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.