Can you learn to write better (without trying)?

Hello and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast.

This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me soon is Sean Coyne. He's the creator of Storygrid and the author of the book Storygrid, and he's an editor with 25 plus years experience.

And he's helping me avoid all the.

Common landmines the that writers go through.

Early on in this episode, we talk.

About the nuances of learning and becoming a better writer.

We talk about lots of different ways.

That you can become a better writer, the types of deliberate practice you can do, and we even dive into the idea of chicken sexing. So you're really going to enjoy this episode. It's a lot of fun and it will help you better practice your art of writing. So let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, I was hanging out with a friend of mine last week, and she was telling me about this sexing chickens thing. Have you ever heard of this?

No.

Okay.

So I'm a little scared, too.

Okay. No, no, it's not actual. It's telling the difference between males and females.

Oh, okay.

Okay. So inside of, like, the major chicken manufacturer plants or whatever, it's expensive for them because they only want female chickens because they lay the eggs and they, you know, provide the meat and all that. So all the money, space, and time they put into raising male chickens is completely wasted. But the problem is there is no way to look at a baby chicken and be able to tell, like, from the earliest stage whether it's a boy or a girl. And there's just no way to do. There's no conscious way to look at it. And, like, look at a checklist or like a diagram and be like, okay, that's a boy, that's a girl. And so there's these people that can do it, and they do it really fast. They, like, pick one up, I think they actually use, because I had read about this a long time ago, they actually use two hands and they grab one and they look at it. While they're looking at that one, they're grabbing another one and they look at it, and in a split second, they know whether it's a boy or girl, but they can't explain how they know. It's all gut level. Like, there's no conscious thought into it. It's all gut level, and they just go super fast. Well, the downside of this is how do you teach the next generation of chicken sexers? Right. And the only way they do it is by basically being an apprentice. And you pick. The apprentice picks up a chicken and looks at it and immediately says, girl. And the other, the mentor is, like, wrong. And so they put in with the guys, and then they pick one up. They said, boy, it's, like, wrong. And they put in with the girls, and then they pick one up. They say, girl, and it's like, that is a girl. And they put in with the girls, and they. All they do is they repeat that over and over and over until the subconscious of the person can tell immediately at a gut level whether or not they're right. And they have an extremely high success rate, like when they test to see how right they are. And so, you know, this is just interesting as you and I, you know, were talking earlier this week about teaching writing and thinking through the process of, like, how I've come through and trying to learn writing and how there is some structure you can put around it, but there's also just this level of doing it, and then. Then going back and saying, nope, that's bad, and don't do that anymore, you know?

Right.

Anyway, I just was wondering your thought on that.

Well, I think that's a really revolutionary way of looking at writing instruction, and here's why. What you just said reminded me of something that I just said to my son who wanted to chop wood. And he called me at the office and said, do you mind if I chop some wood in the backyard? How do I do it? And I. At the moment, I said, there's just really no way for me to teach you how to chop wood. You have to sort of figure it out yourself. You have to shift your weight. You have to be careful. You have to know when to accelerate, when to decelerate. So I said to him, really, the only way for you to learn how to chop wood is for you to do it. And you have to start out very carefully and slowly. You'll get more and more confident as you're doing it. You're gonna miss it a couple of times at the beginning. You're gonna make a mess of the yard.

But it's important for you to learn the skill because we live in Massachusetts and we need firewood. So he went out and he did it, and guess what? You know, over the past four days, he's gotten better and better and better at it. And now I can have a lot of faith in him to be able to go out and chop wood all day. So this brings me to the writing element. It's the same thing with determining the sexes of the chickens, I think, in that if you are able to have a moment where you can constantly check in with somebody who has more experience in writing than you do, and they can stop you before you make really serious mistakes that can cost you months or years of your life, I think that's a really great and effective way of being able to teach something, something very quickly. So the concept of doing the writing and correcting as you're going along, as we've sort of discovered by accident in this podcast, I think there's a lot of potential to that. Now, of course, the trick is finding the right person to give you advice and having the willpower to beat resistance and actually get the words down. So if you can sort of attack those two problems and then bring those two people together in a way that is advantageous to both of them, I think you could learn a lot of the skill set required to become a really good writer a lot faster. It's like your friend Josh and his 20 hour rule. I think you can get those 20 hour rules. I think the trick of Josh's idea is the concentrated effort of getting those 20 hours effective, to have them be effective practice, as opposed to fudging around and making a ton of mistakes that you could correct just much more easily if somebody was standing there and watching you do it. So I'm glad you brought that up because I think if there was a track in colleges and MFA programs where it was much more do correct, do correct, as opposed to go write an entire scene, give it to everybody in the room, and then in a week we'll all shit on it and make you feel bad. I don't really think that's very effective.

Yeah. I've just been reading this book by a woman named Kathy Sierra called Badass Making Users awesome. And she talks about this a little bit where she talks about deliberate practice, because, you know, there's that old thing, practice makes perfect. And it's like, well, no, you know, the right kind of practice makes perfect. And really, most of us aren't trying to be perfect. We're just trying to not suck anymore. And at most skills. And that's in Josh's book first 20 hours. He talks about that of like, you know, this whole thing of 10, 10,000 hours. Yeah, yeah. That Malcolm Gladwell made popular in outliers. And it's like, well, yeah, it takes 10,000 hours to be the top five at something in the world. But if you want to just get proficient at something, which is a totally different goal. You can usually do that in 20 hours, as long as you do the right things in those 20 hours. And that's what I think was so interesting about the difference between the first scene I gave you and the second scene I gave you and how it was so vastly improved. And I think it was because of this idea of deliberate practice. And like, each week I would get all of this feedback before I would write, after I would write, like, after I would deal with specific things or like, I'd hit a wall on Monday and I'm like, I can just hang in till Wednesday when, you know, we record the podcast and then we can talk through it and how that's been such a helpful thing to kind of train me faster. Because, you know, working with so many writers, like, I have, like, I know they get. It's so easy to spin on the same problem for so long or like we've talked about, you know, write 100,000 words before you realize the whole idea of the story sucked in the first place.

Yeah.

And so it's just been. It was interesting to kind of hear that example. And as we continue to constantly play with this idea of like, how much can you structure and how much do you have to rely on the muse? You know, it's interesting to think through how that works with writing, you know, because I feel like again, the whole thing that makes story grid helpful is it keeps it breaks it down into manageable chunks.

Well, that's a good point. And I just want to say this about. I think you really stumbled on to something interesting. There is how much do you rely on structure versus how much do you rely on the muse? And I think that's a really, really important thing to bring up because structure and practice and form are the equivalent of, say, Derek Jeter as a shortstop. Right. Derek Jeter is probably top three top five shortstops in Major league baseball history. Now there's a famous play that he made during one of the World Series run ups and might have been in the World Series or it could have been a, you know, a league championship series. But he. It seemed effortless. But what happened was there was. I think they were playing Arizona and he was playing shortstop. There was a man on second base and there was a line drive into right field and it was one of those shallow right field line drives that was definitely a base hit. But the right fielder, I think it was Paul o', Neill, definitely had a play at the plate. But for whatever reason, the Throw was a little off. And Jeter, because he had practiced so much, was just going with the flow of the ball. And he made this amazing catch and flipped the ball to the catcher, and they got the guy on the out. And it was a major plan in World Series history. And that's a moment when the muse came to Derek Jeter. But all of those other plays that he had played throughout his entire career, all those ground balls, all of those cut off plays that he learned when he was, you know, 4 years old with his dad in his backyard, that was the form and the practice that led to that moment when the muse came to him. And I think it's the same thing with writing. And I think we have this magical feeling that, oh, all I have to do is get in my chair every day and just wait for the muse to come and hook me up and give me some really great stuff. And the fact is, is that, no, you've got to be Derek Jeter. You've got to be doing those ground balls. You've got to be working on those five commandments of storytelling every single day. And occasionally, like, what happened to you a couple of weeks ago when you were really fighting this, this moment in your story. And again, I don't know the specifics of your story. All I know is that you wanted to cram this antagonist down the throat of your story. And then there was this revelatory moment to you where you're like, oh, my gosh, that's not my antagonist. That guy's my antagonist. Oh, my gosh. And that's a moment where you have been grinding and grinding and grinding and doing those, you know, those ground ball pickups and throwing the first when the muse actually did come to you. So I think there's also this website called 99% Academy or something, and it's from that quote from Einstein where it's either Einstein or Picasso or somebody that, you know, hard work is 99% sweat and 1% inspiration. And I think that the percentage of sweat in terms of learning form and story structure for writers is what we talk about every single week. And if you're lucky and you work hard and you keep working on that craft and you get a proficiency, the muse will start showing up every now and then, which, you know, is a wonderful thing, but you can never rely on it.

Yeah. And I think that's what is helpful, is that the structure of it almost gives you the space for the muse to show. I don't know how to put this. It's like, yeah, I guess I feel like the structure of story grid allows you to get to know what to do next. Because my worry and what I had been doing off and on for years is like, okay, you hear all these wonderful platitudes, you know, you hear all these quotes, write every day and blah, blah, blah, you know, and. And so I would sit down and I'd write and I'd write and I'd write. And, like, months would go by, and I'm like, this is all crap, you know, like, nothing in particular was wrong with any particular one thing. But it's like anytime I tried to put together, like, a long. A longer version of something, or anytime I try to write a story from scratch, like, it just all fell apart. And so I felt like it was so kind of up in the air that there was nothing for the muse to kind of come sink its teeth into. And so what has been neat to watch as I've worked on my first draft is, you know, I did all this work on the structure ahead of time, and it's allowed me to actually keep moving and keep showing up for work and doing, you know, the next. The next scene and the next scene and the next scene. And I've had these little moments of brilliance along the way. So it actually, like, set me up for success where I felt like the muse had something to work with instead of my just kind of floundering around, hoping I landed on something.

Yeah, that's not. And we've talked about this before, too, but the methodology, the story grid methodology was invented by myself using concepts that are universally held by people. Every. Everybody from aristotle to Robert McKee to Kurt Vonnegut to Stephen King to Steven Pressfield to Anne Lamott to. All of the things that are in the story grid aren't brand new ideas that I came up with. What it is was a methodology for me as an editor to help a writer make their books better and their stories better as quickly as possible. So the methodology is about getting down to brass tacks soon as humanly possible and to fix those problems as quickly as possible. Because I was under a lot of pressure as an editor to get those books into production. I was paying a lot of money. I wasn't, but the company was, and I was the acquiring editor. I was acquiring books for quite a substantial amount of money, and we needed to get that money back. And so I couldn't really be, oh, well, let's sit and contemplate the tea leaves and hope for the best that the muse comes to you and fixes this problem for you. Instead, I need to say, hey, your obligatory scene in the midpoint is not working. It's really flat. And we need to fix that. What can we do to fix it? Let's think about some solutions. Here's an idea. How about this? How about this? And guess what? After 15 or 20 minute conversation between the two of us, the writer and I, we would figure out a solution. So the reason why I'm saying all this is that all of that work that I used to build this machine for editors, I never really fully understood and realized how it could be reverse engineered for writers so that you could bring all of the story grid methodology to the table before you even create the book itself. So this process, and I know we're coming up on almost half a year of doing this, this process has really helped me as an editor. See, just, you know, how we can use the concepts to help writers who are just starting out to get those 20 hours of really fruitful practice that Josh talks about in his 20 hour. What's his book called again?

I keep forgetting the first 20 hours.

The first 20 hours. So what Josh's point was, and I don't know who knows so much about Josh, but Josh is sort of one of these guys who does a deep dive into anything that excites him. And so he went through all this research and he came up with this concept that you can become proficient at something. Not world class, but proficient at it within 20 hours of concerted practice. And he wrote a terrific book called 20 Hour Rule. Right?

No, it's the.

First.

The first 20 hours. Okay, I see. I'm absolutely ruining any plug plug for his book because I keep forgetting the title Anyway, so the point is, is that the story grid will give you what's necessary to practice in those 20 hours. And then you can take those 20 hours and eventually invest 10,000 and then become Don DeLillo if you want.

Yeah, so I want to go back to your example of Derek Jeter. So you were talking about the ground balls and you know, practicing, practicing, practicing. It's like, what would you say for a writer is that early deliberate practice they could be doing.

I think it's this, and I've been thinking about this a lot. I think the most fundamental unit of story that is the most important to master is the scene. And the scene, as I define it, is. And I'm just going to give some very boilerplate rules here because I think rules are very helpful when you're starting out to learn something. A scene is a 1500 word piece of story that has an inciting incident, has at least one or two progressive complications. It raises a crisis question that has a climax, action and a resolution.

So if you're doing ground ball kind of work as a writer and say, you know, say you're in between projects and you're not really sure what you want to do next, or you haven't done anything before and you want to become a writer, what my advice to start as a writer would be to have some fun writing scenes. And I think I've mentioned this a while ago, but some of the scenes to think about doing are those classic obligatory scenes that we all know immediately. What do I mean by that? Here's a couple of them. In a love story, there's always a scene where the lovers meet. In Hollywood, they call it the meet cute moment in a romantic comedy. And these are the scenes that we all have heard and seen and read a million times before. You know what? Guy walks into a coffee shop, he's ordering a coffee. There's this irritating woman behind him who spills her latte all over his back. He gets a third degree burn. He has to go to the hospital. She ends up being the, you know, the admitting nurse at the hospital. And there's sort of like the moment when they. They meet cute. And so that's one kind of scene that you could give yourself as a task. How am I going to create a situation where. Or in that classic movie Brokeback Mountain, you have the two lovers who end up being two men. They're cowboys and they meet. Not cute, but they meet. And they really don't like each other all that much because they both have to work on this. They have to take care of these sheep in the mountains and it's terrible. Neither one of them really like each other too much. So to think about another obligatory scene outside of the love convention would be, say, the hero at the mercy of the villain scene. I talk about this a lot. And this is the moment when the hero is dead to rights. The villain in a thriller or in a crime story, in a horror story, an action story, the villain whose entire goal throughout the story has been to get this moment where they've got the hero on the ropes. There's no way that the hero is going to get out of this situation. These are the classic moments in, you know, Bruce Willis movies or Mel. Old Mel Gibson movies where, you know, they're chained up and they're. They got the electric cattle prod and they're just gonna torment them and and so there's a scene. How do you innovate that scene? So the great thing about that scene is that the hero has to outsmart or out muscle the villain in order to get out of the situation. So what you want to do is set up a situation that's that you can't really figure out how the guy going to get out of it and then figure out how the guy's going to get out of it anyway. And there's a million of those. So the scene is really the integral part of learning how to write, I think. Yeah.

And do you think it would be good practice to take those scenes in other books and movies that exist and like rewrite your own version of those? Almost like fan fiction of those. Would that be a good place? Because I was thinking like, well, that sounds good, but now I got to create like, characters and I got to figure out the backstory. But would picking Die Hard and the here at the mercy of the villain scene, would that be like, okay, I'm going to write three. Three versions of that in different ways?

That's a great idea. That's a great idea. To give you yourself, the freedom to play with characters and settings that you're already very familiar with. A Star wars scene, the moment when Darth Vader has Luke on the ropes and he reveals that he's his father. Maybe there's a different way to structure that scene. Anything that you absolutely adore as a writer. The scene in To Kill a Mockingbird. There's this wonderful scene in To Kill a Mockingbird where it's a revelatory moment for the protagonist of the story, which is Scout. And I'm going to talk about the scene that. That is brilliantly filmed in the movie, because I think a lot of people have seen the movie as well as read the book. But there's a moment in the. In the movie when her father, Atticus, is worried about the guy who's been falsely accused of raping a white woman, a black guy, and he's in jail. And the father, Atticus, is worried that the, you know, the local guys are going to get together and do vigilante justice and rip him out of the cell. And he's not going to get a trial and it's going to be fair and they're going to do terrible things to him. So he decides he's going to go down to the jailhouse and he's going to sit there and he's going to protect the guy and not let that happen. So he's sitting There. And I'm going to start to this book. And this movie is so good that even when you describe a scene and this is the brilliance of it, you get choked up because it goes right to the heart of the matter. It really goes to the theme, and it's Atticus Finch. You know, he is the theme of that story. He is the heart and soul of that story. So he's there and he's protecting. I think his name is Jim or John Robinson. And so he's out there and he's talking to him. He's like, don't worry about it. I'm gonna. I'm just gonna hang here. I'm gonna read my book tonight, and I'm gonna make sure nothing happens. And of course, you know, the guys come up to lynch him, and they're like, get out of the way, Atticus. We're gonna, you know, have our own justice. And this is the moment when Scout and Jem, Atticus's son and daughter, show up. And they're these little kids, right? They don't know what's going on. They don't understand rape or falsely accused or anything. They just know that there's these guys that were always very nice to them who are going to hurt somebody. And it doesn't make any sense. So Scout says to the one, hey there, Mr. Jones. How you doing? And the guy's kind of humiliated because here he is with a pitchfork and a flame thing, and he's going to do this violence. And this little kid calls him out and says, hey, it's me. It's Scout, you know, and he was showing it, showing the humanity here. Like, hey, we're all human beings here. What are you doing? You're going to hurt somebody and you don't have any authority. This is wrong. So that's a moment where you have this brilliant scene. I don't know how you could do better than that.

I know, like, you're picking quite the one to rewrite, you know, But I'm.

Also saying, like, all of those moments when we say, oh, Coin and his stupid, oh, I'm gonna write a scene. And I think your suggestion, like, if you get stuck and you can't set up your own, what if for your own scene, go and use other people's work and rewrite it in a way that could be interesting to you and give yourself that challenge. And if you practice that, if you do those ground balls, you know, you're eventually going to start coming up with your own inciting incidents and progressive complications and all the Other things. But I think the point that you're making, Tim, whether you knew it or not, is that the best way is to look at the work of the masters, the people that have really affected you as a reader, and be inspired by their particular scenes. And then try and work within that world that you love already. And you'll find it's a much easier way of giving yourself a day's work of intention and to be able to practice working on your scenes at the same time.

Yeah, you know, I think when we were talking about what my first work will be after the first draft, you know, that's where I start to get nervous, because anytime I've tried to come up with, I wrote the scene the way I saw the scene, and I'm really worried that I'm going to have trouble coming up with three different versions of a scene that needs work. Does that make sense?

Yeah, sure. Yeah. It very may well be difficult, but you would be. You know, it's difficult to raise a child, too. Women give birth to children, and it's an impossible situation if you think about it. I mean, they do it every single day. And men do really difficult things, too. So don't worry about the hard work. The hard work you've done. You know how to do hard work. We all know how to do hard work because we wouldn't be where we are if we hadn't done it before. So is it going to be hard to come up with three completely different versions of a scene that you've already written? Yeah, it probably will. And it may take you a couple of days work to figure that out. But if you can increase the drama and the effectiveness of your scene and you can raise it a level or two levels, and you do that through every scene in your book, the amount of work that that will require will be so far exceeded by the quality of the writing and the betterment of the story that you'll just be like, oh, well, I'll be happy to put in that work, so don't fret about work that you is on the horizon. This is one of the things that everybody always does. We say, oh, I don't know if I can be a doctor, because then I'm gonna have to go to medical school and I'm gonna have to take all those classes. I just don't know if I can do that work. But people become doctors every day, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just interesting because I've been. Well, first of all, I definitely did not get as much. Yeah, we talked about writing a lot more than we could. And I've realized, like, if I sit down and write, I can write. It's. It's life that gets in the way, you know? Like, I had big plans this morning to get up a little before 5 and get a good hour in before I started my day because I knew my morning would be weird. And lo and behold, my 10 year old wakes up vomiting all over the floor at 3am and then he does it again 45 minutes later. And so I sleep right through the alarm. And it's like that whole thing, I'm like, well, didn't get anything done today.

But here's the thing, Tim. I bet in the future, if not in this book, you will have a scene where a guy is awakened. I think this is what really great writers do, is they say, okay, I'm gonna file that one away because that's a pretty good inciting incident if you think about it. Being awake in the middle of the night, you don't know what's going on. You hear your son scream for help, and usually nine times out of 10, they had a bad nightmare and they roll over and go back to sleep. But in this one instance, it's even larger, progressively complicated.

That's right. No, that's true. No, actually, I was thinking, because a guy. No. Wrote a novel that is extremely self published, he sold hundreds of thousands of copies of it. But it was to teach this certain way of doing it, which. Oh, I've heard about that book, the Phoenix Project.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, I helped launch that book. I'm in the acknowledgments. Actually, if you look in the book, it's pretty cool.

Oh, I never read the acknowledgments.

Well, yeah, nobody does.

But anyway, so. And it's. So it's about information, a novel, Teaching DevOps, which is a segment of information technology. And like, I'm hearing this guy talk about the book, I'm like, this sounds.

There's no way. Yeah, there's like, how are you ever gonna get that?

And it's just, it's become super popular. And I was like, you know, I should write. I wonder if I could come up with a compelling novel about writing your first novel and like do a novelized version of the last. I don't know if it's been interesting enough. But when you said that about like the kid throwing up, I was just. I don't know, that popped in my head.

Did you ever see the movie adaptation? The Charlie Kaufman movie? Oh, it's this wonderful movie about this character named Charlie Kaufman. And in the film, it's all about how he has decided that he's going to adapt this brilliant book called the Orchid Thief by a woman named Susan Orlean into a movie. And it becomes very meta and it's hilarious. And in fact, there's a scene where a character playing Robert McKee actually gives this guy advice. And it's. It's very funny. And it really is about the creative process and how undermining and difficult it can really be. But that is funny about. Another example of somebody who sort of took their real world life and made it extremely popular fiction is Michael Crichton. Michael Crichton was a doctor. He was at Harvard Medical School. And he was paying his way through school. And he was pretty, you know, he was a pretty good writer. And so one of the ways he put himself through medical school was writing these sort of dime store novels, you know, 40 or 50,000 words that he would bang out in a weekend or a week. And he would sell them to pulpy paperback houses when they would publish these kinds of things that we would find in a. In a drug store on summer vacation and pay 50 cents for. And so he was doing this to put himself through college. And then eventually he decided to write on his own. His first novel under his own real name was the Andromeda Strain, which was about, you know, this great what if? Using the reality of medical technology. And the idea was, what if an extraterrestrial virus landed on the planet? How would we deal with that? So he used that to show. And he used all of his personal experiences working in medicine to write this great thriller. And he used that as a way to inspire him book after book after book. And he wrote some really great thriller. I mean, he wrote Jurassic Park. Yeah, he's amazing.

Growing up, he was my favorite, like, one of my all time favorite books was Sphere. I felt like that had one of the best endings of any book I've ever read. Like, I just love the ending of that book. Did you read that one?

I didn't. That's the one where the thing lands in the middle of the ocean and.

It appears in the middle of the ocean. It's a very different thing. Okay.

Okay.

Yeah, no, it's. Oh, man. Now I'm gonna have to go read it again. Yeah, my copy of that, when I was a kid, it sat open because I had read it so many times. Like, it no longer sat closed. It sat like half open. Oh, right. I read it so many times. Yeah. You know That's. I have no idea how we got there.

The Dev Ops guy.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's interesting. Well, because I told you that one idea I had about a novel because I have a IT and computer science background is what I went to school before. And I had this idea of like, could you totally screw up somebody's life remotely, just like your next door neighbor? And I think I mentioned that on a previous show and it's. But. And I got that idea because it was like, you know, Stephen King talks about this in On Writing. We need to get like some kind of promotional kickback for how many times we mentioned this book, but. Or at least I do.

Yeah, you're doing a lot of help.

Yeah, yeah. So no, so where he talked about, you know, if you're into science fiction, but you, you're a plumber for a living, you know, write about being a plumber on a spaceship. Then you're. That specificity that we talk about all the time, it's going to be there already because there's. You don't have to go out and do the research. You've already done all the research. It's just sitting in your head. And so how. That's another like, good place to start when. And that's what I've run into in the one I'm currently writing is I've already know, like, I've got to go out and talk to somebody that's an actual scientist because like there's all these things I talk about where I'm like, well, this is surely not how they would actually talk about this because I don't know anything about it. But, you know, starting with something where you already know the world, you already either know the technology or you know, the processes or you know, the behind the scenes, you know, in theory gives you that specificity so you can. Your writing will be much more real.

Yeah, that's absolutely true. And tangentially, what's kind of funny is there's only a few sort of ironclad rules in, in book publishing when you're acquiring a book. And one of them is never ever a acquire a book that is set in the world of book publishing.

Why?

It's just book editors and people in book publishing think that their lives are so fascinating and so interesting. And the reality is most people don't, you know, they just think it's kind of whatever, it's not as exciting as being, you know, a CIA analyst or, you know, professional dancer or something. But people in publishing, they, they, it's like the siren call, like, oh, this one day this great novel about book publishing will come around, and it'll finally.

Convince everybody that what we do is not boring.

Exactly. And so I think I. I never did publish a book about book publishing, but I know a lot of my friends who have, and there are some really good books about it. But.

It'S so the tangential argument to write about science fiction from the point of view of a plumber. The other one is that when you know something extraordinarily well, and I think I've discovered this, doing this podcast, you often completely just go right over the most fundamental elements of your knowledge. So what I mean by that is, say you're a plumber, and you know you have to use a particular kind of solder on the joint of the elbow of a piece of pipe, and you don't talk about that in your story, then people won't understand it as well as if you had to go out and do the research to find out what that fundamental thing is. So if you're bringing a creative energy to the research, really figuring out how to best explain something in the smallest, shortest amount of words, oftentimes that is an advantage over somebody who's a specialist. So if you ever. I mean, we've all been to the doctor and we've all asked him their opinion about a specific ailment that we have, and they'll go, oh, yeah, we'll run a cbc and then we'll see what happens. And we have no idea what they're talking about because they've glossed over all the fundamental knowledge that they should be sharing with us, but they just don't have the time to do that.

Yeah, I read this thing one time. A guy was talking about how before. So his books are thrillers, and before he writes about any particular gun, he goes out and shoots that gun. So that when he talks about shooting the gun in the book, he doesn't talk about. Yeah, yeah. He's not, like, just making it up. And so he knows how the gun recoils. He knows how the shell ejects. He knows, like, all of this stuff. And that was like, his recommendation to writers is like, if you can actually go do anything that is talked about in your book, like, go and do it so that you know it at a gut level, you're not just making it up.

Well, the other thing that'll do is, once you experience it, what you'll discover are ways to solve writing problems. So, for example, somebody who has fired a particular kind of handgun and they're going to use the handgun in the hero at the mercy of the villain scene. If they know that the handgun, by talking to the guy at the gun range, often, you know, it ejects the cartridge a strange way, which ends up jamming the. The barrel of the gun, they can use that information writing, or if it's very, very. If it's off a hair or something. So doing that research can actually help you solve and innovate your scenes in a way that you would have never known before. So that's also another reason why to take that day or two to experience what you're writing about. If you can do it, that won't get you to kill.

Yeah, I was. You know, I was just thinking, because we just. My wife and I just rewatched one of the Sherlock episodes with Benedict Cumberbatch, or I don't know how to say his name. So, side note here. One of the reviews of this show on itunes was, like, this glowing review about, you know, the show, and it's great or whatever said.

And.

But the last part was like, however, I smile every time that Tim says genre.

And he said.

And he spelled it Johan Ra. And I got this huge conversation with my wife last night because I'm like, well, how else do you say it? And she's like, I don't know. So we're, like, looking it up. And she's like, wait, how do you say it? I was like, genre? She's like, no, it's. It's genre. And I'm like, yeah, genre.

Yeah.

I'm like, what? No, it's not like, it's so. And she's like, this is from the same man that. The first time I visited the city, I called it Tucson, Arizona.

She's like, anyway, just side note, English language sucks, especially when you're teaching it to children.

So I'm not gonna change. So for all of you cringing when I say genre, I'm gonna actually make it worse and, like, really amp it.

Up so it'll become your. You'll be your catchphrase.

Yeah. So at the beginning of the episode when Watson first meets Sherlock, Sherlock's in, like, beating this dead body with, like, a whip or something so he can study, you know, how the body bruises over, you know, a certain period of time. And as we were just talking, you know, there's a lot of stabbing in my book. And I'm like, I wonder if. I wonder if there's, like, some scenario that I could, like, stab something, like a body or something. Like, I wonder, have you ever dealt with a writer that's actually, like, gone and done something like that?

Yes. I worked with Robert Crace, who's a fantastic crime writer, and he wrote a book that I edited years ago called Demolition angel, and it was about a woman who investigated suspicious sort of bomb squad events and what he did. And he does this all the time. And Michael, I worked with Michael Connelly years ago, too. And what they do is they just call some people at the LAPD because they both live in la and then they spend a good week or so hanging out at the bomb squad offices and talking to guys who have taken bombs apart and all that stuff. So one of the advantages of being a best selling writer is that you can make that phone call and have it returned. But another thing that you could think about doing with the way the world is now and the legal stuff about everything, is that it might be more difficult to have that kind of experience than it used to be.

Well, I wonder, like, if there's, like a medical school in Nashville that I could get in and stick. Stick something into some cadavers or something and just see what it's like.

Yeah, or email somebody and see, you know, what kind of, you know, fruit do you think would best represent.

A fleshy part of the torso? I don't know.

Well, I know on Mythbusters they always use pigs, right?

You could go to a slaughterhouse.

Oh, man.

Yeah, we should all probably go to slaughterhouses to see how it works. I'm not kidding.

Okay. I'm making a note of this. I'm actually gonna try this.

Yeah, go see if you can learn how to separate chickens, too.

Yeah, Well, I used to have chickens, and the lady that helped me kind of get started, she's like, yeah, you know, when they get to a certain age, you know, you can slaughter them and eat them. I'm like, mine are just going to go into retirement because I'm not all about killing some chickens. But I wonder if I could stomach stabbing something that was already dead, you know, like, I don't know about killing.

It'll be an experience, I'm sure.

All right, there. I have my homework for the week, so I want to jump to a completely different subject before the end of the episode. Much more on the industry money side of things. So I have a friend of mine who just got an offer on his third book, and the offer was $100,000 book advance. Now, this is a business book author. I think his first advance was like 5 or 10,000. His second was 60, and now his third is 100. And I remember a while ago, I was talking with an editor and she was like, all right, let me tell you how this works. She's like, this is how it works. When we sit down and decide who gets what input on marketing money, she's like, we split every group up into A, B and C list authors or books, A, B and C books that are coming out in the fall. And she's like, we have the A list that get basically 80, 90% of our marketing budget, the B list who get the other 10 or 20%, and then the C list are on their own. Well, first of all, is that your experience as well?

Yes. You have to think about the business of book publishing. And the very, very bottom line is that those projects that the publisher has invested the most money in at the very start of the process, those projects that they have to make work. So if you were to open up a lemonade stand and you were going to offer lemonade, and you were also going to offer orange juice and lime juice, and they were all of varying qualities, the lemons that you paid the most money for, you would up price the cost of the lemonade. So the way it works in book publishing is that if you spend $100,000 on a book to acquire the rights, and $100,000 doesn't mean it's an advance against the potential sale of the book, because every book contract with a major publisher or even minor publishers is a partnership. So all the money that comes in is divided into certain kind of tranches and the publisher gets most of it, and then the writer gets the rest of it. And this is after costs. So the writer will get an advance against their share of the potential amount of money in the future.

Okay.

And it's guaranteed. So that means the writer doesn't have to pay back the hundred thousand dollars, even if the amount of money that the book brings in is, say, $10,000. So the publisher is on the hook for the loss of $90,000 plus all of production costs for that particular book.

But they make their money back. They make that hundred thousand back long before the author earns out. Because they're taking such a big cut, right? Yes.

Yeah.

Okay. So my question is, like, where. Because that's, that's what I've heard too, is like, I've had writers tell me, like, they, they push for the biggest possible advance as hard as possible. Not so much to get the money up front, but because the more that the publisher is on the hook for with Them, the more the publisher will put in when the time comes to actually push that book.

That's correct.

So could you, and I know I was talking about business books, but like, could you give like rough numbers or are there rough numbers of like. Okay, if your advance was in this range, you're in the A category. If your advance is in this range, you're in the B category. Everything else you're in C category. Like, are there ranges that kind of go across the publishers?

Okay, so for the big publishers, I would do the following categories. Anything over $500,000 will be, you know, sort of the, the A list. We've got our backs against the wall and we have to make this work. Anything between 100,000 and 500,000 will be. This is a book that we have a great confidence in. Usually they could be like the second or third book of somebody who already has a track record. So if the like my example, right. So if your guy has a track record, then they're giving him a little bit of a raise on his advance. But they know the dollar volume that he's brought in with his previous books will probably be consistent and they're hoping better on his third book. So this is why you hear a lot about first time novelists getting a million dollars. Not a lot, but it becomes like major news when a first novelist gets a million dollars for his first novel or $2 million for his first novel and everybody goes, oh my gosh, how could they give a million dollars to a first novelist? And the reason why is that they have no sales track record.

Well, that was my question is like, what, what would prompt that? I mean you've been and you've done that probably like what prompts that?

Well, it's the confidence that the publisher has in their ability to get the message out that this is a book that will be very entertaining and will be the kind of book that everybody's going to read. So it's usually a high concept property. And when I say high concept, I mean it's an idea like Jurassic Park. That is the perfect high concept book. All you have to say is Dinosaur park goes crazy, you know.

Yeah.

And you get it and you're like, oh, I know, yeah, I definitely want to read that book because that sounds pretty cool. So that would be a high concept project that if it's a first novelist, all the major publishers will say to themselves, geez, I could lock on to this property, build a best selling writer right from book one. And everybody gets very excited about that because you don't have to put that much work in. If you make that first book work and it's a series character, the thinking is the second book's gonna work, the third book's gonna work, etc. But usually what happens is that the first book of a million dollar contract doesn't work at a million dollar level. And so you have a lot of first novelists who get these big deals who have trouble getting a contract even after publishing their second book or third book, because if their sales don't go up, the publisher loses patience and invests on trying to hit a home run with somebody else. So there's a positive and a negative to everything. The positive is you get a million dollars. The negative is that does not guarantee that you will have a career. It guarantees that you're going to have at least one or two books published. And after that, good luck. Whereas in the olden days you could build a career. Like people I mentioned earlier, Robert Craise and Michael Connolly, these are guys who started out, you know, probably at $5,000 advances for original paperback, original books, or maybe a $20,000 advance. But their publishers stuck with them book after book after book, and they gave them little raises and they promoted a little bit more. And usually these are the genre writers that you can get to the genre audience in a way that you can't with sort of a big literary book that you're not really sure who the audience is. But anyway, just to get back to your initial question about the tranches, the different levels of commitment that a publisher is going to make, is that anybody under $100,000 advance, the publisher is either, and I don't mean this to be facetious or nasty, they're doing what they call filling out the list. And they know that the book's either going to work or it's not, but it's all going to be on the author. So if that's fiction, if you're talking about fiction, and you can get a long term deal as a fiction writer for, say. I don't think they do these kind of deals anymore, but if they did, I would probably recommend somebody try it. If you were able to get a deal for five books for $250,000 and you can make and budget your life around, you know, the next five years of your life, writing a book a year, that would be a really, I think, interesting paradigm for a major publisher and an up and coming writer so that the writer can develop over time without having the wolf at the door. And the publisher doesn't have so much stress that they have to make back a million dollars on the first two books that they can actually do what they used to do, which is build a career. So that by book six, like somebody like Harlan Coburn, another guy I worked with, you know, he didn't have a New York Times bestseller until his sixth book. Same thing with Crace and Connolly and James Lee Burke and Janet Ivanovich and Nora Roberts. And you can go on and on and on. So there really are, no matter what a publisher is going to say to you, no publisher is going to say, oh, you're on the. We cross our fingers, throw it on the wall and see what happens kind of.

Right, right.

But I think what they.

But that's exactly what happens, you know, that's not what they're gonna tell you before you sign, you know, at any point. But it's just, it was interesting to me because again, my friend who just got this contract, he's like, well, where does that put me? I'm like, you know, I don't really know. And so I thought, you know, it'd be interesting to hear from you on like where those levels are because I've also worked with the authors. They got the, you know, seven figure advanced and it's like everything we asked, when we asked for the publisher to do something, they're like, yes, you know.

Right.

And so it was, it was just interesting. But yeah, it's just interesting how that works. But it's also knowing ahead of time that just because $25,000 is life changing money to you does not mean the publisher is going to think of that any as a big deal that they need to really invest in.

That's correct. Because we should do a couple episodes about this kind of stuff because I know it really well and I have some very strong opinions about it and I think the major publishers are really terrific for certain things and not so great for other things. And I'll be really mystical about that statement and let it sit like that.

All right. All right, well, that, we'll, we'll do that in some upcoming episodes.

Okay.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast for everything Storygrid. You can see that@storygrid.com make sure you go there. Sign up for the email newsletter, make sure you don't miss anything that Sean is coming out with. Also, if you've missed any past episodes or you want to refer to any of the show notes and links that we put in on a weekly basis, you can go to storygrid.com podcast. As always, thank you for sharing it with your writing friends, putting it in your Facebook groups, putting it online, putting it on Twitter, Facebook, whatever. Any way you share the show means a lot to us. This is why we do it. It's for you. So thanks for listening, thanks for continuing to share it and we will see you next week.