Completing the Micro Analysis

Hello and welcome to the Story Grid Masterwork Experiment. My name is Anne Hawley and I'm an experienced novelist trying to ground my craft more solidly in story grid methodology. So I've agreed to be the lab rat in the Masterwork Experiment, which Sean Coyne is conducting as a test of his latest writing and editing methods. Sean is the creator of the Story Grid Method, the author of the book the Story what Good Editors Know, and an editor with many years experience in the big New York publishing houses. In the Masterwork Experiment, Sean and I analyze Annie Proulx short novella Brokeback Mountain with an eye to understanding what it's made of right down to the beat level. Then my job will be to write a novella of my own using exactly the same beats and structure, but set in Regency England with the very different style and voice that that setting demands. Last week we continued examining the beats of Brokeback Mountain and I, as usual, got a little bit down into the weeds. This week I finish the microbeat analysis and we both get a little lost in admiration of Annie Proulx's remarkable multi layered prose. It's another fun episode. So put on your white coat and safety goggles and step into the laboratory for episode six of the Masterwork Experiment. Well, good morning, Sean.

Good morning, Anne.

I went over what we said last time, and we said we were going to start on scene nine, but we actually finished scene nine and we're going to start on scene ten.

Oh, okay. Well, what I always like to do whenever I start anything is to just go back and, you know, even though we both know what we're doing, let's just state it again. And so what, what the whole masterwork experiment is about is looking at a masterwork, and in this case it's Brokeback Mountain at the highest level of resolution that we possibly can so that you, the writer Ann, can go through that high resolution analysis and use it as a template to create your own original work, which will be inspired by Brokeback Mountain, but will be in a different time period featuring different characters, different clothing. All that stuff where we are now is we're in about the middle of the middle build and we'll take this as far as we can. And the goal here is to get the highest resolution analysis first, and then we'll take it step by step and you'll do some work on a scene or two and we'll go through it that way so that you're not trying to completely write the entire thing in one shot and then hand it over to your editor. Which is me. And then that's just too much. So I think just doing it, working it deliberately, with a lot of focus and intention, this is what the whole experiment is about. So the most important thing right now is for us to get a very clear, high resolution document that you can use as inspiration. So right now we're on scene 10 of A. How many scenes is it? Seventeen scenes or something?

Seventeen, I think, is what I came up with.

Yep. So we're. We're a little bit further than halfway.

Well, good. I'm going to need some extra help this time because breaking down the first few scenes, I got down to those micro beats, and they were like 100 words or 20 words or, you know, little tiny pieces. And when I got to this part, I don't know whether it's me and my brain or the actual structure of the story, but the beats seem longer, there's more in them, and maybe I just got where I couldn't see a breaking point. So what I have here is what I came up with. But it feels like I might have missed a few things or I'm not defining them very accurately. So shall we just take a look and see what we've got?

Yeah. I mean, I do have one comment about that. If you were to assume, and I think you should assume this, that you did not just suddenly lose your ability to pick out a beat. So if you were to assume that you're continuing with the expertise that you already have and the beats are getting longer in this middle build, can you think of a reason why that might be?

Well, the middle build is 50% of the story. So it's longer, twice as long as the other two, and needs to be built out with more. Well, basically, the middle build is all about progressive complications in the global story. So the beats have to be longer. There has to be more in them.

Well, if you look at it in terms of narrative drive, it makes sense that the early parts of the story are going to be like Gatling gun kind of micro beats. Because what the writer is doing, her intention, is to really suck the reader in with lots of really varied information that is very specific. Now we're moving into the middle build of the story, which is also these two characters coming into sort of middle age. Right. So what happens when we get into the middle of things is we slow it down and, you know, the days go on and on. Also, she's already really clearly introduced these two guys to us so that we generally know who they are and what they're about. So now she can put a little wind underneath the story, and that's why I think the beats are a little bit longer. So that's my hypothesis to that question. Let's go through it now and see if I'm close or if I'm wrong or if I just made all that up.

Okay.

But I think I'm pretty good on that.

Yeah, well, I imagine you probably are, Sean. I wasn't so sure about myself. Well, let's start with scene 10. Then we're in the middle build. And this is the scene where after Jack and Ennis are magnetically drawn together in their reunion kiss, they run off together, leaving Alma alone. The note that I made in this first paragraph. They went off in Jack's truck, bought a bottle of whiskey, and. Okay, Note the next 11 words. Within 20 minutes, we're in the motel siesta, jouncing a bed. And my note was a sex scene in 11 words, which is quite an accomplish. Accomplishment.

Yeah. And it's all you really need, right? I mean, it's perfectly, perfectly clear. It's just enough. Yeah, it's just enough.

And the amazing thing is that the next sentence, which appears on its surface to be just sort of seen setting. There's hail, outside, rain. And every word she chooses in that next sentence contributes to the sex scene without being obvious. A slippery banging, you know, through the night. It's amazing. You can't address these beats in this story without addressing the absolutely incredible distillation she does.

Yes, and it's also. It echoes the very beginning of the story with the dust that rattles Ennis's trailer.

Yeah, yeah.

It's very much foreboding. It's a brilliant sentence because you're right, it's all about the fecundity of the sex, but it's also a foreboding of death. So you've got this life and death all wrapped up into one sentence that echoes the very beginning of the story and the very ending of the story.

Even the word unsecured.

Yep.

It just. I stop and I just. With my mouth open. The deeper I go into this story, the more amazed I become. So, okay, the next beat is. I just called it pillow talk, basically post sex pillow talk. And it goes on for quite a while. They discuss, after having sex, how they were both sort of planning to do what they just did. And it's nice to know that they both wanted it and it just took a long time for them to get back together.

Yeah. And I also like the fact that Ennis addresses that punch that Made Jax jaw black and blue and he thought that maybe that's why he hadn't contacted him in four years. I also think it was the right choice to have Jack contact Ennis first with that initial postcard anyway. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly what this beat is all about. It's about catching up.

Yeah. So they go on to a confession of failure. Jack's talking about his sort of unsuccessful rodeoing career and he seems to be sort of confessing that he hasn't done very well in the four years that they've been apart. And then we go on to complaints. And I made a note here, Jack likes to complain. He complains a lot in this story. In fact, a lot of what he says is just complaining. So here's a big long complaint about rodeoing and how bad it's been for him and how it doesn't work out for him and nothing works out for him. And that's that beat.

Yes, I absolutely agree with you on that beat. I'm going to sort of point out a convention that you may or may not agree with. This goes also to gender stuff. The complaining of Jack, it's almost as if he is playing the victim in search of a rescuer. And that's sort of an old chestnut, cheesy love story convention that is very perfectly delivered in this story without it being obvious or anything of that sort. Jack looks to Ennis like, when are you going to rescue me? You know, I've gone through hell these last four years and I haven't heard a word from you. And I knew you loved me and I sent you the postcard and you immediately got back to me. So I just want you to know everything isn't okay on my end of the equation and I need somebody to take control, save me from my misery.

That's amazing. Okay, Because I read, you know, I looked this over fairly carefully and I did not get that out of it. So how long does it take working with this before, you know, an individual? Me, for example, gets better at seeing that larger picture because, boy, I hear what you say. It makes perfect sense. And it's like, why didn't I see that?

Well, it's just a different. We wear different glasses, you know, we both have glasses, so it's a good metaphor. So.

And my glasses are all about macro story structure 24 7. And you're a writer, so you've got to have wear your writer glasses a majority of the time. So you're more micro high resolution thinker right now as you should be. And that's why when you can find a good relationship with an editor, that's how you complement one another. So it's not that you didn't see it, it's that what you're doing is you're looking for the practical, prescriptive solutions to your I've got to write a story like Brokeback Mountain problem, right?

Yeah.

I don't have to write the story. So I get the opportunity to move my gaze in and out of the structure and think about global conventions and obligatory scenes which aren't going to be the main focus for you because you're going beat by beat. So I suspect, to answer your question, that if you were working with a writer and you were working as an editor, you would probably pick that up because your mind and your brain would be attuned to that sort of subtextual symphonic beat. And. And the other thing is that I've been concocting and thinking about this methodology for so long that it's almost second nature to me. And coincidentally, I've. I'm working on something that's a love story, a love story scene. So I've had to dive deep into the romantic tradition, all of that stuff that we covered two years ago at. At the Pride and Prejudice seminar. So I wouldn't worry about you, Will. You definitely have the facility. And if somebody asked you, hey, can you come up with some. Some of that convention stuff with the gender switching and the clarity of it, then you would have been attuned to it.

Yeah, okay, maybe so.

I hope you're right. Moving on. Now, the next thing that seems to happen, I noted this next sort of passage. I guess we'd see it as a beat, as one of them is honest and the other one lies. One looks back and the other one looks forward. Anna seems to be being perfectly honest. He's saying, here we are, we've both got wives and kids. I like doing it with women, but, you know, it's nothing like this with you. And he asks Jack, do you do it with other guys? And Jack says, shit, no. And then the narrator, the omniscient narrator, comes in and says, basically, yes, he has.

So Jack's lying, Jack's covering. I love it.

He would have been riding more than bulls. It's a great line.

Yeah. Riding more than bulls. Not rolling his own.

I mean, great choices of language there.

Yeah.

And, you know, Ennis says that summer when we split up, took me about a year to figure out that I shouldn't let you get out of My sights. I feel like in this beat Ennis is being more honest than Jack. And Jack keeps trying to look forward, like we gotta figure out what to do. And Ennis is saying there's nothing we can do. I'm looking backwards. I built a life, you got your baby. This is, you know, right here's what's already happened. There is no future. Kind of seems to be what he's saying. Yes.

Yeah, the dealing with truthful reality. Factual, I would say factual reality because there are two kinds of sort of looks at truth. The first one is objective fact. So if it's 86 degrees outside, that's an objective fact. Objects and objective facts are about matter. What is now subjective truth is more story driven and that's about what matters. So we attach value to objects. So that's what the difference between an objective fact and a subjective truth is. Objects are sort of scientifically derived. It doesn't matter if I measure the temperature outside or you do, we're both going to get the same number. Whereas whether or not the weather bothers us, that's a subjective interpretation. So for me it might be really blistering hot and I can't stand it. And you might be like, yeah, this is fine. That is the difference between objective fact and subjective truth. Ennis is an objectively factual sort of person, so that's how he speaks. So from Ennis's point of view, it seems as if he's telling honest truths because he is an objectively factual kind of person. So he says things like, I like doing it with women. It's sort of like that's a subjective truth. But now, whereas Jack, Jack is more about the subjective truth. So is it factual that he has slept with other men and not Ennis? Yeah, that's, that's, you know, objectively, factually true. But to Jack it's not subjectively true because it's, it wasn't like a betrayal of their love according to Jack. So what do you have in these passages about this sort of the statements of the way they see the world. So this is a brilliant way to clearly get the reader to understand the world views of Ennis and Jack. Ennis is just a realist and Jack is romantic.

You could also say that Ennis lacks imagination and Jack has a lot of imagination.

That's right, that's right. You know, maybe Ennis has imagination when it comes to some sort of craft of like horsecraft or shepherding or whatever. But yeah, Jack's a dreamer and Ennis is a realist and the Two, you need, you know, this is like, you know, from the Jungin point of view, you've got half of one person and the other half of one person and they're together. Right. So that's the beauty of the love story is that it brings our one Persona that we have chosen to identify with. We are attracted to the opposite in some ways. And never does she write something as stupid as he found Jack to be. Just the opposite of, of himself, you know, which she's never, she never does anything on the nose, but this is the way she handled getting that information to the reader. Right. Oh, I'll just have these two guys have a conversation about what's been going on. Ennis will speak very factually and Jack will speak truthfully from his subjective worldview, which is, you've got to rescue me, man. This is no good. I, a break in my body and the rodeo and I had to marry this woman and yeah, maybe we have a little bit of money, but it's not, it's meaningless to me. And here we go, another 400 words tops and she, she gets all that done.

Yeah. The next section where Ennis is explaining about the punch, he talks about how he grew up under his three year older brother and learn to hit his way out of problems. I identified this as an actual scene type that one has seen in other stories. And it's a childhood story to help explain the present. A character tells something about their past trying to explain how they are in the present. Here's my past trauma.

It's so great. That's really a great analytical point. The other day I was answering questions from some students and they were asking, how do you handle flashbacks? And my, every time I hear the word flashback I want to jump off a bridge because it's, it's so sort of cheesy flashback. So how does, how does Annie Proulx handle it? She uses it as ammunition. Right. And as you say, he's telling a story about his past which informs the reader the exposition of his past. But he's telling Jack for a specific reason. He's trying to get Jack on his side. He's trying to get him to understand what it was like being a young Ennis. And he's explaining himself to a guy that, to the person that he loves.

Well, the choice to put it in these conditions of sort of pillow talk intimacy makes it believable that Ennis might finally be able to come out with this story of his traumatic past where he wouldn't if he was on horseback up on the mountain doing his job, being a man. Right. But in this intimate setting he can let go and reveal some of this.

Yes. What does it do? It builds the intimacy between the two characters after they've shared physical intimacy.

Right.

So this is how people grow close. Yeah. You're not going to reveal stuff like that about yourself on a one night stand with somebody. And that's sort of what Brokeback Mountain was the beginning of. It was just sort of a one night stand, physical attraction. And then it, then it became much larger. How she's building this in the middle build is she's putting some wind, meaning she's allowing herself more room to get these beats across because. Yeah, these guys are tired.

And they're just shooting the shit.

Yeah. Defenses are down and walls are down and ye.

And I love that notion of the beat, which is a childhood story, to explain the present. And the one thing I would advise people when you do use that in your own work, is to take the lesson from Annie Proulx and don't go on and on and on. Just boil it down to its essence and then move on.

Good advice. The next beat, actually, as I look at it, it's not all that much different from when Mr. Darcy first proposes to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. It's like the premature declaration. Jack's moving too fast. He starts to talk about getting a ranch together and it's too much for Ennis.

That's really great. That's exactly right. It's too much too soon. It's the too early declaration of love, which is a convention in the love story.

Yep. And all in a tiny bit of dialogue. I love it so much. I know. So in response to that, we introduce the necessary conflict. And it's kind of a. I identified it tentatively as it can't be that easy. Because Ennis doesn't believe it can be that easy. And it also introduces the life and death stakes involved in their having an ongoing live together relationship.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's also. I don't know if I. How deeply I want to get into this, but there's sort of like these, these two philosophical ways in which human beings have lived in the world. And pre Bronze Age, when sort of the Greeks and the Israelites came online in India and China and all those places, sort of the way you lived in the world, you lived in a loop. You lived in a cycle of the natural world. So when Ennis says, caught in my own loop, that loop is sort of like you have to follow the seasons, you have to follow natural movements of the universe. And the way Jack looks at the world is sort of what happened. It's called the axial. What's it called? The Axial Revolution. And Karen Armstrong wrote a great book about this. And so that's the two world world, and that's where Jack lives and where the two worlds are sort of the everyday, normal reality that doesn't seem to make any sense. And then there's sort of this spiritual higher ground where things are really real. And if we can just get our act together, we can sort of get up to that place through transcending our own humanity in a way. And that's a romantic vision. So the notion of this loop is a really great drop in because it cues these very deep cultural understandings in all readers. Whether or not, you know, all this stuff about the Stone Age look at the worldview and the Axial revolution, it doesn't really matter because that's sort of the way all of us are trying to negotiate that worldview. So person like Ennis is not going to say, oh, well, I'm going to plan for the future, because the future I can. If I can transcend myself, then things will be great. He's like, no, man, I'm caught in my loop. I love you, man, but, you know, it's not in the cards. It's 1963. Two guys can't live together on a ranch or they're going to get killed, bro. You know, like, let's just face facts here, buddy. I love you, but I've got a wife and kids and you've got a wife. And so let's just keep moving forward and have our fishing trips. It's the confrontation of those two philosophical ways to navigate the world. You know, again, five sentences.

She also, in choice of words here, she could have said, you know, caught in my own circle or something. But the word loop takes us back to his. He's a cowboy and he ropes cattle and stuff. So there's that loop idea there that just every word choice is so spot on. The next beat we move to is negotiating down. They negotiate for a medium as an acceptable medium between the must and the can't.

Yeah.

And that ends the scene. It ends on, you know, a hollow ringing began in the next room. It's not a great solution. It's hollow. Yes, but it's. It's the best they can come to at the time.

So it's sort of a. A best. Bad choice.

Yeah.

Irreconcilable. Good.

Yep.

It's story grid 101.

And it only took us 30 minutes to get through this one. So should we move on to scene 11?

Yes.

In the beginning of this scene, we have a long transition, several paragraphs covering about nine or 10 years and describing major life changes. Because Ennis and Alma's marriage dissolves. It's just a long description leading up to kind of zooming in on a moment where time slows down and expands and they're at Thanksgiving dinner. And the next scene where. Or part of this scene where Alma takes Ennis to the kitchen. He's come to Alma's new home for Thanksgiving and she draws him off to the kitchen. And to me, this scene is like a courtroom scene almost. She's accusing him and he's defending and it's a truth will out sort of trial kind of scene.

Yeah, I would definitely say the same thing. Yeah, it's a. It's a bit of an interrogation just to let him know that he didn't fool me. I know what's. What's up with you and Jack. And it's assertion of power. She's letting him know, I've got something on you and you better continue to behave in the way you. I want you to, or I'm going to call you on it in a way that can get you killed.

To which he acts out violently.

Completely in character. Right. That's exactly what he told Jack. That's why I was raised. If somebody starts to assert their power over you, you gotta fight him physically. And there you go.

And that's scene 11.

Yep.

I identified three beats in scene 11.

It's also thematically, he's losing his power. So he's getting older. Time's flying by. He. He had an opportunity, didn't he? His wife left him. He has a good relationship with his daughters, as good as you can if you're not around them. He had an opportunity and he didn't do anything about it. And now he's losing his power. And his ex wife is like, I'm more powerful than you are now. And that's why he lashes out violently. And it's. It's a great shift. And it's. It's also thematically about him growing older.

Yeah. And it's passive aggressive in the end. It says he didn't try to see his girls until they grew up enough to come and see him. Okay, you're gonna treat me like this? I'm taking myself away from my daughters and I'm just gonna walk away.

Yeah. It's a moment of deep. I don't think it's guilt. It's shame. And usually when you live in shame, the collateral damage is really extensive. So what did he do? Because he was ashamed of himself? He denied his daughters a father. Not cool.

Right, Right.

So in scene 12, again, we have another long transition, passage of time, using phrases like years on years. And basically, this transition tells us that they cover a huge amount of geography, but they never return to Brokeback Mountain. And then it moves into a beat where it seems to be showing how their differences, Jack and Ennis's differences, are growing greater. And I identified these as class differences. We talked about this in an earlier episode where Jack is doing better financially and he has his teeth fixed and his accent is changing and he's becoming a different person. He's changing and Ennis isn't.

Yeah, that. That goes back to that sort of the loop concept where you don't leave the circle because if you leave the circle and you change your future, it destroys your past. So people who believe in that sort of natural flow of life because you know it's true, like, the minute you aspire or have ambitions to do something interesting or are new or fresh, it separates you from the people that you grow up with.

Yeah. I have a question about the next beat, which I identified as a false alarm. They run into the bear, and I cannot figure out what that beat is in there for.

Oh, well, it's foreshadowing of inevitable trauma and terror.

Okay.

It's very vivid. And interestingly, in the movie, they move it to a different part of the story. They do have a bear scene in the movie, but they shifted it to a different place in this story. And in the movie, it passes by. It's just kind of interesting and exciting and there's action in it. But here I really found myself wondering, well, what? Why do they need this alarm? This false alarm? Turns out to be nothing. Right. The bear wanders off without any effort on their part. Well, they're.

They're living in a dangerous world. And there are great, powerful things that are aligned against them. So that's what the bear is. Now, the purpose why she put it in there is it foreshadows the death of Jack in a way that isn't obvious. Having the bear, there is this moment of tension that the reader. Oh, my God, what's gonna happen? Suspense. Suspense. Oh, phew. Thank God they avoided that. But then later on, it's a setup for the payoff of Jack's death so that when Jack does die, there's like five or six moments prior to his death that she plants there so that it's not massively. It's like, oh, yeah, it was only inevitable. Jack, you know, he slept around. He's kind of has a big mouth. And then all that evidence just supports the fact that Jack was. He was a pioneer. He was a revolutionary force. And what happens to people like that is they get killed. He was a rebel. He was who he was. And he wasn't ashamed of who he was. And he didn't think that there was anything wrong with being who he was. People like that before other people, things don't end well for them. That's why she has this bear scene, is to foreshadow that moment of death. I think that's interesting.

I'm also now thinking that the bear might also be symbolic of their relationship, because she ends this beat with the startled bear galloped into the trees with the lumpish gait that made it seem it was falling apart. Yeah, it's like every word does four jobs. It's just amazing. I'll keep being amazed. And then the final beat of this scene I identified as somehow love endures. Things are getting kind of ragged around the edges here. It's falling apart. But they manage to end this moment on. They're together. They're having a bottle of whiskey together. And Jack says, the whiskey is one of the two things I need right now, and tosses the bottle to Ennis. And you feel like, okay, maybe they're gonna stick together one way or another. I mean, they still love each other.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's bittersweet.

Yeah, the whole thing is bittersweet. A friend of mine is listening to. There's an audiobook version of this story out there, and she is listening to it, and she hadn't read it or seen the movie or anything before. And she texted me, just a text with the flood of tears emoji.

Because that's how you feel in this story.

So going on to scene 13, which overall identified as time as passing, and they're both stuck in this loop, there's another transitional beat where she has some time pass on the third morning. It's not years, it's days in this case. And then I have another question here. Right after that, Ennis said he'd been putting the blocks to a woman. He's telling Jack that he's been hitting on this gal in town. Right. I don't, again, quite understand what that beat's about, unless it is merely to show that Ennis is determinedly pursuing the path that he was raised to believe he has to pursue.

Yeah, it's. It's letting someone down easy.

Oh, okay. That makes sense.

It's just sort of like, I know, you know, the big white elephant, you know, on the prairie is when Jacket said, let's you and me get a place together. And that subtext is always around the two of them now. And so Ennis does things like this just to keep reminding Jack. Still feel the same way. Not going to get a place with you. The purpose of this beat is to justify Jack's going with another man. Which he does.

Yeah, which he does.

So if you don't kind of have this, you love both characters, and you love both characters because they're so fully formed and human that you can relate to both sides of their worldviews. We can understand what Ennis is thinking. We can understand what Jack's thinking. And we don't damn Jack for quote unquote betraying or cheating on the relationship.

No, not at all.

No, because Ennis is just. He can't have that intimacy. And it's the tragedy of his life. He doesn't leave his loop. He's not going to change himself. He's not going to think of a future that would include happiness.

What you just said about that beat, sort of breaking it to him gently or leading up to breaking it to him gently. That makes sense now because in the next scene 14, my idea of the opening beat here is he's breaking bad news in a cowardly way. Annas finally comes out and says, I can't get away. I can't be with you until November again. And he's waited this whole time, this whole camping trip together, to tell him what he's known all along.

Yes.

So it's pretty cowardly.

Yeah. And it supports the action that Jack takes after getting this information.

Right. And then what follows is kind of what I've identified as a thrust and parry. Like a. It's. It's almost like a sword fight, only it's verbal. There's an accusation and a counter accusation, and, you know, I defend myself and then I'm gonna accuse you. And it winds up. Well, she says it at the end of the paragraph that ends this beat. Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved.

Yeah, it's like a marital spat that devolves into just two people separating and going their own way. And this is sort of the slow degradation of their intimate relationship that was described in the middle build scene after they had sex, when Ennis was telling Jack about his childhood and the reasons why he is who he is. And now it's these guys are just going to their separate corners now.

Right. And it's kind of a draw. Nobody wins. No, they both lose.

And then what follows is so interesting because it parallels Ennis's sort of confession of this is what happened to me in childhood is like looking back and explaining his present by a bad thing in the past. This one is a golden memory that Jack has. It's pure omniscient narrator telling us what he thinks and remembers. Right. And so his flashback is to why this relationship was so beautiful to him and how much he's losing as a result of it. But it's similar in remembering an earlier time and using it to explain the present.

Yeah, I'd agree with that.

And it's beautiful. It's just. Just beautiful.

Really is.

So should we push on? We've got two more scenes. I think we can get there.

Yeah, let's do it.

All right. Well, scene 15 brings us to the ending payoff. And it starts out bad news brings shock and grief. So he gets the postcard back saying deceased.

And.

And he has to deal with the shock of what happened. And he deals with it by calling Jack's phone number and ending up talking to Lorene, Jack's wife. Widow. I don't need to go into the details of it, but he's dealing with his shock and grief there. And then in the phone call, I get another beat where, for one thing, it's a phone call scene, which has its own interesting limitations for a writer, but someone fills in the missing pieces. He's talking to Lorene, and she gives him some of the puzzle pieces.

Yeah.

So some truth starts to come out.

Yeah.

It's a very difficult conversation.

And it's exposition as ammunition because it's brilliantly done in a way that we get. We get all this stuff from. Because you're so locked into this, oh, my gosh, he's talking to the wife of Jack. What's this gonna be? And then she drops in all this exposition because you're really engaged in that conflicting battle between the two people. It's the love triangle. Right. The love triangle is driving the narrative drive of the telephone call, which is, as you say, it's a very difficult thing to pull off, but it's appropriate here. Ennis is not going to go to Texas. Does he go to Texas?

No, he never goes farther than lightning flat.

That's right. And that was a big thing for him to do. And I also want to say is that it's very, very difficult when you know that your ending payoff is going to be the death of one of the two characters in the love story, it's very difficult to set that up in a way that it's a solar plexus punch to the gut of the reader. And the way she did this and the choice of the. Of getting a. What did he get? A postcard that stamped deceased deceased. So it's. Guess what that is. That's an objective fact.

Yeah.

You know what? You get what you live. And if you want some objective facts, here you go, brother. And that is. That's the writer's choice. So it's all consistent in character. He didn't get like a phone call from Lorene. No, he has to call her to get, you know, the expository information. So that big moment really, really works because it works at the character level. It's been set up about nine times in a way that was very, very light so that when it does happen, it's a shock, but your mind trickles back to the rest of the story. You go, well, of course he got killed. He was sleeping around. He's in freaking Texas in 1963. Of course he's going to get killed.

She builds that up.

Yeah.

So the penultimate scene of the story is when Ennis visits the twists Jack's parents and learns basically the whole truth. There's another transition, a landscape description followed by what I called the meeting the parents beat, only tragically inverted. Yeah, it has a lot of the same awkwardness of any meeting the parents, you know, like meeting your boyfriend or girlfriend's parents. But it's, you know, obviously tragic and terrible and full of subtext and silence, but still kind of fits the mold of that type of scene with absolutely zero humor in it.

Yep.

There's some posturing between Jack's father and Ennis. And then there's what I identify as a brief beat, a subversive act of kindness. Jack's mother, kind of passive aggressively, is kind to Ennis, where Jack's father is basically busy proving to Ennis. Ennis's own beliefs anyway. Right. Jack's father is one of those guys who would have killed the two ranchers who lived together.

Exactly.

And then there's another truth will out scene where Jack's father reveals pretty clearly what Ennis has only sort of suspected so far, that Jack, you know, had a thing going on with somebody else. And so now he knew it had been the tire iron.

Yeah.

Sorry.

No, no, I'm just. I was just having an emotional reaction.

Yeah.

And Then we have a nice long, very beautiful beat of what I can only identify as discovering an old memento. I know I've seen this scene in. A very similar scene happens in, say, the Bridges of Madison county, for example.

Yes.

Where after one of the people has died, we watch a character or read a character discovering something about the dead lover. An actual physical memento, which in this case is the shirt. And that winds up scene 16 and brings us to the final scene 17, where Ennis makes a memorial to Jack. And I didn't really break this down at all. That's basically the whole scene. I mean, the beat. There's a beat. It's a scene. He makes a memorial to Jack. There's some sub beats in it where he picks out a postcard. But I didn't know how to break that down any further. Do you have any thoughts on that?

No, I think you just go with the flow of however, you know, the micro events that have to occur to make that happen. It's so. It's. He's now. He's now.

It's so unbelievable how well done this story is because now he's out of his loop, isn't he? He's living for a future and that future is when he's dead and it can be with the guy he loves.

Yeah, yeah.

And so he has a very, very deep change and it cost him everything. Everything. The character arc is very clear for Ennis here. That's why he's the protagonist. He's someone who saw the world in one way and now he sees it differently. And he's living for the future time in some other nicer galaxy where he'll. He'll be with Jack again. And they're going to be back in Brokeback Mountain is where they're going to go.

Right. And until then, you can't fix it. You got to stand it.

That's right. And you know, he says, I swear. He swears. He's swearing to God that we'll be together.

And she makes a point of calling out that Jack had never asked him to swear anything. They never made a commitment and he was not himself. The swearing kind. So the word swear appears three times in one sentence. And I think that's really, really important.

Yeah, yeah. He's not sort of a deeply religious person.

Well, it's also sort of a like almost a belated, way too late, tragic wedding vow, in a way. You know, taking a vow, swearing.

Yes, it is. He's built a shrine to romantic love.

Right.

So, wow, this is going to Be pretty easy to just bang this one out, huh?

Yeah.

Oh, man. I wanted to. Just scrolling back to the scene, the motel room scene, there's one line in there that I just wanted to. It really stuck out to me. She says she has Jack say, look over on that chair. And then she says, on the back of a soiled orange chair, he saw the shine of a buckle. That's the rodeo bull riding buckle. Right. He saw the shine of a buckle. Now, I would have, you know, no doubt said he looked over at the chair and, you know, Jack's jeans were draped over the chair and there was a belt with a buckle. I mean, she just distills it down to the. Not even the buckle itself. Just the shine of a buckle.

Yeah.

It's like, oh, my God.

It's very imagistic, right?

Well, it is. And it's so distilled.

Yeah.

So I just wanted to pull that out because I tend to write way too many words, as you know, and this is going to be really hard for me to narrow it down like that.

The great thing about writing too many words is that it's so much easier to cut than it is to get somebody to come up with something whole cloth. So I don't see that that is not a liability in any way. And I suspect, you know, she's. She probably threw away 40,000 words to get down to this. That's a great trick, though, to remember. Can I get the description down to one salient visual that the reader will immediately. It's like, don't think of white elephants. Right. So the shine of a buckle. Bang, there it is. It's in your head. We've all seen something shine. And so you see the flash and the glint of sunlight off of a metallic surface. And there you have it. It's a great trick to remember is, can you boil down the essence of a particular setting into a very specific visual image? And that's what she did there. That's another little trick to. To put in your toolbox.

Yeah, well, it's in there now. I'll see if I can make use of it.

So what's next?

I think what we ought to do is why don't you just sort of start. Why don't you go through the prologue and a couple of scenes, however long you feel comfortable doing, probably thousand to 2,000 words, and just shoot it my way. And then we can go over it next week. And then after we sort of go through those. Those first couple of scenes, I suspect you'll have momentum. But this first beginning. We should probably take it a little slowly just so that we can get in a groove of you show me your stuff and then I'll give you my thoughts and then you can take what you want and then you can move on to the next bit of business.

That sounds great.

Yeah, let's just stop there.

See you next time. Well, we ran into a little technical problem there and had to stop suddenly, so that was a wrap for episode six of the Masterwork Experiment. You'll find links to my foolscap in the show notes, along with my scene spreadsheet and a new crosswalk document where I line up the beats of Brokeback Mountain in one column and the text of my draft scenes from my Regency counterpart in the other. As usual, we include a link to the New Yorker edition of Brokeback Mountains so that you can easily read it and follow along. And this week, thanks to one of our great StoryGrid ground you'd craft, I've also got a link to the prologue that was missing from the New Yorker version, so be sure to check that out. For everything StoryGrid related, visit storygrid.com Be sure to pick up a copy of the book the Story Grid and sign up for the newsletter to get a weekly notice of all the wonderful things we are constantly busy with in the storygrid universe. If you'd like to learn more about me and my work, you'll find me@annholley.net where I'm writing about the process of working with Shawn and the challenges of writing to specifications and set by someone else. I've also posted a couple of my trial scenes there, so check that out on my blog. You can join me on the Editor Roundtable podcast, where I team up with four other StoryGrid certified editors to analyze the structure of a movie or a novel every week to support the show, tell other authors about us, or leave us a rating and review. It really does help new listeners find us. Join us again next week when I submit my first couple of scenes and silently freak out while Sean reads them aloud, line by line. It's fun. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.