How not to waste 100k words

Hello, and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is the show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. In this show, we walk through the book the Story Grid, by Sean Coyne, who will join me in a second. And we are walking through all of the ideas in the book and discussing them and going deep on them so that we all can become a better writer. The way that we're going about that is I, Tim Grohl, I'm the host, and I am a fledgling fiction writer trying to figure out how to do this thing called writing. And Sean Coyne is the seasoned expert helping me walk along the path. And hopefully, as we do this, you can become a better writer alongside of me. In this episode, we talk about how to get started with your story. One of my questions was, I don't want to write a hundred thousand words before I find out that my story is no good. So how do we make sure that we start on a good path and start off right with our story? We also talk about the movie in the book, the Martian, and how the story grid applies to that, and we dive into the external and internal genres as well. So it's a really great episode. I hope you enjoy it and we'll get started right now.

So, Sean, I want to talk about.

I've just been thinking a lot lately about how to get started.

Because it's great to have a bunch of tools that let me know if my story is horrible, but that will only help me after I've written 100,000 words or whatever.

Right.

So what would you say if I'm just, you know, I got my story in mind, like, and I want to do everything I can before I write the actual book to make sure that it's good, and I waste as few words written as possible. Like, what's that process for getting started on your story?

Well, I'm really. I'm really excited that you brought this up, because I've. I've actually been writing something for Steve Pressfield site about this very thing, and.

Here'S what I suggest, and I think this is really good advice.

Yeah, well, I hope so.

Yeah.

Okay, here. Here's what I think. You know, at the beginning of the podcast, at the very. When we first started this, you were. You were really sort of.

Fascinated by the concept of obligatory scenes and conventions and genres. Now, okay, so everybody. Everybody I talk to has read my book or read anything online. That's what they always want to talk about. Tell me more about these obligatory scenes and conventions. And it occurred to me the other day and the other thing people want to know is, how do I start? You know, hey, the story grid looks pretty cool, but I have to have a manuscript before I can actually use it, and that's not true. So this is the way you can use the story grid to get yourself going to start things moving. And what I suggest is to pick an obligatory scene from the genre that you are really enamored with that you really want to write. Say you want to write a crime novel.

Now, instead of, like, trying to sit down and map out your fool's cap global story grid. And all the things that I suggest in the book, just start here. And this is going to lead you down a road that's gonna. That's gonna help fill in all those questions that you have later on. And it's gonna give you something extremely specific to do from the very start. So what do I mean by that? Okay, say you want to write a crime novel. Start with an obligatory scene that you know is in every single crime novel. Now, a great example for a crime story would be the discovery of the body scene. Okay? So you can't really have a crime story or the discovery of the crime scene. So you can't have a crime story unless there's a moment in time. Usually at the very, very beginning of the story. It's usually the inciting incident of the entire story where somebody discovers a dead body or, say, like, somebody's house has been ransacked, you know, the other day I watched Gone Girl. I read the book and I watched the movie. And that obligatory scene, the discovery of the crime scene, is at the very beginning of the movie. And it's at the time when Ben Affleck comes back and he sees that his wife's nowhere to be found. His cat's outside, the door's wide open to his house, goes inside, nothing seems to be amiss, except there's his broken coffee table, and he calls out for his wife and he can't find her. So what that scene establishes is a lot of things. It establishes the fact that something's not quite right with the broken glass. It establishes that maybe some violent act has occurred and his wife has disappeared. So that scene is in the book, too. And so that's an example of a scene where at the start of the scene, it's one way, and then at the end of the scene, it's another. At the beginning of the scene, Ben Affleck is just going home to pick something up or to check on something, and he discovers his cat walking out on the sidewalk, which doesn't really make sense. So he picks up the cat and. Oh, actually what happens is his next door neighbor calls him and says, hey, your cat's loose. You should go home and pick him up. So Aflac goes home, he picks up the cat, he waves to the neighbor and says, thank you for the help. Then he goes to his door and he knows everything's unlocked. So that's it. That's an example of progressively complicating the scene. His door should not be unlocked. So then he takes it further. He goes and he opens the door and he walks into the living room and he notices that there are photographs that have fallen off of the mantle and that the coffee table is smashed. A million pieces. Another progressive complication. So he starts calling for his wife. His wife doesn't answer. Another progressive complication. And so at the end of that scene, we have an establishment of the crime. Something has happened. We don't know why, we don't know how, we don't know what. So say you want to write a crime story? Take that scene, that scene I just described, and do it your way. Do it your way. So, you know, in, in the movie Seven, you know, they, they had this scene over and over and over again because they have the seven deadly sins involved in that story. And so you kind of anticipate as a viewer, oh, I wonder how the killer is going to do gluttony. You know, I wonder how the killer is going to do envy. And so you're anticipating these discovery of the body scenes before they actually happen. That's a brilliant screenplay and a brilliant movie too. So when you initially asked me, how do you get started, start small, right? Start thinking about an obligatory scene. For another example, say you're writing a love story. Now, in every love story, there's a moment in time when the lovers break up, right? They say to themselves, you know, this isn't going to work out. You're really nice and really cool, but, you know, you're really not for me. And you've got to, if you're writing a love story, you've got to have that scene in there. So how can you write that story that, that scene that's interesting, that hasn't been done before, and play with it and come up with a whole bunch of different scenarios. Like maybe the woman is at the health club and she discovers that her lover is standing by the pool right before she gets to go on her daily swim. And he's never there. Wonder what's up there, what's going on. And so she goes over to see him, and he looks terrible, and she doesn't understand why. And before she jumps in the pool, he tells her, I don't want to be with you anymore. You know, maybe that's a scenario that could be, you know, your breakup scene.

So you think that's where we should start?

I think so. I think it's a way in. Because what you're going to discover if you do one specific scene in your global story is you're going to find that it's going to inspire other scenes and setups and payoffs and different sets of different ideas for you to explore later on. Now.

So one of the big things is to innovate those obligatory scenes in your global genre. Now, you need to know globally what kind of story you want to tell. Now, obviously, that's the first thing you're going to figure out before you write any scene. But I think to get your. Your imagination going and your writer skills working, to work on one specific scene to kind of get going is a great way to get into the flow as opposed to being very, very analytical and editorial at the beginning, which would mean filling out your global foolscap page and figuring out, well, am I going to have an internal genre? What's my inciting incident in my first act? What's the progressive complication? All that stuff is really important, but it can really suck the life out of you. You know what I mean? Because what. What you'll end up doing is you'll have all these intellectual, you know, ideas in your head. Like, well, maybe, you know, that moment where the. The ship hits the rocks and it doesn't. Maybe, you know, that was in Titanic, and I don't know. But. So you can really wrap your mind into a really large vortex of pain by being so analytical at the beginning. So what I always suggest is give yourself a task. Give yourself a creative task that can be fun. And if I were leading a writing class and I'd gone through a lot of theory, what I would do at the end of the class would be to give an assignment.

And the assignment would be to go and take a very specific scene task home with them and have fun with it. And I would give them a word count. And I would say, you've. It's sort of like Name that tune. You need to write an obligatory scene where the lovers meet in your love story, and you've got to do it in a thousand words. Go. And so what people will do is they'll think, well, all right, well, what's the setup? Well, let's see. Maybe they're in. Maybe they're in an airport. Now, that's been done before. What about. And you can see where this is leading. The more and more you start creatively thinking about those setups, the more, you know, sort of things are going to start coming into your head. You're going to start to get a picture of it. Then you can bang something out, and it might not be perfect, so you'll try it again. And what I've discovered is that it kind of takes. And this is funny, it takes like 10 times.

To figure out something that's unique and different. Because, like, that. Those first four or five times, there are things like. Even when I'm talking off the top of my head in this podcast, the first things I think of are kind of stupid. You know, they're kind of like. They're kind of like the things you're like, wow, discovery of the body scene. I don't know. But the more you. You dive deeper and deeper into your brain, the more creative you'll be, because what you're doing is you're getting rid of everything that you've seen before and read before. So to actually voice that or write that or put it on the. On the paper is important because it. It kind of gets it out of your head, and it allows you to go deeper into your creative energies.

So. And very specific creative energies. It's not like, come up with the solution to the third act now. It's like, no, do the scene where the woman dumps the guy at the county fair. How are you going to do that? You know?

Yeah.

And so this is just the idea.

Here is to start.

What is it? Just letting some creativity flow before you get analytical about what you're writing?

No, you're using analytical tools from the start to inspire you creatively. And there's a difference. So if I just said to you, okay, just write any scene, any scene that comes to mind, and it has to be 500 words, that's not very helpful. Right? Because you're going to be like, well, I don't know. I don't know what to write. Should I write about walking my dog or what? But if I say to you, you need to create this scene that's going to be eventually in your book, and the scene is this. You have to have a character discover a crime, and you have to end it such that the reader is completely. Just has no idea what happened. So they figured, I want to turn the page and find out what Happens next.

Yeah, it's funny because the reason I asked the original question of, like, how do you get started? Was I was trying to set it up so we would talk about the fool's cap. So this is, like, not what I thought you would say. I thought you'd be like, oh, okay, well, you pull out your foolscap and you get started. Which we need to explain what that is. But so, yeah, it's just interesting that, you know.

Yeah, I think if you. If you start.

If you start with the fool's cap, and you can absolutely do that if. You know, I always try and think of there's two kinds of sort of different writers. There's. The writer likes it. And we talked about this last week. Like, the. The writer who doesn't like to plan the. The pantser. You know, the people who like to write by the seat of their pants. And the writer who loves to plan, who wants to plan it down to the. To, you know, the beat level before they write one word. So one of my challenges is to think about people who don't like the plan so much and to give them the tools necessary for them to be inspired to go back and plan. So the reason why I brought up this idea of writing an obligatory scene from the genre that you like the most to start is that once you have that down, you're gonna feel like, okay, now I have a general sense of the world I kind of want to explore. And, you know, I thought that my lead character was going to go on an internal education plot at the begin, before I even wrote this scene. But now that I look at this scene that I wrote, I see that that person, that character is a little bit different than what I expected. Maybe. Maybe it would work better with a redemption plot, like if you were writing Gone Girl. Right. And, you know, I don't want to ruin Gone Girl, but it's a great setup. It's.

You know, that book reads like a rocket ship. I mean, it's just like. It just rips you through the entire thing.

Exactly. And the payoff. A lot of people love it or hate it, and it doesn't because it pays off in a unique and compelling way that's completely believable. And when you find. When you come to the end of that, you say, oh, my gosh. Yeah. Why? You know, obviously, that's what was going on from the very start. But what's so great about that book in so many different ways is that when you look at the characters in it, you could start and take those. Those characters, anywhere you want to go, but you don't really, you're not really going to be inspired in a way that, that gives you the energy and the oomph to get through that full scout page. And we're going to get into the full scout page. I mean, there's no avoiding it because it's, it's a very, it's in a very, very important tool.

For a writer especially. But you can't be an editor if you don't have any understanding of the sort of. Just to take one step back, Tim, and just sort of give an overview of what the Foolscap Global Story Grid is all about. There's thousands of words on my website about it. But let me just quickly give the big picture here. You know, there are, there are like.

There'S a very global point of view when you're looking at a story, and then there's the micro point of view, which is scene to scene. Now, the Foolscap Global Story Grid is all about the big picture. You know, what, what are the big, big moments in this story? What's the beginning, what's the middle, and what's the end?

So if we're talking about the movie Rocky, the beginning of Rocky is he gets to fight the champion of the world. That's the beginning, Hook. The middle build of Rocky is how is Rocky going to prepare for the fight? And the ending of Rocky is the fight, right? So globally, that's the entire Rocky story. So you need to know what that global Fool's cap story is for what you're going to write so that you know how to begin, how to flesh out the middle and how to end it. So that is the global kind of thing. And that's what the Foolscap Global Story Grid is all about. It's a one page, one sheet of paper map for you to map out your entire novel.

And the reason why we started this conversation and I said, hey, I think it would be a good idea to inspire you to create that Foolscap to start with. One really intense obligatory scene that you really want to write is because it's going to inform you and it's going to help you make better choices for your global map.

Because if you spend a lot of time making a global map and you go, great, I've got my working orders here and I know what I'm going to do. I know the genres I'm going to explore, I know the controlling idea, I know the point of view, I know all of these things. And you sit down and you write, you know Say the inciting incident of the global story, and you're writing a crime story, and guess what? It's the discovery of the body scene. And you write that, and you go, oh, my gosh. You know, I really don't want to do an education plot. And I just spent all that time doing the education plot. This is really a redemption plot. That's why I think starting with something micro so that you can sort of feed off of that to go global is a good idea. Now, other people, you may be completely different, Tim. And you might say to yourself, you know what? I really don't want to do that. That micro story, because I really want to. I really want to do my big global. And I don't mind going back and switching and playing with my global foolscap story grid as I'm writing, but I really need that global story grid to start. That's totally cool. But what I'm trying to do is, in our conversations, is to give options to people who work in different ways. And, you know, I was thinking to myself from our conversation in the last session, when we were talking about, you know, how do you start? Where do you go? How's it going to work? And I was saying to myself, if I had to do that, what would be fun as opposed to homework? And I was thinking, well, obligatory scenes would be fun to do, you know.

Because I look at it as, like.

I'm scared of the writing. So doing the full scap is, like, a way for me to put off the writing just a little bit longer, because I'm planning the writing. And so I was like, okay, cool, we can do the full scap. And I don't actually have to write yet.

But, okay, that's fair.

But it's interesting because so, you know, we're recording these every week. So I have a week from this one to the next one. So what I'm gonna do, because last week, we kind of went through my story on, like, you know, all the five leaves of the genre. So what I'm gonna do by the next episode is I'm gonna write the inciting incident.

Of my story, and I'll send that to you beforehand. And I'll also work on the foolscap as well, but that will give me one a deadline, so I'll actually do it. But that is, like, an interesting way, because for me, you know, what I tell people is, like, whatever you're the most scared of, you should probably work on that first. And so when you said that, like, when you said the first thing, you should do is write the scene like my blood pressure just, like, shot up.

Good.

Oh, I'm like, no, no, no, no, I don't want to write yet. Good.

I could sense a little bit of tension after I had mentioned that. So I. You're. You're absolutely right. I mean, you need to attack the things that scare you the most because you just have to beat them down. And guess what? You can. You know, I have no doubt that you're going to be able to write a thousand or fifteen hundred words scene. And the first one that you write, you're going to really probably say, that's not so good. But there's something there. There's something there. And then you're going to tweak it again, and you're going to tweak it again. And, you know, I have a good feeling that you're going to discover something that is going to inform your global story in a way that you have no idea right now.

It's like when we were talking last week about, you know, the general idea of sort of this. This ship in the middle of, you know, that's been kind of abandoned. It's this little universe that is cut off from the rest of the world. It could be a ship on the ocean, it could be a spaceship, it could be an island, like in Lord of the Flies. And that is a very, very compelling.

Notion because.

We. You know why. And I. And I was thinking about this because I'm like, there's something to Tim's global notion that's interest to me. And I think it's because we all, at times in our lives feel like we are completely alone and that we've been cast adrift and there's nothing that we can do to sort of get back connected to people. So that is one of the reasons why I think that kind of setup is so seductive to us as readers and as people who go to movies. And that's why, you know, the movie Alien was so great, because we could all sort of. There was something really creepy about it at the beginning because you're like, oh, it's a spaceship. There's these people locked on the spaceship. They don't know where they are. And then, you know, as I was talking about at the beginning of this with the crime story, you know, talk about a discovery of the crime in that movie. You know, the discovery of the crime was when. And I'm gonna just say it, because everybody's seen this movie, and if they haven't, they have to, is when that Alien comes out of the guy's stomach, right?

And I have to admit, I haven't seen it.

Oh, my gosh, you've got to see it.

See, I'm terrified of seeing it. I don't. I don't like scary movies.

Oh, okay. All right.

Well, alien movies and.

And any kind of, like, haunting spirit movies, I just, I can't handle for some reason. I don't like. Here's what I don't like. I don't like.

No rules, right? And sometimes it just bothers me because there's, like, some movies or books where all this weird stuff is going on, and I'm, like, trying to figure out what's. What's really happening towards the end. They're like, oh, it's aliens. And you're like, that's not fair, because aliens can just do anything.

And. But I also don't like the, like, unsettling feeling that literally anything could happen next because they. You can just say, oh, it's because it's aliens, or, oh, it's because it's, you know, this haunted tv.

Well, I know exactly what you're talking about. But in the really, the really great ones, there are rules. There's rules for the aliens. And I mean, that is the beauty of Alien the movie, is that the lead character has to figure out the rule of that alien, right? It's this seemingly.

Indestructible force, but she has to figure out how to defeat it. Oh, it's great. And it's really not about aliens. I mean, it's one of the greatest alien creatures ever, ever invented. And it's terrifying. But the discovery of the crime, I'm just gonna say it in, in that movie is that.

Well, it's my own fault. I don't know yet. So.

Well, it's. I don't know if I want to ruin it for you, but.

No, no. Well, I've heard of, like, that scene where, like that he's like, isn't he laid out on the table? And then you were just starting to say, like, it basically eats its way out of him.

Oh, well, here's what happens. Okay. Okay, so this spaceship, it's in the middle of, you know, in the middle of space, nowhere. They all wake up, they're given this mission by command control on Earth, go to this planet and, you know, get these pods and then bring them back. So they go to the planet, these guys. And the great thing about this is that this is sort of like a blue collar spaceship. These people are like, you know, like blue collar guys who are out like truckers. So the whole milieu is not like 2001, where everybody's, you know, these really high intellectual people. These are just blue collar workers. So one of the guys goes down to this planet, he gets the pod. And as he's trying to get the pod, this thing snaps on his helmet. And they can't get it off the helmet. Eventually they free him from this thing and they bring him on board and it's like, wow, that was a close one. Oh, geez, everything's cool. You know, we're gonna have to radio back to Earth that we couldn't pick out the pods. But, you know, at least Jim's feeling okay. And Jim's like, wow, that was really close. I am starving. Let's all go get. Let's all go to the galley and get dinner. So the whole crew goes down to get dinner. The. The viewer is starting to feel relaxed. They're. They're having like, you know, kind of dinner talk that blue collar guys would have. Everybody's making fun of each other, and the guy's laughing really hard because it's a funny story. And then, you know, he has that moment where we all have. We have get something in our throat, you know, and gets caught. And he's sort of choking. And it escalates, and it escalates. And it's. It's stranger and stranger and he just can't breathe. And so they lay him out on the table and they're like, what's wrong with him? And they bring the medical officer over and they're trying to get this thing out of this guy's throat. And what you discover is that this alien has gone into his esophagus and has grown. Grown in his body. And all of a sudden this thing bursts out of his stomach. And that's the discovery of the crime. And it is shocking. It is so shocking. And it's just. It's so innovative and brilliantly done that that's an obligatory scene that has been so picked over and thought through and innovated that we don't even recognize it as an obligatory scene. That's the discovery of the crime scene in a crime story.

So that's what I talk about. Like, say if you were. I think it was. It was an old partner, Steven Pressfield's screenwriting partner, who wrote. Wrote Alien. I forget his name, but I can't believe I forget his name, but I can just sort of imagine him sitting around spitballing with his writing partner at the time and saying, you know, what are we gonna do about discovery of the body scene? Or how are we gonna, how are we gonna make this interesting? And then he goes, I know what, why don't we have him like eating dinner and everybody's having fun and then the thing rips out of his stomach and they're like, yeah, there's something to that. And then they build the scene around that general idea. And this is kind of what I'm suggesting to get your creative juices going, for example, for you, for your inciting incident. Think about, like, maybe, you know, maybe the thing, the inciting incident from my story is the discovery that we are, for all intents and purposes alone, we have no communication back to the islands or back to land. And our ship is basically gps. Less we have no form of communication with anybody else. Holy cow, what are we going to do? Now? That could be the thing that you want to tackle for next week. How do you make that scene unique? How do you discover that information in a way that is going to make the reader say, oh my gosh, what's going to happen next?

Okay.

Huh? I've really ruined it for you. No, no.

Well, now I'm like, okay, I can't think about that yet. Now I'm like, okay, I got to go. I got to go start writing this.

No, it's. It's interesting to.

Well, that's good. It's. It's fun to get a little problem like that, right? Because now you, you have a problem now in your brain that you can noodle over, right? Yeah, it's. It's such that you kind of want to stop what you're doing now and give that some energy. And that's what I think you need to do when you're starting to write your story. Give yourself something to chew on. Give yourself a task that is going to inspire you to do something unique. Now you know what you need to do. You know, in your scene, you've got you in some point in your story, you need the people on that ship to discover that they are rudderless. There is no way. They have no say engines, they. They're just floating and they have nowhere idea where they are. It's almost like castaway at sea. And how, how. How is the. How are all the people on that ship going to react to that information? Who's going to discover it? Who's going to keep their head? Who isn't going to keep their head? What are they going to do? Are they going to. You know, it's like that great book, the Martian, you know, that whole book is about this guy coping with this impossible situation. Okay, here I am on Mars, Everybody thinks I'm dead. How am I going to survive as long as possible? Let me think about that. Yeah, so.

Yeah, it was interesting because I actually read that book within months of it being self published originally. And so then I've seen the movie now which was fantastic and was. As somebody who normally hates movies that are done on books, it was, it was so well done. It really stayed true to the book.

But yeah, so that would be. Well, I don't want to ruin it now because it's relatively new movie, but I could, I kind of walked through that in my head as I was watching like right after the movie. I was thinking through like, you know, the, the beginning, the middle build and then, you know, the ending, the ending payoff. And so it was just, you know.

What'S so great about that? What's so great about that book and that story and you know, I'd be the first one to fall into the trap of just over complicating things to the point where it just, it gets so complicated that it's not fun anymore. Yeah. You just despair. Right. What's so great about that book and about so many of the best stories ever told is that they're very simple premise. It's a very simple premise. What would happen if you were stranded on Mars?

What would you do? And just through that simple premise and you say to yourself, Andy Weir, I think is the writer. Yeah. And he probably said to himself, oh, that's kind of cool. I wonder what I would do if I were stranded on Mars. And I was, and I had these things, well, how. Well, I need to get food. How would I do that? Well, let me do some research about what's on Mars. And he also knows just by that very premise, what is it? What's his ending? Payoff. Right. Is he going to get off the planet or isn't he? Is he going to survive or is he not? And that simple premise is what drives that entire book, that entire movie. And we love it because it's a very, very simple premise.

I think it's that example because one of the things when I read Story Grid, what do you say? It's the inevitable. Inevitable but surprising end.

Yes.

You know, and that is like a perfect example of the inevitable but surprising end.

Yes.

You know, like, you know, from, I mean the, the moment the movie starts, where we're heading is whether or not he gets off Mars and gets home. And you know, but like still at the end, I'm like, oh, man. Like, the ending still got me, you know? Right.

So.

Yeah, so there's no. There's no shame in knowing your ending at the beginning. In fact, you really do want to know. I mean, if you're writing a crime story, you know your ending, right. Are they going to find the person who did the crime and bring them to justice? Are they not? You know, that's. You've got two choices there, and the reader knows that, too. It doesn't mean that the. That it's gonna be boring to write. It's like getting that surprising part is really the crucial part. And I don't know that you're. Anybody is able to really nail that perfectly until they've really almost gone to the ends of their, you know, ability to think, to figure it out. So I suggest just. Just do something. Just come up with a solution and make it better with each draft. And that. That goes with each scene, too. Like, don't kill yourself if you write a cheesy scene. So what? Nobody's gonna read it. You know, it doesn't matter if it's not so good. You know, it's not so good. So make it better. How could you make it better? Well, let's see. Maybe there's not enough conflict here. Let me look at that. Oh, you're right. Nobody's really doing anything here. They're just sort of reacting to, you know, the weather gauge. That's not so good. Well, maybe somebody should have a fight, you know, like, all of these things that I'm verbalizing are the fun part of writing because it's like doing a jigsaw puzzle, and you're the one who creates the puzzle and the one who puts it together, too. Yeah.

So let's.

I want to get particular here. So, okay, somebody. So, okay, let's say I write. Write my first draft of the inciting incident of my story. And you say, okay, it probably sucks. It's going to take you 10 times. You gotta, you know, tweak it. So, like, should I write it and then, like, wait a day? Or, like, wait three days? Or, like, how long should I wait? And then when I go back and critique it, like, what am I looking for? Am I looking. I mean, am I looking for. Yeah, what am I looking for is like, okay, this feels off, or, this is wrong. Like, I need to redo this. Like, what am I trying to do with each of these iterations of the draft? And how do I go about making sure I'm making it better? Instead of just getting lost in the weeds.

Well, that's a really, really good question. And what I would suggest is.

You know, it depends on the kind of writer you are. One thing to do would be to write out very simple sentences for each sort of specific scenario. So say, you know, like I do in the book. I try and boil down entire scenes into as few words as possible. Right. So what you could do is boil down your ideas into. Into. Is like for instance, the, the opening scene of Silence of the Lambs is FBI recruit.

Gets asked to do a job. Right. Starling asked to do job. Now how do you do that scene?

Well, let's see. Thomas Harris, he could have started, you know, he could have had Starling come to the cafeteria and ask her there. That's one. He wrote a write down. Starling goes to cafeteria to meet with Jack Crawford. Okay, the second idea would Jack Crawford goes to Starling's dorm room to ask her to take the job.

Jack Crawford has his secretary ask her to take the job. Jack Crawford brings her to his office to ask the to take the job. And eventually what Thomas Harris came to the conclusion was he wanted to create something that was interesting, that.

Would really show the reader the different roles that each of these characters would play. So what he eventually decided to do is he was going to have Starling called from.

The shooting range or whatever it was. So she would have to come in running from the outdoors and she would have to go underground to the behavioral science unit. And when she entered that room, she wasn't going to go in front of a desk and say to a secretary, hi, Mr. Crawford asked me to come. So he cut all that crap out. We don't want to see the shoe leather of a recruit coming in to talk to the boss. In fact, what he did is he had the entire room sort of empty because it's like it's after hours. Nobody's working but Jack Crawford. And Crawford's not in his office. He's out in sort of the bullpen area and he's looking through files. And so she comes in and there's the boss right there. And so what he's saying to her is, what Harris is saying to the reader is, we've got a boss who's sort of like treating this like an errand. Like he's going through paperwork and oh, right. Like, oh, Starling, can you go interview the craziest serial killer in the history of humankind? For me, he's trying to play it off as sort of this casual thing when reality he is desperate to get information from Hannibal Lecter. And this is his last, best hope, right? He's saying to Jack Crawford, is saying to himself, I need to get this girl, who Lecter will obviously find interesting to look at, to go interview Lecter. How am I going to get her to do that without seeming like I'm desperate? So all of these things played into how Thomas Harris constructed that scene. He didn't want to do it in a cafeteria. Like, what, they're going to be eating scrambled eggs while they asked her to go kill, you know, interview Hannibal Lecter. So these are the things that you need to think about when you're constructing the scene. And what I'm saying is that I bet Thomas Harris did have the cafeteria scene. He started there, and maybe he did have her come in and sit outside a very big office with a secretary and phones going off. Like all those cliches we have in our head of, like, the big interview, right? And it was probably like the 10th time when he's like, you know what? That's not the way it would work. Because, let's see, what he's asking her to do is basically crazy, you know? And he knows some things about her because she took his class at the University of Virginia a year ago and then came to the FBI. So Harris knows all these things, and they're starting to come to him. And this is why I think it's fun to start with an obligatory scene. Because the world is wide open to you when you're doing this. And you might. You might think your lead character is one way when you're starting this. This little exercise I'm giving you. And you'll be like, you know what? Screw it. I'm gonna try something different. Maybe it's not a man is the lead character. Maybe it's a woman. Maybe she's divorced and she's the captain of the ship. I'm just making all this stuff up. But what I'm saying is that.

What you want to do is have fun and don't rein yourself in. And what you're going to discover is that you'll start eliminating things just out of your own gut. And it might. Yeah, you're right. You might write a scene and say, this is perfect. And you'll put it on your file, on your computer. And then you'll go, and you'll hang out with your kids, and you'll go to bed, and the next morning you'll wake up and you'll look at. And you go, this is terrible.

And at that point, what you shouldn't do is think you're terrible. Because that might not be the perfect scene, but what it is, is it's a starting point. And then you'll say to yourself, well, what's terrible about it? Well, I know obviously what's going to happen just from the setup. That's what you'll say to yourself, well, how can I make it more mysterious? Oh, well, what if the thing that I think maybe what they think is happening really isn't happening? You know, that kind of thing. So.

The task would be for your scene, the discovery of being alone. That is the task of the scene that you're gonna write. They have to discover on that ship that they have no communication whatsoever with anybody. How are you gonna make that interesting? And is there, like, maybe, maybe they discovered that all their GPS units go out, you know, So I would.

I was originally. I was originally thinking of.

The opening scene would be the first attempt at the lead character's life, but it's unsuccessful and it could be construed as an accident. Do you think that's like a bad place to start? Do you think I should start with the like, oh, my God, we're all alone, and then move into people getting knocked off or attacked?

Well, I'm of two minds about it.

When you start with an action scene like that. What, what.

You know, sort of, where do you go from there?

You're. You're cueing to the reader when you start with an attempt on somebody's life scene, that.

What you're going to get from here on out, this guy, this character is going to watch his back the entire time. And whether or not somebody kills him is going to be a very big driving force of the narrative.

So you need to make sure in your mind, if that's what you want to lead with, that this is really going to be the controlling force of the story. So obviously, whatever story you're writing is going to have a life and death value.

If you're going to lead with that and not saying not to do that if it seems like an accident, it's.

That's kind of a lot of stuff to convey very early on in the story. So my suggestion would be to try and go with something just. That just doesn't seem right. It's mysterious.

So that you can hook the reader with something that is interesting. They sort of understand the world, but they're not really sure what's going to happen next.

Because my original thought was to.

Start.

Building tension by having a couple things happen that could be accidents.

So, like, in this case, if I. If, like, the GPS or whatever is out, it's like, well, you know, it goes out sometimes. We'll get it fixed. And so everybody's like, okay, that's fine. Life is fine.

Right.

But that doesn't seem very strong of an inciting incident.

No, that. That isn't very. That would be one that you say, okay, that's a good start. What's next? What am I going to do after that? Okay, the GPS doesn't work. That's okay. That's more reporting than actually. Actually having anything happen.

Let's see, what else could I do? It could be the discovery of being alone.

Could be really, really terrifying.

You know, it could be a moment where.

You know, they're. They're. They're heading headlong into some sort of weather situation. And, you know, the captain is well prepared. She's been through this before.

She doesn't really need all the instruments. She's sort of going through her gut. And she knows, well, what we need to do is we got to go and, you know, find this particular, you know, bay off of this island and hide out there before the hurricane comes. And so they're preparing to make that journey. And the instruments go out. And so she's done. Not to worry. I know where we're going. Bear left, you know, bear at this direction. And we're gonna go at 30 knots, and we're gonna do that for three hours. And then we're going to see the coast of, you know, the island. And I know that because I've been on this journey for 70. This is my 75th time I've been doing this course. Everybody chill out. When we get to the island, it's going to be cool. There's a radio station there. Everything's cool. So they set forth on that course, and they go for an hour and everything. Everybody's having fun. And then something else happens.

And then finally at the end, they've been going for nine hours, and there's still no sight of that island. And they asked the captain, what's going on. You said we would reach this, you know, this island in three hours. And it's now nine hours.

And.

She doesn't have any idea that's the end of the chapter, because then you're sort of building progressively. There's a problem. Somebody's going to solve it. That problem is solved. Things are moving well. Another problem arises. It seems to be solved, too. Another problem arises. That one solved, too. Everything. This person is in great command she knows exactly what she's doing and then bang. Captain, what's going on? I have no idea. I don't know what's going on. Something like that. I mean, this is like right off the top of my head, Tim. I mean, I'm not.

Well, what I'm sensing here is like, I'm getting a picture of like, you know, in story grid. You talk about, like, there needs to be the beginning, middle build and payoff of the book, but then there needs to be, you know, an inciting incident. So the beginning, middle and end of each.

Act. Yeah.

And then down to each scene. So you're describing that like that progression. Yeah, that progression in that inciting incident scene.

Right, exactly. It's like these are all sort of like those Russian doll things. Okay.

Yeah. Where they stacked inside each other.

They're all stacked inside each other. And this is the brilliant, beautiful, wonderful thing about story, is that you use the principles at every level of story. You use them from the beat to the scene, to the sequence, to the act, to the, you know, subplot, to the global story. And they all have the same form. They all begin with something that throws the lead character or the group of characters, their lives out of balance. The weather, maybe there's a hurricane coming. I'm just. I'm just using obvious, you know, ideas here. Yeah. So it opens with hurricane, you know, gale force winds do in 15 hours. What are we going to do then? You know, that's the inciting incident. So that's the problem. They need to get back to normal. The captain says, here's the solution. I know this island. If we head due west, set the course. Well, the course things aren't working. What are we going to do now? Okay, well, give me the sextant. The sextant isn't here. Why not? Well, we. We had to throw it overboard when the ship, you know, all these things. And so she shows through her actions that she is extremely capable and that she's, you know, this. These people don't have anything to worry about as long as this woman is on the ship. Right. I've got a perfect ending for you now. Okay. So they're on the ship and she's given these perfect directions and they're due head course and it's, you know, instead of three hours, it's three and a half hours. And one of the first mates goes, go see the captain. The island is nowhere in course. The GPS is out, the radar's out. We have no clue. Could you please find her and go to her cabin. They go to her cabin and she's dead. End of a chapter.

Right? That's a big. That's a good beginning inciting incident. Because the person who's going to solve all the problems is dead. And there they are. They're in the middle of nowhere. The people who are supposed to be in charge. Who knows? They don't know. They've been handing over their power to this captain their entire lives. Now what are you going to do? Who's going to take charge? Who's going to become the hero? Who's going to become the villain? What do people want? You know what I'm saying? Like, if you play with these little ideas, you say to yourself, oh, right, I could just kill the. I can kill the. I'll kill the protagonist. In the inciting incident of my book, I was gonna have this woman as the captain of this thing, but as I was walking it through in my head, the perfect setup is that she's the only one who can save them. And then she dies. She's been murdered. Who killed her? Right.

Yeah.

These are the kinds of things that I think can get you juiced up and excited to go and say, okay, I've got killer inciting incident for my story. Let me go to my full scout global story grid. And now I'm just gonna bang out the rest of this stuff. So I have a general map of where to go from here, and I can. I'm not gonna torture myself over it. I'm gonna answer as many of these questions as I can. If I'm a little fuzzy on something, I'm gonna give myself a break and say, fuzzy. Not really totally sure yet. And then when I get stuck on my next scene or the scene after that or the scene after that, then I can go back to this and remember, oh, okay, that's what I wanted to do. Oh, here's why that's not going to work now. I know. And then you can fix it. So it's sort of like you have a map that will take you from New York to California, and you're on i80 or whatever it is. You're on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and you look up ahead and say, pennsylvania Turnpike closed for the next nine hours. Well, you got to get off the exit. You're going to find a different way, but you're still going to California. Right?

Right. So, okay, so I want to at least start the full scat.

Because.

We talked about everything before we got there, which is, like, perfect. But I want to talk a little bit about what it is, and then we can dive into it more next week.

So you have. So in the story grid you have the six questions that an editor is asking, right? So what's the genre? What are the conventions and obligatory scenes? The point of view, what are the objects of desire? The controlling theme, Beginning hook, middle build and ending. Payoff. And so the foolscap is basically something that allows you to map all that out ahead of time.

Exactly. You nailed it.

Okay, so where did you get this thing? I mean, did this just like you came up with the six questions and like, oh, here, you can put it on one piece of paper. Like, where'd you get this from?

Well, I got it from years of editing book after book after book of, you know, New York publishing level quality fiction. And what I discovered is that in order for myself to be able to communicate with a writer and explain to them why I think a certain scene or why, you know, two thirds of the book is a problem, I needed to be very, very literal with them. And I needed to say to them, well, you, Jim Smith, have written nine New York Times best selling serial killer thrillers, right? And he'll say, yes. And I'll say, well, you know as well as I do that you have to have a scene in there where, you know, there's an amazing MacGuffin scene or a red herring scene, and they'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, you mean like in a red herring you have to turn, you have to have the reader believe one thing and actually turn it to be something else. So it's a false clue, right? And I go, yeah, that's exactly right. So as I was doing this year after year after year for, you know, 15 years, I said, well, there's these six main questions that I need to understand, have answers to before I can have a proper dialogue with the writer. And if I can understand these and I can talk to him about it or talk to her about it and we can come to the same conclusions. It'll be much easier to fix their book than they just say things like the middle is kind of, you know, it's a little slow. And that just doesn't help. So it is through all of that work that I did that I came up with these, these six questions. And I was, you know, I was always having, I always had this one sheet of paper where I would track the global story. What's the beginning, what's the middle and what's the end? Beginning, hook, the middle bill, the ending, payoff. And whenever I'm giving a project to Edit. I answer all these questions myself and if there are problems in there, I can pull out this piece of paper and sit down with the writer over a cup of coffee and say, look, look here in the middle, you know, so that's, that's where this came from. This was a way to communicate.

My expertise to a writer who's usually, you know, they've been working on this thing for years. It's really hard work. And they can't see the forest through the trees sometimes. So the Foolscap Global story grid is a way for them to get out of all that scene by scene work and character development, all that stuff, and really just boil it down to one page. What's the main goal? What are the main goals of this story? And how are you going to solve the problems?

So should I be able to fill this out before I start? Like start to finish, fill out the fool's cap?

Well, I think at the very least what you want to do is to get.

The top quarter of it done. And what I mean by that is you want to know what your external genre is. You know, are you writing a western? I mean, primarily, like, what, what would be the movie poster of your story? Is it a love story? Is it a romantic comedy? Is it, you know, is it a war movie? What, what would, what would you put on a poster that would indicate to people what this story is? And if it's a coming of age story, the poster would probably be character driven in, you know, a small town or something. Something that's fine. But the coming of age story is the education plot, which is an internal genre, right? So that would be your global, you know, sort of plot for the internal genre. But the external genre is going to be something like your, you know, a crime story, a war story, a thriller, horror performance, all that kind of stuff. So you want to, you want to get that in your head and put it down on paper so that you can always go back to it and say, oh, wait a minute, I'm really getting overwhelmed with this subplot. What, what is this really about? Oh, right. This is a thriller, okay? So that's the most important thing to put down under external genre. Make your choice. Put it down. Okay. The second thing is you want to know what, what's the value? What's the core value at stake in the story? And value. It's not like.

You know, like a political, you know, family values kind of question. A value means it has gradations of, it has poles, right? There's love and hate. There's Truth and lies. There's wisdom and ignorance, and each one. Go ahead.

Like back to Rocky. So the external genre would be the performance genre, Right?

Right.

And then the value at stake would be. Would it be winning or losing?

Well.

It could be.

I mean, because we're talking external. Because internal is different. Because would that be. What would that be? I should be able to answer this. Let's see.

Shame and honor.

Okay. And that would be morality.

That would be. I mean, the great thing about Rocky and the great thing about a lot of stories is that a lot of the classifications that I write about in store. Good. Are a little bit fluid. Right. You can look at Rocky as. You could look at as like a status rise of the MOOC from MOOC to, you know, middle class guy. It could be a status genre or it could be an education plot. Somebody who is a little bit ignorant is now no longer ignorant.

He's worldly. Or you can look at it like I do as a redemption plot. A redemption plot moves from, you know, being dishonorable. It's a moral journey from, you know, being sort of bad to make it, you know, as simple as possible, moving from, like, bad to good.

And so the redemption plot in Rocky has a lot to do with honor and shame.

So what would the external value be for that then?

The external value is a performance sports story. It's. So it's performance boxing or performance sports.

Like that movie Whiplash would be performance music. Right.

But that's not. That's the genre. That's not the value at stake. Right?

Oh, the value. The value. The external value at stake would be.

I believe, winning or losing.

Or shame and honor. Shame and honor would probably be. That would be an internal value at stake.

Right. And then when we, like, throw something like James Bond at it, the external value would just be basic life and death.

Exactly.

Okay.

Okay.

And then like. Like we. Early several episodes ago, we're talking about how to lose a guy in 10 days, you know, romantic comedy. So the external value would be love and hate.

Yes. Okay.

I'm starting to understand this a little bit because I feel like, you know, until I can, like, see it in existing things, I won't be able to see it in my own.

No, it's absolutely. I mean, part of the fun of all this stuff is looking at your favorite stories and saying, well, what would the external genre be? Is there an internal genre? What would that be? And what would be the values that stake in that?

You know, crime stories are great because it's always about justice. That's the value at stake.

Thrillers are life and death. Same with action stories.

Horror is life and death to the nth degree. It's the fate worse than death. Damnation. Thrillers can approach that too.

Love and hate is the value.

Performance and war. War stories, a lot of them are about shame and honor. They're about brotherhood.

Like being selfish or part of something larger than yourself.

So values are really important because to understand what the value is, it allows you to help understand how you're going to use your scenes to arc. You know, the change of your lead character. At the beginning of Rocky, Rocky's kind of a loser. He's okay with the way his life is, even though it's cheesy. And he does these terrible fights and he lives in a squalid apartment. He works for the mob as a muscle man. He's sort of given up, you know, he thinks he's a loser and he's living like a loser. By the end of Rocky, he has self respect. He's regained his sense of honor and dignity. And he might have lost. He lost the external genre. He lost the fight, but he won the internal genre. And that was getting his soul back. His sense of self, his belief in himself.

So, you know, these are important factors to know.

When you're writing your story because you're going to know, well, my external story is going to end positive.

Maybe I want my internal story to end negative. So, like, the person who gets the big job learns that they kind of had to sell their soul to get it. Or the person who loses the big thing wins internally by, you know, understanding more about the truth of themselves, which.

The one. The movie you keep talking about, Kramer versus Kramer. That would be that. Right. So he lost the external genre in the end, but he gained. He won the internal.

Exactly.

Okay.

And that. That's a beautiful story.

And so that helps you. So knowing that from the beginning and answering that from the beginning, kind of, it helps you, scene by scene, know, like, the general direction I should be heading. Kind of like the map thing is, like, even if I can't stay on the interstates, as long as I'm heading west, I'm eventually going to get somewhere near California.

Exactly. And the other thing it'll do is it'll keep you away from cliche. So if, you know, like, let's bring up Kramer versus Kramer again. Say Kramer versus Kramer ended where not only does Dustin Hoffman get his son back, but he gets a big job at the advertising agency, too. And he's now the head of the advertising agency. That would be a great ending, right? So he wins the external and he wins the internal. Guess what? Nobody's gonna like that story.

Because they're going to say that wouldn't happen. There's no way. You can't have that. You can't have both things.

Because if you're building up to the point that external material life is something that sucks you away from your relationships like that story did, and then you reward the guy with some material thing at the end as well, as it just doesn't ring true.

So knowing what your external and internal genres are is really going to be helpful because it'll. It'll keep you away from making mistakes. And here's a little, you know, here's a cheat sheet. Don't have both of them. They always have to be sort of yin and yanging. So at the end of the first act, say you open with your external genre opens.

Negative. Somebody loses their job, and the internal genre is negative. Two, at the end of act one, you're gonna want your external to move a little bit positive, so it's positive and your internal genre to remain negative. And then you want to flip them so that there's sort of like the. You remember we were talking about something has to be surprising but inevitable. This is how you do. The surprising part is you look at the shifts of the values in their polarity and say, am I mixing this up in a way that's interesting?

Thanks, as always, for listening to the StoryGrid podcast. This has been episode five, and so far, episode four has been our most successful episode. So some of you are sharing it with your friends and telling other authors. So I really appreciate the help. Now, you're definitely going to want to tune in on next week because it is. When Sean rips apart the first scene I actually try to write. It's pretty excruciating to go through on my end, but I did it for you so that we can all learn together. So you're definitely going to want to tune in for episode six. As always, we can use your help getting the word out about the podcast. The ways to do that are to first just tell a friend if there's other authors in your life in a Facebook group, a forum, or just a group that you get together with on a regular basis. Tell them about the StoryGrid podcast, make sure they subscribe and listen to it, and make sure you subscribe as well. You can do that in itunes or Stitcher or your favorite podcasting app. And lastly, as always, if you like the show, please go into itunes and leave a review. That is how iTunes picks the shows that it promotes and it's new and noteworthy. And it just makes us feel good to go in and see those reviews and feedback and know that some of you are listening. So thanks again for listening and we will see you next week for episode six of the Story Grid podcast.