Die Hard and Tim's Middle Build

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 a creator of Storygrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, Sean has now gotten a chance to take a look at Die Hard, and we dive into how to fix just my stuckness in my middle build based on what I've been learning through Die Hard and other stories. So for those of you that have gotten stuck on your own middle builds, I think this will be a great episode. So let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, a couple weeks ago we went over the Die Hard, right, Watched it and put it in the spreadsheet. And one of the things I was trying to accomplish with that, now you've had a chance to go back and watch the movie. And I wanted to use that as a way to talk about where I'm stuck in my book. So I've had several things kind of bouncing around my head, so I'm just gonna kind of throw them all out and would love to hear your feedback. So the first is that I feel like, you know, looking at Die Hard as an example, there was like this kind of big test and then a little test before the middle point. And in my book, the first big test is the whole tower burning down thing. And then I'm kind of stuck on what to do until we get to the middle point where. Where she gets sucked into that world with her brother.

Right.

I had had in the original, in the first draft this whole kind of competition with, as the, you know, her kind of nemesis in the book. And that might still stand, but I'm just. What I'm stuck with is like, I feel like the story's just real kind of loosey goosey and. Which is a technical term, and it's just real kind of loose and just bland right now. And I made the mistake because I went to Universal Studios last week and went into the Harry Potter world, and it's like every time I go there, it's like a rule. I have to then listen to the audiobook again, right? So I've been re. Listening to the audiobook of Harry Potter and now I'm like, well, maybe like, I don't have that many characters in my book. Maybe I should expand that more. Should I be expanding the world a lot more? And. And making it much more immersive. And then I'm like, no, no, no. You need to just focus on the story. And you can add all that stuff later and getting this, you know, dialing in the things on the story. But then I'm like, yeah, but if I had more characters, then I'd have more to do in my story. So I'm just really stuck on what to do because every time I've gone to work on the book, I end up doing one of two things. I either take the scene that I wrote in the first draft and just kind of changing it to try to make it a little better, right? Which feels like I'm polishing a turd. And then the other one is I just completely rewrite the scene, but it ends up being just a different version of the same thing that I don't think is any better. So I've been just spinning my wheels on it for a while now. And since we're, you know, we, you and I, off Mike, have been talking about, you know, eventually wanting to publish this thing, I should probably actually finish it. And so I'm just kind of stuck with what to do. And so was wondering your feedback on, like, my next steps on how I should attack this middle build with where I'm at.

I think you're facing something that a lot of writers do after they've hit a place in their writing where they start to doubt the work that they've already done because they're so familiar with it that they feel like, yeah, this is run of the mill baloney. Oh, not this again. And it's only natural when you've lived with these characters and with these scenes for so long, to grow tired of them and to start doubting whether or not they're really that good and whether or not they're going to compel people to keep reading the book. So it's absolutely natural what you're going through, but the thing that you need to remember is right now, you're sort of, like, focusing on this nebulous. You're not really going micro and you're not really thinking macro. You're sort of just saying, oh, my middle build just doesn't work. And I don't know what to do about it. So when you face this kind of trouble, the middle build is really about progressively complicating the story to the point of a major, major shift in the action of the story or the worldview of the protagonist. So because your protagonist is going through a maturation plot along with the Action Labyrinth. What you want to think about is, how am I going to get her to the point of recognizing that all is lost, that she cannot find the solution to what she wants, because that's the thing that really pushes the character into another dimension is when the character either gets what they thought they wanted and realizes it's not what they wanted at all, or there's no possibility that they can foresee of them ever getting what they want. And that moment, it's either realizing the want is wanting or realizing that you can never get what you want is sort of the point of no return. The character realizes in a very specific moment in time in the story, my life is never going to be the same. What I want is impossible, or what I've achieved is not what I thought it was. So that's usually the moment close to the end of the middle build. Now, because the end of your middle build, as I recall, because we haven't talked about it in so long, results in a sort of vegetable state, if you will, of your character, so that she's neither dead nor alive, you're gonna need her to reach that sort of point of no return a little bit earlier. And from what I remember, you chose to have her reach that freak out stage about midpoint in the second trial. So now the question becomes the first trial. She brilliantly overturns the expectations of the people that she's all around constantly. In an effort to go back in time, she burns down the thing so that the whole prize and the reason for the competition now doesn't make any sense because everybody's supposed to get to the top of this tower. So she decides to burn down the tower, which undermines the game. And that's a great way. And the reason why she does this is she believes if I screw up their game, they'll kick me out. So that's her pursuit of her want. And her want is to just go back to the way things were before. She just wants to go back home with her crazy mother and her wimpy father and hang out with the rats and do all the other things that she used to get away with. So that motivation for her to do that makes perfect sense now as a progressive complication. It's a pretty good turn. Now the next big progressive complication is when she can't figure out how to win the second trial, so she loses her mind a bit and is touched by the goddess. Or she gets that like in the wizard of Oz, when Dorothy, the Tin man, the lion and the Scarecrow, they can see the Emerald City in the distance. And then there's a field of poppies in front of them. And they. They go into the poppies and they all fall. You know, the. The living beings fall asleep and will die there. And then Glinda the good witch comes to their rescue and makes it snow. So that's similar to what you're doing for your second progressive complication in your middle build is that you're having Jesse get into this situation where she panics. She doesn't know how to win this event. And as they're banging on the door about to take her, she falls into the wormhole and sees her brother. And then the brother comes and lends her aid and gets her out of the problem, and she ends up winning the trial. Okay, so now that's another progressive complication that's, I think, even better than the first one. Do you think the reader will expect that she's going to have her problem solved in the second thing?

No. So I'm happy with both of those. So I feel like those work. The problem I'm running into is how to get from the first one to the second one.

Okay, the first one to the second one. Isn't she called into the principal's office and yelled at for what she did?

Yeah. So where I. The last scene that I reworked was that the scene where she, after everything happens, they start to plan an escape, and then she gets taken to see him, which I also like that because there's this whole scene of them planning their escape, and before they can even get started, they get caught.

Yeah.

So then she goes to see the president. And I like that scene too, because that's where you find out he's not the big imposing figure that you've seen throughout. Because I started putting the big imposing figure guy, like, even in the inside the beginning hook, where there's, like, posters of him everywhere. And then you find out he's this little scrawny nerd guy. And so he's super nice, super grandfathery. And then at the end, when it turns, he threatens her.

Right.

And then sends her back. And so in the first draft, I had her have this run in with as, and they end up going back into the original, the simulation from the tower burning down thing. And that's when she first. The bubble first shows up that she jumps through and escapes. And the whole thing's just not very good. And it's pretty weak. And if we're contrasting it or comparing it to Die Hard, he tries twice to go back to the original world before he accepts his responsibility.

Yeah.

So the first one is when he called. He pulls the fire alarm.

Yep.

And his plan is, I'm going to pull the fire alarm, then I'm going to hunker down and let the cops take care of it. And that's kind of my tower burning down thing. And then there's another one that I forget off the top of my head now. It's amazing how quickly I forget this stuff.

It's the one where he calls the emergency channel to get the police and he's on top of the roof.

That's right.

So the first one is when he pulls the fire alarm, and the second one is when he goes to the top of the roof to call the police directly. Now, there's something that happens in between the pulling of the fire alarm and him going to the top of the building. You know what that is?

Are you talking about when he sends the body down the elevator to them?

That's right. They send up a guy to kill the guy who pulled the fire alarm on floor 32. And they send the toughest guy they have with a submachine gun. And so John McClane is up there, and he doesn't really want to kill anybody. He just wants justice. So the guy comes upstairs and McLean is hiding underneath some kind of construction material. And the guy's like, hey, give yourself up. It's going to be fine. And somehow he worms away without the guy knowing. And then the guy just shoots up the construction material. And McClane knows this guy's going to kill me. So then the guy chases him and McClane and corners him and pulls a gun on him and says, hold it right there. I'm with the police. And the guy says, oh, well, you can't kill me because you're a cop. And he's like, oh, my gosh, that's true. I don't want to kill anybody. I'm a police officer. I abide the law. And so it's in that moment of hesitation that the guy starts fighting him. And what happens is they fall down a flight of stairs with John McClane holding the guy's head. And in the fall, the guy's neck breaks and he dies. So John McClane is that important that.

He didn't actually kill him on purpose?

That is correct. That is a very, very important moment because Maclean keeps himself sort of clean. He's not killing people for any kind of pleasure. It's an accident. And he doesn't feel bad that the guy died, but he didn't shoot the guy in the face the minute he saw him, because then he would have lost the audience. Right. That's not a heroic thing to do. Okay, so that's just after the fire alarm. So you see how the writers are moving McClane into justifiable homicide. They're moving him. He has a moral code until he has to defend himself. It's either him or the other guy. He accidentally kills him, and then he gets the bag of tools. That's when he takes the guy's submachine gun and his bag of tools, and he uses those tools. And part of that is the walkie talkie. So he goes with the bag of tools to the top of the roof after he realizes that nobody is going to show up. You know, the fire alarm went off, then the fire company went back. So he's like, oh, I can't believe this. They're turning around. Then he goes to the roof and he calls on the. The intercom or the walkie talkie to the special channel, Channel nine, or whatever it is that the police are constantly monitoring. And he tells them, get over here. There's terrorists. And the police blow him off. And the lady's like, sir, we got to get off this channel. This is only for emergencies. And he's freaking out. Meanwhile, Hans Gruber, the bad guy, hears him on the walkie talkie and sends up the bad guys to kill him. And then we've got this great action sequence where he has to get away from the bad guys.

And he uses the tools to get away from the bad guys.

That's right. And then the next series is that the one police car shows up to just do a drive by. And the guy's outside checking around, and he can't believe they've only sent one car. So he decides he's going to throw a chair through a window so that the guy can hear. And the guy doesn't care. This is the police officer. Meanwhile, a couple of the goons find him in that office. And the first one comes through the door. And McClain does not shoot him. He says, hold it right there. And he's got his gun trained on the guy, who has a submachine gun. The guy holds up his hands like, I'm not going to shoot. And then he jumps down on the floor, and the guy behind him tries to shoot McLean. McLean shoots him because he's going to shoot him. And then McLean shoots the other guy, too. So my point is, the movement from the first trial to the second trial has active moments of threat it's not just prepare for the next trial and come up. They didn't show John McClane thinking about, you know, how he's going to get the police to pay attention this next time, they actually showed him doing the things that would get him to pay attention. So that is a great clue to think about. In the movement from trial one to trial two, how do you get Jesse actively trying to continue her want? Now, what's her want? She wants to go home. So when she has that meeting with the President, shouldn't she say, hey, Mr. President, I just want to go home? Does she say that?

No.

Well, not right now. Yeah, she should. Okay, because she could go, or you could have the president go. Well, now, Jesse, I'm a pretty smart guy, and I understand what you did there. I see that. What you did is you tried to break my game. And you thought if you broke my game, you would get to go home and hang out with your crazy mother and your wimpy father. Well, guess what? You're not going to get to go home. Because I wanted to see how smart you are. And apparently you're pretty smart. So I'm planning a super extra special trial for number two. So you go on your merry little way, little girl, and you better try and figure out how to beat this next trial. So that way you're raising the stakes and you're saying, oh, my gosh, Jesse is not outsmarting the people behind the machine. In fact, they're manipulating her to get the best out of her. So what could you also do to get her to the next trial? Now, having a training sequence is a good idea, but do you really want to pinpoint or show that there's a possible wormhole, or do you want to use that wormhole in a really incredible moment when all is lost in the second trial? I think the latter. I think having the training session is a good idea. But the trick is to make the training session innovative. How can you make that interesting? You know, it's like in Rocky. How did they make it interesting where the boxer, you know, they had a big space in their screenplay that says Rocky trains for fight. And the way they filled in how Rocky trains for the fight was brilliant. It was so brilliant to character that it made everybody who watched that, that scene fall in love with Rocky. And it was the music, and it was the eggs in the morning, and it was the running through the meat market and the punching of the meat sides of beef in the. His cousin Paulie's beef factory. Because traditionally, the way you train for a fight is. What do you do? You go to a gym, right. And you spar. And then they showed the way Apollo Creed trained and that's what he was doing. So think about how you get Jesse training for a big fight in an innovative way. Would she just go in and train like everyone else? Or is there a different way that Jesse approaches these problems that makes her gifted?

Well, so Rocky is a performance genre with a stat. Is it status? Internal. What's the internal status?

You know, it's squishy. It's definitely. There's status in there and there's also redempt.

And so you have to have the training sequence in a performance genre, but in an action. If I just do a training sequence without some kind of life to death at stake, like in the first training, it'll fall flat and right. I mean, to me there needs to be some sort of danger in the next sequence. Otherwise, even if it's a super cool thing, it doesn't progress the life to death.

That's correct.

So as you were talking and the other thing that. And I tend to get hyper focused on these things that aren't overly important. So, you know, call me on that. But the other thing is I feel like she needs to give one more try to go back to the old world. And so should it be something more along the lines of her basically trying to like sneak on a ship or something and go back home? Like one more shot at going home. Or like, I guess if it's just a. I'm thinking of a training sequence as like her running through a training sequence. But there's no danger there and she's not getting closer or further away from her goal of going back home. Because it's not. In Die Hard when he chucks that body through the window and it lands on the police car is the moment when everybody edged the whole things shifts for everybody. John realizes it's all up to him. Hans Gruber realizes this guy's actually a problem. The police actually take it seriously. Like that's the middle point of the middle Bill. And so in mine, it's at the top of that second thing where she. All is lost for her. She's stuck. Then she gets sucked into meeting with her brother. The brother gives her her new instructions and she takes them on. And the idea of her going back home is gone and she's. She's now moving towards this new ending. So I feel like there's this spot between the first trial and the second trial that I've got To fill with something that's life threatening. Less life threatening than the second trial, more life threatening than the first trial, but also is her still trying to shirk the responsibility.

Well, I think you make a good point about escalating it to life, death. I think a thing that could be interesting is that you have that nice heart to heart talk with the President and I don't know how you'll pull it off, but at the end of that scene, as she is dismissed and leaving, the President should say, kill her to someone. She's a waste. We need to get rid of her. I don't want anybody messing up my game. Kill her.

Yeah, because you know that. I think that's good because that fits what we were saying. You know, one of the problems we found a couple months ago was like, he should not know who she is or care about her.

Exactly.

So if he's just pissed at her for messing up a game and then she's complaining that she wants to go home.

Yes. I thought there was something there, but I was wrong. Killer. So at the end, you know what I mean, like, he's talking to his, his henchmen, he goes, hey, you know, I thought the kid had something for a second there, but she's just a baby. She wants to go home. Just kill her. And then while she's training, somebody tries to kill her and she has to avoid it. And maybe the thing that saves her is the start of the next, next thing, you know, and maybe it could be, you know, like, I don't know. But I think that will do a warp that will take the story and make it life and death, and it will be an active turning point that will propel her into, holy shit, they're trying to kill me. I don't need to go home. I just need to survive. And she might say that to somebody, like, I just wanted to go home now I just want to stay alive. I can't worry about going home right now. I just need to stay alive.

Yeah, I like that too, because she could. Another aspect of that I could leave intact is she could leave the office thinking the President saw on her side, right?

And maybe, maybe she just, I mean, maybe she gets a, like a text message from Balaam or something. He somehow gets a message to her. They're going to kill you.

Well, I was thinking like she's just doing a simulation and then like her Ernst and Alex like lose control and she realizes that what's happening is actually going to kill her and she's got to get out.

Yeah.

Okay. That's a problem I can solve.

So that way, that moment will escalate the stakes, and it will make sense when she freaks out in the second trial.

Okay. So backing up. I mean, this is. Okay, so this is so helpful from a standpoint of figuring out how to break the middle bill down into solvable pieces.

Yeah.

So this idea that, like, I need to come back to the genre, which means it's an action labyrinth plot because I can also make.

Where the stakes are life and death.

Yeah. So I need to progress, you know, make it more dangerous. Also, it's a maturation plot, and she's still trying to not have to mature. So that fits here. So. And then that gets me to the place where everything turns over. And at the end of the second one is where she's taking it seriously. The president's taking it ser. Taking her seriously now because he's now. She's now escaped it twice more.

Right.

So. And then everything can turn over, and I can worry about that once I get there of what to do after that.

Yeah.

So again, if I'm comparing, like, Harry Potter, which is not anything like my genre really to, I guess the maturation is anyway to, like, Die Hard. Die Hard's, like, super simple, not overly complicated to set up. Right. There's not a lot of people. It's like him. You know, him, the bad guys, and like, three other three or four of the people are the main characters. Set in an office building, terrorists trying to steal money. Like, just super straightforward. Not a lot of innovation in the setup of what's going on. And then I look at something like Harry Potter, and it's like, just over the top setup right down to. As I'm listening to the book, again, from the standpoint of looking at it as a writer, I mean, she has, like, the names of the books that Harry Potter sees in the shop in the new world, you know, like, it's so specific. There's so many cat, There's a huge cast of characters. And then I'm trying to think of things like Hunger Games, which I think probably like, splits the two, where it's definitely bigger than life. It's a fantasy world, but it's not as huge as Harry Potter. And then I'm thinking back to. I was listening to an interview with Patrick Rothfuss, who wrote the Name of the Wind, which is one of the best fantasy books I've ever read. But the man will not finish the third book of the trilogy. And so it's driving me insane. But anyway, he was talking about the first book and how later, like, toward. He's this writer that had worked on this book for years and years and years, finally got a publisher to buy it. And then his editor, when he was working with his editor, they had him put in this whole new character that just added a whole dimension to the book that. I listened to it after I read the book, and I was like, oh, I can't imagine the book without this character, you know? And so is that, like a third draft thing where, like, I go back and, like, once I've really got the story nailed, try to expand the world and maybe even characters and just make everything more colorful, I guess. Or is that something that, like, I start to want to do that now, but then I'm like, is that me avoiding the work of actually coming up with a compelling story?

Well, that's a chicken or the egg kind of question. My advice is always as long as the material you see, I think asking the question, what's my genre? Right. Are you writing Harry Potter? No. Are you writing more Hunger Games? Ender's Game? Yes. Right. Now, if you remember Hunger Games and Ender's Game, what the writers did, they spent some time really painting a picture of the opposing teams so that we got a sense of who our hero was up against. And these teams were really strong. Like in Hunger Games, there's, you know, really strong women and boys who are out to kill everybody. And you're just never going to out overpower some of these people. Same in Ender's Game. There are teams of players that are just so diabolical and intelligent that it seems impossible that Ender will ever overcome those odds. So I think if you were to really take a look at the beginning of your middle build, when Jesse walks through that very large cavernous building and she sees and use people like 61 to explain to her her situation. Okay, here's the deal. We've got six teams. One of them's from Blah. And I'll tell you, their teams, their strengths are this and their weaknesses are this. They live in cell block X. So you. At the same time he's giving her, like, the lowdown of the. The world, she's thinking to herself, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to go home.

And then when she finally meets the president after burning down the thing, and he's like, hey, I was really impressed by that. And she's like, yeah, I want to go home. And he's like, oh, this kid just got lucky. Yeah, kill her. Then after she somehow survives and wins round two. She's going to come out of that knowing that it wasn't her who did it. She got lucky. She got a supernatural force. She's barely alive, and now she's got a lie. Now she's got to let people believe she can do things that she really can't do. And she, on top of that, she has a great responsibility and a mission now where her self confidence is kind of undercut. Before she thought, like, oh, yeah, I'll just burn down the tower. And now she has really no clue of how to move forward. So the answer to your question is if it's going to help you come up with solutions to these sort of progressive complications in a way that will be compelling, can you set some stuff up earlier that will pay off in the, you know, the tail of the middle build by Throwing some, like, 61 gives her some precious information about somebody. It's a little tool that she stores in the back of her mind that helps her tell a lie, you know, in the middle build, you know, these are all ideas. So will you want to expand your world so that it's more specific and more we understand it more do you want to explain to the reader through a character saying, you know, this is, you know, a sanitary world here we only allow those who are in the game to be in this sector of the Capitol. And that way you explain to the reader, oh, this is like an isolated chamber within a much larger organism. And you don't have to explain all the things in the larger organism because you've already had a character explained to your character. Oh, yeah, you're not going to see a lot of people here. You're only going to see competitors and, you know, guards. And that's a good little way to cheat a big story into a smaller package. So you don't have to add 36 characters to represent, you know, 36 different levels of society and blah, blah, blah. So all those questions about, do I add these elements of the world now or later, the answer to that is, can you think of a way of adding new elements that also increase the complications of the life and death element? If you're gonna bring in. They literally wanna kill her after the first trial. And so her second trial is not just winning the second trial, it's surviving to play in the second trial. Right, right.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it's like trial one.

Okay, I like that.

Yeah. One of those great plot points. You know, a great way to really spin a story is to have this moment where somebody Says, oh, on the 13th, remember, we have that thing, we have to go to that amusement park. So all this crazy stuff happens and you forget about it as a reader. And then the character, it's the morning of the 13th, and nobody is told the character or the reader. And then the little boy goes, daddy, it's time to go to the amusement park today. And he's like, what? I've got this incredible thing I've got to do. Well, let me take care of that first. And then, so, like, the big event actually interrupts her desire to survive and it actually saves her from death. She's got to compete in this incredibly difficult challenge. And that sort of like she's worried about that, but in between, there's this bigger challenge of just surviving. And as she's trying to survive, a critical moment arises where it looks like she's going to get killed. And then Ba Bing. Now, number, you know, trial number two is to begin.

You know, okay, no, I think that's good. So I will work on that. So what I'll try to do is work on that sequence and then basically getting that into the second trial, because I've already written that part and we seem pretty happy with that. So I'll work on that and then we'll go from there.

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