Finishing the First Draft

Hello, and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience in this episode. I am approaching the end of the first draft of my second novel, and I wanted to talk to Sean about what it's going to look like to do the editing between the first draft and the second draft and what's changed with all the new Hero's Journey 2.0 stuff, along with just what he's been learning. And so we start stepping into that, and I'm excited to have you listen to it, and I'm excited to finish up this draft so that we can get to editing the second draft and you can follow along. So let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, last week we went over the first half of my book, and I was really happy that you just basically told me to keep writing. So I have. I'm crossed over 60,000 words yesterday.

And I feel like I've figured out what I'm doing for the rest of the middle build. But.

I wanted to just start thinking through, because since we did the threshing and we went through, you know, the. The rounds of analyzing the drafts so that I could make fixes.

You'Ve started. You know, you've done all of this work on this Hero's Journey 2.0, which kind of incorporates, you know, not just the Hero's Journey, but genre and, you know, all kinds of other things into it. And so I just thought it would be helpful for me if you kind of started walking me through what I can expect, because my draft will be done in roughly like a month and a half. And so we're gonna have the draft, and in the past, like, I would start with spreadsheeting it and doing a full scap and then looking at it through this lens of, like, the Hero's Journey moments, the Hero's Journey archetypes. But how will you now kind of approach this, this analyzing my draft with this new kind of stuff you've been working on?

Well, the very good news is that.

The. The methodology is. Is fundamentally sound, as they say. So the tools that we've been using are still extraordinarily applicable with my new sort of.

Comprehensive, consilient look at what stories are for. I don't mean to get too abstract about it. But the thing that.

All right, let me just take a giant step backwards and kind of explain.

How the story grid methodology came to be. Well, it was an extraordinarily practical way for me as a professional, to be able to.

Get some kind of job security.

Okay. So at no point when I started coming up with these ideas was I really that concerned about universality, about the collective unconscious, about what stories are actually for, about any of that stuff. What I wanted to create was a machine. I wanted to create an analytical machine that would tell me whether or not a story worked and whether or not it didn't, and if it didn't work, what kinds of things I might be able to. To suggest to the creator how to fix them so that they would work. And the way I was defining work is, will it sell in a commercial environment? Will people part with cash to experience the story?

So what that turned out to be was tremendously valuable, not just financially, but also in terms of being able to figure out the kinds of stories that spread, right? The kinds of stories that are so compelling that they get one person to recommend them to another.

So it began as.

A sort of Dr. Frankenstein sort of means by which to create an editing machine that would take.

Something that wasn't working and pop out at the end. The input would be something that wasn't working. At the end, the output would be something that did work. And what I discovered was that the probability of me being able to increase the commercial viability of a story using this methodology actually proved to be valuable. So it did.

You know, ensure my ability to make a living and to create a life and to have a family and to be able to pay the water bill. So that's great. So that's how it kind of began. But since. Since I've been using the machine, I started thinking about, well, why does this machine work?

You know, like, where did it come from? What are the foundational principles that I stumbled upon that seem to be universally true? And so over the last, I would say, 10 years.

You know, as I was writing the story grid book, which. Which I published five years ago, these questions started to arise, But I kept having to go back to, well, nobody wants to hear your theories about story, Sean. They just want something that works. So just put down the methodology in as simple a way as you possibly can with the best kind of examples, so that people who are struggling to figure out how to make their story, that they can actually use your methodology and make their story better. So that was my principal Directive when I was writing the book, since I published it, since we started working together, I wanted to apply it to a brand new writer who was interested and willing to do the work necessary to take his idea and to create a working story at the end. So for four years we did that and it proved to work again.

So now I'm thinking about, well, what does it all mean? What's a story for anyway? I mean, what's the, what's the function? Where did it come from? And what's the function of storytelling? And this is a deep existential question because frankly, we're the only species on earth that we know of that actually creates stories. Now there are primates that can understand very, very limited stories and animals themselves can understand the, the abstract idea of stimulus response, which sort of is a neurological thing that they are. They're able to move toward the positive, right? As opposed to avoiding the negative. That's generally a story. But so I've been thinking about what's, what's the function and purpose of this thing and then I came to the conclusion, well, it's about how to deal with environmental changes, right? How to, how do we adapt to an ever changing, uncertain environment, both externally and internally? Like sometimes our internal systems don't seem to be working cohesively. How can we fix them? How can we adapt so that we attune to our external environment better? So stories being about change, okay, so they're about how we cope with change. They're sort of like these make it crazy, make em ups and downs that people read and engage with because they serve as either prescriptions for how they might be able to cope with similar changes in their lives, to cautionary tales about what not to do in the face of certain external or internal unexpected events. Cool. All right, so stories are about change. All right, so who is making the recommendations about what to do, about to change? Ah, now this is interesting, right? So this is, this is something that I've been thinking about a lot. Okay? So if stories about change and we are attracted to them because they can provide us guidance about how to navigate through our own changes in our own lives, then I guess the person who's responsible for those recommendations or cautions would be the creator of the story or the storyteller, which is interesting to me because, okay, what makes somebody a better.

Somebody to give another person advice about how to deal with change if they themselves are having the same, you know, 99.9% DNA as I do? Right. So aren't they susceptible to the same problems of self deception as the audience. And the truth is they are. So geez, that would mean that all stories are simply kind of propaganda, meaning they are the subjective point of view of the specific storyteller trying to put forward their model of the universe in order to get people to abide by what they think is right and true. So geez, that's a little bit weird. So that means that every story doesn't really have anything that is in common because everything has been subjectively generated by the creator, slash, homo sapiens, who created that story. And then I thought to myself, but that's not true. That isn't really true, is it? Because there are these stories that have lasted thousands and thousands of years, that across cultures we can say, you know, that story is really true. There's something to be, you know, said for that particular story. And Carl Jung, you know, he was the guy who kind of came up with this concept. And in 1935, you know, the culmination of all of his deep reading across cultures was sort of brought forward in what he called the individuation process.

So what he kind of came up with is that he analyzed all these stories through time, everything from the Bhagavada to Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching to the Buddha story, to Christ story, to Muhammad, across across cultures. And what he decided to do is to say, well, there recurring thematic sort of presences of characters that reoccur in all of these stories. And is there actually a process by which these protagonists in these stories undergo such that they become enlightened? What he discovered is yes, and these abstract forces are what he called archetypes. Wow, that's pretty cool. Now, so is there. So these archetypes arise and they happen in these stories. So is there some sort of point to it all? Like, is there a meta monomythic story that all of these cultures through time share? And he thinks there is, and I agree with him.

So what he came up with is something that's very fascinating to me because when we think of, well, if somebody's making a recommendation of a prescription or a caution to us, then we got to think about their goal state, right? So is there a meta goal state for an individual in the Homo sapiens species? And by extension, is there a meta goal state for the entire species itself? Because if there is, then that story in the pursuit of this meta goal state would be something that would be universal, meaning all people who have the same species DNA would say, and when they heard this story would say to themselves, that rings True, because they would have some sort of emotional catharsis saying, oh my gosh, that's exactly what's happening to me. I can understand what this story is about, even though I know nothing about that particular culture and I've never lived in Zimbabwe. That Zimbabwe folk tale is exactly the way I feel right now. And that's an experience we all have, right? So we can all sort of put ourselves into the position of a protagonist, into a story, and feel the feelings that that culture is trying to generate. So this universality of this meta goal state of the individual inside of a collective species has become to fascinate me. And I was thinking to myself, well, is there a destination? Like, is there an ideal? Is there a utopia? Is that what these stories are offering? Are they saying, if you get to, you know, Valhalla, this is the road to Valhalla. Like, that's the old myth from the Norse tales. Is there a literal Valhalla? Is there a literal heaven? Is there a literal, you know, whatever, Enlightenment, nirvana. And what Jung came up with, which was really brilliant in my estimation, is that, no, there is no one ideal. And the reason why he came up with that was each of these cultures has their own version of what it would be to reach the ideal meta goal state as an individual and as a species. Therefore, Jung concluded, oh, one isn't right. They're all right.

Huh? That's pretty cool. So they're all right. So all of these stories that have come through time are all right. If that's the case, then maybe there isn't a single destination. Maybe it's a process. Maybe you never reached that golden nirvana place, but what you do is aspire. You aspire to a higher level of consciousness.

So, wow, this is amazing, right? So then I'm thinking, well, this is what Joseph Campbell was talking about in the Hero's Journey, right? So what's the difference between the Joseph Campbell Mechanization of Jung vs Jung and. What I kind of came up with is Joseph Campbell studied Jung and he was a brilliant guy, and he came up with a much more sort of Sean Coyne methodology kind of practicality system that could make.

Easier sense of the individuation process. Now, Jung's individuation process is very abstract, right? So there are people who dedicate their entire lives to studying what Jung taught and reading him over and over and over again. Because extraordinarily dense writer. And while he was an extraordinarily brilliant thinker, the practicalities of his metaphor and abstractions are difficult to Follow. So what did Joseph Campbell du? But he practicalized them and he made them much more understandable to.

The time period in which he lived. So he created the hero's journey, and he, you know, he counseled George Lucas as he was creating Star Wars. So this is really where Campbell kind of hit the ball out of the park, is that his mechanized version of the individuation process had clear and it had clear moments and mile markers on the journey to a specific time and place. Now, the thing that I think he might have gone a little bit overboard on was he did sort of make it a destination.

So the hero's journey, as we're all sort of understanding of it right now, there's this moment, the return home with the gift or the elixir from the journey. And so I think we misread Campbell, or maybe Campbell misread Jung when he said that there's this, this elixir, there's this magical form formula that we can come back and share as a gift to, you know, the people that we most closely associate. So I think in this day and age, Campbell's notions of the hero's journey are getting. They're under attack because there's a. There's an undercurrent of colonialization in them that was unavoidable, really, because Campbell grew out of the modern ideological framework. So what I fear right now is that if we start to attack the hero's journey and Campbell's idea of it and we rip it apart, the baby could be thrown out with the bathwater. So I think that his hero's journey needs to be refreshed. And the way to refresh it is to really go back to the core of Jung and the individuation process. And not only that, but to take advantage of the incredible leaps of cognitive science over the last 20 years. Cognitive science is really about how do you. How does the mind work? How do we actually make decisions? How is it that we encode our behavior? It's really about change. How do we change? How do we change our minds? What's an insight? How do we solve problems? What's the deal? How do our brains work? What is the evolutionary framework? There's a whole list and slew of sub specialties within cognitive science that are extremely informing when you look at social story. So what I've been working on for probably the last 10 years, but really intensively over the last four or five, is sort of taking a really hard look at the hero's journey as it's currently defined. By Joseph Campbell and using a couple of new frameworks, a micro sort of microscope using Carl Jung, and a macroscope or a telescope using cognitive science. And so what I've come to formulate is what I call the Heroic Journey 2.0. And the reason why I call it the heroic journey 2.0 is because I think the notion of hero has taken on.

A flavor that alienates a lot of people. And so my goal is to come up with universalities so that people don't fall and cling to language that they find.

Archaic. Right? So hero basically has a male connotation, I think, in the collective cultural grammar. And so, you know, heroes don't have to be male. In fact, there is, there's any number of Homo sapiens has the qualities of heroism. So that's why I've moved away from the hero's gender journey to the heroic journey because it's more adjectival as opposed to.

Noun based. Right. So when you say the hero's journey, it sounds as if the hero's the center of the world. Right? But when you say the heroic journey, what's. What's the center of that phrase? It's journey. Right. So heroic is an adjective describing the journey as opposed to the hero being at the center of this journey. It's the journey itself that's the center of the conception. And I use 2.0 because I love that concept from software, right? So the idea in software is you come up with a minimal viable product that works, right? So the program works and accomplishes a certain kind of task for the user. And then you don't just stop there, you add on features to software so that the tool can become even more robust and vibrant for the user. So what you do is you say, well, this is the 2.0 version. So the way I see this is this is the Heroic Journey 2.0. Because what it's doing is it's using the deep micro mythic structures and processes of Jung, and it's adding onto that the telescopic macro of cognitive science. And we're not. I'm not throwing away Campbell. I don't think.

I don't think it's smart to throw away someone who dedicated his life and did the best work that he did, living under a different cultural grammar than we live in now and just say, oh, well, that guy's worthless because his whole things about colonialism. I don't think he really. I mean, I think if. If he were alive today and he were in the current circumstances and he was Thinking through this, he'd be like, yeah, yeah, I definitely need to refresh that because that's not really what the point is. The point is the journey, as, as Jung said. So, so basically I, I don't want these two, these two figures who did extraordinary work in, in delineating monomythic universality and story to.

You know, the river.

Because they lived in a particular cultural grammar that is not.

Applicable to today. So what it needs is a refreshment. So that's sort of the goal I've set out for myself. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's been a major task, but it has been extraordinarily valuable to me. And it also.

Really makes me feel even more comfortable with my methodology because guess what happened is that the methodology is rhymes. It rhymes with the deep monomythic structure that Jung and Campbell were talking about. And what's even better is that it maps onto the highest levels of empirical knowledge that, that have come from cognitive science. So I know that's a very long winded answer to what this is. But the good news is that.

We can use this new structure and it will even be better. It'll be better because we'll understand the literal movements of the story globally in a higher resolution than we did with the hero leaves the ordinary world into the extraordinary world. That's a very useful idea, but it doesn't sort of.

Have the depth of. Well, this is actually the movement from a particular kind of.

Way of looking at the world into a different world. So that's kind of what this is all about. And I think it's going to be. It's been wonderful for me to figure it out and I think it's going to be really helpful for writers because it's going to bring a clarity to the heroic journey that just doesn't exist there anymore right now. Because it seems formulaic right now. I think people look at the hero's journey and they go, I don't want to do that. That's that old formula that, you know, Disney has been using for the last 27 films. Yeah, they all make money, but it seems like it's been beaten to the ground. And this new Heroic Journey 2.0 is more abstract, but it's also more specific in terms of the ways in which you can actually create a story that's unique and innovative, but lives within the trad of these masterworks. And you know, my big proposition is, well, the reason why I agree with Jung and Campbell and cognitive science is that these masterworks these stories that have lived age, like Pride and Prejudice, like the wizard of Oz, like the Hobbit, they all have this heroic journey 2.0 embedded within them, and that is actually the secret sauce that gets them to be adopted by wide var. Homo sapiens, right? So little kids love the wizard of Oz and so do adults. And it doesn't matter what culture you're from, the story has a resonance to just the average person because it's deeply, universally in tune with this universal monomythic structure.

Let's just take an example. So you said, you mentioned the whole, like, you know, moving from. Into a new. From the old world into the new world, but that's because when I think about formulas, it's like it's this sliding scale where the more formulaic you get, the more constrained it becomes in a way that actually doesn't help, right? So again, some of these systems that I've looked into before, it's like you start trying to cram your story into something that feels like it's over. It's overdoing the whole, like, do this, do this, do this, and you've got a story that works. And then if you slide to the other end of the scale, it's like these vague ideas that sound great until you actually try to use them. And then it's like, wait, I don't actually know. This isn't actually helpful, right? It's like, when you know, it's like the. The Oracle's advice in a story that doesn't make sense until the story's over, it doesn't actually help in the moment.

So using that as an example of the hero, right? So using the original hero's journey, right, Our hero moves from the old world into the new world. What is that in this new kind of 2.0 version? What would I be looking at with that? Because that has been helpful, where I'm like, okay, the person literally has to leave, right? You talked about the Hobbit, you know, which. Actually I haven't read or seen the Hobbit, but I'm thinking of Lord of the Rings, when he actually, like, steps, takes that step where he's further away from the Shire than he's ever been, right? And then I think about the wizard of Oz probably has the clearest one, right? Especially the movie where it's like, it goes from black and white to color and she's in this whole new world. But if it's not. Not the new world, what? What is it?

Well, because let me. Let me say one more Thing here because so this last weekend, you know, it's how, you know, it's October, and so we're watching spooky movies in our house. So we watched M. Night Shyamalan Signs. Have you seen that? The alien one from like 15 years ago or something?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Because I love his stuff because his earlier stuff because it was very Hitchcockian where you. You're scared, but you don't. Not because of anything you've seen.

But, like, there's no super clear new world shift, right? He's just on his farm. Like, you could make a case for like, well, you know, it's, you know, pretty hearing of aliens to post hearing of aliens. Or, you know, when, you know. But there's no. Like, he went from this location to this location.

So that would be one where I'm like, well, that's a little harder to figure out, like, where that shift is. But then when I start thinking of what you described in this heroic journey 2.0, it's like, well, what is that? You know, what kind of shift is that if it's not physically going to a new world?

Okay, well.

There. There are. Thematically, there are. There are two kinds of shifts, right? There's.

Let me back up a little bit. They're basically two kinds of.

Phenomena.

So there are what are called objective phenomena. And what an objective phenomena is is that if you and I were to walk outside together, we would both be able to say, well, the grass is 3.14 inches tall. You could take out your ruler and you could measure that. So that's an objective phenomena. In the case of the wizard of Oz, everyone would objectively say that a cyclone came to Kansas. So we can measure that phenomena. And it's true for everyone, right? So it doesn't matter who subjectively is setting forward the proposition. Everyone would mutually agree that that is an objective fact. The grass is that tall. All right? So that kind of environment.

Is one environment. Now, we also have a subjective internal qualia, right? So the. The color green that I see of the grass is different probably than the color green that you see. So my being able to explain to you what green means to me is going to be very limited, but we can agree into a general category of green, but it's not super specific. It's like not measurable. How do you measure green? You know, it's not easy. And that's. That's because each and every person has their own internal, subjective, perceptual awareness. They have the own. Their own frame of reference, their own worldview, the way they see the world is specifically theirs.

So when we're moving from the ordinary world to the extraordinary world, as discussed in Campbell.

His. His conception is generally viewed as an external movement from no tornado to tornado, no aliens to aliens. A world with aliens versus a world without aliens. Right.

So those work. Right. And when. When you said, well, once the, the Signs movie, once they understood, well, my farm is no longer my farm, my farm is now a farm that has aliens on it. That is a shift from an ordinary world to extraordinary world. Right? So we can, we can make sense of that. Now. One of the problems with the hero's journey is it's not so good with the subjective internal movement from ordinary to extraordinary world. So that's kind of where I've been laser focusing my energy because I believe that you don't have to have an external.

Phenomena to make that shift. So internally.

We have what's called a worldview. Right, I just mentioned it. And the worldview is. I like to use the analogy of sort of like a software program. So my worldview I would call.

You know, world wv5.6. I'm 56 years old, so just for fun, each year, let's just say we get some sort of different worldview. This is why we celebrate New Year's Day, right? Because we're. We're gonna. We have the anticipation that in a year's time we're going to be a different person than we were the year before. So I've got a WV56, right? So.

What, what's necessary for me is to be cognizant of the fact that I need to upgrade my software. Right. If I'm operating under, you know, old software, it might work for a while, but in, as. As changes occur in the environment, both externally and internally inside of myself, I need to figure out a better system. So this is generally what. The individuation process that Jung was talking about, this is about how we go about. It's the means by which we change our minds. So at the beginning of the story, Sean, worldview 56 is going to be challenged. Something's going to drop into his life that will require him to move out of his internal WV56 into the darkness. And that darkness shift is what we talk about when we move from ordinary world to extraordinary world. So I can get super specific about the qualities of that specific psychological movement, but I don't think we want to get that deep right now. But generally, the movement from worldview 56, I have to go into.

Something that's called.

It's kind of like.

When something gets a little bit unstable. Say you have to climb up a ladder and it's really stable. And then the further up you get to sort of cleaning out your gutters in your house, the more wobbly it gets. And you ask your older son to get to the bottom of the ladder to hold it because you're starting to wobble. That's the shift from ordinary world to extraordina. Literally move up the ladder and we start to get a little shaky because our worldview ladder isn't as functional as we think it is.

So that's what Jung was sort of talking about in terms of our subjective internal shift in the individuation process. Campbell externalized what Jung was talking about and he made it literal. So it's a literal movement from a literal ordinary world to a literal extraordinary world. Now, both of those conceptions are true, but I think Jung is more.

Universally applicable than the. The externality that.

That Campbell was coming up with. Now, look, if you're a storyteller and you're telling an action story and the. The external environment does not change, you're going to be in big trouble. Right? So I'm not saying that.

External. External change mechanisms are less than internal change mechanisms. Ideally you can do both. But what I am saying is that to look at the Campbell construction abstractly as an internal process is extraordinarily useful. And that's. That's part of what I've been doing in The Heroic Journey 2.0 is to look at Campbell and, and shade it back to Jung and making it more concrete using.

You know, cognitive science and how we literally go about changing our minds. I know that's another long explanation, but I hope it's. You can have an internal movement from ordinary world to extraordinary world. So what you were talking about in Signs was literally, that was in an M. Night Shama Lyons conception. The Mel Gibson character and the Joaquin Phoenix. That whole family had to make an internal shift from oh, here we are on the farm, to oh my gosh, I think there might be aliens on this farm. I haven't seen any yet. Right. So that's a subjective shift of worldview. They've climbed up the ladder to consider that there might be a presence of an alien life form in that on their farm. They haven't seen it yet, but they're willing to.

You know, go there. Right? Yeah. Because before they're like, there's no such thing as aliens. And now they're like, maybe there Are. Right. So that's a. That's a worldview shift into an extraordinary circumstance. Make sense?

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. All right. So, you know, I've tried to read young before, and it doesn't take me long to give up. And then even I've tried to read A Hero with a Thousand Faces a couple times and just feel like I get lost. And so I've relied on the PBS thing where he got interviewed along with just other people talking about what he said. And so when you start bringing in kind of going back towards young.

My work, like, how do you keep from getting too abstract that it's not helpful? Right? Because if there's, like, this continuum of if we go too formulaic, it becomes unhelpful, but if we become too abstract, it becomes unhelpful as well. So how are you kind of balancing that of going back towards the abstract while not losing what was helpful about the original hero's journey?

Well, here's. Here's where the cognitive science comes in.

Okay?

The. You know, I had. I have two. I have two paths of passionate interest, right? So my first one is storytelling, Right. I'm fascinated by it. I can't stop thinking about. I think it's awesome because it's. It's remarkable. I think it's magical and incredible. Okay. My second fascination is how. How. How does our brain work? You know, like, how do. Why is it that sometimes I'm able to keep my cool and sometimes I fly off the handle? And sometime. Sometimes I'm blissfully aware of the beauty of the universe and the bluebirds in the trees, and other times I want to just, you know, punch, you know, a garbage can through a wall. Right? So, yeah, I'm fascinated by that. What is. What is the processes by which our neurology and our actions. How does that work? So that's what cognitive science is fascinated by, too. So here's the thing. Jung, he speaks in very.

What's the word? I guess they're very sort of mystical kind of terminology. And he speaks of ion and of, you know, the alchemy of mind change, which can get very heady and sort of like, what is he talking about? Like, there's no such thing as alchemy. Alchemy. This doesn't make any sense at all, Right? So I kind of love that stuff because I think that that deep truth of that mythic structure that he talks about actually maps.

I think it maps onto the empirical data of how our neurons fire and the evolutionary projection of moving from the immateriality of life, the non life, material stuff into life forms. So the, the perfect medium here is to look at how we actually do change our minds and then to look at that and say, does that make sense? According to Jung and Campbell? And the truth is, yes, it does. So the ways in which we have insights, what they require, this is through cognitive science, they require us to break the frame of the way we see the world.

So, you know, there's like those, those posters from the 1990s, or there's all these.

These visual representations of framing shifts. Like Escher, the artist, he drew the hands, drawing the hands, which is a frame shift.

And there's his famous drawings of the castles, where if you go up the stairs, it doesn't make sense because it goes back around and going up is going down, which is going sideways. So that is an example of how our visual representation of the world can go kerfluy. Right, it doesn't make sense because.

Is that a technical term?

Kerfuy? Yeah. So the means by which we change our minds require us to break our framing and to reformulate for our framing. Right. So this is a classic.

Like there's a man who married, who was married, who married 32 times, but he never had a wife.

And so that sounds like a weird construction because it's a riddle. And then you go, oh, well, he was a pastor or he was a minister. Right. So you had to break the frame of being married means being with monogamous relationship and you live happily ever after. And then you have to break that frame and go, well, there are other people who, quote, unquote, marry who are actually pastors. Right. So the meaning of the word Mary shifts from a relationship between two people to a relationship between a person and a church.

That's an example of breaking frame. All right, so let's get back to Jung and Campbell. What they're talking about, the processes by which we break the framing of the way we see the world and upgrade that software to a better framing. So how we move from a worldview 56 to a worldview 57 would be the story of 2000 and, you know, 2021 for Sean Coyne. Right. So hopefully I will have a better grip, a better framing of the world in a year than I do today.

That's because I want to constantly be challenging the things that I believe are true and see if I'm still on track. So that's part of what I do at storyguard is I constantly ask myself first principle questions. What's a story for what's the point of this thing? Why do we have them? Why do they work? Why do people talk about them? Why do people sit in front of a TV for nine hours a day watching, you know, serial television? Why is that what compels us so much about it?

So the way not to get too abstract is to bring yourself back to first principles. What's this story for? Well, I'm telling an action story and I want to excite people. Okay, then, then is the interior internal shift of the mind of the protagonist going to be something you want to emphasize in the movement from the ordinary world to the extraordinary world, or do you want to go external? Definitely external. Right. So in your novel, you want Jesse to be literally on a plane moving from one place to another so that the, that the, the audience understands she's literally moving through time into another arena. But if she was, say, incarcerated, stuck inside of a prison wall and she can't leave, what kind of shifts does she have to have there? She has to have internal shifts. I edited a great book about this very thing called Solitary by a Israeli fighter pilot named Gioram. And that entire story, he's incarcerated. He's in a literal body cast inside enemy territory in a cell, and he's interrogated every two hours. How did he move from his ordinary world to an extraordinary world there? Well, he had to construct it in his mind, and that's what he did. And that's what made him sane. That's what kept him sane.

So that's where the abstractions help, is that you can always go back to your original idea. What's this story about? What's this. What genre is this story? It's generally an action story or it's generally a worldview shifting story. Well, then I better emphasize what was required to have a mind shift from an ordinary approach to the world to a different one.

Does that help?

Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. So.

So when we start kind of tackling my novel with this, what do you think would be the first thing I'm going to do?

Is it still just spreadsheet it with the 13 columns and work on that first.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Yeah. The first thing you do is spreadsheet the micro. Find all the places that need work. You don't fix them. You just compile a to do list of the things that you find wanting or lacking in those scenes. And so then you've got your, like your big, big to do list. And then before you start tackling those, you want to review the macro. Now the macro would be everything from, well, am I consistently hitting the obligatory events, the obligatory moments, and the conventions of this, of the genre I've chosen. So that's one box of things you want to check. And then probably the first box I would check though would be this new Heroic Journey 2.0. So the way to do that is I, you know, I can't cover it in five minutes. But it's very similar to the Jungian individuation process.

With cognitive science, and it's less Campbell S driven. Now, thematically, the Campbell model still maps and the archetypical representations like Threshold Guardian and all that stuff, they still work. And those are the things that you want to check too. But there are more specific mile marker posts to make sure that you're, you're breaking the frame of your protagonist's worldview. And then they have to have this moment where they hit all and they have to remake a frame of a worldview that's either better in tune with reality or narrow. More narrow to the reality. And the narrowing is more like an anti heroic figure as opposed to heroic figure.

So, yeah, I mean, basically what you'll be doing is the exact same thing we've done before, but with a greater level of specificity that will enable us to analyze your story at a better level than the first novel that we worked on. That's my general hope, and I do believe that it will do that for us. So again, it's. This isn't a process by which we have to throw out StoryGrid methodology and start a whole new thing. The spreadsheet, the fool's cap, the macro point of view, the micro point of view. These are all the means in which we employ to edit and make a story work. But now we've got a better understanding of the Heroic Journey so that we can probably get it closer to even more universality than than the previous work, which is what we want, right? Because when you can really embed the universality of the monomythic structure that Jung was talking about, this process, the more people who will find it empathetic and the more people will be engaged with it, and the greater the probability that you will actually create an emotional catharsis in your audience by the time they reach the ending Payoff.

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