Getting Unstuck

Hello, and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. My name is Tim Grall and I am the host of the show, and I am a very struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me in a minute is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of Story Grid, the author of the book StoryGrid, and an editor with 25 plus years experience helping authors write. Write books that can sell and that work.

So last week we went through the.

First draft of my book, and Shawn pointed out to me many, many things that were wrong. And I basically spent the last week being in a sort of depression, trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do next.

So this week we actually get to.

Work on how to fix this first draft and turn it into a workable second draft. So it's really a strong episode about how. How you can take your first draft, the questions you should be asking, and how to find your theme and your genre, and how this gets you to a point where you can actually work on your second draft. So I feel a lot better going through this episode, and I think it's going to be really helpful for you as you finish up your first drafts and knowing what you should do with this giant thing you just created. So let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, the last week has probably been the worst week of this entire process for me. Like, I have been so just tied up through this entire week because I was like, well, he didn't even tell me I'm allowed to write. He just told me to go, like, read some stuff, you know? So I went. And so I've had several issues. So one is, every time I've tried to think deeply about my book, I can't. I don't know. Like, it feels like if you're in the woods and you're looking for a deer and you catch it out of your. The corner of your eye, but as soon as you look at it, it's already gone. Like, I've tried to just kind of think about it. I've had to get to the point where I just kind of think about it peripherally. That's a word.

Because every time I try to put my conscious mind to it, I'm like, I can't do anything with this. So I actually started a whole nother book, a nonfiction book that you and I have talked about offline. And so I just started writing that. I'm like 4,000 words into that because I'm just Like, I can't do anything with this. And so you told me to think deeply about the controlling idea, the theme. And so I reread that chapter of your book. I went back and read some of the posts that Steve's done on Steve Pressfield, stevenpressfield.com on theme. And like, you know, you gave me. You said the theme that was in my book was here. I got it written down. You said, those who can overcome trauma will gain in strength. And every time I think about it, I'm like, well, that sounds good to me. Can we not just use that one? You know? So that's kind of where I'm at, is I'm not sure. I'm just completely blocked on how I should be, what I should be doing, or how to handle this or how to go about, like, reworking into a second draft. You know, so much of this has been like, okay, I just need the next thing I'm supposed to work on, and I'm completely at a loss. And so that's where I'm at. I've just dumped all of that on you. So your thoughts?

Okay, well, the reason I wanted you to think, sort of take you out of the minutia of the work for a little while, is that you have a tendency, as I do, to have a checklist of stuff to do to fix things. And there's a time in a project where you have to accept the fact that the book that you have created, the first draft, it's a great thing to accomplish a first draft, but you have to step back and look at it now very, very analytically. And you have to look at it in a way that is completely the opposite of a writer writing a scene or, you know, writing an outline. And this is where editors can really, really earn their pay. So the place that you are right now is you've got a first draft. Your editor has said the book does not work. That your. The genres that you're working with are. They're hurting each other. So that the reader, when they start reading the book, is assuming one sort of genre, and then once they get further in, it kind of switches to another, and then it goes back and forth. And they don't really. They're not really complementing each other appropriately now. So the reason why I wanted you to think about theme is because theme and controlling idea are the. You know, they're the Rosetta Stone of a story. And so if we can lock down our theme in a very specific way, what it's going to tell us is what is the perfect genre to match this theme to. And right now your story has thrillerish techno thriller plot device akin to something like a Michael Crichton story.

And it also has a hero's journey sort of revelation or education plot where your lead character is discovering things about herself as she changes through the course of the story. And they're not, they're not really gelling now. But the good news is that there's a clear theme that I was able to sort of pull out of it. And I think you were working subconsciously to get that theme to be very clear in this first draft. So this is the stage for the writer to say, okay, here's my first draft. I've got to accept the fact that I may have to abandon every single word of it.

And I need to be open to change. I need to be open to throwing out things that I really love, manipulating things that I'm sort of so, so on. And I need to look at this from the 30,000 foot point of view. I need to really get down to brass tacks and figure out my beginning hook, my middle build and my ending payoff. And the right. The way to do that is to hone down your controlling idea theme. Now how do you do that? Okay, the thing to do, and I got this from Robert McKee, when you're trying to really figure out what the controlling idea is, is you have to look at the controlling idea as sort of. Here I'm going to read a sentence from his book story. A controlling idea may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end. So basically what your controlling idea is going to tell you where you start in your story and where you're going to end. And the way you're going to do that is you're going to really focus on the. The global value at stake in your story. Now you're lucky because we've had a lot of discussions about your story and what you want to do. And we sort of came down in the action genre. So the action external genre, the value at stake in action is life and death. Will the hero survive or will the hero not survive? Will. Will the hero save a victim or will the hero not save the victim? Somebody's life is at stake. So we know the value is life and death. And the other thing about a controlling idea and a theme is that you have to have in one sentence the cause of the change. So, for example, after our call last week, I've Been doing some thinking about this. Here's kind of what I came up with that I think makes sense. So here's what I have. Life cheats death when heroes confront their darkest fears and sacrifice themselves for the greater human good.

Life cheats death when heroes confront their darkest fears and sacrifice themselves for the greater human good. Now, that controlling idea theme is very interesting because it talks about the central MacGuffin of your hero. And what that MacGuffin is, is her ability to cheat death. She is capable of not only just surviving a mortal situation, but actually she gets stronger from that experience. So go ahead.

Let me stop you there. So if I'm. If I don't have access to Sean Coyne to read my story and tell me that for me, what would I do? Is this a situation where you get some other literary friends to read it and say, this is what your story says to me and try to find that kind of guiding light theme based on. If I can't see what I'm putting in there subconsciously, that means I have to get input from other people, right?

Well, you can. And I'll tell you how you do it. You have to look at the plot devices and the ideas that you came up with for your story, and you have to look at them from an analytical, psychological point of view instead of, oh, here's a really kind of neat thing that I'm going to use to make my character different than every other character in fiction. So what do I mean by that? You need to think about, well, why did you choose that your hero would have the ability to resurrect? What is it about resurrection and the Resurrection myth that is interesting to you? And what. How could you use the information in the Resurrection myth, the resurrection stories from history? How could you use that information to help you hone in on the right genre to really, really present?

So you're saying, like, take the unique.

Parts of my story.

This is almost an oxymoron. So take the unique parts of my story. See where those have been used before. That doesn't really, really make sense, but.

No, no, it does make sense.

Well, because then they're not unique. And then that's gonna tip me off to the kind of story I'm telling. Yeah, what you're telling me. Yes. So, like, when I think about people coming back from the dead, I think about, like, Lazarus in the Bible. I think about, what movies have I seen that in? I'm sure I've seen that in plenty of movies. If I really went back and looked and so. And Start trying to look at where these devices have been used in other places. And that's going to tip me off to the type of story I'm trying to tell.

Yes.

Is that okay?

Now, the resurrection myth is. So the great thing about myth is that it is pervasive in all of our lives, and we all understand it intuitively because they've myths have been with us for thousands of years. So to look at the gift that your protagonist has, which is an ability to resurrect, and not only resurrect, but get stronger and not die, is a great way of discovering which genre is the best one for you to use to really focus on. And so the resurrection myths go back to Persephone, the Greek myth, where there is a young woman named Persephone who was desired by the God of the underworld, and she was also desired by people on Earth. So the myth that explains the turns of the season is the Persephone myth. For six months out of the year, she has to go live with the God of the underworld. And the other six months, she comes and lives on Earth. So she literally dies for six months and then resurrects for six months. And if you look at the myths throughout time, there's the Lazarus myth, there's a myth in Viking Norse mythology. So what these things all have in common is that they're very strong action stories. And when an action story is.

It has to have three things. And you're playing around with the action story genre in your book, but it's unclear right now because it's a little bit muddled. We're not really sure that the conventions and the obligatory scenes of the action genre are all there right now. So you have a theme that says life cheats death when heroes confront their darkest fears and sacrifice themselves for the greater human good. Now, that is a. Remember when I said that you're controlling idea or your theme has to convey change? Now, the change in that statement is life cheats death. So at the beginning, life is challenged by death, and at the end, life wins. So just that very, very short, a little bit of information tells us a lot about how your story should be structured. The beginning of your story should begin negatively, and the end of your story should end positively.

So what that means is that when you're charting your story and you're looking at it globally, as we are now, you have to say to yourself, how does my story begin? Does it begin negatively? Is it a negative inciting incident or is it a positive inciting incident? Because if it's a positive inciting incident, it would probably mean that the ending is going to be negative because you want to convey change in your story. Okay, so let's look at the inciting incident of your story. The inciting incident of your story is a young woman gets a job at a very coveted corporation, right?

Which is positive.

It's kind of positive. Right. And it ends with her defeating the force of evil that, you know, arises in that corporation. So it ends positive, too. So it begins positive, and it ends positive. Now, I'm not saying that this is an ironclad rule, but it's a good rule of thumb, especially for the really intense global genres like action. Action is one of the first genres to ever come into human activity. Now, when I was thinking about this, I was saying to myself, okay, so Tim should probably think about changing his inciting incident from it being positive to negative. And the other thing that Tim needs to think about are the three primary conventions of an action story.

Now, these are pretty simple. And when I say them to you, you're going to say, oh, yeah, that's so obvious.

But no, I've been talking to you long enough to know if that's. Even if that's my first reaction, I'm like, oh, that can't be right.

Okay, this is very simple. In every action story now, these are roles. These are not characters.

What's the difference?

Well, a role is something that can be. Many characters can fill the role of what I'm going to talk about, or a single character can, or they can switch up.

They.

So let me just say what I'm saying. In an action story, you have a hero, a villain, and a victim. Those are the three conventions of an action story. To begin with, if you don't have a hero, a villain, and a victim, you don't have an action story. Because the action genre, it concerns life and death.

So in all action stories, you have a role filled by a hero who must confront a villain to save a victim. So when you're doing an action story, you need to say to yourself, do I have all of those roles assigned?

I don't have a victim.

You don't have a victim, do you? No.

No.

Okay.

Or I try to, like, make the hero the victim.

That's absolutely a reasonable choice, but that is really convention of a thriller. And you can make that choice in an action story. But that's sort of like a midpoint, middle build, big switcheroo as opposed to starting from there. Okay, so let me give you an example. One of my Favorite action stories of the last 10 years, and I'm not alone here, obviously is the Hunger Games right now. The Hunger Games is a story of a 16 year old girl who lives in a dystopian world. And it's run by by a sort of a technocracy, a bureaucratic division that in order to keep the society under control, it stages these Hunger Games every year or every five years. I'm not sure what the mythology is off the top of my head, but these Hunger Games mean that two children from each community have to go onto this television show. And basically whoever's left standing at the end of this game wins and they literally die. So this young girl, 16 year old girl, she's in this town. And the inciting incident of the entire story is this. So each year they have to pick two people. So all the people show up in this community, in this sort of area, and there's a guy at a microphone and he says. And he draws out of a hat. Okay. Our first Hunger Game participant is Jim Smith. And the second one is, I forget her name, but Penny Everdeen, who is Katniss's sister.

So the little girl is 8, 6 or 8 years old, and she's 10. Definitely going to die very quickly in this big competition. So what is, what does Suzanne Collins do here? She is setting up the hero, the villain and the victim in one one fantastic inciting incident scene. And so what Katniss does is she says, hey, I'll take my sister's place. I'll go to the Hunger Games. She can stay here. So what she has done, the writer has done, Suzanne Collins has done, is she's established a victim, a hero and a villain all in one big scene. The villain is this very strange government tyranny that actually shows and runs this strange world and televises this blood sport. So that's the villain. The hero is Katniss because she sacrifices herself very early on to save her own sister. And the victim begins as the sister, right? She's the victim at first, but it ends up being Katniss too, because she has put herself in the position of victim as well as hero. So in this one very fantastic opening scene, all the conventions, the really core conventions of the action story have been satisfied. And the reader is like, oh my gosh, what's going to happen next? I know exactly what this story is. And we know that Katniss is going to have to go away and she's going to have to be in this incredible competition. How is she going to Survive. What is her. Her major skill? How is she going to get through this horrible set of events? So we're raring to go to keep reading that story. And this is the key thing. When you want to tell an action story. You have to think of a really great beginning hook. You've got to really reel in the reader in that first scene, ideally. So the reason why I'm saying this is that we have a controlling idea theme that fits perfectly. It aligns perfectly with the action genre. So the action genre is very specific. It's not a techno thriller. So the things that you have used and stressed in this first draft that are techno thrillerish have to step back.

Okay.

We need to bring those back. I'm not saying we have to throw out the MacGuffin of. Of how she gets this superpower, but we have to pull it back, and we. The other thing that we have to do is immediately establish a victim and a villain in the reader's mind from page one, if we possibly can.

Okay?

So we know. We also know the ending of your story. The ending of your story is that your hero is gonna win. That's a big deal. We know that she's going to overcome the villain, at least the first villain in this, because. Let me just take a step back now and talk about the difference between characters and roles.

Okay?

A role is. Is something like in Lord of the Rings, there's seven. You know, I think there are seven heroes that make up the heroic core. There's seven different characters who have a specific skill set, and when they're all together, they're extremely powerful. So that core group is the heroic center of the story. In Raiders of the Last Ark, there's more than one villain, right? There's the Gestapo guy. There's the. I think there's a mad scientist in there. There's three heads in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They're not all coming to me right now, but I do think there are at least three forces of evil in Raiders of the Lost Ark. So you can have more than one villain, but they all. The villainous force is a crucial, crucial element in a story. Now the villain is. Go ahead.

So back to Hunger Games. The villain at first is this kind of government, and it solidifies into the leader of that government, White, I think, was his name. Or Snow, I think was his name. So it's like personified even in Hunger Games in a couple ways, where it's like this evil government, but also the guy that leads the government. I mean, is that kind of what you're talking about.

Yeah. The villain is a force that can have multiple heads. And if you're planning on making this more than one novel, then you want to think about how can I have layers of evil now? The villain in an action story is more important than the hero. Right.

Yeah, we touched on that before.

Yeah. And I'll tell you why. Because the villain is the force that generates the spine of the story, meaning what the villain wants will raise an object of desire in your hero. And what the villain wants is. That's, like the major thing you have to figure out now.

Okay. Because that's the. The villain is the one that constantly throws up. It dictates what the hero has to do based on the roadblocks it throws up.

Exactly.

I'm thinking. I'm thinking of Die Hard now.

Yes.

Right. So, like the entire movie, is it John. John McClain McClane, all he is doing is reacting to what the villains doing.

Well, he has an object of desire, and his object of desire is to get his wife safely out of the building because he's so. But, yeah, but the.

Every single thing he does is basically jumping over a roadblock that the villains put there. So the villain is dictating what he does based on the roadblocks it puts up to get to his object of desire.

Exactly.

Like, is that kind of. That's why the villain is. You have to figure out first, because it will dictate to the hero what's happening.

That's exactly right. Now, I think it's a good thing to talk about the Hunger Games for you, because in the Hunger Games, the villain is. It manifests itself as individual people throughout the. The trilogy of stories. But the central villain of Hunger Games is the tyranny of the government. Right. The tyranny meaning that they get to make all the rules, and everybody in that society has to behave according to whatever it is that they want. Now, the way they get that tyranny. The object of desire for the government in Hunger Games is to keep the insurgents down, to make sure that no sort of movement arises that will challenge their power. And so what have they masterfully have decided to do is. And this is. Goes all the way back to Rome, is to entertain the population and entertain the population with a mass spectacle. And the spectacle shows just how very powerful the government is. And it makes victims of each one of the. And it rises in this competitive zeal of all these communities to have their children be the ones that survive and become the winners of the Hunger Games. It's like One big reality TV show that you know has mortal.

Results. People die. And they're not just dying. These are kids who are dying.

So even in the Hunger Games, you can look back. So you look at the Hunger Games and like, the particular unique thing about it is this Hunger Games that these kids are sent to. And then you can look back in even history, not just myths, and see this played out over and over and over. And you can probably just overlay Hunger Games on top of all of these myths. Just like. Is that what you're kind of getting at when we first started talking about looking at past myths of resurrection?

Yes, exactly.

Okay.

And we'll get into the sub genre of the action story. I guess we could do it now, but I think let's stick with the. You can see how you can. As an editor, it's very easy to get off track.

So I always come back to genre and I say, what are the conventions and obligatory scenes of a genre? Have I delivered those conventions and obligatory scenes? And so the first thing I always say, that your story has to be about something. There has to be a theme or controlling idea inside of the machine, or your reader just will not be compelled or they will not have any sympathy or empathy for any of the characters in the story if you don't have something, a controlling idea or theme underneath. So when we began this editorial process, what made me very excited was the fact that you definitely have a controlling idea and theme. And our goal now in this conversation is to, and I think we've already kind of done that, is to really clarify what that theme and controlling idea is, and then use that theme and controlling idea to select the very best meaning, the one that you are the most attracted to and the one that could have the most commercial appeal. Because you're not doing this just for fun. I mean, you want to become a professional writer who makes money doing it, and there's nothing wrong with that. So you have to think about how big of an audience you can reach with your story. Now, we could have decided to write a very smaller. A much smaller story that was internally driven about your lead character and her sorrow about the disappearance of her brother. But that's not going to have as large of an audience as a Hunger Games kind of concept behind it. So anyway, that's why we kind of went through the controlling idea and the theme, because that will lead us to the perfect choice of genre, global genre of your story. And we've come to the conclusion that you want to tell an action story. And so now we're talking about the conventions and obligatory scenes in an action story so that we can go back later and check all the stuff that you've done in your first draft, amplify some, change some completely, throw some. Some of them out. But at least we'll have a checklist of things that we need to evaluate and think about for our next draft. So the goal that we're doing now is we're doing a very big foolscap global story grid review, and it all goes to that. I think it's the six core questions an editor always asks. And the first one I always ask is, what's the genre? And the way I get that answer is I think about what the controlling idea theme is, and that will help me.

Okay, so I want to stop here and try to back up and make sure that we don't get too focused on just my story, because. So the path here is once I have a controlling idea and theme, something I'm trying to say, then we look at the genres, and we think, what's the best way to tell this theme? So if my theme. If you had pulled out of my theme, Love will overcome all boundaries.

Mm.

We would pick a genre that was probably one of the subgenres of a love story.

Yes.

And because telling an action story with that theme, they just don't match.

Or if you're controlling ideas, justice prevails when protagonists outsmart the murderer or crime committer. So justice prevails. And that would say, if justice is what's at stake in the core thing, at stake in the story, then it's a crime story. If life is at stake, it's an action story.

So it sounds like if I'm not. And I would say most writers aren't coming to the page already understanding what their theme is. The first draft is basically me trying to let something come out, let the theme come out. Then I identify what that theme is and what I'm trying to say. And then I go back and look at my story and say, okay, what's the best genre to tell that theme? And then now I can look at, okay, what am I missing? What do I have? You know, look at those obligatory scenes, the conventions, you know, all of those things, and then say, okay, what do I have? What am I missing? And what's in there that needs to be pulled out because it doesn't match my genre.

Yes. And also what your theme controlling idea will do is tell you how your story begins and how it ends. Remember, the thing that has to be in your controlling Idea theme sentence is the value at stake and the cause of change.

So life cheats death when heroes confront their darkest fears. So that means, I mean, you could even whittle that one down to when heroes sacrifice themselves for the greater human good. So the cause is when heroes sacrifice themselves creates life. If heroes don't sacrifice them, death wins. So knowing that, then, you know, at the beginning of the story, somebody's life has to be threatened. And at the end of the story, life has to overcome that threat through the cause of the hero sacrificing themselves for the greater good. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'm coming out of the I've been in for the last week.

I know. This is why, you know, I. I called my company Genre Management, Inc. It's because the genres are such a gift to us. Because when we get stuck, all we have to do is take a step back and say, okay, what genre am I writing again? Because everybody gets stuck. Everybody gets lost in the weeds of their own storytelling stuff because it's fun. And sometimes we forget to even put a villain in the story. And we run an entire first draft and we don't even have a villain or a victim in there.

Yeah, well, I mean, I don't have a victim.

No.

Nobody that my hero is fighting to save.

That's correct. So there's many, many opportunities to fix that. It's fun. It's fun to know what the problem is, because you can fix a problem that you know you have.

Yeah, man. I tell you, like, somebody asked me just this morning. They're like, you know, he was like, yeah, so what have you been working on? I'm like, oh, I've been doing a ton of writing. And he's like, are you enjoying it? And I'm like, well, I was.

And.

Then I'm not anymore. But I think that's a short term problem. But yeah, and this is. And I kept thinking, like, Sean told me I was gonna go through a depression, and here I am, like, depressed, I can't write, I can't do anything thing. So anyway, yeah, yeah, no, this is.

And that's a good thing. It's impossible to explain to somebody when they're in the middle of it. But it's a good thing that. Because you are not blowing smoke up your ass right now. You know what I'm saying? You are not saying, oh, Sean just doesn't get it. I'll find somebody else who likes this. Somebody else will like this, right?

And then you, then you force it upon your friends and then they belatedly say, yeah, it's not bad. And. And then you end up, like, months and months by. And you just, you know, perpetuate the lie. So, anyway, what we're doing now is what an editor does. We are taking a deep, deep breath and thinking about the global projection of this story. What's the beginning hook? What's the middle build? What's the ending payoff? Now, the great thing about knowing your theme and your controlling idea, it tells you what the beginning hook is, and it tells you what the ending payoff is. The beginning hook of your story has to begin negatively, and it has to put somebody's life at stake. And the ending ends positively. The hero overcomes the villain, and life is restored to its balance. So it begins negatively, and it ends positively. That is, I can't tell you what great information that is to know. So here's. Here's another little trick. If you know that your inciting incident of your beginning hook is going to begin negatively, guess what? The climax of your beginning hook is going to end.

Well, positively.

Positively. Positively. And then the inciting incident of your. The positive movement from. Will transition from your beginning hook to your middle build. And then the end of your middle build is going to end how negatively? Because you're going to end this thing positively. So the negative end of your middle build will coincide with that thing we talk about a lot, the all is lost moment. That is the moment when the hero has to reach a point where all is lost. Kind of like what you're going through now as the writer right now. You're thinking to yourself, all is lost. There's no way I can fix this. I'm going to start working on my nonfiction project because this thing is going to kill me if I keep going. And that is actually a good choice to make when you're in the throes of the belly of the beast. Try and move elsewhere, because it will give your mind time to be able to step away from the project for a moment and think about it globally, which is what we're doing now.

Yeah, you know, it's. I remember. And an episode of Mad Men. One of the. It's been years since I've watched Mad Men, but the girl, like, copywriter that got the job and, you know, she's like, the only girl.

Peggy Olson.

Yeah. And she was, like, really stuck on this problem. And he said. Don Draper said, think about it really, really hard and then let it go. And that was, like, over the weekend when I'm like, I gotta Just let it go. Because there was actually. Because we recorded early last week and then a little late this week, I actually had like nine days in between us talking instead of the normal seven. And so I'm like, of course. It's like I get long. Like I kept thinking, God, I just want to talk to Sean. Kids I get. And so over the weekend, I'm like, you know, Monday, you know, I've really committed to this writing thing. I want to write, you know, as much as I possibly can. And I'm not writing anything on this fiction right now. And so when I was on a plane last week, I had sketched out kind of the initial thing of the non fiction. I'm like, I just have to write something to kind of like clear my head of this other thing that's driving me insane. So that's. Yeah, that's why I started doing it.

That was a very wise choice. Okay, so do you want to keep going for the next sort of big whammy?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. Okay.

All right. So we know that it's an action genre. We know we need to have a hero, a victim, and a villain. We know that the villain is actually more important than the hero because the villain has to have the MacGuffin, you know, which is an object of desire. What does the villain want? Because what that villain wants will be the thing that starts the inciting incident. The villain is going to do something negatively that will cause the hero to have their object of desire, which is always to save the victim. So when you get lost in your story, you always have to, especially when you have an action story, you say to yourself, what's my hero up to? Is my hero concentrated on his object of desire or her object of desire? Are they concentrated on finding where the victim is and saving them from the villain? So when you get stuck, that is the through line of the story, we will follow that hero as they aggressively pursue the villain so that they can free the victim. So we know that we're going to know that that's a convention of the genre and it's very, very helpful. So again, the villain's actions give rise to an object of desire in the hero. And that object of desire in the hero is always to rescue the victim. That's the external object of desire. Now, we've talked about the hero's journey and all that stuff many episodes, and the hero's journey is part of the action story. Because how does an action story work? Just generically, you have a hero who's called out of his or her ordinary world. And they have to go into an extraordinary world and confront all kinds of obstacles in pursuit of an object of desire, which will inevitably change them until they return from that extraordinary world back to the ordinary world with knowledge and a gift for the rest of the community. So you see how these two things are running in parallel, right? The external action genre storyline actually parallels the hero's journey.

So it's always nice to know that, because then we don't sit around and go, oh, my gosh, how's my hero's journey doing? Oh, I forgot all about that.

Right?

Because guess what's going to happen in an action story. There's a victim, something negative happens, a victim emerges, Somebody comes to the hero and says, hey, check out this situation.

This bad force has taken this victim away from us. We need your help. And usually the hero will say, you know, I'm not really the person for the job here. You know, there's plenty of more qualified people. I'm just going to stay here in my ordinary world for a little while. And then eventually they have to realize that they have to step up and do it. And then they transition into the extraordinary world, and a whole series of mentors arise to teach them about this new world and how to behave in this world, what the rules are, how to be successful, how to defeat the villain, and then they have to go in, and then they have to fight the villain and either win or lose. Usually they win because it's a bummer when action stories end negatively because it makes us all feel like.

There'S no force of good in the world. So it's great now. So now we know essentially that we have a couple of weaknesses, major weaknesses in the book from the start, but you intuitively built in solutions in that first draft. And here's what I mean by that.

You say, let me stop and ask one question real quick so we're clear. You know, we already said I don't have a victim, and that's why my villain is a little soft. Well, probably a lot soft, because we.

Don'T have any idea what the villain wants, right? It's just this amorphous force that you say is evil. You say, this is a corporation that's really evil. So you basically, you tell and you don't show, and there's no confusion about what's really going on. And you need that. You need something to arise that will get the reader going along for the ride.

Oh, God. Okay, this is great. Okay, okay, you keep going.

Okay, so let me Just give you a couple of ideas on that end. Your novel begins with a sort of a service for the brother of your protagonist who disappeared one day and never came back. And it's been so long that they're actually having a funeral service even though they don't have a body. Correct. Right. Okay. So what if you did this instead?

What if. And I don't know how to do the scene yet, but what if some strange guy shows up and he knocks on the door and he says to this. This young girl, we need your help. Your brother has been gone for three years, and we just got a transmission that he's alive. We need your help. And then that will immediately establish that there's a victim out there who needs this woman's help. In the Silence of the Lambs, they didn't bring in the victim, a real live victim, until the middle build, because they wanted to indoctrinate you into this world. And there was Hannibal Lecter. So you didn't. You know, there's so many great elements in that book that Thomas Harris could say, eh, I'm gonna wait a little while on my victim. But you are writing a first novel, a first action story. So my advice always is lay your cards on the table as soon as possible. Set up an unbelievable inciting incident that's gonna suck the reader in and forgive you for the myriad amount of mistakes that you're gonna make. And a great way of doing that is always the call.

This is a scene where your hero is approached by somebody else. It's like, did you ever read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card?

I actually just read that in the last year for the first time.

It's a terrific book. It's a great book to read for an action story. It's hard science fiction. We'll talk more about Ender's Game as these talks proceed. But what's really, you know, you have this chosen one who seems to be the only person who can come in and help.

And your lead character is. We're not really sure what her expertise is or what she does yet. And we might want to think about changing that. We might want to think about the MacGuffin for her expertise. It might not. We can talk about this more next week. But the thing I would love you to think about right now is how do you set up a scene that's interesting, that hasn't been done a million times before, where you introduce the villain, that there is some evil force out there that has abducted this young girl, Young woman's brother. And I think the way to think about that is to look at the Hunger Games and think, how did Suzanne Collins figure out how to establish a victim very early? So for the next week, I think it would be a great idea to think about the beginning hook inciting incident of your entire novel and think of a concept that could be really fascinating.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. As you can probably tell, I'm in a much better mood after this episode as opposed to the last couple weeks.

And I really hope it's been helpful.

For you to kind of walk through what you can do to get your first draft, the kind of decisions you have to make to get it to that second draft space.

So I really appreciate you listening to this and walking through this with me.

And I hope it's been really helpful for you as well. As always, if you want to see everything that has to do with StoryGrid and really dive deep, you can go to storygrid.com Shawn has all kinds of blog posts and resources. Sign up for the newsletter. Make sure you don't miss anything that Sean is working on along with that. If you have missed an episode of this podcast or you want to reference any of our notes, those are all@storygrid.com.

Thanks as always for continuing to share the show with your friends. If you want to reach out to us and give us any feedback or ask us any questions, we're on Twitter torygrid. So we will see you next week for episode 31.