dining, but with the right attitude and a careful approach, I was able to rediscover my passion at least twice while getting the thing written.

The process was pretty simple, when I had been away from my book for a couple weeks and the spark was gone, I’d revisit the book the way I had at the start. Begin by visualizing the world, the aesthetics, the look and wonder of the story. The joy of the concept rather than the pain of the details. Then I’d see my characters, the protagonist with all their flaws, and everything they were trying to do. But it was more than seeing them, it was seeing what was still in store for them. I’d have a third of a book written, and I’d be able to look into the future and know what was still on its way. The end of the arc, still not on the page. My love would reignite, I had seen everything I loved about the story and everything that was still in store. It’s the reason I’m telling the story, the idea that bubbles in my stomach and warms my heart.

Too Much Buildup is Bad for The Writer

Ideas are made to be spent. Once they come into your brain, they fill a space of it until the day you get them onto the page. Worse, a great idea likes to return again and again, occupying most of your thoughts as you imagine the same scene from a hundred different angles.

The trouble with all that thinking is the buildup. At the end of the day, you only get to tell the story one way. And what does that mean for all those other perspectives? They’re tossed in the bin. Maybe I get to pull an idea or two along the way, but most of it is just wasted brainspace.

My brain knows it’s wasted work, and it hates it.

If I love a scene too much, my brain does everything in its power to keep me from writing it. To write is to commit, it takes the infinite possibility and beauty of a concept and turns it into concrete words.

For me, the best thing I can do with a scene I love is get through it as soon as possible. Keep the reimaginings low, keep the ways to spruce things up limited, and let the scene be like you saw it for the first time in your head, even when sometimes it’s just two characters chatting in a garage. It’s much easier to edit a poorly written chapter than fill a blank page.

The Outline is Key

My outline was my most important ingredient, it turned the impossible journey of 100,000 words into a bunch of 1,200 word slices. When I lost momentum, I put a list on the wall, a series of individual scenes pulled from my outline. With each scene written, I’d cross it off and move onto the next. It meant all I really needed to think about was what was directly ahead, not the entire maw that is the rest of the novel. With this book, the further the outline got into the story, the looser it described the events. That hurt me a lot. The less detail I determined early, the more work I had on the day.

New Rules

For me, seven months is too long to write a draft. The longer it takes to write, the more complications crop up along the way. My dream is to draft in 3-4 months. Less than that isn’t possible unless I start increasing my daily word count goals, and I’d rather consistently hit the daily goals I have now than risk pushing myself too hard and lose months from burnout. So, with all that in mind, I’ve set myself a few new rules:

  1. From the moment I start my draft, the next three months can have no major trips, just the occasional weekend getaway.
  2. If I miss 1 day of writing, I have to do everything in my power to make sure I hit my goal the next day.
  3. Once a scene is imagined, it doesn’t get revisited until the day I write it. No over-engineering here.
  4. Outline early, and outline thoroughly.

Hopefully in the near future I’ll be hitting my goal of 2 books a year.

DEBUT NOVEL NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER! (Not the story described in this article):

The Human Countermove is now available for pre-order! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FM9R7T5F

In a nation ruled by AI Minds, productivity is everything—even play.

Once a legend in the world of strategy games, Zouk Solinsen is now just another burnout in a society obsessed with efficiency. But when the Minds announce a high-stakes tournament—with a seat on the ruling council as the prize—Zouk is drawn back into the fray, determined to reshape the future.

With help from the enigmatic Torrez Institute, Zouk racks up early victories against the Minds. But when Maya Torrez reveals the cost of her support—a violent coup against the Minds—he rejects it and strikes out alone.

Now, with no allies, dwindling resources, and a nation on the brink, Zouk faces the biggest game of his life—and a final, impossible choice: reform the system from within, or burn it all down.

Boost Your Writing Productivity with Pen and Paper

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

I write every day. 

This is a big improvement for me. In the past, I’d try to write everyday, but the words wouldn’t end up on the page. When I thought about writing, it felt big. Like an overdue errand, or kicking off a workout. Even when I was in my chair staring at the computer, my fingers wouldn’t tap on the keys. It was stressful work, and all that stress wasn’t even producing any words.

Three changes made all the difference. The brain didn’t want to write, so I figured out how to change its mind.

Pen and Paper

I used to prewrite on a computer. I’d sit down, let my mind wander, and type out every idea that came to my head. The funny thing was, I’d end up with three pages of pre-written dialog, plot points, and outline. But the moment I started writing for real, it all went out the window. The thinking I had done hadn’t stuck.

There is something fundamental about scrawling words onto a page. Even with my terrible handwriting, I can feel it in my head. You can’t just think of an idea and tip-tap the words with paper. Your brain has to take an idea, turn it into a few words, and convert that into muscle-movements. As the ink goes on the paper, the idea takes on a bigger meaning. Here’s a study confirming it.

When you sit down to write, start with pen and paper.

Nothing real, nothing committal. Just loose ideas, whatever comes to mind, an outline that keeps your brain thinking. My poor pre-writing pages are a junkyard of random notes, doodles, and aggressively circled sentences.

I’ve always found the first real sentence to be the scariest. It was like I had dragged my brain out of a sunny park, into a theater spotlight, and yelled “Perform!” from offstage. But for some reason, ever since I started using a pen and paper, my mind always finds its mark. 

Scheduled Time

My writing used to be inspired. By which I mean I’d wait until motivation struck, then charge into my writer’s room and ride that initial surge of inspiration for all it was worth. Now I’m writing 100,000 word novels and the artist’s inspiration doesn’t visit so often.

I’d always tell myself I was going to start at the bottom of the hour, then it’d be 3:02pm, and I’d tell myself I’d start at 3:30pm. Around 8pm, I’d be exhausted. Worn out by the stress of needing to write, and the reality that the writing wasn’t happening.

Then I put a meeting on my phone. Writing: 12:00pm-2:00pm. 

And I showed up.

My phone buzzes a half hour before. As soon as I see it, I finish lunch, do a last check for texts, plug the device in downstairs, and sit down in my writer’s room. On rough days, I even lock the door. The lock isn’t to keep people out, it’s more of a symbolic commitment to being in the writer’s space for the afternoon.

Writing is an open-ended task. A nebulous thing that half-fills your entire schedule. You can start at any time, even late at night if you feel so inclined. It’s like the cable repairman telling you he’ll be there between 8am and 6pm. Technically the day isn’t full, but you sure can’t do anything else.

Do yourself a favor and turn your writing into a meeting. Here’s a few ground rules: It’s okay to be late to a meeting from time to time. It’s okay to be early. Sometimes you sneak in a snack. But the important thing is that you are present and committed for the majority of the time block. Nobody likes a no-show.

And try not to reschedule your writing day-of. It’s easy to let other tasks push your writing around. To feel like it can happen later in the day, or that it isn’t a priority. Scheduling that time out is a statement to yourself. Your writing matters, and that two hour block belongs to you.

In my experience, turning that nebulous cloud of writing into a 2 hour block will give you more time in the day, not less.

Don’t spend your energy planning to write, spend it writing.

Momentum

Writing is tough. There are so many layers to a good scene, so many details to a story. The unfortunate truth is that it’s too much for one brain to remember for long.

If you stop writing for a week, you forget the upcoming scenes.

Stop for a month, you’ll forget the whole story.

Stop for three months and you’ll forget how to write in the first place.

The hardest day to write is your first day back from a break. Before you can prewrite, you have to remember the story all over again. Worse, you’ll have to remember why you liked it in the first place.

I wish it weren’t the case, but the only way to keep yourself from the pains of ‘returning to writing’ all the time is to never stop. There are two approaches here, daily goals and a writer’s streak.

Daily goals are the recognition that the only way to keep your brain thinking about a story is to make sure that story moves forward every time you write about it. I have a daily goal of 1,200 words. The benefit here is that each time I write, I’m about six pages and a scene further into the story. The downside is that writing 1,200 words can sometimes feel like scaling a mountain. If you can reach your goal everyday, it’s useful. If it’s so large it scares you, you risk exacerbating your existing reluctance.

The Writer’s Streak is a whole lot more forgiving. Each day, you only need a single word for the writer’s streak to continue. In time, writing becomes a habit. You wouldn’t throw away a 150-day writer’s streak just because you’re feeling a little tired, right? It’s a tool to keep you writing on the hard days, and thinking about your story every day.

No matter what method you choose, remember the real goal: keep the story moving, and keep your brain thinking about it.

Writer’s Reluctance

The brain likes to be comfortable, too comfortable. Sometimes I think it hates writing. It sure likes to come up with excuses. Errands to run, friends to see, not enough motivation, fear of imperfection. It’s up to each of us to tame our own brain, to force it to write day after day. But it can be done. We just have to be a little tricky.