How to write a great beginning hook

Hi, welcome to the Storygrid podcast, where we help you become a better writer and storyteller. I'm Sean Coyne. Tim Grall is out this week because of laryngitis, but we did record the episode before he got sick. So we put this intro on me this week, so bear with me. In this episode, we talk about the beginning hook of your story and the importance of really hooking the reader at the very beginning. Also, we get a little bit into character development. And so, without further ado, let's jump right in.

So, Sean, before we jump into what I want to go over today, I had a question. I was working on a new story idea, and I wrote the first scene, but I wrote the scene. I had written a different version of this book before, and somebody was saying, one of somebody that read it said, oh, I should just start with the most exciting scene that was kind of in the middle. And so I wrote that. But it got me thinking about all these different ways that people open their books. So, you know, you have, I think about movies, like, a lot of times in action movies, they'll be just this kind of throwaway early scene that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. You know, just be some kind of, you know, breaking in and getting something and then running out. And then that's kind of it, and they move on with the movie. And then we talked about before with Bird Box where, like, it, the author basically started telling the ending payoff at the beginning of the book. Right. And then the way I was, I was working on it was something where I basically give a scene from the middle of the book that's really kind of intense to let you know, like, this is where we're heading. And then I kind of start almost, you know, how, like, they'll show you a scene, and then it's like two days earlier, and then it kind of picks up from there. You know, what kind of things. You know, what are your feelings on that? And what kind of things are, you know, do you feel like work really well as far as opening a book so that it'll really grab people's attention? If you feel like maybe your opening inciting incident isn't extremely strong?

Well, that's a really good question. And in fact, I was thinking about that the other day.

Here's usually.

My advice about that. And I think your friend was pretty much on track.

A lot of people, what they'll do is they will start something with an action scene that's either, you know, the ending, climax of the entire novel or somewhere in the middle. And then you. Then once you get to the midpoint, you know you have your final ending. Be sort of completely new material.

Oftentimes what you'll do is you'll tack something on after you've done your first draft. So, for example, like a crime thriller that is character driven, meaning almost sort of a mystery crime thriller combination where you're really following the detective or the amateur sleuth as they're compiling clues to start the novel, where they discover a body and they start to get the clues and they slowly build up to a confrontation of possible suspects that takes kind of a slow build. So what often I'll do is suggest.

Doing the climax moment without giving any context and tacking that on as a prologue. And then, you know, then you sort of have a very direct break and then you begin chapter one. And the reason why you do that is to let the. It's a way of enticing the reader to let them know, hey, I get it. You're not sure if you want to invest, you know, six hours of reading experience in this book, and you want to know that there's going to be some great action later. So here's a little bit of some action to start. So that's a trick that a lot of people use, and it's perfectly valid.

Now, literary fiction writers, people who are writing very much in the internal genres.

They know that the people who are attracted to their stories are going to engage with their writing longer than somebody who's going to read a Dean Koontz novel. So Dean Koontz is usually going to start something with a big bang, and then he'll go into a lull and then rebuild. So it's always tricky to figure out what the perfect beginning is. And obviously what you want to do is make a promise at the very beginning of your story. And the promise is you are going to have an incredible reading experience and the climax of this story is going to be really terrific. And so the promise at the beginning of your story has to mirror your ending payoff, even if you're pulling a scene from the middle of the plotting. That has to be sort of like the building block to the major, major shift of the story at the very end. So, you know, it's difficult for me to generalize about it because it's on a case by case basis, but I think, you know, your friend who gave you that advice was giving you some good, good advice. Basically, what they were saying is you got to really, really hook the reader at the very beginning. And the more active you are at the very start of the story, the more that will hook. Unless you're writing at the level of, you know, Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Jonathan Franzen or any. Or Ann Tyler.

Yeah, I don't think I'm quite there yet.

Well, you know, it's. If you're writing genre fiction, and I love genre fiction, I'm not saying that, you know, I'm not denigrating it in any way because I, that's my. I love it. You really do need active beginnings where, you know, maybe there's a heist, maybe there's, you know, the beginning of Pulp Fiction is a great example. You know, it's, it's a coffee shop and a hold up, you know, and then bang, you're right into the middle of the story. And Quentin Tarantino brilliantly juggled, you know, five or six plot lines in that story. And it's, it's based upon the old pulp novels. So he took a little smattering of all of the, you know, the little micro genres within the pulp fiction world and he created this universe that all collides in terms of timing and it's a brilliant screenplay. You can read that screenplay as if it were a novel. And that's, that's a really great way of beginning his story because, you know, oh, this is, this is going to be great. If this is the very beginning of this story, I can't wait until the end. And of course he circles all the way back to the very beginning of Pulp Fiction at the very end. And it's a really great climax. And that's a. If I were to give advice about, you know, a perfectly timed sequence of active scenes and sequences and someday I'll do a story grid for Pulp Fiction is Pulp Fiction. You know, buy the screenplay, read it like a novel and you're going to learn a lot.

Well, I was thinking too, I'm going to take a complete left turn now because I've, I've gone back and I've started rereading the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Mm.

Have you, have you read that?

Yes.

Okay. I, I love those books. And I remember I read them all in one week, all three of them. And I remember thinking, if there was three books that I wish I could unread to go back and, and like experience them for the first time again, it was them. And I think I've waited long enough where I've forgotten the books, I'm rereading them.

I've forgotten what happened.

So.

But I. What struck me is how the. The girl in it, the. The girl with the dragon tattoo, her name is, like, Salander or something like that, and she's kind of this. I feel like the author, Eric Larson, pushed her to, like, the edge of her personality, you know, so he didn't just take somebody that was kind of goth. It was like the. In the nth degree. Goth and the nth degree, like, socially awkward and all of those things. And it got me thinking about some of my favorite characters are those ones that seem to be extreme.

Is when we're thinking through characters. And I know when we talk about characters, you always say, you know, characters are the decisions they make. Yeah.

But.

I don't know. I guess I was starting to think, like, should I. Should I be thinking about my characters is like, I can't just take them to, like, five on a scale of 10. I need to take them to a nine or 10 on a scale of 10 in order to make them.

Like, like, remembered or something. You know, so many of the characters that, like, have huge flaws. Like, I think of, like, Jack Bauer in 24. You know, like, they're. You know, he is just a. On a scale of what somebody will do to save his country. Right. You know?

Right.

And it just got me thinking about my own characters as I. Because I started filling out the fool's cap for this new one. I wrote the first scene, and I started filling out the fool's cap, and it got me thinking about my characters and how I was thinking, like, okay, if they're a little bit like this, should I. Should I find these kind of character flaws or these. These strengths and really just kind of crank. Crank the dial as much as I can on them, you know, like. Like in Misery. Oh, what's the bat? The lady's name that kidnaps him?

Any Wilkes.

Yeah.

Yes.

If she was just a little psycho, the book would not be that good. You know, like, she had to be to the, like, nth degree. Crazy psycho fan person.

Well, exactly.

Yes. My advice about that is to. Is to think of your characters in terms of global archetypes. And I don't want to get into Jung and Freud and everything here, but to think of your character, what is the one defining, you know, sort of element of that character that you think best expresses them? For Annie Wilkes, it's sort of the. You know, it's sort of the. The hermit y. Kind of old maid stuck in the wilderness, who's obsessively, you know, following a fictional fantastical universe.

She is a Remarkable villain because her, her yearning and her desire is so on the nose in that we know that she is addicted to Misery. The character, such a great name that Stephen King came up with with the lead character of Paul, I forget Paul is the writer's novels, but she's addicted to this sort of fantastical universe where, you know, there's love and romance and. And the brilliance of that novel is that it's that addiction to that fantasy that ultimately unpacks does her in that Paul, the writer, the way he tricks her and he beats her in the villain, the hero at the mercy of the villain scene is that he. He tricks her to believe that he's fallen for her, that he's in love with her. And it's not a. It's not some, you know, superficial love that's just purely sexual or in. In need of. Of a. A personal relationship. It's a true romantic love. And that he is going to have a suicide pact with her. And so he lures her into his trap by playing upon her weakness. And her weakness is her. Her addiction to the fantasy life of romance. So if you can think of that one thing that that character will hold on to until the very end. Jack Bauer, you mentioned there's a guy who's. Who will hold on to his patriotism until the very end of his, you know, his days. And then. And the thing about Lisbeth Salander, the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is that she's. She's addicted to her isolation. She has separated herself from the rest of the world and she feels more comfortable being alone. And her, she uses sex as sort of, you know, it's a fun, strange.

You know, side experiment. She doesn't really fall in love with anyone. And of course, her personal backstory is so horrific that you can understand that at the very end. And the whole sexual dynamic of Elizabeth Salander comes to play at the very end of the novel. But so the, the trick is. And when you're saying to take your characters up to these, these levels of 9 and 10, I think the way to think of that is not to make them cartoons. And cartoons means, you know, people who are really bad, you know, really. That doesn't really make any sense because then you come up with like a Snidely Whiplash guy with the mustache that he twirls all the time. But if you think of that one sort of tragic lie they're telling themselves, what's the core lie that your lead character or your antagonist. And of course we all know the protagonist and the antagonist are opposite ends of the spectrum of one sort of being. So when you're thinking about your protagonist, you should think about your antagonist as the opposite of their core thing.

So just as a way to give you some advice about how to ratchet up your characterization, think about that one, one lie that your lead character is telling themselves. Now, your protagonist, in many cases, is going to recognize that lie in the all is lost moment in the middle of your story, and they're going to change their behavior once that knowledge comes to them, and that is how they triumph at the end. Now, the antagonist never, ever gives up their lie. They're going to hold on to that lie until they burn in the fires of hell. So the way to think about your characters is to think about those things that they're protecting that are the most precious to them that they don't want to give up.

I hope that helps. Yeah, it does.

It just. It's. It got me thinking because we just watched every year between Christmas and New Year's, my wife and I go back through and watch Lord of the Rings.

And it got me thinking because I. You know, last year when we watched it, I was like, frodo's not the hero in that. In that story. Sam is the hero in that story. Right.

And anyway, and it just. It got me thinking, like, okay, what are. What are each of the people in that movie trying to protect? And what are they willing? I guess it's more like not, you know, taking something to the nth degree, except that they want to protect this so bad, they'll sacrifice anything else for it.

Right, exactly. What is their worldview that they refuse to let go?

You know, we all believe things about ourselves that are not true. And I'm the first one to say that there are absolutely things about myself that I believe are absolutely ironclad true about myself that are not true. But I don't know that. And I can't change my behavior until I reach some sort of traumatic experience that makes me change. That's what stories are all about. They're about changing our worldview so that we can learn deeper universal truths. So even Pulp Fiction has such, you know, all those characters in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, they're holding on to some sort of lie. And the ones who change and the ones who don't, like Vincent Vega does not change, and Vincent Vega does not make it. But Sam Jackson changes. It's a beautiful story in Pulp Fiction, underneath all that gore and wonderful dialogue. This is about the transformation. It's A redemption story about Sam Jackson's character. And.

The great thing about that movie is that you get that in the first scene. The whole movie is leading up to Sam Jackson's redemption as a character. He gives up the hood life, and it's great. Anyway, so there's a book I would recommend called the Writer's Journey, and I forgot the guys who wrote it, but he's a terrific writer. It's about the archetypes that I was talking about. This is stuff that I need to write more about to help people sort of glom onto their casting. And casting is a really important thing when you're writing a story, of course. And most of the story grid is dealing with the real fundamental, foundational elements of story casting and your protagonist and antagonist choices and the archetypes that you can play with and the hero's journey stuff that's very, very important, too. I write a lot about it on the blog in terms of story spine.

But I really need to do more of that stuff. So I'm glad you brought this up, but the book is called the Writer's Journey, and it was written by a former Disney movie executive who wrote some notes about Pixar movies, and he wrote this terrific book I would recommend anybody read.

Yeah, it's got me because I forget the name of the book, but I remember I read a book a couple years ago.

And I was thinking about the other day because I was thinking about characters and how, you know, how obviously important they are. And I was thinking about it because this book had a lot of cliches in it, right? So it was this tough private investigator that was a girl that had this, like, gorgeous boyfriend, and then this serial killer popped up that was, like, attached to her some way, but yet it still just pulled me through the story, and I didn't. And I'm the one that puts down a story, you know, couple hundred words in if I think it, it's not grabbing me, right? And so it pulled me through the whole thing. And I was just thinking about how so. So many of these things with, you know, within the story grid and the math that we talk about and. And coming up with good characters, it, like, covers the multitude of sins, you know, so you don't. You don't have to be the perfect writer. You don't have to get everything just right. But if you hit some of these fundamental things, it puts you in a place where you're much more likely to succeed, even with your flaws.

Well, exactly. I mean, when. When we have a hankering to read a terrific mystery. There are any number of cliches that we'll just sort of go with because we have a. We have a specific desire to read that kind of story. So, of course, pulp fiction is littered with cliche figures. There's the, you know, the very difficult mob boss. There's the prize fighter, there's the mall, there's the.

Hitman, there's the fixer. You know, there's all those things that we're all the gimp. The gimp.

But we forgive it because we're so immersed and the plot points and the twists and the. The foundational story work is so deeply ingrained, and Tarantino is such a master of story structure that we're just. We're having the time of our life watching that movie. So you're right. It will. It will forgive so many sins. Knowing the foundational elements of story, that story cast and all that stuff, you can play with archetypes, you can play with cliche characters. As long as you have very original and innovative story.

Climaxes and, you know, crises and inciting incidents, you can carry pretty much anything.

Yeah, I was watching this old interview with George Lucas this last week, and he was talking about how after Star wars came out, because nobody, you know, he. The movie almost didn't get made and nobody thought it would make any money. And then it comes out and it's this huge success and he's like, everybody started trying to make movies by, like throwing spaceships in it, right. And like just doing space movies. And he didn't talk about this particular part of it. But I was thinking, like, I know that he was deep into the hero's journey and that he basically just copy and pasted the hero's journey into the script and then filled in all the pieces. You know, I mean, it's obviously more intense than that, but.

It made me think of that, of like, that's why the story works so well, is because it followed this ancient, like you always talk about, it's embedded into us from birth way of telling stories that any number of spaceships or guns or anything else is not going to make up for if you're missing those fundamental things.

Exactly, exactly.

So, okay, so I want to. Now that we're 20 minutes in, I want to get into what I actually planned on talking to you about. So after. So we talked through, like, the different parts of the story last week. The beat, the scene, you know, all the way through the acts and the overarching story and subplot and global story. And now in the story grid, you move into actually getting into the story grid spreadsheet. So I thought it was interesting some of the things you said in the book, because you talk about where editors begin, and you talk about how when an editor reads a book and they don't like it or something's missing, or they just feel like it doesn't work. And that's often the phrasing you say is telling a story that works or doesn't work. Yes, but you say with this spreadsheet, these problems that are just kind of out, like in the back of my mind, I know something doesn't work. It becomes really obvious using the storygrid spreadsheet. Just why is that? Why can even seasoned editors can't always put their finger on it? What's so important about spreadsheeting out a book?

Well, what you're doing with the spreadsheet is you're deconstructing the building. So essentially, the spreadsheet opens up the walls. It, you know, opens up the floors and the roof and the tiling and the plumbing and the electricity. And it shows you whenever you, whenever you have a problem in your house, say the electricity is out, the first thing you're going to do is go down to your, you know, your. The box where all the fuses are and see if any of the fuses are out. That's the first diagnostic tool you're going to figure out beyond knowing if everybody else's lights are out in the neighborhood. And then you'll go down to the basement and you'll say, oh, geez. Well, all of the circuit breakers are fine, so there must be something wrong with that particular switch. Inside my house, in the living room, the living room light is not working and the circuit hasn't blown. So something happened within the wiring of the fixture. So I have to get the lighting fixture looked at and I have to turn off the electricity and check that. So this is what the story grid spreadsheet does for you. It shows you all of the building blocks of your entire story. So as I talk about in the book, what you do as an editor, and this took me years to figure out.

I'll tell a quick story about the process of becoming an editor. And the first thing that you do is you want to become an assistant to an editor at a publishing house. So people who graduate with English degrees or want to get into book publishing, their first step on the, on the chain is they'll have an interview with an editor at a publishing house, and so they'll talk about Their education, the books they like, etc. Etc. And if the editor and the candidate get along, the editor will say, great.

I think you're a very interesting person. What I'd like you to do is take this manuscript and they'll hand them a manuscript and they'll say, take this home with you. And I want you to write me a one page report on what you think about this manuscript, what the story is, and what any flaws are that you see in this story and how you would suggest that you would fix the story. So when I interviewed back, way back in the early 90s, I was handed a manuscript, I brought it home, I didn't know anything about the manuscript and I read it overnight. And I just went through my own rational thinking and I said, is this story interesting? What's wrong with this story? Is there anything wrong with it? And I wrote up my one page document and I wrote down every single flaw I thought was in there. And I turned it in and it turned out this was the lead fiction title for the publishing house and I had ripped it to shreds. I had basically said, this thing is unpublishable. It's terrible, it's unbelievable. And I did get the job. And I think one of the reasons why I got the job was that it's hard to find people who are so obsessive about individual tiny little bits of elements in a story. And if you can find those people who can help make those little bits better, it makes the overall experience better. So throughout my years as a learning editor, I started to develop the story grid spreadsheet, which is column after column of very specific.

Questions that an editor must answer for every single scene in the entire novel. And basically what it does, it lays out the entire electrical plan, the plumbing plan, the roofing plan, the walls, the rooms, all of that in the entire novel. So that you can, once you have that in front of you, you can say, well, this moment doesn't quite work because.

It doesn't echo a moment that happened seven scenes prior to it. Or there's no real climax in this scene. Why is the scene in here? This just seems to be exposition. So you can be very specific with a writer as an editor and say, okay, here's what I've done. I've taken your novel and I've taken a stapler and I've gone through every single page of your novel and I've stapled all the scenes into individual little packets. So your novel breaks down to 62 scenes. I'm just pulling this off the top of my head. And what I found is that in scene number seven, you have a flaw and here's how you might want to fix it. And that scene number seven does not pay off in the way that you want it to in scene number 31. So I can be very, very specific with the writer instead of saying such things as I just didn't feel attached to the lead character, which is a lot of editorial people will give notes like that to a writer. I never felt myself, you know, able to suspend my disbelief or I didn't find that the third act paid off as well as I'd like it. And those are all very, you know, those are, those are very useless. Well, they're not useless. They are identifying problems. I'm not saying that they're not. But what they don't do is identify specifically in the novel itself in the exact place where the writer can actually go in there with the chainsaw or the new electrical plan or the new copper pipe and fix that plumbing problem or fix that electrical problem. Now sometimes you have a house that just is a disaster and should be torn down.

And sometimes you have novels that are sent over your desk that have to be torn down. And those are difficult discussions to have with writers because everybody wants to hold on to their mess. But this is where the spreadsheet came from. I didn't just sort of make this up on the fly. This is 25 years of experience finding ways to communicate with writers in very practical ways. I say this over and over again to people and I don't think I can ever say it enough. A writer, it's not any personal problem that the writer has. It's not that they weren't given the God gifted ability to be able to do a certain magic. There's no personal problem with any writer. The problems are in the work itself. And if you say to somebody, hey, you need it. You need to put a new fuse in your electrical box in order for your light to work. Nobody takes that as a personal insult. But if you say to somebody.

I just never really attached to your lead character, that's going to devastate them. So I prefer to say, hey, you need to fix the fuse in your fuse box to make that light go on. So this is where the spreadsheet comes from. And this is why it's a wonderful tool not just for editors, but for writers. Because if you as a writer can go through your own work and separate yourself from your emotional attachment to it and just lay out all of the things that you've done in a way that is very straightforward. Then you will be able to see the places that you did very well and the places that you didn't do so well and places that you can improve and put places that you need to cut and you can take away all that self flagellation, all that, oh, I'm such an idiot. Why can't I do anything right? My book's never going to work. I'm never going to be the writer that I want to be. These are. These are all tasks that are very practical. They're very analytical. This does not require a PhD. It requires just blue collar hard work going through scene by scene in very, very stringent, specific ways.

Yeah, and you talk about two stages you go through with a book when you first get a manuscript. Like, you print out scenes and staple it together. You know, I think it would be helpful just to hear what your process is from, you know, so if we're. If I'm a writer and I'm trying to do this to my own book, you know, so I'm. I'm done writing, and now I need to put on my editor hat. Like, what kind of process should I go through to start putting on that editor hat and moving towards going through it analytically, like you said.

Well, I'm gonna assume that. Let me just take it back to.

What I did when I was at the major publishing houses. And I think this will be instructive for everyone because everybody's curious. What do those crazy people and what do those editors behind closed doors actually do all day? And most of what they do is go to meetings. But.

What you do when you get a manuscript as an editor is the first thing you do is you read it, and you read it like anybody else would read it. Is this compelling me to continue to read the next page and say, you get through the entire book and you say to yourself, well, hey, the fact that I went all the way through this book is a very good sign. It means that the story held my interest long enough for me to actually wonder what was going to happen at the very end. Even if the ending disappoints you as an editor, you say to yourself, there was enough juice, there was enough electricity, there was enough narrative drive in this story to get me from the very beginning to the very end. Now. So I would define that kind of book as something that works now. Is it perfect? Of course not. Could it be published? Maybe, maybe not. But fundamentally, the story works now. Okay, I've got a book that works now. How can I make it better? That's the next question I would ask. So on the second read, what I would do, I wouldn't get into trying to figure out what's wrong with it yet. I would do what I mentioned before. I would go through the manuscript and staple each one of the scenes together so that I would have a stack of 62 stapled little mini scenes. And after I was done with that, which would take a couple of hours, I would probably call it a day.

But the next day, I would start to do what I call the story grid spreadsheet. And I would fill out on an Excel spreadsheet, column after column, all of the little bits and pieces that I go through in the book. And we can get into them specifically later on. But after I finish that for the entire book itself, I would really, really have some very, very strong clues about where things went off track, where things were really working, and where the best place to start analyzing and going back to fix. I wouldn't fix anything until I had a global.

Plan, a strategy. What is my grand strategy? How am I going to fix. Make this book that works be even better? And.

So before I even went into one scene and started tinkering with any.

Structure of a scene or the climax or anything like that, I would think globally. I would think, what about my beginning hook? How's that working? Is that really pulling me through? What about the middle build? Am I really reaching an all is lost moment there? Is it clear?

Are the characters moving in the way that they should be? How's the ending pay off? I'll think of these global, the very, very big, big moments in the story. Those are the ones you really need to nail because those are the ones that are going to compel somebody to go through the entire book. Now, if I have already gone through the entire book, I'm pretty sure what those global moments are. And I'll think, is there a way to tweak them to make them even stronger? I'm not going to go and start on the first scene and start tinkering with the first scene if I don't know that the global moments are working. Because if I mess with the first scene, it might mess with a global moment that I haven't quite figured out yet.

Well, and again, it's going back to that idea of these are signposts along the way. So you want to start with those big things before you kind of try to get into the nitty gritty.

Exactly. And the thing about the big things is that they need to be surprising. So the climax of your beginning hook needs to be very surprising. From your inciting incident of your beginning hook, what do I mean by that? Well, if your inciting incident is very positive, say your lead character has just.

Received.

A major promotion at their job, whatever they are. So before, they were sort of, you know, just one of one of the worker bees. And at the beginning of your story, they become named CEO of or head of their division. So that's a very positive, you know, change for the character. They're going to get more status, more money, more all those things. Now, if the climax of your beginning hook after that very positive inciting incident is also positive, instead of them becoming the head of their department, now they're the head of. Now they're the CEO. That's not so good. Because when you begin positive and you end your payoff positive, it just feels not quite that surprising.

And that would be an example of, like, reading it and feeling like something was off and then being able to see it once it's in the spreadsheet, and you're like, oh, the polarity change is positive and positive.

Exactly right. That's exactly right. You would read it and say, well, for some reason, that that big moment at the end of the beginning hook just isn't. It just didn't compel me all that much. I wonder why. And then you'll figure it out. You'll say, oh, because they're both positive. So instead, you would want a negative. So at the beginning, let's say the beginning of the story is the person gets promoted to the head of their department, at the end of the beginning hook, they lose their job. So that would be surprising because you would think that this was a story about somebody who's climbing the corporate ladder and is going to make a big name for themselves. And then if you pull the rug out from the reader and say, oh, no, no, no, no. That's not what this story is about. They're gonna lose their job. Oh, my gosh, what's gonna happen next? They just wait. The beginning of the story is that they became a big shot, and now they lost everything. How are they going to rebuild their life? So that will compel the reader to go to the middle build. In the middle build, Your inciting incident of the middle build will probably be positive, and then it'll end on a negative, and then it'll end on a positive. You want to really pay real sharp attention to the polarity shifts of your storytelling. So these are the major movements of your source so this is the first thing I'm going to look at when I'm editing my first draft. Am I surprising? Am I really, really pulling the rug out from the reader? Would they never believe that this is what's going to happen? Because if you can pull that kind of innovative twist off, then it's going to compel them to keep reading.

So after I did that, then I would go and we were talking last week about the units of story, right? We were talking about beats and scenes and sequences and acts and subplots and global story movements. So you'll see that I'm starting at the global story level.

When I'm first approaching the editor. And then I'm going to slowly move down that unit of story list. Then I'm going to look at the subplot. Are the subplots mirroring and paying off in a way that are supportive of the major thematic shift of the story?

Are they in sync? Are they helping? Are they hindering? Are they more interesting than the lead story? If that's the case, I've got to do something about that. And as you can see. So you want to move down that chain of global story to subplot, to act, to.

Sequence, to scene. And ideally, you know, on your ninth draft, then you can goof around with the beats. But I really wouldn't obsess about beats until, you know, you're doing those final line by line tweaks after you've really gone through a number of drafts, editing prior to that. But the spreadsheet is the key place that's going to tell you where all of your problems are. It doesn't say. And then once you know where all the problems are, then you use the levels of story to attack those problems. Always attack the big, major, major problems first.

So if you can go back, talk a little bit about how subplots should interact with the main story. I think one of my favorite, my favorite movies that really uses subplots. Have you ever seen the movie Snatch? One of those Guy Ritchie movies?

Yes, long time ago.

So, like, there's this one, there's all these, you know, separate threads running, you know, probably five different stories running, and at one point they all coalesce where they're all passing each other in cars and there's a wreck and all this kind of stuff.

But.

And it's all. What's funny about it is it's all happening because of this diamond, even though many of the people involved don't realize everything's happening because of this diamond. So anyway, you know, that's what it made me think of is how like all of a sudden these separate threads of story get like tied all together at once and you see how they all interact.

But of course, you know, there's other movies that have all these different things going on that there are, you know, in theory, going to tie into the story. So what are you looking for as an editor when you're reading the subplots? You know, like how much, you know, how much screen time should they get and how do they need to interact and just talk a little bit about that?

Okay, well, there's.

Just to take a very, very giant step back. There are three sort of global.

Kinds of structures. There's the arch plot, the mini plot, and the antiplot. And the mini plot is sort of what you're talking about with Snatch and with Pulp Fiction, Lord of the Rings. These are multiple strands of story that all come together into a larger thematic story at the very end. Those are different than just a straightforward arch plot, which would be a James Bond story or the Martian.

Or a traditional mystery story or a traditional love story. Love stories have subplots. They're usually mirroring or.

Counter thematic to the central storyline subplots.

Let me try and think of a perfect example of one.

Well, since we did the Martian a couple of weeks ago, we can talk about that because Martian is a terrific arch plot where the lead character doesn't make a hero's journey. Mark Watney does not change at the beginning of the story. At the end of the story, he's the same guy as he was at the beginning of the story. But what he does, he's a catalyst character. He's the protagonist of a sort of. But what he does is he creates change in other people in the story. And the other people are the people at NASA and the people on the ship on their way back to Earth.

He affects change in those people.

So when you're looking at the global story of the Mark Watney story in the Martian, what you're looking at are the major elements of his journey to begin with the global story. How is Mark Watney going to come back to Earth? How do I move him from Mars to Earth? That's what you're thinking about. And you're thinking of the beginning hook of that story, the middle build of that story, and the ending payoff of that story. Now, the subplots would be akin to the stories on the spaceship with, I forget the characters names, but.

The captain of the ship, she has to make a decision about turning back. Does she turn back to go back and get Mark Watney, or doesn't she? Because if she does turn back, she will be disobeying direct orders from NASA. So she has to understand that she's.

She's defying direct orders, which is, you know, it's against the law and she's going to get in deep trouble if this thing backfires. So what she decides to do is to talk to the rest of the crew and get their acquiescence to go back for Watney. And they decide to do that. But that is mirroring the courage of Mark Watney himself on planet Mars. Does he just stay in that, you know, that little area that they made where they can live and hope for the best and hope that they come and get him, or does he have the courage to venture outside of that hub and try and affect his own, you know, discovery and survival? So the subplot is supporting the global plot of Mark actually being rescued from Mars. So go ahead.

So the difference is.

This kind of one main story that has other almost supporting stories just to kind of round it out, where something on the many plots is like a bunch of little plots that are all happening at the same time that come together at the end, right.

You don't have one compelling lead character.

You might have somebody like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, but it's that those group of other heroes that have to come together to really change the story. So you get all those little stories that all add up into a bigger theme that's a mini plot story, and that's usually. The Lord of the Rings is terrific because it's about. It's an action epic adventure that has multiple strands of plot that all come together. A lot of literary fiction is concerned with mini plot, which has a large group of characters that don't really do all that much.

They come together for a Thanksgiving dinner, is the climax of.

The corrections. And to get there takes a lot of reading.

So anyway, I think we may have gotten a little bit into the weeds here with my backtracking. But the subplot.

Intuitively, I can say this with confidence intuitively. Any subplot that a writer sticks in there, they intuitively know that it's supporting the global larger story. And subplots don't usually have to be.

Completely rejiggered. They either work or they don't. If they don't work, an editor will probably say to the writer, you know, cut that character. We don't need him. So the subplots are really not as crucially.

Important as the scene by scene movements and the global climactic moments of your beginning hook, middle build and ending payoff.

Okay, okay, so once we get into. I get. I also want to go back, actually, to. As an editor, you sit down, you read it, and you figure out, does it work? Is there a way? Because obviously, is the writer. I'm way too close to the story to make a, you know, good call on that. Like, I was trying to think of should you.

Should you try to get together, you know, a handful of people that will suffer through all of your first drafts or second drafts and give you feedback? And if you do, like, what kind of questions are you wanting them to answer? Because I'm assuming it wouldn't be, you know, extremely specific questions, just more like, I don't know, things like, where did it get boring? Or where did you lose interest? Or where was it confusing?

No, that's not going to help you. That's, that's. That's a recipe for disaster. Okay? I'll tell you why. Because.

Who, whoever you lure into that terrible position.

It'S going to lie to you. They just will. And they won't do it to hurt you. They won't do it. First of all, they're not professionally trained to evaluate story in the way that an editor is. So I would just skip the part of the works doesn't work. Assume as a writer. Assume your first draft is a piece of shit. Just assume that. And that's a pretty good assumption because usually your first draft is pretty sketchy and not the best thing that you're ever gonna write. And that's the way it should be. Nobody writes a first draft that's perfect. And no matter what anybody says to you, it's just never happened.

Anne Lamott talks about that with the shitty first draft in Bird by Bird.

Yeah, it's just. Forget about it. Nobody creates something whole on a first. You know, they didn't create the B52 off of the plans. And then it was this perfect plane. So.

Live and die by the spreadsheet. Let the spreadsheet inform you. And the great thing about this spreadsheet is that it's so not.

Subjective. If you're asking yourself questions like, what is the story? What is the story event in this scene? What happens? And you have to rack your brain to come up with a sentence, one sentence that says what happens in that scene? And if you can't come up with that sentence, hey, that's a problem. And you're going to figure that out. And you're going to say to yourself, oh, I'm going to staple this scene and I'm not going to be able to fill out the story event, but I'm not going to fix that right now. I'm just going to set that aside and I'm going to write question mark. I'm going to put a question mark on the story event for that scene and then I'm going to move on. So what you want to do in that first with that first draft is you just want to get the lay of the land. You want to see where you went, well, where things were clicking, where things didn't click, where you're very, very clear in your polarity shifts, where the moments where your obligatory scenes are paying off, you want to make sure those are in there, right? You want to make sure that you have abided by the conventions and obligatory scenes of your chosen genre. You want to check that out and make sure that you have a hero at the mercy of the villain scene in your. In your thriller or hero at the mercy of the monster scene in your horror novel or your lover's kiss scene in your love story. If your lovers never kiss in your love story, people are going to say, hey, it was pretty good, but they never got together. I don't know why I read this thing. So you need to know that your obligatory scenes and conventions of your chosen genre, your global genre and your internal genres that you're hitting those, those, those marks. And if they're in there but they're a little soft, you're going to figure that out when you look at your global story grid spreadsheet, because it's just going to be a little soft like she gave.

Melissa Peck's peed on the cheek. You know, that'll be the, the lover's kiss scene in your story grid. You'd be like, well, maybe that's not, you know, that thrilling of a scene. Maybe there should be something else. Or maybe that is the perfect, you know, perfect lover's kiss. Maybe, you know, there's a lot of. There's a scene in the Martian in the movie where the character played by. What's her name?

No. Kate Mara. Kate Mara.

Okay, Right on one of the crew, right?

One of the crew. One of the other guys is going out to rescue Watts. He's got the spacesuit on, he's got the helmet. And she pecks, gives him a little kiss on the mask of his space helmet. That's the lover's kiss scene in that love story. And in that moment, we know those two are in love. We know that they're gonna get together at the end of the movie. And guess what happens at the end of the movie? There's a resolution scene where you see Kate Mara in a hospital having given birth to their child. And it's a beautiful moment because you say, oh, there was that lover's kissing and it was this tiny little bit of moment. And that's obviously the screenwriter and Ridley Scott came up with that moment because I don't think it's in the book. And it was a really nice little subplot. You know, these two people on this crew fell in love and she showed him that she loved him because she might never see this guy again. And she kisses him on his helmet and that's enough. So if they didn't have that moment and they had them later on, she's given birth to their baby, it wouldn't have made sense to the audience. They would have been like, huh, why did she have. Why did she give birth to that guy's baby? They weren't in love. Right.

Yeah. You know, it got me. That reminds me of just.

My wife and I just went back through and watched the entire Office. The Office series again.

You guys got to get away from this screens, Tim.

I know.

Yeah.

As I said that I'm like, we watch too much.

The Office is fantastic, though.

But what kills me, what got me thinking about is like, how little each of these sub characters, because you have Jim and Pam and Michael are kind of the main characters, but then there's like 10 other characters in the show that. Yeah. And it's only a 22 minute show. Right. So a lot of times these characters either aren't in. Don't have anything going on in that particular episode, or if they do, it's probably like two minutes of screen time.

Right.

But yet they. We feel like we know these characters intricately just from those little, like tiny glimpses into.

What they do. And I felt like that when you just said that about the Martian of, like, there's only like three or four mentions in the entire movie about the. The.

Now. Now, I can't remember if this was in the movie or the book. I know in the book, when. When Mark Watney is basically writing all his goodbyes, he tells the guy, like, you need to go after her. Like you need to just go for it.

Right, right. And.

And in the movie there's like, I think one kind of. I think, oh, when she says they got a bunk up because they're Already bunking up. I think she says that, and then she kisses him on the helmet and then they have the baby at the end. And maybe there's one more scene, but probably all together it's less than a minute. Yes, but yet you get this entire story of their relationship in less than a minute in a two hour movie.

That's absolutely true. And that's the, that's the thing, is that you don't have to hammer home every single bit. Tiny little detail specificity can pay off in such a large way. Let me quickly just mention my, my point about the Office and what makes that show work is the narrative device of that show. What is the narrative device of that show? It's the conceit that this office is.

Somebody's making a documentary about the Office, Right. So they have the takeaway and they have the interview sessions with some of the characters. So it's very Shakespearean in a way, where they have these soliloquies talking directly to the camera, which gives you the feeling of a documentary being filmed of this Office. And it's that narrative device that is so brilliantly, you know, consistent throughout the entire series of the show that makes it so funny and so compelling because you feel as if you're watching a documentary and these people are revealing themselves in ways and they do a lot of cutaways between the people giving their, you know. Yeah, it's great. So anyway, narrative device is such a key part of writing.

Yeah. And it works so well because, you know, one of the things about, you know, the screen is you can't get the inner dialogue in like you can in a book. And so the way it used it was you. They would show you something and then they would be interviewing that person who's saying the exact opposite. Exactly.

Yeah. That was a great solution to it. The narrative form of film is that you can only film the external. So internal, you know, I talk a lot about Eugene o', Neill, but the, the thing that Eugene o', Neill, as the playwright, did to figure this out, and he didn't figure it out until he was very, very late in his career, was to use drunkenness as a way of revealing the internal, inner, you know, worlds of his character. So in the Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey, in Tonight, in Huey and.

Moon for the Misbegotten, these are all great plays because you get the inner worlds of these characters through their statements while they are intoxicated. And that's how he got around the fact that in a play you cannot go inside the character's mind like you can in a novel. The thing about o', Neil, he always wanted to be a novelist, but he never felt comfortable in that medium. And he always wanted to be able to get inside in free indirect style, get inside his characters minds and reveal their thoughts. And the way he finally figured that out was by using alcohol and intoxication to reveal the innermost thoughts of his characters.

Another narrative device that once he figured that out, he banged out those plays in like six months. His major, major, major plays. These are plays he wrote after he got the Nobel Prize, by the way. These are ones that he banged out without even really thinking because he figured out his narrative device and once he did, it was as if he was just sort of taking dictation. Thanks for listening to the Story Grid podcast for all things StoryGrid. Check out storygrid.com also. All past episodes of the StoryGrid podcast are@storygrid.com podcast and also to support this show, please tell one of your friends or a friend of a friend about it and ask them to listen. And thanks again and we'll see you next week. Thanks. Bye.