How to Write a Great Scene

Hello and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we start talking about a new project we're doing here at Story Grid that I think is. First of all, I think it's been a long time coming. I think everything we're going to take you through, what you're going to learn. I don't want to give anything away till we actually get into it, but it's really exciting for me. I think it's something that, again, has been a long time coming that you're really going to enjoy. So Sean talks about that, gives some background on it and how you can be a part of it. So I'm not going to give anything else away because we're going to talk about it throughout the episode. So I'm excited to jump in and get started. Seshawn. I'm excited, really excited to do this episode and record this, because just yesterday we opened up registration for something brand new that we haven't done at Storygroup before. We're calling it Ground you'd Craft. And so I want to kind of get into it of, like, what it is and why we're doing and how all the editors are going to be involved and all that. But first, just start by telling us what this thing is.

Okay. You know, when I. When I wrote storygrid and when I wrote the book and when I started the website, I really, I didn't have sort of this grand global vision of what exactly it is I wanted storygrid to become.

So since the time, and it's almost five years now, when I published the book and we started, you know, getting more and more people involved in the website, I started thinking about, well, if someone were to, you know, put the power of teaching story principles to everybody on the planet, how would I go about doing it? And so since that time, we've created a whole bunch of courses, and a lot of the times we're sort of flying by the seat of our pants because we were responding to the demands of people who came to Story Grid for what they wanted. And it turned out that it was this really nice, symbiotic kind of, you know, ideas came to us while we were doing it. So I'm speaking very abstractly, but my point is, is that what. What I came down to is that, you know, the very first course that we ever offered was the Love story course. And the reason why we did the love story course was I was just thinking, and the people who were coming to storygrid were asking, you know, could you really dive deeply into the genre conventions, obligatory scenes, etc. And we're really interested in Love Story. And if you could really talk about, you know, the primal love story of contemporary culture, which is Pride and Prejudice, that would be great. So that's how we started everything. We started with the Love Story seminar. And I love that course and I think it's great. And it was a really wonderful experience for me to teach it because it really made me think about, well, what are the skill sets that someone needs to really have at their command before they can even really, you know, wrap their minds around genre? And so from that I came up with this concept of the two modes of looking at story. Now, there are a lot more than two, but the two very important ones are the macro point of view and the micro point of view. So the macro point of view is sort of like having a telescope, being able to explain the big bang, explaining the cosmos, you know, the way things work generally. And so that went over very well at the Love Story conference. And I created Level up your craft, which we're also offering at the same time as we're doing this new class. Ground your craft. Now Level up your craft is all about the macro point of view as a storyteller. Like, what are the big movements of story? How am I going to create a global map for an entire long form story? What are the 15 most important scenes that I need to nail first before I can sort of, you know, fill in the interstitial tissue around it? So level up your craft. Use three different masterworks. And I went through all of the conventions and obligatory scenes of those three specific genres. And I analyzed the 15 core scenes that made up the skeletal structure of each of those masterworks. And those masterworks are the Martian Fight Club and Bridget Jones Diary. And I used the film adaptations to go through each and every one of those. And, you know, I think it went very well. Everybody was very pleased with it. But I also knew I had to do something similar for the other lens that we need to look at story. And that lens is the micro lens or the microscope. Right. So the microscope is all about grounding your story skills. And as I state again and again in the story grid Book, you know, the most important unit of story is the scene. For the novelist, at least now for the actor, it's the beat. But for the novelist, for the screenwriter, for the playwright, for the long form television person, everything boils down. Does the scene work? Are your scenes actually building progressively to those big moments in the story that you need? The beginning hook, middle build, and ending payoff? Are your scenes working? So it's taking me some time to figure out the right sort of way in which I can teach the principles of scene construction in a way that's actually very prescriptive and practical. So, you know, as scientists say, you know, the ideal situation is, is to be able to describe a problem really with great focus and intricacy. So you want to describe something and then you want to prescribe a solution to that problem. So the problem that we're setting up to describe and prescribe in this course is the problem of writing a scene. So the scene is the on the ground experience for the reader or the viewer of your work. If your scenes work, the reader or the viewer will keep, you know, turning pages. Keep watching. It's the potato chip sort of phenomena. If the potato chip tastes good, they'll keep eating the potato chips.

They'll eat one more. One more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So that's sort of the general abstract idea of these two. You know, if there's a story grid 100, you know, the, the entry level courses that you would need to learn story, there are two of them, right? There's StoryGrid Macro 100, which is level up your craft. And the second one is story grid micro ground your craft. So for me, these are the two fundamental classes that you can learn as a newbie, an amateur, or a professional writer and refresh your craft by reviewing these two fundamental courses. So let me get back to what actually ground your craft is really going to be all about. Okay, so again, it's about the scene. Okay, so that brings up another question. Well, what kind of scene, right? What kind of scene are we going to be working on? And thankfully, and this is where I say that our sort of flying by the seat of the pants and giving the people what they wanted early is actually helping us. Because one of the things that all of the people at the Storygrid website wanted was editor certification, right? They wanted to come and spend a very intense amount of time personally with me and with you to learn the craft of story editing as well as entrepreneurial skills, which are your expertise. So we did the Story Grid certified editors program and now we have about 50 certified story grid editors. Some are just coming online now, and we have 19 of the original. So what happened was I started sort of asking around, and this is a really great thing to do when you're facing a problem, like ask other people's opinions. Just state your problem and say, look, I'm looking to define what this problem is at a better resolution. And that's what I did. I sort of talked to everyone at the Story Grid Certified Editors class in February. I said, look, we're going to do. I'm going to put together the micro course now. What sort of questions would you want answered in this ground your craft kind of course? And, you know, they all sort of went away after the class. And then they started sending me emails about the questions that they wanted me to answer. And two of the editors started working independently, Rebecca Monoruso and Kimberly Kessler. And they came up with a great idea. They said the biggest thing that their clients want to figure out is genre, right? So if I'm going to do a micro course, wouldn't it be great to be able to be specific to the 12 content genres, you know, the ones that really people start to get obsessed with? So that got me thinking, and they started thinking more and they said, why don't you do this? Why don't you cover one of the genres each week and create a scene and analyze a scene within that specific genre? And that way, while you're going through the micro details of the story grid spreadsheet for each of these scenes, you'll be able to lay out the global conventions and obligatory scenes of those specific content genres at the same time. And what you'll be able to do is to focus on the core event of that particular genre. So if you're writing a horror short story, you're going to want to feature the core event of horror. And what the core event is, it's the big moment that everybody goes to a horror movie or reads a horror novel to see. And that is the victim at the mercy of the monster scene, right? So when we do horror, and thankfully James Thorne, who's our, our horror expert, he's going to be working with me on that week's work. We're going to look at, you know, a short story, the Telltale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, which is all about that core, you know, horror ethos. So that's just part of it. Now, the other thing that's great is that the story grid editors, they all have their own sort of loves of particular kinds of stories. Right. So James, for example, is a horror nut. You know, he just loves it. That's what he concentrates on. That's what he reads for pleasure. That's what he writes. So I opened it up to them and I said, look, why don't we each week. So we'll have 12 weeks. Each of those weeks will feature one of the 12 content genres, the nine external and the three internal. And one of the StoryGrid certified editors can be the leader that week along with me. So they will be the supportive player to sort of my lecture. They will follow up and do a lot of the coursework and answer questions and really get knee deep into the thing that they love the most.

So they'll be like your TA Exactly.

They'll be like a section leader, teaching assistant to go over a specific category of content. So I opened it up to the story grid editors and they all jumped, piled on. And you and I actually got there first. So you're going to do the war story. Right? And I'm actually going to be doing society myself, because that's kind of what I love too. All right, so the way it'll be structured is that each week we'll go over the analysis of a masterwork scene. Now, these masterwork scenes are, you know, the pinnacle of short stories or really terrific critical moments and specific novels. So what I'll do is I'll lay out my analysis using the story grid spreadsheet tool as well as some other tools that I'll, you know, I want to share that are. I haven't really talked about all that much yet. So each week will the, the, the lecture will begin with the analysis of a masterwork scene. So we're going to open up the hood of these masterworks and we're going to go through the spreadsheet. So everybody who takes the class is going to really, you know, immerse themselves in the intricacies and the difficulties and the, you know, the really, really nitpicky stuff in the spreadsheet. So they'll see me make spreadsheets and so they'll see how I do it. And so they can always refer to that work whenever they get stuck. They'll see how I make the decision, decisions about whether it's third person omniscient point of view or free indirect style or first person whatever. And so each one of those columns, I'll spend considerable amount of time, maybe a minute or two, explaining the decisions that I made to fill in the story grid spreadsheet for just this Specific scene. So we're going to really, really open up the hood of these masterwork scenes. And what's also cool is that I'm just not picking them myself. I went to the story grid editors and I said, look, if you're going to be the section leader, you pick the scene, you pick one of your favorites, you send it to me, you do the analysis independently and I will do the analysis. And then we can have two sort of different points of view about these masterworks, right? So the reason why that's terrific is that it will explain to people that different interpretations, subjective points of view brought to a masterwork are really important. And the more eyeballs you can get on something, the better you'll understand how well that scene actually works. Okay, so that's going to be the first part of each lecture is just a super duper in depth analysis of a masterwork scene or short story within a specific genre. So we're going to have 12 weeks of this covering all 12 of the genres. Okay? Now the next thing is that after I do my super duper analysis, what I'll do is something that I call leveling up my thinking. So I'll take the ground of the masterwork and I'll start pulling out some abstractions from it. For example, the scene that I talk about in the book a lot in the story grid book and I talk about all the time is the scene in Silence of the Lambs when Clarice Starling. The core scene is when Clarice Starling goes and takes down Buffalo Bill and kills him. Right? So she is actually the hero at the mercy of the villain. And that scene is really, really a primal example of how to sort of pull out some abstractions and to help you direct your own work. So what do I mean by that? If everybody can remember that scene in the film, it begins with what I call the stranger knocks on the door, you know, opening. So at the beginning of the scene, Clarice Starling is going to interview this tailor who, you know, worked in the small town. And one of the victims worked with this tailor. So she wants to go talk to the tailor to see maybe if he has any information about who might have wanted to hurt her. So she's knocking on the door for this tailor, and the tailor is the killer, Buffalo Bill. Now, she doesn't know that the tailor is Buffalo Bill, and Buffalo Bill doesn't know who she is. So it's the classic setup of stranger knocks on the door. Now, if you look at the beginning of the hobbit it's the same abstract scene, right? When Gandalf knocks on or comes and approaches Bilbo Baggins, it's this stranger knocking on the door. So what we'll do from that is I will walk through these individual core event scenes in each one of these genres and I will start building an assignment, sort of. I will be starting to form constraints of a scene that the master who created the scene generically sort of came up on their own. So that at the end of this part of the lecture, I'll be able to give an assignment. And the assignment would be something similar. To begin your action scene, which must turn on the life death value. I would like you to write a scene that turns on the life death value. Value that begins with a stranger knocking at the door.

So the way your scene is going to turn in the middle is through the life and death value. So one of the players will threaten the life of the other and. Or, you know, take the life of the other or bring back the life of the other, depending upon whatever choice you want to make. But you'll see how this is where I'm leading with this, is that not only are we going to describe how short scene stories and short stories work. Right. We're going to prescribe a means by which you can inspire yourself by the very masterwork that you love to write your own original scene that uses the solutions that the master has already solved in his or her masterwork. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, because when you first. When we first started talking about doing this, I was very. I was glad it wasn't my job to come up with how to teach this because it was such a big kind of ball of things. And so the idea of doing it through the content genres was really neat. And I love the idea of analyzing the scenes because that's what you had me do. That was like a column I had never had to deal with. Back in December, when I was analyzing the threshing, you're like, go through and figure out what the kind of. What did you call it?

The scene types.

Yeah, the scene types. And it took me like a couple tries to wrap my head around it, but once it did, I started noticing like, every one of my scenes are scenes that have showed up in book after book after book after book that I've read. And it was just one of those times again where I was like, oh, my gosh, it's been here the whole time.

Yeah, I mean, that's the nature of learning. And I talked a little bit about this at the Story grid Certified Editor seminar. And there are. There are basically two ways we learn. And this has been, you know, it's been proven by experiments, psychology experiments, et cetera. But I think I mentioned this before, but I'll say it again. I always forget the name of the guy who actually did the experiment. And I'll try and remember by the time I finish the story. But there was an experimenter in the 1960s and he was curious about the notion of what people call their gut feelings. Like, oh, I just know that that's not going to happen. So he wanted to sort of debunk the whole notion of people's hunches and guts reactions, etc. So what he did is that he decided, I know what I'll do. I'm going to create some sort of nonsense words, but the nonsense will have sort of an underlying structure to it. So every fifth letter I'll turn into another letter based upon some sort of mathematical formula, and I'll do a whole series of fake words that are abide the structural sort of algorithm. And then, you know, as a test, as a control, I'll do just randomly ridiculous words and I'll see, you know, if people actually can identify this underlying structure in these words like they say they can, when, like this whole hunch thing, it's got to be ridiculous. And what he discovered was that people could actually do it. So they would come in, he would show them 25 of these fake words that all had that algorithm underneath them in their structure. And it's not anything that anyone would be able to rationally sort of figure out. And then he would do the ones that didn't. So he would show them 25 that had the structure, and then he would hold up the 26 card and he would say, do you think this card belongs with the other 25? Or. And they would say, yes or no. And what he discovered is that there was like a standard deviation above random chance that was very clearly evidence that people have an implicit ability to identify patterns and structures in phenomena just sort of magically. And it's sort of like our superpower. It's the human being's implicit ability to recognize underlying structures in natural phenomena. So that's kind of interesting and cool. But when he would ask them, like, how did you know that? They would either say, you know, I have no clue, or they'd come up with some explanation that wasn't anywhere near, you know, what the algorithm actually did. So that's one way we learn is the implicit kind of learning. And I think that's what we all understand when we start out to write a story, right? We have all of this experience consuming stories from the time we were little kids. So we have this big bank of stories that have this underlying structure already attached to them. And that part of that underlying structure is what I talked about in terms of scene type. We all can say, oh, right, that's like the scene where the two friends have coffee or the people go out on their first date, or there's a big war and the battle is about to begin, and, you know, there's somebody who's afraid in a foxhole. You know, we've seen these scenes a million times, right? And they're implicitly structural across multiple genres, right? So when you started writing your novel, you had this inventory of scene types that you were already deeply, implicitly familiar with, and you knew how the scene types usually went. And, you know, at the beginning, you would just sort of go on the fly and you would. You would bang out a scene that seemed like a scene based upon that implicit learning, right? Yeah. So implicit learning is unbelievable. I mean, I think it's amazing. However, there's also explicit learning, right? And explicit learning is sort of what story grid stuff is. It's sort of making the underlying structure of stories across multiple genres explicit. We're trying to lay out and describe how the structure works, how you can use that knowledge to help you write better stories. So if you know the underlying structure of a shed before you build it, and you make a plan to build the shed before you actually do, by the time you head out to build your shed, you build the shed pretty quickly and pretty efficiently. If you just are sort of going on your gut instinct of what a shed looks like, you need a roof, you need a floor, some walls. Yeah, that's a little vague. And you have the implicit knowledge, but you really need to add explicit knowledge on top of the implicit knowledge to make the thing actually work. So that's the whole storygrid concept. It's not anything, you know, more revolutionary than that. It's just taking the underlying structure of stories and doing our best to really delineate the different sort of patterns and put them under high resolution so that when we face a problem, we can go, oh, well, what's the explicit structure behind that incredible scene with Claire, Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill? Oh, well, it's a stranger knocks at the door, followed by killer recognizes threat. Killer decides to take care of threat. You know, the threatened FBI agent hides. You know, like, and you can just sort of map it out in terms of abstract ideas, beat to beat. And then you can say to yourself, you know, let me not reinvent the wheel here. I'm a writer. I'm trying to learn. Why don't I just take Thomas Harris's. All of the work that he did abstractly and abstract from it, and then just sort of mirror that scene and see what I come up with? And that will be the structure of the ground you'd craft scene work. So not only will we describe the scenes, we will actually prescribe how to create a similar scene yourself within the context of the individual genre that we cover that week. And it won't just be Professor Shawn, you know, burbling into a microphone. It will be, you know, you will have section leaders. And these section leaders have trained with me for years. Right. So. And they've asked me so many questions that they know a lot of things better than I do at certain resolutions. So why not combine the specialist in a particular genre with the globalist, who is me? We'll both analyze it, and then on the weekly calls that we'll do, and of course, we'll have a forum where there will be questions and answers so that the students can actually talk to the section leader each week and get their points of view, what they agreed with in my analysis, what they didn't, how they approached the work. And to cap it all off, this is really cool. All of the story grid editors have agreed to take my prescription at the end of the lecture and to write a scene themselves based upon the instructions and constraints that I give them so that they will post their scenes that they have written that I have prescribed based upon the masterwork that they recommended. If you can follow that train of thought.

Yeah, yeah.

Probably a far smarter person than I am. But it's a really. What's really. What I love about it is that there's actionable homework to do each week for each student. So if I were to take the class, I would say to myself, oh, wow, there's like, there's at least four genres here that I really want to take a crack at. So I'm gonna plan my work so that I can write a scene at the same time that the section leader is writing it. And then I can look at my scene and their scene and the masterwork. And then I'll have three examples of the execution of a particular scene scene type. And, boy, I think people are just going to learn so much, it's going to blow their mind. And not only that, our story grid editors are going to. They're going to learn a ton. And I'm going to learn a ton, too, because I'm going to write a scene, too. I can't believe I agreed to it. But we'll see. Just like, how, how well, you know, the baseball coach can actually play baseball.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're going to do one, too. So we're both kind of putting our butts on the line here, too. But, you know, that's part of the whole fun of the.

Yeah, yeah, I'm used to it. No, yeah, I thought that was really cool because the thing I liked about it is the constraints part, because it's so hard when you're sitting down and like, okay, I want to practice writing scenes. It's like, okay, we're, you know, where do you even start? I mean, I think that's why it's so easy for people to just, like, I'm going to start a new book and because it seems weird to just kind of write one random scene. So I love the idea that, like, you're constraining it down to, like, this week, this is the setup. You know, this is a genre. This is the type scene you're writing. And it really forces people probably also to write stuff that they're not used to writing, you know, because, you know, for me, I was excited to do the war genre because I've never written anything in the war genre. And so it's an interesting challenge to me. It's like a couple years ago, I entered a bunch of writing contests because they would give you this really constrained short story you had to write and you had to write within the boundaries of that. And it really forced me to write from a perspective I'm not used to writing.

Well, that's the way the old pulp fiction writers used to work, Right. Even when I was, you know, early on in my career in book publishing, there were slots, right? There were. I was responsible for publishing two mysteries a month. And sometimes I just couldn't find mysteries ready to go, you know, So I would call up a pro and I would say, look, I need a Private Eye novel for, you know, next February. And I would say, I've got a budget of ten grand. Can you do that? And they would go, sure. And they would bang out a really solid Private Eye novel, deliver it to me. They get paid, and it's just writing on it's like deadline writer. And journalists, you'll find, are able to do that, too. And the more you learn how to Write on command, the better command you'll have of your own writing.

Yeah, I remember I was listening to an interview of Malcolm Gladwell. I think it was the one on the Tim Ferriss podcast. And he asked him about whoever the interviewer was asked him about writer's block. And he's like, he's like that. In his opinion. I forgot exactly how he answered it. So I'm sure I'm going to put words in his mouth. But like, I remember him saying something like, I don't think it exists because when he was writing as a journalist, your editor would not accept the fact that you missed your deadline because you had writer's block. And so it was just so interesting. And I think it is just that professional mindset of like, okay, this is my assignment. So that's where I think for everybody that joins and considers it, like each week, my assignment is to write 1500 words of whatever Sean prescribes. Like, they're just gonna just shoot so far ahead by the end of the course and just their ability to sit down and write great stuff.

So, yeah, they're gonna have a very clear conception of what the core event meaning, you know, the one event in each one of these genres that is really what people are putting their money down to read. Yeah. So, and the other way I structured it is that I'm moving from sort of the Maslow hierarchy of needs, from the most primal needs of just surviving through security through, you know, love, all the way down to the morality genre, which is about, you know, self transcendence, you know, rising above your own particular humanity in service of other people. So it's moving up the hierarchy as we move from week to week, and it's going to expose everyone to the global concepts behind each one of these 12 genres. So while it is grounding and it is specifically about scenes, the added effect, just as like the added effect of level up your craft was learning how to analyze a scene, is that you're going to get a global macro sort of, you know, injection of explicit learning at the same time, which is cool.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the StoryGrid podcast. First of all, if you'd like to find out more about the new program that we just spoke about, you can see all of that@storygrid.com ground g r o u n d storygrid.com all the information and how to join is there. We're really excited to get into this and have you be a part of it. For everything story grid related, check out storygrid.com make sure you pick up a copy of the book and sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything happening in the StoryGrid universe. If you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any past episodes, all of that can be found@storygrid.com podcast if you'd like to reach out to us, you can find us on Twitter @StoryGrid. And lastly, if you would like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcasts and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at StoryGrid. We will see you next week.