5 Commandments and Pheres

Hello, and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grohl, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book StoryGrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we continue looking at the kind of basic tools and ideas of StoryGrid through this new lens of fears that Sean has come up with and we've been talking about for a few weeks now. And so this week, we dive into the five Commandments and how those work with this new idea and from this new perspective. So it's a really great episode. I think you'll enjoy it. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, I think it's been interesting because we've been going back through some of the fundamental story grid ideas and tools, and it's been neat because we've been kind of going through them with this new kind of perspective around fears, the P H E R E. And so I remember when you kind of had this realization at the editor training, it was in this discussion of the five Commandments and really around the turning point and identifying the turning point that sparked this. And so the thing I was planning on talking about this week was kind of going through the five Commandments again of storytelling and talking about that. And I just wonder, like, I almost feel like this fear thing, maybe it's because it's like the new thing, so it's front of mind, but it's almost coloring how you talk about everything.

And so anyway, I wanted to go through the commandments, but I was wondering how you view it now from this fear perspective of the five different commandments of every part of your story has to have an inciting incident, a middle build. Crisis. What is it? Crisis climax.

It's progressive complication, progressive complications. Crisis climax, resolution.

Yes, that's right. Right.

Well, that. I mean, yeah, the fact that we all sort of stumble on what those five things are, I think is testimony to the necessity of having a story grid golden rule, you know, and that's kind of the way I sort of conceived it in the story grid editor training was I just was not communicating to the group. And one of the great things about, you know, my experience with the story grid was in our idea to bring in other people who have different worldviews and different perspectives. So essentially what happened in that room that day, I was Being asked a set of questions from multiple people in the audience, all. All with different subjective points of view. But what they all shared was uncertainty. They didn't quite get what I was trying to say. And so, you know, in those moments, we all. When we're not communicating very well, we get frustrated and we get frustrated because we're afraid that if we can't explain it to them the way that makes sense to them, we're going to lose them, right? We're going to lose their interest in our way of looking at things. So it was a real crisis for me in that moment. And one of the editors pulled me aside later and said, it's interesting that the crisis for the conference happened on Wednesday, which was the day you were going over crisis.

So it's this, you know, the circle within the circle again. But I think it was important. So, you know, that night I went back to my hotel room and I couldn't sleep. And meanwhile, I'd been talking for nine hours. So it was really sort of obsessing me. And so the fear concept came from this notion of, how do I explain myself about the importance of. In the writing I've written about story and storytelling for the past seven, eight years, I always talk about the turn. You know, a story has to turn. It has to move. The value has to shift. And so concentrating on that critical moment, it really came to me that that is the most important thing in a story. People who start telling you episodes in their life where the value shift never turns are the most boring people in the world, right? And we've all run into them where somebody go, oh, you're not going to believe what happened to me yesterday. I went to the. To the shoe store and I picked up the shoes that I had polished, and they looked great. And then I went to the grocery store and I got the best steak they had available. And then I came home and I cooked it to the perfect, you know, degree that I love. And then I ate it, right? We're ready to hang ourselves by the end of that story, right? It's because it doesn't turn. Nothing happens. No, there's no moment in there. So the concept of the fear. I won't even get into the Jungian stuff and chaos and order and everything yet. But the concept of fear really seemed to me to be the golden rule of story. You gotta have fear in your story. And I love the metaphor, too, because it's what fear is, the prime motivator of action. Most of us don't do anything unless we Become afraid of not doing something. Right. That's what motivates behavior. In my estimation, it's the prime motivator of behavior. It's what advertising knows. That's how they get us to buy things. They make us afraid of not buying it. So the storygrid golden rule is, thou must have fear in every unit of your story. Okay, so if that's the golden rule, then maybe we should just throw out these five commandments. And I say, no, no. The reason why we don't want to throw away those five commandments is because they give us a very clear progression of levels of fear. So if you have the same fear in every unit of story, it's boring, too. There's a great character that I think Fred Armisen played on Saturday Night Live where he sort of. He plays this guy who never gets to the point, and he just keeps saying, like, these escalating things, and he never finishes the story of the escalation. And each one of the things that he says is of the same fear level. And so that can be a nightmare, too, when you just have somebody repeating the same level of fear. So it's like what I call the power of 10 when you're analyzing your progressive complications.

If you have the same type of progressive complication, he doesn't get the job, and then he doesn't get the job, and then he doesn't get the job, and then it's just, whoa, whoa. You can do that once.

It's like when my kids are telling me stories.

That's what it sounds like, right? Because the older we get, the more interesting the world becomes, the more we want variety in our fears. So these five commandments are a way of sort of thinking about the levels of fear in a particular unit of story. So the inciting incident. Chances are that the inciting incident is going to be relatively large now. You could make a smaller one. And then.

They'Re all different kinds of fears, right? There's the thing that doesn't seem to be such a big deal that explodes into a nuclear holocaust, right? And then there's the thing that seems like a massive big horror that turns out to be not that big of a deal anyway. So the inciting incident is sort of. When you're looking at the inciting incident, it literally incites. It's the fear, the moment of fear that incites a scene or a beat or whatever. And the way I would explain how to construct and think about what those things are is just to consider, you know, what we talked about the other Week, which is just what happens when you start to feel fear. What happens is you're going about your day and something unexpected happens, or alternatively, something that you anticipate happening happens, right? So if I say to you, Tim, I'm going to give you a test on the Five Commandments of Storytelling I on Friday at 9:00 clock in the morning, and it's Monday, what you can do is start anticipating the failure of yourself on that test on Friday. On Monday, right? So you can build up an internal fear of the test. And you can do one of two things. You can either just sort of obsess on that fear and make it grow and grow and get bigger and bigger and oh my God, what am I going to do? That test is on Friday. And then maybe you'll try and put the test off of your mind. So you'll go to amusement park and you'll have fun for a little while and you'll ride a roller coaster. But then as you're going to buy a funnel cake, you'll remember, oh my God, that test is on Friday, right? So you can run away from the fear and obsess about it. And then by the time Friday rolls around, that fear has gotten so large that when you walk to that anticipated event, it's a monster, right? It's like the beginning of Risky Business, that movie with Tom Cruise back in the 80s. You know, the beginning of the movie is he. He tells you about a dream, and the dream is he's taking the SAT test, right? So that's, that's the big fear of everyone in high school. Like, how am I going to perform on that very weird, antiquated, stupid test? Okay, so that's an anticipated fear. And then once you reach that place, that could be the inciting incident of a. So the beginning of the Shining is a job interview. It's a job interview where a man is interviewing for a job to be a caretaker at a big resort hotel. That's the inciting incident of the global story. Now, the brilliance of Stephen King was we got all kinds of information about how that character was approaching that job interview while the job interview was progressing. So Jack Torrance, who's the protagonist in the Shining, is really doing everything in his power to get that job. Because Jack Torrance is in deep, deep trouble if he does not get this job. He is. His life could be flushed right down the toilet. He's been sober for a year. There was some really bad incident in his family that caused him to have to go and get a job He's a writer. He got thrown, he got fired from his other job because he was a drunk. And now he has to write a book and he thinks this job is going to solve all of his problems. So the inciting incident of the Shining is an anticipated moment that the protagonist has been thinking about for quite some time before it actually begins. So you'll see that the wallop, the pack, the big level of fear, the fear ball that Stephen King puts at the beginning of his novel the Shining. Perfect. It's a perfect anticipated event that will drive our attachment to Jack Torrance. Because whenever someone has a goal and a desire, we can't help as human beings but root for them. Okay, so that's it. That's an example of an anticipated sort of fear. Now an unexpected inducement of fear would be, let's see, somebody's on a plane and the plane crashes. So it's unexpected event that incites and then it becomes a story of survival. There's plenty of stories available about plane crashes or any other extraordinary sort of random, coincidental, chaotic event from the environment. So you'll see that I'm talking about the inciting incident. Now, not so much as sort of, not generic, but before, the way I defined inciting incident was it could either be causal or coincidentally, it could be caused by another character or, or it could be a coincidental chaotic environmental effect. Now what are we doing? We're thinking about fear, right? We're thinking about this moment in time, either anticipated or unexpected, that forces the character, the protagonist or the antagonist or any secondary character to behave in a way that will allow them to reach a goal. And that is really powerful because when you get confused and you go, you know what? I'm really not sure what the inciting incident is. And this is why I got frustrated at the Story Grid Editor certification conference because, you know, I collected. I mean, they self selected obviously really, really intelligent people who study story manically like I do. So they weren't going to sit in the audience and just let me get away with not being clear. And that, you know, that's why we have these things, is that they make me up my game. At the same time I'm asking them to up their game. It's a, you know, it's a mutually beneficial relationship. So in the moment, yeah, I'm irritated by them, but I can't do without them because they forced me to come up with a better mousetrap here. So let's just talk about in terms of fear. So the inciting incident has a level of baked in sort of fear, P H E R E that is either the result of an anticipated event by the protagonist or the player in the drama, the focal character, or an unexpected event. So it's relatively large and it has multi dimensions, right? So in the example of the Jack Torrance character in the Shining, that job interview is an anticipated fear. And if he does not perform properly in that meeting, that fear will explode and he could lose his wife and his son if he doesn't get the job. Because if he doesn't get the job, he very may well lose all hope. He might say, well, there it goes. Not going to write that novel ever. Nobody's giving me a chance. The world is out to get me here. I've been a good boy for a year. I haven't had a drink. I've done what my wife has said, I've done what my son has said. And guess where that leads. It leads right to the bar, right? So he's holding on a very, very narrow passage that he really, really, really has to navigate properly or his world could fall apart. So that fear within Jack Torrance is so dynamic on so many different levels that it's what drives the entire novel. It drives the horror. His fear.

Actually.

We actually watch Stephen King take this guy's internal fear and externalize. He becomes a monster. He loses it. He loses his freaking mind in this story. So he believes that if he doesn't get this job, he's going to go crazy. Now what's the irony? He gets the job, which drives him crazy because sometimes when we think we're getting what we need and what we want, it destroys us. And that's what happens. And, and that's the beauty of Stephen King is that he externalizes so much internal angst and horror that, you know, we're mesmerized by the action of the story. When in reality, his stories, his best stories are internal horror shows of a depth that, you know, Kafka would, would appreciate. Anyway, so we have this big dynamic ball, multi dimensional ball of fear. That's the inciting incident.

Because I was about to say, when you're thinking about your inciting incident, so you keep going, you're ahead of me on all this stuff.

So when you're thinking about your inciting incident, think about it in those terms. What is the most multi dimensional ball of fear that my character could either anticipate or something unexpected happens to them? And then I'm talking about the global inciting incident of your story. So, you know, before we got on the call, we were talking about Brokeback Mountain. There's another inciting incident that seemingly seems kind of whatever, coincidence, weird. Two guys get a job taking care of a flock of sheep in the middle of the mountains and that's it, that's the inciting incident. But within both of those people there was. There are other fears about fears meaning P H E R E S, meaning internalized authenticity, pieces of themselves that have not been expressed. So they're multi dimensional fears within each of them. And so the unexpected moment of these two being given the same job, they fall in love. And that's interesting because it's an unexpected, coincidental inciting incident that if these two cowboys hadn't had never met each other, it's very possible that they never would have realized who they really are. Okay, so that's really interesting too. All right, so when you're thinking about the inciting incident, think about transformative fears that we all have within us. If I don't get this job, everything's going to shit. That's a transformative fear because it's, guess what, it's not true. So this is what David Mamet always says, and a lot of playwrights insist on this. They always say, when you're telling a story, think about the lie. When what's the lie? Who's playing the lie? When you're writing a scene, what is the lie being bandied about that people accept as truthful? So that's another way to look at the inciting incident. What is the fear within the character that is forcing them to lie to themselves? Because we all know subjectively, objectively, whatever, if you lose your job, yeah, it's not good, it's kind of terrible. But is it the end of the world? Are you never going to be able to work again? No, it's not true.

So like in the threshing, the big fear is going to the capitol.

That's correct. Her fear is that the capital equals death, Right? Exactly. And actually that's a lie because her brother's alive. It means a bunch of other things, but that's a lie. So she has to face her fear in order to find the truth. That's the other thing I love about the concept of the P H E R E because it's pronounced fear. And you know, guess what we all have to do in order to level up in our lives is we have to face our fears because the fears are usually bullshit and not true. Okay, so generally that's the inciting incident where, where the fear sort of lives in the inciting incident is playing around with the lie the character is telling themselves. So the lie Jack Torrance is telling himself is, if I don't get this job, I'm going to go crazy. But the truth is, if he gets this job, he's going to go crazy. Okay, so let's move on to the second one of these five. So we have the. The golden rule, which is the number one principle of story grid. And underneath are these five commandments of storytelling. So it's like if we had a pyramid, at the very tip would be fear. You must. Thou must have fear, P H E R E. And then the next level would be these five units. So the next unit is progressive complication. So the progressive complication, when you're looking that in terms of fear, these are little sort of micro irritants, right? So if you're trying to make a sandwich and you get out of the chair and you bark your ankle on the coffee table, that's a progressive complication. It's a minor irritant that you can probably overcome without losing your shit, right? So that's a little tiny fear. It's an unexpected moment, right? But it can be metabolized. It could be sort of dealt with relatively easily. So you bark your ankle. Then as you're making your way in their kitchen, the doorbell rings. Oh, man, you're kidding me. I'm starving and now I got to go answer the doorbell, Right? That's a progressive complication. That's a little bit more than barking your ankle on the coffee table. But it can be dealt with. Okay, so you're still on your way to get your sandwich, but you stop yourself and go, let me deal with the door first. So you go to the door, you open the door, and it's somebody you've never met before. And across the street there's a black car, and the guy's holding a manila envelope. And that's weird. You don't know this. So that's another progressive complication. There's a stranger at my door who's driving a black car who has a manila envelope in his hand. So now you're like, well, there's no getting around the fact that I've got to deal with this guy and my sandwich is still, you know, in the future yet. Okay, so that's another one. That's. Do you see how we're getting a little bit more difficult? So each fear is getting a little bit bigger, right? First one is easy to metabolize. Second one relatively easy to metabolize. Third one is really, you don't know what to do, right? What am I supposed to do? So you say something like, can I help you? And the person says to you, are you Sean Coyne? And I say, yes. He goes and he hands me the, hands me the manila envelope and he says, you have been served. And then he walks away. And I'm standing there with a manila envelope filled with fear, right? That is the beginning of the crisis of the scene. Because the crisis is now turned the scene, the scene is no longer about getting a sandwich. It's holy crap, what the hell just happened? So that's interesting.

The turning point is always the one.

That shifts the value of the scene. So the turning point, progressive complication, is when I touch that envelope, when he hands me, he says, you have been served. And he thrusts the envelope into my hand and walks away. That is a literal passing off of a turning point, progressive complication, fear that is multi dimensional. That will really get your reader or your viewer to say to themselves, what's going to happen next? What's in that envelope? What is going on? I thought this was about a sandwich. So it literally turns the value of the scene escalates the stakes. So it's a scene that takes the mundane up a level to the extraordinary. That kind of thing doesn't happen every day. At least I hope it doesn't.

And what would you put in the column on the value chain? Like it changes from what to what?

Probably stable to panicked or something like that. You could play with it in terms of the, the internal feeling of the character everyday to extraordinary, stable to panicked, known to unknown, and on and on and on and on. All of those are valid, right? So when I was giving the course, I kept saying to people, hey, your interpretation is valid. What you are bringing subjectively to these stories and to these scenes that we're analyzing is as valid as, as what I bring, right? And so it's a difficult concept to understand that there can be multi interpretations of a value shift in a scene. But it's true because when I see or I read the novel the Great Gatsby, I pull way, way different things than my 13 year old son would, right? So he's going to look at it at a different sort of with a different lens. He's going to look at it with the lens of his worldview, his subjective lens. Now his lens doesn't mean it's invalid because he's younger than I. No, it doesn't mean that at all.

But there is still like I Feel like you're balancing too though there are still like better answers than others. This isn't a situation where it's like, I don't agree, everybody gets a gold star.

I don't agree to a certain extent. And the reason why I don't agree is the beauty of art and the beauty of storytelling is that it's not anti intellectual, but it's for everyone, right? So the sophistication that the person brings to the story is interesting because the best stories can speak to everyone. The best stories relate experiences that people of all ranges of sophistication can understand. This is why we love the Simpsons, right? The Simpsons cartoon operates on so many dimensions and so many multi sophistication levels that I can watch it and go bananas laughing because of the references to the most ridiculous literature that you could imagine. Well, my 10 year old son can watch it and laugh at Krusty the Clown, right? Krusty the Clown is as funny to him as he is to me. But we see it in different ways. Krusty the Clown represents to me an old Borscht belt comedian who fell apart who is now forced to do child's parties. Right. Whereas to my son, he's just a funny clown. Right? So it doesn't mean that his interpretation of why Krusty the Clown is funny is wrong. Right. And it doesn't mean that I'm right or vice versa. That's what art is. Art is a multidimensional work that speaks to the greatest number of people as possible. So this is why I was talking to Kevin Johns the other day, who, you know, the Canadian story, sort of coach, and he was asking me about the, you know, the, what I call the bell curve of story where I clump in, you know, at the very peak where the largest possible viewership would be the action story. Right. So that's why we have. The Marvel universe is such a universal, universally profitable story universe because it deals with very primal action narratives that we can all, you know, we can all pull something from. Whereas Jean Luc Godard's work is, is not very, you know, it's not really up there in the big peak of, of, of popularity in the bell curve. It's an, it's an outlier on the anti plot side that only cafe society would really get, get much out of. You know, you would go, people go to Godard movies and they, they go and have coffee afterwards to try and figure out what the hell they just saw. So that's what for me, I'm a populist so the best art for me is one that has so many different levels of storytelling that as you grow more and more sophisticated throughout your life, the more you can take from the story later on in life. Life. So I guess. Go ahead.

I guess what I mean, though, because, like, the whole point of having a tool like story grid is to be able to look at your story and say, like. Because I'm thinking, you know, if I'm working with an editor and they're like, well, this one doesn't have a turning point. And you're like, yeah, it's turning right there. And I see it and it has this value. Like how if you're saying that everybody's opinion is accurate or then how do you still.

Okay, like, okay, I see what you.

Story.

Okay. You know what I mean? Yeah. Okay. So to take a little bit of a leap back, when I say somebody else's interpretation is as valid as mine is, I'm basically saying, oh, from what you're telling me, the value shift that you saw, you're reading this multi dimensional story as coming of age as the maturation plot. And what I would say is that's a valid, you know, interpretation of the. The value shift. Now, truth be told, Tim, a lot of people can't even pick out a value shift, you know, so the fact that people are putting their mind to it, the chances, the probability is that they are going to globally understand the concept of a value to begin with and that they're. Unless they're saying, oh, it's moving from known to unknown, and then the next scene is unknown to known, and then the scene after that is known to. Yeah, that's not really very specific now, is it? But if they're specifically identifying a value from, say, alienated to part of the group, I'll go, yeah, I could probably see that. So I think we're both right here. I think there are deeper, more sophisticated readings of stories. And obviously anyone who's applying storygrid methodology to stuff their global end of the road kind of goal would be to parse out the most sophisticated levels of story that they possibly can globally and microly and scene by scene. And the better you are at doing that, the more you get out of stories. So for me, storygrid methodology isn't just a way to edit fiction. It's also a selfish act in trying to figure out what the hell Edith Wharton means, you know, what was she really getting at? Because that's great art when you put together a very specific story. It's like Steve Pressfield, when I start talking about Gates of Fire, you know, he just sort of like takes a deep breath and goes, oh my God, I had no clue that I was able to do that. Because in the moment he didn't feel like he was doing this, that. But then I can talk about the brotherhood of the combat soldier and he'll be like, yeah, I totally see that in there. Wow, wasn't that lucky? I got that right. So that to me is art. Right? So that's the beauty of the story grid is it allows you to appreciate art at a level that is so overwhelmingly appreciative at the global level and at the micro level. And, and to see how they put together the Swiss watch and to know that each gear has a particular function is a great gift. All right, so we just went through progressive complication that are getting. These little balls of fear are getting larger and larger and larger until they reach this moment when the value shifts. And that is the multi dynamic fear that is even more larger than probably the inciting incident of the individual scene. And the reason it is is that it raises a crisis and the crisis is an active choice. You know, am I going to do the worst? You know, I want a best bad choice or irreconcilable goods. And those are just, just two different ways looking at the same problem. If I do X, Y will result. Y is not ideal in my. I'm not going to get my sandwich now, right? So I can either just ignore this thing and go make my sandwich and have it torment me or I can open up the package. So what's the best bad choice? If I don't open up the package, then it's going to torment me as I'm eating my sandwich. And if I do open it, then I probably, probably will lose my appetite because it's probably somebody suing me for something.

It's usually not good news being delivered that way.

No, no, it's not like you've won the Irish sweepstakes. Here's your check for 5 million. So the crisis leads to the climax, which is the actual choice. He rips open the thing and, and discovers that his next door neighbor is suing him because his fence is on the wrong side of the property line or something. Or maybe it's larger than that. His wife is leaving him, he's just been served with divorce papers. And then he looks around and notices, oh my gosh, her car is gone, all of her stuff's out of the closet. Like all these things that he hadn't noticed before he now notices. So then that propels the next scene, right? Oh, my gosh, my wife is gone. How do I fix this problem? Maybe I avoid the problem. You know what I'm saying? So that's how you sort of. So the crisis turns into the climactic action which resolves itself into, here is the fallout from that fear ball. Now what am I going to do about it? How am I going to rejigger my goals? You know what? I'm just going to get my sandwich. I'm sorry about the sandwich. Keep talking about the stupid sandwich. But I'm just trying to show you that in each one of these five things, there's a fearball involved. And they're all of varying complexity. The inciting incident one is pretty complex, right? Then the progressive complications one sort of. If it's a roller coaster, the inciting incident is, you know, taking you to the top of the first fall, and then you fall, and then you slowly go up to the next, you know, hill on the roller coaster. Those are progressive complications. And that hills a little bit bigger than the inciting incident, right? So that one. So that one then sends you into an action which takes you down to a resolution, and then you start all over again.

So, I mean, so when you're looking at these, it's still, you know, you're not replacing the commandments, like you said, with this thing. It's just a new way of looking at them from a. From a higher perspective.

Right? It's applying the notion of fear at the five commandment level. So if you have a progressive complication problem, then you would zero in on fear and go, okay, something's going wrong here. Something is not feel. Something doesn't feel right. Let me take a look at what the turning points of these beats in this progressive complication series leading to the knock on the door are. Oh, I get it. So now I'm just repeating the same level of fear. He barks his. His ankle on the coffee table, and then he slips on the dog toy. And then as he's rounding the corner, he bumps his shoulder on the wall. Right? Those are all the same progressive complication. And then the doorbell rings. So you had you. You know, if you're going to assign powers of 10 to the progressive complications, it would be 2, 2, 2, 7. And you're like, oh, okay. Then those twos represent the level of fearball. So I just need to take the second one from a two to a three or a four, and then the third one for a four to a six. So what else could I do that's a little bit worse than barking? Your ankle on the coffee table. The knock on the door is one of them. So that's the way you use fear. The the golden rule of Story grid. That's how you use that to fix, you know, the five stages of a scene or a beat or a unit of story is by, you know, the first thing you're going to do is look at what's going on in with with the fears where how big are they? Are they dynamic? Are they interesting? Are they complex? Now you don't really want super complex ones in progressive complications. So that's why it's important to know what a progressive complication is. And you do know that the crisis is going to be a best bad choice. So the progressive complications are going to lead to a ball of fear that makes the person actually consider an active behavioral change. So what fears are is they cause change. What stories are descriptions of change, how we change our behavior to deal with environmental changes in our lives. Right? So if stories are about change, the thing that causes the change are the fears.

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