How does the Story Grid Trinity apply at the Macro vs Micro levels?

Hello and welcome to the storygrid podcast this is a show dedicated to helping you level up your craft as a writer my name is tim grall and i'm a writer and the behind the scenes guy here at storygrid this podcast episode is hosted by storygrid certified editor kimberly kessler alongside sean coyne the founder of storygrid and an editor with over thirty years of experience in this episode they are discussing how the story grid trinity applies at the macro and micro levels of storytelling before we jump in i want to mention two things you might be interested in first i recommend you pick up a copy of the story microscope by your podcast host kimberly kessler in this book kim shows you how to turn a spreadsheet into a precision editing tool using the story grid approach the spreadsheet becomes a microscope through which you can see scenes sequences and your entire story in high resolution you can get twenty percent off the story microscope and all of our books at storygrid dot com books with the coupon code podcast lastly the next storygrid certified editor training is coming up this february if you're an editor looking to increase the income you can make in your business i highly recommend you join us for this training you can see all of the details at storygrid dot com certification okay that's all in the announcements so let me turn it over to.

Kim and sean hi shawn hi kim.

We'Re back again so we've been talking about internal genres and i've been asking you to help me translate and just you know apply the trinity framework to global internal stories because that's that's what i write that's what i tell that's you know those are that's the majority of my clients these are what we're really we're really into right we're really into the relationships between people and we're really into you know the the pressures and changes that individuals go through in their environment and so i would really appreciate you know you wrestling with this with me and getting to this point where like i really loved what you had to say about that no matter what no matter how much we love our character and what they're going through and how meaningful it is to us and how much we believe that it's going to be cathartic to our reader if it's not exciting if it doesn't have this on the surface excitement something that they that the reader can really sink their teeth into and and the the puppets are moving around the stage so to speak they're never going to get to the end of the book and so they're never gonna get my cathartic moment that i've so beautifully set and so you had a couple ideas you said you know ways that you can we can really help us is to one constrain the time and so have a specific you know really shrink down the time that the story is going to take place over rather than like the entirety of someone's life and also having a really clear external goal state for my character right really making sure we're anchoring in the external so that the internal has some some context and from there we talked a little bit about making sure then that in order for them to achieve this goal state they have to go through a stimulus response of on the surface action happening in order to be moving them either closer to or further from this goal state so can you talk to me a little bit about how we're applying these concepts of.

Time goal state and stimulus response you know i'm kind of wondering how that applies at the different layers of the story like the macro all the way down to the micro of the beat so making me want to ask like the trinity how do you see the trinity applying to the different units of story how does the trinity apply to the macro level versus like the beat level and is it the same or different or kind of like i guess just lead us down that road and i think then i'll have some follow up but i just i wanted to kind of connect to we talked a little bit about genre inclusion and exclusion or emphasis and now i'm thinking about the beats like all the way from the beat level up to the global level and how the trinity shows up that way well.

I think the best thing to do is to start at the beat level because this is really where the rubber meets the road and i think it's going to be a very big innovation for storygrid methodology in that i've been doing i guess this last eight months or so a lot a lot of work on beat generation and as it compares to on the surface beyond the surface and above the surface i got that mixed up but so generally at the beat level i mean the goal state for me in story grid is to be able to as strange as this sounds is to be able to do a bunch of things and the first thing is to establish the different kinds of beats now there are in my estimation i guess you're you're probably not going to be surprised when i say there are three kinds of beats.

A trinity of beats what there are.

A trinity of beats and of course they map on the surface above the surface and beyond the surface ideas so what are the three kinds of beats the first kind of beat is called an expository beat and what expository beats are is when the author now it doesn't necessarily have to mean the artist who is employing the author but let's say for example in the great gatsby f scott fitzgerald created an author and the author's name is nick carraway so nick carraway is the author of the great gatsby but he works for ascot fitzgerald and that's a pretty cool way.

Of thinking about it your point of view narrator character is the person who's telling the story and how they can be different or separate from the you the writer of the story that's exactly.

Right and obviously once you nail who is telling the story a lot of your problems just drizzle away and so if i were to give advice to people i would say really really focus on who do you think the best narrator of your story is like harper lee thought well maybe myself as a early thirties woman telling a story about my childhood would be the right narrator for this book that i want to write and then after a couple of drafts her editor said you know have you tried about writing this from sort of the point of view of yourself when you were younger when you were scout's age and that's what cracked the book right because she was able to do things through the eyes of a child that no audience would believe from a thirty year old or twenty eight year old woman that's a key key component so expository beats are those descriptions of time or the world that are directed towards the audience so for example it was the best of times it was the worst of times that's exposition that's the narrator charles dickens and telling the beginning of tale of two cities.

Well even in the bell jar right that opening line about it was the summer that they executed the rosenbergs that's still that same kind of beat that's.

Exactly right okay and what i've discovered is that genres have sort of conventions of the beginning of the story oh.

Interesting yeah i'm not surprised but still exciting right like yeah that makes sense.

Yeah okay so after jim wiped down the counter he opened up a bottle of beer okay that's exposition because it's describing telling the audience what's going on on the stage right and it's also sort of camera shifting it compresses time so we get to see a whole sequence of events in one sentence oh.

That'S so interesting i don't think i would have thought that that was exposition but when you explain it that way it makes sense that it is okay.

There'S different kinds of exposition beats that i won't get into now but they're all about kind degree and urgency i'll get to that maybe at some point.

Yeah i might have to bring it up again at a later podcast all.

Right so after expository beats then we have active beats now what active beats are they are associated with on the surface these are kind of green i use green for on the surface red for above the surface and blue for beyond the surface so exposition beats are beyond the surface right because they're explaining to the audience and i'm thinking of this directly like what is the experience of the audience what energy is transferring from the actual words on the page to the audience i'm not worrying about the avatar's motivations at this point i'm just looking at how is the audience experiencing the story are they getting good signal is the signal from the author ringing really good bells through the perceptual planes of the audience that's the first level to evaluate whether or not your story works is the signal easy to grasp can the audience get an optimal grip on what you're trying to tell them can they follow the does the action make sense are you moving the camera around in their mind to the point where they're getting dizzy and vertigo right right right so now what we're doing is we're starting to get into a style guide for storygrid which is going to be awesome right because instead of saying don't use this don't do that and giving a bunch of rules we can explain hey when you say it that way when you use passive voice the dog was bought by the owner at the store that's difficult instead of we bought a beautiful puppy the dog was bought by the owner at the store makes the audience kind of have to wait let me think about that for a minute the dog is the so the people bought the dog at the store instead of we bought skippy at the store right so instead of saying never use passive voice we can say passive voice is not an optimal grip for the audience it's confusing it makes them work too hard all right so exposition is beyond the surface it builds the world right the author lays out the world like nick carraway describes jay gatsby's mansion he describes his house he describes the bay he describes the green light at the end of daisy's dock all of those things are energy that goes directly into the mind of the audience alright so then active beats are green active beats are stimulus response so stimulus is when there's information energy that flows from the story to the audience suddenly a ball dropped from the sky so the audience gets stimulated by that description of what just happened it's the drop in of chaos into the story it's an unexpected event that stimulates the audience and it also stimulates the other players on the stage right so active beats you can clearly delineate what the stimulus is where it's coming from how big it is then you can also clearly delineate the red response of the avatar who responds to the stimulus in the hobbit when bilbo sees an old man walking across at the bottom of his hill you know he shouts out good morning so the stimulus is this is the perception of the old man at the bottom of the hill and bilbo's good morning is the response to that stimulus so that can actively be pictured in the mind of the audience very clearly when you read the hobbit it starts to form in your mind there's this little guy standing on this hill and he's got his pipe and he says good morning you see him hold his hand up and wave even though that's not described thing all right so those are active beats lastly and they're associated with on the surface lastly there are passive beats now passive beats are really really interesting because what they are are stimulus that has no response so what that does is they're associated with above the surface what it does to the audience is it indicates to them somebody just said something and nobody's saying anything else like hey kim would you like a bowl of ice cream judy walked by and you're like why isn't kim responding to the ice cream right right that would never.

Happen.

I guarantee it but the audience.

Will be intrigued like wonder what's going on with kim did she fall you know like what happened right so passive beats they're really really you don't want to have a ton of them in there you want to really manage them because what they indicate to the audience is that there's something not being processed in the avatar's mind the stimulus has not been processed and why because they haven't responded and so that is the means by which you can indicate to the audience that there's some shift some change is going on in that avatar.

Is that different than having the character freeze like an acknowledging that you know sean offers kim ice cream and kim freezes and has a visceral response of like oh my god he's talking to me i don't know what to say.

Yeah there's a massive difference okay okay.

Can you yeah can you talk and do that yeah that's super useful yeah.

The difference is this is that when you explain that gives away the joke now occasionally you might want to do that but oftentimes that's usually first draft itis and so what you want to do is on your second draft when you see yourself explaining people's freezing or lack of response just cut it why why do you want to do that because let your audience fill it in because then they're going to be wondering i wonder why they froze but when you go she froze then you're it's not exciting it's not interesting because you're just reporting the result it's it is a response but it's told by the author so that's telling not showing so this whole notion of show don't tell and everything i'm getting a far far better way of giving advice about that stuff and it really has to do about the specificity and the way in which you direct your exposition which goes to a even more micro level of what exposition is trying to do but when you're explaining behavior the author is explaining behavior you really have to be careful about it because what it does is it robs the reader of of why they're there in the first place they want to figure it out they can figure it out what does this author think i'm stupid that's kind of the way i feel when people are like she really didn't like the way he said that to her like why don't you just not respond so it's.

Interesting because i feel like the other side of that of that coin is that when people are like oh but it's supposed to be subtext and you're like no we have no idea what's going on so like how to balance between over you know like giving you every thought that's in my character's head versus like i just left all of this stuff out because quote subtext and i'm so deep you know you're like no no you really need to show us and tell us what's going on like because we have no idea what's happening so that's an interesting problem you know to try to solve that's why.

You have to be very careful about how often you use passive beats.

Passive beats perfectly managed are amazing too many of them are ridiculous right it's all about management it's managing the expectations of the audience it's like being the puppet master and looking at the kids as you're dancing the people on the stage you know what stop talking stop looking at your marionettes for a minute and look out at the audience are those kids ready to pee their pants because they can't stand what you're telling them or are they really engaged you know are they really really interested what do you do at a puppet show well peter woke up that morning and across the way was a wolf.

Right you don't go the wolf wanted to eat him the wolf didn't have any breakfast that morning and he was because the kids are like what are you doing stop at wolf right right right wolf works for us let me think about the wolf not you.

That'S kind of the it's like my diorama trick right like think about your audience it's like once we start looking in our navels and thinking about how well we painted the stage instead of looking about the reactions of the audience that's when we get into trouble and when we start worrying about subtext and like when we make a mistake we'll go oh well.

It'S subtext right like that it's not a cure all for all if i.

Don'T know what it is it didn't.

Work exactly exactly right right so it's interesting yeah and the idea of like oh i don't know what it is am i intrigued or am i frustrated by that right like it's okay to not know if i'm like ooh there's something but i know i know that's what you're doing right yeah like you meant for me to not know so that because you're going to tell me later versus like oh supposed to be picking up on that well you've got.

To pay it off yeah you got to pay it off you've got to pay off the passive beats but this is a means passive beats are the means by which you intrigue the audience and then when you build up a really great set of them for example in chinatown i'm sorry to use these old things but they're the first things off the top of my head but in chinatown what you do when you're watching the film you're like you see elizabeth mulray played by faye duniwit you see her not respond or responding weirdly all the time like at one point the jack nicholson character jake gittis says so your father says to me and she's already got like three cigarettes going and she lights up another one and she won't respond but we see her response as like lighting the cigarette and we're like i wonder why like why is she lighting all these cigarettes all the time and we don't notice that she does it every time he mentions her father or she gets very nervous whenever he says i talk to your father you talk to my father you know and.

You'Re like what's with this weird you know faye dunaway what's with her acting and then then bang all those passive non response or strange response moments they land in that incredible moment at the end of the third act third quadrant when she's like she's my daughter and my sister get it and then you're like oh wow all that passivity really makes sense now yeah so.

You'Re calling that a passive beast so she's lighting a cigarette is her response but she's not responding to him directly it's like that's what makes it passive it's not that they don't take any action it's just the action has nothing.

To do yeah they might do something.

Else that's useful that's useful it's not.

Responding to the stimulus yeah okay that's.

Helpful because i think right because sometimes in the exam like oh they just they don't respond but maybe they just yeah they turn away or they ignore them or they do something else so they might respond but it won't be direct it won't be active it's not an act it's a passive response it's going in a different direction just think.

Of like the stimulus of kim do you want some ice cream that's this little this ball right it's this ball of energy and it goes into the avatar and we see the words on the page kim would you like some ice cream the audience is seeing that so the audience sees you know metaphorically a little ball of energy and it's leaving that sentence and then kim turned and walked over to the xerox machine and we were like what happened to that ball of energy we know it went into kim but she hasn't metabolized the ball of energy yet that's not good she's walking around with unmetabolized balls of chaos inside of her i wonder when she's going to metabolize that stuff and then she doesn't and then she does it and it's like a it's a little twig in the mind of the audience and then three scenes later she could turn you know somebody could say this is a revelatory turning point someone could say to sean who offered the ice cream you know kim's great great grandfather owned an ice cream store and it killed twenty seven children you know right right right right so don't mention ice cream around camp right right.

Right right okay and then the audience.

Goes oh i get it that's why she didn't want the ice cream so.

What this makes me think right is like this feels like kind of going back to my you know this original thought was like how does the trinity play out at all of the different layers right like at you know all the units right and so very small question by the way sorry about that i know i like want to like throw out this giant ball of cast and single we can break it down into as many tiny pieces as you need but i don't know where else to start so as you're talking about all the beats and you're talking about okay we have these passive beats we have these things we're setting up so we can pay them off later right that feels like that's a more macro view of the story right to know i'm going to set this up here and i'm going to pay it off over there and we're thinking about the audience's experience of the story you know at the beat level at the scene level at the act level and you know et cetera et cetera to the macro like this is my opening line about the summer that the rosenbergs got executed and they were in the electric chair so then later when i bring up that my you know that esther ends up having to go through electroshock therapy like you know it's just it so thinking having that kind of awareness and intention when you're approaching the story.

So that's interesting that example is just a remarkable way of looking at exposition what sylvia plath what her she's genius so she's like what can i do to thematically set up the payoff of this story from the very first sentence well let's see the end of this story is electroshock therapy and then the woman's numb to the point where she just goes off and gets married and has a baby okay so electroshock what do i know about electroshock therapy is there anything in the realm of electroshock therapy that i could describe oh right the rosenbergs were fried in the electric chair oh great so all that's where like she didn't go well technically i did leave smith in nineteen blah blah blah and it wasn't the summer the rosenberg you know like a lot of people were like well i can't do that instead she's like that's perfect i will that's how i'm going to start the story so in terms the great thing about all this jargon that i come up with is that it just it just labels things right so you know what kind of thing it is so when you said you would kind of like recognize passive beats in the second draft and like if you get really good at throwing a baseball you don't think about your grip so much anymore when somebody throws it to you you just automatically get the perfect grip and so if you can label these things that make these beats you can eventually like stop yourself and you will start doing these passive beats autonomically so that you can you can get a first draft that has some setups and payoffs in it and then you can you can analyze a scene and go holy crap all i have is i have thirty two exposition beats and no active and no passive and all of my exposition is in the same kind of realm i'm just describing the baseball field which is only about a qualification of the arena in the now maybe i should do a qualification of the arena in the eternal like just to qualify what i'm saying the rosenberg thing i went to new york the summer they executed the rosenbergs okay what does that do that's a qualification of the arena new york when when the summer of the rosenbergs so that is a qualification of the arena in the duration of new york city so being able to look at a sentence and say what kind of beat is that okay it's an exposition what sub kind of beat is that and what is the degree of the beat and what is the urgency of the beat enables you to see this beautiful different kind of notes in a scale that you can start playing music with with these beat.

Structures it's all about what the audience.

Is getting that's right you're constantly looking back at the audience how did that one land yeah yeah oh they seem a little bored maybe i shouldn't have five beats in a row about the agency in the now or qualification of agency would be like he set the beer bottles down with great veracity or veracity not truth but you know what.

I mean yeah i know what you.

Mean it's hard to come up with.

Examples right you're such a good sport about it it's great okay good okay well thank you for this i think this is going to be great and so i'm really i'm excited to get some more i'm going to be going and pounding the pavement for more questions about people's questions about the trinity and questions about internal genres and we're going to circle back but i think these tools are going to be just the clarity of getting to like talk about it at this level and pick it apart anyway i really appreciate it and i think it's going to be really useful for people thanks for listening to this episode of the storygrid podcast if your heart is set on telling an internal genre story but is struggling with how to get it on the page i invite you to to connect with me for a free consult at kimberkessler dot com that's k dash i dash m dash b dash e dash r k e s s l e r dot com for everything storygrid related check out storygrid dot com and make sure to pick up a copy of the book and sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything happening in the storygrid universe also make sure you go to storygrid dot com books to see all of the titles that we've released through storygrid publishing if you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any past episodes all all of that can be found at storygrid dot com podcast if you'd like to reach out to us directly you can find us on twitter torygrid and lastly if you would like to support the show you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on apple podcasts and leaving a rating and review thanks so much for subscribing and being a part of our work here at storygrid we'll see you next week.