Building Your Novel's World

Hello, and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grahl, 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 a creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, I had something really cool happen as I was continuing to write the middle build of my story. If you've been listening along with us, you know that this thorn in my side is like trying to figure out the world that I'm basing my book in, which will then help me figure out everybody's motivations. And I finally had some breakthrough in that. And so I get to talk about that. It was really cool for me, and I think a lot of you hopefully will see yourself in that of, like, you'll eventually get to where you need to be. And then we go into talking about this new show on Netflix called Altered Carbon. And I'm saying this up front because usually in some ways you could say this entire show is based on spoilers, right? So writing my book like you get the entire book as I write it, and when we talk about movies and that kind of thing. But this is a brand new show that's very popular. So towards about two thirds of the way into this episode, I start doing spoilers on Altered Carbon. So either watch that. If you're gonna watch it, watch it before you listen to the second half of this episode. In the context of me talking about that is bas my own fears about releasing a book that's not good, that doesn't work, that people will get angry when they read, and all that kind of stuff. As I write this book, I have different freakouts about different things I just found myself freaking out of. Like, what if I get done with this and it just doesn't work? What's that going to be? And how do I avoid that happening? So that becomes the second half of the discussion on this week's episode, and we dive into that, and Sean, as he does, tries to talk me off the ledge. So it's a fun episode, talking about world building, talking about the show Altered Carbon and talking about how to make sure that your book doesn't suck. So let's jump in and get started. So Sean, last week was super helpful in getting me over a hump. We're working on my middle build. We got past the first big test, and then we worked a lot on like what to do in these in between times for these major story events of how you have to keep them interesting and moving, even though these major story events aren't happening in them. And so I rewrote several scenes, pieced that together with other scenes I'd written. And you felt like that was good. And so my next thing was to start with working on getting from that place, the end of that sequence through the middle point, the big moment at the middle of the middle build. So I started working on that. And one of the things, it was interesting. It was one of these, like, muse moments where so I went back and like reread my story, you know, the first draft of this portion of the story. And I've kind of like, I already knew, like, okay, there's some holes here I gotta fill. Then I want to rewrite these scenes with these new things. And so I took one of the scenes and I was rewriting it. And one of my biggest worries and problems in my head is I have not been able to wrap my head around my world. I keep feeling like there's all these holes in it and it doesn't work right. And I don't understand why the powers are working the way they're working. Which gives me all kinds of anxiety because I keep feeling like it's such an important thing that could change my entire story dynamic if all of a sudden it shifts, right? So if like these people aren't in charge, these people are in charge. Well, maybe they're my villains now. And now that has to change everything. And oh my God, what am I going to do? And you kept telling me to keep writing, that stuff will work. Its out. What I remember you saying is things like your subconscious is working on it. You need to just trust that it'll come when it comes, or whatever. Which is not super easy for me to do, but I've been trying to do that. I was working on this scene that had nothing to do with the history of my world, which I haven't talked about yet. And I noticed in Hunger Games, she very quickly and drips in like who the Capitol is. The fact that there's 13 or there's 12 districts. The 13th one was wiped off the mat. And then like, as they go through the story, she like fills in the gaps. And I haven't done that yet. I'm like, I know once I figure it out, I can like drip it into the beginning. So I was just writing this scene that had nothing to do with that. And then all of a sudden, like, it just started downloading. Wow. So, like, I was writing. So I had this scene in the first draft where they're showing, like, propaganda videos to the recruits, and she sees the main woman from the numbered. In the background of the video. Right, right. So this was a moment in the story where it's like, oh, my gosh, what is she doing there? What does she have to do with this? And so I wanted to rewrite that. Like, I have some ideas on, like, expanding it, making it a little better. And, like, has to, like, weave from what just happened. You know, I changed a lot of what happened before it, so I have to, like, weave that in. And then I just said something like, you know, one of the first videos they show, I was giving context of, like, they've been showing these every week. And one of the first ones was the history of the faction. And then I just started writing what the history of the faction was and, like, where the faction came from, who set it up, why the grid happened, what the people are actually doing in the grid. Because that's been my biggest kind of mind fuck, is just like, why are they plugged into the grid? Like, I don't understand. Like, I have everybody in the world plugged into this thing, and I don't know why they're there. And so it just, like. All of a sudden, it just, like, snapped together. And I just wrote out the entire, like, how the factions work, who's in charge, who the Reapers are, why they're in charge, why they created the grid in the first place, what the people are doing in the grid. I mean, it does not. It's, like, way too long for the scene that I wrote. It was like. I was just so excited that I was like, oh, my gosh, I finally understand what's happening in my story. So that was, like, a really cool moment for me to finally have some clarity on what's going on, because now I understand, like, what's driving President Marcus, and I understand what's going to happen at the end of the story to kick into the second book in the trilogy and.

Let me. Let me just interrupt you for a second and just throw something out. I'm not suggesting you do this, but I think this is a good thing for, you know, all the listeners to think about, too, is that there's a technique of being able to really get the world firmly established in the reader's mind by using sort of a literary trick. And here's the trick. What you do is you have a story within a story. So, for example, at the beginning of some novels. I'm trying to think. There was a baseball novel that was published a while ago, and it was pretty fun. I really enjoyed it. But what the author did, and this will make sense when I circle back to it. But what the author did was he started talking about his protagonist's love and respect for a certain shortstop. And the shortstop had written sort of like How I Play the Game kind of book. So the protagonist, who is also a shortstop in college, reads the famous shortstop's autobiography, How I Play the Game, in the context of what he's doing in the real story. What I mean by that is we literally read along with the protagonist as he's reading, you know, a chapter from this great short stuff. Like the way I always approach a ground ball is like this. And so we, as the readers were sitting sort of over the shoulder of the protagonist as the protagonist is reading a book or, you know, hearing a story. And the technique really, really works well because it's almost like this little bit of candy that the reader gets to enjoy while they're immersed in a larger story. So it's the story within the story. You could have, say, a document that Jesse is given when she gets on the airplane to go to the faction's headquarters. And the document is sort of like one of those things you get when you start a new job. Like, here's your employee handbook, you know, and it tells you all this stupid stuff that you usually don't even pay attention to. But in Jesse's case, it could be the history of the faction, or you could do it as the propaganda films so that you sort of get the history of the faction and the world is inside of a self contained story. So that's a technique. It's like when somebody reads somebody's diary, like the Notebook, that romance written by Nicholas Sparks. The Notebook. There's notebook passages in the book that you get to read. It's great. So you get to read these things that somebody had written to the character years before. Or there's also the great setup where you have this kind of academic researcher, right? And they're in some library and they discover this old dusty manuscript in the archives. And then we get to read the manuscript as the protagonist is reading it. So, you know, he turned the page to page one and this is what it said, you know, and then you get this really interesting allegorical story that will pay off at some point in the narrative. So using propaganda film is a really cool idea too, because, you know, also there's a great moment in the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the one with Gene Wilder. And in that film, I think they called it Willy Wonka, the Chocolate Factory. But anyway, in the film, there's this guy, Slugworth, right? And he comes out. And he comes into the picture frame every now and then. And you see him whispering to the kids who get the golden ticket. And you're like, what's with that guy? You know? So you could have. I think it's 81 or 83 or whatever. She could kind of play that Slugworth role. Where, you know, she appears in the background. She's almost like the character Zelig, that Woody Allen. Well, we shouldn't talk about Woody Allen anymore, but. But there was a mov that he made called Zelig. Which was about this character who always shows up in these famous events. So, anyway, that's a really cool way of solving the problem of how do I dump all this exposition into my story. In a way that will be entertaining and interesting to the reader? And the way to approach the manuscript or the story within the story. Is to think of the story within the story as a story itself. So it can get a little meta here. But you want to craft sort of like how we were founded, you know, as a story. Like, as you wrote all that material. You were telling a story about how this organization, this government, all that stuff came about. And you might be able to splice it into little sections. And stick it into particular moments in the primary narrative. That will be interesting to the reader. And also, you know, you would leave the page with a cliffhanger. And then pick it up later, etc. So that's an idea to get all that material into the book. With it being entertaining as well as informative. And because all that exposition, you have to solve the problem. How do I tell the reader how this world came about? Because we're all assuming that this is far into the future. Or reasonably far into the future. Blade Runner, that's another world in the film that is very specific. And you know where you are the minute the film starts. It's sort of this quasi weird, noirish, 19, sort of 50s dark noir world. With flying cars and strange futuristic imagery, etc. And that's what you want to bring to the page for your world. And I think you did that pretty well at the beginning. When she's in New York, we get a sense of this very dark, strange. But technically, it's almost as if it's been the fall of the Roman Empire. Jesse is living in Rome, you know, it's like things aren't just completely strange and chaotic and the only order is that people, they go into this grid and the answer is why they do. Or, you know, that's really important. You have to make a choice on how to explain why they're on their grid. Like there's a famous old science fiction movie called Soylent Green. Have you ever heard of it?

No, I've only heard of Soylent because a guy took the idea in that movie and actually created. Yeah, but no, I've never actually seen the movie.

Alright, well, I'm gonna completely ruin the movie for you, but that's cool.

If I haven't watched it by now, it's my own fault.

Alright, so it's this post apocalyptic world where everybody's starving and people, they go to the marketplace and there's only these like these biscuits, there's Soylent Red and Soylent Blue and Soylent Green. And people, they survive on this, these little biscuits. And so the whole movie's set up, you know, that everybody's starving. And the lead character is played by Charlton Heston and he's like one of the great bad actors of all time. I mean, just over the top bad, but in a way that's almost believable. Anyway, so he just.

He went all the way around. Yeah, so bad it became good again.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So he plays like this police detective and he's, you know, he's solving this crime and meanwhile the background is all these people starving and the. So always in the background is this sensibility that, you know, there's Soylent Green and people are eating it and hey, did you get yourself green? And then at the end of the film, he figures out that his friend was murdered and he kind of finds the body and he tracks the body and he's, you know, hiding out and he's, he finally gets to. Because nobody knows where the bodies are buried anymore because there's so many people who die because they're starving. So he finally gets to the place where the bodies are buried and the big payoff is that he discovers Soylent Green is made of people. Yeah, and so that's a way using a very key expositional moment as the payoff of the entire story. So if you decide to keep the whole grid thing a mystery, you could use this revelation of why people go on this grid and how as a revelatory payoff in some chapter, in some.

Scene, you just like tied something together for me. So let me just tell you, I don't want to go into the whole thing. But the basic idea that I came up with for that, I think, solves my problems. So, basically, global warming fell off the cliff, and, you know, it's too hot. We establish all that in the opening, the beginning hook. So the amount of places that can support livestock and food growth is really small now. And the Reapers are the ones that basically took that over and established the factions, and they're the ones that, like, take care of the food and send it out to the factions. And what I was planning on doing for the grid. So this is all backstory that may or may not make it into the book, but this is my explanation in my head that I'm writing from, which is basically, they tried to develop a AI to run this because it's a much bigger operation than I'm picturing. Like, 12 people run all of this, right? So they're engineers. They were able to, like, take everything over because they consolidated, but they can't take care of all of this stuff on their own. So they tried to develop AI and it didn't work. And so the grid. And at the same time, everybody's crowding into the cities, and so there's too many people in too small a space, and that's like, wreaking havoc. So they killed two birds with one stone. They developed a grid that everybody plugs into, and what they're doing in the grid is taking care of all of the livestock and food for the Reapers. So the work that they're doing inside the grid is extremely important because everything will collapse without it. But it's also the way that they control the people is having them addicted to this grid. And then the whole point of the threshing is both control over the factions and the people, and also identifying people that they can recruit in to the Reapers to actually help them continue this system of control. So whoever wins the reaping goes to be a part of them, or whoever wins at threshing goes to be a part of them. And so when you said that. So one is. Would love your thoughts on that. Overall, I still like anyway. And then the other is my thought is that what can be revealed at the end is that we didn't know that everybody being hooked up to the grid is the only thing that kept our food supply going. And so when the grid gets shut down, when Jesse tries to free everybody, it causes this problem, which is like, our entire livestock and food is going to collapse and war is going to break out again.

That's good. I think it's a solid Makes a lot of sense. And, you know, you could have a really great villain speech sort of explaining this, and the villain speech would be something like, let me tell you an old story. You know, there once was a village, and in the village were 36 people. And unfortunately, the village was cut off from all other civilization. And they only had one cow, you know, like. And he could tell, like, this little story that would be an allegory for the entire globe. And it's basically, the supply of food is so fragile and the population is so large. I mean, the reasons why the people would come to the cities make sense, right? If you're starving and you know that there's a load. It's like the poor refugees in countries, they all go to these camps for one reason. That's where the food is, right? So the people who go to the cities and they go there for one reason, that's where the food is. So you can't make any food in, like, New Jersey, for instance. All right? So when they're on the grid, it's a twofold sort of control mechanism. They need to sort of artificially regulate the environmental controls that allow these foods to be growing. So it's almost like a biosphere kind of deal, where they constantly have to be regulating the salinity of the soil, blah, blah, blah. So all those people in the grid are getting a dopamine rush by playing games that they think are only games that are actually helping regulate all the food control. That makes sense. So the Reapers, you know, this 12 board member of engineers who oversee the entire grid, and I'm assuming President Marcus is one of them, right? Or not.

Well, originally, I was thinking he was basically set up under their control, but, yeah, he's in on it at the very least, right?

So he's not one of them. That, you know, and part of the threshing is that you could also say the Reapers are getting old. You know, they need to find the best minds in order to keep this system working. Because the system, as difficult and horrible as it is, it's sustaining, say, 12 billion people on the planet. If the system is destroyed, you know, 6 billion people could die within X number of days. I mean, it's like that great, terrifying statistic I read somewhere. We're only. I think it's nine meals away from chaos. And if you think about that, it's really horrifying. And you can believe it, right? Because if once you miss nine meals in a row, you start to lose all sense of blood sugar, and your brain starts to do strange things. So if you multiply that by 7 million people in New York City and they haven't eaten for nine meals, you can see how it could devolve into chaos. So that could be part of your villain speech, you know, like, how many meals do you think you can miss before you start to hallucinate, Jesse? Oh, I don't know. You know, and then you can have him explain to her, young lady, this is a system that works. This is a system that keeps 12 billion people alive. And you want to f with it, you know, like, just because you don't know where your brother went or your mommy's not feeling well and your daddy's a wimp. So you could have the villain make a lot of sense. Like, what you're doing here. You're messing with the fundamental nature of the universe.

And you will atone, you know, that kind of deal. Like the Ned Beatty speech network, which I think is one of the greatest villains speeches of all time. So I really like this notion that if the people understand that there's this place where all the food is grown, then what will they want to do? Go there, right, and eat it all.

So how do you keep people from going to the place where the food is and eating all of it? You have to keep them docile and engaged in triviality, which is plugging into the grid and earning little coins, you know, virtual coins that will give them a little bit more porridge than the next guy. So I think this is a really kind of cool idea. And then the ending payoff of your first novel is, oh, boy, you just blew up the grid.

Yeah, well, that's where I'm thinking, like, each thing in the grid corresponds to something in the real world, which is, like, when you're doing this part of the grid and, like, you're. You know, I'm thinking of, like, people that play Minecraft. You know, my kids are really into Minecraft. And, like, you're literally pretending to do manual labor. Like, how is this fun? You know, but it's, like, got this addictive thing because it's like you do a little bit more manual labor, and you'll power up to get this kind of ax. And then once you have that axe, you can do manual labor a little quicker to get even more of this stuff. And then, you know, it's like all these little things. And I'm thinking, like, different parts of it are, like, guiding the machines to take care. Yeah. To take care of the lettuce the right way. And to make sure the Ships that are bringing everything across the Pacific or the Atlantic Ocean or whatever are getting to where they need to go at the right time. And like, all of it. Because, you know, my thought is, you know, as we think about the fact, like Elon Musk talking about, like, the biggest. I'm probably butchering this, but like, you know, one of the biggest threats to humanity is artificial intelligence. And. But yet, like, you know, one of the things I read about that is robots can't handle, like water being poured on them, you know, so it's like if they start taking over, just pour some water on them and we win. And, you know, and of course you can keep going back and forth, but like, so my thought is like, they thought, okay, if we just do this, it'll work. That didn't work. They need a human hand while society's melting down. So this is a way to get unlimited supply of labor to manage this system without them totally understanding what they're doing.

And also, there's no need for any fossil fuels at this point because the sun is burning solar, you know, intensely on the Earth, that all the solar panels are just completely powering the entire planet. So you could solve the whole energy. Where are they getting the energy for the grid? All that stuff. Just based upon the setup of the story, I think you don't even have to really get into it. Like, yeah, we tried to do an AI program and no matter how we tweaked it, something screwed up. And what we discovered is, isn't it much easier to have people do this manual directive labor than to try and program a computer to take over it? Now I know quantum computing is about to come online. That is, we can't even understand the technological advances that quantum computing is going to bring us anyway. I think your entire conception is very strong. And if you slowly use revelatory turning points with the information and then have the big, big bang at the end be like, oh, congratulations, we're going to have a 12 billion person panic because you shut down the thing that's keeping the food alive.

Yeah, I feel good about and I feel comfortable with my ability to like, weave it into the story as I need it to. My issue has just been I did not know what it was.

Yeah, yeah.

And so. And you kept telling me, like, every time I bring it up, you're like, oh, you'll figure it out. Or, you know, it'll. We'll get to that. You know, you're working on it without working on it and all that kind of stuff. And I'm like, I don't know, man. Like, seems like a big deal. So it was, I thought, like, as I was writing it, I kept thinking, like, huh, see, Sean was writing again, you know, so.

Well, it's great. I mean, it's surprising and inevitable, right? If you think about it, what's the one thing that we all need? Food. And when you're living in a post apocalyptic world, what's the thing that will give you the most power? Food. And we always overlook food and nourishment because we live in such a place, strange, you know, pseudo digital world. But the whole concept of not eating a few meals and what that does to you physically, it's a really great concept because it's so true and it's so primal. And because your book is. You're having the reader taking a leap of the imagination to go to this future strange world to make a simple plot turn on. Food, I think will work because it's so obvious that we don't immediately think about it. We think, oh, these evil people are doing it to get money so they could have more cars. No, they're really doing it just to have enough food for everyone. And it also has a nice thematic element, like, how much of your individuality should you sacrifice for the common good? Is basically being a slave inside a digital world worth it to keep yourself alive and everybody else on the planet? Or is there an alternative? What is the alternative? How do you deal with that situation? There's a lot of really cool, you know, thematic messages that you're playing with here. And it all comes through just with that food element. So I think it's a good, good idea.

Okay.

All right.

That was like, the big thing for me. I still have some work to do before I'm ready to send you, like, the next thing. But it was like a neat moment for it to just start downloading and such a relief to finally find the underlying forces that are actually driving the story. I'm trying to tell. I kept feeling like, again, like, if we're. Since I just read Hunger Games as top of mind, if, like, you're writing this book and you don't understand, like, the history of the Capitol and PNG or whatever, Panem or I think it was Panem, like, that could severely affect how you're getting everybody where they need to go. And so now I feel like I understand, like, all the major motivations of the story. So I can actually, like, have everybody start acting consistently because I couldn't, like, pay off it.

You know, what the big Payoff.

Yeah. So, I mean, I had. The payoff is, like, melting down the grid and her taking over, but I didn't understand why melting down the grid was such a bad thing. You know, it's like, okay, well, everybody's free. Like, yay. Why is that causing problem?

You know?

So I like this. And. Yeah. And it set. I feel like it sets up the speech in praise of the villain of basically, like, hey, can. You know, when. I feel like it's gonna come in that time where he's realizing she could. When President Marcus catches on to what she's actually doing in the threshing, and it's, like, too late. Somewhere in there where he's gonna be like, congratulations, you're doing this awesome thing. You have no idea what you've just done, you know, because, again, one of the books in my head is the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. And that's what the whole first book is, is they're overthrowing this power. And the speech in praise of the villain is when they. They just beat him, and he's dying, and he's like, congratulations. You get to take care of this problem I've been taking care of for the last X number of years, you know?

Oh, man.

So the other thing I wanted to mention here. So there's totally kind of shifting to a different topic. So I'm used to. You know, most of my diet of stories are stories that work. So, like, most books that I read, like, I'm always terrified of wasting a bunch of time reading a book that I don't like. And that actually happened not too long ago. It was like, all the birds in the sky or something. And, like, the payoff. I was so pissed off, and I was like. I was mostly mad that they just. I just gave you 300 pages of my time, and the payoff was awful, in my opinion. Lots of people seem to like the book. I don't understand it anyway. And then, especially with television, I feel like most of this stuff works mostly because there's so much money involved. And I also. The same way where, like, I usually don't watch stuff when it first comes out. I wait to hear what other people think. Anyway. All that to say. I've been watching this new series by Netflix called Altered Carbon. So it's funny you brought up Blade Runner, because it's basically the same type world where it's like a noir kind of thing, set way into the future. And the whole idea is that they found these things that they install when you're one Years old that constantly backs up your consciousness. So if you get killed, they just, like, take it out and put it into a new body. And you can wake back up in this new body, but it's still you. So I probably shouldn't be critiquing it because I'm eight episodes into a 10 episode, you know, season. But, like, the show just keeps pissing me off because I feel like one of my greatest, like, prides in my television watching is that I stopped, which sounds weird, but I stopped. I stopped, stopped watching Lost in the first season. Right. So then I could make fun of all those people that watched for all those seasons and got really mad at the end. So I. And one of the things about Lost that, you know, I didn't watch it, thankfully, but people kept saying is, like, it seemed like they kept writing stuff, and then they're like, well, now we, you know, we have polar bears here. We didn't really understand why they're there. Now we got to make up a reason. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And so, like, the whole show set up as a murder mystery. So the whole thing is like, there's these super powerful rich people that have now lived hundreds and hundreds of years because they keep just switching to new bodies. And so they're like the super elite, rich and powerful, and they have all this thing where even if they do die, they have all these backups so that they won't actually die. They have all these kind of contingency plans. Well, somebody tries to kill one of them. So they bring back this detective from, like, they had taken his little consciousness thing, and it was sitting over on ice for 250 years. And now they plugged it into a body and they want him to, like, solve who tried to kill this guy. And which is a really cool setup of, like, the guy that got killed hired somebody to figure out how he got killed and who's trying to kill him. But then, like, the story just keeps, like, taking these turns that have nothing to do with the main story. Like, there's been entire episodes that aren't about the murder mystery. And then the episode I watched last night, by the way, it's a new show, so I probably shouldn't be talking about it, so I'm gonna spoil it. So turn it off now. But, like, the whole thing was that, like, he really loved his sister, and they kind of established that in the beginning. Well, she, like, shows up out of nowhere in the eighth episode. No setup. Then they try to say, like, oh, yeah, this has been weaved through the whole story. And I'm like, no, you didn't. And there's like. I don't know what I'm getting at, except for, like, this morning, I was running an errand, and, like, I was at Kroger, and I just, like, stopped in the aisle because I realized why I was so mad at the show is this is what I'm afraid of with my story. Like, because it's like, I shouldn't be this angry about a TV show I'm watching. Like, just stop watching it. Your life will go on. But, like, this is my constant worry of my own story is that it's going to suck. You know, I'm looking at this thing and I'm like, okay, they've spent a lot of money. They've spent a lot of time. There's, you know, actors and producers and editors and, you know, all the people that go into making this TV show, they've put tons of money into promoting this thing. And I don't think it's very good. And, of course, there's movies that happens to and all this kind of thing. And so I'm like, I am one tiny person with you. So there's two of us here, and I just get, like, so afraid that this is what's gonna happen to my. I'm gonna, like, publish it. And it's like, people are gonna read it and be like, what is this?

Okay, okay, let me talk you off of the ledge. Here's the situation. I don't know anything about the television series, except that it's a Blade Runner ripoff. And what happened was the producer, director, writer had a really great idea, and it's a great sort of MacGuffin where people can download their consciousness and live forever. They sold the studio or Netflix on the concept of the story. This is going to be just like Blade Runner. And so Netflix said, we love Blade Runner, but we don't want a movie. Can you do a series? And so, of course we can do a series. No problem.

No problem.

And, okay, here you go. Here's your money. Off you go. And what the writers discovered is that they didn't have much beyond the setup concept. I don't know. Is the consciousness the MacGuffin? I don't think so, because it's not in play. So what they said is, well, we sold this on Blade Runner and the Blade Runner really about. If it comes right down to it, it's about a PI trying to hunt down killers. So we should have at least some kind of crime story here. Oh, I've got it. And they come up with another great idea, which is to bring back an old gumshoe from 250 years before to, you know, solve this. This is like Philip Marlowe in Little Sister. The little Sister, which is a fantastic. Raymond Chandler's famous PI Philip Marlowe. Anyway, they basically mined the old sort of crime stories to find something that could hook people for a series of episodes. And then they panicked because they didn't have a payoff. What's the payoff? He discovers who the murderer is and he solves the crime. So that's not going to get the second series greenlit. These are all commercial considerations. This really has little to do with storytelling. It has a lot to do with employing people and paychecks. And I'm all for employing people and paychecks. But when you're creating a work of art, you have to have a vision. And the vision. Somebody like David Chase, who created the Sopranos guy, had a vision. He's like, I'm going to create a crime family that's exactly like my family, and I'm just going to make my mom Tony Soprano, or I'm going to have my mom be a character. And he looked at it as a family drama that had a long, long arc. Will Tony redeem himself or will Tony, you know, will it be a punitive plot? And he ran that. That long vision for I don't know how many seasons, six, seven seasons. And guess what? He didn't even answer at the very end whether Tony would redeem himself or whether he would, you know, have a bad end. But we all sort of intuit that Tony's not going to end well. Anyway, my point is, is that David Chase had a very long vision. And so when he got his second season approved, he's like, great, I got plenty of more stories about Tony now. Again, I know nothing about this series, but I'm just extrapolating from my 20 plus years of experience in this kind of business.

So, yeah, I'm sure you've seen a bad television series before. So it's not like, of course we're talking of something that's never been done before.

And you see great ones, too. And the great ones, I mean, they make you so excited to turn on a television. But will this happen? Let's get to the bottom line. Will this happen to you? I say it won't. And the reason why it won't is because you are constantly, because of me, constantly looking at what's my genre? Am I satisfying the conventions and obligatory Scenes of my genre. What do you need in an action labyrinth plot at the very end you need, and especially a trilogy that you envision, you need a massive kickstart to the book 2. The problem that you've been facing for a long time is you hadn't figured out what that big bang at the end of your book was going to be. So now you sort of know what the big bang is. So you're going to be able to fill in a lot of pieces that were a little bit vague, a little bit soft, a little bit okay, but not great. And now you're going to be able to go back and say, oh, I can, I can seed in all these moments so that my setup for my big payoff will be a big, oh my gosh, why didn't I see that coming? Of course these people are tending the food. Oh my gosh, why didn't I think of that? So the action labyrinth requires certain things that you are consciously making sure are in your story. Now, will everybody love your story? No. Some people are going to go to you on your story. Yeah, it worked. But food, who cares? And that's not your problem. You are abiding the conventions and obligatory scenes of your genre. You're thinking clearly about your protagonists, you're thinking about the world. You're thinking scene by scene. You're really constructing from a vision. Now, the vision didn't fully become clear until two years into the work. I don't think these guys who did this television series had two years to gestate. They had to deliver, deliver, deliver, deliver episode after episode after episode or they don't get they're money. So sometimes when you are under a tremendous amount of stress to create story in an incredible way, it works. Very rarely does it work, especially in television series, because what television writers do is they spend a good six weeks in a room mapping out the entire vision of the entire series. Sometimes when you get too quickly approved for your budget, you're like thrown into it and you have one week to come up with your Bible. And if everybody's just like, we got to get these episodes done, we got to get these episodes done, nobody's going to say, you know what? I really don't think Episode eight, when we reveal who the killer is, this is really going to pay off. This is what happened to that other Twin Peaks, you know, it fell apart at the end of season one. So will this happen to you? I don't think so. Your story is going to work. Now, that doesn't mean that it's going to be successful, but it will satisfy. You are not going to make a promise to your reader that you aren't going to at least make a very strong attempt to satisfy. The problem with this series is that it says, oh, we're a science fiction crime series. But it's not really. It's not really science fiction, it's not really crime. And there's a lot of tangents and there's a lot of character development that doesn't mean anything if you don't know what your global genre is. What David Chase knew about the Sopranos is that he had a lead character who was either going to save himself from the hell he had built in his life or he wasn't. It was either going to be. He was either going to redeem himself or it was going to be a punitive plot. That's the global arc of the Sopranos. Will Tony save himself or will he just become another mook, another underworld slob who shot and killed just like all the other ones. And at the end of that series, we were ready for Tony to die because he had proved himself to be a miserable, horrible person who had multiple chances to change his course, but chose not to. Same thing with Don Draper in Mad Men and same thing with Breaking Bad. We've got these characters who are given multiple chances to do the right thing. And time and time again they just sputter back into their bad, terrible behavior and do what's expedient, what's good for them in the moment. And that is actually a pretty good thing for a long form series because we can always hope this time Don Traber won't cheat on his wife. Oh no, there he goes again. This time Tony Soprano won't beat up the guy and kill him. Oh no, there he goes again. Oh, well, maybe the next time it won't be so bad. And the same thing in Breaking Bad. Maybe he'll tell his wife this time that he has the money. Maybe he'll. Oh, he does. Oh, no, no. It's an even bigger problem. So if you're gonna like and construct and hopefully constructed set, six series, you know, arc, you've got to have an epic world like Game of Thrones or the Lord of the Rings. You have to conceive of an astronomical universe and then really have a global action plot that has multiple characters that are sympathetic to the audience so that you can sustain 7,200 episodes because you've got nine different characters that you can switch between and you can. It's like a soap Opera you can play out.

Yeah, that's what came into mind is like, these things that span decades now, you know.

So the other thing, when you were mentioning being disappointed by something that you read, here's a good sort of boilerplate clue for people who say, I really don't know what genre would be a good one to try and approach. There are masterworks in certain genres that everybody recognizes as the leading title in the genre. And what we're doing now with our Story Grid certified editors is they are. They're creating story grid guides like the Pride and Prejudice guide that I did for Love Story. And what they're discovering, which is fascinating for me to sit back and watch, is that some of these masterworks that people consider to be, you know, the best examples of a particular genre don't work. And I get these frantic emails saying, I can't find this obligatory scene and this thing isn't working and paying off in the way that I thought it would. And they think that they're wrong, right? They think that they're analyzing it in the wrong way. And I'm like, no, that's correct. So what would that suggest, that particular genre about it? It suggests that the masterwork can be exceeded, that the masterwork can be dethroned, that there's opportunity for the right writer at the right time to look at something and go, I can do better than that. And that's the best in the genre. I bet if I do better than that thing, I could do okay for myself. So the trick is when you hear when somebody says, oh, you got to read this book. It's the best science fiction story ever on an alternative planet. And you read it and you go, really? Because they don't have all this stuff. Then you can go. Then a light bulb can go off in your head and say, wow, if I really put my mind to it, I might be able to write a story that's as good, maybe even better than the masterwork.

You know, that's funny you take that perspective because most people would say, well, then, you know, then I don't have to have that obligatory scene to write a book that works. Or I don't have to do it that way because, look, masterwork doesn't have that thing. And you're saying, like, they got it 75% right now. That 75%, the hunger for the genre.

Is so strong that people will accept. 75% is great. That's my point, is that there is such a large demand for that particular kind of story. It's sort of like, think about brand new products, right? When I was growing up, I used to have this dream one day, you know, I would be able to take music with me when I went on a jog. Now I'm an older guy, right? And guess what happened? The Walkman came out, right? The Walkman. You could put a cassette in a Walkman and jog with it, and it was amazing. But guess what? When the ipod came out, did anybody buy a Walkman anymore?

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So think about. They created. It was the masterwork of the genre, the handheld music device. The Sony Walkman was the best thing. It was the masterwork of the handheld audio listening device. Now look at what the masterwork of the audio listening. It's not even an ipod, it's a phone. So when people say, oh, the Walkman is great. Well, there are certain novels and I'm not going to name them because people will just think I'm being nasty about it. But you will discover in some of our story grid guides when they come out, these specific ones. I don't want to take the thunder away from the story grid editors who are putting together these books by, you know, giving away their big payoff right on this podcast. But what you'll discover is that, no, you can do better than that. And if you set your sights on these genres that are, have these massive audiences for, it's the equivalent of a Sony Walkman. And you know how to do an ipod. Forget about the iPhone. You can do an ipod. You're going to really attract all those people who read the Masterwork, and they're going to say, I thought the Hobbit was great until I read the Lord of the Rings, right? Everybody who reads the Hobbit goes, I can't see how anybody can do a better fantasy novel than that. Then you go, here, read the Lord of the Rings, right? Or here, read A Song of Ice and Fire, which is the Game of Thrones thing. And people go, okay, they up the game. So I totally stand by the fact that when people say, see, this book sold a million copies and it doesn't have a speech and phrase of the villain, what I say to that is, I bet it would have sold 2 million if it, if it did. It's. It's not like you don't have to do it if somebody was successful. It's just like, nobody has written the great one yet. No one has made the ipod yet. Can you make the ipod of X genre? Because genres, as I've said this a million times before, they Weave and they change and they morph and they mix and they. So, you know, we've, we've talked about the lit RPG genre, which is this up and coming thing that Ready Player One is the masterwork right now. It's literary role playing game novels. So can somebody write a better novel than Ready Player One? Maybe, probably. Who knows? Is it going to be on the Mount Olympus of lit RPG until the end of time? It could be. It very well could be. But is it possible that somebody could say, I think I might be able to do better than that? And it might even be the guy who wrote Ready Player One. I'm sure he's shooting for it. Ernest Klein, right? Something like that, right?

Yep, that's right.

So that's just one example of Go to the Amazon categories. If anybody who doesn't. Any writers out there who don't do this, I highly suggest they do it is when you go to buy a novel, see what category it's under in the Amazon categories. Because the great thing about Amazon is that they're slicing and dicing and, and adding additional genre characters underneath specific genres all the time. So there are listings for like gay werewolf, shapeshifter, redemption plots, you know, like, you know, it's that specific. And you could say, oh, that's the top of this genre. I'm going to read that thing and I'm going to do a better job and then I'm going to market all of my material for that specific audience. Now, don't pick an audience that is a niche of a niche of a niche of a niche that only has 12 people who have bought the book. Find something that has, you know, a livable wage within it. You could say enough people that if you write a book that's really terrific and you're able to get the word out to that community that you will be able to make $1,000 a month on your royalties. That's a good start. You're not going to be able to live on that. But if you do enough of those books, eventually you could. If you make your craft better, you might try other genres. So anyway, I'm glad you brought that up. How when you start to see things that don't work, you really need to start to recognize why they don't. And it seems to me that series does not work because it doesn't answer the primary number one question of StoryGrid, which is what's the genre? Yeah.

So you're saying looking at a story like that, figuring out why it doesn't work and how you can do it better is a better use of time than using it as a reason to freak out that my story is going to suck.

Yeah, exactly.

All right, thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. For everything StoryGrid related, check out storygrid.com make sure you pick up a copy of the book and sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything happening in the StoryGrid universe. If you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any past episodes, all of that can be found@storygrid.com podcast also, if you haven't yet, make sure you go check out the Story Grid Editors Roundtable Podcast. We've been getting our initial reviews of the show and they're really good and I'm really excited that so many people are liking the show in this show. This is much more about you following my path as a writer and, you know, as I write my book and all those kind of things. And I really like this editor's Roundtable podcast because it allows you to just look at a genre, look at a masterwork, and really dive in and learn very specifically about what makes certain movies work in a genre and not work in a genre. So it's definitely a great compliment to what Sean and I do here at StoryGrid. So if you'd like to reach out to us at any time, you can find us on Twitter StoryGrid. And if you would like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at StoryGrid. We will see you next week.