Getting Your Big Scenes Right

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 an editor with 25 plus years experience. He is the creator of Storygrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and he is helping me as I flail around and figure out how to tell great stories. In this episode, we're working on narrowing down to an outline that I can actually use to write my second draft, which is ending up to be basically a second version of the first draft.

Depending on how you look at it.

Anyway, through this discussion, even though we're talking specifically about my book, I hope that you're learning the kinds of questions you should be asking of your book. And you and your editor should be working through as well about character development, their wants and needs inside of the book, talking through the polarity, shifts of positive and negative value shifts and scenes and in big swaths of your book. And also just talking through overcoming cliches, overcoming kind of basic, normal things that every author deals with. So as you go through this, I hope that you're taking notes and that it's helping you get ready to craft the perfect outline for your next book as well.

So.

So let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, I want to talk and start first with an email I got from one of our listeners. I don't want to read the entire thing, but I'm going to try to sum it up, which is basically with all of our discussions around my stories and my story ideas and you giving me feedback and changing them and molding them and even pointing me towards a genre. Are you overriding my own artistry? Are you pushing back on me like, like a bad art teacher that makes me paint a bowl of fruit when I want to paint something else? You know? Like, I am sure that she's not the only listener that's thinking this, which is basically like, why won't Sean just let Tim write the book he wants to write? So I'd love. I showed you the email and I would love to just get your thoughts on, like, why are you pushing me so hard? And I have some opinions on this. I want to share, but I'll let you talk first on it. But, you know, why aren't you just letting me write the book I want to write? Why are you being so hard on all of my ideas? Why are you pushing back on this, like, you know, overall, what is your kind of answer to the email? Because I showed you the whole thing.

Well, okay. My job, the way I see it, is to help writers write books that work. Now, when I say a book that works, what I mean by that is that other people want to read it, right? That it's something that goes beyond the individual. So is it terrible for somebody to write their own stuff and follow whatever their hard course tells them to? Absolutely not. Go ahead. But you also have to understand that when you do that, you have a very limited audience. Probably you have an audience of one, and that audience is yourself. So what I find is that when people come to me and they say, you're screwing up my muse, you're taking the things that I want to write, and you're manipulating them and twisting them and just you're feeding me your own ideas, and I don't want to write your book, Sean. I want to write my book. And my answer to that is, nobody wants to read your shit.

And that's something that Steve Pressfield and I talk about a lot. Now, Steve wrote a book called the War of Art. And the War of Art is all about confronting something that he calls resistance. And what resistance is is this insidious little bastard inside all of us that tells us things that are lies. And one of the great lies resistance tells us is that if you get help from anybody else or you listen to anybody else, that the work isn't really yours. The only way to create something authentic is if you create it yourself and you get no help and you take no ideas from anybody else. And I think that is the biggest crock of shit that you can actually tell yourself. Because the fact remains this. There is a reason why all of us attach to individual stories. And I say this over and over and over again. Specificity breeds universality. But the specificity has to be in the realm of this story experience. The myths that we have grown so close to, that we use to direct our everyday life, are thousands and thousands and thousands of years old. There's a reason why I read Plato. There's a reason why I read Aristotle. There's a reason why I read Joseph Campbell when I was figuring all this stuff out. And no, I'm not the only one who has figured it out. There are plenty of other people. The story grid methodology is something I've created to solve a problem that I had, which was to help writers identify the problems in their work and to help them solve those problems. And one of the things that I offer as a service is to provide solutions to the problems that I raise in somebody's work. So when I say, tim, that's not going to work. Try this. And you say, well, I don't understand the difference between what I wrote and what you wrote. I give you an answer. I say, the reason why yours doesn't work and the reason why mine does work is the following. You have to have one central heroic figure. You can't dilute the core protagonist in the reader, because then the reader is going to say, wait a minute. I thought this story was about this person, and now it's sort of about this person. So that is an actual answer to a question that is a problem. So whether or not you decide to go with whatever solution I offer you is absolutely up to you. But the thing is, there's something in the execution that is far more important than the solution. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is I can say, tim, do a scene like this.

Right? I can give you two sentences on a scene. It begins this way, it ends up this way. And here's the crisis and the climax. Go. And I give the exact same direction to Joe Schmo from Kokomo. And the two of you are going to write completely different scenes because you're going to make your own creative choices executing that thematic idea. So here's my answer to people to say, you know, man, I operate my own way. And. And I don't want to take anything from anybody else because I'm going to sit and watch the tea leaves and wait for the muse to come to me and speak to me directly. I don't want to hear from your muse, man. I want to. I want to listen to my own. What I say to that is. That is resistance. Now, I'm going to end my argument with a joke. And here's the joke. There's an old woman, and her son comes to her, and he says, mom, there's a flood coming. There's going to be a torrential rain. And they say, we're going to have floods that are just going to take over the entire valley. You have to get out now. And the mother says to the son, son, I believe in that the good Lord will provide, and I'm going to stay home. So the son begs and begs, and she won't be moved. So. So he leaves and he takes his family and he goes out of town. And here comes the rains, and the rains are lifting and lifting. A man comes by on a boat. The woman's on the second floor window. And he says to her, lady, get in the boat. Get in the boat. And she says, no, no, the Lord will provide. Okay, so the floods keep coming higher and higher. Now she's on the roof. A helicopter comes by, and they lower a rope down to her, and they say, get, lady, grab the rope. She says, no, no, no, no. The Lord will provide, I believe. Of course, she drowns and dies when she's at the pearly gates. And she says to, you know, the angel Gabriel, why? Why has the Lord forsaken me? And the angel Gabriel says to her, lady, what do you want? He sent your son, he sent a boat, and he sent a helicopter. Why didn't you jump on one of those? And that's exactly the problem that people have who get locked into this whole thing. Anytime I take an idea from somebody else, I'm being inauthentic. You need to open yourself to the great possibilities and to help, that is going to come your way. And don't throw it away because you think you're going to be a fraud by using it.

Yeah. So I'd like to give my take on this, too, which is a little bit more practical, which tends to be my way of looking at things. So I look at it like this. So it's. If I wanted to become a painter, and you took me to my local art shop, where they have a thousand different paintbrushes and a thousand different colors of paint and, you know, 50 different types of paint and, you know, 100 different types of canvases, and you said, okay, get started, I would be so completely overwhelmed that I couldn't do anything.

But if I joined an art class or a painting class, and the teacher was like, okay, you're going to use this paintbrush, you're going to use this paint, and you're going to use this canvas, and you're going to paint a bowl of fruit.

Now, the bowl of fruit isn't my muse. It didn't come from me. I didn't use that. But inside of those constraints, I can learn the principles of painting. And then once I've learned the principles of painting, I can then exercise those in my own creativity. It's like if my children, you know, we have a piano and my older son's learning how to play, my younger son just bangs on it. And I don't mind that my younger son just bangs on it and plays anything, you know, that he wants. But if he ever wants to learn how to play the piano, he will sit down and he will learn his scales. And he will sit down and he will learn basic songs and the teacher will teach him the same thing. Tens of thousands of people are being taught across this globe when it comes to playing the piano because you have to learn the basics before you can flex your creativity inside of those constraints. And so as I've taken your feedback and as you know, my story has completely changed from what I originally thought and the genre is changing and all this kind of stuff, I look at it that way as I have to submit myself to a teacher, learn the basics and one day I'll be able to sit down and write whatever I want because I'll have taken those basics and those scales of writing and all of that staying and they'll be in my bones and I'll do them automatically. And so I can sit down and my story will fit, will work because I know how to write a good story. But right now I don't. And so I have to accept somebody else's constraints in order to learn the craft. Or like I talked about in the intro of last week's episode, where I don't want to write an 80,000 word manuscript before I get any feedback, I want tighter feedback. And that's what we're doing here. So that's how I've looked at this and that's how I've, you know, some may say justified, but that's how I've kind of looked at this as like it's not me giving up on my creativity, it's me submitting myself to the process of learning the basics so that in the future I'll be able to flex my creativity in a bigger way. But if right now I flex my creativity, it's going to sound like my 7 year old banging on a piano.

That's how I kind of landed on that question. So that said, how we're kind of looking at the next couple months is we're going to do two more episodes of kind of our standard way of doing this. And then we're basically taking a break for five weeks where we're going to run some special episodes that I'm really excited about. We're doing a Publishing 101 series. So we mentioned a few weeks back about doing some episodes just about the publishing industry. And Sean and I have already recorded a couple of those and they're fantastic and you're going to love those. And then we actually have two special episodes of me, Sean and Steve Pressfield talking about resistance and beating resistance and Steve's new book. So those are going to come out as well. So, Sean and I's goal for this week's episode, next week's episode is get me to a point where I have a full scap that I can write my second draft on. So that's what we're going to be working through here. And I think it'll be good for you as you're listening as well, because we want to take all of this kind of, for me, excruciating last few weeks of going through stuff around the first draft and kind of nail some of this down so I can actually start working on a second draft. I've written basically nothing fiction wise since the first draft. And so I want to get moving again on a second draft. So that's our goal here. So, Sean, I've been thinking about your questions about. I have them here. You said I need to think about power dynamics and I need to think about the wants. So what does my villain want? What does my hero want? What does my villain do to lure the victim into a trap? And also what does the villain want to take from the hero? So I've been thinking about this. I made a bunch of notes and still feel very flailing about this. But I really like the idea of, you know, I was ready to kind of give up the whole my hero resurrects. But I really like what we landed on last week about the hero resurrects. She's the only one that can come out of this thing alive.

Yeah.

And so I've been thinking about the specificity of that, of how that would work, but I don't think that's as important right now. And the villain is going to really want that. Why can she do that and nobody else can, including the villain? And what I'm struggling with right now is the victim. So the initial victim is her brother. But we've. Last time we were talking, we were talking about making the victim. But we find out at the end of the beginning hook, he's not actually the victim because he was luring her into this because that's what the villain wanted. So I'm struggling a little bit about who the victim should be. And then we can get into some specificity about the world too. But I'd love to kind of hear your thoughts on that about where I should be going with that.

Okay, well, the thing that you're writing, let's just take a small step back and go over the genre again. You're writing a thriller set in the world of what they call lit rpg, which is literary role playing game genre. And that might sound strange to everybody, but it's a very, very up and coming, interesting genre that has evolved over the last 20, 25 years. It started sort of with a book called Neuromancer. Probably it even started before that with Philip K. Dick. But William Gibson's Neuromancer was sort of the big breakout declaration of new genre. And that was in the late 80s or early 90s. And then the next book that sort of took the world by storm in this arena was Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. And just last year or the year before, there was a book called Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, I believe his name is. And all of these books were extremely successful. And this is a genre that's up and coming for a number of reasons. I can give you my philosophical reasons why I think it's becoming something that is underserved in the marketplace. But we decided a couple of weeks ago that this would be a good arena for you, Tim, because you have an expertise in software and programming, et cetera, et cetera, that you could bring to the table while you're writing. Now your questions about who the hero is, who the victim is, and who the villain is. This is really important stuff to figure out before you go forward. So let's just review what we decided before. Generally, there's a villain and the villain wants something from the hero. And what the villain wants is what begins and starts the inciting incident of.

So, you know, using the stuff that you had written before in your first draft of your previous novel. We came up with this really great dynamic where you have a brother and a sister and a family, and the brother disappeared. And one day a strange guy shows up on the porch of the sister's house where she's living with her family. She's a younger person. We haven't really figured out exactly what age she is yet, but we're coming to either, you know, a young adult age or something of that sort. Anyway, so a figure arrives and says, your brother's in trouble. We need your help. So we immediately establish that there's a victim from the inciting incident of the global story. The brother is the victim in the reader's eye from page one. So this is a great way to get the thing going because now we've established that somebody's in jeopardy and there's some evil force that has got him under their control, and it sets forth the want of the hero. Now, the want of the hero is what she is going to want. What she wants is the return of her brother, so that her family dynamic goes back to the way it was, to the way things used to be. So, great, we've got things going now. Now, your question to me right now was, okay, that's going to get me probably through the end of my beginning hook of my story. Who's going to become the victim after we establish that the brother is no longer the victim? And my answer to that is, guess what? It's a genre convention. In the thriller. As I define it in my book, and as many people define it in the thriller, the hero eventually becomes the victim, too. So the hero transforms from the protagonist just trying on a course set out to save a victim, transitions into the victim themselves.

So, for example, in Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling, she is out to save the life of a victim who is kidnapped by a terrible person who's going to kill her. So that's her goal. She wants to save that person. By the end of that story, she is actually in jeopardy that killer is going to kill her. So she transitions from the hero to the victim. And this is what you are going to want to do in your story. And you've already set this up because what the villain is doing is he or she or who or whatever is setting up your hero to come into this virtual world so that they can rob her of her immortality. Now, what's great about this is that she doesn't even know that she has this gift. And you can use that revelation. Somebody's going to say to her at some point in the story, well, you know, it's obvious why the villain wants you here. She'd be like, what are you talking about? Well, you know, you're the only one to survive death in the virtual world. Yeah, so I thought everybody did. No, if you die in the virtual world, you die in real life. You are the only one who's died multiple times in the game and is yet still alive when you come out of the game. Most people who die in the game never leave the game. They're dead. They die in real life as well as in the game. So you can use this setup because the reader is going to be saying to themselves throughout the beginning hook of your story, what is this thing all about? I wonder if she's going to get her brother back. I wonder if she's going to get her brother back. And guess what? She's going to get her brother back. And then she's going to. Then you're going to twist it and you're going to make it. Oh, well, what's going on, really? Why was she brought in here? And so you can use this suspense and this unknowingness of the reader to create narrative drive. So to answer your question, the victim will transition from the brother, probably it will remain the brother, too, throughout into the sister who is your hero. So the hero becomes the victim by the climax of your global story. Does that make sense?

Yes.

Okay.

Okay. So again, what I'm picturing is I want her to be young enough that she actually thinks this will fix things, because if she's too old, she won't actually think if her brother comes home.

Things will be fixed.

And I also want her to be young enough where her brother, even though he's a bad guy, she still cannot not trust him.

Right. Well, the other thing is that the trick of these things is to make the quote, unquote bad guys. The reader has to understand.

Oh, well, I don't know. Maybe if I was in that situation, I would do the same thing. Maybe he's not such a bad guy. Maybe. So I think you've set that idea up with the definition of your universe. And your universe, just to remind everybody, is this. There's basically two societies in real life. In Tim's story, there are the very wealthy people who are capable of, you know, movement from country to country, and they're sort of the one percenters of our. Of our universe today. In real life, these are the people with so much money, they can pretty much do whatever the hell they want. And then there's everybody else, and everybody else is very limited. They can only sort of stay in their own communities. And the brother move from the MOOC world, the world of all of us who aren't part of the privileged, into the privileged world. And he doesn't want to go back, so.

Well, I. Yeah, I kind of see it as, you know, there's always people that work for the 1 percenters that get a reward for that.

Yeah.

So I don't see it as like he's become one of these people. He's become like an assistant or a butler. Right.

An aspirational figure.

Yeah. Where he gets to live in the houses, he gets to travel on the jets, but he's not in charge, so at any moment, he could just be cut out.

That's great.

Sent back home.

Yeah. It's like Smithers and the Simpsons who, you know, works for.

The evil guy. I forget his name. Anyway, so what's really great about this idea is that as we're talking, you can sort of see These blobs of story starting to take shape and you're seeing, you know, I think you have a pretty. You could probably map out that beginning hook section pretty easily. Not easily, but you could kind of figure it out. It starts here, then it goes here, then it goes here, then it goes here. So you're going to know the climax of your beginning Hook is going to be the big reveal that the brother really is an endanger. Or maybe, no, wait, we're not really sure yet. It could be any number of things, probably. Remember, we also want to use the hero's journey stuff. And so the climax of the beginning Hook, is usually the moment when the hero moves from the ordinary world into the extraordinary world. So it's almost like she goes through that gate like Dorothy in the wizard of Oz or Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs. When she gets to ride on that fei plane to go to another world, that's the moment that you really want to delineate very clearly. She's no longer in Schittsville. She's moving into the 1% territory. And then your middle build is going to be a series of progressive complications that will drive your hero coming to the realization that all is lost. Essentially. She is going to realize she's not going to bring her brother back. She's not going to solve her family's problems by bringing him back. And not only that, if she doesn't take one more step and confront the villain, she will actually hurt not only herself, but all of those people back home.

Okay, so let me kind of talk this out a little bit. So what I was thinking was something along the lines of she thinks she's rescuing her brother. She gets there, she realizes she's not. But, you know, I was kind of thinking of her brother as like the screw up drug addict brother that you just. You can't help but help. You know what I mean? Like, every family has that. And so what I feel like is, once she's there, he will spin it as, look, I've saved you. You get to be a part of this world with me. And so that begins the middle build, where she is trying to come to terms with this new world. And she actually sees the seedy underbelly of all the evil that they're doing. And that's when it reaches this point of all is lost, which is she can no longer look the other way at the world that she's been brought into.

That's close. That's getting there. Okay, don't forget your MacGuffin though. And your MacGuffin is the immortality.

Right?

So you want to tie in your MacGuffin with her. Now, we haven't clearly stated this yet, so let me clearly state it. Now, the external genre that you are writing in is thriller lit. RPG is the sub genre of thriller. Now the internal genre that you're writing in is a maturation plot. Now what a maturation plot is, is the coming of age story. It's a movement from naivete, believing one the world is one way and coming to the realization, no, it's not like that at all. It's not. I'm. There aren't any simple solutions to you can't go home again. You can't bring back the past.

So when you're dealing with two genres and you're. You really have to do this in a thriller because you want to be able for the reader to attach themselves very emotionally to the lead protagonist.

So the revelation that she is immortal and the revelation that all is lost has to gel at the same time. So when you look at my story grid for the Silence Lambs, you'll see that the all is lost moment for Clarice Starling is also the all is lost moment for the external genre of the thriller. Meaning she gets fired from the job, she can no longer help the FBI, says, hey, yeah, go back to the FBI academy, you're no longer wanted, and if you show up on the scene again, you're going to be kicked out of the academy and you will never become an FBI agent. And that also coincides with, with her realization that she's been used by the FBI to lure Hannibal Lecter to give away all of his secrets. So she's damned herself intellectually. I mean, she's got Hannibal Lecter in her head and she lost her job basically. So the external and the internal both hit all is lost.

So my internal all is lost is going to be when she realizes this world that she's been really fighting to hold on to mentally is not real. Like between her brother, what's really going on with this high society. And that's when she realizes there will never ever be her and her brother at home as a family again. That's the internal all is lost, right?

Yes. And it might even be more specific than that, meaning something terrible happens to her brother or something happens to her mother or father. I don't know. But if you can make it very concrete that the family ain't never getting back together again, there's never going to be a nice Christmas again, you know, I just want to take one small exception to something that you said earlier about, oh, I want the character to be young because she believes that she can take back, get her family to get back together again by just bringing her brother home. Well, you know What? I know 50, 60 year old people who believe that if they go home and hang out with their brothers and their cousins, everything's going to be okay. But the reality is, is that it's not okay. The family broke up years and years and years ago and they're lying to themselves and they're living a lie that they can make their family lives better by just physically being in the same places. Anyway, all I'm saying is that we have the capacity to lie to ourselves at such a deep, deep level that age really doesn't come into it.

I guess what I was thinking there, because as we've talked about this lit RPG and you kind of hitting like, hey, use what you know, like, you know this world, right this. And I'm thinking like, well, I got a 10 year old at home and when I'm at school with him and stuff, like I'm hanging out with other 10 and 11 year olds. I don't remember what it's like to be 15, 16, but I'm staring down, you know, staring down the barrel at what it's like to be 10 and 11.

That's a very difficult time. And you brought that up last week. It's a. Yeah, it's a. I guess.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

I like it. Yeah.

And it goes into that young adult kind of space that we were talking about several weeks ago too.

Yeah. And I also think that there's a level in our society where we just do not give children any real credit for having deep thoughts or having heroic abilities. And the fact that you're considering using a 10 year old as the lead protagonist and putting her in a place where she has to exhibit real fundamental courage and also heroic abilities is a good one. Because I think thematically we need to understand that our children have a lot more power than we give them credit for. But just back to your story and back to the intersection of the all is lost. Now, the. The intersection of the all is lost moment in the external and the internal, that's going to be the climax of your middle build. And that is going to be the moment that's going to transition into your ending payoff of your story.

So to think about this moment and to know, okay, this is the moment where my character discovers that she's Immortal. Maybe that's it. Maybe you do that at midpoint. But I kind of think I'll just throw this out here. Imagine if somebody said to you, hey, Tim, guess what? You're immortal. Your first reaction is going to be like, you're kidding me. Oh, man, this is incredible. You mean I'm going to live forever? Yeah, yeah, you're going to live forever. What do you mean, forever? Like, forever. And then you try it, right? And you survive. It's like that movie Groundhog Day, you know, you try and kill yourself, and you can't. You keep waking up. It might be kind of fun for a while. And then what happens? Then you come to the realization, oh, my gosh. Being immortal is like being damned because I never change. Everything around me changes and dies, but I stay the same. So that could be an all is lost moment, too, when. When your lead character discovers that her MacGuffin, the. The very MacGuffin that this crazy villain really wants, she would willingly give him. You know what I mean? Like, sure, I'll. If I could just hand you my immortality, I would. Because immortality is damnation. That could be a really cool climactic moment that ties in with the internal maturation of. Oh, my gosh, my family's never going to be the same again. So the maturation of the internal genre and the external genre that the MacGuffin is not all it's cracked up to be. Could be a really nice thing.

Well, could it be that she basically.

I'm trying to think.

I feel like there's examples of this. She basically turns herself over and is like, look, just. Just take it.

Not a bad idea. Not a bad idea. Because that's a big. You know why I like that? That's innovative. That's an innovative moment where the hero quits, right? We. The hero seemingly quits. Like, dude, you want my immortality? Here, Here I am. I'm knocking on the door. Come take it. That's kind of an innovative twist. And it's also, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, you've decided to end this story positively, which I think is a good. I mean, the external genre, you're going to end positively. And so that means the beginning of the story has to begin negatively. So your inciting incident of your global story does begin negatively. Hey, your brother's in trouble. Come help him. That's a negative inciting incident. So at the end of your beginning, Hook, you're going to want to end that positively. And the positive ending of your beginning, Hook, will be something where hey, come on. Into the extraordinary world. Come on. The water's warm. It's going to be great. So she gets to go to the extraordinary world. Positive. Now, that means that the climactic moment, the ending of your middle build, has to end, what, negatively? So what's a good negative ending for the end of your middle build but for the hero to literally quit. You want my immortality? Why didn't you just say so? Here it is. What do you want me to do? And then you can transition into this moment. While they're trying to take her immortality from her, she realizes that this is the last guy she's going to want to make immortal. So she's going to have a crisis moment where she realizes, man, I just made a huge mistake. I can't let this guy take my immortality because he's horrible. And if I do so, it's going to ruin it for everybody I care about and people I don't even really care about. So the hero will have to sacrifice herself, which means damnation, in order to save other people. If she denies this bad guy immortality, then she is sacrificing herself for the greater good. And it also gives you an opportunity. This is why we love vampire stories so much, and this is why we can have 3,000 sequels to a vampire story. Because vampire Lestat, right? The guy never dies. He's damned. So if you make your lead character immortal, her pursuit, and it could be a really interesting idea for a series of novels, is her pursuit is to find a solution to her immortality in a way that's organically good. But, you know, we're talking in generalities here, but I think you can see the curves of the story grid as I'm discussing this. You can see the rise and the fall and the rise and the fall. And is it true?

It's almost like if you look at that as a. Like a wave. The rise and fall is the internal and external genre. Like, they're kind of rising and falling opposite.

Exactly. It's like a sine cosine curve.

Okay. So it's like. Because that's where my. My wife's been hooked on the show Nashville, which is now. They just decided it was. It's going to be canceled. And she finally, like, halfway through this last season, she's like, I got to stop. Because nobody's ever happy, you know, like, and. Which is just how they do dramas. But that kind of seemed like now I'm starting to understand why they do that. Is like, whenever something good happens here, they counterbalance it with A bad thing here. And whenever they that swings back positive, the thing you thought was positive is now swung negative.

Yeah.

So I'm kind of coincidence, right? I've always felt like those stories, like soap opera type stories, are so ham fisted with that stuff, but it still works, and it works on me. Like, if I'm sitting in the room, I'm like, well, now I got to know what happened. And I hate this show.

You know, like.

Yeah, it sustained careers for 25 years.

Okay. So one thing that I feel like it's starting to coalesce. So because my goal is when we're done with this episode, over the next week, I'll work on a full scap and send it to you, and then we'll dial it in next week. So I want to be able to actually fill this thing out. What I'm still a little unclear on is the personification of the villain because we keep saying, you know, the villain wants this. The villain wants this. In my first draft, you know, my goal was to create a series, so I couldn't have her, like, overcome the main villain in the first book. So I kind of chose this side villain. And I kind of got that from Harry Potter, where, like, each book Harry would overcome the villain, but it was not Voldemort until the end. Spoiler.

And so I'm kind of thinking that way here of like, okay, well, if my goal is to leave this open to a series, I can't have her, like, bring down the entire government at the end of this book. So the villain can't be, you know, like the snow. This President Snow. Right. That was his name in Hunger Games, I think.

Right.

Like, he didn't get taken down until the third book anyway. So I'm kind of trying to figure out, like, is the villain. Here's what I was thinking is if the brother is like a servant type person, like I was saying, his boss, whoever that is, is the villain, and he's not in charge of the government, but he sees if he can steal my hero's power, he will be able to become the guy in charge. And so that's where he's a villain in that he's part of the top 1%. He will still drive the beginning of the book because him wanting her power and he feels so fortunate because her brother works for him. So not only has he figured out the power, but he can use her brother to get it. That's where I'm at.

I think that there's only one thing that gives me pause with that is that it's very, as they say, on the nose. You're not setting up and paying off any big jolt, revelation in the revelation of the villain. And one of the things to think about in terms of creating your villain is to think about those that you trust the most, that you don't really even think twice about their having any ulterior motives. And you know, you did this in your first draft by using the mentor as the one who transforms into the villain at the end. And that can often work if you don't give away your cards to remember I told you writing this kind of story is a lot of poker playing because you don't want to give away any big payoffs too soon. And there's any number of ways to do it. You know, it could be something. One of the great things about thrillers, and I've written about this before, is that thrillers are very popular because what they do is they give specificity to our own amorphous panic. And what I mean by that is that in our society today there's so many things that we can't control. We don't understand what's happening. And it's just overwhelming at times. So the purpose of a thriller is, is that it really, it really narrows down a focus of something that can be overcome. So if you can sort of figure out what is the thing today that would be most upsetting to learn, would it be that. And this is. You can see this in the evolution of thrillers. Back in the 1960s, there was this paranoia about your spouse. You know, there's the great horror film Rosemary's Baby where the spouse of the woman turns out to, you know, be the enemy, the villain. The guy who sells his child and his wife to the devil in order to get professional, you know, success. And then it became like the babysitter. You remember that movie like the Nanny or whatever?

Yeah, I know what you're talking.

Yeah. So if you can find, figure out what would really knock people for a loop, could it be your brother? Maybe it's the brother. Maybe the brother is playing victim in order to transform into the villain. That's a possibility, especially if you decide to go down the road of him playing the role, playing the part of the fuck up brother. Right. The brother who seems to always be in trouble. And oh, here I am, I'm so helpless. Can you help me out? Because I'm just. And then it turns out that this guy isn't as helpless as he makes himself out to be. And there's nothing worse. I Think than being conned. And when you're conned, say somebody, like, if you're walking down the street and somebody who's well dressed and he says, I. My. Somebody stole my wallet. I need a dollar to get on the bus. I need to get home. I'll mail it to you if you give me your address. You go, no, forget it. Here's the dollar. And then 25 minutes later, you see him hitting somebody else up for a dollar, you know, and then you're like, oh, I fell for it. I hate myself. So if you can figure out a way to have that brother be so perfectly characterized as somebody familiar that we all know it's a brother who messes up all the time. And to discover later on in a climactic moment, oh, no, he wasn't that stupid. He's been playing you your entire life. And in fact, he's perfectly happy to rob you of your immortality for his own evil ways. That could be an interesting revelation. I'm not saying that's the solution, but what I'm offering is way to think about how you can make the revelation of the villain pay off with a gut punch to the reader. Like, oh, my God, I didn't see that coming. I thought it was that computer guy. Oh, it's not. It's that guy. You got to be kidding me. Oh, man, I got to keep reading.

Well, I still have to set up. If I'm going to do a reveal of the villain late, I have to have a fake villain through the thing because I have to establish the villain from the beginning. Right.

You don't necessarily have to clearly establish it. This is the great thing about writing and about the intelligence of readers today. You can let the reader assume that the villain is somebody. Right?

Right.

So you don't have to set it up so that it's really clear this is the villain. Just have that person behave like somebody working in a corporation or whatever. They're not necessarily villainous, but their actions seem like they're out to get you.

Like Snape in Harry Potter.

Exactly.

But so I still have to have the character that is the villain.

You have to have conflict. Of course. Yes.

Right. So, okay, because you're saying, like, what are we most afraid of? And I know as a parent, and then today's society, us parents go kind of nutso with this. We're constantly afraid that somebody we trust is gonna take advantage of our kids. And so to me, if I was to set up the villain, it would be. Well, that's what I liked about Turning the mentor in my first draft is I wanted to set him up as the one that looked like he was constantly protecting her. But we realized at the end it was to get his own gain. Did that work at all in my book, or was that too on the nose or.

It was a little bit telegraphed, you know. Okay, another thing to think about. I'm just throwing this out here. Is that thing about worrying about somebody else taking advantage of your kids, right? I can totally relate to that. What about this? What about a parent who's so monomaniacal that they want to take advantage of their own child? Now, I'm not saying in a physical way. I'm saying if you establish. And one of the great things you did in that first draft was establishing that very strange family dynamic. And you have this father who's sort of walking on eggshells and protecting the mother because she's so damaged and sad, right? She's so sad. Wouldn't it be interesting to make that so sad? Mother the really shitty person in this story. What I'm saying, and I'm not trying to. I'm just trying to get you to think of different alternatives that are quite close and yet surprising. So if you present her like you did in the first draft of your book. As this very sort of fragile being that everybody is afraid to, you know, upset. And then you discover that she's been manipulating every single person in that family to serve her own purposes. She is orchestrating all of this from behind the scenes. In fact, she had this daughter. And once she discovered this daughter because she suspected that she and her husband would be able to create an immortal being. Sushi's living a lie, right? Maybe she's a lot smarter than she seems. Maybe she's the one who is the big reveal that is like, honey, there was no way I knew that you were immortal until I was able to put you through these things. Now that I know for sure, now I'm afraid I'm gonna have to take your immortality, darling.

And would that reveal be at the end of the middle build or like, right at the end of the book?

That's a good question. I think that's enough of a real. That's a solar plexus kind of blow that could really make this girl say, you know what? No, no, I came back. I was going to give the immortality to, you know, the Xerox Corporation. And now that I know that Xerox Corporation is you, mom, fuck you. I'm not gonna do it. And that could be a great revelation that will say, oh, she's gonna stare down her mother. You know, like. And psychologically it's interesting, too, because on a, on a psychological level, there's all these family dynamics at play. And it's also a maturation plot. Don't forget that it's maturation. It's discovering that your parents are not perfect people. That's part of growing up, is understanding your parents are human beings. They are not almighty gods. And until you understand that they can make mistakes, you will never, ever get out of your strange cotton candy world.

Okay. All right. I think I have what I need. I'm going to.

I've got a big thing to talk to you about next week, so I think this is a really good place to stop.

Okay.

All right, let's stop here and we'll finish this up next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Storygrid podcast. As I mentioned, during this episode, we have some cool stuff coming over the summer, so you're going to want to stay tuned for that. We're going to be talking through publishing. There's a couple really great conversations with Steve Pressfield around his new book. You're really going to enjoy it, and Sean and I are going to enjoy taking a couple weeks off as we do some traveling. And I work on my second draft for everything you want that has to do with StoryGrid. You can get that@storygrid.com if you missed any past episodes or want to look at any of our show notes, that is@storygrid.com podcast. Thanks as always for continuing to listen and share it with your friends. We really appreciate the support and we will see you next week.