I'm Freaking Out

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. When it comes to this podcast, I have a few rules that I've imposed on both me and Sean and myself. One of them is that I'm not allowed to get any feedback on my writing from Sean that's not being recorded for the podcast. So anytime, like, I send him a scene and he gives me feedback, that's the first I've heard of it. We don't do anything outside of the podcast, so that you're always getting kind of an unfiltered, raw version of. The other thing, personally, is I try to always ask the questions that I'm afraid to ask, directly address things that I'm trying to avoid. And this episode is all about that. I've been kind of freaking out about the novel this week. I had, like, a plan of what we're going to talk about a certain topic, and we're going to try to get that into that in a different episode because I realized that I was avoiding something and talking to Sean about it, and I realized that would be breaking that rule of always being transparent and always going headfirst into the thing that I'm afraid of. So this episode is all about me freaking out about my novel. And hopefully you hear kind of the.

Rawness of where I'm at with it.

So hopefully it's helpful to you. And so let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, I had originally emailed you with a topic for this week that didn't have anything to do with my book because I really didn't want to talk about my book. And this morning I was working on it some more, and I've been working on it. I just got. I finally just got really angry at the book this morning. I feel like I'm just stuck. And now right now, honestly, I just want to throw it away and start over because I think it's a complete train wreck now. I'm, you know, maybe I'm. I keep telling myself, well, I'm probably overreacting. It's probably not that bad. It's probably a simple fix, but. And I actually wrote you this just huge email, and then I didn't want to put you through the pace, because it was one long. It was one paragraph that was probably a thousand words long. I'm like, I'm not going to do that to him. I'll just do it on the podcast. So here's where I'm stuck, because I'm rewriting these scenes, and I just feel like I'm polishing the brass on the Titanic. You know, it's looking nicer when you get close to it, but, you know, we're still sinking here. And the reason is, is because I think there's major.

Problems with. I don't even know what the book is about anymore, and maybe I'm too close to it or whatever. So let me just talk about where I'm at with it and what I think is wrong with it, and then you tell me what you think. So I feel like overall, it's super complicated. Like, the whole basis of the, like, people plugged in and the threshing and the factions and the Reaper, like, I don't even understand it anymore. And I don't understand what. Why the people are plugged in. And I can kind of come up with reasons, because then I'm like, well, that's how they're being kept down by the dictator or whatever. But I'm like, well, the dictator keep. You know, in most dictatorships, they keep the people pressed down, but they desperately need the people to, like, you know, grow crops or whatever or manufacture where this. They're not doing anything. So I feel like the whole kind of basis kind of unravels. So then I start kind of thrashing around about, like, okay, and this is when I've been trying to work out what the labyrinth is. And I'm like, is this about a school that she's trying to work her way through, or is it her trying to, like, undercut or get through this system? But then I'm like, well, what is the threshing even about? Because that keeps kind of changing in my mind. And I feel like I come up with this kind of elaborate reason why the threshing even has to exist that I can't really spell out in the book because it's too elaborate. And then I start thinking through, you know, so many of the books that we talk about in conjunction with my book and how simp the underlying idea is, right? So if we look at Matrix, the robots need the people to stay alive. It's that simple. If it's the Hunger Games, it's, you know, they use this game to keep the people suppressed. You know, if we look at Ender's Game. You know, they're training these kids to go into battle, and they desperately need them to do well when they go into battle and, you know, the end. Surprising. But it's exactly what they were trained to do. Same with, like, if you look at Harry Potter, you know, all of these ideas are very simple. Where mine is, like, I feel like it gets complex because I try to fix things that are broken from the beginning. So I'm just stuck because I don't really know what's driving the overarching pieces of the book. And so when I'm in a scene trying to write it again, I feel like I'm just kind of wandering in the woods, like, okay, I think this scene is better than the previous version of the scene. I think the whole beginning hook is way better than the first draft, but it's not going anywhere. I still don't know what the end of the book is. So, anyway, I feel like the whole foundation of the book is very shaky because it's not simple. It's not clear. It's not, you know, I can't stick it into one sentence. Okay, anyway.

All right, so what you've hit is what I think Joseph Campbell called, and I know David Mamet calls it this, and Steve Pressfield calls it this. What you've hit is what they call the belly of the beast of a creative effort. And the belly of the beast is when you are getting close to solving a lot of deep problems. And what happens when you get close is this intensive panic arises within the artist. I know this is going to sound strange, but this is a good sign that you're feeling this anxiety. Every artist wants to throw out their book at least four or five times as they're creating it. And they have very, very good reasons for doing that, because, you know, I think Steve Pressfield really talks about it in a really amazing way. When, you know, he was at the Story Grid seminar back in February, and he stood up and he said, look, there's two worlds. You know, there's the world that we live in every day, and then there's this world that we have no conception of. And he says, I have a feeling that there are intelligent forces in this world that we do not understand. And they are good forces. And they want us to bring in new consciousness, new ideas, new things. And they're constantly trying to get down into our heads, speak to us and help us. And a lot of times they're successful, but they only really want to work with people who are really working hard. They're not really interested in finding somebody off the street and whamming them with all this great insight because they don't think the person will do anything with it. They want people who sit at their desk and bust their butts day in and day out. So this is a great thing. Now, there's one big problem, that there's a force in between the spiritual force that none of us can understand. The muse, the collective unconscious, whatever you want to call it. There's a force in between that collective unconscious, muse and us. And that force is called resistance. And resistance has a lot of qualities, and it's got a lot of wonderful things about it. And the thing that it really, really resents is when an artist continues to work harder and harder and harder, and the spirits are starting to give them more and more information.

So what resistance does is it really rallies its forces and hammers down on the artist in a way that makes them want to quit. It will tell them, your ideas are stupid. They're too complex. And it's nothing like fill in the blanks. It's nothing like X, Y, or Z. You're never going to be as good as Tolkien. You're never going to be able to do the things that Suzanne Collins does. So you should really quit, because everything that you've been doing is leading up to a big fabrication of nothingness. Your book is. And your story is stupid. You don't even know what it means, do you?

Right?

And these are all the things that you just told me you're feeling right now. And you probably don't know this, but that's a good thing. And I know it's painful right now to experience those feelings, but that's a good thing. You've been working on this manuscript for two years, 100 episodes. You haven't quit. You haven't. You keep going back to it. Even this week, you wanted to talk about something else, but you keep going back to it. And that is what's going to get you through this hurdle. Now, that's really nice. Everything I just said is a really nice pep talk.

So let me give you the reasons why I'm saying that and why I think everything that you said earlier is not true. Okay? So the first thing is that we have to remember what genre you're writing in. Right? So we kind of cracked this a few months ago, but to me, and I'm just going to freewheel here, because I'm not going to put you under the gun so that you can second guess yourself what you're writing, it's in the genre of action.

It's an action story. Now, action stories revolve around one major issue. Do you know what that issue is?

Life and death.

Life and death. Survival, Right? So everything in an action story needs to fall along the lines of will they survive or won't they survive? Will Jesse make it through this labyrinth and survive or won't she? Will the faction survive or won't it? Will her brother rise from the dead or won't he? It all revolves around survival, life and death. Okay, so the genre you're using is action. Great. Understood. Now, one of the other genres that you're using is in the reality clover, and in the reality clover, you've chosen to write a fantasy. Now, fantasy has many, many connotations to people, but I'm going to use it as this fantasy being an alternative universe. What you are creating is a special world. And what's difficult for you is that you're doing a double whammy. You're not only having a special world, you're having a special world within the special world. So the special world that you've created is a dystopian future whereby things are happening where everybody has to be plugged into a computer, literally plugged into a computer, and they have to do things in another strange universe that we don't quite understand in order to keep order.

Now, you've constructed, and you are continuing to construct the rules and regulations of both of these universes. In fact, you're constructing myths, you're constructing the long stories that rule these universes. And guess what? You're not going to have all the answers all the time. When Tolkien was writing the Lord of the Rings, which took him 17 years, by the way, and it. And he had promised the book within a year after the Hobbit. So when he was writing the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which wasn't a trilogy, it was one long million word novel at first, he already had the Hobbit, right? He had already constructed the world of Middle Earth, and still it took him 17 years to figure out the Lord of the Rings. And the reason why it did is that all of the myths and ideas that he had started up in the Hobbit, he had to follow through on in the Lord of the Rings. So it all organically made sense.

So when he was writing the Hobbit, he could talk about elves, he could talk about orcs and goblins and dwarves and not really give you all that much information about them. If he had, no one would want to read the book because there would be no mystery to it. Instead, he had to trust his deep understanding of that universe, even though he didn't have all the answers all the time, so he could introduce brand new beings into this universe. Understanding that he had the capacity as a creative person and as someone who had constructed these worlds in his mind since he was a little boy, he had to trust within himself that he would have the capacity to make sense of it if it ever came to that.

So the reason why it works is that he had a deep trust in his myth and you are not having the trust in your own myth right now. And I'm sure Tolkien went through the same things when he was writing his stuff, and any writer does. So to answer your question about, well, we don't know why these people's heads are plugged in. We don't know what the factions all about. We don't know the backstory, we don't know the history. We don't know this and we don't know that. That is actually all working in your favor now because you are not writing a million word trilogy right now. What you're writing, for lack of a better description, you're writing the introductory novel to a larger story. You're getting the story to a place that will end in a very dramatic and ironic way that propel the reader hopefully into wanting to read the next story in this series. So the reader who's going to start reading your novel is not going to expect to get all of the answers.

Within 80,000 words of your universe. That's why they want to read the next note.

So when Tolkien was writing the Hobbit, he introduces, you know, these dwarves show up and this wizard, but he writes it as if. Yes, naturally, this is when Gandalf the wizard shows up. He doesn't apologize for it. He doesn't give you 19 pages about Gandalf's backstory. The only person he even references having a backstory is the crucial character of Gollum. And it's maybe a paragraph. So when you panic like this, don't worry so much about the construction of your fantasy world. And we don't know all the information yet that's actually working in your favor. Now to speak more to the global genre, I think you're on track. You're on track to. You've set up this life and death situation. It's obviously a very important thing that these kids are recruited to go and compete in this thing so that the powers that be can maintain their power. You've insinuated in numbers of ways that people are given credits for doing certain things which allow them certain privileges as long as they're still on this grid system that they have to go through in their minds. Now, the only thing that you could add here that would be helpful is sort of the. The Gandolfian level of necessary exposition at the right time. And I think you've even kind of solved that problem. And when you had 61 come back in the story, 61 knows where the bodies are buried in the Capitol. This is a guy that you introduced early on in the beginning, Hook, who was thrown into the number because he got kicked out of the Capitol. And the only reason why they brought him back to the Capitol was for him to train Jesse. So when he goes back to the Capitol, this is a guy who has a lot of institutional memory and he is going to be kind of pissed that he has to go back and spoon feed this kid through this threshing operation because he finds it completely ridiculous and absurd. So you can use 61 as sort of the guy who explains the way things are. Listen, kid, let me explain something to you about this situation here. Take advantage of Jesse's vulnerability and ignorance because she's a stand in for the reader. She's a stand in for the people who will be reading this novel. So whenever Jesse take opportunities, like we did with Bilbo Baggins in the Hobbit and Frodo in Lord of the Rings, when these guys are confused, they ask Gandalf, hey, man, what's going on? Who are these elves? Who. You know, what's going on? Where's this Dark Lord? I don't understand. What. What does this ring mean? This looks like a nice ring to me. What's the deal? And he explains to them, well, back in the. And we go on that ride because there's a character who's explaining something to another character, and his motivation is to tell her a certain kind of story to get her to do a certain kind of thing. When my kids ask me to tell them how to use the lawnmower, I explain it to them, but I explain it to them in a way that will make them want to cut the lawn. I don't want to cut the lawn.

Right, right, right.

So think of these characters like 61 and 83 and the President and all these other things as opportunities to drip in some of your mythology. Well, kid, you know how the factions came along, right? Oh, my God, you don't know that. You don't remember the Great War? You know I'm just making this up off the top of my head. But you can have them just drip in things that will land with the character and make her mature along a path. And when those moments arise, you should try and time them at the moments of. Of the hero's journey. And those sort of those eight stages within every novel, you know, a good. A good place to drip those in is when she's confused or is angry or whatever. It's bargaining or. No, you can't do it that way because of this. Now, the other thing that you might want to consider, what you've kind of hit here is I feel.

You'Re rewriting a scene and you're going, oh.

This is just, you know, scene number 17. That gets me from scene number 15 to scene number 19. And that's really not interesting. So your own personal brain is getting a little bored of the structure that you've been working on so intently, and resistance sees that and is jumping on you and saying, see, it's all stupid. Everything that you planned is done. All this structural work is baloney. If you were a real writer, all this stuff would come naturally to you and you wouldn't have to do this. But that's a lie. So just to get back to another suggestion is one of the elements in fantasy. I've been sort of doing a deep dive into fantasy recently, is that.

There'S what's called the impossible task. And it's usually the impossible task comes in a moment in the story when you hit a wall, when you've done this big hook. You've gotten the character into the. In the extraordinary world. They've, you know, had a taste of it, and now it seems as if things are starting to drag.

The notion of the impossible task is this. It's when Dorothy gets to Oz and she gets there and she threw all this real hard work. She finally gets an audience with the wizard. And the Wizard's like, get out of here. I want nothing to do with you. I don't care about your problem. And then she guilts him, right? She's like, well, I came all the way from Kansas, and I can't believe you're doing this. And so what does he do? He wants to get her out of Oz, right? So he gives her an impossible task. I'll tell you what, Dorothy, you go and you bring me the Wicked Witch of the West's broom, and then we'll talk. Then I'll give you everything you want. Go get it and come back. And guess what? Now she has a Task. She has an impossible task that she has to go and get before she's going to get what she wants. And the reader's like, oh, my God. How is she going to get the broom from the Wicked Witch of the West? That's impossible. The woman is incredible. You can't beat the Wicked Witch of the West. Oh, my God. I gotta keep reading. And the impossible task in the Lord of the Rings or let's take the Hobbit. The impossible task in the Hobbit is, oh, you have to go and steal all the treasure underneath the world's most dangerous dragon who lives inside a mountain that is so large that caverns and caverns and labyrinths and all kinds of passageways have been put there. And this. This dragon has destroyed an entire village, an entire city. Nobody lives there anymore. Everybody's afraid of this dragon. And the dragon sleeps on top of this treasure. Go get it. That's the impossible task for the Hobbit. Lord of the Rings. Here's the impossible task. Oh, you've got a. Get rid of this ring before the most evil force in the world who created the ring, by the way, gets his hands on it. Because once he gets his hands on it, then everything is lost. He's going to take over the world and everybody will be a slave. So all you have to do is take this ring and go into this mountain and dump it in a lava pit. Go ahead. It's an impossible task. And those things help drive fantasy novels, especially when you hit this sort of middle build wall. You know, Jesse already has an impossible task, but you need to reiterate it. You need to have people talk about it. You need her to think about it. Now, wait a minute. What am I supposed to do here? I'm supposed to. What's the goal here? She's going to ask these two guys that she was just assigned to, you know, part of her team. Well, what's the goal here? I know I'm new, but can you fill me in? Oh, it's simple. You have to beat every other team here so that you can compete against two other teams from other parts of the world. And whoever wins that battle gets all the food. And if you don't win, everybody starves. Get it? Oh, right. Okay. So I get it. And if I do that, then I can go home. You know, you have a completely questioning and asking. So you remind the reader what the impossible task is.

And so when she hits a wall and she goes in the second severing and freaks out, and she's like, Look, I'm done. I can't do it. I'm freaking out. They're going to come knock down the door. I'm going to be out of here. And then the magical moment happens when her brother reaches her and brings her out of that. And guess what? He's going to tell her. He's going to repeat the impossible task. Look, Jesse, you have to do this. Don't you understand? I can't be there all the time, but I will always try to be there for you.

So all of this is to culminate at the end of your novel in what Tolkien calls the EU Catastrophe. EU Catastrophe. What that essentially means in fantasy is that a catastrophic event is going to happen at the very, very end of the story. But. And everything's going to seem as if there's no way the hero is going to get out of it. No possible way. And somehow it's a good catastrophe. Somehow good rises from the ashes of the evil. And like in Lord of the Rings, I. I'm sure everybody's read it. Who's listening to this? You know, Frodo refuses to give up the ring, right? He's right at the entrance. All he has to do is throw the damn thing in the. He's made it. And he gets tempted. Finally, Frodo is corrupted by the ring. And then Gollum bites it off his finger and then falls into the pit, right? So Gollum saves the universe by his own greed. It's a great ironic ending, right? The guy who we keep wanting somebody to kill ends up saving the world.

And the ironic ending there was is so powerful because Frodo is not the prototypical hero, right? You've got. Tolkien was a genius. He came up with this idea like, it doesn't make any sense that Frodo would be able to throw that rein. This is the most evil thing ever created. The only way this is going to happen is by accident and by greed and Gollum doing that. It's perfectly in character for Gollum to do that. And when he falls, he almost doesn't matter to Gollum because he has his precious back and he's gonna, you know, rot in the pits of hell and the world is saved. So that's an example of Hugh Catastrophe. Also Hugh Catastrophe in the Hobbit, when again, Tolkien doesn't have Bilbo Baggins slay the dragon. You know, what a gutsy move. You know, everybody says, oh, I want to be innovative. I don't want to do the cliche thing. Well, guess who pulled that off. Brilliantly. Was Tolkien, right? Because every story before that, the hero always slays the dragon instead. He said, it doesn't make sense. Bilbo just. He can't do it. But what Bilbo can do is recognize the vulnerability of the dragon. So he can see where to kill the dragon, but he can't be the one to do it. And so his revelation travels through the birds to a real hero who pulls back his arrow and shoots the dragon in the perfect spot. The real hero is some human guy who's a great archer. But my only point is that everything that you've done so far is tracking perfectly and you are hitting a wall. And there comes a place where you have to say to yourself, you know what? Screw it. I'm just going to finish the thing. I'm going to finish the thing. I have to trust that all that structural work, all that thinking I did about genre is going to pay off. And the labyrinth that you've constructed is a unique labyrinth that the reader has not seen before. Or if they've seen elements of it before, you're going to twist them in ways that they haven't seen. So I hope this has given you fodder to keep moving forward and maybe some tools to quell all of your anxiety. Like, you know, just give 61 a speech, you know, telling some backstory so that people go, oh, that's why people plug or have their heads plugged in, because if they go out too long, they'll die from exposure to the elements. There's only a certain amount of crops that are available each year. And then maybe in book two or book three, you'll be like, hey, what if I play with that myth that all these people have known for all these years and expose it as a lie that there's actually more stuff? You know, there's actually tons of food. But they're denying it, people, because these power structures are in place because of X, Y and Z. I don't know. I'm making it up. All I'm saying is that you are the grand wizard of your storytelling, and you have to trust that the grand wizard will come up with the right myth, the right story, the right solution to all the problems. See, all these things that you're seeing as problems are elements that will keep readers reading. They want to know, right? They want to know.

Isn't it a problem that I don't know?

No, it's not. You'll discover it. You have to have faith that you do know. Because guess what?

That's not my specialty.

If you create something, a story element or arc or something that came from somewhere, you might not know personally where it came from. You might think like, oh, it just came to me. I don't know. But I believe what Steve believes. I believe that there are forces that none of us can understand and that they are helping you discover things in yourself that you can tell, only you can tell. So just trust that ideas that come to you that you, you don't really know where they came from, there is a deep explanation within yourself that will make those things real and valid. And the thing about Tolkien is that he was like a linguistic expert in the Middle Ages and Middle language. And he was a, you know, a professor at Oxford. He was a brilliant guy and he had deep, deep understanding the Middle Ages, especially in England. And one of the reasons why he created the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit is to give a real strong mythic structure to the Anglo Saxon world. So his ideas came from his deep research of his everyday, you know, life as a professor. And, you know, what do you do? You went to college and you graduated with a computer science degree. You were the guy who became computer guy. In companies when people would get in trouble, they would call you, you would come in and you would fix the problem. You have a deep knowledge and a deep fascination with digital landscapes, digital worlds, programming, artificial intelligence. These are things that you probably think that you threw away when you became a book guy, but they are not thrown away. Those are within you. So this world that you've constructed is not a coincidence. You didn't make it up. The answers to all of your questions are in you. You know, this is why an editor can never write somebody else's book. I can help lead you down the path and give you, you know, pointers, but only you know the landscape in your mind where how Jesse walks down the corridor, how Jesse, you know, has the plug stuck into her head, what she sees when she's on the other side. Because you've had these visions yourself and you are your own inner Steven Spielberg creating these worlds on the page. So because you don't know the answers to all the questions yet, you haven't plotted out the, the third book in this trilogy. But you know where you're going. You know how this is going to end. You know, Jesse is going to blow up the machine and it's going to be a great event. It's going to be a EU catastrophe. Just when it seems that she's going to be defeated, something is going to happen. She is going to overcome the forces of evil, and she is going to push down the digital tyranny by the end of the book. And it's going to raise all kinds of different questions at the end of the book. But at that point, she will have reached a maturation point and we will want to go on the journey. This is an experienced young woman. Now, I wonder how she's going to handle the next problem. So, any questions from you about any of this?

Yeah, I guess. So. Do I need to just. So part of me. So you're like, okay, well, one of your solutions is to have 61 explain something about the world, but I feel like lost in my own world right now. So, I mean, is. Do I need to keep trying to figure that stuff out or should I just keep rolling? I feel like if I don't figure that out, then I'm gonna just be kind of writing all this random stuff that isn't going anywhere.

No, this is what you do. I don't know where you are in the book, but intuitively you know there's a moment where you're starting to lose the reader. And it's in that moment where you need to say, okay, I get a bad feeling that people are losing the thread here and they're going to go, I don't get what's going on. So this is a good time to have Jesse freak out and say, hey, I don't know what's going on. Can somebody just explain to me again what we're doing? I mean, I've been in business meetings where somebody will say that everybody will have a big sigh of relief and they'll go, oh, my gosh, that's exactly what I was thinking. And then, then the boss has to go, okay, let's walk it back. You're right. Let's take it from the beginning. What's our goal here again? Oh, it's to increase traffic in our website. Okay, so how are we going to do that? Has that been proven? So you walk it back and you could have. So in these moments when you're starting to have this intuitive freak out, like people are losing the thread, have Jesse ask a very specific question. Why do. Why are you guys pumping me full of drugs? I don't understand why you have to pump me full of drugs. And then Alex will go, the reason why we have to pump you full of drugs is that the inside world of the digital landscape is so overpowering that your brain will think it's real. And when your brain thinks it's real, you might go into cardiac arrest. So what we do is we give you sedatives so that your heart doesn't go into cardiac arrest. Well, how do you know when my heart's going to go in the cardiac? Well, it's really funny, but you have this EKG that's attached to you, and when it starts bumping up and down really fast, then we know that you're going to go in the cardiac arrest. And that's when I give you the thing.

So you make it like, duh. You make it. You know, you make the. The point of the thing is for Alex to show Jesse that he knows what he's talking about. Meanwhile, that exposition where he's making her feel foolish by explaining to her how an EKG works and how, you know, you sedate somebody so that they don't have a heart attack. That act of choice, that's exposition, is ammunition. You're dropping in really important details to the reader, but you're doing it in an active way. One character is. Is showing their power over another and saying, you have to trust me. I'm an expert at this. So you might have ERNST say to 61, now, what are the teams again? I don't understand. What's this Euro division and what's the Russian division? And 61 can be like, look, idiot, you know, the threshing was founded 24 years ago, right, when everybody was starving. Well, this is why there's only so much food, right, smart guy? You get what I'm saying, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's funny.

And look at Lord of the Rings, you'll see. You'll see that all the time. Gandalf is always explaining something to somebody or, you know, the Elf King or Elrod or whatever. It's just these moments you have to say, okay, I'm losing my audience. Somebody has to freak out and ask what the hell's going on. These are what, you know, in the Hero's Journey, these are the heralds, you know, these are the people who are constantly asking, why are we doing this? What's that? That's why you need, like, multiple characters in fantasy, so that you can have one of these characters be the idiot who's always asking the stupid question.

Yeah, because it's funny. Where I stopped writing this morning was halfway through a scene where I need to do that, and you're saying, just keep going and trust that I'll have the answers when I need the answers.

Yeah. Say to yourself, what question? What is making me nervous here? Oh, it's because I Haven't explained how they entered the digital world. Oh, so let me have one of these characters Ask somebody else what's going on, and then I'll have them answer it either as a way to yield power or seed power or make friends or any active thing that one person does to another when they have information that they want. Think about the moments when you ask me a question that you don't understand, and I either give you the answer or I don't. Why do I give you the answer sometimes? And why don't I? Because, you know, I have motivations. I. And it's the same thing with fictional characters. Think about your fictional characters. What do they want? Why would they give this information? Would they withhold it? Would jesse get pissed? Would she then go ask somebody else? Think about the triangular relationships among people. It's always a power struggle. Everything is a power struggle. Somebody has power in a relationship. Somebody doesn't. How the person with power handles that, that power base is indicative of their character. So all this stuff that we're dealing with now in our national culture about men who are manipulating women because they have a power over them to get sexual favors Is endemic in all of life. So when somebody has power, how they yield or wield that power says what kind of person they are. So if you meet somebody, they have information that you don't have.

And they pretend that they don't know what you're talking about, you immediately we have a. Some. We both know somebody like this. I'm not going to, you know, say their name, but we both know somebody who's extremely intelligent, who has a great wealth of information, who has tried things and has been very successful, and they're very good at getting other people like you and I To spill our beans and give up all of our gold nuggets that we've, you know, taken years to earn and say, oh, well, this is the way you run a launch. You do x, y, and z and zis. And then here's the trick. You can't do it on that day. You have to do it on this day. And what she'll do is say, oh, my gosh, that's so thankful. I'm so dumb. I don't know anything. And then we'll ask a question like, well, how did you do your thing? Oh, I don't know. I just.

Yeah, yeah.

I just stumble along and do the best I can. I'm really kind of stupid. And we both know. Note to self. Don't give any more gold nuggets to that person because they're not going to share.

She has gold nuggets that she won't share with other people. And I'm in the business of sharing and she's not. So we shouldn't be in business together. God bless her. She can take the gold nuggets I've already given her and move on with her life. And, you know, that's the way some people operate. And some people are really successful externally using that method to get what they want. But you and I both know that you only get so many, so much happiness from external success. But that's a whole nother show.

So think of power relationships. When in doubt, in a scene between two people, three people, one person and a crowd, whatever, always ask yourself, who has the power?

Who? How are they handling that power? Are they using it for good or for ill? Are they lying? Are they manipulating? Why are they doing that? What is our character, who's in the inferior position, doing? You know, sometimes those people who have no power act the most aggressive. They get frightened. The way they deal with their fear, bite back. These are things to think about. When you're threatened by somebody because they have more power than you, do you threaten back or do you knuckle under or do you call them on it? You know, there's any number of tools that people do in everyday life. Why did a lot of women who were harassed, why didn't they say anything? Well, it's not because they weren't brave. It was because the entire system was corrupt. So for them to go out on a cliff by themselves was suicide. So they had to make a very practical decision that was probably very personally painful.

Until there's a momentum of, hey, that happened to you, too. Why don't we both come out together? Why don't we both say something? Why don't we both try and stop this? Those are all the things that go on in our everyday lives that we see on the news or we read about. Think about those in terms of power structures and how you can use and think about the decisions that people make in positions of power and positions of being powerless. Because that's what drives conflict and it's what drives turns and scenes. It's what drives character. It's everything. Everything is in that dynamic.

Okay, I think you've talked me off the ledge and back into the window for now.

Oh, good, good.

Okay, I'll take this and I'll just keep going and see if I can.

Keep going and see what I come up with.

Okay, good.

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