How to Rewrite Scenes

Hello, and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grohl, 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 dive into how to rewrite your scenes. As I'm going back through these scenes that Sean has edited, I'm trying to figure out the best way to rewrite them, because I feel like my kind of natural thing is to just, let's throw it out and start over. But that's kind of inefficient. And so Sean walks me through how to rewrite scenes, how you can approach your scenes, and the right way to do that. And so, for all of us listening, I'm sure this is going to be an episode that's really helpful. So let's dive in and get started. So, Sean, I've been working on this rewrite, and I'm really struggling with. I've never actually rewrote anything like this, and I'm facing this a little bit. With my first book. To your first 1,000 copies, I wanted to write a second edition. I got this editor to give me all this. It was, like, 20 pages of things that I should add and change and everything. And it makes me just want to throw everything out and write again from scratch. And so when I'm looking at rewriting some of these scenes, I'm really struggling with not just throwing away everything and just rewriting it again based on your advice. But I know that's a really inefficient way to do things. So how do you suggest I approach. Like, if I have this scene, that's 1500 words, but, like, 700 of the words need to change. I'm just struggling to, like, change those and still, like, piece it all back together.

Well, my advice about that is to almost block out all the other scenes from your mind and go back to those notes that you've made. Because I know one of the things that you sort of intuitively picked up about sort of structuring scenes is to look at each of the major players in the scene and look at the scene from their particular point of view and say, oh, well, this could happen if this person did this. If this person did this, then this might happen. And then sort of constructing the different possibilities of altering that scene so that it complies with the note I gave you. So, for example, one of your scenes, as I recall, it begins with Jesse going into sort of the. The canteen of the. The numbered people. And there 83 is having her cup of coffee, and they sit down and have a chat, you know, having coffee. And my note to you was, that's not active enough. And it's. You're wasting an opportunity to pound in some fun and interesting exposition about the world here. So what you should do is use that scene and the, you know, the scene event and expand it so that it moves out of the canteen coffee arena, and instead, 83 takes Jesse on a tour of hell, in a way. So for that example, you probably will end up tossing most of the original scene, but the event of the scene will remain standard and whatever. And the choices that you have to make are, how do I get this to turn? At what point am I going to make it turn? What value is it going to turn on? And how can I sort of think through in my brain, how can I map out a scene that could be interesting? So you could say the scene opens with Jesse and 83 walk outside during daylight.

And, you know, before they actually even go outside, 83 has her put on almost like an asbestos suit, like they do in the old steel mills, because it's so hot outside and the ultraviolet rays are so intense. The numbered people, they work during the day while everybody rests. So you could actually have 83, you know, putting the uniform on Jesse so that she can go out and. And do the work. And that could be sort of your opening, you know, foray into this world, which will be kind of strange and shocking to the reader because they'll not be sure what's going on here. So after you get them outside, then they can progressively move towards one single, really nasty task that they have to perform. And 83 tells her, you know, this is the way to go. You don't want to go this way because of the, you know, the toxic fumes that are coming off of the whatever. So that you want to. Instead of worrying so much about rewriting the scene, just give yourself the imaginative, you know, license to play around a little bit. And, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book is the power of 10 and sort of mapping out 10 variations of how you might accomplish the goal of this particular scene. So the other scenes that don't need massive work that could be tweaked later on, my recommendation is leave that for another day. The goal in this process right now, and we're Kind of discovering this together.

Is to really, you know, get a very, very strong beginning hook to this story, the core story, spine of the hero's journey. For Jessie, you want to get her in a hole, and you want her. You want her to get out of the hole at the end, but in a negative way. And we've. We've mapped that out, and you know what to do. But it's each of these individual scenes that you have to challenge yourself by saying, okay, how do I make this scene the most memorable scene in the novel? And, you know, you probably.

So for each scene, I'm trying to make each scene the most memorable scene in the novel.

Well, that's like the psychological ploy that I would use personally. I would say to myself, you know, there. Just to give an example, there are great. You know, in every great movie, we all have our favorite scenes. And like, for example, the Godfather. Now, if you ask, say, my brother, his favorite scene in the Godfather, he would say it's the scene when Michael has to shoot Sollozzo and the cop at the Italian restaurant. Because the tension in that scene is just incredible, right? But if you ask me, I would say my favorite scene is when Michael is sitting at the Don's desk, and the Don has just been shot. He's in the hospital. Everybody's panicking, and they all turn to Michael, and Michael says, it's very simple.

You get the cop and Sollozzo in a room, you plant a gun, and I'll kill both of them. And it's this wonderful moment because then, you know, James Caan goes, oh, you know, big Ivy League tough guy. I thought you didn't want to be part of the family business. Bada bing, bada boom. What, are you crazy? You're not going to be able to kill these guys. And it's that moment, for me, that's one of my favorite scenes. So if you look at the Godfather, you look at every single scene in that movie, and it might be somebody's favorite scene, because Puzo and Coppola, when they were creating this, they challenged themselves. And you can see they didn't just say, oh, you know, here's the wedding scene. Let's get this over in two minutes so that we can get to the Don getting shot. No, they're like, let's bring in Johnny Fontaine. Let's. That's really milk this. So to think about each scene in terms of constructing almost a cinematic experience for the reader, in my opinion, is a great way of having fun as a writer and creating very Unique, individual scenes that just, you know, bang, bang, bang, bang. And when the scenes are great, the readers just. They can't. They can't get enough. It's. It's potato chips. They're just so wonderfully constructed, and they feed into next, and the transitions are seamless, and you don't have a lot of exposition. You just have these movements of scenes that are very strong. So, you know, I always say to you, and I've said this to you I don't know how many times. For me, all of story boils down into the fundamental unit of storytelling. And the fundamental unit of storytelling is the scene. It's the scene in television, it's the scene in cinema, it's the scene in novels. It's just such a primary primal, perfectly constructed, you know, Russian doll from which everything else is built from. So when you really challenge yourself to make each of your scenes the very best that you believe it can be, then it's just gonna make the whole novel better and better and better. So if you have a scene that is, you know, like the very. The inciting incident of your. Of your novel is just. It's a meeting scene. It's a. It's a. It's a stranger knocks at the door scene with either a good or a bad event. That's essentially what it is. But instead, what you did is you didn't literally have somebody knock on the door. You decided, why don't I have Jesse in the middle of what she's really good at, stealing food, and have her being caught in the act?

So you took a generic idea, which is stranger knocks on the door inciting incident, and you created something unique. And that's. That's kind of what you want to do. When you look at the purpose of each of your scenes, you say to yourself, okay, the event is this. The valence of movement is from positive to negative. The value shift is from life to threat of death. How can I make that work in a really unique way that's consistent with. With the rest of my story?

You know, I'm struck. Like, I feel like there's so much I struggle with this, but. Did you ever watch this show the Office?

Yes.

Okay, so there was that one episode where Michael Scott was taking improv classes, and, like, everybody hated him because in every scene he pulled out a gun. And, like, you know, so they did this interview, you know, one of those side interviews with him, and he's like. He's like, what's the most exciting thing that ever happens in a movie? It's like, somebody pulls out, he's like. So I make sure I do that in every scene. And it's just this stupid thing. But this is what I struggle with, is that I tend to pack too many things. You're like, you put too many things into a scene. And when you critiqued my full manuscript I did back in the spring, you said, this is, like, three books. It's not one book. It should have been three books. So you're doing way too much stuff. But then you say, make this scene the best it possibly can. And, like, all I think is, like, basically a version of, like, I gotta pull out a gun in each scene. You know, like, I gotta do this, like, big thing in each scene. So what I just struggle with, like, how can I make a scene that, to me, is just moving the story just a little bit ahead.

A really compelling scene.

Well, that's a good point. And the way you figure that out is by understanding the global movement of your story. So, for example, again, when you have the scene where Jesse and 83 walk into hell and 83, the purpose of that scene, the story purpose of that scene, the thematic purpose of that scene is to present to the reader the ordinary world of the numbered people.

The whole. This is like describing the hole that she just fell into, right?

That's exactly correct.

Okay. So I did it by having them sit and sip coffee and just tell her what this world is.

Right. Instead, what you want to do is show her what this world is like through a purposeful, active moment. You know, one of the things that when you're an actor is. And it's very similar to when you're a writer and an editor gives you notes like, well, I didn't think the middle had enough juice to it. And when you're an actor, if a director says to you.

I'm just not getting where you're coming from. You're not giving me enough colors. These are the kinds of things that will make somebody like myself, a very practical kind of person, want to hang himself.

Because there's no practical thing that you can actually do.

Just put more colors in.

Yeah. How do you do that? So that's why, you know, your question about the gun is a very good one. And it goes to the global movements of the emotional movement of the story, the story spine, the hero's journey, those six things that we talked about, the hedometer and Andy Reagan at University of Vermont a couple of weeks ago. These are the things that grab the insides of a person and drag them through the story. So the purpose of this opening beginning hook of your novel is twofold. It's to, you know, really suck the reader in by putting your protagonist in a man in the hole narrative arc that gets very, very deep, very, very quickly. And when you make that promise to the reader, what you're saying to them is.

Hold on to your seats. I am pulling you into a story that goes very, very quickly into a deep crevasse. So I'm making a promise to you, and my promise to you is this. This is just the beginning. Hold on to your socks, because this is going to get even more deeply involving for you. So these early moments are you're challenging yourself to really make a deep promise to the reader. So one of the reasons why I like the fact that we're doing this beginning hook and we're not really going to move further along until we feel good about this hole that we've dug and how Jesse gets out of this hole, is that once you make this promise, this deep promise to the reader, it's going to push you into your middle, build with very, you know, big expectations of yourself. And you should have those expectations of yourself, because if you're able to create a beginning hook like this, then you have to challenge yourself to make it even stronger in the middle. And the big payoff is going to be really terrific. So just back to your question about how do you make it more involving and interesting without bringing in guns? And, you know, that's what I did.

With my first scene. Right. The first draft of the first scene had a stabbing at the end.

Yes.

And you're like. You're like, that's weight in. That is like, you know, that's pulling out the gun, you know, and so you ended it with just the word with her saying no.

Yeah.

And so I'm. I think what I'm struggling with is like, how do I make like. It is. It's. When I. When you say you got to go big on the scene you got to make, I'm like, all right, somebody's getting stabbed. You know.

When I met when I mean big. I mean, not necessarily the active life and death value, but big in terms of the purpose of the scene. The purpose of the scene for Jesse and 83 is to introduce her into the hellish world. And so it's not a big scene when they're sitting and having coffee and she's telling her what the world is about. It's far bigger if instead of a dialogue over coffee, 83 is putting an asbestos suit on her. And she's zipping her up, and she's, you know, putting the really intense goggles on her, so. And then maybe, you know, there's a. An extra oxygen pack that she's going to have to strap to her back like a backpack. And she says to her, don't use this up the first 15 minutes, because we've got X amount of time to take care of this. And if we don't get this done, you know, you're gonna run out of your oxygen before we get back. You ready? Here we go. 1, 2, 3. They open the door, and there's the furnace. And they step into the furnace, and then they go back and they do their task. And we follow Jesse as she struggles along with 83 to get this task done. And then they come back from the task exhausted and just wiped out. And that's going big because it's saying to the reader, look at this environment that this poor girl has put herself into.

It doesn't. When you say, hey, don't go out. Instead having a scene where they say, hey, don't go outside, because it's really hot out there, right? That's small. That's not a big scene. So that's the difference. It's letting your imagination.

Live in the world a little bit and describe it in a way that is shocking and compelling to the reader in an active way. They have a goal at the beginning of the scene. The goal is to, I don't know, turn on the water at somebody's house so that, you know, their cooling system works enough to keep them inside the game. You know, they got. They got some kind of alarm saying, you know, house number 76 down on, you know, the corridor needs a water treatment system checked. So 83 takes Jesse on that trip. And that way you're giving information to the reader beyond just the hellish world that you're also saying, wow. So this. These environments have to be perfectly calibrated. And it's so important that these people are locked into this, you know, this game, like digital virtual reality, that they send people out in horrible situations to keep those people in the game. Okay?

So I'm trying to break this down because, you know, the mistakes I made in writing my beginning hook is I had several scenes that didn't move and several scenes that weren't as, you know, big or as riveting or grab the reader as they should be. And so one of the things that we changed from me trying to write an entire first draft of a book to this is to write just the Beginning hook. And then we started with the first two scenes and then you release me to write the rest of the beginning hook. And as I approach these scenes, I was just kind of like, okay, I was thinking, okay, what happens next?

And what I'm starting to kind of hone in on is like, when I. So there's some value in not like mapping out all 60 scenes before I write one of the scenes. There's a value to just kind of figuring out what's next. But I think I need to have like a list of questions I ask myself when I get to the next scene. And one of them is like, where, you know, something around, like, where am I? Where are they going in the scene? Or what is the main thing that happens? Maybe it's, you know, four of the spreadsheet columns of like, okay, what's the polarity shift? Because I think one of my issues was I didn't really know where a scene was going until I was writing it. And then once I got to the end of that scene, I'm like, okay, I got there and I move on to the next one where if I'm saying, like, okay, what am I doing in the scene? So again, we'll just stick with the same scene. Okay. In this scene, I'm getting 83 to introduce Jesse to the world. Okay? So by the end of it, Jesse needs to understand what she's gotten herself into.

Then I can stop and say, okay, well, what's the most compelling, interesting, non cliche way that I can get from where we're at at the beginning of the scene to where we're at at the end of the scene instead of just kind of riding my way to the end of the scene, do you think that would be helpful to kind of ask at the beginning, not map out every scene? But once I've written one scene, go to the next scene, think, okay, where am I going? What's the polarity shift? You know.

Those kind of things?

Yes, I think that's a good way of handling it. You know, the primary question that you always want to ask is what happens next? What's going to be interesting in the next scene? And from that question, you're probably going to have some initial idea that you'll say, oh, well, this will happen next, because that just previously happened in the last scene. So my thing would be write down that initial, you know, your first instinct of what should happen next. But before you write the thing.

Say to yourself, okay, does that make sense in terms of what, what happened before now? What happened before was a shift from negative to positive.

Oh, geez, this, this scene that I want to write next is also negative to positive. Is that going to work or should I go positive? Negative, which is traditionally the way you want to handle, you know, a back to back scene. You want to move the valence from negative to positive and then start the next scene going positive to negative. And this is a way of keeping the reader engaged in the story. It's a technique, it's a structural technique. It's a story technique that is extremely helpful to keep you on track so that the reader, your eventual reader, will be engaged by the story. The other thing to think about is to think in terms of sequences. Now, sequences of scenes, they can be tricky and they can. They can boggle your mind sometimes. And if that's the case for you, then you disregard what I'm going to say. But sometimes they help. So, for example, I'll use the movie Misery, which is a fantastic movie. It's based upon Stephen King's novel. Just a. William Goldman wrote the screenplay. There's just nobody better than William Goldman. He wrote Marathon Man. He's all the President's Men screenplay. Just a genius writer. And if you look at Misery, the great thing about it, one of the great things about it is that the sequences of scenes are so purely clear that just, you know, if you stop your, your video and just watch each scene and say, okay, what happened in that scene? Oh, this happened. And I do get into this a little bit. I think I use this in, in the book to talk about sequences. But the beginning hook of Misery is what it's getting. Paul, I forget his last name. Paul, the writer. Into a hole. He. He gets into a whopping hole. And so it begins with this writer, this famous writer, who's sort of sick of the kind of, you know, the boilerplate stuff. He's been writing for years that's extremely successful. He's a very wealthy man. But he wants to write his great American novel. So the beginning of the movie, and in the novel, he's just finished this book that he's. He's, you know, sweated out for. For a long time. He's in the mountains. He's at this very nice hotel. He rewards himself with a cigarette and a glass of champagne. It starts to snow and he says to himself, oh, man, I don't want to stay in this resort tonight. It's just. It's just snowing a little bit. I'm going to make it back to la. I think he's in like somewhere in Colorado. And he says he's going to go back to LA or wherever. So it starts to snow and he gets in his car and it's snowing more and more heavily, and bang, he gets in a car crash. His car gets totaled. He falls in a snowbank. And cut. That's the end. Now that I just described the sequence. There's two scenes, maybe or three scenes in that entire thing, but it's a sequence. It's getting Paul from finishing his novel and celebrating to wiping out on the road with his car totaled and snow falling. So that's the inciting incident of Misery. And, you know, everyone says to themselves when they see the movie or they read the novel, oh, my gosh, how's he gonna get out of this? Then the next sequence begins and that sequence is him being rescued. So William Goldman was like, how can I create these scenes visually that'll be interesting to get him rescued? And Stephen. Stephen King, when he was writing the novel, was thinking the same thing. And so, you know, in the film, you see this sort of hunched over figure. It's almost like Sasquatch coming out of the woods, right? And, you know, it's just got this big coat on and you see it, you know, ripping the door open and, you know, pulling the guy out. And obviously it's. It's Paul, our writer, and he's. He's unconscious because he was hurt terribly in this car crash. And the figure throws him over, over his shoulder and sort of goes into the woods and, you know, cut. Then the next scene is he wakes up and we see Paul in a bed and he's immobile, his legs are broken, he's black and blue, and he's been rescued by some, you know, nice person who's brought him to their home and put them in bed.

Yeah, I just laugh at nice person.

Yeah, exactly. So then, you know, now we've got another two scenes that have established his rescue. So that's a sequence of Paul gets rescued. So it moves from Paul gets in a crash to Paul gets rescued. And we have four scenes. So what I'm saying about these sequences is they can help you figure out what happens next in a way that keeps you on track. Because if Goldman and Stephen King needed to move from man falls in the hole, man gets out of the hole, man falls in a deeper hole, right? So the inciting incident and this all happens. It's brilliant, brilliant filmmaking because the man in the hole beginning is maybe seven minutes of entire screen time, maybe nine minutes. So you get this Full man in the hole. And then you get a double man in the hole. That will take you to the realization that Paul is being held hostage and he's with some crazy fan, his number one fan. And if there's any writer's worst nightmare, it's spending time with the number one fan.

Yeah. So thinking through mine, it would be Jesse falls into the hole. So that's the scene where she says, no. And then we have the shaming. Then Jesse's introduced to the hole.

Jesse, would it be, like, tries to escape the hole.

Well, what's nice, Tim, is that you have a mini hole at the beginning. The mini hole is that she decides, forget it. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. No way. And so then she gets the consequences of falling in the hole, which means that she gets really physically harmed. She gets a cap put on her head and she's rescued. So she comes out of that hole only to go into a deeper crevasse after she's rescued. So what I'm saying is that the crevasse of the second fall is not very interesting now. Okay, but the first fall, the first hole, when she gets shamed. The scene when she gets shamed is really good, right? Because she gets her hair cut off and she gets that thing plugged into her head and her father abandons her. And it's all done in a very, very compact 2,000 words or so.

So the challenge is to do a fresh hell for the second fall. That's even worse than the shaming, because the reader is going to think, oh, man, how it can't get worse than getting a cap put on your head. And then you're going to be. Want to bet?

So you've got the pain. It's called progressive complications, Right. It's one of the things in the five commandments of storytelling. Has to progressively complicate deeper and deeper levels, more and more negativity, more and more positivity. So you can't go back. You can't, like, go from. You know, I write about this in the book the power of 10, right? Like, evaluate your scene and give it a number. You know, what are the chances of the character being able to turn back time and have no consequences for what happened that scene. And if it's small, you give it a two. Now you created at the very beginning. There's no way she's going to be able to go back after the shaming. So you've got to make the next one even more horrifying. Not only are you a number, but you have to spend your time in horrific, horrific working conditions to keep, you know, society going. And I think, you know, again, we were talking last week a little bit about using.

Historical record to inform your fiction. And you know, just as someone who grew up in Pittsburgh in the steel mills, that's the first image that comes to me is, is the way these guys just have to go to work every day was literally putting on asbestos suit, putting on goggles. It was 150 degrees in the mill and they had to tap molten lava. It was hellish. It was hellish work. And if you could use something or a coal mine or the garment industry or there's any number of really the oil industry, the roustabouts, there's any number of rank and file jobs from the early 1900s that you could use thematically to root your fictional universe.

When you're creating a fictional universe, I always suggest root it in reality. So that's just a suggestion. Note that's your artistic choice to do with as you wish.

Well, it actually made me think of.

There's this. It's completely. Has nothing to do with writing, but Scott Adams, the guy who created Dilbert, I read this post he did one time and he talked about how to become successful at something was to either become the top, you know, 0.01% at one thing, so become the best scientist or the best, whatever he said, or be mediocre at two things and put them together in an interesting way. And so he's like, you know, I'm not very good cartoonist, I'm not a very funny guy, but I'm decently good at both of them. And I put them together in an interesting way. And in this. I wonder if, like, I could do that where I basically. Because they're basically just housekeepers. But if you combine housekeeping with going to a coal mine every day, it puts it in a. Like, if I can make going in as a housekeeper seem like going into a coal mine, that's just what popped in my head. It'd be a way to root it in reality, but combine two unrelated things to create a reality that never actually existed. Does that make sense? Is that kind of what you're getting at?

Absolutely. And just as another sort of example of what we're talking about in the movie Alien, which is just so scary and so remarkable. I forget who, who mentioned this, but Ridley Scott, you know, when he was shooting it, somebody had mentioned, you know, these guys in space, they're kind of like just Truck drivers, you know, they're like interstate truck drivers in space. So the characters in Alien who are on the ship have the, the mannerisms and the sensibility of, of, you know, long haul truck drivers. So it's in that familiarity of those characterizations that made the viewer look at them and say, oh, I totally get it. These guys are just like the blue collar workers in space and they've got the spaceship and they're, you know, they're out to go pick something up. They're like, you know, the guys who drop off your furniture when you buy.

It or, or like Firefly. Joss Whedon show was a space western.

It was.

They were all cowboys. Yeah, basically. And they were not pirates. But like, what were they in the western? The outlaws, you know. Right, right. You know, they had him have like a long jacket, a long leather jacket in his gun, even though it was like, it didn't shoot bullets, but it looked like a six shooter.

Right, right, exactly. So that speaks to the Scott Dilbert idea of bringing two seemingly different things together in a unique way. It's also a genre meld by using the tropes of one genre in a different universe. So like, you have the space western as you describe, and you have the space epic opera like Star wars too. So using, using things to ground your work so that you say to yourself, okay, so this is as if these are, you know, late night. It's, it's sort of like, you know, when I worked in the city.

I would stay, I'd stay late. A lot of people would stay late, but I would stay till sometimes 10, 10:30 at night. And the cleaning crew would come in and they would come in at 10 o' clock and they would say, oh, excuse me, I'm sorry, I didn't know you were here. And I would hand them my garbage. And there was a whole community of people who were there to clean up the messes of people like me. And that's an interesting way of looking at the way the numbered people are. And I think that's, that's a very clear signal that you're putting into the novel. And I think it's a good one to show that these are the people who clean up messes. Yeah.

And I want to. I was already planning on making it something where like, Jessie had never really seen them before because they always come when she's not there.

Right.

They come out when she's not there and really kind of playing. Because we are, we talked about last week or the week before, like flipping it where people live outside at night and inside it during the day. And so the number have to go out during the day so that they're unseen. Which is why Jesse never really understood the hell that they lived in.

Yes.

Because I was thinking, like, even, you know, after we talked last week, and I was thinking through rewriting that scene, I was thinking, like, I, like you took it further with the bestos suit, but I was thinking already of, like, having 83, like, hand her a pair of sunglasses. And she's didn't really know what those were for.

Right.

Because I'm trying to think of ways to explain what's going on without explaining what's going on.

Yes. So you walk the reader through their routine, and it's through the routine, the things that they do in the routine, that will inform the reader of what's going on. You always have to remember how brilliant your readers are. Your readers are so, so far ahead of the game that all you have to do is. And I would take it further than sunglasses, I would say they're putting on here. You got to wear these. What are these? These are made of asbestos. And you need to wear them because of the UV rays or whatever. They just put the asbestos gear on before they go out. And there's a lockdown. There's a chamber in between. It's like in those cheesy, you know, virus thrillers where they've got the lockhole, you know, the airlock, you know, and that way the reader is going to be. Oh, got it. Oh, I love this kind of book. Also, like, they're going out, and it's really hellish up there. Oh, I can't wait to see what happens next. So you don't have to do too much of that. Just enough to say, okay, they're putting on the very deep, dark protective gear because of the environment that they have to be in.

Yeah.

So those are ways. And, you know, we're talking about this one scene in this episode, but those are the ways to attack the scenes that you have to redo. And again, if. If you have a scene that's working that you need to sort of play up the dialogue and maybe make things make the turning point a little bit more Clear. Clear. But essentially, you've got the. The bones of the scene pretty much cracked. I say leave that for another day and focus on the ones that the scene's just not working. There's no movement. And up your game as best you can so that by the end of this beginning hook, we've got, you know, this, this moment. And I think, I'm not sure what your decision, your final decision at the end of the beginning Hook was, but I like the decision of her, of Jesse surrendering in a way and saying, okay, enough is enough. I'll go. And that way she loses. And it's ironic, but her loss will take her into how the 1% live. And so she's gonna have. She's gonna be thoroughly, thoroughly exhausted from the hell of the numbered and bang. She's gonna go into this magical, incredible world where the 1% just, you know, things are just done for them. And it's great. It's dramatically ironic because she would do anything not to go there because she's, she suspects what, what's waiting for her is not anything that she wants to combat.

Yeah. When you were talking about leaving scenes that are close, it made me think of when my dad was trying, ended up being unsuccessfully to teach me how to play golf. And we were putting, he talked about like, he said, picture the hole is like the size of the top of a barrel. He said, and just get it in that barrel. He's like, because if you try to, from, you know, 30ft away, sink a putt when you don't know how to putt very well, it's going to drive you crazy. So just, you know, just try to get it where, like in a, in a two foot radius around the hole and then you can get it in from there. And it was this way of like not putting this pressure to get the putt, the 30 foot putt perfect. It's just get it close enough that you can fix it on the next one.

Right.

And that's kind of what I was. The picture. I was thinking when you said that about, you know, just we're basically. And you kind of said that last week when we talked when I was worried, you know, my beginning hook's only going to end up being maybe 10 scenes and you're like, oh no, no, no, we can fix that later. As long as the big pieces are there.

Yes.

So I think that's what's been. I've been struggling because I'm like.

I want the next version of these scenes to be it, you know, like ship it off to copy editing.

We're ready to go.

Like.

And remembering, like, I'm just kind of, you know, slowly scooting everything, getting things closer and closer to the hole and hoping like on the fourth or fifth round it'll finally be ready to go.

Yeah, that's, that's a good way to look at it. And it will re. It reduces the pressure on you to make everything perfect on the second draft or the third draft. As long as you understand, hey, you know, I'm going to come back to that and it's going to be fun to tweet that because I have some ideas. And as you move forward, what's the great thing about the creative process is you can never underestimate the wonderful things that are going to come to you when you put something into the back of your mind to percolate. So when you're leaving a scene that's 80% there to move on to a more challenging thing, your brain is still working on that stuff without you even realizing it. And something will come to you, you'll write it down and then you'll drop it in later and it'll be perfect. So you're never, you know, it's just not possible to write a perfect scene after perfect scene after perfect scene after perfect scene and to understand that even these scenes that you're going to construct now are going to need some work later on too. And just to speak to that 10 scene beginning hook that we talked about and you were, you were worried, oh boy, my beginning hooks only going to be maybe 10,000 words, maybe 12. Is that enough? Again, what you're going to find is that when you get into your middle build and even your ending payoff, you're going to come up with ideas that are going to need to be set up earlier.

So you'll say to yourself, oh, thank God I have some room at the beginning because I can drop in an 800 word scene that's going to set up the climax of my middle build. Whereas if you just pound and pound and pound and try and fill out the entire thing at the first round, you're not going to have that opportunity later on to drop things back in later.

Yeah. You know, after we recorded last week, I told you about that book Pines by Crouch and.

How it just, I hadn't had a book that just. I literally couldn't put it down, like in the most literal sense of the word, because I started reading it at 7pm I like told my kids to go back and read before bed. I was like, okay, I'm going to start this new book. And at like 1am I finished it. I just didn't put it down. And in the afterword or acknowledgments or whatever part at the end of the book, now that I'm writing more, I like reading those. And he was just talking about thanks to these people who saw this draft of the book and thanks to these people who saw this draft of the book and had me rip out these scenes. And I'm sure I was reading between the lines to a certain extent, but it was this. How many times he went back to this book because it was such a tightly written, like, I don't. There was no scene that I felt like I could put it down and just come back to the book later. And so the book was just so, like tightly written and pulled me all the way through and I'm like, that was not his second or third or fourth draft that was that tight. You know, like, that was like draft after draft after draft, feedback after feedback, feedback after feedback, you know, cutting stuff, tweaking stuff and getting and doing that where like each scene was extremely compelling and led you into the next scene. And so, yeah, I was just thinking that, I'm sure, like, if I go back and read it now, he didn't say all of that, but I read, I was reading all of that into it, of just how much went into it. How many people read early drafts and gave feedback and just, you know, remembering that on mine, especially as like, you know, I'm new, this is really my first book and so I'm gonna have to churn through a lot of this stuff to finally get it dialed in by the end.

Yeah, and it again, it goes back to at the beginning of this episode where we talked about the importance of the scene itself as the fundamental unit of story. You know, the reader will forgive a lot of things if each of your scenes are just perfectly crafted and they move, they're clear, there's surprise and innovation on each. They turn in a way that is surprising to the reader. Those are skills that anyone can learn. And if you look at a great television series, you look at an hour long television show, each one of those scenes like a Breaking Bad, you're hard pressed to say, eh, I don't know if they needed that scene because, you know, there's a group, there's 10 writers in a room who are beating on each other and not accepting, you know, the first scene that somebody comes up with and they sit there and somebody says, how are we going to get Walter White from the classroom to the meth lab in the mobile home? How are we going to do that?

And they grind on it and they grind on it and grind on it and they come up with so many unique things. Who came up with the idea, like, he takes his clothes off.

To cook the meth because he doesn't want to contaminate the meth. I mean, it's just. Or. And he doesn't want to get the fumes on his clothes because then his wife's going to smell the clothes and his wife's going to be suspicious of him. So he's always thinking nine steps ahead. That's just steam work at a level that is so intense that as a viewer, you're just riveted. Why is he taking his clothes off? He never explains it right. He just takes his clothes off and then it's a gas mask on and he takes his clothes off. And you're watching it and you're saying, what the hell is he doing?

Yeah. You know, I remember reading this article about the writers for the show 24.

And did you ever watch that show?

You know, so many people have told me to and I just never, I never have confess.

No, that's fine. I mean, it's. To me, it's like the perfect TV that I enjoy watching. Fast paced, lots of violence, you know, but the writers. So the whole thing happens in real time. And they were just talking about how taxing it was to write that show.

Show.

Because you could have no play in the script. Because while you were watching one scene, if that scene took four minutes, there was four minutes that was happening somewhere else that you had to account for because everything happened in real time. And they were just talking about, like, by the time they were getting to like the 6 and 7 season, they're like, well, now what are we gonna do? Because they had like pulled out all the stops on every season. And it was just interesting. I remember reading about that and how they were just talking about how exhausting it was to try to write that show. Because it wasn't so much just making every scene work, it was making every scene fit in this very constrained thing of like, they only had 44 minutes. You couldn't have anything that happened off camera that was important that you could go back to because it had to happen in real time anyway. Yeah. And it was just that, like, how taxing it is to create compelling stories and, you know, being gracious with myself as, you know, you go through the spreadsheet and half of my scenes don't go anywhere. And I'm just like, well, you know.

So.

Happens to all writers, you know, they, they do it all the time and they don't, they go, okay, that didn't work. I've got to fix that. You know, it's, it's, it's a problem that they know, oh, I know how to fix that. I know how to write a scene. Geez, My, my challenge today is to write this kind of scene. How can I make that interesting? Instead of, oh man, I blew it. I'm never going to be a writer because this, I. I just can never get this down. You know, Build the scenes. Build the scenes and the rest will follow. And even if you have to throw out a great scene, what you'll discover is that you'll have a file of that scene or it'll lodge in your brain. And six books from now when you need to pull out a scene, you'll go, oh man, I already wrote this scene. This is great. I'm just going to pull it from that thing that I threw out six years ago.

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