How does Stephen King write?

Hello and welcome to episode four of the Story Grid podcast. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and this podcast is dedicated to walking through all of the ideas in the book, the Story Grid, and putting them into real life to help you become a better writer. So we've been doing that over the first three episodes, and we dive into a lot of fun stuff in this episode. We talk about how we assume Stephen.

King does his writing.

We talk about the difference between learning and flailing, and we start to dive into what character development really is and how to use the almighty content leaf from the Story Grid book. Before Sean and I jump in, I just want to remind you that you can subscribe to this podcast. So if you use itunes, you can just subscribe to the podcast directly into itunes and the new episodes will automatically get downloaded. If you want to use other apps, I recommend Stitcher. That's what I use for my podcast listening. You just go into Stitcher, Stitcher. You put in our show, you mark it as a favorite, and new episodes will automatically download every time we put.

A new one out.

So make sure you subscribe to the show. And here is Sean and I as we dive into this week's episode.

Okay, I want to start out this. This one just. I had this thing pop in my head the other day as I was talking about something, and it came back to.

On Writing by Stephen King, when he talks about where his story ideas come from and then how he writes his stories. And he basically, he makes it sound like he comes up with this scenario he wants to write, and he, like, just sits down and starts typing and the story falls out the other end. And I feel like. And so all the, you know, when I, you know, there's this constant, like, struggle. I see it online. It's called Plot Plotters versus Pantsers. Right, so.

Right.

You know, and so I have this theory. I came up with this theory and I want to run it by you. Right? So in the story grid, you talk about, like, the three acts and the inciting incidents and the build, the middle build and like, all the different parts of a story and how to kind of lay those out.

And I have a theory that Stephen King has been reading for so long and writing for so long because he talks about how he started when he was basically a kid.

That he does all of those same things.

He just.

They just come to him so naturally that it feels like he's just sitting down and writing. Like, I picture it like if I take my 7 year old to play basketball, like the amount of concentration it takes for him just to dribble the ball is, is like total concentration where you compare that to an NBA player and they can dribble, shoot, and like be in the exact right place in the court that they're supposed to be, all without even consciously thinking about it. And I kind of think of it that way where like, people like me that are just getting started, we, we need these things because we're just getting started where somebody on Stephen King's level just naturally does all of these things when they write. What do you think about that?

I think that's very accurate. I think what happens as you describe is that.

The writers like Stephen King and all the John Grisham, for example, very, very commercial. James Patterson, they've been doing it for so long. And like, I like the, I like your analogy too, about the basketball. I like to use like high, high diving. You know, like whenever you watch on the Olympics, these amazing divers would get up there and they do like this triple lutz, you know, dive with a tuck and then they, they enter the water perfectly. And you think to yourself, geez, they don't have any time to really think about all of the practice that they had to do when they got to the top of that diving board. They've already done all that work. So what they basically want to do is let their muscles remember all of that work and sort of let their, their, their brain slow down and let their body do the work for them and execute the dive in the way that they want and just perform. Right. They want to perform knowing they have all the hours behind them. And that's, I think, what Stephen King was describing in, on Writing. You know, when he sits down, he has in his mind, he's thoroughly sort of what he and Steve Pressfield told me. He does this too. He sort of has a very, very vague sense of, you know, he has a very specific beginning point inciting incident, and he has a vague understanding of how it's going to end In a surprising way that's inevitable. And then as he's writing, these sort of autonomic systems, you know, go in, go into overdrive. And he knows when he finishes a certain chunk, oh, now I have to mix it up, now I have to turn the table and now I have to do the next thing. And he just starts to do that intuitively. So the things that I'm teaching in the story grid are all the craft lessons that Stephen King and Stephen Pressfield and John Grisham and Nora Roberts and on and on and On Ann, Tyler and, you know, and Rice, all these people, they have learned from writing from book to book to book. So I love the basketball analogy. It's absolutely true. Anybody who picks up a hobby or wants to start, say, playing pool, you know, like billiards, it takes a while to learn how to get the shot. You don't have to worry and line up every shot because you already know it, but when you're just starting out. And this is another thing that I remember from our conversation last week, and I felt a little bad because you had asked me something, and it took me a while for my brain to click in and to remember what I had actually written in the story grid. And I think that's also a part of it, too, is that I refer to the story grid probably as much as you do day to day, because these are sort of really great principles that you kind of. You understand them, you learn them, and then when you're in process of describing them, you need to kind of refresh your memory. So the great thing about the whole, you know, craft of it is that these are the places that you can go back to and reference and remember, oh, okay, now I know why I'm stuck. Now I know where to get going again. Yeah.

And I feel like this is where.

You know, if you. So, again, like, thinking about how, you know, all of these are absolute assumptions. I've never actually worked with him, but, you know, thinking about how, like, Stephen King goes through his kind of first edit, read through, you know, I don't think he, like, reads a scene and thinks, oh, I didn't turn that scene from negative to positive. No, I need to, you know, like, it's just. He just like, oh, something's wrong, and then he fixes it and it's done.

Right.

You know, that's absolutely so Right. So that's where I think, like, okay, so basically what we're trying to do, as if we're an amateur writer and we're trying to do something like story grid is we're trying to shortcut all of. Some of those years, not all of them, but some of those years where Stephen King and others, again, making total assumptions, were just flailing, right? So they're just flailing. Writing and writing and writing. And then, oh, that doesn't work. That doesn't work. That doesn't work. Rejection, rejection, rejection. Trying to learn why it doesn't work. Where this is more like, okay, here's why it's probably not working. And it kind of shortcuts those years and hundreds of thousands of words, Right? Like that's the goal with some of this stuff.

Yeah, exactly. And I also think that knowing, and I think this is really what. I think what you're doing is a very interesting approach, which is if I set myself a task right, my task is I need to write a scene that starts one way and ends another way. So at the beginning of my scene, let's say my lead character has a lot of hope. You know, things have gone right for them. They think, you know, things are turning around for them. The beginning of this scene is when somebody, you know, starts out with a lot of hope, say they're feeling really great and they decide they're going to ask their next door neighbor out on a date, right? So they decide to raise the courage to do that. They have a lot of hope, things are going well for them. They go across the street, they make niceties with the neighbor. The reader or the person who's following the story believes that, you know, something's good gonna happen because, you know, it just started on a positive and then something strange happens to turn it from a positive of hope to despair. So at the end of the scene, it's turned. At the beginning of the scene, our lead character, who's going over to ask her next door neighbors for a date, feels really confident. And then at the end it ends in despair. So that's an example of a scene that turns. So if you know from the start, generically, the beginning of my scene, my lead character is going to be hopeful, and at the end of the scene, my lead character is going to be in despair. How do I get them from A to B? Then when you write that scene with that completely focused in your mind, I guarantee you that scene is going to turn and you're not going to be thinking about the crisis question or the progressive complications of each beat by beat scene. You're going to just know, I've got to start here and I have to end there. Now, for instance, somebody like, say, Stephen king, when he's 12 years old and he's writing a little story for himself, he might begin a scene with a lot of hope and end with a lot of hope. And the scene doesn't move anywhere. And then he gives it to his friend to read and he goes, I didn't like that story. It was stupid. It didn't go anywhere. And then he'll say, oh, I wonder why? And he'll reread it and go, oh, well, the guy just doesn't change. So maybe I'll make It that something happens to him, that he's in despair at the end of that scene. And so he learns that through trial and error. Whereas you, Tim, now is sort of like trying to really, you know, like, do Occam's Razor of writing a story. You know, the principles, and so you bypass that moment where your friend tells you that the scene doesn't work.

You think you lose something in that process.

No, I don't. Because what I think you learn is a really critical.

You're building up a muscle. It's sort of like if you want to get strong, right, you can do a couple of things. You could go outside and, you know, chop down a tree and drag it somewhere and push it really hard, or you can go and to a weight room and concentrate on that one specific muscle for a period of a week. Now, it's going to take you probably an entire summer to get as strong, you know, doing the bushwhacking work as it would going into a weight room. So I think there's a similar analogy. There is that you're trying to exercise very specific muscles when you use the approach of the story grid. I don't think it's any less creative than it would be doing the bushwhacking work. And in fact, I think you're going to get less discouraged by knowing these principles and you'll have something to sort of hold on to. Yeah, I don't think.

I'm not thinking of it as less creative as much as, like, you know, I guess I worry trying to find shortcuts like this, because that's how I see it is you're. You know, that's probably a crass way of saying it, but, you know, my goal is like, I don't want to spend the next 10 years flailing until I figure this out. I want to start ahead. But I worry sometimes, like, am I losing something by, you know, not flailing for 10 years? I guess.

See, I would make the argument that you have reached a point in your life where you have flailed enough, Right.

But everybody would assume that.

I don't think so. A lot of people, you would be surprised, Tim. A lot of people will. Will. Just when I start to describe the story good. And what I'm talking about, their eyes will roll and they'll say, oh, you can't create anything creative that way. That's ridiculous. Now, those are people who haven't flailed enough because they're assuming that there's some magical moment where the heavens part and the angels descend and give you A story, and that's not the way it works at all. And, you know, Stephen King would be the first one to tell you that it's a lot. You know, there's a very short little aside here in the novel Misery. He has this wonderful section in the middle of the book where he's talking about the creative process. And, you know, I forget the lead character who's imprisoned in the house, but he's. He's in bed and he's. And he's thinking of how this woman who really wants to know how he creates these stories, he could hand her, like, how he actually does it, and she wouldn't care. Right. She wouldn't have no idea what he's talking about. She would see that the whole process is valueless and stupid. Whereas somebody who has really been dedicating their life would go crazy to get that little writer's handbook. Right? So I think the people who have flailed understand that there's a structural form underneath everything that they need to learn, and they slowly do learn it through flailing. And when they're. When somebody approaches them, like a. Like a Robert McKee and they go to his seminar or say they read the story grid, or they read Stephen King stuff or other practical guides. There are plenty of practical guides, and it touches them. And they go, oh, my gosh, now I know where I've made my mistakes.

I think the flailing part.

Is a personal choice that we all sort of. It's a form of resistance, I think. I think we all like the drama of flailing around and saying, woe is me. I can't fix anything, and I'm an idiot.

Yeah.

I'm trying to think, because I remember this point.

Like, 10 years ago or something, and I was reading a bunch of Seth Godin stuff, and I'm a huge fan of Seth Godin, but he was talking about.

I can't remember exactly what. But it felt like he was saying, this is how I remember it. Feeling like, just put out work that you care about, that you're passionate about, that you feel like.

Really makes a change in the world, and that's what you should be focusing on. At the time, I was barely making enough to pay my bills. And I remember thinking, like.

I can't do that. You know, like, if I have to choose between work I care about and work that will pay the bills, I have to pick work that will pay the bills. And sometimes I think we get too far away from being hungry, that it changes the way that we see our work. And I Mean, it's a bonus, right? You know, if we can, you know, be much more picky and only work on things we really care about or passionate about, that's a bonus.

And I don't know why that came into my mind as we were talking. And I think it has something to do with this where it's like.

You.

Have to get.

Maybe it's a parallel. More than anything I feel like you have to get out of your system. This idea that you have to struggle or this idea that.

You know, there's this, there's this, like you said, like the, the heavens are going to part one day and everything's just going to come down and realize like there's a practical way to go about these things that will save you a lot of heartache. If you can kind of get over yourself and get over your kind of weird pride and just focus and do what, you know, do what has been proven over and over to work.

Yes, I would agree with that. And I think you're bringing up Seth Godin is a very good point because I felt the same way years ago. I actually bothered him enough where he agreed to meet me for a 10 minute coffee. And I had this grand scheme, you know, I was going to do this, this amazing website where you know, all of these unwanted and unloved but you know, beloved, you know, works of fiction would find a home and it would, it was this very complicated thing that, that may or may not work ever. And anyway, I call him and I go up and I pitch him and he says, you know, yeah, that could work if you, if you really love it enough. But what are you going to do then? What are you going to do that, what's, what's next after that? And he really, what that said to me was you can't think of your work as having an end, right? You can't think of when I finish this dissertation for my PhD, that's when I'm really going to apply the principles of everything that I've learned studying for the PhD to something practical that will make me happy. You have to think about how do I make my work every day. And you know, this doesn't happen overnight. And obviously, you know, this was, you're talking about something that was happened to you 10 years ago. I'm talking to something that happened to me seven years ago. It takes you a while to put in into practice what you want, you know, in the long term. So understanding that there isn't going to be any magical moment when everything is going to be Great. And you're going to be able to write your novel without any distractions. It's just never going to happen.

Yeah.

So. Yeah. So how can you make every day a little bit more interesting and creative? That gives you some. A little bit more happiness each day that you're doing something that you like?

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's what's interesting about where I'm at right now is I'm wanting to.

It's hard because I was, like, pursuing this one thing for a long time, and it really, like, crystallized and came together and gave me exactly what I had been wanting for years. And it was one of these things, like, there, you know, you hear this reminds me of a Friends episode where Joey was talking. He had just got fired from his soap opera, and he was like, you know how, like, you think these things are great and you want them for the longest time and you finally get them and they're not that great. He's like. He's like, this was not that. Like, it was everything I thought it would be.

And.

And that happened for me. Like, I got it. And I'm like, I literally. It was one of these, like, wake up one morning and realize what I've been striving after for a decade. I'm finally there. And what was funny is I started, like, not too long after that, I realized, like, I wasn't doing anything anymore. Like, I just stopped working. And I was like, my why, like, the reason I got out of bed in the morning was gone now. It was because it was to get here, right? And, like, I'm here now, and I'm like, oh, I need to find something else that. That I can. That I need to, like, go after that I actually want to accomplish. And that's when, like, a couple months later, after, like, lots of conversations and figuring it out, you know, I'm like, well, I've been playing around with writing fiction for a long time, like, now. Oh, I can do this. I can really go after it because I've worked so hard in these other ways. Oh, yeah. And it was funny because my friend that finally, like, crystallized that part for me was like. He's like, well, you know, he brought it up because he's like, you've been writing that, you know, you've never published anything. Like, why, you know, you got books and why haven't you done this? And. And he's like, why don't you just do that next? And I had, like, three or four things I had been playing around with, and that wasn't even on the table. And when I stopped and thought and I gave my answer, my answer was because I don't know that I can succeed at that. And he's like, yep, that's why you should do it.

Exactly.

And.

What I also like.

I hate to interrupt you, Tim, but what I also like about your story is that, you know, I remember last fall you were. You were working on a novella or, you know, nano Month or something like that, and.

Yeah, the nanowrimo.

Yeah. And here. Here it is a year later, and you're still at it. Right. And I think that's. That's real testimony to your commitment and you're enjoying the process. And you're like, ah, well, I think I have more to learn. Let me see if there's something I can learn from Sean. Let me. Let me. Let me reach out to him and see if he'd be interested. And I think that's really neat.

Yeah, well, so. Okay, I got it. Let's. So we were talking about.

This. I. This, like, you know, this idea of Stephen King and where this. Where his writing comes from. And I wanted to ask too, about, like.

In the story grid. Now, I've read it a while ago now, but you don't talk a lot about characters and character development.

Am I remembering that right?

No, you are remembering that, right? Yeah.

So where does that fall into it for you? Because a lot of other things I've read, there's a lot of, like, character development focus and this other thing called the Snowflake Method that I went through last year. Like, there's this whole thing where, like, you plan out all the characters in the book, who they are, what they want, you know, describe what they look like, like, go through these whole things.

Do you.

How do you feel about that? Because you don't really get a sense of that from story grid.

Well, there's obviously another book that I could write about character development. But I'll say this about it. The reason why I don't stress it in the story grid is because character, and this is really, really, really important to always remember. Character is revealed through action.

So you can have the most florid and beautiful description of the way somebody looks or an expression that they have.

But true character is revealed by what people actually do.

So the story grid is really about structuring the scenes so that people do.

Things.

And through those actions, it reveals the characters that you want to explore. So, you know, obviously there are. There are any number of scenarios to begin out to map out a cast of Characters, and it depends upon your genre that you want to write in, who that cast of characters will be. So I stress a lot of a lot about choosing your genres within the story grid because that is going to help you sort of flesh out your cast of characters. And the other thing I know, being a wannabe writer myself, a fiction writer myself, which I haven't reached that level of nirvana yet where I've given myself freedom to do it.

What I do know is that every single person who, who writes fiction, there's a character in their head. It's either an antagonist or a protagonist, or there's some sort of, you know, primordial oozing kind of idea of a character that. Or. Or cast of characters, if it's a family, you know, drama of sorts of. That they. They've been toying around with in their brains. So this notion that you should figure out your entire cast before you start plotting your book, I think is a mistake, because what you end up doing is we all think of casts in a certain way, right? We think of usually a family cast. You've got your brother, you've got your sister, you got your mother, you got your father. And, you know, if it's an office, you've got the boss, you've got the managers, you've got the worker bees. And all of those things have specific kind of prejudices and specificity to them that we unwittingly start to let cloud our mind and our judgment when we're trying to plot out an overall structure for specific genre. So if you're so enamored with sort of a cast of a family, a family, and you, you decide you want to write a thriller and you can't figure out, you know, where to put the sister in that story, you'll sort of jam her in somehow and make her a secondary or tertiary character that has no meaning at all, but will get a lot of really good scenes and lines and it'll just cloud, you know, the drive of the story.

So what I think is a better approach is to think about the genre that you want to write in first of all. Now, you know, we've been talking about genres kind of generically and through. I think we've covered sort of four of the five leaves of the. Of the genre clover so far. And it's the fifth, you know, the fifth clover, the content clover that's really going to help you sort of flesh out that beginning hook, middle build and ending payoff of your story. And then once you sort of have those ideas and Those events down, you know, your cast is really going to start to come to you and you can layer in all of that character stuff about how tall they are. You know, I really don't even think you need to put much physical description and a lot of. Unless it's a strikingly important physical description, like, you know, like Tom Buchanan and the Great Gatsby. His physical description is an important thing for Fitzgerald to give the reader. You know, he lets the reader know this guy was like a tight end on the Yale football team with a granite jaw. And, you know, like, what are those natural athletes that some. Everything always came easily to this guy. So the description of a Yale tight end who's an all American tells the reader very specifically, this is somebody with a lot of power. This is a powerful person who's not going to be easily overcome. So that's a physical description that has an active presence in the reader's mind. But to flesh out character biographies and character sketches and casts and to do all that work, I think it's busy work that will cloud you and really throw a pipe wrench into the real fleshing out of the structure and the form, which are what I described earlier, which are basically saying to yourself here, I need a scene where it begins with life and it ends with death. The beginning of this scene, somebody is going to be alive and at the end of the scene somebody is going to die. That's a value shift from life to death. In this scene, we're going to have a scene where there's a truth at the beginning and then at the end it turns out to have been a lie. So that you, you don't have to have so many specifics loading down each scene. And it gives you the freedom to work within. It's like playing a 12 bar blues. If you're a musician, you know the chords that you have to use, but there's any number of millions of ways of being able to create it.

Okay, so I want, I want to put a pin in right here because that naturally leads me to the question of like, well, what do you do at the beginning of your story to get started, But I want to stop before we hit that and talk about the content leaf of genres and to kind of wrap up talking about genre.

So tell me.

Because we talked about reality, which is realism, fantasy, factualism, absurdism, we talked about time, style, structure. But the big one that seems to really drive your obligatory scenes, who your characters are going to be, all this stuff seems to be the content leaf. Would you agree with that.

Absolutely.

So talk a little bit about what the content leaf is all about and. Yeah, let's just start there.

Okay. What the content leaf is all about is. It's two things. It's the levels of antagonism that are facing that are in your story. So every story has to have a conflict. So if you don't have any conflict, you don't have a story. You have a setting, maybe, if you're lucky.

So I break them down into two kinds of content. There's the external content and the internal content. The external content genres are all concerned with, you know, external levels of antagonism, meaning, you know, like the weather, you know, like an avalanche or a personal vendetta, one person against another. These are all external things that somebody or something happening to your protagonist or your. If it's a small cast of a mini plot, your. Your series of protagonists. So the external content genres, I'm just going to run them down for you. You know, you have your action story, which is like a James Bond story. You have a horror, horror stories, which are monsters and victims.

You know, a great horror would be the Exorcist. That's a great horror story. Crime stories are, you know, the value at stake is justice. Will or will a criminal, a criminal act has been made, will that criminal be brought to justice or not? So those can include, you know, murder mysteries or spy novels, organized crime stories.

Any number of things. And I do. I get into voluminous detail in the book, so I'm not gonna go crazy here. So that's crime.

Now, sort of like a really cool thing that came together over time was a combination plate of sort of action, horror and crime, which I called the thriller. Now the thriller is a combo of a crime story and a horror story. And it's sort of like the protagonist becomes the victim and the protagonist is sort of the investigator in a crime story. And luckily, the story grid is all about the Silence of the Lambs, which is a thriller. And all of my theories about the thriller are in the book.

So I'm not going to get too deeply into the thriller. But that's. That's another external genre where you have sort of a serial killer or a legal thriller or say a journalistic thriller where your lead character becomes the controlling element, victim in the story.

So would you take a book like the Firm and call that a thriller? Yes, because it's got crime and action. Right? Like, that's what I would think, because I wouldn't say there's a fate worse than death in that One for horror.

There's a fate worse than death for.

The Silence of the Lambs and for.

The Firm.

The fate, you know, the thing is, is that the fate worse than death is what I call the negation of the negation. Now, I'm going a little bit deep into my theories about story, but you don't necessarily have to take it to the end of the line in a thriller. So what Grisham did is he took it to the life and death. He didn't really take it all the way to the fate worse than death. Like if Mitch McDeer and the firm doesn't succeed and outwit the mob that controls his law firm, you know, I don't think he's gonna face damnation. You know, he's. He's not gonna go to hell for. For that failure. Whereas somebody like Clarice Starling, if she doesn't go the full nine yards to try and get that woman out of that hole in the Silence of the Lambs, she will be tormented the rest of her life. She will have a life on hell.

She will have hell inside of her own mind. So that is a fate worse than death.

So you don't necessarily have to go to the end of the line of the value in a thriller. Those that do, and do it successfully, I think, are incredible works of fiction. And if you can go to the end of a value line.

In a specific story, you're really, really taking the genre to its outer limits. You're pushing the envelope.

So just to continue on the contents, on the external, there's the love story, which we all know and love. There's the war story, which we're all familiar with. And that, you know, the obligatory scene in the war genre, of course, is the big battle at the end of the scene, at the end of the story. There's the society.

Story, which is really. Oftentimes the genres that literary fiction writers like to work in, like domestic drama, where you have something like.

You know, to take an example for a play, Long Day's Journey Into Night. There's a. There's a story about a family. It's a family domestic drama that has to deal with social life.

And again, there's far more description in the book about this than I can really get into now, unless we went into a specific novel or story. There's the Western, which we're all familiar with. And then the last one is performance, which is sort of those great stories that we all love where there's a big event at the end, like Rocky A lot of the sports stories that we know and love, like music stories, was. There's like that great movie Whiplash is a performance, you know, story. And those are all external genres where there's this big, you know, external forces of antagonism and personal forces of antagonism that are stopping your. Your lead protagonist from getting what they want and their object of desire.

So just to move on into the internal. So the internal, as opposed to the external, is all about what's going on inside the protagonist. What are they coping with in terms of their own internal buttons that are holding them back from getting what they want and what they need.

The internal genres are really about.

You know, personal growth.

So just to give you an example, you have stories like, you know, the Maturation plot, which is a change in a worldview of the lead character. So at the beginning of a maturation plot, like something like Saturday Night Fever, you've got a lead character who's immature and believes the world is one way. And then at the end of that story, he understands it's a much larger universe than what he believes he could ever have imagined.

Again. Another one maturation plot would be To Kill a Mockingbird, where, you know, Scout's worldview at the beginning is dramatically changed by the end of the story.

There's also the disillusionment plot, which is. Which is a very, very popular one in American literature, where you have a character at the beginning of the story who believes in a certain, you know, a certain order and justice about the world, and then at the end finds that everything that they thought was true is actually not true. And the Great Gatsby is a great example. You know, the lead character, the narrator of the story is Nick Carraway, who's sort of this up and coming bond trader who goes to New York for the summer. And he's in this fabulous world. He thinks that there are these, you know, these really good people who have a lot of wealth and there's justice and goodness in that society. And by the end, he discovers it's all rotten and empty and vacuous. So that's a shift in a worldview. It's a change of perception of his life, of life in and of itself. So the worldview is one of the internal genres. And again, there's sub genres that I just talked about, you know, including outside of Maturation and Disillusionment, there's education plots and revelation plots. Now, so go ahead, let me just get through the last two and then you can nail me with as many questions the Last two in the internal genres are the morality genre and the status genre and the morality genre. Genre is about how the. The lead character's moral compass is sort of changed, right? So there's the punitive plot where somebody who's good at the beginning of the story turns out to be, you know, he goes bad and he turns out to be evil. So, you know, one of those kind of stories is like the Treasure of the Seadra Sierra Madre. Another one is Wall street, you know, where the. The character Bud Fox at the beginning is sort of this naive young traitor, and by the end, he's doing the dirty dealings for Gordon Gekko. And then in the third act, he has a. He has a turnaround where, you know, he finds redemption. Which brings me to the redemption plot, which is part of the morality. And that would be where, you know, a bad guy at the beginning of the story reforms. And so the redemption plot is a very, very popular one. And a lot of Hollywood movies like Drugstore Cowboy, that's one of my favorite movies from the 90s with Matt Dillon. That's a really. A really strong redemption plot where somebody at the beginning thinks they're, you know, they're a horrible, terrible person, and by the end they have a moral shift.

And then you have in the morality, the testing plot, which is where, you know, somebody's willpower is tested against temptation. Cool Hand Luke is a really good testing plot. So also the Old man and the Sea, that's a great testing plot.

So that's the morality internal genre. And the last one is the status genre. And this is where, you know, we have a change in social position. The lead character moves from either a higher place to a lower place on the social hierarchy or vice versa. And there are, you know, there are four different kinds of, you know, sub genres of that, but generally, that's really what it's about. It's about.

You know, somebody who moves from a small, lower, you know, class to a higher class. Like the great example is American Tragedy, Dreiser's novel, which is the story of this sort of clerk who falls in love with this beautiful woman played by Elizabeth Taylor in the movie, it was called A Place in the Sun. It's a great movie. And Montgomery Cliff plays the lead character, and he.

He wants to rise from, you know, just a nobody to a somebody.

A great example of the tragic plot matched with a crime story is.

You know, Patricia Highsmith stories the talented Mr. Ripley. If you ever saw that movie with Matt Damon. The novel's fantastic. It's A story of this sort of loser guy who pretends that he's part of upper society, and then when people start to find out that he's not, he starts killing. That's great.

Yeah.

So that's really it. There's, you know, those. There's lots of sub genres that, that swarm these two general content areas. But and I. And as we talked about last week, you can have a story that has both. You know, you can have the redemption story within a crime story. You can have a testing plot, part of a love story. There's any number of combinations. And this is why I think it's really great to start with what genre you want to write in. Because as I said earlier, if, you know, you want to write a western redemption story, then, you know, you're gonna need a barmaid in there, right? You're gonna need. You're gonna need, you know, some sharpshooters. You're going to need, you know, the, the guy who owns the farm. You know, you're going to need the certain cast. So a lot of those questions about cast and all that stuff are going to be solved for you just by your choices of genre. And also, as you mentioned earlier, the obligatory scenes and conventions are going to help you map out, you know, your global, you know, beginning hook, middle build and ending payoff too.

Okay, so I want to try to break down how this is actually useful because.

You know, I sense that, like, I don't want to come, you know, I'm not. I'm not like taking all of these external genres and like, throwing them in a hat and like picking one out and then doing the same thing with an internal genre. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna write a story on this. These things, right? We usually come with an idea for the story.

And so how would you. So, okay, so let's say I. Okay, so I'll just use an example. So right now I'm working on this idea for a story where.

It is where a bunch of people are basically locked out on this boat and they can't get back and somebody's trying to kill everybody and they're trying to figure out which one is which. And so I would, to me, what I would do is I have an idea of the protagonist and who he is, and I'm starting to have an idea for who the characters are. And like, where the story is going to go is. So, so how do I use this genre, you know, five Leaf Clover here, to actually help me write that story?

Okay, well, what I always Advise is like there. There's sort of two kinds of thinkers when they're thinking up a story, Right. If you ask somebody, what's your story about? They're either going to say, well, okay, it begins by an alien invasion, and when the aliens invade, this happens, and then this happens, and this happens, and this happens. That's sort of a, what I call the what if, you know, kind of thinker. And then if you talk to somebody else, they'll say, well, what's the story about this. This woman.

Who has a change of heart at the beginning of this story. She thinks that her life is perfect. And then the stranger comes to town. And because of the way she interacts with this stranger, she discovers that she really wants something else.

So it sounds like you're saying some people come at it from an external genre, like heavy thinking, and some people come at it from an internal genre. Heavy thinking.

Exactly. Okay, so from what you described, if you were to say to me, okay, this begins. There's a boat in the middle of the ocean. All of its, you know, communication systems have been destroyed. There's. Sorry, let me just shut off the phone.

All right, just start that part over again.

Okay.

So from what you described to me, it sounds like, hey, there's this boat in the middle of the ocean. It's lost all of its communication ability. There's 52 people on board the boat, and things start to happen. The ship's captain is trying to get a message to get rescued. They're running out of supplies, and things are getting very, very tense.

And then all of a sudden, a body is found. Somebody's been murdered. And then it would proceed from there. So the inciting incident would be, ship loses all forms of communication and is adrift.

So what that would say to me is, now, okay, that's a pretty good setup. Now let's walk through sort of the. The Five Leaf Clover and see if we can hone in on exactly what specific genres you want to work in.

Okay, look, can I try?

Sure.

Okay, so time is easy. This is going to be a long story.

Reality is. I want to do.

Realism because it's, you know, it's. It's not fantasy, it's not absurdism. And I'm trying to remember, what would factualism be? Is that like the historic. Like if I'm telling a story inside of a historic thing that actually happened. So there's all these. Okay, so I would say realism.

So it's something that is. Has not happened, but could have.

Right.

Okay.

Okay. So, yeah, so that's realism.

Yes.

Okay. And then under structure, I would say it's just drama because when we talked about, you basically cut out almost all of them. Right. So you can't write cartoons, you can't write dance, you can't write musicals. Most of these you can't write. You're just saying these exist. But for writing, you were like, okay, there's literary drama, maybe documentary, but in comedy.

Well, yeah, I would. It would probably be a dramatic story. And the only other little thing that you might want to tweak would. It might be a little cinematic. Right. So if you're thinking like this could be a great movie, then if you're thinking in those terms, using the cinematic slash, drama style is not a bad choice.

So what's the difference between cinematic and drama?

Well, cinematic would basically be you're thinking in terms of the visual.

Representation of the action. So you're not just going to be writing about somebody's panic in a closet. You're going to be doing a big action sequence in the story so that if some, you know, somebody in Hollywood reads your novel, they're going to be able to see what that action sequence will be. Do you know what I'm saying? So it'd be much more over the top. Sort of a shark bites through the ship and then, you know.

Yeah, okay. So structure is pretty simple because it's mini plot, anti plot or arch plot. Or is it arc plot or architecture plot?

It's arc plot. But, yeah, you're definitely in. You're definitely in the external genres, which are all arc plots, so.

Right, okay.

All right.

So in the content side, I would say this is gonna be.

Well, a thriller with a combination of action and crime, basically, because there's gonna be people dying, so that's a crime, or being killed. And then there's gonna be action, which is, you know. Yeah, it's gonna have a lot of action in it.

Well, the only thing on thriller is that you have to make a choice. You can have a crime action story, the thriller. What separates the thriller from a crime story is that oftentimes the crime story, the protagonist who solves the crime, the master detective or the whoever is the lead, they don't necessarily have any connection to the forces of antagonism. So what that means is that.

It'S never made personal. Like, for example, in the Silence of the Lambs, it's made personal for Clarice Starling when.

When Hannibal Lecter.

Gets inside of her mind and makes that pretty pro quo sort of thing. Yeah.

So like an action would be, I think we talked about this before, like James Bond is just pure action because there's no real character growth and no personal investment in the outcome other than like, you know, this is what he does.

And so then I would say crime then would be more like the law and order where the cops are just doing their job. It doesn't become personal in most of the stories.

Exactly.

My current plan for the book is it's going to be a group of guys that went to high school together and they were all friends in high school and it's now, you know, a set number of years later and they are getting together for this scuba diving trip. They're called liveaboards, where they stay, it's like a cruise but for scuba diving. So they're out on sea for a week and they're doing all these scuba trips and it's kind of this get together and so.

And then one of them, you know, has his reasons for why he's killing everybody off. And so I would put that in the thriller category because the reasons that he's killing everybody off are all personal.

Yeah, yeah, that works.

Okay.

And I'm assuming that the final showdown would be between, you know, the guy he really, really wants to get back at, you know.

Yeah, well, yeah, so there's like the most of it's going to be told through like one character. So I have like a protagonist that's one of the guys and he's can't figure out which of the other ones are the bad guy.

Right.

So yeah, a final showdown where they're basically the only two left.

So.

Then when I start thinking about the internal genre, I don't think it's morality. And I guess it could be because I want my protagonist to be a good guy that would never hurt anybody. That's just kind of your run of the mill guy that has a family and has a job and you know, wears a tie to work.

So it could be morality where he realizes like, he'll do amazingly awful things to survive.

Or like, I don't know, I don't think it'd be status for sure. But I don't think I know enough about like worldview versus morality to make that choice.

Well, I think it depends on the, the, the MacGuffin of meaning. What is the. You know, whenever it comes to a thriller or a crime story, I always say before you start thinking about your protagonist so much, you, you gotta nail the antagonist. Okay. You have to really, really focus on the darkness because the darkness is really the thing that drives.

Readers interest. And that seems strange, but think about it. It's far more interesting to not know how dark is somebody is going to go or what motivates a psychopath than it is the guy who, you know, the nice guy from down the block who works at the pta. We were fascinated by evil. This is what drives, you know, serial killer thrillers and all those dark horror novels and, you know, any darkness that features a murder, even, you know, cozy murder mysteries, we want to know. We want to sort of have some excitement when we're reading the book. And the thing about excitement is that somebody described it as, it's like going to the zoo and there's a tiger in the cage. Right? It's exciting to look at that tiger. But we also know that there's a cage there. You know, the tiger's not going to get out and eat us up. But we do get excited to see that, that, that danger without personally experiencing. So if you can create a danger like a tiger in a cage and slowly make the reader think that that cage is starting to fall apart, then that's what's going to keep them moving. It's going to engage them in the work. So when you're thinking about, you know, a thriller, a crime story, an action story, this is why you always think about the villains in James Bond. You know, you think of, you know, Goldfinger, you know, what a great villain. I expect you to die, Mr.

Bond.

Yeah. So sorry.

That was a great impression.

Thank you. So, so if you can create. And this is what makes great horror movies like Freddy Krueger. I mean, what a great creation. I mean, the thing only comes after you when you're asleep and everybody needs to sleep. So how do you stop the guy from coming after you? I mean, it's amazing. So that's why Dracula and vampires, these are just the zombies. These all come back because they're these, you know, really, really entrenched, you know, ideas that terrorize us and make us really frightened. So if you can create a lead character, an antagonist that's unique and innovative and interesting, you know, you can write anything.

And people will really, really engage in it. So when you're thinking of, you know, is this. It looks like you're. What you're looking at is a thriller on a ship, you know, like Alien. There's a thriller on a ship right now that is incredible. It's not really a thriller because it's a. It's sort of a horror action science fiction pastiche because the, you Know, the alien doesn't care about Sigourney Weaver or anybody else. That that thing is just. Its only goal is to reproduce and survive. So that's a, that's a really great screenplay because it introduces a really innovative force of antagonism. So what we often do when we start thinking about stories, we think we put ourselves in the position of being the protagonist, right? And what I always advise people is think about all your, all the worst things that you think of. You know, all the terrible ideas that you have. Like somebody cuts you off in traffic and you've got five minutes waiting on a stoplight and you just want to, like, you want to fantasize about what you would do to that person for almost, you know, sending you to your death. So you think about all those things that you can never, ever tell anybody.

And then you give that to this, this alter ego force of antagonism and think, and think it through, spend a lot of time on it. Because the more time you spend on that force of antagonism, what you're going to find is that that guy or that woman or that creature is going to feed you so many story ideas to make your story rich and unique and with so many wonderful twists and turns. So when they're just to think about it for a second when they were creating the alien creature, they're probably like, well, everybody's done aliens before. How are we going to make this different? So what they probably were thinking like, well.

What if its blood was like acid, right? And they're like, yeah, that's good.

So you have to think about those forces of antagonism in really fun and unique ways. And again, what they're going to do is they're going to help. They're going to help you, you know, add twists to scenes that you haven't even thought of before. So generally, and I know you're using a realistic setting and it's going to be a real ship.

On the, on the ocean, but you might, you might want to just even take a little bit of step, step back at this point and say, let me figure out my force of antagonism and really, you know, tweak that and make it something and give yourself the freedom to be able to shift and change. You know, you might say to yourself, hey, this, maybe this is, you know, this is a spaceship lost, or maybe this is something else, or, you know what I'm saying? So that you can, you can. That's the beauty of asking these questions is that, you know, you want to write a Thriller, Right. Basically, generally, now, there's a million ways of doing that. But the really key thing in a thriller is the force of antagonism. So you say to yourself, the most important thing in a thriller, the one thing that I gotta have that's gonna make everybody want to read the book, even if there's a ton of holes in it and writing's not so great, you know, is the force of antagonism is the killer or the. You know, how can I make this killer fresh? Who are the best forces of antagonism in the thriller arena? Let me go look at Silence of the Lamb. Let me go look at Kiss the Girls. Let me go look at Along Came a Spider. Let me think about, do I want to make this a force of evil as opposed to a specific human being? Do I want to do a combo play? What do I want to do?

Well, that gets into, like, the next step, because that's what I feel like, is once I have.

My genres kind of mapped out.

With the. At that point, if I want to find my obligatory scenes, I want to find my general, like, cast of characters, like you said in that Western, you gotta have a bar made. Right, Right. It's. I'm. I'm feeling like the best thing I could do is grab five novels that are as close as possible to the genre I want to write in and basically map those. Read through them again and map them out and be like, okay, here's the characters. Here's who they are. You know, here's what's driving them. Here's, you know, and then here's, like, all of the scenes that this. That show up over and over in all of these different books. And that is kind of where I get my kind of structure for what my book should be like as well.

That's a great idea. That's. I make that suggestion to people all the time, and it requires. It requires a lot of sort of fun work. And a lot of people are like, well, I really need to get into the writing, though. I don't want to, you know, I don't want to analyze five books. I just want to get into my writing. I want to plot out. And when I. Well, the thing is, is that by doing that work, it's going to pay off in such a large way later, when. When you're facing a dilemma, you can say to yourself, oh, let me think, let me think. James Patterson solved that this way. Let's see. Peter Benchley solved it this way. I don't want to do it that way. What about this. No, that's a little cheesy. I think what's his name did it there. And so by having a comprehensive knowledge of the genre you want to write in, you can take it up a level, right? So that when you. So if you're constantly trying to challenge yourself and to create something unique and innovative in each of the obligatory scenes or conventions, by the time you eventually write that book, it's going to have that extra special something that an editor at a major publishing house or a group of readers who buy things just based upon their concepts online would really be interested in reading. So you're going to innovate within your genre if you know the genre. You can't make a better bookcase if you haven't studied 10 or 20 bookcases before. And it's the same thing in writing. So your idea about. Let me go out and let me think this through. What are stories that feature some sort of vessel or like small culture stuck, you know, like even Lord of the Flies is a great example, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, there's. There's this, like, the dissolution of a cult. The Beach, I think, was a great book by Alex Garland about something similar where you have a group of people who are sort of cast away, who devolve or evolve based upon the external pressures on them. And, you know, you might even say to yourself, maybe my forces of antagonism even aren't personal. Maybe this is. What about Deliverance? Right? Deliverance is a story of four guys who go down a river for fun, and they're gonna go on their final white river rafting trip before they flood the area, and everything is gonna be under 30ft of water. So it's gonna be this great weekend. They go into the middle of nowhere. They've got their canoes. The inciting incident of the story is that four guys go on a river trip, and just before they leave, they drop their cars off with these guys who live in the. In sort of like the. In the woods. And they're kind of weird, you know, but, you know, they're cordial and everything, and everything's fine. And then they start going down the river and things really start going badly for them. And how they react to those external problem is fascinating. You remember at the beginning of the podcast when I talked about. You asked me about. Some people say to write out your list of characters and your cast and that. And I always say, no, no, go with your genre first. This is why you go with your genre first. Right. And Deliverance is A perfect example. The lead character in Deliverance is played by Jon Voight. In the movie, he's a schoolteacher. He's just a normal everyday guy who's trying to get along, who also has a really tough friend who kind of challenges him, played by Burt Reynolds. And so there's only four guys in the movie and in the novel, too. It's a brilliant novel. And so this character moves from being this mild mannered guy, somebody who has to protect his best friends, and he goes out and he hunts down and he kills somebody because he needs to protect his clan.

And it is brilliant. And you're rooting for that guy. And he makes a moral change from somebody who would never kill to somebody who makes a firm decision that he has to and he does it. And that action, that action of making that choice to hunt down that bad guy and kill him is character. We now know what that guy is really all about. At the beginning, we thought he was one thing, but he turned out to be something else in the end.

So that's where action really, really creates characterization. It's not how you describe them, it's what they do.

That's it for this episode of the Story Grid podcast. As always, I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you sharing the podcast as well. So so far we're getting a couple thousand downloads of each episode. But my goal, because it's constantly not good enough, My goal is 5,000 downloads per episode. So I could use your help doing that. There's several different ways you could do that. The biggest one is just tell a friend. If everybody tells one friend, we're going to get pretty close to that goal of mine. Other things are go to storygrid.com sign up for the email newsletter. You won't be sorry. That's where you get all the newest stuff from Sean around the Story Grid. On top of that, you can go into itunes and drop us a rating and a review. Review. But the biggest thing once again is just tell a friend. We appreciate you sharing it. It makes it fun for us to keep doing this podcast as we march on forward through the Story Grid book. So thanks for listening and I will catch you on episode.