6 questions (good) editors ask

Hello, and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is the podcast dedicated to helping you become a better writer. My name is Tim Grall. I'm your host, and I am the writer just trying to get into storytelling and learning how to do it. So I am asking all of the inane little questions that writers like us want to ask, experts like Sean Coyne. Shawn Coyne has been in the industry over 25 years. He wrote the book the Story Grid, and he is an expert in making sure your story works. And your story is something people will want to read. So that's what this podcast is all about. And this is episode seven. In this episode, we talk about macro and micro stories. We talk about the six questions every editor is trying to answer, and then we walk through the five different parts of a story and what each of them mean and what they mean for your story as well. And just to let you know, we did a survey last week to the email subscribers@storygrid.com and we asked what story you would like us to run through the story grid, and you voted. And the answer was the Martian. So Sean and I are working on that right now, and we're going to make that available in a few episodes. In fact, that's going to be our Christmas episode that comes out on December 23rd. So you're going to want to look out for that, because along with that, we're going to run the classic story the Christmas Carol through the story grid as well. So look out for that last thing. Before we jump into this week's episode, I just want to remind you that one of the best ways that you can support the show is to go to itunes and drop in a rating or a review for our show. Right now, as I record this, we are at 29 and I would love to get that to 50. So I know there are thousands of you listening to this podcast, and so far we've had 29 ratings and reviews. So if just a couple of you jump in and do this, we will hit that goal of 50 reviews on iTunes. So go into itunes and do that right. Right now. Okay, let's jump into this week's episode.

So, hey, Sean.

Hey, Tim.

How's it going?

It's good. It's good. Good to be back.

Yeah. Been looking forward to. So last week we did a nice, complete public tear down of my scene, which was so much fun for me.

And did.

Were you able to put any notes on that?

Yeah, I'll tell you what I did and shoot it to you, and then maybe you can post it for everybody listening. So what I did is.

I took your scene and basically I went and I plugged in after certain points in your scene, just general comments and it's in red text. So generally it's reiterating a lot of things that we talked about last week. And also it sort of goes in a brand new direction at the very end. So I think after you go through it, you'll see that, you know.

We talked about a couple of weeks ago, like, where do you start? You know, how do I start my novel? What's the best way to do it? Should I fill in the global foolscap, you know, story grid, or should I, you know, start a scene? And what I suggested for you, because you're sort of like a mad planner, is to do the opposite of what your inclination is. So you probably wanted to sit down and bang out that, you know, the foolscap global story grid and just fill it all out. And so instead what I asked you to do was to write an inciting incident scene for your global story. And that's what you did and you sent it to me. And last week we went through it in general terms. And so what I've done.

With the actual scene itself is to go very specific and to talk about how you could use that first crunchy draft that you banged out and you really needed to just get something on the paper, how you can use that to inspire you to solve a lot of questions.

Last week we talked about how you initially thought that your story was going to be sort of akin to Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians. Or I think they published it under a number of different names. That, that one story about the, the group of people and you have to figure out which one is the murderer. And, and we sort of looked at that and looked at your, your storytelling and I, I kind of pointed you in the direction that what you were setting up for the reader was a different experience than that you were setting up a sort of a global action story set on, you know, the, the high seas where there's a group of people who are stranded and, you know, the reader is going to expect a certain kind of story when you take them into that world. So. Based upon. Yeah, so go ahead.

I was just, I was just surprised by how much just trying to tell one scene, like showed all the holes. And you know what I thought I was writing and immediately brought so many things to light, you know, like my notes, even just my personal notes on everything you said was just so extensive. On 1500 words.

Yeah. I mean.

As we've been talking about over the weeks, storytelling is really like that thing with the Russian dolls, you know, those great little dolls that fit one inside the other. And so when you start with a scene, you're starting with like this little kernel, this microcosm that will expand into a larger global tail. So, you know, when I asked you to do one scene, your brain was going to sort of like try and jam as much into that one scene of what you wanted to do as you could. So that's a good place to start because it's going to show you the places where you probably would get off track if you were trying to bang out a 60 to 80,000 word novel just in one scene. So I think that was, you know, fortuitous in that I really didn't, I really didn't know that we were going to come to so many different conclusions based upon that one scene. But I think it really.

You didn't know how effed up my story would be?

No, not at all.

This is the great thing about storytelling that's so much fun, is that when you write something, there's so much stuff that's on the page that you as the writer don't even really see. So it does take.

You are an advantage if you have somebody who's a friend who can help you see the things that you can't see yourself.

Well, so do you think I can't remember how deep we went into this last week, but I mean, if you are, you know, you should have an editor when you're writing. Like, would it be good to have that editor be getting involved this early in the process?

Well, yeah. I mean, ideally, if there's somebody that you trust.

Who has a very good sense of, you know, the genre that you're working in, even if it's somebody who's not a professional editor and you know, you write one thing, asking somebody to read 1500 words as opposed to 70,000 words is so much easier. Right, right. So even if, say, say you wanted to write, you know, a story like Star wars and one of your good friends is like one of those Star War, Star wars fanatics.

And he or she may not even have any experience in book publishing, but I can guarantee you they know the genre structure of a Star wars story probably as good as any editor would at a major publishing house. So if you said to them, hey, I want to sort of create this world like Star wars and I've written this scene and it's kind of like that scene where Luke Skywalker you know, gets the call to, you know, leave the. The. The planet. And here it is. What do you think? And they're going to say to you, well, I'm not really sure if that this sounds more like this other scene. And so I do think that if you do have friends who are real experts in a certain kind of story area to use their expertise by using. By giving them one scene, going to be fun for both of you, and they're going to help you find, you know, problems way before you go down the road of 20,000 words that you have to cut out, you know. So I do think if you have the advantage of being able to work with somebody who's a story expert, the sooner you do it, the better. And the more you respect and trust their opinion, the better it's going to be for you.

Yeah, and I also like that, you know, I didn't think about till later when I sat down to do it. You gave me the homework of reading Hemingway's. Was it Hills like White Elephants?

Yes. Yeah.

And so I read it, and I was just devastated. And I'm like, so my homework is to write like Hemingway? No, I mean, I understand what you're going for, but I was like, oh, my gosh, I can't do this.

You know, that's. I mean, obviously, that's one of the greatest short stories ever written. And it's. It's an example of subtext. It's. It's one of the finest scenes where the. The two people never really directly addressed. I mean, Hill's like white elephants. I mean, what's the elephant in the room? You know, it's the thing that nobody wants to talk about but is constantly on everybody's mind. And the reason why I wanted you to read that is to see, you know, when you're doing a scene where two people or three people are in a conversation, you know, being direct is almost a mistake. You actually want them to be.

You know, playing around the central problem without anybody really directly addressing it. Because when we. That's. That's what people do, you know, they run away from problems and they. They say things that address a problem, but never directly.

So anyway, that's. That's why I wanted to read it.

The thing you pointed out, too, that.

You know, it's these things I've heard before, and I know, but until I'm in it and doing it, it's that whole, like, they know what's going on, so they wouldn't directly say these things. Not even just to avoid things but because they already know the other person knows what they're talking about.

Exactly. It's like a conversation that you would have with your wife in the grocery store. Hey, did you get that thing? Yeah, yeah, don't worry about it. Well, what do you mean? Did you get it or not? And you don't have to say, did you get the lamb chops for the party that we're gonna have next Tuesday? Because you know what I mean, the two of you already know that.

So when you can do that, the expectation of the reader, it creates a, A mystery for the reader. Right. Because then they're like, I wonder what they're talking about. I'm going to keep reading because I'm going to eventually going to find out.

Yeah. So I had sent you, and we'll go over this next week, but I'd sent you a rewrite where it was basically dialogue between two people. And I kept. I re. Edited it several times to take out.

To take out description and to take out like, I ended up writing like 3 or 400 words basically towards the end of the scene that I ended up going back and just deleting it and shortening it to like a sentence or two, you know, and just trying to. I was basically trying to say as little as possible in the 1500 words about what they're, you know, just. I don't know how to put it.

No. There's a great line that Elmore Leonard, you know, said all the time and people said, well, how do you write? And he says, well, I like to leave out the things that people are going to skip.

Yeah. What? Yeah, Leave out the boring part.

Yeah, yeah. All the stuff that, that a reader already knows, they're gonna skip over that they don't want to. They don't. I call it shoe leather. You know, it's scenes where somebody, Jim, walked to the door, he opened, you know, he turned the knob, the knob was a little sticky, and when he pulled the door, it actually opened. And on the other side of the threshold was his, you know, long lost friend, George. You don't need that. You know, George came over. That's it. That's all you have to say.

It's like, I hear you say that and I realize it's bad writing, but I think I've written that exact thing before.

We all have. And that's why you cut it. You know, that's what you have in your first draft. Don't kill yourself over it. Everybody does it. Yeah.

Okay, so we'll shelf that for now. So if you again. If you want to download Sean's notes on my scene, that's in the show. Notes for this episode@storygrid.com podcast episode six.

And then we'll talk about the rewrite next week. But this week I want to dive into the Fool's cap. We've been talking about it for a couple weeks now. And just tell me a little bit about what is the fool's cap and what is the whole point of it.

Okay.

There are, there are two major components in telling a story. There's what I call the macro point of view, which is, you know, the global. The global, you know, three sentence description of a story. You know, like the movie Rocky, you know, bum fighter from Philadelphia gets a break to fight the champion of the world and goes all 15 rounds in an incredible, you know, triumph. That's basically the story of Rocky. That's, that's the macro point of view. It has the beginning of the story, the middle of the story, and the ending of the story all encapsulated in as few words as possible. Now, so that's what, you know, the Foolscap Global story grid is a one sheet piece of paper that will give you, the writer, a global map of your story. And we'll get into the details of it later. But that's what it's for. It's for sort of, you know, you're on day 37 of your writing and you're in the middle of your middle and you say to yourself, where am I going again? That's when you pull out your, your full SCAP global story grid and you say, oh, okay, I am now writing the. I'm progressively complicating the, you know, the middle of my book. And, you know, I have about three more steps to go before I get to the, you know, the global crisis of my middle build. So that's what it's for. It's a map. It's sort of like, you know, going from New York to Los Angeles. It's going to show you, you know, which interstate to go to, to go through Kansas.

Then there's the other part, which we'll get into later, which is the micro story. And now the micro is all about scene to scene progressions from the beginning of your story until the very end. It's all very detailed.

It's really about making sure that you're consistent in your storytelling, that you're raising the stakes and never going back.

So that is really an essential editing tool. But they're both very important editing tools. But as a Writer like you who is starting out just on sort of coming up with a global outline for the book that they're, they're going to write, starting with the global full scale story. Story grid is a really great way to go because after you're done filling in this one piece of paper, you're gonna, you're gonna have your Rand McNally map to go from the beginning to the middle to the end. Okay?

And you have it split up into four sections. So the first one is the global story. And this is where you figure out your external genre, your external value, your internal genre, internal value, this type of stuff. Why is that so important to make those decisions first?

Well.

It'S extremely important because these answer those six questions that I talk about a lot in the book, which are the first six questions, and an editor is going to ask.

When you understand specifically, and this is what we talked about last week, you need to know, you really need to hone in and lock down your genres. And the reason why you need to do that is your genres are going to be so helpful for you to create your map. Because what your genres tell you are the indispensable elements that you're going to have to have in your story in order to satisfy your reader. What does that mean? What that means is that if you're writing a crime story, you're going to want to have a scene where a body is discovered, and you're going to want to have that scene in your beginning hook. Because if you don't, your reader isn't going to understand that your story is primarily a crime story. And if you hold that scene, that discovery of the body, until the middle build, they're not going to really understand. They're going to think that your story is something else. So making these decisions and sticking to them and figuring out what the conventions of that particular genre are is going to be invaluable when you're planning your entire book. Now, for example, last week when you were writing your one scene, you initially thought that your story was going to be crime story. It was going to be a story where somebody is murdering everybody on the boat. And the big mystery for the reader will be trying to figure out who the culprit is. That's sort of like, you know, an Agatha Christie story. It's sort of a master detective element.

But when you started writing it, the possibilities and the interesting elements that you, the world that you want to explore was shouting out for something else. It was shouting out for an action story. Now, it doesn't mean that you're not going to have a crime element in that story. Absolutely. You are going to have a crime element in that story, but the crime element is not going to be the global driving force that you're going to pay off for your reader. Because when you start on a boat in the open sea, your reader is just going to be like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to settle in. I'm going to get a great seafaring yarn. This is going to be a great action story. Life and death is going to be at stake. Boy, this is going to be great. And if you don't sort of raise the stakes and get to that point very early on in your inciting incident for the global story, your reader's gonna be like, wait, wait, what's it. What is this? I thought this was gonna be one of those really cool scene novels. And this is gonna be turning into Murder on the Orient Express. Oh, I don't want to read that. I think, you know, they're gonna be disappointed.

And, yeah, so that's where, like.

I was.

I can't.

So if I start with the Crime John genre, you know, I'm gonna. I'd be looking at red herrings and lots of investigation by a central character investigator where one guy's outwitting another and what an action is. It has different conventions that I have to have. So that's basically a completely different roadmap I'm picking.

Exactly, exactly. So this is why the very top of your, you know, global Foolscap page is so important. Because these are the things that. These are the big, big, big, meaty, juicy answers that you can always go back to and refer to. It's going to stop you from writing a scene that isn't going to make sense for your. Your global genre.

So at the very top, you know, the first quarter of the page, now, I actually came up, a lot of people asked me, where did I get the fool's cap, you know, concept? And this came from my friend Steve Pressfield, who learned years ago when he was a struggling writer in New York, he was driving a cab. He couldn't get arrested, and he was just at his wit's end. And one of his good friends is a documentary filmmaker named Norm Stahl. And Norm, you know, is banging out great documentary after documentary. He seems to have the world at his feet. And Steve's crying and saying, oh, geez, I don't know what to do, Norm. What should I do? And Norm finally, you know, had had enough and said, let me take you out to lunch. So he took Steve out to lunch. Steve gets his cheeseburger and his iced tea, and he's waiting for, you know, the big moment. And he's. He's like, geez, Norm, I just don't know what's going on. I just can't seem to, you know, crack the story. And my novels just don't seem to have that one thing. And I keep going off track, and I don't know what to do. And Norm stops him, and he pulls out a legal pad of paper. It's that yellow fool's cap that we all know it's a legal pad. He said, steve, the good Lord made the yellow fool's cap so that you can put an entire story on one piece of paper. And he sat down and he outlined an entire novel for Steve. And I think Steve said he went through the Great Gatsby, which I think was amazing. And he just showed, just as you see in the story grid, he drew a couple lines on the page, and he said, you've got your beginning, you've got your middle, you've got your end. Now at the top of the page, you want to tell yourself what kind of story you're going to write, and then you're going to fill in the other three things. And then whenever you get lost and you're struggling, you just go pull out that piece of paper, and you know where you have to go. And this is going to get you a first draft. Once you have a first draft, then you can start doing your real work. But the really difficult thing for writers is getting that first draft so then they can start going back and tweaking in and making things better and better and better and better. So that's why I call it the Foolscap Global Story Grid. It's in salute to Norm Stahl, who came up with this concept. And I think it really works well, because everybody wants that. They want that one piece of paper. Where's my guide that I don't have to be flipping through a million pages of notes, character histories, and all that baloney a lot of people ask you to do if you have one piece of paper that's going to say, oh, I need to write that scene today. I need to write the climax of my middle build today. Oh, okay. And this is what it's going to be. It's going to move from X to Y, and it's going to go from positive to negative. Got it? Now I can write my 1500 words today.

Yeah, I feel like looking at it, you Know, there's.

You know, there's this continuum between, you know, the plotters and pantsers. Right. The people that just. Or the panthers are the people that just sit down and start writing like they have an idea. So they just sit down and start writing. And you can go all the way to the other end of that extreme where you basically do these like, very intense outlines. And I think that's what.

Oh man, James Patterson does is he has like, each scene he has a paragraph described, but before he writes the book, he has a outline that describes each scene and what's happening in that scene.

And so this seems kind of like a middle ground.

Right.

So it's not starting with nothing. You know, it's doing some planning ahead of time and knowing where you're going, but it's also not, you know, planning out your 82 scenes and exactly what's going to be in each one.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to argue with James Patterson. And I'll confess that, you know, if, if I was tasked to write a novel, I'd probably go closer to what he does than other people. But. But I think what is really informative is what we experienced last week and what we'll talk about more next week is that if, if you give yourself a little bit of freedom and you don't decide concretely straight away, I'm definitely going to write a locked room mystery story and nothing's going to stop me from doing that. If, if you don't do that. And you say to yourself, here's kind of like the kernel of the idea that I have. And you started with this and you're like, the kernel of the idea that I have is this guy, this bunch of guys on a boat who are going on this very expensive deep sea fish scuba diving adventure and they start dying one by one, start dying off one by one, and nobody can really figure it out. So that was sort of the kernel of the idea that you had. And you said to yourself, oh, okay, well, that could be sort of like an Agatha Christie story. And this is similar to Ten Little Indians, which is Naga. So let me just use that as my starting point. And I'm going to write this scene, my inciting incident to get the thing going. And the inciting incident that you came up with was fantastic. Which was one of the people gets sick and they have a very, very bad sickness, which is the bent. So from that, you know, you wrote your scene and what we discovered last week is that all the decisions that you had thought you had made concretely before that actually weren't going to serve the global sort of big what if that you had initially in your head. So all of this is to say that if you spend a lot of time plotting out 82 scenes and writing a full paragraph about each and meticulously thinking about the, you know, A goes to B, B goes to C, C goes to D. You know, that's a really great way of planning, but it leaves you little room to discover and discover those things that you haven't consciously, you know, figured out yet. So that's why I like the Global Foolscap story grid, because it's basically you're plotting out 15 scenes, you're not plotting out 18. And they're the 15 crucial scenes that you're gonna have to deliver. Now, what are those scenes in the beginning hook, the middle build, and the ending payoff? Those are. It's a three, three part the power of three. All stories, no matter how many acts they have or sequences or scenes or anything, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And in each one of those sections, the beginning, the middle and the end, they need to have five very, very crucial story.

Story scenes.

And those five scenes are the inciting incident of that section.

A scene that progressively complicates the problem of the inciting incident, a crisis, a climax, and a resolution. So each one of your parts, your beginning, hook, middle build, and ending payoff, needs to have a scene that is analogous to one of those four, I'm sorry, those five crucial elements in story. So you're going to need an inciting incident scene, you're going to need a progressively complicated scene. You're going to need a crisis scene, a climax scene, and a resolution scene. So you know that right off the top for each section of your book. So no matter what genre you're writing in, no matter what story you're writing, you know that for a fact. You need to do that. So that's why I use those five scenes as your global Foolscap story grid to map those out, because those are going to be the key, the key scenes in each part of your book. So to have a general sense of where your book is going to go from the beginning until the end, with five scenes in each section is just a great way. They're like mile markers. You know, it's like, okay, I'm starting in New York, I need to know how to get to Pittsburgh. Then from Pittsburgh, I need to know how to get to Chicago. From Chicago, I need to know how to get to Denver. From Denver, you know, you know what I'm saying? So those are the mile markers for each section of your story. So.

I think that explains it and ask away. I'm blathering on.

Yeah, no, So I have those five pieces. The inciting incident, complication, crisis, climax and resolution. So I feel like I understand the inciting incident pretty well. Right. So that's what knocks the world out of balance. The world's in balance. It now knocks it out of balance. And usually the protagonist's goal is to just put the world back in balance.

Yes.

So then the complications are one or more things that keep. Basically keep the protagonist from putting his world back into order. Right. So usually, like I heard it described once, you know how you write a story is put somebody in a tree, throw rocks at them, and then let the person get back down out of the tree. Right. So the complications are where it keeps getting worse and worse, or things, you know, it keeps staying out of their grasp.

Right. Get somebody in a tree, take away the ladder, start throwing rocks at them, then set the tree on fire, then have an earthquake happen. That's the kind of thing. Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so the two that I feel like I get the most confused about are the crisis and the climax. Because how is the crisis different from the complication or the. So the inciting incident is what knocks it out of balance. Complications keep it out of balance. What is the crisis?

The crisis. I always think of a crisis as a question, and it always helps. It's the question that the protagonist has to answer. In the dilemma, it boils down to one of two choices. So just for fun, let's use the guy up the tree. Okay.

Okay.

So you've got a guy is up a tree and, you know, he thought he was going to be able to get down. Let's say it's a hundred foot tree and the bucket truck that put him up there has had to leave. So he's up there in the tree and he's got to get down, and there's no way he's going to be able to climb down because the jump will be too high. So he's sitting up there and he's thinking about it. And as he's thinking about it, he's like, okay, I can wait for the bucket truck to come back, or I can start climbing down and see if there's a way for me to maybe jump to another limb and another tree. And then maybe I can sort of Tarzan my way down. So he starts climbing down the tree and.

Let'S say a Group of nasty people start throwing rocks at him from. From the ground. So he's like, okay, I have to go the other side of the tree now, because I'm getting hit by rocks on this side of the tree. So he. He tumbles around to the other side, and then as he gets to the other side, he's going further and further down. Somebody lights the bottom of the branch on fire, and so there's fire starting to come up from him. Now he knows that he can't continue to go down. He's now reached a crisis. Now, the crisis that he's reached is the following. If he stays on that limb of the tree, he's going to burn up. Fire is coming up. He's got maybe five minutes before that fire is going to reach him. He's starting to get smoky. It's starting to get very uncomfortable for him. So the crisis is, does he jump from there, which is. Is probably going to break his legs.

Or does he risk going to the other side and having those people throwing rocks at him? And he did notice that there was a possibility of him being able to jump and leap 10ft into the air and perhaps fall onto a very large pine tree that could break his fall and not break his legs. But if he gets hit by the rocks, he might miss. And then he's not just going to break his legs. He's going to die because he's going to land directly on his head. So the crisis is what I call the. The best bad choice. Right? So he can either try and still wait for the bucket truck, which is stupid at this point. He can jump from where he is and break his legs, or he can try the other route. So this decision is the crisis. This is the moment. All right?

So the difference between a complication and a crisis would be. A complication is like the obvious next thing I need to do to try to reach my goal, right? Where a crisis is either the best bad choice. So there's base. You're down to two choices that are both horrible, and you have to pick one. Instead of thinking, okay, this thing is gonna get me what I want. It's like, well, neither of these probably are, but I have to do one. Or you also talk about the. Oh, the two.

Irreconcilable goods.

Something's good for me or it's good for somebody else, but both of us can't get the same good. So.

So that's when you transition, trans. Transition from complications to the crisis of the, you know, beginning hook.

That's exactly correct. And the thing. And this gets. This isn't that complicated when you're talking about a guy in a tree. But it does get complicated when you're. When you're working on your story. And the thing that transitions from a progressive complication to a crisis is the thing called the turning point. And I talk about the turning point in the book a lot. A turning point can. Can happen in two ways, either through action or revelation.

And the turning point means that there's just. You can't stay where you are. You have to make a decision. It's sort of. So for the guy in the tree, it's an active turning point. The tree has been set on fire by somebody. Somebody took an action that caused that character in the tree, forced him to make a decision. Now, a revelatory turning point would be something like, somebody doesn't set the tree on fire. What the guy sees is, say, a rope ladder.

That he can't reach perfectly, but if he stretches and then jumps a little bit, he may be able to grab the wrong. So that's a revelation. That is new information that changes the status of the guy in the tree. So nobody does anything. There's just a rope ladder that some kids had put up on another tree that this guy sees, and it's revealed to him, oh, there is something that can change my circumstance. So a turning point is either active or revelatory.

So.

So let's go back to the story I'm writing. Because to try to put this in concrete. So when I rewrote the first scene, basically, I'm making it all about the fact that this guy.

The one guy thinks he doesn't have the bins, the other guy thinks he does. And they're arguing about what to do about that. Do they go back or do they stay? And so how I was planning on doing it is basically over the next few scenes, basically, those things stay in. We keep going back and forth. Like something happens that makes you think, like, okay, he's getting better than. The next thing happens, that, oh, he's getting worse, but everybody still wants to stay, you know? And so my turning point will be where, like, there is no longer. We can no longer wait to make this decision. We now have to make a decision right now. Are we going back or are we staying? And that would be the turning point. And that would then move me into the best. Bad choice.

Yes. And just to play off of the scene that you wrote, the first draft of the scene, the crisis was, yeah, the guy has the bends. And we either have to head back or, you know, make sure that he's going to be okay on board. So.

That'S kind of a, that's not, that's not a really good crisis because the reader is going to say to themselves, well, geez, somebody's got the bends. You're definitely going to go back.

Well, so I did some more research on the bends and there is a lot of case, like in most cases where you have at first just mild symptoms, people assume it's not the bend and they just act like they're just feeling sick or they take some oxy or they're tired. And so a lot of times it's easy to talk your. And a lot of people get the bends really bad because they talk themselves.

Out of the early symptoms.

Right, Great.

And so what I decided to do was basically keep it on this edge of maybe he doesn't have the bins because, well, he's just feeling a little run down and we gave him some oxygen and because I found this really great article where somebody talks about how they had the bins and their captain kept telling them, no, no, no, no, they, you don't have it, you don't have it. And kept doing all of these things until finally she basically fell out and she had the bins. And I'm like, oh, well, there's my progressive complications, which is, no, he doesn't have it, we're fine. No, he doesn't have it, we're fine. No, he doesn't have it, we're fine. Oh my God, he has it. We have to go back now.

That's good, but. No, that's good, but here's the thing that you can't do more than once, and I talk about this in the book a lot, is that with each complication, you can't have the same complication over and over again or the reader will get bored. Okay, so if, if the person.

Initially you can say, you don't have to reveal it's the bends. They're not feeling well, they're tired, they've had some oxygen, they're feeling better now. Now you can't do that again. You can't have another argument about, oh, well, they're feeling bad again because you've already covered that ground. So you have to escalate the progressive complications. So.

I'm just playing around here. So the initial thing was Jim doesn't feel well. Oh my gosh, what's wrong with him? Well.

He seems to be feeling better now because we've given him oxygen. Okay. Then the Next complication has to be something like, hey, we're starting to lose our navigation equipment and you know, it'd probably be better if we headed back.

Yeah, I guess so. But we're, you know, do we have the.

And then there's a storm coming.

Exactly.

I see, I see.

Okay, so that's an obvious example, but that's the thing. You have to keep twisting the, the, the rope so that it gets tighter and tighter and tighter. You can't just use the same level. Okay. And that's, that's a mistake a lot of first time writers make is like, hey, I'm progressively complicating everything because first he's sick, then he's not sick, then he's sick again, then he's not sick. So that's four different progressive complications. And I'm like, yeah, that's true. But they're, they're the same one.

Okay, You've got to think boring pretty quick.

Yeah, very quickly. And the other thing is that when somebody gets ill, it's a telegraph to the writer or to the reader.

Either that whenever anybody gets ill in a story.

The reader is going to assume they're gonna really go down the. Down the deep end.

Because why? It's like that famous Chekhov saying, you know, don't introduce a gun into your story unless it goes off. Yeah.

It's like when you're watching a show and they try to introduce like a side character that you're not supposed to care about, but they give him like three too many lines and you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, that's the killer. Because otherwise they wouldn't have spent so much time introducing us to this character. That's not supposed to, supposed to matter.

Right, right. Or they have like a famous star come on, and you're like, oh, well, that star is definitely going to be a big part of the show, you know.

Right, right. So, okay, so I have complication. And then the crisis is where I'm at a point where I have to make a decision.

You have to make a decision.

And so the climax is the, the climax is where you make the decision and you see what happens.

Right, exactly. So a lot of people say, well, what if he just doesn't make a decision? What if he just stays in the, in the tree? Then I'm like, that's a decision. That's a decision that he is going to burn up. Because you can't, you can't stop the fire.

And here's the thing, you know, here's the thing, Tim, you Know, a couple of episodes ago, you asked me about why I don't really get into characterization and stuff so much in the story grid. And here's the reason why. It's the crisis moments in your story that reveal character. So if your character decides to stay in the tree.

That says a lot about that kind of person, right? They're very fearful. They're incapable of making decision, and they're going to die because they have no courage.

But if they choose to jump and try and find a limb to go elsewhere, that shows that they're very courageous. Or the third option would be maybe they're really smart and they somehow convince one of the rock throwers to get a ladder in some way. You know what I'm saying? So it's those crisis moments in your story that define who your characters are.

Like at the beginning of Casablanca, Rick, you know, his friend is arrested for gambling or something. It's played by that. That great character actor. I forget his name, but he talks like this. Rick, you know, Rick. I forget his name. But he gets arrested. The cops come in and they take him. And Rick owns the place, right? And Rick could have stopped the cops and said, hey, hey, he's cool, you know, don't arrest him. I'll vouch for him. But he doesn't do it because he's like, I stick my neck out for nobody. Screw it, let him arrest him. I don't care. That decision says who Rick is. Rick is sort of like a pathetic alcoholic who's only concerned about himself.

So that's the beginning of the story. By the end of the story, Rick's actions are, no, you know what? I'll stay back here in Casablanca and I'm going to fight the Nazis, and I'm going to let the leader of the resistance and the woman I love get on that plane without me. I'm going to sacrifice my life to fight evil and to try and save for a better world. So the transition of the actions from Rick at the very beginning of that story and Rick at the very end of the story, that is called what you call a character arc. And character is revealed through action. So the crisis moments in all of your scenes, you know, you have to think about them very specifically. What is this choice saying about my character? What kind of person do I want to portray by the action that they take?

So the crisis moments are, you really need to sort of. You don't have to use a sledgehammer to.

You know, you don't have to do one of those moments, like at the end of the old Batman shows in the 1960s cartoon series where they go, what will Batman do? Will he? You don't have to sledgehammer the question home to the reader, but the reader has to be able to pick up what that crisis moment is. And they have to understand that that character is facing a choice like Katniss Everdeen and all the Hunger Games things that. Without. That girl is faced with choice after choice and crisis after crisis. And each time, each choice that she makes, like, at the very beginning of the Hunger Games, you know, they come and they say, we're picking two kids out of this lottery. They're gonna have to go and fight to the death in the Hunger Games. And, you know.

If one kid wants to substitute for another kid will allow one substitution. So, of course, they pick Katniss Everdeen's little sister to fight in the Hunger Games. And what does Katniss Everdeen do? She says, I'll go. I'll save my sister. Right, Right. That's a crisis situation. Am I going to let my sister go and get killed in the Hunger Games? Or am I going to sacrifice myself and maybe I can survive? I'm going to volunteer. So is that the beginning of the.

Or is that the end of the beginning hook of Hunger Games?

Yes, that is.

And, you know, it's like when you. When you're watching that movie, you're reading the book, and you go, oh, my gosh, this is going to be great.

Right? Yeah.

You're like, oh, wow. You know, I wish I would have the courage to do that. I don't know if I'd do that for my sister.

And those are the moments where the writer did not say, here's the crisis moment for my character. She just presented the circumstances and let the character make a choice which defined that character. Who they are, what they believe, what they value. And that is just great storytelling. And so you have to. When I say these, you know, we can get wrapped up in all this, you know, inciting incidents and progressive complications and crisis and climax. And the thing is, when you're writing a great scene and it's humming along, I guarantee you all this stuff that we're talking about is inherently in what you're writing. You're just not really. You're not conscious of it. But if you go back three days later and look at that scene from an editor's point of view, you'll be able to pick out that moment and go, oh, man, I wrote a hell of a crisis there, didn't I. Wow, that was incredible. How did I do that?

So the crisis is the question confronting the character where they must do something. They have to make a choice. And the choice is between the lesser of two evils or choosing between irreconcilable goods. Like in the movie Kramer vs Kramer, Kramer has to make a choice when his wife leaves him. Do I take care of my son and at the expense of my career, or do I stay on the career track and become a big shot in advertising and, you know, my kid will be fine. You know, I'll get some. Some lady. I can hire some lady to take care of my kid. He'll be fine. Everybody, you know, everybody does that. So, so the, the goods are, it could be good for Kramer. He could become a big shot, or it could be good for his son. His son could be around his dad all the time. Well, a lot of times is brilliant.

And a lot of times the irreconcilable goods and two bad choices are kind of the heads and tails of the same situation.

Exactly. It's the yin and the yang. And you can look at pretty much anything from the irreconcilable good point of view or the. Or the lesser of two evils point of view. And that is true. I mean, that is the duality of the universe. And in choice, you know, are you looking at it from something being good for somebody or something being terrible?

Okay, so we've gone over the inciting incident, complication, crisis, climax, and then what is the resolution?

The resolution is it's a really important part of.

Of the story structure because what it does is it gives the reader a sense of the.

World after the climax has been done. Meaning it doesn't have to be this huge statement of.

Huge scene. It basically says, here's the way the world is now after everything has changed. So let me try and think of an example. So let's just go back to the guy in the tree. Okay, so let's say the guy in the tree in the crisis, he's either going to jump and try and catch that rope ladder, or he's going to burn up in the tree or he's going to go the other side and get hit with a rock and maybe die. So he decides the lesser of two evils is to try and grab the rope ladder. And if he misses, he's gonna break his legs. So he jumps, he grabs the rope ladder. He almost, you know, he almost gets it, but it slips out of his hands and. But it's enough to break his Fall enough that he doesn't break both legs. He only breaks an army.

So the resolution of the crisis is that his courage enabled him to save his own life and only break his arm. So the resolution of that scene is what happens after he makes the choice, after the climactic moment when he jumps from that tree. Usually what happens is that. I was talking about the old Batman shows. What the old Batman shows would do is they. And they did this in the 1940s during black and white, fun western movies. They would stop the action right when the character makes the climactic choice. And so what they would do is the guy in the tree would jump out of the tree and they would say, tune in next week to see what happens with Jim jumping out of the tree. And so that's a cliffhanger that will hold the attention of the audience until the next week, hopefully. So the beginning of the next show, what they'll do is they'll walk the viewer through what happened. And then this happened. And Lassie went and chased the rabbit. And then the rabbit. You know, I'm mixing up Batman and Lassie.

You know, they're basically the same thing.

Yeah. So the resolution. They would wait until the next episode, and the resolution would be he jumps, he grabs the ladder. It breaks his fall just enough to. To slow down his momentum, but he can't hold on long enough. He falls, breaks his arm instead of his leg. And the resolution is the arm break instead of the legs.

And usually the Resolute especially, you know, since this isn't the final resolution of the book. The resolution rolls right into the next inciting incident. So in this case, he. He makes it out, breaks his arm or his arm instead of his legs. But now all of those rock throwers see him and they start chasing him.

Exactly. Now we have another progressive complication. We now have another. Now we're onto a new scene. What's he gonna do now? And that. This is like classic action storytelling. You know, this is. This is the great. The great action stories that we all know and love. That's what they do. They progressively complicate until, you know, cars are going into buildings and people are jumping out of the sky. This is James Bond stuff. And it's great. We love it.

And so this is where, you know, you were talking about those. Those Russian dolls, right? So we have. We have those five pieces inciting incident through the resolution in the beginning hook. But then we have that. That same thing sometimes within scenes. Right.

As far as. Like always, we always have them within scenes. Yeah.

So every scene has the. The same five pieces.

Yeah, it's like. It's like DNA, you know, like your. The. The cells in your fingernails have all the DNA necessary to make another you. So does the cells in your hand and then your hand and your arm. And so it all sort of. It's. It's this sort of primal thing that goes from the beat to the scene to the. To the sequence to the act, to the subplot to the global story. And the five things, these five. And I. I say in the book, they're the five commandments of storytelling. Thou must have an inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis, climax, and resolution in every unit of your story.

And, you know, as you said, once that guy falls and he's got a broken arm, then he looks over, and those guys are going to start to chase him. That's the inciting incident of the next scene. Right. We're gonna. We're gonna go through that same progression. And he can't go back up a tree again. Right. Because we already saw the tree scene. Right.

So we can't just send them up the next tree over.

That's right, because people are like, yeah, we already saw the tree scene. He's got to jump in the lake now or he's got to jump off the cliff. Or, you know, like Butch casting in a Sundance Kid, there's a great example of progressive complications. You know, these guys rob a train, and then they start getting chased, and it just progressively complicates all the way until they're the top of the mountain. There's nowhere else to go. Sundance looks at Butch Cassidy, and they're like, what are we going to do? And they look down, and there's a little river. And Butch says to Sundance, I guess we're going to have to jump. And they jump, you know, and that was such a climactic moment. That's the end. That was the end of the beginning hook of Butch casting and the Sundance Kid. When those two guys jump off of the cliff and Sundance is afraid of jumping off the cliff, who's the most courageous gunslinger in all the West? He turns to Butch. He goes, I'm not gonna jump. And Butch is like, what do you mean you're not gonna jump? These guys are gonna kill us in, like, two minutes if you don't jump. This is our only chance. And he says, why? Why won't you jump? He goes, I can't swim. And then Paul Newman cracks up laughing his ass off, and he says, swim. Jesus, the fall is going to kill Us.

And that's when they go, holy shit. And they grab hands and they jump off the cliff, and, boy, are we excited. And then that's the end of the beginning hook. And we're like, wow, we want to spend another hour and a half with these two guys because they're hilarious.

So how do you differentiate between, like, the inciting, those five pieces of the beginning hook, the middle build and the final payoff or the ending payoff and the five pieces.

What I'm struggling with is like, okay, so the guy falls out of the tree, breaks his arm. He's. Now the people start coming after him. So that's the inciting incident of the next scene. But is that also the inciting incident of the middle build?

Well, it depends on your.

It depends on your. The length of your story, right? So.

Let'S go back to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for a second. Because the. The beginning hook of that story.

This is. This is for. It's written by William Goldman. If anybody has not seen this movie, you got to go see it. You got to rent it, got to Netflix it, because it is just. It's a genre buster that, that reinvented the western into the modern world. And it's basically about the, you know, how individualism and freedom of the old west was destroyed by, you know, big, big corporations. Anyway, that's the big theme. But the. The story itself, it's about these two guys who are really fun. One's a gunslinger, one sort of like the brains of the operation. And they. They're just free willing guys, and they go around the west and they rob banks, and when they run out of money, they rob another bank and they have a hole in the gang of a bunch of other guys who help them out. And they usually just rob trains. They don't hurt anybody. They. They rob the trains of the Harriman Company, which is this huge corporation with tons of money. So the beginning hook of the story is that they rob this train and they get away with the money and everything's great. And then it escalates. We're like, oh, man, let's rob another train. We're out of money. So they go to rob the next train, and they do. But as they're about to take all the money, this huge posse shows up and they start to chase them. So half of the Hole in the Wall gang goes one way and Butch and Sundance go the other way. And they figure, oh, well, you know, half of the posse is going to go with the other. Butch. The Hole in the Wall gang and the other half will chase us. But no, the whole posse goes after Butch and Sundance. They don't care about the other guys. They want the ringleaders of this gang. So now we're following Butch and Sundance as they're running away from this posse that's out to get them, hired by the Harriman Company, which is this huge eastern conglomerate banking system. So the end of the beginning hook of this story is that moment I just described. They've gone to the top of the hill. The posse is after them. There's no way out. The only way they're going to survive, the only way that they're going to live the life the way they want to, is to jump off that cross cliff. Because if they let these guys take them, they're either going to kill them or they're going to throw them in jail for the rest of their lives. So Butch and Sundance make a decision in that moment. It's a climactic moment. The crisis is, do we wait and be taken by the posse or do we jump off the cliff? They decide to jump off the cliff. That's the end of the beginning hook of the story. The beginning of the middle build is the two guys survive. Now the middle build of this story also has to rise. So the ending of the beginning hook is negative. These guys, their life is completely out of balance now. They can't go around robbing banks anymore because there's a posse after them. And, jeez, they can't even live in their own country anymore. What are they going to do? That's the inciting incident of the middle build of the movie. So the whole middle build, the climax of the middle build is when Butch says to Sundance, we gotta go to Bolivia. And Sundance is like, what? Bolivia? He's like, yeah, they got lots of banks down there. And I speak a little Spanish. And so they convince Sundance's girlfriend to go with them, and they go to Bolivia. And the whole middle build is about how these two gringos figure out the customs and traditions of Bolivia and how they can be free in Bolivia by robbing the same sort of banks. And it's a brilliant setup, and they become successful, and it's a positive thing. And then the ending payoff of the story is again, they're cornered. They're cornered in Bolivia, and they have to make a decision. Do we give up, put our hands up and go out and be arrested and thrown in jail, or do we go down fighting? And those guys go down fighting? And the final shot of the movie is them running out of this dilapidated Bolivian sort of hut and the entire Bolivian army is out there and they shoot them dead. And the ending is a downer because it's the death of the old West. It's the death of individualism. That is a way of structuring beginning hook, a middle build and an ending payoff. The beginning hook is we meet Butch and Sundance and we take them to a really negative place. They have to leave their own country. So it ends negative. The middle build ends kind of positively. They go to Bolivia and they're pretty successful after a bunch of screw ups. But they end up, you know, making a life for themselves and things are going to be okay. Then the ending payoff mirrors the middle build where they get into this exact same situation. But this time they're not going to overcome big government, they're not going to overcome the, you know, the big banks. They're going to get killed. And that's a very, that's a very simple story that's, you know, an hour and 20 minutes, 110 page script and it's brilliantly executed and it has all five of those things in each one of the movements. The beginning hook, the middle build, and the ending payoff.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast.

If you want to see everything Story.

Grid related, you can do that@storygrid.com and of course, sign up for the email newsletter. As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, we just ran a survey and people got to pick which story we were running through the Story grid. So if you want to throw your voice in on that along with everything that Sean sends out on a regular basis, make sure you go to storygrid.com sign up for the newsletter.

On behalf of myself, Tim Grall and Sean Coyne, thanks for listening and we.

Will see you next week for episode eight.