Do you have to be depressed to be a good writer?

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 author trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me soon is Sean Coyne. He's an editor with 25 plus years experience. He is the creator of Storygrid and the author of the book Storygrid, and he is helping me get through all of the common hurdles and mistakes that that new writers make. In this episode, we talk about several different things, but we eventually get to a question that I feel is very important. And the question is, do you have to be depressed to be a good writer? This seems to be a pretty wide ranging, deeply held belief among writers and I think it's an important subject to discuss. So Sean and I talk about it and we don't necessarily fall on the same side of the issue. So I think it's an important discussion to start and I hope you enjoy it. Before we jump in the show, I want to remind you that my friend Joe Bunting runs this great site called the Write Practice. T H E W R I t e practice.com if you want to become a better writer, get some righty props. Be a part of a community where everybody's working to become a better writer. This is the place for you. So check out the Write Practice. He's just a friend of the show and I want to share it with you because I think it'll help you out. So thanks for listening. We're going to jump in and get started.

So, Sean, I gotta say, and I'm sure our listeners, they are listening to the Storygrid podcast. So there's only so much praise I can heap on Storygrid without people rolling their eyes. But I will say, oh, bring it.

On, bring it on. Okay.

Writing this book with all the work I did ahead of time, has just become so much easier to sit down and write. The other day I made the decision of buying a puppy for my wife for her birthday. But what that meant is I was caring for a puppy all weekend instead of writing. But I got like this 30 minute snippet of like, okay, I can put on my headphones and write. And because of all of the work I'd done gridding out this story and getting it ready, I was able to sit down and bang out 500 words in that short period of time. And what I found is, I can sit down. I put on my headphones. I have this one album I play on repeat that's like my writing album. So my head's like, okay, you're in writing space. I read the last thing I wrote for like three minutes. And then I just start writing and having everything just like, plotted out so I have everything just laid out in front of me. It's just been so much easier to keep moving on my book than I thought it was going to be anyway. I don't. That's really not a question there. It's more just like. Like I'm just surprised how I've been able to, like, because other times when I've written, I'll write a little bit and then I'll sit there and then I'll like, just kind of twiddle my thumbs for four days. And this has just been my most consistent writing I think I've ever done.

Well, again, this is really great to hear because storygrid, as, as you know, it is something that I created as a way to help myself edit other people's work. When I was at the major publishing houses, I would. I was an editor and I'd bring in, you know, things would come to me and I would acquire them, but they would need work, and I had to figure out a way to communicate with the writer the problems with the book and also get. Offer them solutions and tools so that they could fix the problems as fast as humanly possible. And that's a very, very important element here is speed. The story grid is a tool, and it's all about speed in a way, because when you're an editor at a major publisher, you have very limited time to get the book to perfection. In fact, you can't get it to perfection. What you need to get it to is a saleable product as fast as possible. So if you buy. When I say buy, I mean acquire. What that means is when you're an editor, you get submissions from agents and they say, we're offering you this. What do you think? And if you love the project, you say, I'd like to offer you a contract. I'd like to commission the writer to do it. And then you do legal stuff and you give them an amount of money depending upon the demand for it. That's called buying a book. That's parlance and editorial world. You know, I just bought this book yesterday from Esther Newberg. That's the kind of thing that you would say. So by the time after you buy a book, it's incumbent upon the editor to get that book into production as soon as possible, which means getting it to copy, editing, proofreading, Cover design, you have to get it in the schedule. You have to start planning, marketing. And if you're spending a lot of money on a book like I used to when I was in publishing, anywhere from $100,000 to millions of dollars. The more money you spend, the faster you want to get that thing out in the public's eye because you need to recoup that money for your corporation. So the story grid was a way that I could really jettison the process of editing to get it going as quickly as possible to create a language that I could use to communicate with the writer in a way that wasn't flowery or unspecific or silly. Saying things like, well, I think you're. You know, the middle needs a little work there. It's a little slow. That's completely unhelpful to a writer. In fact, it just brings them to their knees in despair. So the fact that you're seeing the machinery of the story grid and you're basically reverse engineering story grid to use as a tool as a writer is really exciting to me because I always thought, you know what, if somebody were able to apply these principles to actually creating a story from whole cloth, they would find that it's a much more streamlined way of working than plumbing the depths of your soul day after day and hoping for the best.

Yeah, I was learning a little bit about how Apple, inside of, like, Apple stores the employees, when they give each other feedback, it's this grid, right? So you can have positive and negative feedback. I think that's the Y axis. And then you can have vague and specific, right? So if I just say you're awesome, that's vague and positive. And if I say, like, you suck, that's vague and negative. And so what they. What they say is that. And that's what in a lot of places you get is like this kind of vague, like, you're doing great, Tim. And it's like, okay, what am I doing?

Right?

And so what they say is the only kind of feedback you're allowed to give is specific. So it can be negative specific, which is like, you did this specific thing, and we don't like to do that because of X. Or it can be positive specific. You did this, and that was great. So keep doing that. And I think what's been helpful going through story grid is it's helping me get really specific about things. Like, so. And that's what made it pop in my head is you said it kind of gives this vague feedback. And so what the story grid allows you to do is like, take that kind of vague stuff and get really specific. And so I think that combined with what we talked about of like story gridding, Harry Potter, and kind of using that as my roadmap has been two of the most helpful things of getting it going. And what's neat is I sent my outline because I built my outline inside of the writing app Scrivener, and you can export your outline and send it to people. And so I sent it to a couple writer friends of mine, and one of them came back and they're like, the story's really solid. And I was like, awesome.

But it was.

That's unspecific. Positive, Tim.

That's true. But I mean, it just. Both of them said it was compelling. That kept him engaged to the end. And I only asked for feedback from people that I believe will give me bad feedback if it's bad.

Right.

And so it was. And what that said to me was, like, all of that work ahead of time of like, it took me forever to story grid Harry Potter, and then, you know, going back and forth and then story gridding, the sequences of Harry Potter and like, where is it going? And I need to do that in my book. And all the different characters that made me create that work ahead of time built this thing that has a very solid structure. And now I'm just kind of feeling like I'm going in and filling the gaps with actual words and writing. So it's been. Because I'm roughly halfway. I mean, who knows how long it's going to end up being, But I feel like I'm about halfway through. So it felt really good. And each day I'm able to sit down and write pretty quickly. I'm doing the whole. I only write forward. I'm not changing anything. You know, I just. The only time I go back and look is like, to remind myself of something I need to refer to and what I'm writing now. So that's been good. I did get some feedback I wanted to run by you. So what I've realized is I've left some, like, kind of hanging things in the book. So there was this one book I wrote, I forgot the name of it. It was really interesting. It was a really good book. But they introduced like two cops early on, and the. The writer spent a good deal of time introducing who they were, and they did a bunch of investigation and then they dropped off and you never heard from them again. And that was weird. And I went in the reviews and people were like, yeah, this was a great book. But what happened to those cops? We never heard from them again. And the guy that was giving me feedback on my book pointed out a couple of those things of, like, okay, this guy, you spent a lot. It looks like you spent a decent time on him, but he's in two scenes in the entire book. And there's a couple things like that. And like, I introduced this tool that I made it sound like it was really important, and then like, it never shows up again.

Right.

And is that a pretty common problem that you run into when you're writing your book? The first draft?

It is. And it's not something to panic about. The reason why you're doing it is while you've been doing your story grid, sort of scene by scene plotting, you are working from a very analytical point of view. And oftentimes, and this is sort of the magic of writing, once you start the writing, you have your intention for the day, and you have your scene work that you have to do that day, and you do it. But for whatever reason, and I know this happens for me, you can start getting on a Jaguar, your sensibilities start. You fall in love with a character, or you fall in love with a thing, and you give it a little bit more juice than you actually intended to when you started. And what you're going to discover is you're going to find those things. What you're doing right now, Tim, is really difficult because you are in the process of creating and doing your first draft, but you're doing it. It's sort of like you're taking a shower in the middle of Central park, you know, with. With no shower curtain.

Nobody wants to see that.

But what you're doing is you're. You're showing your process as you are creating your process. So what you're doing is you showed your outline to people a little bit early, before you had a first draft, and they're pointing out things to you that you would have discovered as you started your editorial work after you finished your first draft. But I hope it's because I'm helping and keeping you from jumping off the ledge. But when they point those things out to you, that could send somebody who doesn't have a resource, like some crazy editor like me over the brink. Because those are the moments when you can say to yourself, oh, my God, I don't know what I'm doing. Look at this. I created this character, and he's in a half a scene, and I spent 2,000 words on him. What am I doing? I Don't know what I'm doing. I gotta quit. And you would be surprised how many people really do quit on something that kind of trivial. And, you know, a lot of times what happens is you'll write a first draft and then you'll, you know, like, famously, Harper Lee, you know, her first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird was Go set a Watchman. And after that first draft, she shared it with her editor, Harper, or her agent, I forget which. I think it was her agent. And her agent probably said to her, you know, this is a little. This isn't quite there. Why don't you think about this some more? Oh, actually, I think it was in her editor. And her editor said, hey, have you ever thought about, you know, when you go into the voice of Scout, it's kind of cool. Have you thought of, like, maybe reconstructing the story and telling it from the point of view of Scout? And so Harper Lee, because, you know, she got some really great advice and she was open to it, she went with that, and she went with it in a way that allowed Scout to take over the book. So sometimes what happens is in your first draft, there might be a character, even a MacGuffin, and the fact that you're creating a tool and you're not using the tool, usually a really great tool is a MacGuffin that could be used by the antagonist or the protagonist to overcome the. The antagonist in the critical hero at the mercy of the villain scene. So you may or may not know it, but that tool might come in handy later on when you're faced with a very difficult problem. So this is all to say that as you are using the analytical approach to have an intention for every day of work, you're still being visited by the mysterious muse, and she is sort of feeding things to you that you don't understand, nor should you understand. At this point, I have to kind.

Of keep stepping in and out because if every week I just. We got on here, and I'm like, okay, I've written another 7,000 words. And you're like, awesome. That wouldn't be a great episode, right? So, like, I have to keep kind of stepping in and out. And I took this because we were texting my buddy, and I just. I copy and pasted it in a Word document. I printed it out, I put it in my notebook, and I'm not looking at it again until after the first draft. So I'm trying to do both. But it was, like, interesting having his feedback of. I basically kind of started down these Paths that I was like, well, I don't know where this is going yet, so I'm just going to start. And it's like that'll I guess that stuff everybody has to clean up in their second draft.

Yeah. And if they don't, their editor should really help them do it for them after they ask for an opinion. When you were bringing up the novel about the two cops who do some investigation and we never hear from them again. Yeah, that, that's something that you can't unless you're David lynch and you're doing some sort of like quasi anti plot thing. Like was that famous Mulholland Drive or something. Anyway, there were some, some characters in one of his movies that are very critical in the first half and then they disappear and you never hear from them again. And that's not my kind of storytelling. But some people like the anti plot kind of art filmy or art story transgressive fiction world that does not. And I will say this about story grid. Story grid is really for mini plot and arch plot stories and that have a through line and have, you know, used the traditional forms of storytelling. If you want to write an absurdist drama akin to early Edward Albee play or postmodern fiction, the story grid will probably be a great thing to know not to do. But in terms of commercial fiction, meaning people who engage the most, if you want to engage the most people in your story, I suggest you steer clear of anti plot and transgressive fiction.

Yeah. One of my realizations that really made me pull the trigger on like I'm finally going to write fiction was sitting in the new Star wars movie and I felt like such exhilaration and joy that I only get through like, you know, great books and great movies. And I was like, I have to at least try to do this for other people. And the books that like I love the most are when it feels like they just grab a fistful of my shirt and just watch me through the entire book. You know the ones where it's like 3 o' clock in the morning and I'm like smacking myself to stay awake just so I can keep reading. So yeah, that's what I'm trying to read. I'm not getting into the other stuff. I just want a very linear plot that gets me through. But it was, you know, you were mentioning about like when the muse shows up. So in my book there's like this character that's like looking out for my hero and then this character that's actively working against Her. And as I'm writing this character that's looking out for. I'm like, I'm really kind of falling in love with him. You know, like, he's like. He's really, like, taking care of her, and he protects her a couple times from, like, bad things happening to her. And as I'm reading, as I'm getting through it, I'm like, oh, no. He's got to be the guy at the end that's trying to kill her. Like, it's just, like, dropped on me. And I'm like, no.

Like, I kept kind of pushing it back. And like, finally yesterday, when my buddy was giving me this feedback, which had nothing to do with this particular point, I was just like, yeah, no, I gotta. I gotta make him the bad guy at the end. Like, I just have to. And I remember, like, in Harry Potter, like, that was what made it so great, is this guy. You never assumed he ended up being there. But what I'm going to have to do is take the guy, which got exciting to me because I'm like, what that means is, looking back at Last Episode, when you're talking about the power of 10, I'm like, okay, on my rewrite, I'm going to have to go back through and make him even more likable and make him somebody that you feel like is really going out of his way to take care of her. So when he shows up at the end and he's the one trying to kill her, you know, it goes to a new level.

Yes.

Does that make sense?

What you're talking about is. I'm glad you brought it up. There's a great word that's been around forever, and it's called catharsis. And what catharsis is, is at the very end of a story when the revolution of the story and the ending payoff is so emotionally chilling to the reader or to the viewer that they have an emotional response. And so this is, you know, this is one of the reasons why great storytellers can be very powerful people. If you can create that moment in a reader or a viewer where they have an emotional response, they start to cry, or they laugh hysterically and they can't stop or, you know, that sour kind of feeling in the pit of your stomach when you come to the realization that everything you held dear in your mind to be true is actually false, those are the moments that you're shooting for as a storyteller.

Because.

And I write about this all the time, stories are ways to show people how change happens. How we can change our worldview, how we can change the way we see the world and the people in it and how we behave, how we can be more humane, how we can all of those things that are so difficult to change in ourselves. So the tools to create catharsis aren't very sexy. They really are. What we're talking, what we've been talking about for the past half year on this podcast, what they are, is. Are being very, very specific and taking the time to really push yourself to not accept the first idea that pops out of your head. And one of the ways to check yourself to make sure you're not doing that is to use that concept of the power of 10 that I talked about last week that you so wisely brought up now. And the way to build catharsis is to really. And it doesn't have to be. It all comes from the creator. So my level of 3 on the scale of irreversibility of a particular scene might be a five for you. It doesn't really matter. It only matters to the creator. It's self evaluation that is the most important. So I wouldn't suggest that you find a group of writers and everybody assigns a power of 10 number to each one of your scenes, and then you have a big debate about whether or not scene A is a three or a four. That's a waste of time. What's important is for you to do it individually, yourself. It's like when you think about something internally that may go on in your life and you don't share it with other people, and you say to yourself, you know, yeah, I was kind of mean to that cab driver the other day. I wonder what was going on for me. Is it because of this or that and the other thing? And you sort of self evaluate. It's the same thing you need to do as a storyteller and using the power of 10 to evaluate your scenes and say, okay, well, yeah, I'm slowly building. I'm going from 2 to 3 to 5 to 7 to 8 to 9. And my catharsis, I need to pull out all the stops of my catharsis. I need to solar plexus punch my reader and my viewer in such a way that they're going to have an emotional response. And the fact is that when you fall in love with your antagonist, that's a great sign because you have to really understand the humanity of the dark side as well as the light side. And I've said this again and again and again, it's the dark nature of humanity that drives people's curiosity.

I think it was surprising, though, to me how I got there, because it wasn't. I'd been trying to think about, you know, we had talked about, like, your antagonist and making sure, you know, you're, like, really planning out your antagonist and, like, all this stuff. And I'm like. I kept trying to do it, and I'm like, it's not working. Because I'm, like, looking at this one character, I'm like, it's not. I can't break kind of through the wall. So I'm like, I'll just keep writing and see what happens. And that's when I realized. And this. I feel, like, so weird talking about it like this, but that's what I'm realized. Like, oh, that's because he's not my antagonist. Like, it's this other guy over here. And then I know. Then, like, all these things, like, click, click, click, click into place. And how I realized that that's what needed to happen is, you know, when you'd say you did something like, you're an ass to your wife in some way, and. And, like, you haven't talked about it or thought about it yet, but in your mind, you're, like, clicking off all these reasons why you were right even though you knew you were totally wrong.

Right.

So you're like, here's okay, I'm getting my list of things in place of why my response to this was totally justified. And then finally, I kind of get to this point where I'm like, all right, I just need to admit that I was a jerk, you know?

Right.

And it felt exactly like that where I kept like, no, no, no, no. That character. I'm going to need him later in, like, other books, and. And he's going to be fine. And, like, I'm focusing over here. Like, I kept, like, ticking off all these reasons because I didn't want it to be him. And then finally I'm like, ah, jeez, it's him, you know?

Well, I think that's. That's kind of fascinating when you think about it, because. Just exploring the notion of change for a minute. And we talked about this in an episode a long time ago on the seven stages of grief. But what. What you were just describing is the bargaining element in change. Right? So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So when we need to change our behavior, we go through a whole stage, you know, the Kubler Ross stages of grief, which are. Oh, boy. Shock, denial, bargaining, depression. I'm messing them up. But you can. It's not here. Hold on.

Okay, go ahead.

So what's interesting for the writing process, and this is why people love to write and want to be writers, because writing is a process of creating your own internal change as you're writing a story. And Steve Pressfield has been writing about theme for the past couple of weeks on his website, stevenpressfield.com and, you know, a lot of people get confused by what he writes because he says, you've got to know what your theme is before you can really understand. You know, what to do for your book and how to have your characters behave. But I've written books and not known the theme.

We talked about that here, right?

So it seems like this crazy disconnection, like, what's he talking about? You've got to know your theme, but you don't know what the theme is. And you wrote a book. And I think what that disconnection is all about is writing is a process of internal change for the writer as well as the ultimate viewer or reader. And what I mean by that is, internally, as you're creating a story, there's something in your unconscious that's at play that you don't understand. And it is. You're giving it a venue for it to display itself in your work. So things like you'll create a character and you don't know why you did, and he's got 2,000 words in one scene, and then he disappears. You don't understand what that's about. Well, just keep moving on that. Something inside of you has blurted that out. You might cut it. You might end up using that in a completely different way after you look at it again. So these moments of, oh, my gosh, that's not my antagonist. My antagonist is over here. And I really build up a great life history for that guy, and it's perfect. And no, I don't want the good guy to end up being the antagonist. And so you're bargaining with yourself until you hit a level of, you know what? My good guy's a bad guy. It's a bummer. Now I've got to fix it.

In the Kubler Ross curve, the thing that comes after bargaining is depression.

Yes. Because you can't bargain yourself out of the truth. Right? This is the thing. You can live in denial your entire life and never go beyond denial. But once you hit bargaining, you either convince yourself of your own baloney or you hit a depression. You hit the dip, as Seth Godin calls it. And the dip is that moment of realization that your idea is maybe wrong or Your process needs a tweak or there's something you haven't figured out yet. And it's that depressive moment that's crucial in creative work and business work and any kind of work. Psychoanalysis. It's a really important moment because. And this is what is in every story, by the way. The depression moment is the all is lost moment. And it's usually at the end of the middle build. It's the moment when the protagonist realizes, oh, my gosh, everything I've tried to achieve has failed. There's no way I can continue on the way that I've continued my entire life. There's only one thing I can do. I have to change. I have to figure out an innovation. I have to figure out a way to move forward in my life that will change my life. And I have to accept that life, for me will never be the same. And then you have to move forward. And what's the next stage after depression?

Deliberate deliberation, then choice than integration.

Right. Okay, so the deliberation moment is saying, okay, here's the story. My company is falling apart. It's not going to be what I always want it to be. So what do I have to do? Well, let me deliberate it. I'm gonna have to cut all my payroll. I'm gonna have to sadly say goodbye to most, my most trusted employees and apologize to them for not being able to keep the company the way it was going. Then I'm going to have to come up with a new idea and a new product. And this is what Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple after he was shunned and kicked out of the company. They brought him back and he had to say, oh, computers aren't going to be our thing, guys. We have to think of something new. We have to innovate. You know what would be really great is if we solved the music problem and he came up with the ipod. He didn't come up with a Macintosh, you know, the new age Macintosh. He came up with the ipod, and he came up with the iPhone. He created a computer out of a little handheld computer. He created a supercomputer that you could hold in your hand. He didn't reinvent and come up with a new desktop. He came up with a supercomputer that you held in your hand. So it's those moments of depression that lead to deliberation, that lead to a choice that lead to the final change. And when Steve Jobs made that change, he was extremely successful in his first, you know, living in The. In his own little world at the beginning. But then he hit a depression moment, and he had to innovate. And the innovations that he brought changed the world. And storytellers face the same thing in their writing. Now. That stuff can also waylay you, meaning when you hit it and you're going to hit a depression. Tim, I hate to tell you this, but you're going to hit it in your.

No, I planned too good. I won't hit it.

No, I'm convinced, like, within, like, four or five episodes, you're not going to want to do the call. You know, you're going to say, I'm going to have to. I can't do it. This week. Something came up. But when you hit that depression, it's that moment when you always say, oh, you know, I thought I knew I planned for this depression. But this thing is, I can't beat it. There's no way I can beat it. So storytellers go through the hero's journey in much the same way that their characters do. And you're finding that something in your story is not quite working, and figuring out a solution to it and making a deliberate action to change your path is a good sign. It means that you're not being too precious about your work and grinding and grinding and grinding until you can make it perfect, you know, your perfect vision. You're going with the flow, and that's a good sign.

Yeah, it's been interesting because all of my writing, basically before this has been nonfiction. And so it's been such a different thing with fiction for me. And I think that that showing up and realizing I had the wrong antagonist was the first time I kind of got that, like, brush against the muse, the thing that lives in the ether that nobody can explain. And it was that, like, tingly feeling of, oh, this is what everybody talks about.

Because it is. It's been hard because there's been these times where, like, what I've decided is my definition fault is I keep writing. And so I let things stop me, but only if I feel like I'm pressing against something, like, kind of in my personal life. What I feel like is when I come up against something new, I kind of, in my mind, put my hand on the door and kind of push. And if the door starts swinging open, I'll keep pushing, but if it kind of pushes back at me, I. I just say, okay, nevermind. And you and I were just talking about this before the call, about a project we were thinking about, and it just felt like it was Pushing back. So it's like, okay, I'm going to let that go. And I've kind of taken that into the writing where, like, when I was running against that antagonist problem and you were telling me, like, you got to. You got to think about your. You got to plan it. And, like, you know, you got to know your antagonist even more than, you know, your hero. And every time I try to do it, I'm like, man, I can't. I'm just pushing on something that's not going to give. And so I'm like, okay, I'm just going to keep writing. And so that's kind of the rule I've made is like, one of the things I've realized is I'm going to actually have to track down, like, a molecular biologist and get him to help me, because I have a little bit of that in the story. And I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm Googling. What was I Googling? I was like, equipment in a molecular laboratory. I'm like, okay, so I'm learning about the equipment so I can put that in the story. But knowing I'm probably messing everything, but I don't want to do that now. I'll do that later. But learning that kind of balance between stopping and doing a little bit of work, like we were talking about, like, coming up with names for characters and that kind of thing, but then knowing when to just be like, I'm just going to keep writing. I can't figure this out right now. It's a tricky kind of thing.

It is. And I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but one way to sort of jumpstart a problem with an antagonist or a protagonist or the thing about the antagonist, and forgive me if I've said this before, but you can never say it enough. The thing about the antagonist, especially in a thriller or an action story, essentially any story, you need a moment of clarity of their point of view in the story. And what I mean by that is you need to give them some sort of platform or speech where they can say the thing that is motivating them, their rationale. When you were talking about, you know, having a disagreement with your wife, and, you know, the minute you get home, you're gonna have. You're gonna sit down and quote, unquote, talk about it. And when you quote, unquote, talk about it, you've got to be prepared, right? You've got to have your arguments nailed. And you've got to say, well, when you Said that thing you, it reminded me of that time back in Buenos Aires, you know, like, so you can really keep yourself prepared. So think about antagonists in the same way. So what do I mean by that? What I always like to do is think like the antagonist and literally come up with my own speech and write it down or say it into a tape recorder and take the point of view of the antagonist. Here's somebody who's probably been dedicating their life to one particular goal and the goal to them is righteous. Whether or not you believe it or not, or a third party believes is righteous or not, they wholeheartedly believe that it's righteous. So for example, you know, I read a book review recently about a time in the United States. At the very beginning, the turn of the century, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of forced sterilization of so called imbeciles, right? So in the United States there was a law that said that the state, a government could impose a sterilization practice on people of an intelligence level that were determined by third party scientists as imbecilic. So there's a moment where you say to yourself, how the hell did that happen? That is crazy. In the United States of America, there was literally a law passed that. And you ask any lawyer and you mention this and they're, they're like, oh yeah, that was Stevens versus blah blah. Because they teach this in law school to explain this very fact. So how did that happen? And you have to think to yourself, somebody thought, and this was the time of science masquerading as absolute truth. So people at that time thought that science was the answer to everything. And science at that time said what? We have a problem with our genetic gene pool of the human race. So all we have to do is eliminate the bad genes from procreating and having children and we'll be cool. So let's just get rid of all the bad genes by sterilizing people against their will so that, you know, we'll get better, we'll have a master race and some really nasty, horrible people really attached to this idea. But if you think of that rational thinking, well, if you don't have bad genes in the gene pool, they won't reproduce. Now this is absolutely against current scientific theory which requires a lot of different genes in the gene pool. It's not a black or white thing. Genetic engineering and genetic research is not a black and white thing. Mutations occur. If you don't have a really thick gene pool of different kinds of genes, then mutations that make, you know, us have better abilities to adapt to our environment will never happen. But anyway, you have to think about those moments in history or those moments in your own life when you made a really stupid decision, but you thought to yourself you had a goal in mind and you did something wrong, and. But you thought you were doing right. And so that's a way to look at creating your antagonist. What is that thing that they are wholeheartedly in favor of? You know, a lot of very powerful people sometimes have to make very difficult decisions that are not good for everybody, but they're good for the majority.

Yeah.

So if your antagonist is like, one of us is gonna have to die, or we all die. So I choose you, Tim. You're gonna die now if you're Tim, you're like, my God, this guy. Maniac. But, you know. You know what I'm saying? It's like everything is contextual. Everything's.

It's empathizing with them.

Exactly.

And seeing it from their point of view. Okay, so I want to take a little side thing here before to make sure we talk about this in this episode, because this is. I don't know, it's kind of important to me. So I started following this Twitter handle. It's advice to writers. And I actually. He posts all these quotes from writers and actually set it up where I get a text message every time he posts. So all day long, I get these quotes from writers, which is probably not good.

But he put this one up from Kurt Vonnegut, and I haven't done background checks to make sure Kurt actually said this, but this was the quote. You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed. And there is this kind of. Actually just this morning, I was talking to a buddy, and he talked about. We were talking about Stephen King's own writing and how, like, the best line in that book is when he says something like, your life isn't a support system for your writing. It's the other way around. And it was talking about how he had been on drugs and all this stuff and came out of it. And then later. And again, I haven't checked this to see if it's true, but my buddy was like, yeah, I was watching this PBS thing with him, and he actually says when he wrote that line of on writing, he was high at the time.

And, like, there's just this level of belief and, you know, working in the. In publishing, like, I have, like, you meet all of these people that have decided that have to, like, die for their Art or live a totally depressed and depraved or never happy life to have good art. And do you believe that?

Well, I think it attracts a certain personality. But just to circle back to what we were talking earlier about the Kubler Ross curve, it seems to me that the depressive state is one that we intuitively know can lead you to a deliberate revelation. And what I mean by that is the things that Kubler Ross wrote about and the hero's journey that we've talked about, there is always that moment where things just. They didn't work out. You know, things just didn't quite work out the way the hero thinks they're gonna work out. Dorothy in the wizard of Oz thinks that she, as long as she gets that broom of the Wicked Witch of the west and she brings it to the wizard of Oz, he's gonna send her home. And guess what happens? She gets the broom and she brings it back, and he says, oh, I'm sorry. I'm a fraud. I really can't send you back to Kansas. I'm sorry.

So she has to reach this level of depression where, oh, my gosh, everything that I've done to get back to where I need to be failed, That's a depressive state. So I think this whole sort of thing where the writer or the artist is depressive, I think there's something to that notion that we intuitively know that if we reach a certain level of despair, it will force us to deliberate a way out. So people try and sort of get to that depressive state without doing any of the work that gets them to the. If you know what I mean. They're not shocked. They're not denying anything. They're not bargaining. They are sort of just going from zero to depression without any of the thought processes or work entailed in the rest of that Kubler Ross curve. So a real artist is someone who sees something in the world that they find shocking and wrong. So what? They. They find that shocking and wrong. And they say to themselves, within their spiritual selves, some literally, probably a lot, just through, you know, whatever circumstance, they're shocked by something in the world, and they need to create something to address that shock. And then what happens is they deny doing that thing, that resistance bears down on them and tries to stop them from creating something that can address that kind of shock. Now, I'll just use a specific example. Before Steven Pressfield ever showed anybody the pages that would become the War of Art, it sat in his desk for 10 years because. Because he found this Thing that was shocking to him. And people would always say, steve, geez, you're so disciplined. How do you do it? How do you do it? And he kept saying to himself, it's pretty simple. You got to just crank yourself up and sit down and do the work. And he thought about it, and he came up with this notion of resistance. But you know what? He didn't just publish that thing immediately. It kind of sat in his drawer, and he would give it to people, you know, when they would ask him this question so he wouldn't have to listen to them anymore. And it took him 10 years until, you know, a moment of. Not crisis, but a moment where he said, oh, you know what? I'm gonna take a chance. I'm gonna show this. I've never written any nonfiction before. I'm gonna show this to my friend Sean, and maybe something will come of it. And it did. But my point is, is that the shock is an artistic expression. An artist expresses shock at the state of the universe. And he goes through a process of denying actually creating something to address that. And then he goes through bargaining of why he should or should not do it. And then he'll reach a level of depression, like, ah, man, I just. I don't know, what am I going to do? And then it moves forward from there. But I think the point of Kurt Vonnegut saying, well, you got to be depressed to be an artist. I think what he's saying is that you've got to go through a level of. It's not easy to create something.

I think there's points of depression, and then there's this belief that you have to be an anguished person in order to create. And. And I'm asking this if I'm being completely honest out of this fear of, like, you know, I'm a generally happy guy, you know, like, am I. Since I'm, like, a happy guy that, you know, pretty much enjoys life and have not dealt heavily with depression or demons in those ways, like, am I going to be able to write something good if I'm not one of these people that are, like, sacrificing my happiness for my art?

Because me, you and Steve were talking about this a couple weeks ago when he was like, oh, you got it. You got it. Like, everything's got a sacrifice to the writing. And I'm like, God, I hate that answer. Yeah, because it's not. I have, like, kids, and, you know, I work out, and I go to church, and I love my wife, and, like, I got another business. I Run. And I'm also trying to write. And so when these things kind of pop up of like, okay, you got to be depressed to be a good writer, or like, everything in your life's got a sacrifice to it. I'm like, I react very strongly to that because I really, really want to believe it doesn't have to be that way.

Well, I think that's a good question, Tim, and I don't really have an answer for you. I can understand both points of view. Knowing Steve, as long as I have, I have so much respect for the choices that he's made. And he has really sacrificed a lot of things in order to reach the level of craft that he brings to the table every single day. And it did not come easily to him. And when it doesn't come easy. And you also have to remember that there was a moment in time that old people like me sort of look back nostalgically when the novel, when the writer was a national treasure. And we looked to the writer of novels and fiction as a way to think about our world in a deep way. So we would. When a new Hemingway novel would come out or a new Philip Roth novel would come out, or Don DeLillo is coming out with a new novel in a couple of weeks, these are the people that we would, you know, we would look to, or John Cheever short story. And that era of the deep thinking, important fiction novel as driver of the culture, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon your point of view, is gone. What drives the culture now is very much informational, video driven story. That's, I would probably say television is the main driver of the culture and ideas today. And film is pretty much spectacle stuff that's action oriented, that has very archetypical figures like Iron man and things and Star wars, which are pretty much morality plays that are pretty simplistic but very exciting and interesting to watch. So the reason why I'm saying this is that after, when you were raised in that era of the novelist being like a philosopher king, cultural figure, and today the novelist does not have anywhere near that stature. And 50 shades of grey is celebrated as this wonderful thing. And maybe it is, I haven't read it. Whereas back in the day Portnoy's Complaint was like the Talk of the Town or Underworld by Don DeLillo or the Corrections by Jonathan Franson. So anyway, there's a level of this high art versus low art thing that has been going on for a long time, but the story driven, fun spectacle kind of fiction is sort of taking that over. And so do you need to plumb the depths of your humanity to create a great superhero novel? No, you don't. What you need to understand is the craft of storytelling and to create some very innovative characters and some innovative conventions and obligatory scenes that the viewer will be re energized by that they will say to themselves, I've never seen that twist before. Holy cow, this guy's incredible. But are you going to deliver an existential revelation on a par with, you know, something that Hemingway wrote or F. Scott Fitzgerald? I don't think so. Those guys were seriously impressive people who were really, you know, they were really at the edge of their psychological breaking point. And I don't think you need to go there. And I think. Here's the other thing. I think the more you write, the more you will approach those big cathartic moments in your fiction writing. But to obsess about this stuff as you're in the process of learning the craft is a great way to give resistance a big hand keeping you away from your chair.

Okay. I like that way of thinking about it. I think that's a helpful way.

Times have changed. Well, times have changed.

I mean, but there's still, you know, it's hard for me because I'm more on the side of the more the better. And so I think what's great now is that you can find the things that speak to you. There's always more of what will speak to you. I don't know. I'm probably messing this up, but I feel like it's just interesting as you were talking, because it's like those types of books that you were describing, like.

I've tried to read.

Read those, and I'm like, oh, my God, I hate this. You know, it's like, I really resonate with that. I heard somebody say, classics are the books that everybody wants to have read but doesn't actually want to read. And I was like, oh, man, that is me, like.

And so I just. I think it's interesting the way you put it of just like, they are plumbing these depths that I just personally am not plumbing. And so it doesn't resonate with me, which means that's not what I read, and that's not also what I'm going to write. But that's where like. Like sometimes when I talk to poets and they're talking about, like, how to find commercial success, and my. My real answer is like, dude, not gonna happen, probably, you know, and it's like. And there's this level of having to become comfortable with the Fact that your muse, or whatever you want to call it, is not currently, in your time in life, commercially viable. Because one of the lessons of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers is not just the 10,000 hour rule. It's also, were you lucky enough to be born at the right time?

Right.

If Steve Jobs or Bill Gates had been born 10 years later, they would have been too late. And if they'd been born 10 years earlier, they would have been too early and we would never have either of them. And so, like, there's this level of luck, of the draw of, you know, I have to be okay with. I'm never going, probably never going to write those kind of things that have touched those kind of people, because that's not who I am.

Yeah, that's absolutely valid. And again, there is a lamentation process for people as their generations grow older. I grew up in a similar sensibility as Steve did, but I was the next generation. So I was really at the end of that sort of moment when a writer was really like, you know, a deep thinking guy who wore a beret and really knew language in a way that I would never understand. And what I favor is deep, well examined storytelling that is also popular. So you're probably going to roll your eyes when I say this, as many people have before, when I've said this before. I think the Silence of the Lambs is a deeply literary story that can operate on so many different levels. It operates at the level of a chilling serial killer thriller that you just. Your heart is in your throat the entire time. But it also has deep, resonant thematic imagery and metaphor from his historical, you know, Judeo Christian theology. And you can look at it in any way you want and pick out whatever you want, depending on how deep you want to go. And I always think that that is the penultimate way of creating art. If you can create a work that reaches the everyman who doesn't want to read the classics because they're boring. And he goes, oh, man, that was great. And you can also reach the people in the Ivory Tower who are looking at the imagery of the Judeo Christian imagery in Silence of the Lambs and saying, did you see what he did with that? That thing on that thing? And the way he positioned that? That is really. And they're both valid. That, I think, to me, is really reaching a new level. Because to be crassly commercial, just to enthrall people just with spectacle, just to make a buck, I think that's cheesy and, you know, not the way to go about anything. But if you have an intention of plumbing your inner world in a way that you can innovate a particular genre using the same tools as other people before you, and go deeper and deeper with each successive work, I think you're on the right path. So all of this is to say is I think you can have great literature inside a great story and appeal to a wide, wide market of people on different levels. And to me, that is the goal of working on your craft. So right now you're in a position where you're just trying to learn, you know, the great storytelling craft. You want to hold people's attention, you want to excite them, and you want them to have a cathartic moment of excitement at the end of the story. Totally cool. I'm down with it. I think it's great. Maybe in 15 years after you've written four, five, six, seven, eight other novels, you may say to yourself, you know what, I want to go a little bit deeper here and see if I can't use some deep seated imagery and metaphor that will bring another level to this. And that's what Stephen King did. You look at Carrie and then you look at Misery. I mean, Misery is just a wonderful story and it's also so deep. It's all about dealing with success. It's dealing with all the internal demons that are out to destroy you. And you look at Stephen King's career and you see him go deeper and deeper and deeper in each book. Now he'd probably say, oh, I'm not thinking about deep stuff, but you know, it's in there. So he is.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast for everything Story Grid related. You can see that@storygrid.com for any past episodes, for any show notes. If you want to download the Harry Potter Story Grid I did a few weeks ago. All of that is available@storygrid.com podcast. Thanks as always for listening for sharing the show with your friends and we.

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