Does On-the-Surface mean External Genre?

Hello and welcome to the storygrid podcast this is a show dedicated to helping you level up your craft as a writer my name is tim grall and i'm a writer and the behind the scenes guy here at storygrid the podcast episode is hosted by story grid certified editor kimberly kessler alongside sean coyne the founder of storygrid and an editor with over thirty years of experience in this episode they are continuing their discussion of the story grid trinity by talking about how on the surface relates to the external genres before we jump in i want to mention two things you might be interested in first since it's october i recommend you check out the storygrid masterwork guide to frankenstein how does a book written in eighteen eighteen by a teenage author remain a classic and a bestseller still permeating our culture and haunting readers two hundred years later in this masterwork guide to mary shelley's frankenstein story grid editor and novelist maya rushing walker leads us deep into the heart of the story demonstrating how shelley blends essential elements of the horror and morality genres into a spectacular and chilling effect you can get twenty percent off the masterwork guide to frankenstein and all of our books at storygrid dot com books with the coupon code podcast lastly the next storygrid certified editor training is coming up this february editor certification has many benefits including free access to all storygrid trainings and workshops you can see all of the details at storygrid dot com certification okay that's all on the announcements so let me turn it over to kim.

And sean hi sean so we're back again i just really wanted to say that i appreciate you diving into the internal genres with me and talking through these things and i appreciate you being a good sport about me dropping this stuff on you without giving you a heads up and i love that you're able to tap into all of your experience and pull out these gems for us so thank you for that oh sure so i want to keep going i'm just going to keep kind of circling back around to this idea of the kinds of stories that i want to tell and that my clients tell are these global internal stories and i really want to and i'm hoping to help sort of translate and articulate some tools for them so that they can see how the trinity is applying and how they're able to execute the on the surface above the surface and beyond the surface in a story that the major global focus is on what's going on inside the character what their transformation that they're going through and how we still can bring that to being on the surface but still communicate this above the surface and so that it can be beyond the surface meaningful to the audience so there's a couple thoughts that kind of have come up over the last couple episodes that i kind of want to circle back to and and just see if we can shine some light on it so one thing is that you know we were talking about on the surface being the literal active can you know i think you know called like the kinetic this is characters on stage like they're walking around they're talking they're interacting there's stimulus right there's stimulus in response going on on the surface and it's interesting you know we were talking last week about the bell jar and how it even it opens with this idea of life and death right it opens with this line and we're talking about the summer that the rosenbergs were executed and i'm curious about this idea of is there something when we're talking about on the surface is this really where we're talking about the external genre whether it's you know life and death or we were we talked about it being performance like respect and shame i don't know if we want to go as far as to pa paint that broad brush to say that the on the surface is the external genre realm but that's what it that's what's coming through and it's what it's feeling like to me so i'm just curious if you can kind of talk us through like how the life values can be expressed on the surface as.

A general heuristic i would say that on the surface is about solving the problem of staying alive it's about life survive how do i survive the survival realm is living down at sort of the the lower end of maslow's hierarchy of needs so on the surface is really concerned with how do i survive literally at the bottom and then how do i how does my life survive generally so the external genres play in the realm of the external forces that are literally trying to destroy us right right right on the surface of course is going to be concerned with kinesis the kinetic energy transfers between individual human beings if i hurt you i'm going to drain you of energy and perhaps take your life so the kinetic energy is really at the play of on the surface so we associate that with the externality demands of the environment so the external genres which are action war thriller horror crime those are really concerned with the safety of the individual and society in general to say that those are really going to be dominant on the surface is accurate now it doesn't mean that you don't have the other two in an action story so what we're talking about here is not we're talking about emphasis yeah not all or nothing okay so above the surface is about cognitive behavior right what cognitive behavior is is how we process inputs into our bodies and our minds on the surface is really about how stimulus comes in and then above the surfaces after the stimulus has come through our sort of cell wall or our markov blankets how do we then process how do we process that energy information and meaning such that it can get us what we want get us what we need and perhaps get us what we all desire so above the surface is really about the cognitive processes of the avatar so when we're talking about on the surface we can really evaluate that with glass great specificity and with great detail because that's what the audience is going to experience.

The audience is not going to be able to experience what's going on in the minds of the avatars just as i cannot experience what's going on inside your mind it will never happen right so all the audience can experience is what they quote unquote see on the stage and that is on the surface right so you can't have a story without on the surface because you're just going to bore the hell out of the audience they're not going to have anything to see describing what people are thinking is not interesting and it will not sustain excitement so on the surface generates excitement because if we can have some kinetic energy on the stage that the audience can actually see and objectively evaluate themselves then maybe we can hold their attention long enough to care about what the avatars are thinking so above the surface is the cognitive processes of the avatars so when we're looking and we want to analyze our story when we start looking at above the surface we're thinking about did the character get what they wanted did the character get what they needed what happened when they didn't get it how did they respond when they did get it those sorts of things i don't want to scare the hell out of you but i am working on another level of spreadsheet that would fully analyze a story just from the point of view of the avatar and of course there's a super low level that we talked about at the trinity seminar where you analyze just what's happening on the surface to see the excitement energy that's transferring to the audience and then beyond the surface that would be alright so if i had to label these i would say on the surface concerns generally as a heuristic.

The external genres above the surface generally as a heuristic is concerning of the transformation deep breaking up of frame so that would be the internal genres and then beyond the surface would be heroic journey two point zero right the deep patterns of how one goes about navigating the external and internal worlds of our own experience and that's what jung was after when he was talking about individuation my interpretation of what's been called the hero's journey is to go back to the source and that's carl jung and jung never intended nor did he ever see the process of navigating the world as a result oriented thing it's always a process and he had a circle and he called it individuation so he saw it as a process and that's the way we frame heroic journey two point zero too heroic journey two point zero is the thing that provides the deep meaning such that we could say oh yes that's cathartically true so in terms of emotions i would say on the surface is about excitement above the surface is about intrigue and beyond the surface is about catharsis so again this trinity concept is like a homing device so that when you get confused and you're like well i only want to do this kind of story the first thing you need to say to yourself whoa whoa whoa whoa i can't do that why because i can't live in isolation in my mind i need food i need the external world right just think of it yourself yeah okay i need the external world so i can't just write an internal story because that's not life right life is externality internality and connection that's it so we have the external we have what's going on inside of us and then we connect so that's on the surface is the external above the surface is the internal and beyond the surface is the connection between the two yeah so.

What makes me really happy is that tracks with like the model of the universe i had built in my head when it comes to the trinity so thank you for confirming but like that feels really good so it seems like when we're drawn to myself and my clients and those like us when we're drawn to the like you're saying the how am i making sense of the world around me and i want these internal you know the transformation of the avatar but ultimately i want it to be meaningful because i want the transformation of my audience right like i want them i want them to connect with my with the transformation of my character so that they can transform right that to me that's what's so interesting about global internal genres is that it's the catharsis moment right what does it mean what does it really mean to the reader so in order to do that we are coming back to i still have to connect it to this on the surface what's actually happening and it's interesting i have this thing that i've been exploring and i've been saying and i've been saying it to people and clients and whatever i blogged about it on my list you know whatever right so it's like that idea that like and i think i emailed you about it once where it's this every story is a love story right because now that's my lens right that i see everything through i'm like oh we have these seven types of love and there's all these relationships and this connection and it feels like that to me that hero's journey two point zero is like oh that's a love story about me and who or you know my avatar and whoever i'm connecting with and my book is a love story between me and my reader like i'm trying to connect with them so it's just interesting and so this idea that like we have connection and disconnection happening at beyond the surface and we have life and death happening in its varying degrees on the surface it's interesting to think that you know in my version that like okay if every story is a love story well every story is kind of an action story too right we all have some version of life and death happening because we have people in this story like they're representations of life and we have life and death in life and so if you don't have some sort of on the surface something going on like and again it doesn't just say that we're going to be injured or have death the stakes of life and death necessarily but i'm just i'm thinking of all of these you know all of the internal genre stories that i studied when we were doing the roundtable podcast and how you could see like okay yeah this is a this is a worldview education story and it's a love story and it's a friendship story and it's all this stuff but you know they go on a road trip and they're rushed for time or there's all these other like oh and they you know the guy forgot his medication like there's all these like other sort of like life and death things that are going on even though they don't feel like life i don't know i'm kind of rambling it's just it's interesting and i like this idea that you're saying it's not about exclusion or it's about emphasis right and it's about.

Emphasis let me comment on your concept that every story is a love story because i would agree with that fundamentally but i agree with it from like a different frame so it goes to the notion of the expansion of life.

So we have a lot of potential life we have a lot of potential within ourselves and within other people and within the universe itself so the potential is awesome but it's only potential until it's actualized there's an incredibly brilliant philosopher named forest landry and i recommend people start to look him up because he's got some really amazing ideas it's very difficult sledding because it is dealing with very high abstractions but one of the things that i really love about his approach to deep questions is is that one of the things that he says is that love is the thing that enables choice and so if you move away from love as purely this romantic notion of right and you look at it more in the agape sense of creating the future with yourself and others then enabling choice is a really good rubric of thinking of love so what choice is is the potential and the actuality so making the choice to actualize your potential is a big deal and when you do actualize your potential you're actually complexifying so you're you're bringing more life you know metaphysical life into the universe when you actualize an idea or you have a conversation or you make a connection with somebody it doesn't mean you've built the eiffel tower from your hands from scratch the smallest potentiality that is released as actual stuff is great so love is that which enables choice so when we think of stories we could look at it through the lens of love is my protagonist how are they enabling choice are they enabling their own choice or is their choice portfolio extraordinarily constrained oh interesting well let's use that frame well the beginning of the usual story the character's pretty locked in their choices they're not moving beyond the environment that they like they like their food cooked a certain way they like their bed a certain way and they don't want to change so looking at.

You bilbo looking at you.

The heroic journey is is this deep mythic sort of transformational process that is the process by which the protagonist learns how to enable their own choices and then once they learn how to enable their own choices they can expand that by enabling other people's choices and then when they do that they can actualize for the good so enabling effective good choices is what love is yes so it's exactly true that if you say i only want to tell a story about love okay cool that's every story it is every story but if you don't have values that which people can make choices from and a whole portfolio of values and emphasize one value over another to make it clear and abide by the genre that likes that value and has you know hundreds of years of experience of telling stories about that specific value so yes you can have internal stories that have a road trip in them and and people go to the dentist and they go to the circus but if it's a performance story then it's that's going to be its arc you can see a movie like whiplash which is an internal story but boy is it active right right right is it exciting it sure is is it a performance story yes but it's really about an internal shift of somebody breaking frame and instead of playing for the validation of a bully mentor he learns the beauty of playing just playing and the ending of that story is amazing because the bully recognizes genius and he plays with the genius so that's an internal transformational story where the worldview is exploded from i want to be the best driver of all time to i really played pretty that was pretty awesome what we just did that's enough your idea of love is great so i have no criticisms of it i love how.

You'Re clarifying like we're not talking about romantic love we're talking about connection we're talking about agency we're talking about because that's what i mean and so it's fun to say it that way and people are like no it isn't you're like i know but but this is what i mean though right like and it feels good to me yeah like you're saying like it's about enabling effective good choices in yourself and therefore in others and that feels that feels true.

Well no it's not just there for others it's first yourself and then you have to have the courage like bilbo did to make effective good choices even though he would be cast out of.

His tribe yeah yeah yeah yeah and that's proof of love right yeah that's.

Right that's the proof of love so.

It'S so interesting so when we're talking about you know it's not exclusion it's emphasis right it's emphasis because one thing that you know with my pattern recognition brain or whatever i've been noticing with like oh hero at the mercy of the villain when the hero gives their gift it kind of feels like proof of love right like it kind of feels like that and when the performer has to do the big performance yeah.

It'S all different language right it's different.

So it's useful to have the specificity of what it of like how do you express the life value the core for the four core right of that genre in that moment and then how it's also you know that's why it's heroic journey two point zero like it's still it's universally still are we are we expressing agency or or we you know constraining agency right like you got.

It you got it it's all flavoring yeah yeah yeah it's different kinds of.

Snow cones yes right the ice the.

Daiquiri ice if you want a watermelon snow cone and i bring you a rainbow snow cone you're not gonna lie.

Right my daughter will cry her eyes out and be so upset because she only wanted watermelon yeah totally but you're like no it's still snow cone you're like but i don't want that yeah.

See that's different now when you want a crime story you want a crime story you don't want a dog's breath.

Right right right so that's really interesting and so so that's to me that's like what you're saying within the trinity right within the trinity the trinity applies to every genre right like every genre that we're telling it still has this these three layers going on these three dimensions happening and the way that you execute these dimensions they're going to have their own flavor based on what the genre the global genre that you're telling.

Does that ring true that's exactly right okay that's exactly right and where i got the trinity is from cognitive science and information theory so it maps onto our best understanding right now of the perceptual and expression planes of existence so perceptual planes that come into our bodies through our five senses the sensory system is the means by which external stimuli enter our bodies and then we have an above the surface sort of feeling system and so we feel those things that are not autonomic processes right so a snake response we're not going to feel a snake response we just jump but those things that are difficult being processed by your mind which isn't just your brain it's all of your peripheral neural systems so those things that are hard to figure out the answer to they go up for more processing right and the second level of processing is called feeling it's your your limbic system the you know amygdala and all that stuff it puts a valence on it pleasure pain is this something to approach or avoid and that is happening in above the surface right so sometimes you get so much information flooding and the avatar gets so much information flooding into them that they freeze because they can't process all of it and so what you do on the page is just have them freeze and what that will signal because this is the way we all are that will signal to the audience is oh something's going wrong they're not processing they don't know this off the top of their head but they will recognize the freeze response to too much information okay so and the other great thing is that we also do this thing called modeling so we're mutually modeling our friends our neighbors everything so we all have a model of our closest relationships our first party relationships we have models of second party relationships so we're modeling machines and all that means is we're making these models of our connections to other things and people and we're loading them into our sort of deep memory software so that we can predict so what happens when the audience is reading a story is they automatically you don't even have to worry about this they will model themselves onto the avatar protagonist so that way when the avatar protagonist is passive and freezes it intrigues the audience immediately because they are following the story through their eyes which means that they're seeing through the eyes of the avatar which means the avatar them so you don't have to build sympathy or empathy between the audience and the avatar protagonist if you are doing on the surface correctly this worry like oh i just don't know if my audience understands what the motivations of my avatar protagonist are in this particular moment there's only way one way to solve that clear signal clear stimulus clear response if you have wishy washy unclear ambiguous signal and wishy washy unclear like it was a nice day she was feeling good about herself what that gives me no information this is the problem with our culture is that it's the no judgy culture right i don't judge you know they might be the worst person in the world but you won't hear me saying it you know this whole no judging thing thing is killing our art it's killing our art right because what happens is artists are fearful when they get to the page because they're worried that they might be too judgy with their words in the story that they're telling i've seen this a million times where a first draft will have something like he was a real son of a bitch and then the next draft is people didn't like him as much as you might want them to you know it's just like what.

Yes.

Yes right so that's another thing to watch is signal signal signal be specific make a stand don't give me wishy washy descriptions because that's all the audience has to care about people love the bad people they much prefer they do.

Yeah they really do they love an.

Artist who will describe a real son of a bitch yeah right with great.

Detail i think there's something so fun about that too like where like if you're willing to go there and say the thing that everybody's thinking and know nobody wants to say right and you like call it out that's what's so fun the specificity i mean that you can get to certainly in any in any story but the specificity that is necessary and that you can get to in an internal story right like because you really want to like anchor them in like you're saying on the surface so you can really get in there with some of those details and when you combine it with your point of view narrative device like the edginess that you can bring is just i don't know it's so much fun it's just so so fun yeah that's great okay so we're talking about on the surface above the surface beyond the surface and again i'm keep bringing it back to okay how am i going to write my global internal stories how am i going to help my clients write my global internal those global internal stories and so we're getting the you know we want to make sure we have the external on the surface signal response this is what's happening we want to have the sense making part but be careful not to do too much right too much of that inner monologue just telling the reader what they're thinking we want to be showing that through stimulus and response and sometimes the best way to show them struggling to process is to have them freeze so to stop taking action so that's really interesting i think when it comes to so it's kind of like this idea that the hero heroic journey is about connection it feels like that agency creating you know what i'm calling like a love story right and we have this external is really about survival and it's the version of what's happening on the surface like what does life and death look like for this person in this story and so the internal the above the surface so you're saying this is really about the avatars the avatar sense making of and you mentioned something you mentioned something at the conference which has stuck with me this idea of the now the duration and the eternal right so i've noticed some really cool pattern between jumping from now to duration to eternal and how again the trinity of the time and how it's mapping onto let's say conflict or mapping onto progressive complications like oh this is a complication in the now but it's not really going to affect them later so it's you know where now later you know let's say there's a progressive complication that's going to affect them for the duration right like so it's interesting how you can use that to yeah just to progress your your story so the different layers of the trinity that we have and we're kind of all like they're applying to every genre the fact the kind of this idea that all of the genres are showing are exist but we're emphasis we're choosing to emphasize something we have to pick one like it goes back to like what your primal thing that you were saying like you have to pick a genre so i guess what is the caution with seeing these three planes of perception and seeing how on the surface above the surface beyond the surface is there a risk of someone being too wishy washy about their genre and kind of trying to do the mashup thing and i mean i guess that's always a risk but i guess how do we balance i guess that's my question how do we balance having all things three of the planes of perception and really delivering this to the reader and still choosing a global focus to make sure that the message is coming.

Through clearly it's a pretty simple step by step ladder kind of deal and unfortunately people who are obsessed with internal stories aren't going to like what i'm going to say you have to excite the audience so nobody cares about somebody's internal processing or their worldview shift if it's not exciting excitement occurs on the page on the surface so if you're telling an internal story and you really want to focus on that there's a couple of tricks that you can use to really selectively constrain your enthusiasm to show just how brilliant your enlightened idea from the worldview transformation is right and the first thing is you've got to constrain the time okay first think of it like this is a story that has to take place in nine months or six months so that's number one think of it in terms of memoir right like if you're writing a memoir who wants to one of the things i hated about biographies when i was a kid is they would always start jim smith's great great great grandfather came from liverpool and in liverpool in sixteen thirty seven like i came to read the story about jim smith not the story of where his great great great grandfather came from in liverpool right that's kind of a cheat because that way you can just dump a lot of information on the page and biographers would be like well you can't really understand the context of jim smith unless you understand where he came from well you can do that in ways that is sort of like camera shifting exposition inside a story that is actually happening so for example a movie like lincoln you know it's the story of passing a very specific bill the emancipation proclamation or i forget what the bill was but.

It ended slavery yeah emancipation proclamation yeah.

Yeah it had a very clear timeline associated with and it had battle scenes it had the civil war it had lincoln it had all this stuff it had congress etcetera but it was a very clear time frame all right so that's number one number two is what's the goal state nobody has a goal state of i want to blow up.

My worldview right nobody nobody no one.

Right right so the goal state has to be an external goal state nobody ever feels like oh i'm fully enlightened now that's cool i'm all done.

I'M just going to sit here and hum until i die right right so there's no goal state inherent in the worldview transformation story right so the internal stories are really emphasis stories and the reason why we call them internal stories because the externality isn't all that massively important a movie like little miss sunshine you know it's a little it's a pageant.

Right right right it's not it's no.

Big you know no big deal but what's a big deal is the transformation of the people who go on the road to make the little girl have her pageant right right so you need that pageant yes what's because it's a goal state i want to win the pageant right i want to be the lead drummer in the band i want to be right so all of those things are extraordinarily important to figure out for your internal story and what will happen is then you'll go well what are the stages involved in becoming getting that goal then you can start blocking it out and think of the story in terms of what is happening what stimulus and response is happening is this exciting or have we seen the scene a million times before where the young ice skater comes on into the rink right yes yes yes yeah look if you know ice skating right say you were in competitive ice skating there'd be a great ice skating worldview maturation story it's just that the stories that have been told have been pretty cliche i think somebody who knew competitive ice skating would have details that would be amazing like what the rink smells like at three o' clock in the morning after the hockey players have been throwing up and drinking beer all night on the.

Ice right specificity of place yes yes.

You gotta nail what's going on the stage if you're giving a puppet show and the and the puppet master is talking to the kids for twenty minutes and not a puppet has moved on that stage that's great the kids in the audience are going to start screaming and crying wanting to get out of there yes so put people on stage create conflict stimulus and response is stimulus is conflict it's a breaking of a markov blanket with energy and the response is conflict back well here you give me that here you get back well what are you going to do that well let me think about it here's something else right yeah and we're predicting what the other person is going to give us based upon a goal state if i'm nice to kim she might you know go out on a date with me right or if i mean to kim maybe she'll leave me alone you know like it's that dumb it's that simple but when we start thinking about our big masterwork where our lead you know goethe character has a change of transformation then we just get so locked in the importance of the story that we forget that there should be.

A story thanks for listening to this episode of the storygrid podcast if your heart is set on telling an internal genre story but is struggling with how to get it on the page i invite you to connect with me for a free consult at kimberkessler dot com that's k i m b e r k e s s.

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