How to Spreadsheet Your Novel

Hello, and welcome to the Storygrid 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 a creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book StoryGrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we go over in detail how to use the the StoryGrid spreadsheet to analyze your novel. This is what I'm in the middle of with my second draft. And so Sean and I went through it and talked about the different columns in your spreadsheet, and we went over some specific questions I had on making sure I'm filling it out right. So this next series, as we look at my second draft, I think is going to be really helpful as you get a chance to see the story grid tools in use. And so we're going to be getting really nerdy as we dive into them. So if you enjoy the nerd part of StoryGrid, which I'm sure is most of you out there, then you're really going to enjoy this episodes and the ones to come. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, I'm a little over halfway through spreadsheeting my second draft, and I've been trying to fill out the full scap as I do that as well. And it's interesting going back through what one is. This is like hard work. I don't know, you know, because one of the things we talked about at some point was just the value shifts, you know, getting, you know, this to this. Right. So, you know, danger to safety or those kind of things. That third or fourth column. Actually, why don't we start first so people know what we're talking about? Like, can just talk a little bit about what the spreadsheet is, what it's for, and maybe describe the first few columns. And then I have some questions as I've been working through it.

Okay, sure. Okay. So just to take a giant leap backwards, the whole genesis of the story grid came about from me trying to figure out a way to help writers make their books better. So after I had acquired a book, I needed to work with the writer and explain to them in as short amount of time as possible how to evaluate the work that they already did and to fix the. The bugs in the system that could make the book better. So there were two strategies, because there are two global ways of looking at a work of a story or A novel. And the first one is the global big picture, which is just looking at the big, big movements of the story, beginning, middle and end, having a very big broad understanding of whether or not the global story is working. And that is represented by the story grid foolscap page, which, you know, boils down the entire story into one legal size yellow piece of paper. And it goes through just the big sort of 15 global scenes that have to be in the work. Now, that is one level of analysis. The second level of analysis is all about the micro detail of each and every scene. So you see how I'm dividing the problems of story and into separate buckets. The first big bucket is the global story, and that's the full scalp global story grid. And the second bucket is the story grid spreadsheet, which is all about tracking the scene to scene movement of your story to make sure that each scene is a working. And working means abiding the five commandments of storytelling. And secondly, to track the continuity of the story itself. So, for example, in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, brilliantly, the continuity in that story is off the charts, perfectly specific. It begins sometime after Michaelmas, which is the middle of September, and It ends about 15 months later. And you can literally track every scene and the movement of time throughout the novel. It's brilliantly done, it's impeccable. Okay, so the continuity is one element. But I think what you're talking about in the story grid spreadsheet is sort of these first couple of columns. So generally the bottom line of the spreadsheet is there let's. There are 14 columns in the spreadsheet and there are iterations of the spreadsheet. Like Ann Holley, one of our storygrid editors. She has one that goes for 20 columns and she includes the five commandments. I've got like a PhD level of spreadsheet, which is. Which is even wackier. That goes for 35 columns. And those are all different levels of analysis that you can get into if you really want to. But let me just say this again with the story grid. Now, the story grid, you can go as deeply into it as you want or as globally as you want. And you should not let it overwhelm you. Because the bottom line is if people read your story, they enjoy your story, it works, they tell their friends about it. You have a working story now. Can it become better? Yeah, sure. But you don't want to spend your entire life working on one manuscript. So people who fall into the abyss of the story grid methodology, you know, I Have great sympathy for them because I do myself. But you always have to remember you only want to bring out this toolbox if you absolutely have to. But the bottom line of the spreadsheet, the 14 column spreadsheet, will really serve you well. And yes, it's a hell of a lot of work to do just filling out those 14 columns. I'm actually editing a novel now which, you know, you and I will publish down the road. That's fantastic. But, you know, it's 160,000 words and I'm going scene by scene, and I'm lucky if I do three scenes a day because this is very intense. All right, so the first column is just the scene number, the chronological order of the number. The second column is the word. Count how many words are in in that specific scene. And again, I always recommend between 1500-2500 or less is a very nice level that somebody can read quickly and enjoy and get everything they can out of it. The third column is the story event. Now, the story event is what actually happens in the scene, what shifts in the scene. If you had to boil down the scene into the fewest possible words, what would that story event be? So for you, you know, the first scene of your novel, it would be something like, Jesse gets caught stealing credits. Right? So that's enough that tells you, oh, it's really a reference point for you when you're going through. You know, oftentimes people use index cards and they put the story event on each index card and then add other things as they go along so they can track the scene. Okay, now the column after story event is the value shift. And that's what you were just mentioned. Now, every scene has to have a shift in value. It has to start someplace and end another place. And what you're really looking at here is the value at stake in the scene. So if somebody is endangered at the beginning of the scene and they find some relative safety by the end of the scene, the scene has shifted. It's shifted from a negative danger at the beginning to a positive safety. So that's what you want to be able to track in each one of your scenes. And so the next column after value shift is the polarity shift. And that's literally a negative slash to a positive. So. Or a positive to a negative or a negative to a double negative. So sometimes something can get even worse. Somebody's in danger and they get into even greater danger. And that works. Or a positive to a double positive. Somebody meets the love of their life and then the love of their life tells them that they're enamored with them, too. So that moves from a positive to a double positive. So it doesn't have to go from positive to negative, negative, positive. It can also be, you know, varying degrees on the spectrum of negative and varying degrees on the spectrum of positive. Now, I'm going to stop there because I think that's where you're going. Your question lies. Right?

Yeah, because I can. You know, obviously the scene and word count and story, event are pretty easy to fill out. And then I'm also filling out the following five. So the turning. Well, did you talk about the turning point?

No, let me get to that now. All right, so after the polarity shift, then I have the column of the turning point. Now, the turning point has to do with the five commandments of storytelling. And as we all know, the five commandments of storytelling are. Number one is the inciting incident. Number two are progressive complications. Number three is the crisis. Number four is the climax, and number five is the resolution. So where the turning point comes in is smack dab in the middle of those five, you know, commandments. And the turning point is the. The last progressive complication right before the crisis. It's the complication that gives rise to the crisis. It's the place where the value shifts. It's the moment of truth in the scene where a complication arises in such a way that it gives rise to the crisis question. And it shifts the polarity of the scene. And turning points can either be action, meaning somebody's behavioral, physical behavior, active behavior, gives rise to a shift in the value. For example, somebody's in danger. Someone arrives and grabs them and pulls them out of the sinking ship. That would be an active turning point in the scene where the value has shifted from danger to safety. And it has happened through the complication of a rescuer arriving, providing aid, and literally pulling somebody out of the water. Now, the scene wouldn't be over necessarily because there could be a crisis that arises after the saving. Anyway, I'm not going to get into my hypothetical scene that I just made up on the fly. But that's generally what the action turning point requires. Somebody actively does something that changes the value of the scene in another way. The other way to turn a scene is through revelation. A revelation is a verbal action. It's when someone brings new information to light that changes the value of the scene. So, for example, I always use this one, and it's an easy one. In Chinatown, there's a great moment when the detective confronts Sort of the femme fatale and says, you know, tell me the truth about this girl. And she says, she's my sister and my daughter. And that is a revelation that absolutely turns not only that scene, but the entire story on its head. And the detective comes to realize that the femme fatale gave birth to her sister, meaning she was raped by her father, which was a massive revelation, a massive turning point. He's confronting her and now he has to protect her. So it completely shifts the dynamic of the scene, the global story, at the same time. So that's the turning point. It's not one of the five commandments, but maybe I should make it one. You know, it's sort of like the sixth commandment because it comes right before the value shift. It's a progressive complication that's either an action or revelation that turns the value of the scene. So you want to. On your spreadsheet. I put it in the spreadsheet because you want to be able to pinpoint exactly when the scene shifts. If you can't find the turning point in your scene, either your value never shifts or you never directly make it clear to the reader when that actually happens, or you have a really weak value, like moving from uninformed to informed. A lot of people have a lot of scenes like that where someone. It's basically an exposition scene where someone just gets some information. Now, does it shift? Yeah, technically it shifts from someone who sort of doesn't have all the information at the beginning of the scene and at the end of the scene, they have more information. But it's such a weak value shift that often you can't even find a turning point. So those are really easy to find when you're looking at your story, scene to scene, using the spreadsheet. They might, you know, fly through your brain when you're going globally and just reading through your book. But when you are required to really look at each scene individually and point out each one of these elements, these things don't get past your eye. It's like a microscope. And you. All of a sudden you can see the little, you know, unicellular organisms. Whereas if you don't have a microscope before, you can never see them. So after the turning point, the next column is the point of view. And the point of view is usually consistent throughout the story. But you must put it in there because oftentimes we accidentally will change the point of view. Now, point of view is very simple. It's either the first person, meaning, let me tell you a story. My name is Jim. And when I was a little boy, the following things happened to me. That's a first person story where you have a real narrator telling you the story, like the Great Gatsby written in the first person from the point of view of Nick Carraway. So you want to track that. Another massive, you know, use of point of view is the third person omniscient, where you have sort of an otherworldly presence that's telling you the story. Like a Charles Dickens kind of story. Once upon a time, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. And then he goes on to tell you a story and the narrator takes on a sort of authorial voice or a godlike, you know, narrative structure. Third person omniscient is used a lot. And then, you know, one of my favorite ones is free indirect style, which is a combination plate between third person omniscient and first person. And in that way you have the global narrator. And then occasionally they will let you hear the thoughts of a single protagonist in the story. So you can't have multiple free and direct style. And that's a lot of. A lot of people make that mistake. So you really want to track that. And what I mean, like, you can't have multiple characters. You can't hear the thoughts of multiple characters or confuses the reader. You can only do it one time. So in Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris, he allows us to hear the thoughts of Clarice Starling, who's the protagonist of the novel. And, you know, technically he does let us hear Jack Crawford's thoughts, but only when it's Jack Crawford alone in a single scene. So I know I just said you can never do that, but if you're Thomas Harris, you can do it and it can work, but you really need to have a level of craft that is really up there at a level that most of us don't have. So after the point of view, then you get into what I call the continuity columns, which are basically just making sure that you're mixing up your storytelling work in a way that makes sense. The next column is period time. That would mean, like, if it's a time travel novel where the character moves from the 21st century to the 16th century, the period would be whatever the scene is. So it would be 16th century, let's say French provincial town. The period would be the century, or even the year or the month. And period time would be September 1, 1593. Provincial town of, you know, whatever in France. And you would want to list that and you would really want to be specific about it because the more specific you are, the tighter the focus your reader will have. So if it's just generic and you never tell exactly what time it is, you really need to make a choice about that. Either be super specific about it or explain sort of long ago and far away in another galaxy. Right? That's the beginning of Star Wars, Long ago and far away in another galaxy, something similar to that. So what George Lucas did when he wrote that was he was establishing time and place and he was saying, I'm not going to tell you the year because it's not going to make any sense. So let me get that off, off the table right now. This story takes place long ago, far away in another galaxy. So once the reader or the viewer has that in their mind, they're like, oh, okay, I'm along for the ride. I don't need to know it's 1923. But you need to firmly establish that. And even when you do that, you have to have a consistent linear sort of movement of time in the story. So that when we go through the Star wars storyline, I mean there's a trilogy and then there's the pre story and the sequels that all have a very straightforward time passing sequence of events. So that's the importance of this column so that you can track to make sure that you don't make a big mistake and all of a sudden move 50 years in the future without ever warning the reader. And then you lose them because you haven't made that clear to them. The next column is duration. And duration is just means how long is this scene taking place? So if it's two people having a cup of coffee, it's probably 15 to 20 minutes. It doesn't have to be perfect, but you should have a general idea. If instead it's a battle that begins in the morning and ends three days later, we need to know that too. So for duration you would say something like 30 minutes if it's a two person scene. If it's an epic battle scene, you might be like three and a half hours or 27 minutes or whatever it would be. As long as you can figure out how long that scene works, you will inform your the next round of editing. When you go back to it, you'll be like, oh, the duration is this. Wow, this is really going on a long time. I need to trim or I need to expand. The next column is the location. Where is this scene happening? So it could be the corner coffee shop on 14th street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan in 1986. The coffee shop is called Twin Donut. So knowing that specific element will help you as a writer. Because guess what happens if you can literally see in your mind a specific place and time. Like I can think of that Twin Donut coffee shop on 14th street and 8th Avenue right now. And that thing has been shut down for 26 years. But when I just came up with that idea, oh, two people having coffee. Where would they have coffee? If it's set in the 1980s, they would have it on the corner of 14th street and 8th Avenue and it would be across the street from that old bank and they would have that cream filled donut in the window and they would be probably sitting on the stools that look overlooked the avenue. And all in that one second microsecond. All of that stuff comes back to me and informs me as a writer. So if you can think of moments in those places from your own personal life and use those memories to inform your work, it makes them so specific that the readers or the viewers will immediately believe it because it does have a level of factual otherness that's already built into it. So that's location. And then the last four columns, the first one is on stage characters, meaning who is literally on the stage, who is talking in the scene, who is present. So you want to list them. And the reason why you want to list them is that you don't want to have 36 scenes that only have two people in them. Because guess what gets really boring and repetitive. Oh, not another scene at the coffee shop at twin donut on 8th Avenue and 14th Street. And you don't want your reader to start to feel that way. So you want to list them so that you can really track to see that you're mixing up your. The social world that you are, you know, trying to portray. You look at a novel like Pride and Prejudice and it begins with, you know, a couple of people on a walk or talking in a drawing room. And then it moves to a very big party. The whole town shows up for this party. So it moves from very intimate one on one conversation to a big event, back again and forward and all different levels of, and numbers of people in the particular scene. And literally you want to count them so that if you don't want to look at all the people, you can just, oh, I have a nine person scene here. This is great. But I should follow it up with something like a two or a three scene. And then the last two columns are the offstage characters and the Number of offstage characters. Offstage characters are when one of the characters who's on stage refers to somebody who's not there. And this is a great way of reminding yourself to set up particular people that might not arrive for several scenes down the road. So if you have a scene where someone says, well, my Great Aunt Bertha is due in town in three weeks and I don't know what to do, then the reader, in their mind, it sort of sticks this pin in their mind that says, oh, I wonder what this, you know, Aunt Bertha is all about. And then when you finally do introduce Aunt Bertha, the reader will feel as if they already know the character. So oftentimes, people will begin their novel with the cast of thousands. And it can be very, very disorienting for a reader because they can't track everyone. So oftentimes what you'll find is that the beginnings of novels or the beginnings of films begin at a level that is very manageable for the reader. It's got one character or two characters. So for your scene, the beginning of your novel, it begins with Jesse. She's on the move. She's, you know, she's robbing a house so we can follow and track that one character. And as opposed to beginning with, you know, the Battle of Waterloo, where you've got, you know, a thousand people on the stage, if not more, it's not to say that you can't do the big, amazing set piece, but you have to be very, very skilled so as not to disorient your reader before they even get into your story. You got to remember, you got to bring them into a warm bath, familiar terrain, a sort of, hey, come along with me and I'm going to tell you a story. The story begins this way. It begins with a young girl who doesn't really know what to do with herself. And to mark time, she enjoys going to rob people, which is. This is a really nice way to start your story because a lot of people say that the hero's journey begins with a crime. And so Jesse, you know, actually committing a crime at the beginning of the story is pretty good. I mean, Dickens did a really nice job with Oliver Twist, where he begins with a crime, too. You know, he becomes part of that group. Anyway, I'm getting off track. So Those are the 14 columns in the spreadsheet. And as you said, is it a lot of work to go through every single scene in your book? Usually there are 60. And to fill out this spreadsheet, you're damn right it does. But what it does do is it gives you such a clear familiarity with your story that it will show you all of the places that need work, and it will teach you how to make sure that you're telling a linear story or you've got your time period right and its continuity is fresh and all that stuff. And more importantly, it will tell you if your scene turns, if your scene is actually about a value shift. If it's not, then, you know, you have to rewrite it.

Okay, so I've run into a couple questions as I've gone through this, so I'll start with, I think, some easy ones. So on the duration. So several of mine have similar durations, but there's, like, time jumps in between, Right. So some are. This happens and the next scene picks right back up and keeps going and then picks right back up. And then some of them, it's been a week in between. Should I be keeping track of that in the duration as well?

Yes, because generally what you want to be able to do is if there's some weird guy like me who comes to you and says, tell me about your story. How. How long does this story last? You go, what do you mean? Well, when the story begins, it begins on a particular time and place and day. And we're assuming that we're telling a story that abides the Newtonian laws of physics on Earth, Right? So how long does it happen? And you would say, oh, well, I'm not really sure. Probably like six months. I'm not sure. That's a really big red flag. Because if you're the writer and you haven't fully sussed out actual, well, this is. It's Thursday. And tomorrow would be the day that X happens. And if you think I'm crazy that you have to know this, just check out Pride and Prejudice. Because Jane Austen accounts for every minute over a period of 15 months. And trust me, because I checked.

You'Re that guy.

I'm that guy. And the reason why I checked is I said, okay, so she's. Why did she mention Michaelmas in the very early stages of the novel? Why would she mention that now? Michaelmas is. It happens at the same time every year. It's a British sort of holiday that happens around the middle of September every single year. So the reason why she used Michaelmas was to. Instead of saying in the late fall, she said, when Michaelmas, she has one of the characters refer to Michaelmas. So what that does. It's a little Easter egg that tells you what time this is all happening. So Bingley comes to the country at the end of September. And if you track the story from that point forward, scene by scene, they all get married at Christmas the following year. So the entire universe of Pride and Prejudice occurs over a 15 month period. And you can literally go from scene to scene and know at what time the characters are living. You can know, oh, this must be September, this must be December, this must be January, this must be March. So if you know that the entire story, let's say, I mean, have you thought it through, Jesse? Let's say the severing, the threshing happens every six years. And before the threshing, they start bringing in recruits to become the best people that they can put up for the threshing. When, when did they start training for the big threshing? Two years before, three years before, four years before? The day after the threshing? When? Because if you know that and you know the time period, then you can add so much drama and stakes to your story and all with one little sentence, even though you know something like, well, the other members of the American faction had been training since three years prior, Jesse, you know, and so it makes her stumbling into the extraordinary world at a critical moment. All the more critical if everybody else has been training for two years and she shows up and they've already begun the severings. She didn't have two years of training that these other people had. So it's, it's implying to the reader this girl is gifted. This girl has something extra special that these other idiots that have been training there for two years don't have. And she doesn't even know it. Right. Maybe it's a secret how long they've been training? Who knows? It's up to you as the writer. But how many times when the severings happen, do they have the severings just before the threshing? So that these people are. Their confidence is high. Like if you imagine that you've survived three really intense severings and you've just won the third severing and you made it, wouldn't the faction then want to put them immediately into the threshing? Because it's almost like after you've run your fastest quarter mile, don't you want to run like three days later at the event? Because you've reached your limits of your capacity at a very important time, so you want to be able to the next day sort of exploit that. You don't want to sit around for three months after you've had your best time and then go Right. So it's almost like building these. These athletes up to this moment of critical capacity and then. Then throwing them into the furnace. So this is good stuff to know. Right? So if you know the structure of how these geniuses have figured out how to psychologically manipulate these young kids into performing during this threshing, then you can, with very, very minimal language, load all that information back into your draft in moments of. Well, you know, she's only. She's only in her first quarter. These guys have been here for seven quarters. I can't believe that she was able to figure out that. Burning down the tower when these idiots have been here so long. Something like that. So the question you said is, if there's a gap of time that there's a week between a scene, you either need to come up with some kind of device that tells the reader that, or you need to, through the language or the structure of the scene, refer to the week passing. But you need the reader to really have a conscious understanding, a subconscious understanding of the duration of time.

Okay. And I need to track. So I need to track in that column both the duration of that scene and the duration of time before the scene between the scenes.

I would. Yeah. Okay.

So what I've been doing is I fill this out. So I fill out the first three, the scene and word count. That's easy. The story event, pretty easy. And then I can usually catch the turning point. I've had to kind of think and reread a couple times to pick my turning point. Then once I know the turning point, I know what it turns on. Action or revelation, point of view is easy. Period in time. You know, all of those get pretty. Just like, you know, writing down what's already there. But in the polarity shift, I can figure out pretty easy. But the value shift, what to put in there, to me is consistently the hardest thing to figure out exactly what shifts. And so part of me feels like, because this was going to be another question is basically, how do I keep from lying to myself that something actually shifted when it didn't. But the other is what kind of language to use in there? Because I know in the past I've done 10 scenes that are safe to unsafe or unsafe to safe. And when we went through it before, you're like, well, it's right, but it's not overly specific. So I'm trying to get more specific. But then I'm not. Like, my very first one is so, like, the first scene is not when Jesse gets caught. That's actually the third Scene. So the first scene is just kind of an action scene to set up the world and set up what she does. So she steals and gets away with it, or so she thinks. And so at the very end of the scene is when she actually likes ducks into the sewers and she's gone. But the turning point was when she should have left, but she stayed to completely. Like she had stolen enough and she was running short on time, but she stayed and put herself in danger to completely wipe them out. And the reason she did was because she hates the people that have all the money. And so I put that it turned when she decided to stay instead of leave. Then the value shift became, okay, is it survival to what was I have survival to revenge or helpless to control? Like, I was having trouble putting into words. I felt like, okay, it's pretty clear, you know, when her compatriot tells her, you have to leave and she decides to stay, like, it's showing something about her. Right. Which is the point of the turn. But now I'm trying to decide, well, how do I put that into words what the turn is? Do you understand what I'm struggling with?

Yeah, yeah. And this is an indication of your growing as a writer, because the fact.

That I don't know what to do.

No, no, no, no. You're absolutely on the money in terms of deliberating what value shift to write down. And I think that's a very good sign because, you know, in a perfect world, there would be a resource that would have the value of safety, and it would have. And, you know, again, I'm referencing Ann Holling here twice. But, you know, I came up with these ideas of the spectrums of value, and Anne, you know, actually put them on a spectrum value on a. On some resources that the story grid editors have for our cheat sheets. And I think it's a really, really great tool. And if you were to think of, like, in terms of splicing and dicing our language, what levels of vulnerability are there? Can you move from one level of vulnerability to even more vulnerable level or a less vulnerable level? And can you put that on a big, long spectrum? So when you're talking about what to write down for the value shift, you start exploring the language that we use at a really great level. You're saying, well, is it specifically her moving from vulnerability to or from safety to vulnerability, or is it more about what's motivating her to do that? Should I put down, say, she resents her personal thing, is she resents the wealthy in her society so much that she's willing to risk capture. So that is a great character indication of what she's about. So if you choose something like safe to vulnerable, you're not dealing with a deeper psychological character motivation. But if you put something like tactical to emotional, Right. So she's letting her emotional part of herself dictate her behavior, as opposed to her practical sort of intellectual part, which is go in there and steal credits, get as many as you can and get out of there before you get caught. So she's crossed a line in order to wipe out these rich people because she resents them so much. So if you put the value shift that's a little less specific, you might forget that element. But if you put something like careful to emotional, or again, I don't have it right off of the top of my head, it requires some thought. And that's the beauty of the story grid spreadsheet and also the great taxing nature of it is it makes you really, really think about the intention of the scene, is this scene. This scene is about establishing her as a thief, but it's also establishing her character. So my big point to you, the big point, the big takeaway here, it's probably not going to matter in the grand scheme of things in terms of the global external genre, right? This is an action story. You're selling it as an action story. It's a labyrinth plot. People who come to this story are going to get it. She's becoming vulnerable out of some choice that she's made internally. Fine, whatever, move on. But if you're really starting to going down to the deeper levels of characterization and you put the value shift that has to do with her moving from, you know, very practical intellectual choice to emotionally, you know, charged choice, then that will help you later on in the book when her emotional choices become more evolved and she understands that she has a deeper level of understanding of the world. I don't know how well I'm answering your question.

So, again, I fill in every other column and then I come back to turning point polarity shift and value shift. And I usually fill in the turning point polarity shift. And I just sit there and stare at the screen while I try to figure out what the value shift is. And I think feel a little bit more, you know, based on when we talked a couple weeks ago, I feel like this is the version of the book that will become the final version of the book, if that makes sense, you know. So it's like now's the time to think about all this stuff. Because the next rewrite should basically be taking the story that's already there and just amping it up and all the ways it needs to be amped up, but the story's there.

All right, I'm going to give you an answer that I think makes sense. And it all goes to genre. Okay? Now we all know that a value shift inside a particular scene does not have to move on the global value at stake. Now, the global value at stake in an action story is life and death. But when you're trying to suss out what the value shift is in an individual scene and you hit wall, like you sort of have think about that scene in terms of whether or not the global genre that you have chosen is externally or internally driven. So because your story, you know, if you had to put a cover on this book, you would put an action cover on it. You wouldn't put a maturation plot on it. Right. You wouldn't put a field in, you know, like the standard coming of age story. You wouldn't have a jacket like that on this book. You would have guns and stuff. So that means that because you chose an external genre, you should probably track the value shift in terms of the external story. So for this scene, it would be in control to vulnerable. Right. Don't you think?

Well, like I had, I had survival to revenge.

Survival and revenge are not in the same spectrum of value. Right. Like, if you look at revenge, the spectrum of value would be what's the opposite of revenge? It would be, ugh, I don't know. Off the top of my head, I.

Kept having to Google antonyms.

Yeah, well, this is part being a writer. It's like really, really hammering home if we have all these spectrum values. Like, when I talk about spectrum, I'm talking about like the spectrum of light. There's ultraviolet light, there's radiation, there's green, there's blue, there's rgb. You know, there's all of those different fractured layers of light. You can look at language in the same. Using the same metaphor. So the spectrum of value for life is, yeah, there's death, there's unconsciousness, there's super consciousness. There's all kinds of different levels on the positive and negative spectrum. So revenge would be on probably the.

Like forgiveness to revenge.

Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Or resentment turns into. Resentment would be being angry about someone and really not liking them, but not actively showing that, you know. But revenge would be, you know, somebody has done something to you and betrayed you and you want, you know, your, your Pound of flesh for that act. So that would probably be on the betrayal. I don't know. I don't have it off the top of my head. This is the thing to remember is that when you're dealing with stories, you're dealing with language, which is. Is not a fully, completely objective science. It's part of the humanities, right? So the language is all about finding words that represent experiences so that we can all share. Like when I say revenge, you go, oh, I get it. Because in your mind you start circling back about, you know, either a revenge story that you've read or seen on television or the time you got revenge on someone or. Or whatever. So they're all very subjective definitions, but we all share a global sort of general idea of the word revenge. So let me get back to the answer because I'm really going down the rabbit hole here. So what I mean is, if you were to say from in control to vulnerable or safe to vulnerable, that would be indicative of the external action arena. If you were to say instead of cool customer to resentful, then that would be on an emotional. On an emotional internal plane. That would have to do with her emotional state as the protagonist. So you're talking about her external safety as opposed to her internal state of mind. And what I would suggest is, because your global genre is an action story, that when you get stuck on your scenes and is to look at it through the prism of the external story and not the internal character movement, even though you have a maturation plot moving in the same time. Now, just to complicate things further, you could do two. You know, you could do.

I was about to ask that question.

You could do two. And that would be another level of analysis if you really wanted to make sure. Sure that your internal genre was moving appropriately. And in fact, it is what I've done when I do those story grid diagrams, I track Clarice Starling's emotional point of view as well as the external story. But that's really, again, it's a process of someone being a nerd and enjoying the analytical process.

So I mean, that's kind of what we do here. So I don't think that's. I mean, so that. Then that begs this question. So say I start tracking the value. So then I start wondering, okay, is this scene a turning on action scene or is this seen a turning on internal? Or let's use better language, is this scene a turning on external or turning on internal? Can a scene turn on. Like, can it have separate ones, one for internal and One for external.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, it absolutely turns on both.

Now, would the same turning point be for both? And then I say, you know, at this point, it turned here externally and it turned from, you know, shifted from here to here externally and from here to here internally.

I would have to really think through that. But generally it probably would shift at the same time. And the reason why is that the turning point. When we look at the world, we have two ways of looking at the world. We have the objective and the subjective, right? So the objective world, for lack of a better. Just to sort of make a parallel here, the objective world is the scientific nature of things, the external, factual things of life. So the objective world is the same as the external world. The subjective world is the same as the internal world. Objective facts are things that we can quantify. We can put a number on them. So the human body can. All kinds of numbers could be, you know, correlated with the human body. There's your body weight, there's your iq. There's how many cells are in your body, there's how many atoms are in your body. There's all kinds of numbers that you can associate with the human body, right? But those numbers don't tell you anything about the quality of the human body. So the way we look at the world in terms of quality is a subjective way of looking at the world. So the subjective way of looking at the world would say the person's attractive, they're a good person, they're morally sound, they are funny, blah, blah, blah. So those are qualitative ways of evaluating the world. So when we're walking around every day, we don't consciously know this, but this is what we do. We look at things objectively and subjectively at the exact same time. So if I'm on a desert island and I haven't eaten, eaten anything, I would see a coconut objectively as a thing that fell from a tree that weighed three and a half pounds, that had hair on it. That would be my objective perception of a coconut. But subjectively, I would say that that would be the most precious thing that I'd ever found on earth, right? So it's two things at the same time. So when we're talking about a scene, there's an objective, external turning point, right? And then there's the subjective, internal turning point. So with the coconut, those would both intersect when I opened up the coconut and ate it. The turning point would be grabbing the coconut and eating. And it would work on both the external objective and the internal subjective turning point, because the Coconut would cease to be a coconut after I opened it externally. Right. It would then be a broken coconut. And then it would also be subjectively food.

Right. So, like, in this case, I could. It's almost like switching between being an observer of what's going on and having no idea what's going on inside of Jesse and then switching and being the person inside of Jesse, knowing her thoughts and knowing her motivation. So from the outside, at that point in the story, she moves. And I can. I'll figure out to make it more specific, but she moves from safe to unsafe. Right. She moves from. If I leave now, I'll be safe. Okay. She stayed. She's less safe. So that's a positive to negative. But internally, it shifts as well. And I could track that as well, separately. Because now you know what's driving it's also important on that level of the story, on the external level of the story. Doesn't matter what's driving it. What matters is it switched from safe to unsafe. Is that what you're referring to?

Yes. And because you're writing an action story, don't kill yourself over the internal stuff yet. And you might not even worry about it so much later on if the story works. This is funny because a lot of times when I've worked with Steve, he'll give me a manuscript and then I'll write back and I'll tell him all these internal shifts that he didn't even recognize in his own stuff because he was so busy making sure that the global external genre was working that he wasn't even really focusing on the internal. And when I bring it up, he'll go, oh, my gosh, I didn't even see that. You're right.

Wow.

Holy cow. That's amazing.

I'm amazing.

Yeah. Like, oh, man, I'm a great writer. I didn't know. And so, you know, you can get to the place where you can rip out all of the magic by really going at this level. But again, sometimes, you know, you become a better writer when you understand what you're doing more. So understanding both the external and the internal in terms of objective and subjective experience isn't going to. You shouldn't run away from it. Like, oh, I don't want to know that, because then it'll ruin all my writing. I absolutely don't agree with that. I think having a keen intellectual and analytical mind only helps you. It never hurts you. It will help you clarify your intentions. Sometimes we start writing things and we don't know why we're writing them. And we just enjoy it. And when someone says, well, what did you think you wrote that for? We don't want to go near it because we don't want to ruin the magic of it. But it's my contention that you're not going to ruin it. In fact, what you're going to do is discover things about yourself and that you had no clue that you knew or that you didn't even understand that you were passionate and interested in. And so it's not something to run away from. It's to when you have the time and you're really trying to level up your craft to think about this stuff. And then there is going to come a time when you have to draw a line and say, you know what? I can really drive myself crazy if I track every internal, you know, turning point in this. When it's an action story. Let me keep to my knitting, make sure that my action. I'm hitting my action story points first. And then if I want to, and I have the luxury of time, I can go back and check the internal, but I might not want to if it's working really well. And that's absolutely reasonable. But to. To not even want to consider that element, which obviously you are, if you wouldn't have even asked the question, I think is limiting you as an intellectual and analytical being. And the more you sort of explore that very nitpicky analytical part of yourself that isn't just for your analytical self, it will help you in your imagination. Like that moment when I earlier in the podcast when I. When I remembered twin Donuts on 8th Avenue and 14th Street. And now I can picture entirely what that coffee shop looked like and all the people I had coffee in there with that came from this really weird analytical process that you and I are undergoing. So it's not worthless and wasteful, and it's not going to ruin your imagination. It's actually going to enhance it.

Okay, well, I'm going to keep rolling on this, and I'm going to try to have this to you so we can discuss it on the next one. That way we can. You can kind of give me your overview of where it's at and what we'll do next.

Okay, Sounds good.

All righty. Thanks, Sean.

Thanks. Talk to you soon.

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