Listener Questions and More Rewrites

Hello, and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grohl, 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 Story Grid, the author of the book StoryGrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we first dive into some listener questions, and if you ever have questions for us, you can shoot them to us at our Twitter profile, which is StoryGrid, and we get to as many of those as we can. So we start with some listener questions, and then we dive into some more of rewriting of my scenes. I also want to stop here and just thank all of you for listening. This is our 50th episode. When Sean and I started doing this podcast, I only talked him into agreeing to do 10 episodes, and it just got so much response from you, and we were enjoying it, and so we decided to just keep going to see how long we wanted to do it.

And.

And we're at episode 50, and our listenership has only grown, and we're enjoying.

It more and more.

And so I just want to thank you for listening to it. This is why we do this, so we can share it with you. So a big thanks to you for listening and getting through 50 of these ginormous episodes. So, without any further ado, we're going to jump into this week's episode and get started.

So, Sean, I sent you the one scene, and we'll go over that in a few minutes. But we have gotten a couple questions from some Twitter followers, and for any of those listening, if you want to pitch us questions on Twitter, sometimes we'll throw those into the show. But there was a couple from Peter Michael that I thought would be good. I think they're probably questions. Other people I know, one of them in particular. I've wondered, too. So let's just start with this one. So could you share your thoughts on why some books sell spectacularly well, even though they're considered to be poorly written? So when I read that, the first thing I thought of was 50 shades of gray. Because if you go and read the reviews of 50 Shades of Gray, Gray, you will see like. Like all the top reviews. Say it's, like, horribly written, but yet, you know, it's one of the biggest sellers of the last few years. And then people would arguably say that about James Patterson because it's these books that are just churning out, and you don't you know, have to have an opinion on their writing. But just I think we can all agree that some books that sell really well are not written as well as other books. So why do you think they take off when others don't?

Well, I think there are two things that work at play here and one of them you can do something about and the other you really can't. Okay, so the first thing at play is the quality of the storytelling. So when I say the quality of the storytelling, I'm talking about all the things we talk about on Story Grit and the podcast. I'm talking about Valent shifts from scene to scene, compelling inciting incidents, great turning points in scenes that are unexpected, things that keep the reader turning pages because they want to find out what happens next. Now that is such a simple formula. You know, just make sure your reader wants to keep reading the pages that we often forget about that. And the way you do that is by offering extraordinarily compelling scene by scene work. And that doesn't mean that necessarily the language is, you know, Keats, you know, quality or David Foster Wallace intelligence or you know, any great literary master writer's cadence. But what it does mean is that there are clear and distinct movements in the scene and if not the scene, there is something compelling in the act or the inciting incident of the global complication of the entire story. So James Patterson has a real gift for very compelling inciting incidents and in generating suspense in that we don' know what's going to happen. And the character, the lead character usually doesn't know what's going to happen either. He does not deal so much in dramatic irony. I haven't obviously there's no way I could ever read everything that James Patterson has written I have read.

I don't think he could read everything.

But he, you know, I'm talking about his early stories that really made him a bestseller like Along Came a Spider. That book, I believe has some, some wild number of chapters which are scenes which I think it's 120 or 30 chapters and everybody at the time when I was in the, I was in the industry at the time and as an acquiring editor, the, the big, you know, the big talk was, geez, the guy, the guy has 10 word chapters. What's going on here? What, he's deconstructing the entire novel form. But for some reason I read the whole thing last night. That's the first thing. They're very good storytellers. They're not necessarily great line by line writers. So that is something we can control. Right? We can all learn how to be better storytellers. And in fact, that's what this entire podcast is about, is learning the craft and the form of story structure and constantly not settling for the first idea that pops into our head. So that's one reason why these books work so well, is that you just can't. You can't stop reading them. The second reason is something that speaks more, I think, to the 50 shades of gray phenomenon. And I might. I might dig myself some sort of hole, some social hole here by my theories, but I'm gonna do it anyway. Okay. Okay. Because why not? I think that our culture, meaning the global mishmash of everything that gets injected into our brains as we're walking down the street or on the Internet or watching television, has a great effect on what becomes the next big thing, what becomes popular. And if you look at sort of the mass psychology of a particular culture from a very, very big point of view, almost as if Martians landed on the planet and they were trying to figure out what's going on here. Why are these. Why do these people behave in the ways that they're behaving? I think you can say you can draw some conclusions. And one of the things over the past I'll just use as an example the rise of the legal thriller in the 1990s. The rise of the legal thriller coincided with a lot of, you know, the trial of the century, you know, the O.J. simpson trial, and a lot of real turmoil within a number of communities, and that continues today that really started to question the whole system of justice and criminality in our country. So people started to think about, well, geez, maybe the court systems aren't fair. Maybe there's such prejudice within the court systems that it's impossible to get a fair trial. And I think it's these underlying questions and experiences that people are having that drive them to a fictional story that explores those themes. So the legal thriller was about justice. It was about whether or not the criminal justice system works. And in many cases, all those thrillers that explored and showed the flaws and the hypocrisies of the criminal justice system were the ones that became the most popular. Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow. These are. These were primarily written by lawyers who were frustrated by the systems themselves. And they were writing probably to vent a lot of their own personal strife and anger about it. John Grisham Rose at this point, Robert Tannenbaum. There were, you know, book after book after book in the 90s was these legal thrillers that were just astounding. And then what happened is, I think they started to wear out the public's welcome. After OJ after the OJ Trial, it was sort of this moment of, oh, man, I don't want to deal with this stuff anymore. I can't figure it out. You know, that was sort of the general thing. So to extrapolate from that global theory, my global theory, that the cultural underpinnings of society really do, you know, they're reflected in the books that we find most compelling, the 50 shades of gray phenomenon, and in my opinion, is a reflection of the women's liberation movement in the 1970s. Women in the workplace, women getting more and more powerful, men losing their perspective of what it means to be a man anymore. When, you know, when I was growing up, I'm in my 50s now, when I was growing up, it was pretty clear what it took to be a man. You know, you had to be forceful, strong, you had to support your family. You had to do these things, this thing. And it was a very, very long list of things that were required of a man. But today, to become a man requires a lot of deep thought. The male roles and the female roles have shifted in ways that are completely different from historical. The historical record. So what you have here is a lot of male, female tension that's in the culture. I can speak for myself. I always get uncomfortable when I have to talk about this kind of stuff because I don't want to offend anybody. And, you know, this is one of the reasons why Mad Men, the television series, I think, was so popular because it reflected what it was before and that conflicting moment in the 1960s and early 70s where women in the workplace. And we're just saying, I'm not going to take this anymore. This is ridiculous. You guys don't know what you're talking about. I am just as valid as you are. I've got my own ideas. I'm thoughtful. So I know this is a long explanation, but for me, 50 shades of grey, it puts men and women in these old historical contextual roles where the man seems powerful at the beginning, the woman enjoys his power over her. It's a game, though. It's a game. And the movement of the story is about. I don't want to make it simple, but. But it's sort of taming the wild man who is the untamable beast in a way. So my idea about that is you can't. Nobody has any idea, right? You can't sit down and write A novel based upon what you think the culture is all about right now, you can try and maybe you could be close, who knows? But you can't as an artist be worrying so much about getting that perfect sweet spot of cultural movement to align with the planetary shifts of your novel so that it becomes successful. So my recommendation is of the two things that you can control, the one thing always I always recommend over the other is that concentrate on your story's form, dig deeply into all of the elements that make up your story and don't settle for the first thing. Challenge yourself, get better and better and better and let the culture sort of take care of itself.

Well, and that actually leads into the second question that came in from Peter. Could you share your thoughts on the significance or insignificance of a writer style that is their use of language? And this came up to me. I was talking with another writer friend of mine because I'm starting to have writers think that I know what I'm talking about because you and I do this podcast and so they start asking me my advice and I'm like, well, I think Sean would say in this case, blah, blah, blah. And so one of the things that I said was just the writer was kind of all worried about their form and their use of language and all this kind of stuff. And you know, I feel like, you know, with the books that I've read and the books that are popular, you know, so if you read on writing, Stephen King spends a spectacular amount of time talking about cutting out adverbs, but yet you read the Harry Potter series, which you know is one of the most popular series of our time, and she uses adverbs after almost everything. You know, he, he, he walked down the hall sneakily, you know, all of these kind of crazy like adverbs you've never heard before, she just shoves in there and it works. And so my thing is that language and the beauty of language or your style of writing is like a supplement to a killer story because the story is what drives it. And I'll forgive even, you know, in some self published books I've forgiven like major grammar mistakes that like are annoying because I just got to know what happens next. So that's kind of what my answer to a friend about that same thing. So I'm curious if you would agree with that, how much like writer style and use of language and that kind of stuff really matter versus just getting the story right.

Well, I think I would agree with you, Tim. I think the story, it's the beating Heart of the Creation and the language and that sort of thing. It's important. I'm not trying to belittle it or to say it's not important, but what's important about the language is that it be authentic, that it be an original voice, that it be sincere. And, you know, I remember as an editor at the major houses, I would use a phrase when I was pitching at the editorial board, and the phrase I would use is that the. The storytelling is sincere, the language is sincere. And what I would mean by that is when you read, say, the Da Vinci Code. Now, I'm not a great fan of the literary skills of the language in the Da Vinci Code, but what I will say, it's sincere. You don't feel like Dan Brown is trying to put on some sort of disguise to write his novel. It feels like here's somebody who is working hard, who is writing at his best voice with the best language. He is. He is comfortable with, and this is sincere. Whereas if you oftentimes what. What you'll find in publishing is that a very highly regarded literary artist, somebody who's given rave reviews by, you know, the New York Review of Books or whoever, they sometimes slum it, and they say, well, I always wanted to write a crime story, so I'm going to write a crime story. And here it is. And what you discover in those stories, even if they're technically and the form and the story is pretty solid, is that the language feels inauthentic. It feels as if somebody is putting on some kind of mask to pretend to be somebody that they're not. So language is a very important. It's the skin. You know, everybody has a heart, but everybody looks differently. And so the heart of your story is the form of story. The things that we talk about at the StoryGrid podcast, you know, your inciting incident, your progressive complications, your crisis, your climax and your resolution from scene to scene, from sequence to sequence, act to act, et cetera, et cetera. That is the beating heart of your work. Now, the skin and the. All the other things that comprise that living thing are made up of the language and your authenticity as a writer. So my point would be, if some of these great writers, now, there are people who can do both, right? And those are the people that we all just sort of fawn over, because when they write a great novel, I'm thinking of John Irving when he wrote the World According to Garp. Now, he's written a lot of terrific novels, but I think that novel was so remarkably interesting and Also filled with story innovations in a way that nobody had seen before. Plus, he was just a great wordsmith. And when you read the book, it's. It's out. You know, it's this fantastical, strange story that is believable, too. So when you can combine both, you really have something. But what I would say is grow into your voice as you're learning the form, right? So learn how to tell a great story. And as you tell more and more and you work on your scenes more and more, you will eventually find a sweet spot for your own personal writing. When you say, that sounds like me, that sentence. And followed by, if I analyze my own writing, I would see probably a long sentence and then a short sentence and then a longish and then a medium. And if I were to put it under some hedometer or computer, it might give me some sort of pattern that would sound like Sean Coyne. But I know it internally. And you know your voice internally. When you. You're hitting on all cylinders and you feel good about your scene, you. You say to yourself, maybe not really, but deep down you go, that's me. I feel good about that scene. And I'll put that scene in front of anybody, and if they have a problem with it, they just don't like the way I write. And that's okay with me. But that's me. That's my voice. And, yeah, I can't mimic Sean Coyne's voice because I'll never do it as well as him, but he'll never do me as well as me. So that's the trick in learning about language. I would say learn your craft first, learn the form first. And as you are doing the blue collar work necessary to do that, guess what's going to happen. You will be writing more and more and more and more, and eventually you're going to start feeling your original voice.

Okay, I like that answer.

Good.

So. Okay, so let's go ahead. So the reason I sent you this scene was. This is the one that we talked about the most. So if you go back and read the scenes that I posted with the last two episodes, this is the fourth scene because we cut the third scene. This is the one where Jesse and 83, where 83 is basically indoctrinating Jesse into this new world. But my original scene was like them sitting in a living room with coffee. And you said it needed action. And so that's what I tried to rewrite. And I sent you that this morning. And before I give how I felt about it, I want to get your feedback on it.

Well, the first thing I'll say is I think it's a very large step in the right direction. And the reason being is that it feels like we're watching two people do something interesting rather than watching two people have. Have a conversation. And that's because that's what's happening. And the other thing that it's doing is that you're just dumping so much exposition into this scene in a way that's organic. And when I say organic, what I mean by that is that we, the reader, are learning about the world in the same way that the protagonist is learning about the world. So putting the camera over Jesse's shoulder as she wakes up and we watch her put on these clothes and leave the compound and see all these bald headed people. It's very disturbing and strange. And in the meantime, you are teaching the reader about this universe. You're talking about this, this world that they are living in without saying it was a very hot day. And on this very hot day, a little girl. So you're through active movement of the two characters. The one character wakes up, the other who has a terrible hangover from a terrible experience being shamed, and she's like, you got to get up. We got to move, we got to move. We got to get you out of here. And I like it because it does feel literally like somebody has a hangover at the beginning. So all of this is to say that this is a very large step forward for. As opposed to the previous scene. How did you feel about it?

So one thing I loved about it is it was significantly longer without, I think being boring. So the original was 1200, 1300 words, something like that. I can't remember off the top, but this one was almost 2,000 words. And I didn't even realize it was that long until I was done. So most of my scenes, I'm like struggling to extend them out to the 1500 word mark. And most of them don't hit it where this felt like pretty natural to extend it that long. And it didn't feel like I was just like adding stuff in to extend it, which makes me feel good about if we've got to cut it, like cut pieces out of it. There's room to do that now, right? So that felt good to. It just felt good to write that long of a scene without trying to add stuff in. I felt like I couldn't figure out how to end the scene in a. You know, I was thinking, okay, she's, she's starting out Negative. And did I end it negative. So I feel like there wasn't a valiant shift, but I didn't. Couldn't figure out how to, like.

That's. That's very good. That's exactly the problem.

Okay, so I couldn't figure out. But it needed to start negative because I cut out the third scene. No, I need to start positive.

That's correct.

Oh, so if I had figured out a way to start positive, the rest of the scene would have worked.

Well, it does start positive. Let me just jump in here. It does start positive.

Well, so let me finish real quick.

Okay, sure.

That I could sense that something was off, and I, like, struggled at the end of the scene to end the scene in an appropriate way. And I couldn't figure out really what to do with it, so I just ended it how I did. And you all can go read it in the podcast notes that are listening. But. So there was that. The other thing was, I did have fun just kind of figuring out, like, you know, like, there's a couple points, you know, when she, like, puts on the goggles for the first time and then when she, like, forgets to put them on when she goes back outside, that, like, I'm explaining the world without explaining the world, you know, and so those points were kind of fun to, like, just drop those in. And I'm more and more feeling like, you know, well, the reader will figure out what's going on or make up something that works to go along with what I'm writing.

So that's a great example of, let me just bump in and I'll let you go on. No, no, that's.

That's about it on my end.

Well, that's a great example of showing and not telling. So a lot of people get confused when somebody says show, don't tell, and that's what that means. Have your character deal with the environment literally by putting on goggles rather than saying, the sun burst through the door in a way that was remarkably powerful, you know, because it's much more interesting to the reader because you. You're. If you look at this again, like being Steven Spielberg in your mind, you are explaining the movements of the story as you are witnessing them in your mind's eye. So when you're creating the scene, the way I would create this scene is think of a little girl lying in a bed at the beginning and slowly walking her out the door, putting on these clothes, putting on these goggles, etc. So that has literal movement in the scene that the reader can feel A progression of moving from one room to a new room to another area to this. So that works very well. Now let me explain the challenges here and I'll offer some solutions to the challenges too. But before I say that, I just want to say again, this scene is much better than the previous scene serving this purpose. Now, the previous scene, the value shift, moved from uninformed to informed. So Jesse at the beginning of the scene is uninformed, which is a negative, and it ends informed, which is a positive. Now that is sort of the same. That value is at. Is at stake here too. But what I'm suggesting to you is the value isn't strong enough to support this scene. Because when you move a scene from uninformed to informed as a means just to sort of get some exposition out, you face a problem that you are facing in this scene. And that is, it doesn't feel interesting after a while. There's no turning point. There's no big moment that we can pinpoint that says, oh my God, oh my God, what's going to happen next? And that's what you need at the end.

It just kind of petered out.

Yeah. Yeah, it kind of did.

Okay, so. Okay, so good.

You recognize that. So the way to deal with this is to say to yourself, how can I kill, you know, two birds with one stone? And you've done a nice kill of setting up the extraordinary world here. We're getting a feel for just how difficult the circumstances are in this world. Now the one, the other thing that you could do is explain the other side of the world. And what I mean by that is, okay, we have these numbered people who go and do all this dirty work during the day. And they service those who are locked, having. Having their brains locked into this, this game. And this game is so compelling and so interesting that they don't notice these numbered people at all. They're anonymous, they're. Jesse doesn't even remember seeing these numbered people when she was on the other side of the equation. Now, which brings up the question, what is it like for those people who are plugged into the game? And instead of trying to describe the whole kit and caboodle, what you want to do is set up, set up the transition from this very dark world to this utopian world, fake utopian world in the future, in. In the next act. So this is a very long winded way of saying that have a turning point that informs the reader about what it's like to be in the weird world. So as an example, what you could do is as Jesse is cleaning up the bedpan of the woman or the man, whichever one you want to pick, as somebody who's a newbie doing something, what happens is that you inadvertently do something wrong without knowing. You don't know all the rules yet. So Jesse could inadvertently pull the cord out of one of these people's heads, and then that would be an active moment that turns the scene. She actively, even though accidentally, she actively removes the cord, the Ethernet cable, if you will, that these people put in before they go to bed, before they go to sleep, so that they can live in this dream world. And then after she does that, something extraordinary has to happen. Something so shocking and strange that it really makes the reader flinch a little bit. So one of the things that I was thinking about for you is you might want to mimic a real life thing. And a real life thing is that is extraordinarily strange and weird is when people overdose on opiates. And when they overdose on opiates, what the police departments now have to do is they have to inject Narcan into their bloodstream as soon as possible so that it blocks the opiates and then their breathing can come back and they resuscitate. So if you ever saw the movie Pulp Fiction, there's that amazing scene when John Travolta sticks to the needle in Uma Thurman's heart to resuscitate her after she's OD'd on heroin. And she. She lets out this gasp. It's almost as if she's pulled out of a. You know, she's drowning and somebody pulls her out. So today, unfortunately, we have opiates that are far, far more addictive and horrifying than heroin. There's something called fentanyl, which is just this thing that's like hundred fifty times as powerful as heroin. So when. When these people who are ODing on fentanyl are given Narcan, what happens is that they have the withdrawal of losing the opiate rush in exponential form. So when they were awakened by the Narcan, they feel so horrible that they lash out when they wake up. So it's almost as if there are these. These zombies lying on the ground. They get the Narcan shot and then they attack whoever's just saved their life. So my thinking was, because you're building up this thing where you have these docile zombie, like people who are. Who are so out of it, they're lying on bed and they're going to the bathroom through, you know, intravenous tubes. And these poor women and numbered people have to empty their bedpans. And, and it seems that these are, these are like. And also you've set it up earlier before that they'll fall to the floor and won't even know it because their cords are still in it. So if Jesse pulls out the cord and one of these people go. Attacks her as if to kill her, then you, you escalate the stakes very quickly. You turn the scene from, oh, Jesse, we're indoctrinating you into the world. Isn't this difficult? It's going to be very hard, Jesse. But bang, this is life threatening. You make one mistake and you pull out one of these people's cords, they can kill you. And then we could have 83 rescue Jesse before, you know, she gets the ethernet cord back into the, into the head of the person and puts her back on the bed. And then bang, you end the scene and the character and the reader goes, oh, my God, what is going on in that virtual world? How attention addictive is that? That is some messed up thing going on. What's going to happen next? So that was a thought to take this away from a scene of being moving from informed or uninformed to inform to safe to, you know, vulnerable death. So you can move the value from, from being kind of a soft value to a very hard value. That's, that's action driven. That's my suggestion.

No, I, I like that because I could even use it as like, you know, if you don't log out of your computer the right way and just shut it down, everything can go haywire.

Right.

So like.

And it also explains the behavior of her mother. Right. We've seen her mother on stage once and we're going to see her shortly again. So when. And one of the things, one of the notes is like, mother seems a little over the top. But now when you, when you put this in the mother, we will be explaining the behavior of the mother through this. So there might be a certain kind of person who really gets locked into this and is a mess when they're not in the world. And then there are the other kind of people like Jesse and her father, who seem to be able to negotiate the dreamlike world and reality in a far better way.

Well, just like the vast majority of people that take drugs don't actually get addicted to them.

Right. But I will say that, I mean, I'll say this about the drug problem now is that the drugs now are so outrageously addictive that the fentanyl Thing is, you take that one time, you got a good shot at being addicted very quickly. So it's not like that whole. There used to be this thing when I was growing up in the set. Oh, he's experimenting with drugs. Well, it's not smoking a joint. That has no power in 1970. Today you smoke a joint, you're out, man. It's over. So as people. People keep experimenting, but the drugs are so strong now that you, you know, it's a. Don't experiment. You know, don't go near that stuff, really, seriously. No, I know you're not advocating it, I know that. But I'm just saying if you had any inclination to try something for the heck of it, that is a terrible, terrible mistake.

And so this comes back to. Okay, so I'm building the tension with kind of rolling through this. So if, if we. I basically remove the ending and replace it with something like this, it would fix the scene and the scene would work.

Well, the scene works now. It's just not very. It's kind of. If this is the third scene in your novel and it is, you're gonna want to keep the engine going, you know, keep, keep rattling, you know, ratcheting up the suspense so you know the scene works. But it's not your best scene. Right. It's not as good as it could be.

Okay.

And the way to fix a scene that's not as good as it can be is to really look at the value shift. What's at stake in this scene now what. What's at stake in the scene now is information. She doesn't have it at the beginning, she has it at the end. That's a change. That work? Is it great? No, it's not great. It's too soft, especially for your genre. Right.

Okay.

Now if this was a coming of age novel and somebody was going to work in a candy store and they learned how to use the cash register, that might work. But you're running a dystopian action thriller with a. So you, you need to abide the conventions of your genre. This isn't a soft coming of age story. This is a hard action thriller coming of age story. So when I noticed this, I said, how can we increase the value at stake so that it's consistent with what's come before and what's going to happen in the future without it being absolutely life threatening. And this is a way to do that. And it also kills two birds with one stone because you can, you can really set up exposition like you're, you're using exposition as ammunition, as Robert McKee likes to say. And it's a great piece of advice. The exposition that you're putting in this scene is setting up things that you're going to be able to really nail and hammer in your middle build because you're. You're. You're setting up this mystery for not only the reader, but Jesse. Like, Jesse doesn't know what she's in for. You know, she's getting deeper and deeper into the hole. And, you know, of course, 83 is going to save her from this zombie because we need her to, but, you know, she might get a nice little scratch on her cheek or something. You know, something that's going to hurt and it's going to need to heal over time so that, you know, she's learning. My gosh, maybe I should have taken that scholarship. What am I, nuts?

Right? And so now it also moves it.

This is also going to move a polarity shift from a negative to a positive instead of the positive to a negative. Because you want. Let me just. I have. I have your thing up on my computer. Let me just click the story grid spreadsheet from your beginning hook. Now the second scene moves from negative to positive. I thought it moved from. Go ahead.

Yeah, but it. I thought it was. Yeah, negative to positive.

Right. She saved at the end.

So this should be positive to negative.

Yes. And it does open positive because she is awoken by a maternal presence who's going to guide her through this help. So she's got. Her mentor shows up. That's a positive thing. But at the end it's negative because she almost gets killed.

So this brings up something I was wondering. So one of the writers I like is Brent Weeks. And he does this thing where, like almost every scene he ends with a cliffhanger. And we've talked about this before about how, like, you know, a scene is an inciting incident. Oh, man. Okay. I feel like I should get this right on a test now. Yeah, the inciting incident. The.

Oh, shit. The climax.

The middle part. The climax or the crisis? The climax in the.

He ends on climax instead of resolution, Right? Yeah.

And so. And then the resolution is the beginning of the next scene. So we leave off the resolution for the next scene of that storyline. So should that. To really end it on a negative, should it end with her being attacked, like, turning around and the lady has. The old lady's woken up and is on top of her, and then it ends. And then the next scene begins with. With the struggle in 83 saving her? Or should I finish out that thought process in this scene? Does that make sense, what I'm asking? Yeah.

Yeah, it absolutely does. Okay. My inclination is to. Is to end it on that cliffhanger.

Okay.

That's my. That's my gut reaction, because then it'll catapult the reader into chapter four. If you're gonna pull out sort of narrative velocity trick, you want to get people really so sucked in as quickly as possible. So, yeah, I would probably end it on the cliffhanger where the old lady's got a, you know, a razor blade and is about to, you know, cut her face or something. And. And then you open up the next scene with the. You're resolving scene three at the beginning of scene four. So, yeah, I think that's a good course of action. And the other thing is, once you know what you're doing, you can. You can change it. Right. So you, you know, this is how I create a cliffhanger. Should I put a cliffhanger in chapter three? Hmm. Yeah, I think I should because I ended chapter two with her being saved by these unknown numbered people. So I gave the resolution in chapter two. I came. Cliffhanger, chapter one. Remember, she just says no at the end.

Right.

So there was sort of a cliffhanger at the end of chapter one. End of chapter two was you had a full resolution there. And chapter three. Ending on a cliffhanger, I think is a good idea.

Okay. Which will automatically. So it'll end negative, which automatically. Because I have to finish that story. So it's going to be dangerous at first. It's going to automatically start negative again.

Yeah. I mean, again.

The valence shifts and the positive to negative stuff, they're not absolutes. And what I mean by that is that you interpret them by the value at stake. So even though the beginning of chapter four could start negatively with her fighting for her life or something, because it's the resolution of the previous scene, you can. Yeah. All I'm saying is that don't kill yourself over that. What?

Well, I just. You just said something that clicked, I think, for the first time about. You have to know what's it. What's changing? Like, what's at stake before you can do negative or positive. Yeah. So even though. Because I was thinking, well, you know, she's waking with this terrible headache in this really scary place. That's a negative beginning. But if we're looking at the value shift as safe to unsafe, then she does start positive because she's safe at the beginning and unsafe at the end.

That's exactly.

Okay, that's, you know, that's where I've always just struggled of, like I could have read that scene and interpreted it, that it was positive to negative, where you said it was negative to positive. And I didn't understand what I was missing. And so that was the missing piece for me was you have to know what's at stake first and then you can see whether or not it has shifted and where it shifted to.

Exactly, exactly. You want to look at it only.

Took me a year of you saying that to understand it.

It's not. These are, these are discussions, some would say arguments that I have with people sometimes about their interpretation of a particular text. And the thing is, it's a little squishy. So your evaluation of a scene and my evaluation of a scene might be different and we might be attracted to a different value than the other person. So you could be doing a story grid spreadsheet of your scene and you could move from informed or uninformed to informed as you would have in the first draft, in the second draft of the scene.

But I couldn't end it that same way because uninformed to informed, it would need to turn on a.

On a revelation piece of information. That was a very big revelation. And what you had was a lot of progressive little revelations that didn't add up to a big revelation. Now in, in the notes that I had written in the previous draft, I had written in the spreadsheet, something like, Jesse has one week to acclimate. And I remember telling you, if you're going to use uninformed to informed. Not in so many words, Tim. I'm not saying that I said that specifically. I was just talking about the scene globally. I said, you're gonna want to have some revelatory piece that turns the thing. So in that case, the way you would turn the scene would be to have 83 at the end of the scene, after they've emptied the bedpans, turn to Jesse and say, you do know, you only have one week. Get ready and bang. That would be the revelatory turning point of the scene. And as I was thinking of that, I thought it was cheesy. I thought it just, it seemed too forced for 83 to do this. So instead, what I'm recommending instead is to turn it on action and to raise the value incrementally from a kind of wishy washy informed or uninformed to inform to safe to vulnerable. So, yeah, I mean, the way to look at scenes is to say to yourself, what value is going to be, is going to serve me well in this scene and how do I turn the value? So when you're dealing with something, somebody being threatened physically, it's pretty easy to turn the value. You have somebody attack them. When you're dealing with somebody who's looking for information, like in a mystery novel, like a detective who's interviewing somebody. And this is what all detective crime fiction is built upon. The scene where the investigator is interviewing somebody. And at some point the somebody says something that gives a clue, gives the investigator a clue. It's a revelatory turning point. So those are moments that are throughout mystery crime fiction, which is softer, especially in amateur sleuths. But in action stories and thriller stories, you know, the primary thing at stake is life and death. Life and death. So when you think about that, you want to say to yourself, I want to have a lot of active scenes where life and death is at stake so that I pay off the promise to the readers that I've made by the COVID on my book. If you pick up a book and it looks like a thriller and it's all revelatory changes in the first three or four chapters, it. It's like, wow, geez, this is boring. I thought somebody was going to punch somebody. Where's the action here? So this is what to think about, you know, as you have chosen your genres, you know, whenever you get a little confused, you say to yourself, okay, what promise did I make the reader? Okay, I'm writing a thriller about a young girl who has to go on a mission to save her family. And it's a thriller and it's, it's dark. So how, how am I best going to keep that promise to readers? I'm going to turn scenes as best I can, as frequently as I can, with as much innovation as I can on the life and death value. And the other thing that you're accomplishing in this scene, remember this is a scene that I said to you, you need a scene that basically shows the ordinary world for this girl. Because when you move into the extraordinary world in the hero's journey sort of path in the middle build. We need the reader to know, have a firm grasp of where she came from. So I said, take her on a tour of the place so that, you know, the reader can learn. So this was a scene that we built as an expositional scene that is about informing the reader of this world.

Now that accomplished that.

I think it did. I mean, yeah, I think you've got, you've got the really strong foundation of a very interesting, active journey that this girl goes on that shows just how dark this world is. And in addition to that, to use a life and death stake at the very end. So what you're doing is you're. You're zigging the scene when the reader's expecting a Zach. So when they start reading the scene, Tim, they're going to say to themselves, oh, I get it. This is the scene where we walk through the ordinary world. Now, they're not going to know that. They're going to know that intuitively. Right. So they're going to expect you to do what you did and you did it. So the way to zag them when they're expecting a zig is to change the value at the end. Oh, you thought it was about this? No, this is about how dangerous these people are when you unplug them. Which is kind of an interesting thing when you. When you think about it, it. So they're gonna expect. Oh, this is the. What. What she has to do. Oh, my gosh. That zombie woman just almost killed her. What's gonna happen next? Okay, you get it. So you're.

Yeah, yeah.

You're paying off the promise that you made the reader. Oh, this is a thriller. Seriously, stick with me. And then they start scene three, and they're like, oh, this is that scene where they're gonna walk around town and see everything. Oh, my gosh. Oh, wait. Maybe this is a thriller. I gotta keep going.

Yeah. You know, I told you about that book Wayward Pineapple.

Mm. And I'm thinking I need.

I might go back and read the first few chapters, because it's all about waking up in this world that kind of looks familiar, but everything's wrong with it. And the author did a really good job of just, like, sucking you into wondering what the hell is going on.

Yeah.

Okay. So that gives me, you know, I can work on that scene. The end of that scene.

Oh.

So how did you feel about the length of it? Did you feel like it was too long or did it work if, again, these last. It turns the right way at the end?

I didn't feel one way or the other about it. I think it's perfectly fine. You have to remember that it's okay to have 900 word scenes. I mean, you and I were talking about Pride and Prejudice the other day. It opens with three scenes that are less than a thousand words, and you're sucked right in. You know, you can't help yourself. You want to know? Oh, my Gosh, there's a bachelor in town. Is he going to marry? Who's he going to marry?

Yeah, I, you know, I know that. But at the same time when I repeatedly, when like all I seem to be able to write is 900 word scenes, I start to get concerned.

Well, that's just because you're at the beginning of your craft. And I don't know any professional writer who says to themselves, oh, my scenes are too short if they. So being able to accomplish the five fundamentals of storytelling in one 900 word scene is something to be proud of. And trust me, it will not be difficult to go in and pad with, you know, all that stuff we were talking about earlier, the language stuff. And once you start the line by line editing is when you can start saying, oh, it seems like I'm Johnny one note, I'm doing 900 word scene. 900 word scene, 900. And you might say to yourself, these two scenes work. Maybe I can just jam them together into a single chapter with a good transitional sentence and then I could have a two scene chapter that the reader will feel as if they're getting a full body chapter. While, you know, there's tricks, there's tricks that you can do, but these are tricks that are, these are like these polishing and sanding before you put on the polyurethane on your, on your table. So you're, you're working with two by fours right now and you're putting in foundational pouring concrete on the foundation. So to be, to be very short with your scenes is perfectly fine and I encourage people to do that. So this is all to say don't, don't sweat short seams.

Okay. Okay, well, I'll keep moving on this rewrite of Beginning Hook and try not to think about that. It's only 25% of the book that's taking this long. So.

I'll keep rolling and we'll be back next week to go over some more scenes, I guess.

Okay, cool.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. For everything StoryGrid related, check out storygrid.com make sure you pick up a copy of the book and sign up for the newsletter so that you don't miss anything happening in the Story Grid universe. If you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any of the past 49 episodes, all of that can be found@storygrid.com podcast. If you would like to reach out to us, you can find us on Twitter at storygrid. That's where you can leave us your questions. Lastly, if you would like to support the show, you can do that by telling other authors about the show and by visiting us on itunes and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being part of our work here at Storygrid. We will see you next week.