Diving deep into genre

Hello and welcome to episode three of the Story Grid podcast. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and Sean Coyne will be joining me shortly. He is the author of the Story Grid book and the mastermind behind this entire podcast. I just want to thank you again for being part of this podcast. We're now on episode three, and it's been really fun to see everybody's reactions to the first two episodes. Downloads continue to go up, you guys continue to share it on Facebook and Twitter, and we're starting to get questions that we're going to integrate into future episodes. Episodes of the podcast. Our whole goal with this podcast is to help you become a better writer. I'm beginning my journey as a fiction writer, and Sean is helping me along the road with this podcast, and hopefully it will help you find your way along your road of becoming a better writer as well. So we're going to jump in. This is a fun episode. We're talking about objects of desire. We're continuing to talk about different types of genre and content genre. And we even get into the hero's journey a little bit. So I hope you enjoy it. And let's jump right in.

So, Sean, how's your week been? You're traveling, aren't you?

I am. It's been pretty hectic. I'm actually on a move from New York to Massachusetts, so I've got my hands full.

You're. You're on a. So you're moving from New York to Massachusetts or.

Yeah, I'm. My kids are moving to a different school, so my wife and I are actually going to go with them.

Oh, wow.

I'm kidding. They're still in elementary school, so I think they lock me away and throw away the key if I didn't go with my kids.

So last week we were talking about the reality part of genre, but there's four other pieces, and I just kind of want to keep working through those because when, honestly going through the book.

This was the part that just kind of broke my brain the most trying to figure out all this stuff.

So we talked about.

The short, long and medium version, the time we talked about reality. So I want to jump into the style part of genre. So just tell me a little bit about what you mean by style and the different decisions I have to make when I'm trying to decide the style of my book.

Well, the style is very much when you're writing fiction, a novel or something like that. A lot of these styles that are in the book are really. They're really.

Things that A filmmaker or documentary maker or, you know, a dramatic writer for the stage is really going to focus on, you know, the. The ability to write cartoons as novels is really not going to. There's a very, very small market for that kind of thing, so.

Or like, you have musical here. That would be really hard to write as a novel.

Yeah. Would it really would, because your characters really can't break out into song. It just really wouldn't be work. So the style. The style section is really about just to take a quick step backwards. You know, it's always important to remember about genre that it's really just a way to categorize things and it's sort of a way of breaking, you know, different kinds of airplanes down to Piper Cubs to 747s or what have you. So I can understand how it can get overwhelming, especially when you go through, you know, I really specifically get into every single thing in the book. And my suggestion is, if you have no intention of writing a musical or a documentary novel, you can really just sort of skip through that stuff and not let it overwhelm you. The important thing to remember about the style thing, it's really about.

How is your reader going to. What are. What are they going to expect from your novel? If it's a comedy, they are going to expect some laughs, right? If there's, you know, there's comedy, romantic comedy within the novel, they're going to expect to laugh. And what. What comedy is really about, in essence, is the ability of people to sort of throw away and not deal with reality in a way. So it's comedy. You know, I'm getting a little esoteric here again, and I didn't mean to do that. The most important thing to remember is that the style stuff is you're gonna know whether or not you're gonna write a comedy or a drama. I would really just really limit it to those two things for a novelist. And also the last one is the literary style. Now, the literary style is really about. We were talking about this last week, Tim. It's really about a means to position your book in the marketplace. It's really kind of marketing. So if you want to be a literary writer, you know, there's all sorts of really hoity toity, kind of big words that you can describe yourself as. For instance, you could call yourself, you know, a minimalist, you know, postmodern meta fiction experimentalist. And what all that means is that you're trying to get really, you know, big attention in esoteric literary reviews of the New York Review of Books or the New York Times to call you the next. I don't even know who. Samuel Beckett, maybe. So that is a real decision, but it's a stylistic decision. It really has nothing to do with how. How to structure your book. It's really about.

You know, the quality of your line by line writing, your sentence structure the way you can, you know, jam 150 words into a single sentence. And some people can do that in an amazing way, like Jonathan Franson can do that. But I wouldn't recommend that for the average writer.

Well, so it sounds like. So the five, you know, the five decisions you say we have to make with genre is content, time, reality, style and structure. And I would guess most people that are coming into writing kind of already know the time, structure and style. And the two big decisions they're making are the reality and the content. Would you agree with that?

I would agree with that.

The style.

Part of the equation is really about, you know, the. I'm just going to do this a little bit because I think it's an important. I didn't just throw it out there just to fill in the five leaves of the clover.

It really is a specific kind of decision that you need to make. Now, again, I would say as a writer, you need to think about, you know, two things in terms of style. Is it a comedy? Is it a drama? And what drama is all about is real emotional conflict. It's about dealing with emotional situations that are true and real and difficult. It's everyday life. It's. So a drama means dealing with emotional. The emotional world the way it is. Comedy is about doing everything you can to avoid emotional life.

So I know that seems a little bit like, what. What's he talking about? Comedy is just supposed to make you laugh. Well, if you think about comedy, and Robert McKee does a great. A whole day on comedy, and I couldn't recommend it more. But the thing about comedy is it's about avoiding emotions. And one of the, you know, one of the funniest people in the world is John Cleese, right? He's the guy in Monty Python. And, you know, there's a great story about when I think Graham Chapman had died and Graham Chapman's funeral, you know, they asked John Cleese to speak, to talk about him, you know, to give a eulogy. And John Cleese, who's just remarkably hilarious, stood up at the. At the funeral and said, I'm really actually glad that the bastard's dead. And so what he was saying was, was to Speak, you know, sort of this truth in a funny way, because he didn't want to deal with the reality that he lost one of his best friends. So we laugh because what he is saying is. Is kind of true. You know, he was a cheap bastard. He owed me 196 quid before he died. I'm never going to get it back, you know, so it's very, very funny because what the person is doing is they're. They're laying out the truth of the situation in a way that is completely emotionally barren. So it gives everybody a cathartic relief.

So anyway, you know, I could do a whole book on comedy and drama, but that's not really important, I think, you know, for a writer like you. And I always try and think back to what. What is Tim going to want me to tell him that's going to be to him. Yeah. And that's what I want to. Exactly. So I sort of know the arena that you want to work in. And, you know, for the most part, science fiction, you're dealing with dramatic situations. Yes, there's some comic relief now and then, but you're really dealing with, you know, is the. Are the orcs going to attack the Moops or whatever? I'm just making that up.

And how do, you know, how do we. How do we deal with this conflict now? You know, just quickly, the last, you know, in the last section, we were talking about the reality genre, and a lot of people think science fiction is a content choice, but it's actually a suspension of disbelief choice. So I did want to clarify that, because over and over, a lot of people say, well, I thought science fiction and fantasy was a content choice, but it's actually not. Because when we get into the content stuff, you'll discover that you can have science fiction stories that are love stories, that are crime stories that are war stories, that are performance stories, that. So science fiction is really about a specific reality choice. It's building an alternative universe, if you will, for your reader to fall into and, you know, just love and adore, but the storytelling is really about content.

Well, in that, you know, we talked about this at some point. I can't remember if we were on the podcast or not, but I feel like the science fiction has to be a backdrop because bad science fiction is when it's about the science, you know. Yeah, it has to. It creates the reality that they did. You then tell a story into. You don't.

If you're.

If you write a book about the science fiction, that's what bad Science fiction is, is when it's too much about that.

That's a really. That is exactly what I mean. And I'm glad you articulated it better than I did, so. Yeah, exactly. If you, if all you care about is building the world, you know, nobody cares because there's no emotional attachment to any of the characters if they're talking about whether or not the Z force better than the Y force or whatever.

Yeah, we leave that to the nerds after it's already out.

Exactly. Yeah.

All right, well then let's, let's dive into the content part because this to me is the most like, I feel like you have to layer them. And so anyway, so you have. You break up the content genres into external and internal content genres. And so talk a little bit about that first before we try to dive into specific ones.

Okay.

Now this is.

When I was trying to figure out how am I going to explain content genres. I was thinking to myself, well, there's, you know, there's the great coming of age story, right, Like To Kill a Mockingbird. Where does that fit in? And where does like James Bond fit in? Where does.

You know, a great love story fit in? And I was thinking, you know, for quite a while about it and what it. The division line for me is external and internal. And what I mean by that is external content genres are all about forces of antagonism that come at your lead character from other people or society or sort of nature itself.

And so what the lead character has to do is that the world is upended by an external force. For example, in Kramer vs Kramer, a great movie, Dustin Hoffman plays, you know, this advertising executive who's really, you know, cool and up and coming and he's really successful. And he comes home one night right after work and his wife says, see you later, I'm out of here. And not only am I leaving you, I'm going to leave you our 4 year old and she leaves. And so that's an external force of antagonism. And it's something that the protagonist is going to have to deal with. It throws his life completely out of balance. He wants just to get back to the good old days when his wife was at home, who took care of the kid. He came home at 7:30, his wife cooked him a steak, he talked a little bit and then he went right back, right to bed to start all over the next day. So that's an external force of antagonism. Antagonism when another person upends your life, another external force of antagonism. Is.

You know, a war story.

Like, I can't believe this came to my mind, but Michael Bay's Pearl harbor right now, Pearl harbor started, you know, the. The American involvement in World War II. That's an external story that, you know, upended the lives of every American citizen. So these are very, very obvious things in the external content genres that we can all immediately understand.

So.

The internal. Internal content genres, though, are all about the inner struggle of the protagonist. And these stories are really about somebody facing deep internal antagonism. You know, we all have voices in our head. Freud, you know, he came up with a theory of three voices in our head, but I'll just focus on two. And one of our voices in our head is sort of like the.

Voice that we really don't like very much, which is the one that says we're not doing well enough, all of our efforts are for naught. It's. It's a very difficult world and we're never going to make it. And, you know, the critical voice that tells us we'll never be a writer, all that stuff. And Steve Pressfield deals. Deals with that voice in the war of art in a wonderful way. So that's one of the voices in our head. And the other voice is sort of like the.

Sort of like the negotiator, right? Like, oh, well, you know, if as long as I finish this task now, then I can have a marshmallow later. It's sort of like.

A manager.

At a job telling you, if you do this, you'll get that. So it's all about managing your world so that you can actually negotiate the world. So an internal genre is about when all that stuff stops working very well for a lead character or a group of characters. So that, for instance.

Something like To Kill a Mockingbird is what I call an internal. The internal genre is coming of age maturation plot. And it's the story of a little girl, I think she's five or six, who has to really. She doesn't understand the world in the way that she wants the once do. And it's an internal struggle because she's not really sure.

Why she's getting in trouble for just pointing out the obvious. If you remember at the beginning of the book, Scout, you know, there's the kid at school who's from the other side of the tracks. He doesn't have any money, and she gets in a fight with him because he gets her in trouble at school. And they bring her home, bring the kid home for lunch, and the kid goes crazy, right? He wants to eat this whole pile of food, and then he gets this big pitcher of molasses, and he pours it all over the food. And Scout says, what are you doing, you pig? You can't eat like that. And Calpurnia, the housekeeper, pulls Scout aside and gets her in big trouble and says, you are not to talk to anybody like that. That's a guest in our home. So this is a moment when Scout's like, I don't understand my internal world. The way I've been negotiating the world isn't working anymore. And that throws her life out of balance. And then brilliantly. I mean, it's one of the greatest novels ever written. It escalates. The stakes progressively get more and more difficult for Scout to understand the world. You know, why. Why is Boo. Why is Boo Radley locked up in his house? I don't understand that. That doesn't make any sense. So that's an internal genre that has external forces, but it's really about her negotiating the world in a way that she will understand the way things work.

So, you know, I could. You know, I could spend another couple of hours talking about the difference, but it's really thinking about when one was like. Another example would be Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, right? Dostoevsky wrote this book about this guy who. Raskolnikov, who's sort of, like, too smart for his own good. And he thinks to himself, you know, morally and ethically, it would be okay if I murdered the woman upstairs. Just as a sort of an experiment to see, you know, whether or not society is capable of capturing somebody who is at an intellectual level above everybody else. And the whole novel is about how he's sort of trying to justify and play with this little game in his own mind, and he does commit murder. And so the whole novel is really about the struggle of man trying to form a moral and ethical core. And he portrays it on himself because his body refuses to allow him to do something so, you know, terrible. And he actually helps the police investigator, you know, realize that he was the one who committed the murder anyway. So that is, at its core, an internal genre. Now, do stories have both external and internal genres at play? Yes, absolutely. And I think the best stories, the ones that we attach to the most, the ones that really get us excited, have both elements to them. And, you know, it's really. It can sometimes become a parlor game to see. Well, is the external genre of the. Of the crime story in To Kill a Mockingbird, is that bigger than the maturation plot of Scout. And that's kind of a fun parlor game to play if you want to. But the reality is there's two, right? There's the. There's the rape trial of. I think John Robinson is the character. And there's the maturation plot of Scout. And then there are some little mini plots too, but those are the two core.

Stories driving the entire novel. We want to know, is that poor guy gonna get convicted of rape when it's obvious he didn't do it? And how in the hell is Scout going to negotiate her world when it's sort of. It's all changing? She's not sure.

Well, would you say that a lot of times the external and internal are at conflict?

The external and the internal are at conflict? That's a really good question, I think.

Well, so we talked last. This book I'm reading called the Way of Shadows, I'm rereading and of course I'm reading it from a different perspective now because I'm thinking about it from writing a writing standpoint. And so as you were talking about that, like, I would say the lead character, like, he constantly just, he kind of got forced into this life as an assassin to be. To just survive. But he doesn't, he doesn't want to hurt anybody. But, but at the same time the external conflict is forcing him to hurt a lot of people to do the greatest good. And so I just thought it was interesting. And then I just started thinking through like other stories that popped in my head where so many times the external conflict is forcing the character to do something they don't want to do.

Because they have, but it keeps just forcing them to do the next thing that they don't want to do.

That's absolutely true. I mean.

I think when you're looking at building your own story to think about two things, and I get into this in depth in the book and on my site too. There's two things in your lead characters sort of world that are going to drive how they are going to behave throughout the story. And I call them the wants and their needs, what they want and what they need. Now, a three dimensional character, someone, a character that starts at one place, at the beginning of the novel say they're selfish and at the end of the novel they're not selfish. They need to be in pursuit of a want and also have a need. And the need is.

Usually a search for some sort of worldview truth to them. So in the case I haven't read the book that you're talking about but that's a classic setup of a way where you place a lead character whose life is in conflict. What they want is basically to live an honorable, decent life, but what they need is to also live within a society. And I'm sure the writer of the book that you've been talking about, he thought to himself, well, how can I force this person to do things that he really, really doesn't want to do? And the way you do that is you, you know, you come up with crises in the character's life that force them to make a choice. They have to make a choice between what I call the best, you know, the best bad choice or, or a choice between irreconcilable good. Now, I love.

I love the way that you put that because you taught. The example you gave was about the guy hanging on to the grate and like the pipe of water or something. Yeah, yeah, right. So.

So it was so the idea. So talk about that. So give me. What are those two options again?

Well, the best bad choice.

Is about something, something not good is going to happen, right? There's no way around it. But you do have a choice.

Do you.

Choose something that will result in a little bit of bad happening or a lot of bad happening? Now, I'm being very generic here, so let me try and come up with an example.

So, for example, in Kramer vs Kramer, which is the movie I was talking about earlier with Dustin Hoffman, now, you know, his wife leaves him at the very beginning of the story, which is the inciting incident of the global story. And it's a love story. This is a love story. It's a brilliant love story about a father falling in love with his own son. And so at the beginning of the story, his wife leaves. She leaves him with the kid. Now, that crisis raises a question to the Dustin Hoffman character because he says to himself, who's gonna take care of this kid? Right? The best thing for me would be to get somebody else to take care of him so that I can keep going to work and everything would be great. But it's probably not really good for my kid. So let me, you know, let me make a small choice. And what I'll do is I'll drop the kid off early at school. Then I'll get the lady downstairs to pick him up after school. And then I can get home at say between 6 and 6:30 at night, Cook him dinner, and then I can, you know, I can work at home when I get him into bed. So he's making these choices that are the Best bad choice. Right. The best thing for that kid is to have his mom, right? To have his mom and his dad in the apartment taking care of him, loving him. Right. He's not getting that. So the writer.

Had.

Kramer at this crossroads where he. So he slowly, incrementally, throughout this story has to keep making these choices.

He has to keep confronting the reality of his son's life and seeing, is it better for my son to have a rich father who he never sees, or is it better for my son to have a father that he sees a lot and not have so much money? Is that a better choice? So these are the brilliant things in storytelling. And now you never see this on screen, right? You never see Dustin Hoffman saying, hmm, what do I think about this? Should I? And. But it's the situation and the way the story is constructed and the structure of the story that everybody intuits that crisis, even though it's never blatantly stated. And they watch the choice that the character makes and they say, oh, that's a good choice, or, oh, boy, that's not gonna be good.

Yeah. This makes me think of the show 24, because Jack Bauer was constantly put into this scenario where he had to do something awful because it was the least of two evils, right? Like, there was this one. I have no idea which season this was. But, like, the terrorists were threatening to do such and such, and they said he had to, like, bring this guy to this empty parking lot and, like, kill him in front of them or they would do something awful. And so he ends up committing murder on purpose because it would have done this other awful thing. So that's, like the best bad choice, right? It's a horrible choice, but it's better than the other. The other horrible choice.

Exactly. Exactly. And we all face those in, you know, in our everyday life. They're not at that level of, you know, death and life, but we all, you know, it's. It's a very, very complicated universe that we live in now. And even the smallest decisions that we make, you know, we face those things. The other choice is the irreconcilable good, right? And they're sort of like. It's sort of yin and yang. You can look at these crises and in either their irreconcilable good, you know, way or the best bad choice, it depends on, you know, what floats your boat and what you think is stronger. So, for example, if we looked at the irreconcilable good thing.

In the Kramer vs Kramer story, you know, the Irreconcilable good thing would mean it's good for somebody else, not so good for me. So the character has to say to himself, you know what? It's good for my son that I lost my job and now I have to go find another one and I have to take seven steps back in order just to get a job. It's better for my son. It's not so good for me because I have defined myself by my place on some advertising hierarchy, and now that I'm falling back, I'm not feeling so good about myself professionally. So here's another great example of want and need, Tim. Because what the character wants at the beginning of the story is to be the best advertising executive on Madison Avenue. And we can all relate to that. We all want to be the best at whatever we do in our professional lives. But what he really needs is deep truth. He needs to find out the truth of the world as opposed to the baloney about the world. And the truth of the world is what he needs is to find a bond with his son. He needs to form a really strong relationship with his son. And that if he can realize that by the end of the story and if he can accept that beautiful truth, his life is going to be astronomically better than at the beginning of the story. Beginning of the story, he thinks he's on the top at the top of the world, Right. But the reality is he's not, because he has no close relationship to a being that he is half of, and that is a tragedy. So, you know, all these wants and needs and these irreconcilable goods and best bad choices, they're all about negotiating a world to find a deeper truth. And it's. You know how they always say your character has to arc? Well, that's true. Your character at the beginning of your story has to be different by the end of your story.

So on that note.

So tell me how. Because you bring up the James Bond stories throughout your book. So how does. To me, thinking back to the James Bond books, how does he change from the beginning to the end of one of those books?

I'm so glad you brought that up.

Because it seems like he's just this, like, exact same character through the entire series.

You're absolutely right. He is. And that is an example of a story that only has an external content genre. It's an action. It's a pure action story. There's no underlying internal drama within James Bond. James Bond is a spy, and James Bond is a lethal weapon for you Know Her Majesty's Secret Service. And that's all he is. And he loves his job and he finds the best looking women to seduce and everything's great in his world. This is a guy who has no inner turmoil. He has no inner antagonism.

But they've changed that in the recent movies.

They have, because you know, why that's.

What we want now?

Well, it's also, they've exhausted, you know, how many, you know, how many setups. The thing about action stories and a lot of people, you know, they turn their nose up at them and they say, oh, well, you know, I prefer, I prefer, you know, really deep stories. And those action stories are just silly. There's nothing more difficult than innovating an action story. There really isn't. And I would put up any, I'd put Don DeLillo up on, you know, against Shane Black to see who can innovate an action story better because the action story has no underlying stuff. So what you need is to create such extraordinary personal and extra personal antagonism that it constantly is driving the story forward. And you've got to have this incredible climactic moment at the end of the story that supersedes the beginning of it, which is the thing that really hooks us. You know, the beginning of every James Bond movie. He's getting chased, right? Yeah, somebody's chasing him. He's got to somehow get out of an impossible situation. And this is why we love James Bond movies. Because at the beginning you're just, your heart's immediately in your throat. You're totally hooked. It's the beginning of it. And that's just a little, you know, that's like the amuse bouche of James Bond. And then you start to get the big, you know, then the big story comes in. He goes in for the meeting and they say, there's this bad guy, he's going to take over Fort Knox and take all the gold and you've got to stop him. And we're like, how's he going to do that? How's he going to do that?

And that's wonderful. And there's nothing more exciting than somebody facing personal and extrapersonal antagonism and, you know, winning some, losing some, and ultimately winning the big day, stopping the big, you know, event and we can relax. So those are pure action, external content genres that have no internal content genre.

So in these, in these content genres, so I mean, you have a list of them here you have action, horror, crime, Western, war, thriller, society, love and performance. And each of them like you have action goes from life to death. And, you know, that's what's in conflict.

You know. So the point of even walking through this, to me, as I'm thinking through writing, it helps me kind of ground when I make a decision. So there's, there's this guy named Derek Sivers and he, he does, you know, he teaches on business and stuff. He started this company called CD Baby and sold it. And he talks about how whenever you're starting a business or whatever, you need to optimize for fame, fortune or freedom. And you need to make that decision early so that whenever the two come into conflict, you know which one you're gonna pick, right? So if I'm optimizing to make the most money over free, I'll pick that when I have to make a decision. So it kind of makes early on, helps you make this decision. So in the future, when they come into conflict, you know which direction to go. And I feel like that's what this is for is that if you know what genre you're writing, when you come into like a decision point of like, what am I going to do next? It helps you make that decision.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. It's.

The beautiful thing about, you know, really understanding and I just do want to say one thing about the, the content genres is don't feel like you have to become Robert McKee before you start writing, you know, because McKee knows this stuff backwards, forwards, and he's made his life, you know, studying story. And as an editor, I had to learn it because I needed to decide, you know, what part of the publishing world I wanted to concentrate in. So I needed to learn the, you know, the huge sort of big canvas of story so that I could make some choices. And that's why I wrote the book, so that people would, would be better served to make the right choices. Now say, you know, oh, okay, I know exactly what I want to write. I want to write the next Star Wars. And I've got this thing in my head and I just need to figure.

Out.

How is Star wars structured? And then I can sort of use that sensibility and create something that is in the same form but completely innovative and unique. I'm not going to do the same scenes that Star wars has. In fact, I've got completely different scenes that will.

Satisfy specific elements in a Star wars kind of story. But I need to know, what do I do when X happens or what do I do when Y happens? Should I throw in a love story there like they did with Luke and ah, I'm just confused. So that's what the story grid is for. So once you know you're going to write a crime story or whatever, then just sort of dive into that silo, dive into that one particular genre that you want to do or two. You know, again, you can have an external and an internal genre together and they complement each other. As you. As you stated before, you know, there's. The external is about what somebody wants, and the internal is about what somebody needs.

So. And, you know, the thing is, is that we don't always know what we need. We know what we want. We don't always know what we need. And so to just make it more simple, when you're starting out, you're going to design your story and you're going to figure out all the little pieces of things that you need to do to get a first draft together. Don't freak out and say to yourself, well, I really can't do that until I understand what the war genre is about. If you're writing a love story and there's no war in your love story, don't do it. You know, just focus on what's important to you. I love what you just said about Derek Cyvers. I read his book that he published with Seth Godin.

Anything you want.

Yeah, it was wonderful. And that's a really great philosophy because.

It really helps you. There's another quote that I'm going to completely ruin, but it's sort of like, think about your philosophy when you're not under tremendous amount of stress. So that when you do become under tremendous amount of stress, you'll already have the answer ready. You already know how to behave because you've already thought about it. When you're not. The gun's not pointing at your head.

Well, that's probably good. Character development.

Advice alone is like, when you're thinking about what your story is going to be about before you even write it, decide what your character believes and what they will and won't do in life. So that when you come up on these decisions in the story, you automatically know which way he's got to go.

That's right. And also, that is such a really. That's a great way to start. And I'm going to go one. Take it one step further. Figure that out. Say, for example, that your lead character is somebody who's decided about his life. I'm not going to stick my nose out for anybody anymore anymore. I've done that before. I'm going to take care of number one. I'm not going to hurt anybody intentionally, but I'm not going to put myself in any vulnerable position for anybody else because in the, in my past, every time I've done that, I've gotten hurt. So I'm going to pull back the wall and I'm going to just take care of number one, and it's going to be cool. And, you know, that's, that's a philosophy that a lot of people come to in their life. Right. And so if that's what you're starting with and you say, well, how am I going to change that person? What are they going to be like at the end? Is there a way to take them from, you know, looking out for themselves and not, you know, sticking their neck out to somebody who would sacrifice everything for anybody? How am I going to make that progression happen?

And it sounds like a great way to find an inciting incident, too.

Exactly. And that's that I'm. Who I'm describing is the character Rick in Casablanca. You know, the beginning of the story, he's just this sad sack selfish bastard who won't stick his neck out for anybody. He's really cool because he's played by Humphrey Bogart. Right. If you had to have a really strong leading man to play that role and have people fall in love with him at the beginning. Because if you look at it objectively, at the beginning of that story, here's this guy who's whining about losing his girlfriend and he's got this bar and he doesn't help anybody. And by the end, what does he do? He gives up the woman that he loves and he saves the Western world. I mean, it's a great way of looking at your lead character. How do I take them from this place to this place? And that's the same thing in Kramer vs Kramer. At the beginning you have a very selfish, you know, guy who wants his own name in lights. And at the end, you've got a guy crying because he's got his son back.

It's. That's when we go. That's when the tears come to our own eyes when we're watching a story like that. Because it, what it says to us, the deep message of these stories is this is what's important, and this isn't important. And here's a reminder. When you're pursuing your life's dream and your profession, and you want to be the biggest cheese in book publishing and you want to be Stephen King, that's great. That's nice. But don't forget the Fact that you have people who love you and care about you and need you, and those are the relationships that are going to make you happy. No number of New York Times best sellers is going to make you happy, but a connection with another human being will. And that's the takeaway from stories like Kramer versus Kramer and Casablanca. And this is why storytelling is so damn important, because it solidifies and even like your assassin book. I haven't read the book, but what you've described to me is here's a guy who has to do something that he doesn't want to do in order to survive. Who does that sound like? Right, that sounds like me. Before I left major book publishing, Right.

I was going into work every day, not very happy. But I said to myself, I have to climb the rings of book publishing to reach this place so that I can do that. And then I can do that, and then I can do that. And meanwhile, I didn't really want to be going into the office every day with a suit and tie on. And it just wasn't me. So that's why story. And if it wasn't for reading and stories and the stuff that we're talking about now, Tim, I'd still be chasing the editor in chief job at Joe Schmo Publishing.

Well, so this actually gets into the next thing I wanted to talk about, which was objects of desire and then the conflict.

So when we start talking about objects of desire, I mean, we're saying that we have the protagonist and we have something that they desperately want.

Yes.

And then something happens to keep them from getting that.

That's right.

So. So if you're. I haven't seen Kramer versus Kramer, but.

So it sounds like the object of the desire is for him to become the number one ad executive, but then his object of desire changes over the course of the book.

Yes, it does. Yeah, it was. It was a novel first and it was a movie. And.

The brilliant thing about it is that, yes, his object of the desire at the beginning is to become a big, big cheese advertising executive. So, you know, I remember watching it.

You know, I came out in the 70s and I was a kid, and I remember seeing the movie and saying to myself, I kept. I kept wanting the movie to start. You know, I kept wanting, you know, when's he going to do the big meeting with the advertising people? You know, when's that going to happen? Because that's a brilliant way of sort of hooking your viewer or your reader with something that they can relate to and then slowly eroding.

That specific want to the point where they understand what's more important. What's more important is that he get his. Pick his kid up at school. So, you know, the other thing about.

I'm going to use Lolita again as an example to explain the power of a want.

The power of a want. And this is a really great thing to write down. When you're doing your, you know, you're planning your novel and you're thinking about your protagonist, give them really, really something extremely specific. You can always change it, right? But at the beginning, when you're just mapping out your story, think of something really specific that they want and then play that out a little bit. For what I mean by that is Lolita, right? The lead character is a terrible person in Lolita. Terrible. He's a pedophile. Right. Humbert Humbert and Hubbard. Humbert, what he wants to do is seduce an underage girl. He wants to bed an underage girl. So that is his want. And we learn that in, like, the first pages of the book. Now, you think most people would say, this is disgusting. I'm not going to read this anymore. But the power of the want in humanity is so strong, and Nabokov is brilliant to use this in such a way. It's so strong in all of us. We all can relate to wanting something so much that the reader or the viewer of a movie help but attach to that character because they want something so badly. And even though Humbert Humbert is a horrible human being, we can relate to his want. And subconsciously, not consciously, nobody's rooting for him to seduce this girl. Consciously, but subconsciously, we want to find out what happens. Right? We want to find out, well, how's this going to work? Is. Is he gonna. How's this? Is he gonna get this? And then we. Yeah. So the want.

Like the James Bond. It's a very simple want. He wants to stop the bad guy. That's a really important, easy to understand want.

Well, even though in, like, Kramer versus Kramer, you say, okay, so in the book, you say the inciting incident happens and it gives rise. Rise to the object of desire. So would you say that, like, his true object of desire was to not be a horrible father or like, because the inciting incident is his wife leaves and he's stuck with his kid. And now, you know, if his true object of desire was to become an ad executive, he would have pawned the kid off and kept on going.

That's correct. His what? He wants his true object to desire, the inciting incident is the wife leaves. His object of desire from that inciting incident is, I want to get my wife back. I got to get my life back into equilibrium. I have to get my wife back. And at the very beginning of the movie, there's scene after scene after scene where Dustin Hoffman says to people, she'll be back soon. You know, it's one of those women things. You know, they chit chat and one puts an idea in their head, they leave for a little while, they come back and everything's fine. So at the beginning of the story, the first, you know, the first third of the story, the first act, Dustin Hoffman is completely committed to the fact that this is a temporary setback. He's gonna get his wife back and he's gonna apologize. Maybe he'll buy her a nice piece of jewelry, give her some flowers. Everything is gonna be fine. So the object of desire that arises from the very beginning of the story is get my wife back, get equilibrium back. And so we could have seen an entire movie based upon that premise. And there are a lot of movies based on that premise where somebody is left at the very beginning of the story and they spend the rest of the story trying to get that person back. And that is a very clear object of desire. I want to get my wife back. But instead, in Kramer versus of Kramer.

It innovated the convention of, oh, here's an inciting incident that gives us an object of desire of getting the partner back.

What if. What if the object of desire and he, you know, Dustin Hoffman, until the very end of that movie, still thinks he's gonna get her back.

And it's only when, you know, she invites. Meryl Streep plays his wife. You've got to see the movie. It's really good. Meryl Streep plays his wife. And until the very end of the movie, like, I'd say four fifths of the way through the movie, he still has that object of desire. He thinks, oh, if I'm a better father, my wife will like me better. You know, if I pick up my kid at school a little bit and we hang out, she'll, you know, she's gonna see I changed. And once she sees I change, then, you know, she's gonna find that. That wonderful thing about me that we had before when we got married, and it's gonna. It's gonna resolve itself so deep down, you know, and at the. And so until the very end of the movie, he. She calls him and says, you know, I'm. I'm ready. I'M ready to come back, right? And he's so excited, right? He's like, she's ready to come back. I'm gonna get her back. And he says, oh, well, when are you moving back in? And she says, oh, I think you misunderstand. I'm ready to take the sun. I want the sun back. I don't want you back. I want my son back. And that's, you know, that's the payoff for the final payoff of the movie, which is the battle for the sun. Who's going to get the son, the mother or the father? And you have a courtroom scene, which is a great external genre that the writer uses so that we can all attach to it. We all know the conventions of a courtroom scene and we all know what's going to happen. And it brings up another best bad choice. Irreconcilable. Good. And at the very end of that story, Dustin Hoffman has to say to himself, hey, you know, is it good to put my kid on the stand, on the witness stand so that I can show that his mother abandoned him and that I deserve to be the primary parent? Is that good for him? Is that better for him than for him being with his mother by himself? And he makes the biggest sacrifice and he says, no.

I've got to let the person that I love the most in the world right now go because it's better for him.

Oh, man, I don't know if I can watch that movie now.

It's unbelievable. And you're with every single. And the acting is impeccable.

And it's just, it's life affirming and it's scary. It's scary because it's a very, it's. It's one of those stories that you could say to yourself, oh my gosh, I could be that guy. Right.

Well, so when we're trying to. So the very beginning of your story, you're trying to think of it sounds like, you know, starting with your character and what is a particular thing he wants. The inciting incident is what keeps him like ultimately throws out his path of what he's going after. And then the object of desire is what he goes after for the rest of the rest of the novel.

Yeah, I mean, I'll try and make it even more simple than that.

Okay.

The very, very beginning of your story, your character's life is thrown out of balance. That's it. And what we want when our lives are thrown out of balance is we want to get back to equilibrium. We want to get back to the same old routine. We don't like stress of being unbalanced human beings in general. So think about your story that way. Something happens to your lead character. What I call the inciting incident that throws their life out of balance. That thing that out of balance thing from that is the stew from which the object of desire will arise. And the object of desire is the thing that the lead character thinks if they can get, their life will go back to balance. Yeah.

This makes me think of Star Wars. So, you know, the stormtroopers come in and wipe out Luke's family. So that's the inciting incident.

Right.

And then he's like, okay, okay, I'll take you as far as this place. And then I got to go off and figure something out. And then it's like he keeps getting dragged along on this adventure that all along he's like, can I just get back to my normal life?

Yes.

And so. But even while he's, like, in the trash chute of the, you know, Death Star, somehow he ended up there. And that seemed like the quickest path to get back to how things used to be.

Well, it's been a long time since I saw Star wars, but I think.

About, like he said, you know, he tells, you know, Obi Wan Kenobi says, okay, you have to. You have to come with me, and you have to join this, and we got to fight. And he's like, no, no, no, no, but I'll take you this far, you know, and he's. And then he just gets dragged into the whole thing.

Well, there's no. Here's the thing about Star wars and George Lucas. He's the first one to say it. He used Joseph Campbell's the Hero's Journey as his inspiration for the plot points in Star wars. And he tried to follow the hero's journey in a way, in the way that Joseph Campbell described it in that great series on pbs. And if you haven't seen it, it's definitely worth watching.

And he also wrote the classic book the Hero with a Thousand Faces. And what the hero's journey is is something that I call the story spine. And I'm sorry to get a little bit too.

I'm trying to get. I don't mean to get away from the core of content, but this is the core of content. And the story spine is sort of my manipulation of the hero's journey in a way. And Star wars is about what happens in a hero is that their life gets thrown out of balance, and what they try and do is keep Trying to get back to their life the way it used to be. But they are the one. They are the one who has to do this certain amazing thing to save other people. But they're reluctant to do it. I mean, this goes all the way back to the Iliad, you know, and every. Every tribal, indigenous culture in the history of humanity has this story. I mean, this is like the DNA of story.

It's. It's a. It's a beautiful story, too, because. All right, so the hero at the beginning of the story gets his life thrown out of balance, just as you described Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. And then he makes it his journey just to get back to some sense of normality. And there's always this mentor figure who says, no, no, no, no, no, no. You are required to seize your inner self. You are required to help humanity. We need you. Or dire things are going to happen if you don't take on your purpose in life, your goal, you're going to ruin it for everybody. And so there's a moment where it's sort of the all is lost moment when the hero says to themselves, okay, enough already. All right, I'll do it. And it's at that point where we get the great climactic scenes where they have to seize that inner genius within them to overcome external or personal conflicts. It's usually a war story or something of that nature. And then what happens at the end of the story is that that hero has changed. They have transformed from someone who's not. Who's sort of. I don't really want to change who I am to somebody who has completely changed. And then they go back. They go back home like in the Odyssey, and they explain to the people what they've learned. And this is a beautiful story.

That's the end of the Lord of the Rings too.

Of course it is.

He tries to go back home and he can't.

Yeah, because there's, you know, there's any kind of. The thing is, is that the hero has information that other people, they want it, they want that information, but they can't. They can't understand it. So the hero, what happens is that, you know, when they go home and this is what happened to poor Odysseus. You know, he finally. Finally gets back to Ithaca or wherever it's Ithaca, and nobody recognizes him because he's been through such an ordeal. He's got. His hair is, like, down to his butt, and he looks like a pauper, and he's a king, and nobody wants to hear a word he says about anything. And it's not until he's recognized by his, you know, Penelope that he really. He really feels back home. And so that's the. That's the. I mean, if I was to give one bit of advice, it's really nice place to start to sort of get a global sense of. Sorry.

A global sense of beginning, middle, and end is to think about the hero's journey and from that sort of.

Exploration, put that hero's journey into the content genre that you love. So think about, like, Jake Gittis in Chinatown. That's a hero's journey.

Now, would the hero's journey apply in the love story?

It does.

Because at the beginning of a love story, usually the two lovers, they want to do everything possible but fall in love, you know, and if they do want to fall in love, they want love on their own terms, like When Harry Met Sally. That's a great movie, right? And that's a love story, but it's. It's. It's such a great love story because we'll do anything to tell ourselves.

Oh, I haven't found the right person yet. This isn't the right person. Yeah, she's cute and everything, and she's nice, and we laugh all the time. And I love going to movies with her, and if I have a problem, she's the first person I call, but she's not the right one for me. And the entire movie is about these two people who are obviously in love from the first moment they meet.

Just avoiding that. Right. So what do they want to do? They like the equilibrium of saying, there's somebody better out there. I'm going to find the, you know, the woman who's going to rise from the sea.

She's coming for me. And so I can't concern myself with this other person until the woman from the sea arrives. That's the same thing with women, you know, like, oh, he's okay, but he's kind of a fixer upper, you know, like, he's kind of a slob, but he's. He's funny. So the great. The hero's journey in a love story is the realization of, you know, the only thing worthwhile is an attachment with another human being. That is the strength of.

A marriage or a monogamous relationship. Because it's in our relationships on Earth that we remember fondly and we live on, not in filing the right form at the irs.

Thanks for listening to episode three of the Story Grid podcast. As always, we really appreciate you tuning in, and we hope that you're getting a lot out of it, and it's helping you become a better writer. I wanted to let you know that every Tuesday, Sean is posting the entire transcript of each episode. So each episode comes out on a Wednesday. The following Tuesday, posted@storygrid.com is the entire transcript. So if you want to go back and and reference anything that we talked about, that's the best way to do it. Also, while you're there@storygrid.com, go ahead and sign up for the email list. That's where Sean announces new articles, new tools. He's putting out basically everything that's going on in the story grid universe. That's the best way to keep up with what's happening. If you'd like to support the show and continue to spread the word, there are two main ways you can do that. If you go to itunes, you can go in and put a rating and a review of the show. That helps it spread spread through itunes, which is where a lot of new people are looking for podcasts. Secondly, if you know an author that is trying to become better at their craft, please share the show with them. So whether you're in a forum or a Facebook group, or you just shoot an email to a friend, if you know any authors in your life that would enjoy the show, please share it with them. That's the best way that's going to help spread the podcast and make sure that we can continue doing this. So thanks as always for listening, and we will see you next week for episode four.