Can I just rip off Harry Potter?

Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. My name is Tim Grall. I'm your host and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me soon is Sean Coyne. He has 25 plus years in the publishing and editing world. He is the author of the Story Grid and it's a fantastic book to help you write a story that works from start to finish. In this episode, we dive into the Hero's Journey. I've become fascinated with this over the last few weeks. So I ask a lot of questions about how the Hero's Journey works alongside of Story Grid and get Sean to explain to me how the mentor role works. How do we figure out what characters to have in our book and what roles they have to play and who can play them? Along with that, the last half of the episode, I dive into something that I was actually pretty nervous to bring up with Sean and ask him. And well, you know what, I'm just going to let you follow along with me as I talk to him about it. So let's jump in and get started. I hope you enjoy this episode. So, Sean, I've been thinking a lot and reading a lot about the Hero's Journey, the thing from the Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. And I think, I'm sure we've talked about it before, but I'm wondering your take on it because it's kind of resurged in my mind because the new Star wars is out and all my like story nerd friends are like, oh man, it's just straight hero's journey, right? And then I had a long drive last week for like 10 hours. And so my wife and I listened to the entire first Harry Potter book again. And as I was listening to it after reading about the Hero's Journey, I'm like, oh, this is just straight Hero's Journey from start to finish. And so I just was wanting to get your take on Hero's Journey. Like, what's it? Is it useful? Like, how does it work with the Story Grid? I tend to wonder sometimes if these things are like things you look at after writing or is it something that can help you with the planning of the writing as well? So I just kind of want your take on it.

Well, that's a really primal question and it's a really important question. The Hero's journey is. A while back at Storygrid, I wrote a series of posts about what I called the story spine and what the story spine is, what is fundamental in just about all stories is the Hero's journey. You know, we read about it, we talk about it, we hear about it all the time. But what it is, the Hero's journey, is something that came from Joseph Campbell and also from Carl Jung. And it has to deal with, you know, these two guys. Campbell and Jung were fascinated by storytelling and myth. And, you know, where did all this stuff come from? And is there. Are there things that are in common among different cultures? So what Campbell and Jung did is they looked at all of the. The big myths, from, you know, Herodotus and Homer to, you know, the Bhagavad, Avita, Indian cultures and Asian cultures, Indian. And they discovered that there is this very simple structure to the majority of myth. Jung called it the collective unconscious, and Campbell actually specified it even in a trajectory. He sort of used a circle, like a revolutionary circle, to track what the hero's journey is. And something that I've done in Story Grid is to track it in terms of change, in terms of Elizabeth Kubler Ross Grief Cycle, which is also used to track change. So generally, what it means, and the question is, is this helpful to writers before they begin the work or when they're editing the work, or when is this useful? And I think it's useful from the very start. And here's the reason why, because what it does is it gives you those mile markers in your story that are going to be crucial for you to nail. And we talk about, you know, conventions and obligatory scenes and specific external and internal genres, and those are all very important, but they all fit in within the story spine, which is the Hero's journey. So what is the Hero's journey? Just generally. Let me just quickly outline it for you. There's a great book that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago by Christopher Vogler, which is called the Writer's Journey, I believe. And it goes into the Hero's journey in terms of craft much more specifically than what I'm going to talk about now. So if this excites you and you're passionate about it, I highly recommend buying and reading that book. I refer to it a lot. And, you know, I'm going to go over some of the principles now. So in a Hero's Journey, essentially what you have is a moment of crisis in a culture. So let's say we're, you know, you and I are part of a tribe, Tim, and there's a lack of water, and we're all looking at each other in our tribe. And, you know, one of us is going to have to go out and go over the mountain and get some water, because our tribe needs the water. So this is sort of the ordinary. The ordinary world of our tribe is the way things are, and a crisis results. And that would become your sort of inciting incident of your global story. If we're looking at, in terms of storygrid and one of us in the tribe takes it upon himself or the group decides that that person is the one who has to go over the mountain and get the water. And generally what happens in that moment is that person or that group of people become the heroic center of a story. They need to lead the tribe and go on an adventure and come back, and hopefully they're going to come back with some water. And generally, this is what happens when we face something that disrupts our own world personally or within a group. So after, you know, somebody is selected, that hero is. Leaves the ordinary world. They have a calling now, and they have a purpose. They have a very clear want. What they want is to go over the mountain and bring back some water or tell us where other water is. So that hero leaves the tribe and goes on an adventure. This is the beginning of the hero's journey. Makes sense, right? Yeah. So after they leave the tribe, they are met with all kinds of obstacles and gets progressively more and more complicated. When they go up the hill, they lose their sandal, so their foot gets caught on a rock, and so they have to get themselves out of the rock. Meanwhile, a rainstorm is coming and they can't get into shelter, so they actually have to do something to go to shelter. And on and on and on until the hero returns triumphant with the water or not. And this is essentially the core spine of a story. If you think about it. We have at the very beginning an inciting incident that happens. It creates a need in a character. That character goes in pursuit of that want, being satisfied. And as he or she progresses through the story and things happen for good and for ill, they may or may not get what they want initially, or they may get something else when they return. This is the classic story structure of the Odyssey, the Iliad, Harry Potter, Star Wars. If you look at it globally, It's a very, very good way to structure your story. Now, the beginning of your story is about 25% of your story is going to be the ordinary world. The inciting incident arises, and something in the ordinary world is amiss, and somebody within the tribe has to leave. And then they go into the transition between the ordinary world and the extraordinary world. Another example I always use for this is the wizard of Oz, which is one of the, you know, wonderful. And I'll speak of the movie, not the. The book, but the movie is such a wonderful trajectory of the hero's journey. And it's so clear at the beginning of the movie. It's in the black and white world. It's in the middle of Kansas. There's about. Yeah, there's going to be a tornado. And the inciting incident is this tornado. Dorothy gets thrown up in the house. It's torn from the ground, and she lands and destroys the Wicked Witch of the east accidentally, but that's the inciting incident. And then the new world that she enters is extraordinary.

And it's literally a new world.

It's literally colorful. It goes from black and white to color. And then, as you can see in the movie, all the characters from the ordinary world are transformed into extraordinary characters in the extraordinary world. The farmhands become the Tin man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly lion. The carnival barker in the black and white world becomes the wizard of Oz. It's such an incredible example of the hero's journey. All kinds of obstacles arise. There's a very, very strong negative antagonist in the Wicked Witch of the West. Toto, her sidekick, is her dog, who sort of, you know, represents her inner energy, her innocence. So as you go through that story, you discover. And there's no place like home. That's what she's, you know, that's how she gets home. Her goal is to go back home. And that is the hero's journey is once you leave the ordinary world to go on an adventure, you want to return home, just like Odysseus did in the Odyssey. After, you know, he wants to get back to Ithaca after the Trojan War. It takes him 10 years to get there. But his entire journey, his odyssey, is about the transition from the warrior life to a domestic life, back with his wife Penelope, and with his son Telemachus. And so these are stories that are so. They're so much a part of us, and they're so much a part of every culture and every one of our myths that to ignore them when you're thinking about your own story and writing your own story is a mistake, because you can really, really, when you get off track, you can think, let me think of my story in terms of the wizard of Oz. Is this the moment when they get in the castle, or is it clear that this is the Wicked Witch? So the hero's journey, it's just a wonderful metaphor, and it's also literal. You can bring that stuff to bear in every single thing that you write. Yeah.

One of the things that stood out to me that has been helpful, looking at it, is some, like, specific characters you need and specific things that have to happen along the way. So, for instance, it's made me realize, like, I need to have the mentor role. And some, you know, somebody has to come along when I'm stuck to tell me what to do next. And, you know, just again, in wizard of Oz, it's the Good Witch. You know, in Star wars, it's Obi Wan Kenobi. It's Han Solo. In the new Star wars, you know, it's. It's those things and then the helpers, too, of, like, they. The hero always finds people that. That he needs that will help him get him to the next step.

Yes.

So it's helped me, like, okay. Because I've really struggled with figuring out what characters should be in my stories. And reading through the hero's journey is like, oh, I have to fill these roles in order to flesh out the story. So that's been one of the things that's been helpful is like, okay, I gotta have somebody that comes along and tells my hero what to do, because he's not going to know what to do.

Well, that's true. And the trick of the thing is to identify those roles and then innovate them. And when I say innovate them, I'm meaning one of the great things to do is to take the mentor role. Traditionally, we think of the Obi Wan Kenobi, the one who teaches you about the Force. And he's a very clear character. He's an older warrior who's been through the wars.

Wizened old man.

Right. So one of the ways to do that is to have the sensibility of the mentor come through in other characters. It could be, you know, a series like Hercules had to perform seven heroic deeds before he became Hercules. And so you could have the mentor role be these challenges that your lead character has to overcome in order to gain experience. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a specific person. The mentorship could come through a series of tasks that are brought on by antagonists. So at the like, at the beginning of a story, there's no way that the character you would ever believe would be able to slay a dragon. But if you build to the slaying of the dragon through smaller tasks where they learn little tricks that they can pull off to outwit and outsmart the dragon at the very end, then you can build into that rational journey so the reader or the viewer will believe it.

So the mentor role could be. It's basically whatever tells the hero what they should do next.

Right. It's experience. The mentorship is a process by which someone gives you some experience, and they explain to you, watch out when you go down this road, because there's, you know, there's a snake at the end. So that's what the. The mentor does, is to help the. The hero navigate their journey. And a lot of mentors can be hidden antagonists, too. Like, for instance, the first Christopher Nolan Batman movie. I think Liam Neeson plays the mentor role to Batman. So we love Liam Neeson. And then we discover, holy cow, Liam Neeson's the bad guy. How is Batman gonna beat the bad guy? Because the bad guy taught Batman everything he knew. And so it raised the stakes, and it made it. It was a great twist to make Liam Neeson the bad guy because he had been built up in the viewer's mind to be such a strong figure through his experience teaching Batman how to be Batman. So it's like, oh, my gosh, how are you going to overthrow the guy who taught you everything you know? That's the same thing in the Color of Money, or the Color of Money is the sequel to the Hustler, and it's a great movie with Tom Cruise and Paul Newman. And Paul Newman plays the old, wise and old pool shark who teaches the inexperienced and naive but extremely talented young pool player Tom Cruise, how to hustle people. Yeah.

It makes me think of the movie Unbreakable. Have you seen that one?

Is that the one with Sam Jackson in it?

Yeah. And Bruce Willis, Like Bruce Willis, you find out, because he survives this. I forgot what he survives, and you realize, like, oh, he can't be hurt. And so he. You know. And then Samuel L. Jackson kind of mentors him on this role of becoming a superhero, basically. Yes. And then at the end, spoiler alert, you find out that Samuel L. Jackson had been systematically creating devastating accidents that killed hundreds of people. Like, looking for Bruce Willis.

Right.

And so at the very end, though, that. To me, that was that. That's what reminds me of that twist of, like, he ended up being the bad guy from.

Right. Or that cartoon, the Incredibles, the Pixar movie where the bad guy. Yeah, I mean, we can go on and on, but that's the thing is that, you know, a lot of these very, very big movies and big ideas and big action thrillers, they're built on the primal myth. And when people Say, oh, that's just the hero's journey, you know, it's extremely difficult to innovate. Like I say this all the time about the action genre. It's very difficult to innovate the primal genres because we've seen them so often and we love those parts so much. We love the role of the old mentor and to make that interesting and different and twist it in a way that's unique, quite difficult. So what a lot of writers will do is they'll fake things, they'll make the mentor a shadowy figure, or they'll make the best friend, the one who ends up being the real antagonist at the end of the story. But these are fun things to think about while you're tracking the spinal movement of your story. As an editor, the first thing that a writer wants from me is they want me to tell them, is my global story working? Is it tracking? Does it feel like the movements are hitting their marks? And it's. It's difficult as an editor when you're first reading something, because especially someone like myself who's read so many stories, I know very quickly when it's not working. And then I. Then it's sort of this moment when I say to myself, oh, my gosh, now I've got to open up the hood of this thing and figure out what went off the tracks and where and when and how. But that's a good thing because, you know, I always say, you know, the problems are the problem. You know, you're not the problem, it's just the problem. So figure out what the problems are and then you can fix them. And one of the ways to identify the problems is to look at your global story and say, is it following the mythic structure of the hero's journey? Is there an ordinary world at the beginning? Is my lead character being called to go pursue something that's going to take them into sort of another universe, another way of looking at the world? And are they going back? Is the climactic moment when they're going back to the ordinary world with the thing that they were always looking for or the thing that they never got. So you have, you know, your beginning, your middle and your end, and you want to move from the ordinary world to an extraordinary world and back again, because you need that full circle resolution, and that tracks exactly when I talk about inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis, climax and resolution. What are those five things? Those are the five global movements of a hero's journey. And you got to have them in every scene, every beat, every. You Know, act every sequence so that the form is repeating itself in deeper and deeper levels. Globally and micro levels as well. Yeah.

So I want to mention another thing that stood out to me in it is one of the things I read about the hero's journey is that along the way. So basically what I'm doing is. And you've already said so many things, that overlay with the story grid is basically, okay, what parts of the hero's journey fit into what parts of the story grid, and how can I basically pull things out of the hero's journey? So one of the things that stood out to me is during the middle build, when I was reading. I forgot where I read this. Now, when I was reading something about the hero's journey, it said this. The hero gets tools along the way that he will eventually need at the end for his, you know, the final test.

Yes.

And he doesn't usually know their tools along the way. And so this stood out big time in Harry Potter, where through the entire middle build, he kept kind of getting these things that he ended up needing all of them at the end. Right. So him and Ron kept playing chess off and on through the entire book. And sure enough, at the end, the final test, one of the obstacles was a giant chess game. And then one of his friends is Hermione, who can solve, you know, is super smart, has studied everything, and she's like the book nerd. And sure enough, she needed all of this stuff that she had learned along the way to get them past one of the tests. And it made me think about the middle build differently, because I'm thinking, like, somewhere in these scenes, I need to have the resolution be that they get something that they're going to need at the end. They get a series of either skills or knowledge or actual tools that, lo and behold, they're going to need to overcome in the end.

That's a good way of looking at it. The trick to doing that is to not make them so sledgehammery, meaning you don't want the reader to feel like they're being manipulated. And often whenever you. You sort of set yourself up and say, okay, here's the scene. Now, I also recommend this, so I think this is a very good place to start. But I think, you know, your third or fourth draft, these are the questions that you have to start asking yourself. So, for example, say, you say to yourself, this is the scene where my hero needs to acquire this certain skill. And your initial instinct would be for them to get into a fight and learn like they that they have a really powerful left hook or something. That being your initial thinking, I would always say, say to the person, okay, write that down. And then come back to it and do it the opposite way the next time. Have them.

Is this where you write 12 things down?

Yeah, kind of. Kind of. Because the reason why, why you do that, and there's no way that I'm gonna sit here and say that J.K. rowling made any mistakes, but I will say that I did not go so crazy over the moon for Harry Potter, like. Like a lot of people did. And I'll tell you, one of the reasons why is that I went to see the first movie. Now, I hadn't read the book. This is probably not J.K. rowling's fault. It might be the screenwriter. But the problem that I had with the first movie of Harry Potter was that Harry Potter never lost. He never, ever lost. He would always be challenged and it would look like, oh, my gosh, he's going to lose. But he never lost. And I always found that disappointing. I want a wounded boy. I want somebody when at the end of that story, they've got bruises, man, they're bleeding.

Do you think that's because it's a children's book?

Probably.

Because as I've.

I don't think you have to literally be bleeding, though. But I think children need to understand. I think that's a kind of a cop out too. I think children need to learn that the best of us and children experience heartache all the time. Things don't go well for children a lot of the time. The things that they want, they don't get a lot of the time. So when the heroes of their stories always seem to triumph, I think it sends the message that, oh, well, you're just a loser. People in stories win all the time. And because you don't win all the time, you know, you're never going to be Harry Potter. I don't know.

You know, you're probably going to get emails after this.

But that's okay. That's okay. Because I think part of growing up is learning perseverance and resilience. And in this, that's part of how we learn that is through what we read and what we enjoy in our stories. So I was always attracted to the stories where the hero, you know, against all. That's why we love underdog stories, because against all odds, you know, they were the ones that they didn't get picked first for the basketball team. They had to be. They had to go home and train and work really hard before they could make the basketball team. I always liked those stories more than the. The one touched by greatness, whose greatness eventually triumphs when everybody recognizes how great they are. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Well, so I want to come back to this tools thing. So, I mean, is that. Is what I was saying about like acquiring the tools along the way now. And I would say this was again, a little heavy handed in Harry Potter. That again, because I think it's a children's book, is. Yeah, they have to be. You know, the fact that like he happened to get this cloak that he needed at the end, you know, like that. That's a little. But I find that as, like I've read more children's books along with my sons as they're growing up is like, for them it needs to be pretty clear or. Yeah, they'll miss it. Where like, once you get older, if it's that clear, you're kind of like, okay, yeah, yeah, right. But what it did, rereading Harry Potter made it stand out of like, again, it was, it was perfect timing because I just read all this. But it was that idea that along the way and if we go back to wizard of Oz, it was the same thing, except the tools in these cases were the people she picked up along the way.

Yes.

And, you know, the slippers and like all of these things. She got that at the very end, made it where she could get back home.

And so.

I just have to interrupt on that one element because the most favorite thing about the wizard of Oz for me is that at the end of the story, we realize that all of these people searching for these things, the Tin man, he's the most romantic of the group. Right. And he wants to, he wants to get a heart. He's the guy with the biggest heart from the start. The Scarecrow says, I want a brain. He's the guy who comes up with the plan to get out of the castle. And the lion's like, oh, I don't have any courage. He's the one who fights all the guards. So the beauty of that story is that they all had those qualities before they went on the search. And Dorothy, all she had to do was click her heels three times at the very beginning of this story and say, there's no place like home. And she could have gone home, but she needed to experience those very traumatic moments in that passage along that yellow brick road for her to actually appreciate home in the way that would make her change.

And this is an important. This is A really important point. The character. We always talk about character arcs. The character has to start someplace and they have to finish the other way. And it's the path of their journey that makes them change. Odysseus in the Odyssey, Remember at the beginning of the Odyssey, he's this really kick ass warrior. You know, this guy's a very triumphant warrior. And he's heading home as this very strong, undefeatable warrior. He ends up, when he gets back to Ithaca, he looks like a bum, he's wearing rags. Nobody even can recognize this guy. The only people who recognize him is his dog. And so he has to change. He has to come back as somebody who's a vulnerable human being. And that was the, you know, that's part of the beauty of the Odyssey is the change of the warrior, the triumphant warrior. When he comes home, he has to come back as a vulnerable human being. He's no longer indefatigable. So when we say all this stuff, well, you got to do X, you got to do Y, you got to do Z. They got to get some tools. It sounds very, very cynical and it sounds very formulaic. And I get this a lot. People are like, ah, story. Granted, it's so formulaic and it's baloney. Well, it's not. It's what you bring to it. It's. These are the tools by which you can show your character, change their attitudes and what they think.

Yeah, and that's, I think what's what was helpful for me thinking about it because I was looking at the middle build as like filler.

Right, right.

You know, like, okay, we have the inciting incident that gets them, you know, moving towards something that they really, really want. And then at the end it all comes together and I gotta put a bunch of stuff in the middle to make sure I have enough words. So what it made me start thinking of is like, no, no, no, no. I have to have the middle build or the hero won't be ready for the end.

Right. So.

He has to have a moment. It's what in Hollywood they call the all is lost moment. And the all is lost moment is what usually happens at the end of the middle build. It's sort of the climax of the middle build. And the climax is everything I thought to be true, everything that I thought I needed to do to get what I wanted is false.

Everything that I believed before I went on this journey will not help me anymore. I need to change what I, and I call it, you know, the truth will out scene. And this is really Important for internal genres. You know, a coming of age story, a redemption plot. Everything that I thought before this moment that I held to be true is false. So that's the all is lost moment. I'm not going to be able to solve this problem. So in a redemption story, usually a redemption story is about self hatred and it's about coming to a realization that you're not as horrible as you think you are. That, hey, maybe there's a little bit of hope for you. You know, it's like the Grinch who Stole Christmas. You know, his heart grows three times his size. That's his all is lost moment. He's standing at the top of that hill. He's stolen all of the Christmas gifts. He's ruined Christmas for the who's. And this is his moment. He's like, yes, now I've stopped Christmas. These idiots down below are not going to be singing. They're going to be crying. They're going to be going, boo hoo hoo. And he's standing on top of that hill and he's waiting for that moment and he's getting. It's going to be the best thing. And they start singing instead. And that's the Grinch's all is lost moment. Because that's when everything that he believed to be true was false. No, it's Christmas is not about gifts, bro. And that's when he realizes it. And that's when he changes. He turns that sleigh around and he takes it down the mountain and he gives the who's back their gifts and he even carves the roast beast. And then he's their friend. And he understands what communal living is about, what it means to be a part of a tribe. The Grinch was a loner up on the top of the mountain. He was better than everybody else. He thought everybody was an idiot. And it was through that experience he changes. And that is another great example of the hero's journey, the ordinary world of the Grinch. At the beginning of the Grinch who Stole Christmas is a very dark place. He's all by himself in a cave and he can't stand the noise from all the people down below because he's not included. He's an outsider. He doesn't like being an outsider. He doesn't know that he doesn't like being outsider. He thinks he likes it. So he's lying to himself. I'm the Grinch. I hate everybody. Those people down there suck. I'm going to ruin their Christmas. And the whole story is about how he's going to go and he's going to destroy the who's Christmas. And he ends up, you know, we. This is why I cry every time I see that thing. Because we all have those thoughts. We all think we're the outsider. We all think that nobody wants us to join in their. Their celebration. We don't understand what everybody's all excited about. We feel left out. And that is the hero's journey. And so it's that simple. And it's that complex, too. So the all is lost moment is at the end of the middle build. It kicks you into the climax of the ending payoff. And the ending payoff is Grinch turns the sleigh around and he makes the choice to go back and give them the gifts. That's the resolution. And it's beautiful. And we love it. You know, if they cut off the story with the Grinch heading down the hill without him giving the gifts away, we all been like, oh, man, I really wish I had seen that scene where he throws the gifts to all the guys.

Yeah.

So that's why you need the resolution. I'm just bringing that up because a lot of people are like, well, why do I have to have a resolution scene? Because we need that. We need to feel that completion.

Yeah. So I want to go a different direction before we run out of time. Because. And this was something like this week, as we've been getting closer to our time to record, I was, like, actually embarrassed to ask this question. I'm like, I just can't do it.

But I'm like, well, that means I probably should. And so I had this idea, and it sounds like the worst way to go about doing something, but I think it might work, and I want your feedback on it. So, you know, a couple weeks ago, we. We went over another one of my scenes, and you had talked about how I had come a long way. And so I've been, you know, just writing kind of standalone scenes as practice, and I really want to write an actual book now. And so as I've started to map it out, I have just gotten completely overwhelmed because it's like, I feel like I understand the story grid well enough to put 1500 words together, but the idea of putting another 60,000 words or 70,000 words together in a way that tells a complete story just becomes completely overwhelming. And so as I. This again came to me while I was listening to the Harry Potter audiobook is the first scene opens, and I thought, oh, you know, if I had that scene in my book, I would do it this way and then the next scene happens. And I thought, you know, if I had that scene in my book, I would do it this way. And I thought, okay, what if I just sat down with Harry Potter and did a front to back story grid of every scene and then replaced each of those scenes with my story? And so it would basically be a scene by scene map for a book that I rewrite as my own scene. So like in this scene when the mentor comes along and tells Harry, for the, you know, when the big guy comes along and tells Harry, no, you're not normal, you're a wizard, like, that would be the scene in my book where the mentor comes along and kicks the hero out of their normal world by telling them you're not normal. This is, this is what you have to do. And like just basically took the Harry Potter story grid and replaced it with my scene by scene with my own story grid and then wrote that book. Would that just be like a basically just a bad version of Harry Potter? Is that ethically questionable to even do, or is that like a good place to start when 80,000 words seems just completely overwhelming?

Well, let me answer that by just saying that years and years ago, before Robert McKee and everybody started really dialing into structure and everything, what writers would often do when they get stuck is they would pull out the Sun Also Rises or Little Women or Pride and Prejudice, and they would turn to page one and they would just start typing. They would retype the book because they felt if they could channel the writer's work through themselves, it would give them a sense of voice and it would give them some kind of quality. There would be some magical dust that would sort of go into them when they did it. And most of the time it was a waste of time. But I will say that the idea that you have is not stupid. It is a really good way to learn a craft. If you were to want to build a workbench and you ordered a bench from a great wood manufacturing company and it came to your house, what I would do is I would look at the way that thing was put together. Then I would draw a plan based upon the way those materials were put together. And then I would try and re engineer that table based upon the way it was put together. So you're deciding or thinking about going through step by step Harry Potter and writing it scene by scene with the same choices and structure that J.K. rowling did. Not a bad idea at all. In fact, what it will do is it will give you A very, very strong starting point. And it will free you from all of those panicky things like, oh, I don't know if I'm. My climax in the third act is really paying off. But if you're doing the same structured story scene that J.K. rowling did at that moment, this is why I always recommend that people. People always ask me, can you give me a list of all the conventions and obligatory scenes and tell me where I need to put them in my book so that I can outline it exactly like the prototypical thriller or love story? And I always say, you don't need me to do that. In fact, if you. If I gave you that formula, it's not going to really help you that much anyway. What you need to do is to find those stories that mean the most to you and do exactly what you're talking about, Tim. Go through every scene and see the way the writer of that story solved the problems that you're facing. And if you get stuck, steal, rewrite, rewrite the scene. Well, because rewrite the scene with your characters using the fundamental structure that your hero wrote. That's not stealing. That's called inspiration. You're not stealing. You're not plagiarizing. You're not taking their. Their intellectual property. You're looking at the kind of wood that they're using. They made a cherry wood dresser, and you decide to make your dresser out of cherry wood, too. There's nothing wrong with that. The idea that J.K. rowling has, you know, a patent on the climactic scene where the mentor reveals something to the hero that they don't want to know, that's not true. That scene has been done. I mean, every love story is a ripoff of Romeo and Juliet. Look at the structure of Romeo Juliet. And that's pretty much a romantic comedy. So what you're doing is you're becoming a writer is what you're doing. Tim, you're saying to yourself, I'm not going to let my fear keep me from my work. I'm gonna try this. I'm gonna try this idea. My fear is keeping me from outlining every single scene in my book because I don't know if I'm gonna do it the right way. So what if I just do it the same way that J.K. rowling did and see what happens at the end of that? And at the end of that, what you're gonna do is you're gonna have a first draft of something that probably works to a degree. It probably works. And then you can look at it and go, you know what? That's a complete ripoff. Everybody's gonna expect that I'm gonna twist that. I'm gonna change that scene, and then I'm gonna fix that, and that scene could be better. And everybody's gonna know. Anybody who's seen Harry Potter is gonna know that that's gonna be their climax. So I'm not gonna do it that way.

Yeah. So there's two fundamental worries. I.

That it's, like, ethically questionable to do it. The other one is, it's almost like when you go and see an impersonator, right? A good impersonator is good, but it's not as good as the real thing. And it actually is. Like, if you actually put them side by side, you're like, oh, that's really sad. You know, and that was like my thinking of, like, would doing this create just a sad, wimpy, impotent version of. You know, you never know. Yeah, well, that. Yeah, well, when I was. I was talking to a buddy of mine about talking to you about this, and I was like, yeah, you know, there's been times where, like, I throw out this crazy thing to Sean. He's like, yeah, that's a good idea. And then there's times where you're like, that's a complete disaster. Don't even try it. And so, like, I was like, before I do this, I want to make sure you wouldn't say that that's a complete disaster. Don't even try it. But as you say that, I feel like that's what it does is it's like. Because my biggest worry as I start to map out the story is like, what's a haiku?

You know what a haiku is? It's a little poem. I forget what the structure is, but it's like seven words. Seven words, eight words.

Yeah.

Yeah, right. Something like that.

I think I know what you're talking about. I don't know what the structure is.

What you're doing is you're creating a haiku, only you're doing a long form haiku. You're. You're doing the work. You're analyzing the work of a master and you're. You're discovering how she is paying off and doing the five commandments of each unit of story in her story. And you're letting that inspire you. I don't think there is anything wrong with it. And this is why. I'll tell you what, Tim. This is why people don't ever talk about their writing.

You know, like, Jonathan. Jonathan Fransen, probably. In fact, I read this somewhere. He read a really dense book years ago. Man, I wish I could remember the name of. But it's just this really intellectual writer, and he basically used the form to write the corrections. He rewrote a famous novel. He didn't rewrite a famous novel. He was inspired by a famous novel. He was inspired by the structure of it. And then he restructured his work, his ideas, his thoughts, his characters in terms of that global structure. Sam Shepard, he wrote Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, his greatest plays. If you look at them in terms of Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene o'. Neill. Of course, if you look at Long Day's Journey Into Night and you look at any domestic drama with a family in it, it's exactly the same structure. It's a group of family members who end up attacking each other in the third act. That is not a coincidence, and there's nothing wrong with that. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? That's Long Day's Journey into Night with two couples. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. This is why, when somebody creates a new sort of genre, a new form, there wasn't any Long Day's Journey into Night until Eugene o' Neill wrote it. That's why he's won the Nobel Prize. That's why we all talk about him, you know, 50 years after he's dead. Now, he didn't write Long Day's Journey into Night until he wrote 70 other works before he could do that. And the first works that he wrote were based upon the drama of the era. So when you say, I want to someday be able to be as good as J.K. rowling and write a story as good as hers, there's nothing wrong with being inspired about the way she structures her work. She'd be flattered by it. She's not going to be insulted.

Well, if she ever realizes I even exist, that'll be a win. So.

No, I. I think what I was trying to accomplish with this is, you know, we keep using the map as a reference. So what I feel like when I sit down to map out an entire book is like, if I'm sitting in Chicago and I want to get to California, and there's two roads or like, eight roads, and I have no idea where each of those go, and I don't want to get to the end of those roads before I realize I'm not in California. And that's what it feels like when I'm Trying to do this thing from scratch. And so the idea that I could use that. And then basically, then each scene I can make my own, knowing that it's along a road that's already been traveled.

That's true, yes. And I'll end on one bit of more advice. And this is an old screenwriter's trick. Not even a trick, but it's a great thing to think about. Start at the ending. Think about where you want to end up. So start in Los Angeles and then walk your way back to Chicago. Don't start in Chicago and get scared about. Because it's sort of like. You ever do those little puzzles where you have to, you know, get into the center. My kids do them all the time. And I always cheat. You know, they. They go, dad, can you do it? And I go, yeah. And I start in where you have to end up, and then I just follow the squiggles path. And that's how you can write too. If you start knowing that the climactic moment is when the daughter turns to the mother and says, I'm never going to see you again, you're dead to me. And you know, that's the climax of your story. Then walk it back. What led to that moment? Those two. That's such a primal relationship between mother and daughter. There had to be all these little things that had to have happened to lead to that moment. That is so climactic. So if you start at the ending, like Raiders of the Last Ark. They knew. Okay, the end of the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spoiler alert here. We're going to open up the Ark of the Covenant. And because the power in that ark is going to fry everybody in the room who has their eyes open. So our hero and his girlfriend are going to keep their eyes closed, and that's what's going to save them. How can we get from there to Indiana Jones in a classroom at the beginning of the story, and then you don't end up going down blind as many. As many blind roadways as you would. If you're just starting in Chicago and you say, oh, I'll take Route 15, and you end up in Jackson, Mississippi.

Yeah. Okay, good. It's. I'm kind of relieved because I actually, right here in my bag on the floor next to me, I had my son dig out his copy of Harry Potter and I'm carrying it with me, and I was like, I have to ask permission before I can do this.

I give you permission. Just don't plagiarize.

Thanks for listening to this episode. Of the Story Grid Podcast for everything Story Grid make sure you visit storygrid.com Sign up for Sean's newsletter. He's constantly sending out great information there. You won't want to miss it. Also, if for some reason you've been listening to this show and you still have not purchased a copy of the book Story Grid, stop right now. Go to Amazon and buy a copy for yourself. You will not regret it. Along with that, if you can continue to share the show with your friends. We love to see so many more authors joining our little community here at the Story Grid Podcast. So share it in your Facebook group, in your next writers group, post it on your blog, Put on Twitter whatever it is that you do to share content stuff with your writer's friends. Include StoryGrid in that as well. If you want to ask us any questions or shoot us any notes, you can do that on Twitter @StoryGrid. And as always, if you are feeling so inclined, head over to itunes. Leave a Review we are currently at 97 and just three away from hitting 100 and wouldn't you like to be one of those three that helps put us over the top. Thank you for all of you that have left ratings and reviews. Sean and I read every single one of them and enjoy all all of the good ones. Okay, thanks for listening and we will see you next week.