How to finish your 1st draft

Hello, and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of Storygrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we start off talking about editing. What editing is how a developmental editor works with an author. But it morphs into a conversation that I think is really important, and that is basically how to get to the end of a first draft. There's just so many times you can get hung up on things, you can get stuck on things, and you're not moving forward, and you can just churn and churn and churn instead of actually getting to a first draft. But then, as you've seen in these episodes, there are times where you need to stop and go back and rewrite and stop and go back and rewrite. And so how do you know when something is. You should actually stop and go back and rewrite. And when it's like, okay, that's good, it's working, and you move on. And so I think it's a really important conversation, one that I know all authors struggle with is, you know, when you're writing that first draft, do you keep going? Do you stop and go back? When is the right time for both of those? So I think you really enjoy it, and hopefully it will help you as you finish your first draft as well. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, as we've continued to work through this book, I've kept having this feeling that, like, this isn't really a lit RPG book the way I was planning on it being. And if you look out there at the lit RPG books, basically, there's a whole lot more RPG than what's showing up in my book. And then we've had several people email us about this topic, too, and they're like, hey, here's, you know, six really good lit RPG books, and your book doesn't look like that at all. And so I'm interested and we've touched on this topic, but I just wanted to talk a little bit about how things morph as you write them, because I know Steve recently wrote about this, Steve Pressfield and his site. And, you know, how. How do you view this as you're working on a book and you're like, okay, this is the genre I'm writing in, and that you Know, I keep thinking, well, Sean said that's the most important thing because then, you know, your conventions and your obligatory scenes and all that kind of stuff. But then it keeps kind of shifting away from that, and I feel like trying to force it into that isn't going to work. And so I don't know, how do you deal with that when you're working with a writer?

Well, that's a really great question. Here's something that I heard from Bruce Springsteen in an interview he had with Marc Maron and wtf? And I was really, really impressed by this because he really kind of summed up what the role of an artist is, and the experience of the artist is something like this. He grew up in a blue collar world, and he wrote a lot of great blue collar songs about growing up in that way. And if you listen to his albums, from his debut album through the latest album that he wrote, you'll see an evolution of storytelling. And the songs that are on Born to Run are a lot different than the songs that are on the River. You can take any artist, you look at the early work of Jasper Johns and his later work as an artist or any. Any writer, too. And here's the thing that I think is. Is happening. There is something inside the artist, the writer, the entrepreneur, the. The person who is looking inside of themselves and trying to give life to a creation.

They don't.

They're not conscious of really what's going on, even as they're working through it. So, you know, what Springsteen said in this interview was my songs were all about the evolution of emotional turmoil from letting go of family problems in my songs until, you know, the father and son relationship could bond and become stronger. And he said in his real everyday life, he was nowhere near living that reality. So it was as if the songwriting that he was doing, and I'm talking about songs that he wrote for Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska, the River, and all the songs that mention sort of the father, son relationship. The relationship evolves in the song from being of great turmoil to some kind of reconciliation and understanding between, you know, the father and the son. And in the reality of his life, Springsteen's life, he and his father were not getting along at all. And there was no way he could ever imagine that reconciliation. But his work were. He was writing about characters who did so he was writing almost projecting his internal life into his work in a way that he was not capable of living yet. So later, when he became older and he started thinking about these things, he said to himself, huh. Isn't that interesting? And I read his book, too, which is terrific. Born to Run, of course, it's called. But, you know, he spent all this time running away from himself, but his music and his art were reflections of what he longed for and what he yearned for. And the reason why I bring this up is that it's important to remember when you're an editor and you're helping an artist or a writer or a painter or a salesperson or whatever, somebody who's trying to fry the right hamburger, there's a very, very delicate process that you have to learn as a mentor of when to press, you know, and when to give a lot of rain. And I'm not saying that I have any solution to this or that I'm a master of it. But it goes to the question that you brought up about lit rpg. Is your story strictly lit rpg? Absolutely not. Are the conventions and obligatory scenes ironclad lit rpg? No. Are they? Is it a coming of age story? Not quite yet. Is it an action story? Yes and no. Is it a social novel? Yeah, kind of. But the reality is, is that as you are writing the book, there are things that are inside of you that are coming out that you don't even know. And so last week, when we talked about, you know, you're writing a particular sequence, you said that you hemmed and hot, and you didn't do anything until you sat down on a Monday and you thought you had a general solution to your idea, and then you just banged out 3,000 words. And what I'm saying is that banging out of the 3,000 words was your internal system fleshing out whatever it is that you had decided mentally, but it was your internal self expressing itself in the words and the scenes that you wrote. You didn't know that stuff was in you until you finished the 3,000 words. So your analytical mind gave yourself a task, and then you allowed your internal life to bring that task to life. So I may be, you know, speaking in riddles and runes here, but my point is, is that the editor, the developmental editor, meaning an editor who works with a writer from the conception of an idea to the end of publication, has a very difficult task. Because I could say to you, tim, Tim, you're not playing by the rules. You haven't done this right. The lit RPG conventions are not being met. You have to fix them. If you don't fix them, there's no way of having commercial, marketable success. If your protagonist is 12 years old, nobody who's over 14 is going to want to read the book. Even people 14 might not want to read the book. Are you confident that this is the next Harry Potter? What are you trying to do? Who do you think you are?

Why don't you make anxiety just hearing you.

Exactly. And it's worthless and it's pointless. Because here's the thing that you can do. Once you have a first draft that you generally think is close to the story that you want to tell, you are able to look at it from a much better perspective. You can say, okay, there's my ending payoff, there's my beginning hook. What does that mean? What is that book ending? Is this really about the hero at the mercy of the villain? Is this really about the maturation plot? Is this story best served with the 12 year old protagonist? Or can I go back and change her age from 12 to 17? What would that mean? Should I add a love component here? Well, I could add six scenes. That would give me a really nice subplot of Love Story if that's what's necessary. So to put all these limitations on the writer and obligatory things that they have to do while they are figuring out the story is a mistake, in my opinion. And the reason why I say it's a mistake is because I've done it before. I.

You know the end of that road.

Yeah, I do. And what happens is that the writer feels as if a, I'm writing the book, which I shouldn't be doing. If I have a book to write, I should write it myself. So they, they begin to resent the fact that I'm making them write things that they don't necessarily feel like they should be writing. So they resent the fact that I'm writing their book. I'm taking control of their book, which an editor should never do. The second thing is that it exhausts them. They lose that inner fire that motivated them to write the book in the first place. And they'll either abandon the book or they'll finish it reluctantly and they'll throw up their hands and they don't want to do any more editorial work and the book isn't ready yet and it's not working. But they say, you know what? I'm done with it. Try, you know, I'm going to try and sell it. And then it doesn't sell. And then they feel like they've wasted their time. And that's not good for anyone because it's never a waste of time to explore a story. Never. It's never a waste of time. You always Learn something. But it's excruciating to spend 18 months on something and have nothing come from it commercially. To not make any money from something that you've worked so hard on feels like failure, and it feels like a waste of time. So that has happened to me before, working with writers, and I can't go back in time and say to them, hey, I'm sorry about that. Let's, you know, let's. Let's take it up again and try. Because, you know, I made a mistake, they made a mistake. We didn't figure it out the right way. And I'm not. This could happen between us. Who knows? Because I don't have all the answers. And the thing about stories is that they have very strict structures, but those structures evolve from the writer organically to impose a structure on something. Yeah, you can write genre fiction and you can hit all the obligatory scenes and you can write genre stuff with no internal investment beyond something cool. And I'm not putting that down. I think that's a way of becoming a better writer. But to do that from. It's not what I'm interested in as an editor or a creative person. So I kind of forget what your original question is.

Oh, I think that goes. That goes back to, like, you know what I feel like, okay, so I did last spring, I did the sit down and bang out an entire first draft. And, you know, while you still claim it wasn't a waste of time because we found a theme, it feels like a waste of time because it was. So much of it didn't work where the way we're doing it now. Because, you know, I get these emails too, from people trying to protect me from you. And, you know, it's just like, well, you know, this doesn't work, or this doesn't work, or this genre doesn't work here, or, like, he needs to, like, lay off because you're doing fine. And I realized, like, looking back, like, last week, I feel like last or two weeks ago was such a good picture of this because we had this scene, and you're like, it doesn't really work. And you actually were fine to, like, move on. But I kind of kept questioning, and what we finally pointed out was it didn't work because there was no crisis, which is something that I can fix. Right. So then you helped me kind of brainstorm some ideas to fix it, but you left it to me to fix that problem. Problem. But what. And what I realize you've done through this is you've let me write my own book. And you've. There's been times where you've kind of come along side me, almost like if I was just sitting down with a friend and like, hey, what would be cool with this, that or the other thing, you know, and coming up with new ideas. And then there's times where you're like, this doesn't work for this reason. You. You need to figure out how to fix it. And so you're letting me write the book I want to write, but you're also keeping me from making these mistakes that so many writers make, which is not having a crisis or not, you know, progressively complicating something or missing, you know, the whole, like, drugs into the new world. And so I think that's how it's evolved is you've kind of like kept me from making, you know, the mistakes. The mistakes that make a story not work and force me to fix them when they don't work. Like I was saying last week of like, having to rewrite that same sequence four times until I finally got something, you know, and each time you would say, okay, well, it doesn't work for this reason. And so I'd rewrite it. Okay, it doesn't work for this reason that, like, you fixed that, but now you got to fix this other thing until it finally landed on something that worked. And when you say worked, it's just basically meeting the guidelines of what makes a story a story. And, you know, like, I actually have written down here because last week when I was sitting at my desk for that, you know, I put it off until Monday, which means I actually had to write something. And then. And then I sat here for an hour trying to figure out what to write. And I actually, like, opened the book, went to the five commandments of storytelling, and I wrote down inciting incident, progressive complication, crisis, climax, resolution. And I'm like, I need this for the sequence and I need this for each individual scene. And so coming back to that form allowed me to start filling it in with something that actually worked. So that's how I feel about the way that it's morphed, is that you've done good to step back and let me. Because you've, like, said, hey, you know, maybe you do this, that. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I go and write something completely, completely different than what you suggested. But if it works and it abides by the story grid, then it works and you're good. Like, that's what we're going for, is not like writing the story you think I should write? It's just writing a story that I want to write that works by the standards of the story grid.

Yeah, exactly. And the thing, again, is not to bring in too much mystical stuff, but the songs that Springsteen wrote were trying to communicate something to him personally. Now, they were universal for people under, you know, similar circumstances who grew up in, like, the blue collar world, but they were very personal songs that had universal appeal. So whatever it is that is attracting you to this storyline and the revision of the storyline and fixing this storyline is very particular to you. I'm not saying that you need to figure out exactly why this story is so interesting to you or why you're coming up with it, but that it's not particularly my cup of tea. Right. So for me to sit in a high chair and explain how you're not abiding by the things that you need to do yourself doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And the global. The thing that I always come back to with the podcast is that we started this thing with a very specific idea. And the idea was not this. It was not an editor and a writer work on a book, publish it, and make it a bestseller. That's not what it was, what it is. And I think a lot of people get confused by that because we commodify everything today, and everybody thinks that there has to be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And while that would be nice and great and everything, it's not why we're doing this. Why we're doing this is to our initial idea. And what sold me on doing this in the first place was the. The experimental notion of somebody who's been around the block a long time being able to guide somebody deliberately through an apprenticeship, mentorship, whatever you want to call it in writing so that they could learn 10 years worth of writing principles and work in a fraction of the time. And I think we're extremely successful doing that right now. But that doesn't mean that I don't want you to write a complete novel that is very perfectly aligned with a specific market of readers who would be attracted to it. They could be lit RPG readers, they could be romance readers, they could be whoever. But we don't determine that until we have a really strong idea of what the novel and the story is really about. What is really the controlling idea of this story? We came up with some ideas to get you started because you said you wanted to write an action thriller. We went to the conventions and obligatory scenes and notions of an action thriller. And we came up with the generic, you know, action thriller, controlling idea where, you know, the. The hero sacrifices himself for the. For the betterment of others. That's the generic, controlling idea of the thriller. And that's where we started. And that's a great place to start. But the specificity of the idea will evolve as you work on it, and it's becoming more and more clear as, you know, this process moves forward. So, you know, the notion of the story grid as a way of using the structure and forms of story to get you on the road to writing is a great one. And I think the more you know about your craft, the better your ability to release the inner vision that nobody really knows that they have until the work comes forward.

Well, I think this would be a good spot to talk about because I've gotten, again, you know, from people listening to the show. It's. People are like, well, this is great for you, but I don't understand, like, what am I supposed to do? Like. And we've talked a little bit about this, but what do you see the role of a developmental editor? And I think it's good to just back up and talk again about what is a develop when you. Because I didn't know. And I honestly couldn't name all the, like, different layers of editing at this point. But, like, I just thought of editing before I got into writing. I thought editing was just like, okay, well, somebody writes a book and somebody else goes through and makes sure, like, the commas are in the right place and. And the quotes are in the right place. And that's an editor. And the way we're working is to the point where I'm like, you need to be with Sean Coyne. Your name needs to be on the COVID So there's a big gap there. So what do you see a developmental editor's role is of working with an author?

Well, it's sort of like by a midwife of sorts, a creative midwife. And the midwife doesn't have the baby, but she helps the woman have the baby. So a developmental editor is somebody. And there aren't many of them out there. I don't really know any beyond myself. But what I love about it is that.

It allows me to help you laser focus on what it is you want to say and the story that you want to tell. So the editing that. That you're talking about, there are proofreaders and copy editors who do all that work that you talked about previously, who make sure that the grammar is appropriate, that you know everything Makes sense, and that there aren't typos, etc. Etc. And those are very important people to have. But that's a skill, a set of rules that you can learn through dedicated work. And there are very specific yeses and nos when it comes to grammar. A developmental editor is someone who guides somebody through their chosen story field until they have something that they can go back and edit. And what that means is that what an editor, a story editor, does is that they look at the global movement of the story. Is this thing. Does this thing have a compelling beginning, middle, and end? Is it abiding the conventions and obligatory scenes of the genre that the writer has chosen to write in? And if it hasn't, where is it going off the rails? How can it be fixed? How can the writer go back and make sure that they hit the right moments at the right times so that the audience that loves that kind of story will be attracted to it? So a developmental editor is somebody else who helps the writer get a first draft. And then once the first draft is done, it doesn't mean that the book is perfect. What it means is that the global story works. It has a beginning, middle, and end. The scenes abide the five commandments of storytelling. There's inciting incidents, progressive complications, crises, climaxes, and resolutions. The units of the story make sense. The scenes build to sequences, the sequences build to acts, the acts build to subplots. And then you have the global story itself. So those two things are the things that you do as an editor. Once you have a draft, you. You check the scenes to make sure they're working. You go to micro, and you also go to the foolscap global story grid, which is the macro point of view. So you have to look at the story from two points of view, the big point of view and the micro point of view. And then when all of that's done and you feel confident that you have the appropriate genre, you have made the right choices to satisfy that genre. You've done the best you can to innovate the scenes in that specific genre to a point that makes sense. You have a great title. You have an idea for a cover. Those are all the things that happen after you have a first draft. But it's like after the baby's out, you got to make sure that they have the right clothes, that, you know they're swaddled, that you. You help them find out what they are, you know, through the years. And so the editor, after a first draft, is looking at a fresh baby and saying, how do we let this baby find their, their appropriate home. I don't know if this metaphor is working at all.

Well, I, Yeah, and I've been just thinking of it as like getting a working first draft is getting it somewhere between 70 and 80% there. Because I already thought like with the character I introduced last week, like I at least have to refer to him earlier in the book and. But I wouldn't have known that until I'm in the middle of the middle build and I add him in and then I gotta like make it continuous and like as you said, we're still even figuring out what the book's really about. And so once we figure that out, it'll be towards the end of the book. So I'll have to go back through and make sure that thread is continuous through the whole thing. And so I just think of like I'm gathering all the pieces I need and putting them in a rough order. But then I'm going to go have to go back and churn on it several times to make sure it's actually a finished project. But that at the. I used to would think that would be the hard part. And I'm realizing that part, which I haven't done it yet, so who knows? But like I feel like that part will become much more clear. And this has been the part that's just so hard is figuring out what the story even is from the get go.

Yeah, I think the first time is the hard part. And that's why you want to build in and allow for avenues of revision that could change the story dramatically but not require all that much surgery. What I mean by that is, for example, a lot of people have emailed me and said Tim's protagonist is 12 years old and that's not going to work because X, Y and Z. And. But my point is that.

The differences between a 12 year old point of view and a 48 year old's point of view are often not that different.

Especially when we're dealing with a story about a worldview change. Because we as human beings, it doesn't matter how old we are, we are really, really good at lying to ourselves. So if your story after, at the end of the day, when we have a first draft of it and we look at, and we say, okay, let's take a look at the marketing of this novel. Who is the core market? Is this going to satisfy a core market? Should we, should we hone it in into, you know, a litrpg only point of view? Should we do that or should we Try and amp it up a little bit and try to go to the action thriller genre, which is a little bit more diffuse and amorphous. Maybe we should change the protagonist's age. That's not, believe it or not, that's not a lot of hard work. What that requires are moments of adding, oh, how was the promise? You know.

And a lot of people would probably say, this is, this is crazy. That's a huge difference. The character and the actions that the character take are what define them. Their age are little characteristics. It's not the same thing. The age of the character is not the same as the actions that the character takes. We are defined by our actions, not by our characteristics. Nobody looks at me and says, oh, that's salt and pepper hair guy. You know, they say, oh, that's the guy who edits books. What I do, my actions define who I am, not my physical attributes. Nobody, nobody says, oh, Sean Coyne is a brown eyed guy with salt and pepper hair who's in his 50s now. They go, oh, that's the guy who edits books. And that's the same thing in our fictional characters. The age. Nobody cares how old Jay Gatsby was. And you know, Katniss everdeen, yes, she's 17 years old, but she, she has the courage of a superhero. She could be her, her soul is a lot older than 17 years old. She makes choices that 52 year old guys don't make. So her age and her characteristics are the novelist's choices that can be manipulated after the story has been told. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, I feel like again, it's getting to that point of like we're just deciding on the age of the character is not what makes the story work. And again, I think that's what as I've, as I think back on my own writing, as I've, you know, I've been working with writers now for eight years. You know, it's just so easy to get caught on these like tiny things that don't matter.

Right.

You know, so like, because I got forgot who one woman wrote this like 3500 word blog post talking about how the book's not going to work because it doesn't. Because basically because she's 12.

Right.

And so, and so like I've, I've kept thinking like, okay, well should like we change it or whatever. But then I've thought that same thing of like, well, to make her like 16 would take me about 30 minutes, you know, to just go back through and just change you know, because the book's not about fifth grade.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like, the book's not about, like, what it means to be in fifth grade or whatever.

Right.

Me. It's. It's about all these other things that have nothing to do with her age. And so if at the end we need to change it, we'll just. We'll just change it. But I could see how, like. Like, okay, oh, man, I need to just go ahead and change race. I'm gonna make it 16. So I go back through. At this point, I stopped, I go back through, and I change everything to match 16. Well, then somebody else tells me she should actually be seven. That would be even better. And so then I'm like, oh, well, you're probably right. And there's all these really good reasons of why she should be. I go back and I change that. Or, like, oh, well, it should be a boy instead of a girl. Yeah, you're probably right. So I go back and change everything, and it's like. And I think that comes back to the idea of this guiding theme is the theme is not about man versus woman or age. It's about this overarching, you know, sacrificing yourself for the good of others. And so that's. As long as we're writing on theme, we can always change other things later. And that's where I keep just telling myself, like, you know, keep writing scenes and sequences that work according to the story grid, and at the end, I'll be able to take a much broader look at everything and look at the book as a whole. But for now, that's enough to pay attention to. And once they work, I can just keep moving and knowing that like. Like, it would be so much trying to think of how to explain this. It's like, you know, there's so many things I could be doing that I could tell myself was progress. Right. Is not actually progress. And, like, you know, I have those friends that have been working on the same book for three and a half years, and it's still not done, and it's half done, you know, because they just keep going back and, like, retweaking things without having a book actually to look at. And so that feels like progress because, you know, every day they get up and work on the book, but they're actually never getting to an endpoint and actually putting the book out into the world. And so I just think of this as, like, I want to get a book out into the world. I want to finish it. I want A working book. And at the end I can go back and fix all these tiny little things. It's like when I do woodworking stuff, it's like the last thing I built was like this big table to go on our porch. And I just put the damn thing together first. And then I go back and I fill in the holes and I sand it and I like might unscrew something and tighten it down and pull it back and, you know, start doing all of those other things to really dial it in. But I need the table first, right? And if I tried to make each individual board perfect before I put it together, the table would never get built first and it would still not be right when I finally put it together at the end. I would still have to do all that work to make the boards match each other and come together at the end. And so that's how I think of this is like I'm just trying to put something together that at the end looks like a table. And I can go back through and refine it and make it perfect at the end. But for now, I just need something that looks and smells like a coming of age story that's an action throw thriller. And as long as I have that, I'll have something to work with and I can tweak everything later.

That's true. And there's, there are plenty of examples of the, the coming of age story. The maturation plot is, is a universal theme and, you know, it's, it's part of the worldview internal plot, which is a shift of the way we see the world. And a 12 year old's coming of age can, can be very similar to, you know, as good as it gets. Where the, the character is in his 60s or 50s and sees the world one way, has a moment of clarity that completely devastates him and he changes his point of view. He tries to become a better person. Springsteen talks about that in the interview where, you know, when he was growing up, he thought as long as he solved his rock and roll problems, meaning he became a successful rock and roll artist and made millions and millions of dollars and was able to take care of any financial problem that, that he faced, that everything would be fine. And he did that. And when he was in his early 30s, he had a crisis because he realized that.

That worldview was naive, that he wanted a life richer than just a guy who tours all the time and delivers four hours of great music, you know, every night. That was a mask that he wore. And he was running away from being a Fully functional human being. And he says this. It's a great interview. And his book is exactly. Has that exact thematic progression. His book is called Born to Run, which was the title of his second album. And it was how he ran away from himself for years and years and years and years. His story in his book, there's a reason why he didn't write his book when he was 28. He write, he wrote his book now because he can look back at his worldview and he can say to himself, you know what? Yeah, I'm a rock and roll star, but that's not what I'm proud of. I'm proud of the fact that I faced some very challenging things in my life and I changed. I changed the way I view the world. I realized that living a life dedicated to only my selfish art was not enough. That I needed to change myself so that I would be able to have a loving relationship with another human being and to have a life that had meaning beyond dollars and Grammys and platinum records. And that's what his book is about. That's why his book is so great. That's why this interview is great. And that is what we're all trying to do so we can get locked into and, you know, storygrid gives you million, million different things to drive you crazy and to run away from the core story of your. Of your story. What's the theme of your story? That's what you were searching for. That is progress. When you move that ball a little bit closer to understanding what this story is really about. And the way we can cheat is by saying, well, let's pretend we know the theme. Let's go with that. Yeah, I love this genre. I love thrillers. And what are thrillers about? Thrillers are about sacrificing for the greater good. Great. I'm going to start from there. My book is about the importance of sacrificing yourself for the greater good. Okay, let's move on from there. So what. What's the other thing that I want? Oh, I like the Harry Potter story. So I'm going to make my character 12 years old. Who cares if you change that later? As long as you evolve and move your story forward. And you're absolutely right. Going back and fixing stuff because your story changed in scene 26, so you have to go back and fix all the other previous scenes. That is a waste of time. That is analysis. That's the paralysis of analysis. You need to keep moving forward.

You.

You can fix that other stuff later. You can hone in On a specific genre, you can say, oh, well, this is a thriller. But it would really work better if I toned down the violence and amped up the coming of age story. So maybe I should do that. I mean, a lot of these great action stories like Ender's Game, there isn't a lot of action in Ender's Game. It's a lot of coming of age stuff. But he used the arena of the action story to give depth and an immediate sort of visceral identity for his readers. They're like, oh, yeah, I can't wait for that big moment. And then he, you know, he, he seeded all this other coming of age stuff inside of it. What does it mean to be your own person? What does it mean to. To be lied to? How do you, you know, how do you navigate a world where you're alienated? Those are big themes. But it's a great little, you know, it's a great story about a big event at the end too. It's a war story. So your story right now, it's not perfect, but it's moving forward. You're moving forward. And to stop yourself and say, oh, Somebody wrote a 3,500 word blog post that really made a lot of sense. And, you know, she's right about my, my genre choices and my marketing choices and my marketplace. Maybe I should go back and fix it. That is a recipe for despair.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's such a hard line to know when it, when it's worth stopping and redoing and when it's worth moving forward. That's where I found, like. Because, like last. So last week we talked about, like, okay, well, as probably shouldn't have a gun and be shooting people. And. But that you're like, but you need to keep moving because that was the big. It was a big kind of aha. Moment for me is like, I stop and fix something when I'm breaking one of the five commandments of storytelling, you know, or when. Or when I'm obviously missing a major piece of the story, you know, and sitting still and churning on something until it meets the story grid conventions is worth it. And then once it's there and it works, it's time to move on. So I made a note, you know, as shouldn't be out running in the woods shooting people. And here's why. And I'll fix that later. Because who knows, as may do something, you know, And I just keep thinking like, okay, I fixed that. That now and then as does something else in a future thing that I have to come back and fix it again. And so as long as it works and it meets the, you know, the five commandments, and it's, you know, it's, you know, a good working sequence, it's just time to keep moving. And I can fix that stuff later.

Yes. And I'll just add one more thing to that, and that is this. That the, you know, the story spine, and we've talked about this a lot, but you can never talk about it enough. Your audience will forgive so many mistakes if your story spine is very clear. And what the story spine is, is the hero's journey. And it requires that your lead character or characters have a goal. They want to get something. They have a want, and they have to leave their little world and go after it. They have to go on a mission to get what they want. And by the end of the story, they either get what they want or don't get what they want, or get a little of what they thought they wanted but. Or ends ironically where they. They get something and they. They lose another. But the whole thing about stories is that they're about change. They're about how we human beings cope with change. Now, change is the one thing that is always present in our lives. The universe is constantly changing. Things happen to us that we had no idea were coming, and that throws us for a loop. So what we do is we look to stories for advice. We look to stories to give us prescriptions on how to handle specific kinds of change.

And we also look at them for, as cautionary tales, what not to do in case something happens to us. So knowing that as long as your story is about a character who undergoes a very drastic change and has to navigate an alien world in order to get back home changed, as a human being, your story is on very solid ground. And you can mash and mix and make all kinds of mistakes in your storytelling in terms of genre, if that is so crystal clear that it grabs a reader and makes them want to go on the ride. So I'm not saying ignore conventions and obligatory scenes of your chosen genre. What I'm saying is those conventions and obligatory scenes are ways to help you navigate the storytelling to get from your beginning hook to your middle build to your ending payoff. We know in a thriller there has to be a scene where the hero is at the mercy of the villain. So if you finish this book and there is no scene where Jesse is at the mercy of the villain, we have a problem. And we can fix that problem. But knowing that that scene has to be in the ending payoff or close to the ending payoff. You know you have to deliver that scene and you will write that scene. So that is really, really helpful. But the story spine is as simple as a character undergoes a very traumatic change for the good or for the ill. They have to deal with that change, that change causes a worldview change, and they come home irrevocably different. That's what storytelling is at its most bare bones. It's about how to deal with change.

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