Critiquing Tim's Beginning Hook

Hello and welcome to the Story Grid 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 shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we finally dive into the entirety of my beginning hook. So I submit the 11 scenes, two of them we've gone over on the show. So nine new scenes. So 11 total scenes is the beginning hook of my story. And Sean and I start working through those. And as you can imagine, there's some ups and downs in our conversation. So as we've gotten feedback on the show many times, it's this deep dive critique, getting in the weeds to talk about this stuff that a lot of you really enjoy. And if that's you, then you're going to enjoy this episode. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, I finished the next nine scenes. That got us to like the end of the beginning hook. I sent you those to look over. I've only thrown up twice since I did that.

And so now I want to. Where do we start? What do we do now?

Okay, well, I need to just say one thing. I only. I got this yesterday, which was Wednesday. We usually, we usually tape on Wednesday, but we pushed it to Thursday. So I've had it for about, I don't know, maybe 20 hours. So all the things that I'm going to say now about it, you have to sort of take it with a grain of salt. I'm confident in what I'm going to say. But as I work, I usually get better and better as I go. So I'll tell you what I've done with the material. First of all, this goes to sort of what an editor does. I go over in the story grid in the book, and this is exactly what I did. And I did exactly what I recommend editors do in the book. I read the material just without trying to make any editorial thinking about it, just to get the flow of it. And then after I let it sit for a little while, it was good because you worked in scenes, so you just gave me 11 straight files. So I didn't have to do my usual print out and staple and all that stuff. So I had all 11 files ready to go. And then what I did is I created the story grid spreadsheet for those 11 scene. And you know, I don't like Doing the spreadsheets just like everybody else. I find it to be tedious, difficult, analytical work that's a pain in the ass. So I'm just going to say that right up front. I don't enjoy doing the story grid spreadsheets for a project. And every time I get a project, there's a moment in time where I say to myself, hey, maybe I don't need to do it this time. You know, maybe I can just sort of wing this one because I've, you know, I've. It's in my bones now. Maybe I don't have to do the spreadsheet. And each and every time I say to myself, well, tell you what, why don't you do it? And then if everything that you thought that you would we're going to come up with is the same as before you did it, then great. And of course, when I did the spreadsheet, I discovered a whole bunch of stuff that I hadn't even thought of with my generic notes. So just to take a step back, I read the material. And after I read the material, I sat down and I banged out a couple of pages of notes chapter by chapter, just based upon my initial feelings. And then I was ready to just spout off and give you all kinds of advice without doing the spreadsheet. And then I said to myself, you know what? Don't do that. Do the spreadsheet, too. I've done the spreadsheet, and that has further informed, you know, all the comments that I'm going to give you today. And probably we won't get that far into it. And that's no reflection on it being bad. It's just that, you know, we need to think about a lot of different things.

So, yeah, and I think if we work through this over two or three episodes, you know, I don't want to rush it because a lot of the feedback we've gotten from listeners is they've liked when we really dug into the material. So, yeah, let's just take our time and pull that band aid off as slowly as possible.

Okay. Okay. The first thing I'm going to say, just generally is that your feel for scenes is getting better and better and better. And yes, you've made a lot of mistakes, and there are a lot of things that we can fix, and a lot of things that I'm going to recommend can change. But I think if you look at this draft of these 11 scenes and compare it to the first 11 scenes, the large draft that you did and completed last spring, I think you would see, and anybody would see a very large shift in progress. You know what? Ed feels more of a coherent story than the other one. And that's because you've been really concentrating on all of the skills that we've talked about with the story grid craft. So I think maybe the best way to start would be to kind of. And we can share my grid, my story grid in the notes. And you have not seen the spreadsheet that I put together yet. So why don't I walk through the spreadsheet, you know, columns themselves and explain to you what I took out of these first 11 scenes. And we'll just sort of go scene by scene and we'll track the movements that I like to track, the valences of value, et cetera. So let's begin with the very first scene of this novel. So it's scene one. That's the first column. The word count for this scene is 1255 words. And then the next column is what I call the story. Eventually, this is in as few words possible, the editors writing down what actually happens in this scene. So for me, this is the. In the first scene, Jesse rejects a place in the crossovers Elite School of Programming and Defense. So that's what happens in this scene. Jesse rejects a place in the crossovers elite School of Programming and Defense. So. So at the beginning of the story, she's not offered anything. At the end of this, in the middle of the scene, she's given an offer. And at the end of the scene, she rejects the offer. That's what happens in the. That's the event. Now, the value shift in this scene for me was acceptance to rejection. So from my point of view, this scene began with a positive. This man arrives to offer her a plum position in a school. It's the equivalent of some recruiter from Harvard, Yale or Princeton coming to somebody and saying, hey, we got a slot for you next year. Do you want to sign up? So that's an acceptance. And then the end of the scene, she rejects them and says, no, I'm not going to your school. So that's the value shift from acceptance to rejection. The polarity shift. Meaning, does it move from positive to negative, negative to positive? It's from a positive to a negative, which is great. So this scene really works so far. The turning point is that thing that shifts the very moment in the scene that shifts the valence, meaning it shifts the scene from positive to negative or negative to positive, depending upon the kind of scene it is. So. So the turning point I Always like to identify in my spreadsheet because it will tell the writer and the editor if it's clear, you know, is there clearly a moment in the scene when it shifts from positive to negative? And if there is no clear turning point in the scene, that's a problem because you really want to explain to the reader as they are going through action that there is a shift. So what this does is it creates a sense of narrative drive. It gets momentum going. It tells the readers, things are happening. You should hang on, you're going to learn more. So the turning point in this scene is when Jesse literally says, no, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to accept this position. So it turns on action. She actively states, I am making a choice to say no. Okay, so the turn now is that it turns.

Is it the, the first time she says no or when the scene ends with her saying no?

It's the first time. Okay, it's the first time. And then, you know, the rest of the scene plays out where, you know, it's this really kind of. He's like incredulous about it and he asks her more about it and she, she holds up her end of the. She holds to her decision, which is a really nice character trait early on for you to show in the character. She's going to be our protagonist. We want to know that she's willful. We want to know that, you know, she's going to stick by her gun. So she does at the end. And it makes us want to read more about this person. You know, we all want to be that person anyway. But the turning point is literally the first. No. Okay, now we come to the point of view. Now the point of view I get into a lot in the story grid and this is a place where this very first scene is inconsistent with the rest of the, the, the other 10 scenes that you wrote. And that's okay because the scene that you sent me was the one that I, I kind of tinkered with with a little bit and I dropped in some free indirect style stuff which took us inside the head of Jesse. Now, upon further reflection, and after reading that stuff that I had stuck into your scene, I'm 5050 on whether or not we need it or not right now, I would say, no, we don't need it. And we could cut out all of her internal thoughts because it just seems a little bit too much too soon. It doesn't mean that you couldn't pull that in later, but you've got to sort of make a decision early on about whether or not you're going to use that kind of free and direct style and go inside the brain and have. Have the character share thoughts in the third person. So my recommendation right now of this, as of this moment is to not do it and just use third person omniscient point of view from Jesse's point of view. So take that for what it's worth. I think it's probably the best decision for you, and it's from reading the other material. I think you're just more comfortable as a writer writing from that stance right now. And that's perfect. Yeah, it's perfectly acceptable.

I feel like I am trying to find the simplest. I'm trying to cut out as much fancy stuff. Not that that's fancy, but like, yeah, you know, if I only have to watch her and report what she's doing, that's all I have to focus on instead of trying to also make sure I have her thoughts right, you know, because I still have struggled with, like, making sure I keep her character consistent. And so I feel like it's harder if I'm coming at her from two angles instead of just one.

I think you're right and I think it's a good choice. So let's make a universal choice right now that this, this entire story will be told from third person, omniscient, from the point of view of Jesse. So. So what that essentially means is that you, Tim, the writer, are sort of this cameraman who's standing, you know, above, maybe five feet off of Jesse's back of her head, and you are showing the story from her point of view from here on in, but you're not going to go inside her head. And you know what? My gut is that with. With young adult stuff, that's the right way to go, because young adult fiction, the primary market are children, you know, under the age of 16. That doesn't mean that adults don't read them, but they probably would be less engaged by the internal world and internal struggle of the lead character than somebody who's my age, because they're just forming their authenticity for themselves. And so getting inside the head of a character is. Is just probably not. It's probably distracting to that audience. And from what I can recall, there is very little of that kind of mind gamey stuff in Harry Potter or Hunger Games. I really can't even think of any specific moments come to mind, you know, whether J.K. rowling or Suzanne Collins use that technique. So let's make that decision. Let's stop right there on that. So from now on, every chapter is going to be third person omniscient from Jesse's point of view, unless we make another decision to drop in something else. And we'll get to that in a couple minutes. Okay, so the next column in the StoryGrid spreadsheet is period time. And this is an interesting thing. When I was, when I was doing the spreadsheet, I was like, okay, this is something that Tim's going to have to solve and make very clear that is not solved and very clear right now. So we really don't know what the period.

Right now. We know it's not contemporary, we know it's probably a post apocalyptic sort of future, or maybe it's not even post apocalyptic. Maybe it's just future with gradual degradation, who knows? But it's not clear if this is the past or if this is the future or the present. So I think, you know, that's something to keep in the back of your mind. Not something that you have to solve right now, but something to think about. And the time is another thing that you need to really lock down. And time means, is this a Tuesday, September 26, 2052? Is this the morning? Is this the evening? Is this, when is this? Where does this sit on the calendar? And to map out that, just to take a step back, the Silence of the Lambs is brilliantly laid out in terms of period and time. You know, the entire story takes place over a period of a couple of weeks, as I recall. And if you go through the literal words on the page, you can suss out every single day of that investigation. You can suss out when Clarice Starling is in that hotel room by herself the next day, the day after. It's all very consistent. And it doesn't seem like any of that stuff is detailed in the book when you're reading it. But when you look at it from an editorial point of view and you look for it, it's all in there. So that's another thing you have to keep in mind. Again, this is not a problem for you to solve right now. This is kind of like one of those fun things to fix later on when you've got your big soup of narrative and you say, oh, I can drop in little things here to fix that and make it interesting and drop it into a sentence and sort of hide it. But it's important to have it in there because what it does is it grounds the reader in this fictional reality to the point where it's engrossing and believable. And you don't even as a reader, you don't even consciously make those connections. Okay, so period in time. I'll just sort of pass over those as we go through the rest of the scenes. Unless, you know, it makes sense to talk about it a little bit. The next column is duration. And what duration means is how long does this scene play out? How much time does it take for the scene to actually begin and have a middle and an ending? And since this is a meeting of sorts, this is two people having a conversation in closed space. I put it at somewhere at like 10 minutes. And you don't have to be, you don't have to nail this perfectly. It just has to be a reasonable guess and a meeting. Go ahead.

It gives you like a sense. Like, is it 10 minutes or an hour or half a day?

Exactly.

Is that kind of what you mean?

Exactly. And the reason why you want to track this, it all goes to the writer. As Steven Spielberg, I bring this up a lot, but the writer is Steven Spielberg. To be able to track this, you say to yourself, oh my Gosh, I have five scenes that are only 10 minutes long through duration, back to back to back to back. Huh?

Is that kind of, is that kind of like what we talked about with the like two people to a crowd, back to a small group of people?

Exactly. It's exactly the same thing. So when you're tracking your. This is why the story grid spreadsheet is such a, just such an indispensable tool. And again, I don't enjoy filling it out, you know.

So everybody listening can't send you their book to have you fill out their story grid for them.

But what it'll do is it solves all of it. Shows you all of these easy to fix problems that if you're not looking at that specific problem in that specific column, they'll just fly by you. Right? There are all these unseen elements that a novelist brings to the table that you don't pick up when you're reading. You have to literally look at each scene as an editor and say to yourself, okay, this is a scene about two people having a conversation. How long does usually a two person conversation lasts? Maybe 10 minutes. I'm going to put that there. Okay, what's the next thing is the location. Where is the scene happening? Where, where is it going about? And so for location, I wrote down inside a blue collar house in the future or past, because right now I'm not really sure if this is the Future or the past. And that's kind of interesting. And I think it works. And is this a house or is this an apartment? That's a decision that you, Tim, will need to make if it's a house. I think it works because she crawls through an open window, she's in a kitchen. You know, it seemed to me when I read this scene what it recalled to me was a nice blue collar house, maybe, you know, a two family detached house in a blue collar area in Pittsburgh where I grew up. And I grew up in a two family house on a long stretch of row houses in suburban sort of outskirtsy area of. Of Pittsburgh. And that's the flavor I got from it.

Well, so that actually encourages me because. So I was kind of picturing kind of a middle class, middle lower class kind of house. But you filled it in with your lower middle, you know, middle. Lower middle class house. Yes, that was. That's the right kind of tone you want me to hit with my scenes is like just enough where people fill it in themselves.

Exactly, exactly. So I think it works. And if that was your intention to portray a lower middle class, blue collar house in sort of an industrial area, I think it worked. So that's great. The next column are the onstage characters, meaning the people who are literally in the room who are, you know, you refer to or they speak. So the onstage characters in this scene are Jesse, then the man that Jesse is talking to, and then there's a plugged in guy who's sort of a catatonic zombie sitting in a chair. And then there's the plugged in woman who's a catatonic zombie female. So I. So the number of people in this scene is four, but only two are talking. The next column after that is the off stage characters and what I mean by that are who are the characters that the people who are speaking about are referring to who are not in the room. And again, this is not fun to do, but it's important to do it and I'll explain why in a minute. So the offstage characters are Ryan, who is Jesse's brother, and then there's Jesse's mother, who's referred to, and Jesse's father who is referred to. There may be others. Again, this was on a first read. I didn't go through this with microscope like I do when I do major projects. But generally there were three off stage characters talked about. Now again, the reason why we want to have. And that's the end of the story grid spreadsheet columns. And we'll go to the second scene in a second. But for me, this scene works. This scene, it has a very clear location. It has a clear duration of time. It moves from a positive to a negative very clearly. There's a clear turning point. The turning point is an active turning point, which I think is an important choice to make in an action story. You want your inciting incident for an action story to turn on an active moment. Now, we'll talk about how you turn scenes with revelations later on. But when you're doing an action story, I think it's a very good idea to turn your first scene, which is going to be the inciting incident of your entire global story. It should turn actively, meaning the character should make an active choice that propels the story forward. And it does. Jesse says no. And so the only things they're a little unsure of right now are the period and time. And that's pretty much it. The period in time. Okay. And I think it's okay to leave that vague in this first scene. And the reason being that it's a way of creating a narrative velocity to keep the reader questioning what's next. It creates a level of mystery. Now, the way you create mystery, and we're going to talk about this when I get to scene three. But there are three ways to keep people interested in your story as a writer. Three ways, three techniques. There's the technique of creating mystery. There's the technique of creating suspense, and the technique of creating dramatic irony. Now, that all sounds very, you know, like I'm some professor on a. On a platform saying that. But simply what creating mystery means is that the reader does not have much information as the characters in the story. So the characters in the story have a lot more information than we have. They understand the universe they're living in. They understand the rules. They understand so much stuff that we don't understand as a reader that creates mystery when the reader is engaging in the work. So you want to create mystery at the very beginning of your story, no matter what, in my opinion, because if there are things that are all answered for the reader, it's not interesting, it's boring. We want to be propelled forward. We want questions to be raised in our minds subconsciously as we read that. We know the writer will eventually answer, but if everything's answered from the get go, it's boring. You know, you don't care.

You did say that the first time we went over this scene, because this is the scene we went over couple months ago, I think, and that I opened Up a lot of loops that I didn't close. And that would kind of draw people into the story.

Yes, yes.

Okay.

Okay. So you're working with first device of narrative drive, which is mystery, creating mystery. And again, mystery only means this. The characters have more information than the reader does. So narrative drive is all about how much information you share with your reader and how much information you share with your characters. So the first scene creates mystery. Now, the second element of narrative drive is called suspense. What suspense means is that the reader and the protagonist of your story have the same amount of information so that the reader has the same information as Jesse. Jesse has been offered a position by some third party, you know, authoritarian figure to go to this great school. So that's what the reader knows too. The reader knows what Jesse knows. Reader doesn't know more about who this guy is than Jesse does because we're looking at this world over Jesse's shoulder. So suspense is when the reader and the protagonist have the same amount of information. I'm going to get into dramatic irony when we get to your third scene. So let's just move to the second scene. And I'm not gonna go as deliberately through this as I did with the first scene because we already kind of covered the column. So I'll just sort of go as quickly as possible while making points along the way. Okay. The second scene, the word count is 1257 words. And the story event is Jesse is shamed. So story events, you try and boil it down to the least amount of words. It's shorthand for you as the writer or the editor to be able to just sort of go in there and know exactly what happens in that scene. So we know that this is the scene where Jesse is shamed. So the value shift in this scene is from abused to rescue. And the polarity shift moves from a negative to a positive. And I just want to say this is nice because the first polarity shift of the first scene went from a positive to a negative. So what you're doing in the second scene is you're taking up that negative from the ending of the first scene. You're beginning the second scene with a negative sensibility, and you're moving it to a positive. So we're getting a sense of narrative movement just from first scene to second scene. So that was a great choice to make. The turning point of this scene is turned on action again, which I think was a good choice because this is an action story, and you want to. To let the reader know that there's going to be plenty of action here. And the action that turns this scene is at the very end of the scene when a man and a woman pick up Jesse after she's been shamed. That turns the scene from Jesse being abused by this crowd and this faction and getting her cap put on to being rescued by this man and woman who come and pick her up and take her off stage. So we have a clear movement, we have a clear turning point. Again, it's third person omniscient. From Jesse's point of view, the period time you want to be able to drop in when this scene happened is this the day after she's been. She's turned down the thing. You could probably drop that sort of exposition into the dialogue between the father and. And Jesse at the very beginning of the scene. It's something to keep in mind. It's not a huge point. I probably would say save that, you know, to fix in another draft. But it's up to you the duration of the scene. To me, it seemed like it was between, you know, an hour and maybe two hours. We don't know the time of day on this, though, which is something that you have to keep in mind. And I just want to say, sort of go off on a little bit of a tangent here about day and night for a second.

Okay.

And this is going to speak to the global universe of your world. So let's just kind of put a pin in the spreadsheet for one second here. Well, longer than a second. And let me just talk about daylight and nighttime in this universe. And this is a suggestion, it's a thought, it's whatever you want to do with it. It seems to me that what you're creating here is a universe in the future that has gotten to the point where there aren't just sort of vague notions of differences between social classes. There are literal differences between social classes such that the lower classes serve the upper classes in a way that we don't fully understand, or I don't fully understand. And that's okay right now, but in this future, it would be best to sort of lock it into assumptions that we have about the world on Earth today. So what I. What I mean by that is in the future, perhaps, and this is just through reading I've done and all this stuff, but perhaps based upon the. The global warming phenomenon that we're under now, and also the exponential rise in technologies and digital technologies, perhaps in the future there will be a world such that we can't really walk around during the daytime because it's so hot and there's such weather concerns that it might be interesting for your story to sort of have this opposite world, meaning people live at night and sleep during the day. Everybody goes inside during the daytime because dust storms happen. It's tremendously hot there. It's just very, very difficult to get about, especially in this blue collar world. And the other thing that I thought was interesting, and I love the notion that we'll get into longer of these people who are physically attached to, you know, this matrix like world. And they literally have these hats on, these caps, these people have plugs in the back of their head. And that's kind of interesting to me too, because it reminds me of the evolution of Internet technology. Right when we all started getting on the Internet, everybody needed, you know, a phone cable. And then the only way to get on the Internet was to, you know, put in your thing in the phone jack and you would go through America online and it was a physical thing that you had to connect to something. And then you had the ethernet cable and now everything's pretty much WI fi. So what was interesting to me you're showing these people in this lower middle class world is that they all have like an ethernet connection, you know? Right. They have like this literal plugging in because they can't, they can't live in the higher society that might be all WI fi. Right. And this is something to think about in your middle build the transitional from Jesse moving from her ordinary world to the extraordinary world.

Right.

So maybe in this ordinary world of the blue collar world, nobody has WI fi brain, you know, intersection with this matrix. They all have to have these helmets. They all have to be literally plugged in. This is why people are zombies in their houses, because they can't. But maybe in the next world there's a different way of connecting to this matrix like world. Okay. So that's one thing. The other thing is the, the notion of night and day. And to flip it so that people live by night and sleep or hibernate by day, so that the numbered people are the ones tasked with literally going out in the sandstorms and the heat to do all of this horrible stuff that the plugged in people aren't doing. That's just a thought.

And the reason I like that a lot, I like. Because that's the whole, like they'll be plugged in during the day and out at night.

Yeah.

Which flips around when the numbered live their life. So they remain unseen but have the hardest life.

Exactly, exactly. So that speaks to Period in time. So the shaming would have to happen at nighttime.

Right.

Because that's when, you know, the people can go outside, it's cooler, and they can stone her with, you know, without getting dust in their throat.

Which is good. You know, it's good. Okay, so the duration is anywhere from 60 minutes to a couple hours. You know, I think that's fudgeable. The location is good. It's different than the blue collar house. We start inside an old church that isn't really a church anymore, and then we move into sort of the town pavilion center where she is abused and she's put in the thing. And it's great. It's reminiscent of the Salem witch trials. It's really cool. So we love this scene. The onstage characters are Jesse, Jesse's father, Jesse's unplugged mother, Mayor Charles, the crowd of stone throwers and shamers, and then at last, the man and woman saviors who come and pick her up. The offstage characters again are Ryan, who's Jesse's brother, who is assumed dead, and the global sort of undefined villainous force called the faction. So scene two works. Scene two again. It's strong, it's clear, scary. I like the movement from a two person scene to a transitional two person scene to a big sort of gross scene of a mob of people, and then finally ending on a human interaction where a man and a woman, a mother, father figure, come and save the young girl. It's good.

So I want to stop you here because. So this was the scene that you were like, it's good. Keep writing.

Yes.

And so I.

The.

When you posted the transcript for this episode, you know, you always do your little intro. This is my favorite line from the intro you wrote about this scene we just went over. I found it unique and compelling, which I loved, of course. And then you said, unlike any of his previous scenes we've worked on.

The truth hurts, my friend. The truth hurt. Oh, I know.

It was like. I was just like, like, oh, that's beautiful.

Yeah, don't get too excited. Yeah, it's sort of like, here's a nice apple, now there's a razor blade in it.

Okay, so now we're going to move on to scene three.

And this is the first scene of the group you haven't seen yet.

So that's correct.

You had edited scene one. You had seen scene two. And then you said, you know, finish up the middle build and we'll go over it all at once.

I mean. Yeah, the beginning or the beginning hook. Yeah. Okay. All right. So I'm going to walk through the spreadsheet here, and then we can discuss what I described to you. And if you disagree with me during the spreadsheet analysis, let me know. Okay? Okay. Okay. So scene three, the word count is 886 words. And the story event is Captain Mason meets with the General, and they set up a plan. The value shift, it doesn't move. There's no movement in this scene at all. The polarity shift begins at a negative and it ends at a negative. So it doesn't even move in a polar way. The turning point, to be fair, I said that it turned to a degree with the revelation that they will use the rat children to change Jesse's mind.

So it does turn in a way in that Captain Mason or the General and Captain Mason sort of figure out that, oh, if we use these rat children that are the friends of Jesse to get her to change her mind, maybe that would be a good plan. That's more of an expositional thing of just sort of dropping something in without really. It doesn't really turn, but it does give information.

Yeah. So this scene, after I had finished or was getting towards the end, I almost pulled it many, many times for several reasons. One is, I knew it didn't turn, which means all I. The only reason I. Then I was like, well, why'd I write it? And it was to give information, which isn't a good reason to write a scene. And what was the other reason? Oh, and it's the only scene that's not from Jesse's point of view. So I almost pulled it, and then I was like, well, I'll just leave it in because I wrote it, and it'll give us something to say, you know, to like. I feel like what's useful in this process for everybody listening is to see it all. Yeah. And so I don't want to edit before we talk about it. So I just left it in. But, like, I kept. I knew. I just knew it wasn't any good or, like, it just wasn't supposed to be there.

Okay.

So I feel like looking back now, the whole thing could just be thrown out and we just jump on to scene four. Because even revealing that plan takes away some of the mystery.

That's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. The other thing I want to say about it is. And this goes to what I was talking about, narrative drive. Remember? Narrative drive. You create mystery, suspense, or dramatic irony. What you've done here is you create a dramatic irony. You've given Information to the reader that the lead character doesn't have.

And that was one of my questions, is like, is it good to. Should I try to use all three in a story? Or like, if it's a. If we're using mystery, we just stick with mystery and that's how we're driving the story in general.

I would have to really do a deep think about the best uses of these three. My gut about it is that you don't want to bring in dramatic irony until you need to.

It's sort of like dramatic irony is when the reader knows something the characters don't.

Yes. So essentially this scene is bringing in two people that we've been introduced to, this Captain Mason, but we don't know him by name. The other thing that you do here, which is kind of interesting, is to show the ethereal world of what the world is like when you do plug in.

Yeah, that's what I feel like is missing is like, if this is a true lit rpg. I haven't shown anything of what it's like when you're plugged in because I pulled Jesse out in the first scene or the second scene. Like, she can't even access it anymore. So that's been another concern of mine as we work through it, which is another reason I threw in this scene that shouldn't be there is I was like, well, I need to show that it's like, you know, and I wanted to establish the guy in charge is like the opposite of what you would assume was in charge. You know, he's like this nerd.

Right.

So there's all these, like, reasons that aren't actually useful to the. To the reader.

Well, you're absolutely right about the litRPG element. And it's not something that I want to just shrug off and say, don't worry about. But what I will say is that.

The first draft is really about nailing the story spine. And when I say story spine, what I'm talking about is, you know, all these hours that we've talked about, you know, the six primal story arcs and the hedometer and having Andy Reagan on and talking about man and whole and Cinderella and Kurt Vonnegut. That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the story spine are the emotional arcs, the story itself, meaning that the reader subconsciously attaches to the story because you have this built in beating heart of story arc, a story spine that moves ideally from something like man in whole, man in whole Cinderella tragedy, and I'm not gonna kill you with that right now. Only to say that what we're establishing in this beginning Hook is a first man and hole kind of story arc. And just to remind you, the man and hole story is simply an everyday person walks down the street, they fall in a hole, they move from a positive place to a very low place. And then we watch them climb out of that hole. How are they going to get out of that hole? So Jesse, she starts off, she's winning, she's getting her food, everything's going well, she's making her steals, and then she gets caught. She falls in the hole now. So we've got a man in the hole. We've got it working well for us here. So let's work through the man in hole. And then later on when we say to ourselves, oh, geez, we've got, I don't know, 10,000 words of our beginning hook, and we want pretty much a 70 to 80,000 word manuscript. How are we going to juice up this beginning hook from 12,000 words to, say, 18 to 20? Oh, wait a minute. This is a lit RPG novel. You know what would be cool is to drop in a scene where we see this world in a way that we'd never seen before. Let's think about doing that now. How could we do that? And where should we put it? So, but we can do that after we've established this man and whole beginning. And the man in hole is also, you know, it runs parallel to the hero's journey. Right, right. The hero's journey is about the hero sort of avoiding the call is the beginning. You know, it's the avoidance of the call to adventure, which, I mean, I.

Did that pretty clearly.

Yes, it's clear that she's avoiding adventure. It's not so clear right now. Why beyond? Oh, well, my brother went on the adventure and he got killed. So I don't want to because I'm afraid of dying. But she never literally states that. She just sort of says, no, I'm not going to do it, because, you know, my parents already lost one child and they can't really afford to lose another. But we can get into a place to drop that fear of the lead character in somewhere else. But I do agree with you that you have firmly established that she's avoiding the call to adventure. And that's important in the beginning Hook, because we want to get her from avoidance of call to the adventure to going on the adventure. That's the goal of this beginning Hook. But we also want to entertain the shit out of the reader along the way. Right. We don't want to bore them with getting her to the adventure. We want to make them invested in man, in the whole story. Remember, I was talking about the six story arcs as sequential elements, not, you know, the through line hero's journey. But again, I'm getting very theoretical here. So let's go back to the practicality.

All right, so third scene we could probably just throw away and nobody would ever miss it, I think so.

I think it's superfluous and it doesn't get us anything. And we don't want to know right now. The villain is not personified quite yet. And I think we're using that to an advantage. The villain is the system in much the same way that the villain in the Hunger Games was the system at the beginning. We don't really have any clearly defined villain beyond the society at the beginning of the Hunger Games. And it worked because the rules of the land were so abhorrent to us that they were inherently evil. And the whole what if of the. The Hunger Games story was inherently evil. You know, let's have a contest and have children kill each other, and whoever wins the contest becomes a celebrity. I mean, that's a pretty abhorrent what if? And so that was. That's enough, you know, that's enough to get us going. And I think with your story, there's enough mystery of the villainy. But it's clearly, clearly this is a dystopian world where we don't really understand everything that's going on. But it's not good. It's not good at all. It's like the worst of our past and the worst of our future mixed with the worst of our present, all sort of coming together in a very nasty goo. And that's good. So, yeah, we can get rid of the third scene and just chalk it up to a mistake and move on. But it's also important to. To just. Clearly, the dagger in the heart of this scene is it's in its use of dramatic irony to create narrative drive. Because what would happen if you kept this is that the reader would read the third scene and then she would throw the book across the room and say, ah, I don't want to read this. I know where exactly where this is going. And she would get pissed, and I would too, because you're essentially saying, you know what? I really don't have the confidence in my narrative capabilities, so I'm just going to tell you the things that are going to happen in the future, and then I'm Going to show you how that actually happens. And nobody wants that. Okay. Okay, so we'll get rid of the third scene. So the fourth scene is 1537 words. And the event is that Jesse meets her mentor and her mentor's Name is number 83. So that's the story event. And the value shift moves from uninformed to inform. So that moves from a negative to a positive. Now the turning point for me was a revelation turning point. And you might be a little confused by this, but the revelation is that Jesse has one week to acclimate to this new lower, lower, lower class of world. And so it doesn't. There's no active turn. It's a revelation from number 83 to Jesse telling her that she has one week to acclimate. Point of view again is again third person omniscient. Jesse's point of view. And the period time, I suspect was a day after the shaming. So after she's shamed and sort of unconscious, they bring her back to this compound of sorts where the numbered people live and she goes to sleep sort of knocked out for a while. So the duration of this, this entire scene for me was about eight hours. So she had time to sleep, to throw up, to go get coffee with number 83.

Okay, I have some questions.

Okay.

So, yeah, my, my goal with this, I feel like most of what you said, I agreed that's what I was trying to do. I wanted to get her introduced to what she was gonna do, what where she's at now with the idea that she's not going to accept that, which will be the next scene. And I wanted to do something where the part of society she was a member of was already pretty low and this is even lower. And so I thought the thing that you can do to make people even worse is to take away their names, just make them numbered people. And so, but then I felt like as I continued to write the scenes that like naming a main character 83 was like weird and heavy handed as I kept using it. So I would like just your overall thoughts on those decisions. Well, I guess, I mean, maybe you were getting to this, but I'm just curious, like, because this was the scene where I start actually like going off of what we've already talked about and coming up with my own stuff. Yeah, so yeah, just, you know, sure.

My, my reaction to it was that it was working and giving them numbers. Yeah, it's a little on the nose, but. And on the nose means obvious, but I think it's okay. And it didn't bother me because I'm going with you. You know, I'm a reader, and I think these first two scenes were interesting. And, you know, I'm kind of interested to know who these two, this man and this woman, are who came and saved her and took her away. So the fact that they're numbered also makes sense, too, because you do depersonalize people, you know, not to. This is very sensitive thing to say, but, you know, with the Nazi. Nazi occupation and putting the Jewish star and numbers on. On Auschwitz, you know, camp survivors is a harrowing thing. And depersonalizing people to a number is. Is excruciatingly painful. And I think your use of it was not. I think it worked. I didn't. I didn't think you were milking it. I think it was sort of organic to the story that you were telling. So my suggestion is let's keep moving forward with that concept, but you need to be consistent with it. So I think the man's name is 97, and then he just becomes the man later on. You've got to lock in and give these people numbers. And if they're. If they have numbers, we need. They have to have other descriptive elements about them that will distinguish them from one from the other. So I think that's okay. Now, globally, this scene, I think it works, but I think it can be much better. Okay. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna take it just a minute here to explain something that I thought was really, really brilliant in Matthew Weiner's, you know, his television series Mad Men. And it was in the very first season of Mad Men, and I believe it was the second episode. It might have even been the first. But go with me here on this tangential journey for a second. But the lead character in Mad Men, that Wiener Weiner. I think it's either Weiner or Wiener. I think it's Weiner. He established that Peggy Olson, who is this young woman who just enters this advertising age as a secretary to work for this very powerful figure, is sort of our protagonist. It's the person that everybody who watches the show immediately feels sympathy for because she's in this. Who knows what this place is about? It's very sexist. It's very strange. Her boss is very strange. It's kind of a negative but positive figure. She's not really sure about the environment. So instead of doing a lot of exposition where, you know, people come and say, hey, I'm Jim from the. I'm Jim from the buying department of our advertising agency, and I think you're a really nice girl. And instead what he did is he had a guy on the make who really thought she was cute come up to her and say, hey, let me buy you a sandwich. And he walks her through the entire advertising agency, explaining to her how the whole business works. Meanwhile, his motivations are he wants to take her out, you know, he wants to get her in bed, but he's showing us and he's giving us the world of this advertising agency. He's doing a lot of expositional work while also having an active, you know, motivation of why he's doing it. And the reason why I bring this up is because this moment is similar to the Peggy Olson moment for Jesse. She's arrived in an alien environment. She's extremely vulnerable, and she's looking for somebody to be her mentor. She's looking for somebody to look after her interests, to tell her what she's got to do. Because you got to think of the world from her point of view at this place, okay? She's a strong willed young girl. She puts her money where her mouth is and she says no to going to Harvard, okay? And she doesn't just get sort of like thrown out of her little group of friends. She gets a helmet, you know, smashed into her head. She's almost stoned to death, and she wakes up on this really threadbare cot in this really disgusting environment. She's got to be scared shitless, right? So what do you do when you're vulnerable? What you do when you're vulnerable? You are attractive to anybody who treats you with kindness because you want somebody to show you how to get along in this world. I don't think Jesse at this point is all that strong internally. What she wants is somebody to just get her through the next couple of days and maybe, maybe after she can, you know, get her shelter and her food and her, you know, her principal things that she needs to survive, taken care of, then maybe she can think about still fighting this faction and what she's going to do with the rest of her life. Right now, what she wants to do is get some kind of security. So the reason why I'm bringing this up is this is a scene where she wakes up and she's basically in hell. And this kindly person, number 83, takes her under her wing, right? She makes sure that. That her brow is cool and she. She overcomes all the bad things that happen after you get shamed. Now, this speaks to the place and the setting of your story. So instead, what, what I'm recommending is don't have her go into another place and have coffee and have a meeting, a 10 minute meeting with somebody who's, who's sort of like, you know, the original guy in the very first scene. We don't want a meeting scene. We want something that has more activity to it. So what I would suggest is, and I don't think you have her wake up, have her brow mopped, go back to sleep, and then wake up again and then go into the, you know, the coffee room for the, for the numbered people instead, wake her up and get her moving. And I think 83 is going to say to her, honey, I know you feel like crap, but the thing we got to do is we got to get you moving. You got to trust me on this. Come with me. I've been, I've gotten through a lot of people in your state and this is what we need to do. And you're going to walk with me and I'm going to tell you how you're going to survive. And I think she has to take that walk through the advertising agency into this very, very hostile world. And people are going to look at her and they're going to scowl at her and they're going to hiss at her. And this 83 is going to indoctrinate her into this world in a more active way than having coffee.

So, okay, so if I take one thing you said earlier and what you just said, should she take her out on her first day of chores, which will be the first time that Jessie has been out in the sun and out in the heat.

Yes.

Because she's never had to do that before.

Yes.

Like we were saying earlier. And then she gets to experience that, experience the chores and stay moving. And along the way, 83 is teaching her these.

That's right.

Information I need the reader to know.

Exactly. And you're giving a lot of exposition. So the only thing that we really need to think about, you know, the way I would think about this scene, I'm sorry to go off a little bit here, but hey, if you've ever had too much to drink.

Like time to time. Well, way too much. Right. And you wake up the next morning. Right. And a friend of mine told me this about his father, which I thought was brilliant. So one night, my friend, he was in high school and he went out with his friends and he got into a lot of trouble, but he finally made his way home and he drank too much and his father knew exactly what, what he had done, but his father wasn't gonna make him, you know, he wasn't gonna be a jerk about it. So he let the kid go to bed, right? And he wakes up and he's got the world's worst hangover. Like that first hangover you ever had, the first time you drink. I mean, you can't even hold anything down. So what the father did, he said, hey, buddy, how you doing? Hey, it's time for our jog.

And he made him go on a five mile run, and he stopped for him and he let him throw up along the way, and he did all of those things and he took care of him, and he made sure he had enough water, and he made sure he, you know, he wasn't going to end up in the hospital. But what he showed him was like, hey, if you make that choice, you got to wait, you know, you still have to run in the morning, so think about those choices that you make. And this is kind of the way I see this scene. It's like she wakes up, it's like, honey, yeah, I know it must be painful. So she's a benevolent force, but she's a maternal, paternal force who's teaching this young girl a lesson. You make choices in the world, there are consequences. And yes, you got to put on the mask. And yes, you got to go out in 112 degree heat with, you know, 98% humidity, with the dust storm, and you've got to empty people's shit. And this is what we do. Welcome to our world. I'm sorry you're not feeling well. And so she indoctrinates her into the world. And yes, I know we don't go out during the daytime. Guess what? We do. And so this moves from a place of positivity, of being saved, to negativity. And so we need. And she would ask questions like, well, why do I have to do this? I'm still sick. And she would say, well, these things on the back of our head, they light up, you know, and when we don't do our chores, we, you know, we get a negative impulse to get us to do our chores. So you can explain a lot of things with the questioning that Jesse's going to make. And you can make this an active scene that introduces us into this very, very strange and nasty world, and it will put her further and further into that whole hole. Right? You know, the man and whole. You want. What we need to do in this beginning, Hook, is establish a hole that Jesse has dug for herself. So we want to go deeper and deeper into this negative Shitty hole. Because then when she can climb out of it in a way that's interesting and innovative, the reader will really admire her for overcoming this really negative whole. So anyway, that's my suggestion to sort of revamp this scene is to move it from, as you said, as I said earlier, uninformed to informed. So it moves from a positive to a negative. But, you know, it needs to turn, you know, kind of actively. And the active turn is 83, you know, forcing her on the chores. She's got to do the chores.

Okay, so should I work on. Should I work on reworking that scene, you know, in between us going over the rest of this, or should I kind of wait until we go over everything? Because so one of my worries is that, like, we'll make a major shift, you know, on scene eight that will, like, make me go back and redo early, earlier things to keep them all consistent. Or like, what, should we just continue to go through them before I go back and start messing with stuff?

Okay, let's talk about the major things that I think you need to do in the beginning hook, and maybe this will inform you, maybe it'll encourage you to redo the scene. Anyway, my two major notes for the beginning hook are this beginning hook is.

In all of the scenes together.

All the scenes together. Okay? You need to introduce the rats early and then come back to them like four or five scenes later. So the rats coming to see Jesse, instead of her being so powerful and saying, you do this, you do that. This is the thing we gotta. She needs to say, you know what, guys, I'm out. I can't do this anymore. I think you need to take Jesse to a point of basically forgive, you know, giving up to a degree. The other thing is that I think you need to set up 83 as a mentor, which you've already done. But she has to have motivations outside of being a benevolent figure. I think off stage in scenes we haven't seen that the villain has Co opted 83 and has told her, okay, you've got to bring this girl around, and if you bring the girl around, we'll do this for you. So she has to be a Judas figure in some way.

Well, you know, what I was thinking was that the way that I ended up going with the first, I was struggling to figure out how later I would reveal the mom is the bad guy. And so what I started thinking was of attaching her to 83. And then the next scene, after the ones I sent you, was going to be Jesse leaving. But they let 83 come with her.

That's possible. That's possible.

I was thinking, like, that would be, like, a gift that Mason did for her, was to let 83 go and go with her. But really, all along, she's this person that's basically out to get her own.

Yeah, she's the informant.

Yeah, yeah. And. And so she ends up being. Instead of the mom being the bad guy, it ends up being her because you kind of. I want you to fall in love with her for taking such good care of Jesse the whole time.

Well, that's good. That's good. Let me just speak to one other element. In a later scene where the lights go out. You know, the lights. If they don't get back to the compound, then their lights will turn red. Yeah, you got to have one of them turn red, man. You can't. You can't just have them. Everything turn out. Okay.

See, I. Okay, I. Now, see, I've, like, flipped the other situ. Because in the very first scene when I had her, like, stab the guy, and you're like, wait, that's what? Way too far. You can't go to, like, death and violence that quick.

I was.

Now I'm, like, on the other side and, like, shying away from it because I originally wanted one of the men that were with them to not make it back. But then I'm like, well, am I killing somebody too soon?

No, I think. I think that's the right way to go. I think one way to set up her as a false mentor, good, benevolent figure, meaning 83, is to have her light turn red, but it flickered back to green quickly. So it's like the reader and Jesse see her light go red, but somehow it goes back to green. I don't know. I mean, that could be a way of sort of signaling things aren't what they are. It puts just a level of doubt about the character in a way I'm not sure yet. What I think is that you can redo scene four without it affecting. You may bring the rats in at the end of scene four. You know, they. They come back from the day of chores, and there are the two rats waiting for. For Jesse. And then 83 tells her, hey, sweetheart, you better get rid of these guys, or you're even. You have no idea. And then Jesse can basically say to them, look, guys, I'm out. You know, you guys are on your own. This is how. I can't do this anymore.

Okay, well, I'll rework that, and then we'll continue to, like, work through the beginning hook and figure out where we end up.

Yeah.

How's that?

It's good. Just overall, this is fun to work on, and I think it has a lot of potential, so.

Okay.

It's getting there. All right. All right. Sounds good. Okay. Thanks, Tim.

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