How to Story Grid a Book

Hello and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. My name is Tim Grall and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Helping me along that journey is Sean Coyne. He's the creator of Storygrid, the author of storygrid, and has 25 plus years experience in editing in traditional publishing, self publishing, and everything in between. If you remember from last episode, I talk about using Harry Potter as a guide to outline my own story. So I began story gridding out Harry Potter and you can actually see that in the show notes for this episode@storygrid.com podcast I have a link to my spreadsheet where I story gridded out the entire thing and you can see it there. So we talk through as I've gotten started doing that, and then we get into just different things. We talk about specificity, we talk about the publishing industry ins and outs, how to do research, all these types of things. It's a really great episode. If you've tried to storygrid your own book or you're thinking about StoryGrid in your own book, this is a great place to start. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, last week we talked about basically taking a book and laying it out and going through it and story gridding it and then using that as a map to map out your book. And it's one of these things. Like, I think the only reason I've ever found success at anything is because I greatly underestimate the amount of work something takes. And so I just start and then I'm like, oh, this will be easy. And so, so I started working on story gridding. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the first book I'm about 2/3 of the way through. It's a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Yes. Yeah, it's, it's intensive work because what you're doing is you're not only doing the global foolscap, you know, story grid, which hits all the major signposts in the story. Your beginning hook, middle build, and ending payoff. But it's really the nitty gritty of the story grid spreadsheet that can really intimidate you. Because once you analyze scene by scene, what often happens is that you discover that there are moments in some of your favorite books that don't work.

That seem to have no real, you know, polarity shift from one scene to the next. And, you know, a lot of people say to me, and they're, they're always trying to sort of, you know, catch me in a, you know, a screw up. And I love, I love being.

It's so nice of people.

I mean, it's good because the fact that they're paying attention and they're really, you know, laser focusing on the story structure is, you know, that's the best thing that comes of it. But there is sort of that global works, doesn't work paradigm that I talk about in the book and I talk about at the website, which is we all have that works, doesn't work sort of on, off, switch within ourselves. So if you read a book and you enjoy it and you want to recommend it to somebody, it works. And that doesn't mean that there aren't sort of challenges and things that don't work within it. Every single book and every single novel, if you went to the writer of the, of the novel and said, if you were able to go back in time and we stopped time and we gave you, you know, a month and a half to go back and, you know, tweak things, would you have any work to do? And of course they would all say, of course I would. I would have tons of work to do. There are things that have been nagging me about that one scene that I wrote that I would love to retweak, but I have to move on with my life. And that's sort of the thing that we have to remember when we're story gridding is that to see a master writer make a mistake, I think it gives us some confidence that even the people that we admire the most.

Sometimes their scenes don't perfectly gel and sometimes.

The major action doesn't sort of coalesce in the way that you would want it to. And you can learn from those moments as much as you can learn from the moments when they're very successful. So the fact that you're going through Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, is it Sorcerer's Stone or Philosopher's Stone? I think philosopher.

The original UK version was Philosopher's Stone and then the US version was Sorcerer's Stone. I believe that's how it works. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. So the fact that you're going through that is going to. It's very challenging because as you can see, the story grid spreadsheet has a lot of columns to fill in. Yeah, I kind of.

There's a couple columns. I'm like, yeah, I'm not doing that.

Well. You can, you can take what you want. And there are columns that are extremely specific, like all the characters that are mentioned on stage and off stage. Those are usually things that you want to do in maybe your seventh or eighth round of editing, just for continuity sake, to make sure that you're not mentioning a character and never have them come on stage. So to be able to track the characters is really for the. For the work in progress that is at its latter stages of development. The major things are finding those polarity shifts in each scene and the values in which those polar opposites shift. That's important because once you start to get a grip on how each one of these scenes begins positive and. And then ends negative or begins negative and ends positive, and the way that the writer moves the fluidity of the storytelling from positive to negative to positive, you know, sometimes it's negative, double negative or positive, double positive. But you can always have a sense of movement. And so every scene, ideally, is going to move on a value shift. There's a scene in the Silence of the Lambs that doesn't shift anything. And it's pretty much.

Sort of a journalistic approach to getting information. It's exposition, but we allow it as a reader because it's so deep in the book. And it's the moment when the senator's daughter is kidnapped by Buffalo Bill. And Thomas Harris puts in a very short. Maybe it's 500 to 600 words of exposition about what happens. What are the procedures that occur, you know, in Washington, D.C. when somebody who's powerful's, you know, daughter or spouse gets kidnapped, what happens? And we find that kind of fascinating. So the fact that that passage doesn't move doesn't really matter to us because it's kind of interesting information to know how the Secret Service and all those organizations cope with something like that. And you will find that sort of those sort of lulls every now and then in your favorite books, too. In To Kill a Mockingbird, there's a lot of exposition very early on in the book about, you know, the nature of Macomb, Alabama, and, you know, who. Who's in the town and the relationship between Scout and Jem. Or is it. Yeah, I think it's Jem, her brother. And it's okay, because it harkens back to what we were talking to about last week, which was the. The Hero's Journey. And in the Hero's Journey, the beginning hook of your story is. Is in many ways establishing the ordinary world of your hero. Like how things are just in normal everyday life for them. So at the beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird, we hear the narrator, who is Scout, some years later, as an adult, recalling this incident from her past, talking about the way the world was when she was five years old. And so we get an understanding of the time, place and the period and the relationships of the people in the town. And because the voice is so specific and authentic, we go along with it. We don't need to have big action. We don't need to have a false accusation of rape to keep us going. We don't need a trial scene. We don't need anything like that. And that is a real rarity when the voice is so strong at the very beginning that we just sort of fall into the world.

But any.

Yeah, you know, I actually just double checked you while I was trying to do one of those gotchas. So I pulled up the spreadsheet and you actually did just. You left the value shift blank in that scene.

Oh, good. Yeah, so no, it was interesting. There's a couple different things. So I love when I get surprised by stuff like this. So there are several things I was surprised by. So the first is I had trouble figuring out where a scene started and ended. So inside of Harry Potter, she'll have a chapter, but then so much happens in that chapter and she doesn't have any breaks. But like, I would start to like, because what I. One of the column, I added three columns to the spreadsheet because I wanted to keep track of scenes, scene numbers, but also track of what chapter those scene numbers were in. Right. And then I also kept track of page numbers based on the copy that I had. That way I could easily flip to that scene if I wanted to. And so I would start and be like, okay, well this scene goes from here to here. But then when I would read it, I'm like, well, actually there's like three scenes inside of there all kind of mashed together. And so I'd have to like say, okay, well, I think this scene ends here and picks up on a new one. Like, I don't know why that surprised me so much, but I guess I assumed there would be like, you know, either those like big paragraph breaks where it's, you know, the formatting is saying something new is happening. But instead, inside of Harry Potter, there's just all of these things mashed together. The worst one I've come across so far is when the kids get on the train for the first time. They talk about the. Them getting on the train and a bunch of stuff happens and they talk about Harry and Ron being together on the train and like getting to know each other. And a Bunch of stuff happens. And then Draco Malfoy, the bad guy, shows up and a bunch of stuff happens. And all of those things are just kind of crammed together. And so I kind of had to go through and say, well, I think this scene ends here and the next scene picks up here. Like, is that normal inside of books? Like, I've never looked at a book this closely.

It is. There is a certain sort of the.

Prior. Prior to. I would say.

I'm just going to pull out a date. I would say around 1985.

There were a lot of commercial fiction writers decided to do something interesting. And one of them was Thomas Harrison. Another is James Patterson. And there are a lot of other writers who do similar things in that. What they decided to do was to not worry so much about, you know, comprehensive chapters and have an entire novel in 15 chapters. So what they did is they broke down the work in a way where they made each scene almost a chapter in and of itself. Now, because J.K. rowling is writing in sort of a rather affected sort of sensibility, she's trying to create something unique in that it has the qualities of classic literature, while also, you know, being contemporary in feel. So what she decided, which was a wise choice, was to have Meteor chapters that were comprised of a number of scenes, so that her chapters are longer. There's other elements to consider too, and I would have to go specifically through the book along with you, and we could have a longer discussion about this, but it's very possible that some of the things that you're identifying as scenes are actually beats, or they could be scenes and the larger chapter could be. Comprise a sequence. And my advice is not to get so overwhelmed by the. By the categorization of the story unit. I mean, I love to get into that stuff, but it's more what you described about the train movement could very well be three scenes as you're discussing, that are sort of perfectly transitioned from one to the other because they're all within the same space, time and space. Or they could be just one scene that has three different, longer beats to. It doesn't really matter. Again, I would have to look at each. What does matter is that a beat, like a scene, does have a very distinct value shift. So, for example, when you're talking about Harry and Ron meeting on the train, it could be, you know, the beginning of the scene is Harry is scared, like everybody would be, you know, just going on this train of strangers. And he's reluctant to put himself out there to meet anybody. And along Comes Ron. And, you know, so the beginning of the scene is alienation, and the end of the scene is brotherhood. I just made that off the top of my head. And that's a very, you know, somebody would say, well, that's not a very big value shift, you know, somebody just meeting. But it is. It's a very distinct value shift when you're alone and then you've got a friend. So a lot of these things that don't appear to have these massive value shifts, they shouldn't. Especially if it's very early on in the storytelling. You want to have those big, big moments of value shift happen at the climaxes of your beginning hook, middle build, and ending payoff. You don't want to have all these big, big events very early on in storytelling because then there's no rhythm. It doesn't build to a crescendo. It's like a symphony, you know, you don't start. You build up to the climactic moment at the end of the symphony, which is the fourth movement. And it's just like that in a novel, too. So the fact that J.K. rowling is packing more scenes per capita into each of her chapters is fine. And I think your idea of writing down the page numbers of where each scene is and knowing sort of the transition points is a good way of knowing it, too. Because when you, Tim. Say, you decide that you're going to, you know, write a story, and instead of them being on a train, they're on a boat. I don't know. Then. Then you can sort of use that paradigm and say, well, how can I make this boat trip interesting from one place to another? Oh, well, I could think about what J.K. rowling did, where. What she did is she put her lead character in a position of vulnerability, made him feel a little bit better. And then she escalated the stakes by, you know, bringing in a bad guy, Malfoy, who threatens him. And then by the end of, you know, at the end of that scene, he's vulnerable again. And so you can see how she escalated the stakes in that one. You know, that one passage of these kids getting on a train and. And then when they disembark, how the world is completely different and how Potter is threatened at a higher level than when he started.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to continue to storygrid different books because there's been several points that I've noticed that I would have never noticed just reading through the book. Like, for instance, there was on the train. There was that scene where he Gets to know Ron and he had already met Malfoy a couple weeks before he gets on the train. He spends some time with Ron and then Malfoy comes in and basically pushes him to either make a decision, you're either with me or you're with Ron. Right. You know, and so, and that's the first point in the book where Harry chooses good over evil. Right. Everything else, he was just kind of looking out for himself like there was really no choice to be made. And so, you know, that was interesting. The other thing I thought was interesting is now I just listened to the entire book in one sitting basically a couple weeks before I started or a week before I started storygrading this. And if you had asked me, because the main story is the Sorcerer's Stone, right? So the kids are in the school and all this stuff starts happening and they figure out somebody's trying to steal the Sorcerer's Stone. And so that's kind of the main story of the book. And if you had asked me when that part of the book book got started, I would have told you around 25%. But at halfway through the book they are just getting to Hogwarts and going through the whole sorting hat and getting sorted into the houses and then like getting settled at, at the school. She spent half the book just getting him to the point where she could tell the story. Right. And I thought that kind of blew me away because again, if you had asked me, I would have said I was like, oh well, you know, that was all done in the first fourth of the book and it wasn't, you know, again, a book I've read a couple different times and listened to now and that. So story gridding it out and do. Especially doing the page numbers and being able to see. Like when I, when I did that scene of sorting the Hat, I realized my thumb was almost to the middle of the book and I was like, what in the world is going on? Well, go ahead.

Well, I think, I think that's a really good point and it's interesting to think about well, how did she sustain your interest? Right. Because if she waited until halfway through the first episode of the Harry Potter story to even get him to the school, I think what, what maintained your interest was the, the very attractive notion of the hero's journey. And she specifically spent an extraordinary amount of time to establish Harry's ordinary world. And the reason why she did that was she wanted Hogwarts and the whole concept of the school and the whole idea of the series.

To be so magical and believable that she really built and worked very hard to make sure that people understood the world of Harry before he got there. Because the world of Harry before he got to Hogwarts is very much a humdrum sort of ordinary existence. He's a loner, he's been rejected, he's an orphan. And we all feel alienated. And so his alienation we are attracted to and we feel a kinship with him very early on in storytelling. And she probably both intuitively and intellectually knew, hey, if I work really hard here and make this ordinary world and the transition between the hero's call to, you know, adventure interesting for the reader, then they're really, really going to anticipate, you know, the world of Hogwarts. And once I get there, then I'll be able to do all kinds of things in ways that, you know, if she was writing a 288 page, say 65 to 70,000 word novel, she wouldn't have been able to do. Now the other great thing about J.K. rowling is that she had a certain naivete about publishing. And if she were to know the things that you and I sort of know now, Tim, she may not have made that choice and it would have been a real big mistake because, you know, young adult novels, traditionally before Harry Potter, you know, publishers would always say, oh, we don't want anything over 160 pages, which amounts to about 40,000 words. Because kids, they just can't concentrate that long.

We can't hold their interest very long. So what we do is we do really short books that have a lot of spectacle in them and that's what makes them excited and that's what makes them buy them. Now, J.K. rowling, when she was conceiving the whole Harry Potter world, she didn't know any of that because she was more into the creation of the world than she really cared about. The. And this is what a lot of people are doing when they're getting into writing. They try and ignore publishing's, you know, traditions and paradigms and follow their instincts. And in the case of J.K. rowling, her instincts paid off very well. But she's an exception to the rule. But what she did, and we talked about this last week too, about breaking, you know, the pattern, breaking the structure to suit the form of the writer's vision. So she broke the pattern without literally knowing what she was doing. So when her agent, I think it was Christopher Little in the uk when he read it, he must have been like, oh my gosh, this is Fantastic. There's no way I'm gonna sell this, Right? Well.

And how many publishers. There was a ton of publishers that turned it down.

Yeah. And Bloomsbury, which is a smaller boutique publishing company, they were the ones to say, you know what? It's just too good. You know, this is a great thing about book publishing, is that it's made up of a lot. And, you know, I'm the. The most cynical when it comes to book publishing. And I can rant and rave about, you know, how everything's corrupt and everybody's, you know, nobody knows what they're doing and it's terrible, blah, blah, blah. But it. It's also filled with. With people who just love to read. Yeah. It attracts people who love great storytelling. And every now and then, at every single publishing house, from Random House to, you know, mom and Pop, there's going to come a book that will land on somebody's desk, and they'll fall in love with the book, and they'll show it to their colleagues, and they'll be like, oh, my gosh, this is fantastic. And then it'll come up in an editorial board meeting, and they'll all say, boy, this is amazing. But we don't know how to publish it. And the publisher will end up saying, you know what? It's just too good. Let's try. Let's just try it. And that's what happened at Bloomsbury with J.K. rowling. And those are the moments that give me great hope and great love for the industry as a whole, in that there are those exceptions. And it happens all the time in my career, every year. Every single year in my career, when I was at the major publishing houses and I was at Doubleday, I was at Dell Publishing, I was at St. Martin's Press, and it didn't mean I got fired. That's the way you actually are promoted. You have to move from house to house to make a living. So a lot of people are like, well, gee, you couldn't hold on to a job.

But that's. That's kind of the way the system worked when I was in publishing is that, you know, it was sort of like if you. If you were homegrown, you know, unless somebody else was interested in hiring you, you couldn't get a promotion. And then sometimes, anyway, I have a.

Friend that, yeah, that's been an editor a bunch of places. And that was. The whole thing was like, in fact, one of the jobs, he was like, he tried to get a raise and a promotion there. He's like, no, he's like, you won't be able to get that anywhere else. And so he goes out to another publisher that he didn't even want to work for and basically got a job offer, brought it back, and say, look, I am worth that. And his boss was like, okay, go take that job.

Yeah, exactly. I wish I could say that didn't happen to me, but. And a lot of times you feel so depressed because you. You think like, oh, well, I've been giving my blood to this company, and now I'm just disposable. And they'll, you know, they'll just give the. The young Turk a promotion, who'll take my job. They'll pay him half of the price. And. And then you go to the other house and you have to restart your entire career. So it's very Darwinian in the book business. But. But the point I was trying to make is that what's great is that there are. There are lovers of fiction and there are lovers of books. And every year, there's always an exception, and there's always a book that they always say, we don't know how to publish it, but it's just too good for us not to try. And nine times out of ten, it doesn't work.

So J.K. rowling was this. This moment in time where a very ambitious and smart company said, we know we're not supposed to publish a book like this. It's too, Too big, but it's just too good. And maybe. Maybe we'll get lucky. And they. They got lucky because the book was so good. Everybody who read it recommended it to somebody else. So that was all word of mouth. They really didn't have any budget to promote or market this thing. And then now we see all these series of books for young adults. I mean, the biggest growth engine in book publishing over the last 10 years has been young adult fiction. Yeah.

Because so many adults read them too. Right.

You have the Mockingjay, Hunger Games. You've got Divergent series. You've got all these series that are similar in sensibility to the Harry Potter. And J.K. rowling was, you know, she was the one who broke the mold. So she did that by doing what you're talking about. She put three scenes into a chapter or five scenes into a chapter. She went back to the traditional classical sort of Dickensian structure where you jam a lot of stuff into a chapter and you make your book big. I mean, meaning a lot of words, because you want to immerse the people in a very distinctive world. And they feel like the better the exposition, the better the sensibility of it. The more we understand about the characters, the more we'll be engaged in the world. And in her case, she had the ability and the voice to make that true.

Yeah, so I wanted to. You mentioned the world and everything. I wanted to talk a little bit about that. So. So I'm a big fan of Seth Godin and he had this book called Tribes and it's, it's kind of a marketing book and it's, it's a really interesting take on things. But he talks about how like everybody's in tribes and you have all this way to identify your tribe, you know, so like, you know, we're in the book tribe we're in, you know, I'm in like the CrossFit tribe. I'm in the Star wars fans tribe. You know, we're all part of these tribes. And he talks about one of the important things of tribes is that they have their own language. So, you know, there's all these things that you know and words that you know and definitions and the way that you talk that makes you kind of stand apart and it's a way that you identify other people that are a part of your tribe. Again, I'm going to keep using CrossFit as an example. Right. So if I talk about kipping pull ups, if you know what that means, you might be in my tribe. You know what I mean?

Yes.

And I was really interested because again, you know, critically looking at Harry Potter, I mean, this is just packed full of it, right, With Muggles and Quidditch and all this stuff that unless you're a fan, you won't, you'll wonder if people are like speaking a different language. And you know, this is obviously unique to, not unique to Harry Potter, but unique to the fact that this is literally a different world. Right. It's this magical world. You know, this is not a thing that's odd in the fantasy genre. But I was just, I'm wondering like how much world building should go into the book. Is it extremely specific to the type of book you're writing? You know, I'm trying to think about like how, how much do I have to like suck people in to a new world? I don't know if I'm asking the right question.

No, I think you are. Here's my advice about it. What you're, what you're speaking about is specificity. And what specificity. When I talk about that, what I mean is this. When you're a writer and you're writing a novel and I. And you speak of the ordinary world that you establish at the beginning hook of your story to sort of, you know, lock into the. Establishing the, you know, the story spine of your novel, which is the hero's journey. And then you transition from the ordinary world into an extraordinary world. And then ideally, what you want to do is, you know, at the resolution and the ending payoff, the protagonist or the group of protagonists return to their ordinary world changed. They're not the same person. So when you're talking about Seth Godin and tribes and language and nomenclature, that's all absolutely, positively true. So specificity, when I talk about specificity, what I mean is that you want to. It doesn't require making up Quidditch or any of those major things that are in the great fantasy novels or Lord of the Rings has so much detail. Star Trek, Star wars, these all have tremendous amounts of detail and specificity to the world, the rules of the world, etc. Etc. Now, I'm going to use an example to talk about. I'm going to use an example from film because.

A lot of people have seen a lot more movies than they've read novels. But the example I'm going to use is When Harry Met Sally. Now, When Harry Met Sally is a love story. And what is a love story? A love story, you know, it has several different structures, but the story of When Harry Met Sally is very specific. And the ordinary world that they start in is the University of Chicago. And it's literally only maybe three or four minutes of screen time, but Harry Meets Sally at the University of Chicago. And they're these young, you know, these young people who have just graduated and they're. They're going to drive together to New York City. And so they transition. They literally transition from the ordinary world, which is, you know, just entering adulthood, to a road sort of situation where they travel across the country, then they get to New York City. So in that space of time, which is probably 15 minutes of the film, we get so much specificity about these characters that we know them like the back of our hands. We know who Harry is all about. We know who Sally is all about. And it's through their repartee in the car, their specific discussions about male, female relationships, about, you know, whether or not to put the dressing on the salad or to have the dressing on the side or. And all these fun things that we learn about those characters. So that specificity creates the world that those two people are leaving, and then it transitions into the extraordinary world Years later, when the two of them meet again, they meet on a plane, they're both on business trips, he's about to be married, she's got a boyfriend. And the point is, is that the tribes of people who love romantic comedies or love stories, they're familiar with the structure of boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, or boy loses girl forever, or boy, boy or girl goer or whatever. I mean, Brokeback Mountain is a great love story, too. And that's two guys, two cowboys. So, anyway, my point is, is that specificity of characterization and of the world and of the ordinary world doesn't mean that you have to go and create just completely different situations. What you have to do is create. I mean, different literal worlds. But what you have to do is create different dramatic moments between your characters. And the way to do that is to be really, really specific about the choices that you make for the characters and what they're doing.

I'm being pretty vague here, and I'm trying to correct myself, because I can understand. I'm being vague.

Yeah, no, I think you're doing. I think you're explaining it fine. And you're kind of. Yeah. Helping me figure out the best way to ask the question. Because, you know, one of the downfalls, I think, of trying to look really, really closely at a popular book is see these things and think, oh, man, for my book to find success, I got to do it like this. So I'm like, all right, do I need to create, like, this whole nomenclature that goes into my book and. And realizing, looking at it, that that's more like correlation, not causation. Right. So there's plenty of books that come up with their own world and own nomenclature that nobody ever reads, but, you know, Quidditch and Muggles and all this stuff became popular because of the book, not because that was in there. But, you know, I think what you're almost describing when you use When Harry Met Sally as an example is kind of back to the genre conventions. Right. So when you use the conventions inside of a genre, you're basically speaking the language of people that like that genre. And so they're like. They start feeling comfortable.

Because you're speaking in a language that they understand.

Yes. And also.

The thing to remember is to have a very clear. And we talked about this, about generating ideas. Now, if I were to write a novel about book publishing, I know a lot of insider terminology about book publishing. I know the way the hierarchy of book publishing works. I think you do, too. So If I were to set, like, if I were to set a love story inside a book publishing company, I would be able to create a believable world through the specificity of knowledge that I have about book publishing. So the situations that I would come up with to put my characters in dramatic conflict would revolve around my knowledge base of the world in which I've built my career over 25 years. So I would be able to create a pretty interesting scene that was set, say, in an editorial meeting. And the language and the repartee that would go about and the. The unconscious things that people would do at the table to either get other people to manipulate other people to get their support or to cut somebody off at the knees because you don't want them to get a book on the list. Because if they get their book on the list and you don't, then you might get fired. And there's all these very political things that go on in an editorial meeting, and it's all subtextual meaning. Nobody blatantly comes out and says, oh, well, I don't want to support your book, because if I support your book, then you. Then my book might not be allowed to be acquired. So I'm going to pretend that I don't like your book so that your book will get, you know, axed and mine will go through. Nobody says that. They'll say things like, well, I just. There's just something about the ending that just didn't, you know, worked for me. And if you get enough of those undermining comments in an editorial meeting, the book will be destroyed. And these are the things. These are the things that writers don't understand. A lot of the time you might write an amazing work that for one of context at a publishing house, you're just not going to get a contract because of things that are completely out of your control. And that's like anything. We could be talking about an oil refinery company, too. There are. There are moments in, like. One of my favorite movies is Michael Clayton. Michael Clayton's the story of sort of a fixer lawyer who gets in this big trouble because one of his friends is defending a client that's a multinational corporation that is sort of destroying the environment. And his friend sort of goes crazy. And so we learn about the way legal firms do underhanded things completely above board and legally while subverting our environmental protection laws. And how it was just an amazing. And Tony Gilroy wrote the screenplay, and I think he directed it too. And it's just a. It was Just a great. And also abiding the hero's journey. And it showed us about the way multinational corporations are able to subvert the law and how heroic people can make them get their comeuppance. But the point is that each one of us lives in a tribe. And you brought this up earlier, Tim, you're a member of tribe. I'm a member of tribe. So when you're a writer, think about the tribes that you belong to and all the insider information that you know that other people may or may not understand.

And ideally, your. The tribe that you're a part of has some kind of sexiness that other people who aren't a member of the tribe would like to learn about. So, you know, I think that. I hope that answers your question about establishing the world. Try and immerse yourself and know the inside knowledge of your particular tribal affiliation and then bring that knowledge to the page. Put your characters within those tribes, and then use the circumstances within that tribal world that can create dramatic conflict. And, and what you'll find is that, you know, if somebody said to me, write a scene, set an editorial meeting at a major publishing house and you've got 15 minutes, I'd probably be able to do that. And if somebody said to you, tim, write a scene about a marketing expert on a conference call with a publisher to go over the marketing plan, you could write that scene too. Because you've been in that situation so many times that you know, all of the hidden language that, like, oh, we're going to take a look at that, which means they're never going to do anything.

Yeah, yeah. This reminds. This kind of comes back to that idea of writing what, you know, because. And this always makes me think of when Stephen King talks about writing if you're a. If you're a plumber, you know, write a great thriller where you're a plumber on a spaceship. You know, you'll be able to write that in a way that feels very real because you know all about plumbing, but, you know, you've never been on a spaceship before, so it's just, it's, you know, again, it's one of those things that makes it a little easier because you're, you're. You don't have to do research, and research is always going to be different than real life experience.

That's true. I mean, some people are. Years and years and years ago, I worked with the senior editor who was working with Elmore Leonard on the series of books that became Justified, you know, the television series. So Elmore Leonard was just the sweetest guy, great writer, and he was somebody who was capable of. Of writing what he did not know, using what he knew about human nature to flavor it. So what do I mean by that? So he wrote Get Shorty, which was about a wise guy from New York who goes to Los Angeles and becomes a movie mogul. So Leonard certainly knows the movie business. So what he did is that he went out and he made a few phone calls, and he hung out with some wise guys in New York, and he found out what they do, and he came up with the character Chili Palmer based upon real research that he did. When he wanted to write about sort of the fashion industry, he called Anna Wintour, and he went to Vogue and he hung out in the offices, and then he went to all the Porter shows or whatever. And so partly when you get a real firm confidence in what you already know. Another guy, this is Steve Pressfield, you know, when he understands the story structure and he feels very confident with it, he doesn't have a problem going and reading and doing the research and interviewing people, because what he's doing is he's sucking out phrases and he's getting the nomenclature of the tribe so he can bring it to the page. He's not asking them stupid questions. He's listening to the way they speak. So when he was writing his book about the Six Day War, he had to write narrative nonfiction about what it was like to be an Israeli ground soldier in the Six Day War. So what did he do? He went and he talked to 150 guys who fought in the war. He got the words that they talked about, and he came in with. And he's a secular Jew from the United States. He knew no Hebrew, but when he came back with was words like Kavanah and Matara and all of these great Hebrew phrases that have such deep meaning, and they're part of the everyday lexicon of language among soldiers over there. So when you read the book, you're like, oh, my God. How? Pressfield's like, how did he do it? And what he did was he was confident in his ground understanding of story structure, so much so that he knew, I just need to get the nomenclature. So that's what the research is about. It's about finding the tribal language and then using that tribal language and the circumstances and the conflicts of that tribe and bringing it to the page with your deep understanding of story structure already inherent in your work.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting because that same. That same kind of process is what goes into good marketing writing as well, you know, as I. Because it's funny because when I write, you know, something that I want to really resonate with writers, I know exactly what to say because I've talked to hundreds and hundreds of them and heard their fears and heard what they're dealing with. And so I can put into really, you know, basically as, as authors and writers read it, they're like, this dude's reading my mail.

And so it's just interesting because that kind of puts in a new context for me because that's one of the things that I do is like, I hear, you know, I basically just talk to enough people and ask them enough questions and basically wait till I start seeing things pop up over and over. I was like, oh, that's the language that people are using when they talk to themselves in their head. And it's interesting because so what I find interesting. So I haven't read the Steve's book that you were referencing about the Six Day War, but what's interesting is if somebody reads a book and somebody hasn't done that kind of research and even those. I'm trying to think of a simple way to say this. Basically, like if I read a book that's set in a world that I know nothing about, but somebody in there, but there's two books, and one of them somebody did that kind of research and one of them somebody didn't, I'd be able to tell the difference even though I don't know that I don't know anything about that world, you know. So I think that's an interesting idea too, of just, you know, making sure that you, you understand it deep enough because people that read it that, that, you know, aren't Jewish, will still be able to tell if it's authentic or not.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. It's what really good journalists are capable of doing. Master of this is Tom Wolfe, you know, Tom Wolf, when he wrote the Right Stuff, you know, he spent four years getting the language of the astronauts and their wives and NASA and mission control and all of those intricate details in a fighter pilots. And what, what he did was to bring all that language to bear in a story. And the story of the Right Stuff is about, you know, the birth of the nuclear age and.

Astronauts. And it's an amazing book, but he knew generally what the angle that he was going to take after he did all the research. He saw the patterns that you're talking about, Tim. He saw, wow. Well, where did this sort of ethos start? Where did the Right stuff Start. And what he found out was it started with a guy named Chuck Yeager. And so what he did is he talked to Chuck Yeager and he found out that Chuck Yeager was the preeminent fighter pilot World War II. And he was so great and such a ballsy character that every airline pilot from the end of World War II to the present day has taken on his particular way of speech. So every time you're in an airplane and you hear the pilot come on and he's kind of folks in, he's like, hey, folks, we're going to be landing at. That is the same way that Chuck Yeager talks. And so it's, it's a fascinating idea that he was able to come and go to the root and find the root of what the right stuff was, which was Chuck Yeager, who was the greatest fighter, one of the greatest fighter pilots in World War II. He became a great test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in San Diego. And it was from that crop, that Edwards Air Force Base that brought us the astronauts. And every, every pilot wants to mimic the coolness of Chuck Yeager and just, just watch the movie because Sam Shepard plays Chuck Yeager in the movie. And you know, you, they couldn't cast a better guy to play Chuck Yeager than Sam Shepard. So that's, that's kind of the point we're talking about is like get into the world and find those, those wonderful phrases and those wonderful made up words and use that to create the specificity of the setting and the subject matter of your work. And people will immediately glom onto it and they'll go, oh my gosh, this is authentic. But if you say something like the right stuff was about the way the astronauts became really good pilots, that's just boring, right?

Yeah. And so I would say so the difference that we're talking about is when we're looking at great fantasy worlds like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, it's like somebody creates a really in depth world and then they do a really good job of basically explaining that world and immersing you in that world where on books like the ones you've been talking about and most books I would say is more of like taking an existing world and immersing you in that one.

Yes, that's a very good distinction.

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