First Draft is Done. Now what?

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 Grohl, 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, we get to actually dive into the editing process. So the subtitle of the book, the Story Grid, is what Good Editors Know. And we've spent the last nine months or so just working on a first draft of my story. And now that the first draft is done, we get to actually dive into the editing process, which is exciting for me to change pace a little bit. And we start to get to use all these really cool story grid tools like the spreadsheet and the graphs and all that kind of stuff. And as usual, I get out in front of myself and Sean kind of reels me back in in this episode, and we start talking. Exactly what I need to be doing now that the first draft is done and what I've got to do to get to a second draft. So it's a really fun episode. I'm really excited for you, the listener. You no longer have to just hear me slog through my story scene by scene. We actually get to dig into the editing side. And this episode in particular has some really actionable advice for you. So once you get that first draft done, what do you do? How can you use storygrid to edit it and get a much, much better second draft? So that's what we talk about in this episode. That's what my homework consists of. And I think it's going to be a lot of fun over the coming weeks as we start to dig into the editing side of this process. So I'm going to stop talking and jump in and we can get started. So, Sean, it was nice to be done with the first draft for now, I guess. Done with the first draft and moving on to the editing. And I think our listeners will enjoy a nice change in pace of actually editing something instead of just churning through a story. So my homework was we were both going to go through the first 11 scenes, so the beginning hook and do the story grid spreadsheet and kind of compare notes. So I have my spreadsheet. Do you have your spreadsheet?

I do, but before we get into that, I'd like to sort of take a giant step back because one of the things that writers often forget is that editors are human beings. Right.

Thought you were just a robot. No, no.

And that an editor. Every time I, I get a new project, I have a moment of panic. I have a moment of, oh my gosh, how am I going to get through this? Where should I start? How am I going to communicate properly? How am I going to evaluate it? How am I going to make great recommendations? And on and on and on and on. So editors face the same sort of resistance to doing the work as writers do when they're plopped down, you know, a first draft of manuscript and they've agreed to take it on, and they cache the first check, and all of those things bear down on the editor in much the same way that they do a writer when they're working on their first draft. What I'm trying to do here is to teach you not only the principles of writing, which we've sort of gone over ad nauseam over the last year and a half, but now we're massively shifting gears and we are moving away from the creative day by day writing process into the very analytical diagnosis of the story that you've put together. So the first thing I think we should do is to talk about sort of the mindset that we take on when we make that shift. You just finished your first draft, and that is a huge deal, and you should feel really, really good about it. What often happens if you don't take the moment to, in your mind, make a very severe shift in thinking is that you can overwhelm yourself very quickly with all the things that aren't correct in your book now that need to be fixed. And because you're so close to the writing process, you can make a huge mistake. And the huge mistake that you can make is to start fixing things before you've comprehensively created a to do list. And so the mind shift that you need to make right now is away from, oh my gosh, I'm almost done. I've got a first draft, I'm only a couple drafts away. As soon as I can finish this stuff, then that, and then the other thing, and then before you know it, I can get this to an agent, and then the agent will take me on, and then the agent will sell it to a major publisher. And then nine months later, you see what I mean? You can immediately fall down a vortex of expectation and emotional trauma or emotional expectation that can completely destroy you. This is when resistance, you know, we talk about this a lot and just for everybody who's listening, for the first time, resistance is A force that Steven Pressfield writes about in his book the War of Art. And it's a force that we all contend with. It's the force that stops us from doing the work that we should. So you have really, you won a round, but it's a 15 round battle with resistance. You've run round one and it was on points. You know, you didn't knock them down. You won on points. So if we're going to use the metaphor of battling an internal demon, as you're writing a project, you're fighting a boxing match. You won round one because you have a first draft and resistance is not very happy now. And it's a good idea to anthropomorphize it because if you don't, then you start attacking yourself using resistance as a force, a literal thing within you that's trying to stop you from creating the thing that you're intent on creating. That is a very, very big, helpful tool. And it's why Steve's book is such a huge bestseller year after year after year, is because it gets you away from self blame and allows you to look at an enemy and a battle in a very systematic, thoughtful way. So resistance is now very upset with you because it's beaten you so many times on your first drafts that you've quit probably three or four or five projects in your life, maybe more, before you actually had a first draft. And even the first drafts that you've had before the one that you shared with me last year, that really wasn't a professional first draft. Okay. And so the last year, what we've created is. Is a professional first draft. Meaning what do you.

Okay, yeah. What's the difference?

An amateur first draft is a series of scenes that don't have beginning, middles and ends, that don't have valence shifts, that don't have any values at stake, that are riddled with cliches, that just. They read. As a reader, readers know what's going to happen far before they do. There's no real thought about the global movements of shift and genres and obligatory scenes and conventions and all that stuff. It's sort of a heated moment when a writer cranks out 60,000 words beginning with word one, ending with the end, and you kind of have to throw it away because not one of the scenes really works. And they don't build. There's no arc. It's 60,000 words is what it is. It's not first draft. What you have now are scenes. How many scenes are in. In the project now?

So I still haven't written those three or four in the middle right of the final act or the. Yeah, so right Now I'm at 57, so it'll be right at 60.

Okay. You're gonna have 60 to 63 scenes, depending upon, you know, things that we have to figure out. But each of those scenes has a beginning, middle, and end. We've gone through them laboriously. You've written probably a hundred scenes, and we threw out 40 of them. So now you have a professional first draft, meaning it has a clear beginning, it has a clear middle, and it has a clear ending. And now is the moment when, you know, when you have a professional first draft, you kind of think and you lie to yourself, and resistance is whispering in your ear, oh, boy, you're almost done. Hey, this is great. You're almost done. You just fix a few things, tweak a few things, and before you know it, you can get that out to New York, and then all of your dreams will come true. And the truth is, you're very far from home. You're very far from home. And it's okay to be very far from home, because what you're going to do now is be almost like a building engineer. You're going to not worry about the quality and writing and all that stuff. All you're going to do is go around with, you know, a thermometer and a brace to see, to check the floorboards and to check the plumbing, and you're going to write down a list, a punch list of all the stuff that you're going to need to do before you have another draft. Now, this draft has nothing to do with line by line writing, meaning the last thing you should do is start polishing your prose. Now, polishing your prose are for the last seven drafts.

Okay, so. The last seven.

Yeah. So this draft is about getting a punch list of things that you have to do the. Really. And we're gonna. I'm gonna walk you through, step by step, how to create this punch list. But the thing that you're gonna want to do, and it's gonna be eating at you, because resistance is going to tell you, don't listen to Sean. Fix that scene. Resistance is going to say to you, oh, my gosh, I really need to knock out some of these problems because they're just driving me crazy. Let me just fix that scene. And in the middle, build that doesn't work. And then you go and you. You try and fix that scene before you have your full punch list. And what that is, is Wasting your time. And it's not just wasting your time. It could completely destroy everything you've worked so hard to build now, because you need to take a very, very long view, a 30,000 foot view, what you're trying to accomplish in this novel and all of the ways in which you are not getting to the place where you need it to be. You need to find and diagnose all the problems in the book. And you need to have a very large spreadsheet that lists these things from top to bottom. And once you have that list, then it will start to embed in your subconscious all of those problems. And I'm going to tell you, you might reach a moment of despair and say, there's no way I can fix all this stuff. But until you know all that is wrong, you're not going to be able to come up with an elegant solution that will solve multiple problems at one time. So.

So when you talk about these problems, are you talking about, like, scenes that don't follow the five commandments, or are you talking about, like, continuity problems? Are you talking about, like, character inconsistencies or just like all of the above?

At this point, generally, you have abided the five commandments in each one of your scenes. So now we're sort of. And I've never told you this or anybody else, but the story grid, the book is really 1.0 of the methodology. And there's like a PhD level of story grid that will slowly build to. That is a spreadsheet that moves far beyond 14 columns.

Oh, dear.

So what you want to do now is, you know, all those sort of narrative arcs. I talk about, you know, the Kurt Vonnegut. You know, if anybody hasn't seen Kurt Vonnegut talking about story and the, you know, the six, you know, fundamental stories in humanity, just go to YouTube and look under Kurt Vonnegut and storytelling. But Kurt Vonnegut talks about the man in the hole, the Cinderella story, the, you know, the tragedy, the Icarus story. There's six of them. And we had a whole podcast about how computers have actually figured out that Kurt Vonnegut was right and that he said this in 1948 or whatever. But anyway, those arcs that Kurt Vonnegut so elegantly draws on the chalkboard, we need to test that your arcs are, you know, abiding those sort of movements. And I'm going to show you and tell you how to do that. And that's what a lot of people say to me. Hey, I totally get the story grid spreadsheet. And the foolscap page, the story grid graphic is cute and everything, but I don't really see that it's all that helpful. And I can understand that when you're at the beginning of your writing process, but as you get more and more professional, the more you come to realize that the story grid arcs are the things that really, really show you where your scenes are moving emotionally.

So, you know, in the book, you have the different tools of the foolscap, the spreadsheet, and then you actually do the graph of Silence of the Lambs, like, so we do that for this draft.

Well, we're gonna take it one step at a time. Okay. So don't start panicking about having to make a story grid yet.

No, no. I'm just curious of like. Well, because at this point, I've never gotten this far before.

Right, right.

You know, so I'm in completely new territory of just. Yeah. So when I went through, I. I did fix a couple typos, but otherwise I left it alone. And what I did is I added a note section to my spreadsheet that just like, major things I noticed I would just take notes on, but I didn't change anything.

Right, Great, because that's my first recommendation. The very first thing you need to do when, after you've, you know, had a beer to celebrate having a first draft, is to take a few days off and then put on your editor's hat and be just not negative, but objective, as objective about the work as you possibly can. And the way to sort of get yourself into the mode is to start the spreadsheet. So, you know, that's where we. What I asked you to do last week was to map out these first 11 scenes. And we'll talk about them in a second. But you want to do, you know, this in three parts. Your beginning hook, your middle build, and your ending payoff. And it's really a question of what you're most comfortable with. I didn't tell you to map out the entire spreadsheet for the podcast because we don't want to have a nine hour podcast. So we're just. We're gonna look at the beginning hook of the story and just objectively say to ourselves and ask ourselves some questions about them. So once you do your spreadsheet, then, like, you started putting a note section in the actual spreadsheet. What I would recommend is to. And you can do that as you're going through the spreadsheet, but also open up a brand new document and call this, for lack of a better word, the story grid to do list. And so you literally put down number one and you find the blatant problems in your spreadsheet. So you and I have done a lot of work to make sure that the scenes are moving and have valences and have, you know, values at risk and at stake from scene to scene. But, you know, obviously we're not perfect and we probably screwed some things up and there are probably some scenes that are, that may not even have a value at stake. I might have glossed over something in our one year discussion of this. So don't take anything for granted. That's my point. Okay. And it's kind of, if not fun, it's a different set of neurons that you'll be using. So you're not going to feel like the dread of having to create a thousand words and writing a scene from scratch. So objectively look at your scenes and make sure that you have the five commandments of the story. You have clear turning points, you have clear value shifts, that you have a consistent point of view. And now's not the time to worry so much about continuity. So should you make sure that, you know, you're, you're not shifting, you know that you're changing the name of your character? Yeah, definitely. But don't overwhelm yourself with the minutia of continuity. And the continuity columns are things like period and time duration, location on stage characters and offstage characters. That stuff is really the really tiny, nitty gritty that's really easy to fix that you can tweak in later drafts. This is really finding the big holes, the big scene problems. So once you do your spreadsheet, then what you would do is for number one, you would write something like scene two. The value shift is unclear, turning point weak. And so you would make a note to yourself, I need to go back and look at that scene and tweak it to make sure that I, you know, I make it very clear what the turning point of the scene is, that the crisis is clear. You know, that kind of stuff. So if you go through your 60 scenes, you probably have 15 scenes that need this kind of dedicated work. Global, you know, real rethinking of the five fundamentals. You're not a terrible writer if even half of your scenes aren't, you know, up to snuff. But again, just write them down. The ones that need the work.

Don't actually fix them.

Don't fix them yet, because until you have a global perspective of everything, don't start fixing things, because your fix today could be a major screw up for tomorrow. Things are going to reveal themselves to you in elegant ways down the road that will fix multiple things at the same time. And you don't know what all the problems are yet. So what you need to do is get a big master punch list of what all of the problems are. So you have these systems in place using storygrid methodology that will allow you to exhaust your editorial thinking and get you this big, you know, 200 item master list or whatever it is.

Okay. All right.

Okay. So you know what I think might be good is to get. Just give an overview, just take it to the next level before we go into the minutiae of your scene by scene stuff. Because this is a really big episode. Because this is a transitional moment, as we started to talk about at the very beginning. This is a transitional moment from the writer's hat to the editor's hat. And I gotta tell you, once you have the writer's hat and you can put it down for a while, it's going to be a great relief. But you have to put it down a long time before you pick it up again. So again, I'm going to. I'm going to warn everybody out there. Once you have that first draft and you say, that's my first draft. Now, you've got to be an editor. And to be an editor requires very analytical, anal retentive story grid stuff that will give you a list of problems that your writer self will solve in a month or two months or however long it takes.

All right, so before we dive in, I have another maybe dumb question. So it's great that, like, you know, I have you to help me go through all this stuff, but is this the point if I. So if I were on my own and I wrote a first draft and you say I've got to put my editor hat on, is that because, like, I've got you? Or like, should every writer be switching over and doing this? Or is this the point after their first draft where they're like, okay, now I need an editor to help me find the problems?

Well, I'll tell you this. Most people make the huge mistake of hiring an editor at this point. And the reason why it's a huge mistake is because while you have in your mind and on the page something that can become something, it's very far away.

And if you handed some editor your first draft of the threshing, they would probably say to you, oh, boy, you're. You're kind of far away. Here, let me see if I can give you some ideas about how to flesh this out. And their ideas will really mess you up because they are going to react to it from a whole set of their own subjective point of view. And they could say things like, I think you should add a character who is a wizard. And you'll say, what? There's no wizards in this book. But for them, they might say, well, it's a. It's a futuristic fantasy of sorts, right? You go, yeah, but it's really a thriller about, you know, coming of age. Oh, I don't see it that way. You go, really? You don't see it that way? No, I think this would be much better as a fantasy novel set in a futuristic world where there's magic at play. And you could actually get convinced to completely do a page one rewrite based upon the opinion of an editor who hasn't spent 18 months creating this first draft. This isn't a knock on the editor. The editor is doing his or her best to help you create something that's workable and publishable to a large commercial market. They want you to succeed. They're not out to sabotage you. But their opinions and their subjective point of view can destroy you. Because what they will say are things that are based upon their worldview. And they may say to you, hey, Tim, you know, there's been Harry Potter. There's been, you know, Rick Riordan's books. I forget the title of that character. But there's been a lot of these. There's been these movies that are, you know, trilogies based upon coming of age stories and futuristic worlds. What you're writing isn't really all that unique. And it's not yet. I'm not trying to make you panic or feel terrible about yourself. I'm just saying these are the moments that can really upend you. And you wrote this story because you, Tim Grohl, had this story inside of you. And while I made suggestions about possible genres that would work for you, you ultimately made the choices that are in this first draft. And that's a delicate thing about an editor, is not to be so specific that you can upend somebody's internal muse, but also to give them direction. So the original question is, if you have a first draft of this caliber, your professional first draft, should you seek outside editorial counsel? And my very, very strong opinion is no, no. Because what is best is for you to employ you first. Because a great writer, you know, who edits my stuff, Steven Pressfield. Now, Steven Pressfield didn't become an editor. He didn't spend 25 years working in book publishing to become an editor. But Steven Pressfield's a great writer. And so I trust Steve because he'll say to me, that's not working. This isn't working. Try this. And I can trust him because he knows the same principles that I do. But his brain is wired for writing. Mine is wired for editing. So that's why we're. You know, I think we're a great team. And that's why I trust him. And he trusts me is because he knows I write and I know he can edit. So we can. We're like two halves of the same brain, in a way. And every writer has an editor brain. Steve does not ever, ever, ever send me a draft like the draft that you have now. He would, okay. He would never in a million years consider sharing that with anybody. It's like this goo that he, you know, very delicate goo he doesn't want anybody else to see. So that's what you have now. And a lot of people just want to dump their goo on an editor and have the editor form that into something for them. And, yeah, sometimes it works. I mean, a lot of people email me with exception. You know, they always say, sean, I saw that you said this, but, you know, the five commandments of storytelling aren't, you know, in scene 26 of X novel, which sold 75 million copies. So you're an idiot. And my point is that, yeah, there are exceptions to everything. And some writers use scenes that don't go anywhere. In Silence of Lambs, there's one or two scenes that don't go anywhere, but they're expositional scenes used to explain a situation. They're very short and they're sweet, and they get the job done. And he's out. He gets out of the scene very quickly. Yes, there are exceptions to the rules. Sometimes there's a way of getting exposition in, in an innovative way that does not use the five commandments of storytelling. And I don't want to make this episode about that, but my point is.

Well, I see.

Go ahead.

I see what you're saying is, like, there's a level of me that's exhausted now.

Yeah.

Right. And so the idea of, like, passing it off to somebody else, like, spending a couple bucks and making it somebody else's problem to fix the story, like, that sounds pretty good.

Yes.

So. But I mean, it sounds like you're saying that's. I mean, that's just a fool's errand or, you know, it's not going to work out the way you think it will.

No, it won't. There's this old saying, this old farmer saying. And you know, you see it when you go to somebody's house and they'll have this, you know, this drawing up on. On the wall, and it'll say something. Never try to teach a pig to sing because he'll never sing, and you only irritate the pig.

And so when you do try to dump your goo on an editor, they're feeling about it. And this happens to me all the time. Everybody wants me. They want to pay me a lot of money and hand me their goo. And it infuriates me because, hey, dude, I'm not the writer. You're the writer. You've made some. You've made some choices here, but you're so far away from something that I can actually, you know, tweak and amplify and polish and help you polish that it's ridiculous. You know, you can pay me $100,000, $200,000 to do it. And, you know, I'm. I might take that job, but then I end up ghost writing your book for you. And I've ghostwritten people's books and I've taken paychecks that way. And while, you know, I appreciate the financial security it gives me, I also, you know, I think the writer just quit and they dumped their problem on me and I fixed it. It's published. Sometimes they're best sellers. But you know what, you're giving yourself short shrift. And I know you're exhausted. That's why you get to go on vacation. Half of your brain gets to go on a very long vacation. And the other half of your brain, which I know you personally, this is the brain that you really like to use.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, when you start talking about to do lists, I'm like, bring it on. Because I can do to do lists. That's like my specialty in life.

Yeah, you just knock it. Scratch that out. But you've got to create the.

But it's the finding the to do list. Like, I. Yeah, you know, I could see, like, dumping your story, wanting somebody else to rewrite it. I'm okay with the rewriting. It's the. I don't know how to find the problems. And I mean, that's what we're going to talk about, but, like, that's the part that seems overwhelming to me. Okay.

And here's the other thing about the problems. Some things would be problems for me, but not for you. It all depends on your controlling idea for your novel, the choices of your genre that you've taken, your attachment to your character, what you internally feel that they could or could not do, etc. Etc. So there are challenges and there are questions more than I know I use the word problems all the time, but sometimes these things are just questions that you need to answer and then make sure that the reader understands the answers to those questions in the book. So problems, they connote this like a broken engine. And it is a broken engine. But I think it's probably more instructive to think of them as, oh, here are all these questions that I haven't answered yet. And I can't answer question 6 until I figured out the answer to question 312. So until you have the full list of all the questions that you need to answer, you can't answer each one individually yet. So your second draft, which is what we're talking about now, your second draft is all about being an editor and finding as many of these questions that are unanswered in your book as possible, that you can systematically write down the problem that you need to address and allow it to percolate in your subconscious as you're doing your analytical editor work. So this is a skill that Stephen King has, Stephen Pressfield has, John Grisham has. Jane Austen certainly had it. This is a skill that takes you from somebody who really busted their ass and created a professional first draft to someone who can turn a professional first draft, which is basically the clay of your sculpture. It's like the block of granite that Michelangelo started with. He took a long time to figure out, you know, what he was going to do, what sculpture he was going to create. And it probably took a long time to find the right piece of marble to chisel, too. So now what you have is Michelangelo has figured out he's going to create this statue of David, and he's got this big, huge block of marble in his backyard. He's got his chisels out, right? And now, so you've got that big blob of marble, and it's a great thing to have. But don't give the marble to somebody else, okay? Only you can fix it. And the way to do that is to use the story grid editorial approach, which will give you a comprehensive list of tons of things to think about that you will think about and fix and put into your next draft. So the first step is to do a spreadsheet of your entire novel. You've done the first 11 scenes, and through those 11 scenes, you will write down little notes of things that you have to fix and change and think about. So it can even be things like in your first scene, the very first scene of your novel, Jessie is confronted by the president as she is taking food from people who are plugged in. Right?

Right.

So the scene works. We worked on a long time. But one of the notes you can say to yourself in that first scene, boy, this is. See, this is the other thing about being an editor is that my brain just fired 19 million times to other scenes where someone gets a job. Basically that scene is about Jesse being offered a job. And the conflict is that the interviewer, offerer of the job has leverage over the lead character. He has caught her red handed doing something illegal. So she is at a great disadvantage in the scene. And the reader, when they read that scene, is going to say, oh boy, this guy has her over a barrel. Not only has he caught her doing something illegal, but he's an authority figure who has great massive power and control over the entire universe, this story. And so instinctively, a reader is going to say to themselves, there's no way this girl is going to turn this guy down. It's impossible. She'd have to be crazy to turn down this guy's offer of a job and security of leaving her mundane existence to go to a magical world. And so I think your first scene works because she says no at the end. And it's a complete, you know, reversal of what people would expect. So I think your first scene generally is in good shape, but it doesn't mean that there aren't other possibilities to tweak it. You know, I think you mentioned in one of the podcasts that maybe she's not after food. Maybe there's something else that she could be after. So instead of making that decision, now you can write a note. Scene one. Jessie caught red handed, offered job. Maybe what she's stealing is not food. Could be something else. Question mark. Okay, so you're an editor now. This is kind of fun, right? You're not having to answer the question. You just say, maybe there's something else you could steal because you definitely wanted to say no at the end of the scene.

Yeah. So what you're doing is first you're looking at making sure there's a value shift, polarity shift, and a turning point. And five commandments are there. So the scene works on that level. And so now that you know it works on that level, you're able to step back and say, okay, what, what else could we do to make this scene, are you thinking things like, am I hitting the right levels? Like, because there's one scene where I'm like that when we were going through, I'm like, it's just not. I think it hits all the right notes. Just not strong enough.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going.

To get to that. Okay, but I mean, those are the questions you start. Once you know it works in a kind of fundamental way, then you start asking those questions. I was thinking here, because he mentions the rats, that he could also mention Balaam here so I can start weaving him into the story earlier on.

Exactly.

And like, just overall, you know, because when we wrote the beginning hook, we didn't really know what the capital was yet.

Exactly.

And so all the references to the capital don't fit. Fit what it ends up being. And so, like, I just made notes that, like, I'm going to have to clean that stuff up. And we put in the voice in her head and we never use that again. So I put a note in that we'll probably need to take that out. That's what went in my notes once I figured that the scene was working.

Okay, I think this might be fun or it might be overwhelming for you.

Okay.

I'm ready.

How's that for an inciting incident? Just to address the things that you were just talking about. There are ways to use storygrid methodology to answer those questions. So just to give you something to think about and the listeners to think about, you had a really great question. How do you know that this scene is strong enough? Or is it too strong, or is it just blah? And eventually after we, we get through a second level of analysis. After we do this first level of analysis, the second level, of course, is we're going to look at the full Scout global story grid and check everything, you know, do we have the hero at the mercy of the villain scene? Do we have the. All of the conventions and obligatory scenes of your chosen genres? Is there an all is lost moment? Is there, you know, is there a Hero's journey progression? Now the, the maturation plot is all about hero's Journey. And we, we had hours of episodes about the hero's journey. Now we can actually test your story to see that we've hit all the marks in the Hero's Journey. There are about 14 different elements in the Hero's journey that you, you should have, or they should at least be hinted at. There's a transition from the ordinary world to the magical world. And from the beginning hook to the middle build and then there's a transition from leaving the magical world back home at the very ending payoff. Just off the top of my head, you did do both of those things, so don't worry about that. But what you want to do is check all of those things to make sure that they're in there. That would be. That's kind of the foolscap global story grid check. And then the next level is to start thinking about creating a story grid. And the way you do that is this is a really kind of cool thing that I've been thinking about over the past. I don't know, I've always thought about it, but I'm now starting to put it into practice, which will answer a lot of questions, is to think about your 60 scenes in terms of positive and negative valence. What I mean by that is if somebody held a gun to your head and said, okay, Tim, what I want you to do is sort your 60 scenes. I want you to find the scene where the value of naivete is at the lowest and the value of worldliness, maturity is at the highest. Which scene of your 60 scenes would you say is that? And then you would assign a number, the all is lost moment where the person is completely lying to themselves. They're panicking, they don't know what to do. That would have a number of negative 30. And the one that's really the realization point, the truth will out scene when the character realizes they can no longer live in their naive world and now they have to live in a world that has lots of variations of gray. That would be a plus 30. That's the moment when she has a change of worldview. Which scene of those 60 scenes, what number exactly is that moment? And assign that scene a valence of plus 30. Now, the inciting incident of the global story would be your baseline, right? That would be your zero scene. So if you're going to start gridding this thing and you assign valences according to the two global values at stake in the thriller, it's life and death. That's one value. Life, death. And the maturation plot is naivete. So naivete and worldliness or maturity is the value at stake or the internal plot. And then so you would have two columns. One says, what's the valence of the life death value? And what's the valence of the worldliness value? Maturity versus naivete. And you would go from scene one to scene 60 and you would try to objectively give a number for each of those values for each of your scenes.

And this is how you create that graph.

That's right. And what you will discover on your second draft is that you're gonna have a lot of wishy washy scenes, scenes that aren't clearly, you know, one or the other. And you'll see when you look at the story grid for Silence of the Lambs and for Pride and Prejudice, that's okay as long as they're in the trough of the emotional arc and they're being. The other side is being more like, for instance, some scenes in Pride and Prejudice are really sort of low on the maturation scale, but high on the dramatic love value. You can see how this can get very mind numbingly, you know, confusing for people when I'm talking about valences and assigning numbers. But the reason why you want to go through that process is what you're going to identify are moments when you're just not arching the story. You know, if you're not progressively moving it from low to high or high to low or midpoint, or those things that Kurt Vonnegut talks about, this is the way to check them. So when you do that, you will find those scenes that you need to work on and take from, say, 18 positive to 16 positive. And how you do that is through, you know, looking at levels of conflict, which we can talk about at another time. But you can see, like, there's a real. For every problem or challenge or question that comes up in a story, there are ways of looking at it. There's an analysis process that you can go through that will take you out of the I'm a terrible writer point of view into a very thoughtful, you know, examination of the actual scene and the actual character. So you're actually thinking about how to change the scene to work in a global way, even though it works. Right. This is the way you create narrative drive. This is the way you hook people into reading the book from page one to the very end. And the magical moments that will come to you are solutions to those problems. But that will happen after, you know, your global problem. You know, the global challenges.

I'm getting lost. Okay, so. Because. So is that something I should be doing now, like, as I go through each scene? So that's something I would like.

No, don't do that. Don't do that. Okay, what do you want to do is you want to sort of. I have a big yard. So when I clean up the yard in the spring, I've got huge down trees and I've got branches that are sort of big. And then I'VE got all these pine needles, and I have leaves, and I have twigs, and I have all kinds of stuff. So when I look at that mess in my yard, I can panic and go, oh, my God, I'm never gonna get this done. Look at all this stuff. There's no way. Or I can say, oh, okay, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go find. I'm gonna get my chainsaw and the big dead tree in the middle of my yard. First thing I'm going to do is going to cut that into logs, right? And I'm going to put the logs on the side of the yard. And, you know, we might use those for stools around the campfire, but I'm going to just not deal with those yet. I'm just going to put them to the side so that I can eventually cut the grass. And then I'm going to get the big, big branches, and I'm going to cut those into much smaller pieces that I can burn. And then I'm going to get the leaves and the twigs. So I have a system, a systematic process of cleaning up my yard. What do you have is a really nice piece of property that has a lot of broken branches and you've got some fallen trees. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to find out where the fallen trees in your yard are.

And so going through each scene and filling out these first seven or eight columns and then making notes along the way, that's. That's the first thing?

Yeah, that's finding the fallen trees. And that doesn't mean that if you see a bunch of twigs next to the trees, you don't make a note. Oh, there's a whole pile of twigs here that I have to clean up, too. So systematically, not overwhelming your brain and worrying about whether or not you have an irreversible progressive complication in the third beat of scene 18. Because you can go that. You can go down that road, and you can. You can fall into a pit of despair. So, okay, oftentimes you don't even go near that stuff. You don't even want to know the beat. You know the beats of your scene. You just. So anyway, go ahead.

So as I go through this. So I've done the first 11, and it sounds like my homework this week will be to keep rolling. Like, is there anything I'm looking for in particular? Or am I just trying to get all this down so that I can kind of step back and look at all 60 scenes at the same time.

The second part after you have. And again, I have an absolute second document that says story grid to do list, second draft. So yeah, write down all of those thoughts and ideas about each scene that you think you could tweak. That are opportunities, you know, in your mind, some of the global problems already, you're already thinking about them. Balaam, I'd like to get him in earlier. I need to fix the. The world. I need to devise and create, you know, a real understanding of what the capital is like far earlier than I do now. All of those little things are already in your brain. You've already done a lot of editing that's stuck in your brain. So allow that editor to be creative. And the way you do that is to write down your thoughts.

And so this is, this isn't just because I was at first thinking like these would be granular to do's where this is almost like a brainstorming document. Like, you know, should I have this in there? Or like, because one of the themes that came out towards the end was this kind of, you know, higher consciousness you can break out of reality that I didn't have in any of the rest of the book. So like, that would be a question of like, should I be weaving that in and just kind of dumping down anything that pops in my head.

That's right.

As I go through it.

Okay, that's right. You might say maybe I could, you know, it's scene three. This is a moment, a higher consciousness. You know, action point possibility. Like maybe I could have her blank here.

Okay.

And you, you might be like, you'll find moments like, could have a transitional scene, an interstitial scene that deals with X here. Okay, so yeah, you start from scene one and you go all the way through until the end. And then all those scenes that are, you know, to come, scenes that you haven't written yet, you're gonna, by the time you get to those scenes, you're gonna be like, oh, this is what I should have in that scene. And make notes of, you know, this is possibilities, possibilities for this scene, possibilities for that scene. So that's really the stage we're at now. Story grid spread at cheating. Check your five commandments. Check your turning points. Make sure the scenes work. If they don't work, write down why they don't work so that you can fix them later. And don't fix anything. Just be an editor. Just be an editor. Don't write. And this is step one. Do your spreadsheet. And then, you know, after that, we move on to the fool's cap, which is a. You know, you move from the granular to the telescopic view. You go from, you know, the atoms to 30,000ft above, and that's what we're going to do next. But it's good to flip your point of view. It's good to think small and then large and then small and then large. Keep moving your focus back and forth. And the process in the second draft is to get a master document of all of the stuff that you possibly can think of that you need to think about and address and check off as you move through. Actually, you know, the second draft. The second draft, we're not. You're not going to start writing that second draft for a few weeks. At least a few weeks.

So looking at the spreadsheet, you know, I always worry I'm doing this wrong, right? So I realized that, you know, my value shift, I may identify a different value shift than you. And that's not. Not necessarily right or wrong. But then there were scenes where I'm like, I don't know where this shifted. I don't know where this turned. Just write that down, okay? Write all that stuff down.

Don't know where this shifts. Don't know where this turns. Okay? So that. That's fine. You don't have to solve the problem. You just say, not sure about the value shift here.

Okay?

Don't know where it turns. Inconsistent point of view. You know, you just write that and just let the writer fix that later.

Okay.

Eventually, this is going to sound really obvious, but eventually, when you're firing on all cylinders, your intention of the value shift will be realized in the brain of your reader. So your reader will absolutely understand what the value shift is without knowing it. So when. When your reader. If I had used story grid, Pride and Prejudice, it would look very similar to mine. Will it be exact copy? No, but it will be really similar. Okay. And there will be different nuances to the way you look at Pride and Prejudice as the way that I do. And that is great. That is called art. Because great art means different things to different people. And if Jane Austen looked at my spreadsheet, she might say, oh, my gosh, I had no idea that I did that. Wow. You got that out of my book. Holy cow. You're kidding me. And when, you know, when we had the seminar in February and we had Steve Pressfield in the audience, he told me later on when we went out to dinner that somebody looked at him and said, because I had mentioned you know, the controlling idea of Gates of Fire and what it was about and the love story and how Steve's book was a way of bringing love into a war story that was, was very, about the brotherhood of arms and, and all this stuff. And somebody at the break asked Steve, hey, wow, did you, I didn't know that you put all that stuff into your book. And Steve laughed and said, I didn't either. I just asked Sean at the end what I did. And then I'm very happy when he tells me things that are interesting and that, you know, that is the beauty of art. So my point is that your spreadsheet for pride and petrified my spreadsheet. They would be nuancey, different. We would have different points of view about different scenes, but globally we would both agree of the structure of it. It's a story about two people who have to give up their small minded thinking in order to be capable of loving one another. And that's the theme. We have to become better people in order to earn a loving, intimate, respectful relationship with another human being. We are not guaranteed love, we have to work for it. We have to change ourselves for the better. And in order to get love, it's not guaranteed to anyone. You have to work at it. And Jane Austen would say, yeah, that is kind of what I meant. Yeah, that is it. And you say to Steve, so your book's really about love. It's really about, you know, the guys at Thermopylae loving each other and you know, working together to save one another's lives to the best of their ability, with honor, and that's enough for them. And you go, yeah, yeah, that's, that's what it's about. That's what guys go to war. They're not fighting for their country after they go, when they go to war, they're fighting for the guy next to them. That's why guys can go to war. It's not about the country, really. Yeah, they believe in the principles of the country and they believe in democracy and all that stuff, but when they're on the battlefield, they're fighting not for themselves. They're not fighting to survive, they're fighting to have the next guy survive. They don't want to let down the guy next to them. That's why they fight. That's why those guys died at Thermopylae. They didn't fight to save western civilization, they fought for each other. They put the life of the guy next to them to a higher standard than their own. And that's why guys fight. And you say that to Steve, you go, yeah, yeah, that was my point. So this is how you get to being able to communicate with people. And if you can make your value shifts in your scenes identifiable and recognizable globally to a reader who's never heard of you before, who doesn't know what you look like, who isn't your friend, and their spreadsheet would look like. My spreadsheet would look like your spreadsheet or the guy down the street. Then you've created art. You've communicated to a mass of people a very important idea. And that's why you want to check your spreadsheet. You want to make sure you. That you have actually put in a value shift. You want to make sure that there's a clear turning point. Because you want people to recognize that. Because you are building an argument with your story. The argument of your story is that people have to sacrifice their own stuff in order for everybody to benefit. That's generally the idea of a thriller. Heroes sacrifice for the good of others. And to be a hero requires that kind of behavior. That's what your story is about. You cannot be a little child and live in this world being petulant and silly. No, you have to go through trials in your life to become a better person that willingly sacrifices their own personal goods for the betterment of other people. That's the message of your novel. And all of the thriller stuff is great. You know, the futuristic stuff, it's fantastic. We love it. But that is the communication that people need to hear over and over and over again. Because if we lose that story, then we lose meaning. We don't find meaning in our lives if we don't have stories like that that solidify really important human values. So that's why your story is important. That's why you are the only one who can fix that goo. You can't hire me. I can't fix that goo for you. I can do my own thing on your book, but it's not my, it's, it's not yours. And it's, you know, you can't pay somebody else to tell your story. You can have somebody help you tell your story. That's what I hope I'm doing for you, but I can't write your story for you.

Okay? So moving forward, I'm going to try to get through as many scenes as I can in the spreadsheet. And then I'm just brain dumping every question, potential problem, anything I see that might need my attention. Putting into a master to do list.

Yes. And then why don't you share the master to do to do list with me and then we can go scene by scene through it and, you know, just see if I can add anything to the soup. Then we can move to the next stage of editing, which is adding more stuff. You know, that from the Foolscap Global Story Grid, which are much more clear tests of hitting your obligatory scenes and conventions and your global art. But we can get into that later. The first thing is to just go scene by scene and brain dump all of the opportunities, questions, interesting thoughts, all that stuff in one document.

Okay, sounds good. I'll keep moving.

Okay.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. For everything StoryGrid related, check out storygrid.com make sure you pick up a copy of the book and sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything happening in the Story Grid universe. If you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any past episode, all of that can be found@storygrid.com podcast also, I put a link up in this week's episode to the Google spreadsheet that I'm using to map out all of my scenes and the to do list. Sean and I mentioned this episode link to all of that is going to be in the show notes for this episode. And of course last week I put up the full draft of my book. So if you want to download that and take a look at that, that would be great. Just, you know, I don't want to. Please don't give me your feedback. I'm really sensitive right now about my story. Anyway, so all that is up@storygrid.com podcast. If you'd like to reach out to us, you can find us on Twitter StoryGrid. And lastly, if you would like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on itunes and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at StoryGrid. We will see you next week.