Micro to Macro: Editing Your First Draft

Hello and welcome to the Story Grid 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 move from the micro to the macro. So one of the Sean's rules is if you're really concentrating on something small and you're stuck, you then go big and you look big at your story, and once you do that work, you can then go back small. And so I've been spending a couple weeks doing the spreadsheet where I'm going scene by scene through my book. And now we go back to macro and start talking about the full SCAP story grid and putting everything on one page. So it's another great way to look at a Story Grid tool. And we actually kick off the episode with a question from StoryGrid listener. So I think this is a great episode. As we continue diving in how to do the editing of your first draft. Let's get started. So, Sean, before we jump into my spreadsheet and, you know, getting through this first draft and everything, I was chatting with one of the guys from our workshop and he was, he had a question that I thought was a good question because I thought the question and. Which means if two of us have, lots of people have out there. So I don't know if it was last week or the week before, you kind of threw out this like, you know, something, you know, oh, we'll get to that on the seventh draft or something like that. And so this guy was like, you know, what does this mean for my writing career? The idea that I have to do like seven, eight, nine drafts on a book? Because you have, you know, these masterpieces that people are trying to create over a long period of time. And then you have these authors that have, you know, pretty good online followings and are literally writing a book a month and putting it out and making really good money selling their books. And I, it reminded me of, I heard that at R.L. stine's height, he was writing a book a month. And now, you know, these aren't hundred thousand word manuscripts, but still, a book a month is a book a month. And then you have the process we're going through where we're going to take a book through, you know, seven, eight, nine drafts before it's ready like, how do you think about those things? Like, as a writer who's like, okay, I want to make money on my writing. So this idea that I have to spend that amount of time to write a book, I don't know, I guess there's no. I don't have a specific question other than, like, how do you think about those kind of pressures on the writing?

Well, it's. It's true that somebody could tinker with their work until the end of time, and a lot of people use that as an excuse never to publish anything. So I'll. I'll say that right off the bat, there will come a time when you have to say, this is done, and I'm going to move on. Now, the people who write a book a month and, you know, are in it for a revenue stream, that's fine. But the reason why I'm in the business and why I care so much about story is that I don't see. I think each novel and each story has, you know, great potential. And I think it's not just about finishing the thing and putting it, you know, on sale to me. Each book, each project.

Comes to you for a reason. Whatever is circling around in your brain or inside of you, there are, I believe, that there are unfinished curiosities in each and every one of us. And a novel and a story is a great way to examine those things that bring you personal joy or turmoil. So my process and the storygrid process is a process of examining the story to help us discover the things that we really want to say. People write stories for a reason. Yes, they write them to entertain people. Of course, they have to be entertaining or nobody will read the thing. But as I've said this a million times on the podcast, genre stories are really, really important. And the necessity of communicating the global universal truths that we all hold dear and what hold our society together, it's really important to do that. So the more work you do on each story that you create, the more you're going to be better at actually discovering what you want to say. And then once you know what you want to say, then communicating that to an audience through storygrid strategies will become better and better and better. Now, I'm not doing. When I edit Steven Pressfield's stuff, I don't go through spreadsheets and I don't go through the fool's cap stuff to the degree that I'm going to do with you. I usually send him like a 10 or 12 page letter that talks about the genres that he's choosing whether or not he's abided obligatory scenes and conventions. He usually does. And if he hasn't, it's just a technicality. Oh, you forgot to throw in some red herrings here. Something like that. But what those memos are really about are helping Steve, helping the writer hone his controlling idea. What is it about this novel, about this story that compelled him to take a year of his life to write it? Because that's an interesting question. And if you can think about that question, you become a better writer. So, yeah, plenty of people just try and, you know, do this for financial gain, and that's totally fine. But what I'm in it for is exploring. Everybody has something that they want to say. Everybody says to me when they meet me, oh, I've got a book. Oh, I've got this amazing story, and, you know, I really need to sit down and write it. And so everybody has a story to tell. It's. So finding the ways to tell it the best possible way and really getting into the details are going to make you not only a better writer, but a better person. Because when you have, like we were talking earlier, before we got on, on the podcast, something, you know, you were in a bad mood the other day, and you had to sit down and talk to your wife about it, and you had to pick at what your bad mood was about. But once you unearthed it, then you were released of the tension, and you're like, oh, okay, now I know why I was snapping at my kids for no reason. It wasn't about my kids. It was because of that. And when you're a writer, that's exactly what you do in your story. So there are parts in your story that are going to be a problem for you, and those are opportunities to be able to examine what it is that you really want to say and how well you're saying it. And so that's. That's the writing craft. The writing craft is also a form of, for lack of a better word, self therapy. You allow yourself to examine things about you externally so you can say, oh, this is just my novel. This isn't really about me. This is about this girl who, you know, has to go to this thing. So you. It's like you anthropomorphize your internal angst through your characters. So when you're picking apart their problems, you're actually helping yourself. And that's why I think so many writers, they say, oh, I'm going to quit writing. I've had enough. Stephen King has retired 20 times. But he keeps doing it. He keeps doing it. He finds new projects that he has to do because it helps him. It helps him be a better person because he has to examine what it is he's trying to say, what is bothering him inside that makes him externalize his frustrations and anxieties into stories. So yeah, sure, you know, write a book a month, I don't care. As long as you're thinking about why you chose to write that particular story, what's interesting about it? How can you make it better? So that's my answer.

All right, sounds good. So looking at, and oh, were you serious, like when you say the seventh draft, like what am I doing on the seventh draft? Surely not going scene by scene and, you know, coming up with 157 different problems with it.

No, seventh, eighth, ninth draft. Those are, those are moments when you look at the end of this big picture, looking at everything from the micro and the macro point of view, you're going to have a very long list of to do's, so you're not going to be able to sit down and do every single one in every single draft. Right?

Okay.

Because you'll go crazy.

So what you're going to do and we'll get into this later and I think in this episode is we're going to find the big problems first and then we're going to have a list of all the little, tiny little details. And the reason why I had you do all the little tiny details now is because you need to be intimately familiar with each and every scene that you've written and you need to brainstorm each scene and say to yourself, what can I do here? How's this working out for me? And then when we go on to the larger problems in the story, and they're not massive problems because we worked so hard on this first draft, but when we do get to them, then all those little things will be percolating and you'll be able to solve a lot of problems with, you know, one draft. But the seventh and eighth draft are usually you're going through it, you know, systematically to winnow away your big to do list. So the seventh draft might be 20 things on your to do list. The final couple of drafts are just going to be language drafts, those line by line writing things that you'll say, yes, that's, that's kind of rickety, that sentence. I need to tweak that a little bit. You might think of image systems in those drafts. Meaning do you want to use imagery, mental Imagery in a way that will consistently remind the reader of a particular dilemma. For example, in the movie Chinatown, water is a major image system. Too much water, lack of water. The whole plot is about privatization of the water supply. And so when Robert Towne was writing the screenplay, probably in his later draft, he said to himself, how can I put in more things about water in here so that, you know, I can get. Immerse the reader in a particular sensibility so that it returns and you know, the guy's murdered in water, the glasses are in water, everybody's talking about water all the time in the movie. And it's, it's great when you look at it for the 75th viewing, which I've seen that movie so many times that you start to pick up all these little bits. And the image system is something that you might want to do in a later draft. So when I say 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 drafts, those are systematic things, you're not going to feel like, oh, I'm so exhausted, this is my 11th draft. Instead you're going to say, oh my God, I can't wait to go to draft 11. Because then I can put all those ideas that I had on my to do list and in an image system, blah, blah, blah, and then you'll go through it and you go, here's a great place to insert something. Here's. And I see in your notes from your spreadsheet, you've made little bits of notes, like, maybe I could put this here, maybe I could put that there. What about this? How am I going to do that? And all those little bits and pieces will add up and help you as you're going through the, the editing process. Believe it or not, this is actually fun. This is not the painstaking, oh my gosh, should I use a four syllable word or a two? You know, it's not like that. This is actually the fun part. This is when you get to chip away at your statue and polish and sand and all that stuff. So don't get so overwhelmed by draft 11, you probably do end up doing these drafts in maybe a week. You know, you might be able to fly through the book in a week on one of those drafts.

Okay, so did you get a chance? So you looked through the notes on the spreadsheet?

I did, and I think they're spot on. They're exactly what you need to do. The point of the spreadsheet and the to do list at this stage is to, you know, write down all your thoughts. How can I tweak this scene? What do I need to do here? And you, you know, for each one of your scenes, you have like three to four notes, sometimes five. And this is, this document is going to serve you, you know, immeasurably for, you know, for the next drafts. So the other really important thing is, and I know you haven't done this, is not to, you know, once you have this, this one micro spreadsheet done, not, not say, oh, why don't I just tackle these problems now? I'll do another draft and I'll knock these things out, and then I can concentrate on my next editorial thing. And again, I'm going to recommend that you never, ever do that, because what you want to do is take the small scale stuff and we'll talk about the large scale stuff today. And then there are about. There are about five different ways of analyzing your story that you're going to compile to do lists for. And this is the first one. And it's, it's a real bear because it makes you really get detailed. And the reason why you should do the detailed one first. Now, here's a caveat for what I'm saying. What I'm teaching you, Tim, is how to edit yourself. So the way I do it when I get a manuscript is different than the way I'm teaching you to edit yourself. Because. And this is, this is the thing. When you're editing somebody else's work, it's important for you to diagnose whether or not they have a working story. You have to diagnose if they have a really if, like maybe they don't have an arm or they're missing toes or their eyesight. I'm trying to give an analogy here. It's like triage for a doctor. You have to see if this thing is alive first. And if it's not alive, then you have to pinpoint where the cancer is or where you know the accident was. So the reverse of that is when you're editing yourself not to panic immediately. And if you find a big problem immediately, what you'll end up doing is just so obsessively focusing on that big problem that you lose the force, you know, for the trees. So that's why I recommend for writers, your first editing process is to go very micro so that you can have all these tiny little problems that aren't so dramatically upsetting. You can pinpoint those first before you move on to the bigger problems. And when you do go to the bigger problems, your identification of all the little ones will help you solve the Big ones. But if you just go to the big ones first, you might panic and throw your manuscript away. Because you, you will go like, I'll never be able to fix that. But if you have all the little micro problems and you're very familiar with every single scene, then a lot of those micro problems can be solved and help you fix a big one. I know I'm talking in very unspecific terms, but I talk about this a lot. Being able to shift focus from narrow focus to global focus is an extraordinary skill. And whenever you get into a place where you're panicking over your focus, if you're narrowly focusing and you're panicked over it, you know, I always recommend go to a global, you know, move your. Move your field of vision away from the micro because you're obsessing and vice versa. So the reason why you did this, you know, massive micro spreadsheet first was so that it can help you deal with challenges that are larger in the next. The next stage of editing for you and the next stage of editing. And I think, you know, do you have any questions about the spreadsheet? No.

I felt like, because I had. I had several scenes done last week when we talked about it. So I felt like I was on the right track with, with my notes and everything. And I ended up with 157 notes or 156 notes. And I felt like it was fun to go back through the novel because some of these scenes I hadn't read since the fall. And then it was interesting to see how my writing even changed over that time. But no, I think it was good. It was a couple things. Like there were scenes that I knew didn't work. So I'm like, I don't really feel like thinking through the value shift and polarity shift and turning point when I already, you know, they're going to get cut. So I would just like leave that blank. And, you know, there were some points where I couldn't really figure out what the turning point was. So I just put question marks next to it when I filled it out. And then I did. I did have a lot of fun brainstorming. And I would actually go back and you know, like, right towards the end of the book, I thought of something that I could do in the first scene. So I went back up and added something to that. But yeah, I'm not sure what to do with all these notes now. So I have all these notes, all this brainstorming. I've got the first, you know, half dozen Columns in the spreadsheet, filled out for all the scenes. And now I don't know what to do next.

Oh, okay. Well, it's like when you go to the doctor and they take blood and they send it away to the lab. They don't just check your cholesterol, right.

They check, you know, your liver function. They check so many different things. How much, you know, ldl, low density, lipo, whatever. And so when you get the results of your blood test back, you get like nine different categories of analysis. And that's the process we're in now. So right now you've done one category of analysis. So the next category of analysis is to do a fool's cap global story grid for your novel.

Okay.

And to do it exactly the way you would if you were planning the novel. So, you know, you would start by defining your genres. Right?

Okay.

So, you know, for everybody who's familiar, who is not familiar with the full scalp story glit, you can always go to storygrid.com and download one of these things. So let's just walk. Let's start walking through it. Okay. And you. Okay, because you were. You're editing the book now. I don't want you to have any preconceived notions about the answers to these. So, all right, so the first thing you want to fill out is what's your global genre? So that means what is the. The genre that will be on the COVID of the book? How will you market this book? What will you say when people say, what kind of story is it?

So are we talking about the, like, the Five Leaf Clover we're talking about?

Yeah, what we're talking about is the external, internal, and global. See, every novel has a global genre. What I mean by that is To Kill a Mockingbird is a global maturation story. It's a coming of age novel. But there's also a legal thriller in there. But the legal thriller is not the global genre of To Kill a Mockingbird. The maturation coming of age novel is. So if I were to do a story grid foolscap page for To Kill a Mockingbird, the global genre is coming of age maturation now.

So you have on the global story grid sheet, external and internal genres. You don't have global on here.

I do. I do on. I put in the global genre about, I don't know, seven or eight months ago.

Okay.

And the reason why I did do that is that everybody gets confused. And. And the reason why I'm saying global is the. It's the one that everybody says the book is or the story is, it's the dominant genre. It's like in genetics, there's blue eyed gene and there's brown eyed gene, and the brown is a capital B and the blue is a lowercase B. And that's because brown and a big B and a little B gives you brown eyes. So you have to have two recessive genes to get blue eyes. So the brown is the dominant, you know, gene in eye color. In stories, some, some stories only have one genre. They're only external, and those are usually action stories. James Bond stories, classically, except for the last couple of movies, only have external action genre. But your novel has a bunch of genres inside of it. So if I were to say to you, Tim, of all the genres that are in your book, what's the dominant one? What would you say?

Coming of age or thriller? I don't know.

I thought you would like the coming of age answer, so that's why I said it.

Oh, okay, okay. No, your book is not coming of age. It is coming of age. Yes, it is, but the global genre. You're not going to be selling this book as a coming of age novel, right? Because when you say coming of age, we think of Stand By Me, we think of To Kill a Mockingbird, we think of a smallish story. When I say smallish, I mean, it doesn't have, you know, action scenes. It's about like Stand By Me is a great short story by Stephen King, which I don't. That was the movie title. I maybe I think the Body was the name of the short story. It's a story. These, these kids in Maine who go see a dead body and the whole thing is about them, you know, walking to see this dead body. So it's not a big canvas, bombs exploding kind of thing. It's a coming of age story about friendship and honoring the dead. Anyway, so that story would be a coming of age story. So when we traditionally think of coming of age, Brooklyn, that's another coming of age story about a young woman who leaves Ireland to come to United States. So when we think of coming of age, we think of heartfelt movement from one worldview from naivete to maturity, which is recognizing that, you know, life isn't black and white and that there are paradoxes in the world. So your novel is a thriller. It's a. It's a post apocalyptic thriller. And you could. I think that's probably the best description of it.

Okay, now you want to throw young adult in there.

Yeah, you could, but that's more Of a marketing thing.

I think that's what I'm struggling with is like. Because like I asked about sci fi a couple weeks ago and you're like, well, that's the setting that you put a story into. Yeah, it's like, okay, but that would be. If you're talking about the. But to me, the COVID is the marketing. Right?

Yeah.

And you would do a different cover for a young adult story than you would, you know, an adult thriller. Right. If you.

Well, what about Twilight? I don't want to get into a discussion about marketing, but I think the covers for young adult thrillers are often so short sighted. Like the Hunger Games covers were graphic in nature. What I don't like about young adult thrillers in their marketing covers is that they, they usually feature a young adult on the COVID.

And I think that that dumbs them down to the point where certain readers are attracted to that, but a lot of readers aren't. And I think you alienate more people than you attract by having imagery of young adults in danger on the COVID So the young adult thing is probably important to put on your global genre because there are some conventions in young adult literature that you need to abide. So let's put down young adult post apocalyptic thriller as your global genre and basically thriller. Right. It's a thriller. All the other stuff is descriptive in that. It, it says setting and marketing element. But if you had to boil it down to one word, it would be thriller. Okay, all right. So the external. Now just moving down the page, the external genre is thriller. Right?

Right. And then value at stake is what? Life and death.

Right.

Or life.

Now here's an important part. One of the conventions of thriller is that it goes to what Robert McKee calls the negation of the negation, which means it moves from life to unconsciousness, to the possibility of death to the negation of negation, which is the fate worse than death. Damnation. So I would write that down under the value shift. So it moves from life to unconsciousness to death to fate worse than death.

Okay.

Now the reason why we're writing this down is to remind us that we need to analyze our story with this piece of paper in mind and see and pinpoint exactly where in the story we've abided the conventions of our genres.

Right, Right.

Okay.

Like I have to. Yeah. I start immediately wondering if I pushed it far enough as far as fate worse than death.

Well, you're absolutely in the realm, but you're going to have to tweak it. Right. You're going to have to make it more clear, you're going to have to clarify it for the reader through some moment in the story where a crisis arises, where it's very crystal clear that if she does not, if she chooses to not move forward, she will damn herself. The fate worse than death is walking around damned knowing that you, you chose selfish interests over the greater good. And usually, just as a side note here, redemption stories are about people who are living with damnation, who redeem themselves, who overcome their darkness. Okay, the next line is the internal genre. What's the internal genre?

Coming of age.

Yes, it is. I would use the.

The phrase worldview, which is the internal genre. The worldview maturation. So the internal genre is worldview. The sub genre is maturation plot. And how does the internal value in a maturation plot move?

Oh, I know this one. I can't remember. It's like coming from realizing the world's not black and white to their shades of gray. It's. Yeah, I don't remember off the top of my head.

Okay. It's naivete masked. Now the negation of. The negation of the maturation plot is when somebody behaves as if they know everything, when they really don't know anything. So it's naivete masked by sophistication. So for example, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett acts as if she's just got, she's got the world figured out right at the beginning of the novel. She, you know, she knows that rich people are idiots and that they're all silly and that the only good people are country folk who are idiosyncratic and fun loving and all that good stuff. So she pretends and she's well read. She's. She can talk better than anybody else in town. Her father thinks that she's just the brightest thing in the world. So she's naive, but she masks her naivete with its sophistication. So what characters start out as in coming of age stories is that they see the world in a very, very distinct way and, and they think they've got it all figured out. Now Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird is five years old and she sees the world very clearly as she doesn't understand why she can't make fun of somebody. She gets into fights because her worldview is that of a five year old child, which is only within the confines of her neighborhood does she really fully understand anything? So when she goes to school, she doesn't really. She can't understand the notion that there's another child who's Even poorer than she is. So she kind of makes fun of him inadvertently. No, she doesn't make fun of him. She gets in a fight with him because he gets her in trouble in class. Anyway, we're not analyzing To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm just trying to give you an example. So it's naivetave masked by sophistication. And sophistication is another word for knowing. You know, like a. Know it all. To be sophisticated. They pretend as if they know it all, so they're pretending to be sophisticated. And Jesse seems to have that personality at the beginning, too. She knows what's good for her and what's not good for her, and she's not gonna listen to anybody else. Okay, so that's at the very bottom of the negative. Then it moves up to naivete, which means they recognize that they're not lying to themselves anymore. They understand that they have a lot to learn. In your novel, when Jessie freaks out in the second severing, you know, thing, that's an indication that she's reached a place where she understands that she doesn't know everything. And it's overwhelming. She's naive. She doesn't understand how it's all working. The next one is uncertainty. And the uncertainty means that they are deliberating in the world without a clear understanding. They have to, you know, it's a way of looking at this is through the Kubler Ross, you know, eight stages of dealing with. With death and grief and change. And lastly, the goal is maturation or sophistication, meaning that you can understand that there are paradoxes in the world, that there's a goodness that comes from tyranny, not a goodness. Order and tyranny. Tyranny brings some. Some level of order. Order, because there's such strict control mechanisms. But tyranny means that the rules change depending upon who's in charge. So that is wrong. And if you had to categorize as good or bad, that's bad. But the order. People aren't living in chaos. That's kind of good. So it can be both. It's ironic. It can be negative and positive. And maturation is the process of understanding that you can have two opposing ideas in your head, and they both can be true. Okay, all right. You can see why it's important to go through this stuff because you have to remind yourself, what's the goal of these genres? What. You know, what. Where do I need the reader to identify this person on a particular value scale?

Right. So, like. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

No, I was just going to move on to the obligatory scenes and conventions. Okay, so the next line on the fool's cap, and this is the top of the page before we even get into the beginning hook, middle build and ending payoff. The next line is obligatory scenes and conventions. And what this, this section is for is to literally list what thriller and coming of age stories have in them that must be on the page, what things you have to deliver to the audience, what they're going to expect from those genres when they sit down to read your story. So we need to list the obligatory scenes and conventions of the thriller and of the worldview maturation plot. Now we are going to. The next thing after this is going to be exploring because you also have a fantasy element in the story, and fantasy elements are best tracked by looking at the hero's journey. And there are like, I'd say like 12 little bits and pieces of the hero's journey that, that we'll look at in the next iteration of the editing process. So let's just list the obligatory scenes and conventions of the thriller here because that is your global genre and it's the thing that really, really must be in there. Secondary genres, while they're extraordinarily important, you can often get away with not having everything in there. And things can happen off stage in a secondary genre that can be referred to that don't have to be on the page. But for the global genre, you really need to have the obligatory scenes and conventions on the page in the scenes themselves are there.

We talked about this, we've talked about this with like thrillers and action stories that have love scene, that have love stories. You know, the first kiss doesn't have to be on the page.

Right.

You know, so that's an obligatory scene of the love story. But since it's a secondary genre, it's not important that every single obligatory scene happen on the page.

Exactly. Now, just just as a side note, a great solution to that is to combine conventions and obligatory scenes into one mishmash. And what comes to mind is Guardians of the Galaxy, the first one, when they have the first kiss, as you know, they're going through a really intense action scene. So the first kiss is sort of a joke and it's part. So they deliver two conventions with one scene at the same time, which is a really good idea. Okay, so let me dig up my Silence of the Lambs foolscap page. Should have that.

Well, I've got.

I've got the chapter 31 from StoryGrid up here. Where you have conventions and obligatory scenes for the thriller.

Oh, great. So why don't you just read them all?

See, this is where I had this whole plan where you were going to ask me and I was going to say them like I just knew them.

And just totally blow your mind. Okay, so an inciting crime is the first one. A MacGuffin is the second one. Red herrings is the third one. A speech in praise of the villain is the fourth one. The fifth one is the stakes must become personal for the hero. If he fails to stop the villain, he will suffer severe consequences. The hero must become the victim. Number six is there must be a hero at the mercy of a villain scene. And then number seven is false ending. There must be two endings. And it was interesting, I thought that because I rewatched Guardians of the Galaxy this past weekend, getting ready to watch the sequel, and they had that false ending and then the ending. So. So those are the conventions and obligatory scenes of the thriller.

Okay, so let's go through them one by one and just review what they mean. So an inciting crime is the first one, Right?

Right.

And do. Do you have that in your book?

Well, can it be the hero doing the crime?

Sure.

Then, yeah, that happens in the first scene when she's stealing from the people that are plugged in.

Good. Okay, what's the next one? MacGuffin.

Yes.

So what's.

I don't remember. What MacGuffin is that? Is that. Is that the thing that the hero wants or it's the thing that they. It's just the thing that somebody wants that drives their action.

It's the thing that the villain wants.

Okay, so the villain wants to win the threshing. And. But in the beginning hook of the book, the villain wants Jesse to go to the Capitol.

Well, I think they're both the same. The villain needs Jesse to escape. Right. The villain escape. Escape, yeah.

So why do. What do you mean, escape?

Because the villain is Randy. Right. Hello?

Yeah, I'm thinking. Sorry, you gotta. Gotta give me time to think, I guess. I was thinking the villain is Randy. I was thinking of Marcus as the villain because that's who we're setting up as the villain.

Well, yeah, yeah, that's. That's fine. But you're doing. We're doing a switch Show In Act 2, though, in the middle build, where Marcus is just a tool that Randy has manipulated in order to. To devise his own escape.

Right. So Randy wants Jesse in the Capitol. I mean, that's what he needs. He needs her in the Training?

Yeah. He needs her to be in the threshing so that he can escape his captivity. He's being held captive by Marcus. He convinces Marcus that the only one who can win the threshing is his sister. So the MacGuffin is. The MacGuffin is that Randy wants freedom, and he's going to use Jesse to get it.

Okay.

Okay. So what's the next one?

Red herrings.

Red herrings. Now what. What's a red herring?

You tell me.

They are misdirections.

So a red herring in a crime story. Now, thrillers evolved as a combination of action, horror, and crime. So we have a little smattering of, you know, conventions and obligatory scenes from those three genres. But I'll stop there. It's in the original story grid book, but red herrings are usually a crime crime convention. And they're. They're just misdirections. So you want, like, if the investigator is constantly finding the right clue and drawing the right conclusion, it's boring.

So red herring is when the investigator makes a mistake based upon a clue. He misreads it or she misreads it or whatever. Or something seems like something, and it's really something else. So a red herring, for example, in your novel, Marcus being the ultimate evil is a bit. Is a red herring because Randy is actually the one who's been. Who drives the action.

Yeah. One of the things I put in my notes, I didn't call them red herrings. I called them mystery boxes. I went back. I remember J.J. abrams talking about this. So I went back and rewatched his TED Talk, and he talks about how he creates. He constantly creates these things, throws these things in his stories that make you want to figure out the. Figure out the clue. So it's like in Lost, the polar bear showing up on the island as a mystery box, which I hated Lost, but. So I realized going through my book, there's not enough mystery, that there's not enough things that she's. That you see that you don't know what it is. So, like, I was thinking of things like in this case, a red herring could be, you know, when as is first showing her around the Capitol, there's like a door that you're not allowed to go behind, and she decides down the road that that must be where Randy is. And so she decides she wants to get behind that door, but that's not really where Randy is. Like that what you're talking about?

Yeah.

Okay. So I would say I have, I guess, one, but no other ones come to mind.

Right. So you're going to want to make a note. You're going to want to say, I need. Now, in the Silence of the Lamb story grid, I don't know if I've posted my full thing anyway, at the very, very bottom of the story grid for the Silence of the Lambs, the places in which Thomas Harris abided all of these conventions. So what you'll see on my story grid, at the very bottom, you'll see, like, red herring number one, clue number one, so that you see the places where the misdirection is. And in Silence of the Lambs, there's some brilliant ones. And the big red herring at the very end is also the thing that gives rise to the double ending is that the FBI finds James Gumm in Chicago, but it's the wrong James Gumm, and they break down some guy's door. And then you cut to Belvidere, Ohio, and Starling has found the real one. So that's the red herring. And they also tell Starling, hey, we got him. Come on back to Quantico, everything's fine. We got him. And she could. She could have gone back, but for some reason, she didn't. She was compelled to check out that. That, you know, that tailor, Jane Gunn. So red herrings are really important, and you don't have to solve all of them right now. And I think one of the fun parts about editing is that now you know what your story, you know, you know, the nuts and bolts of your global story, so you can think of a really fun red herrings that can misdirect the reader and pay off in a way later on. Maybe the mystery door doesn't lead to Randy, but it leads to something that will help her later on. Like, she believes she gets through that door, she's gonna find her brother. When she gets through the door, she finds something else. Okay, you know, let's get through these obligatory scenes and conventions, and then we can move through more of this next week, but go ahead.

Okay. A speech in praise of the villain.

Right now, the speech in praise of the villain is very important. It can often be the villain actually praising himself or herself. In Silence of the Lambs, the way they handle the speech and praise of the villain is they have a couple of them, but the one that's really, really great is at the end of the beginning hook of Silence of the Lambs, Starling and Crawford get on a plane, and they're flying to West Virginia to go to the crime scene of the latest victim of Buffalo Bill. On that Plane. Crawford hands Starling a dossier that has all of the information about Buffalo Bill and how impossible it is to figure out where he's going to strike next. So the way Harris handles the speech in praise of the villain is to show how smart this guy is by having her refer to the documentation of the case file, which is a really, really terrific way of doing it. I'm trying to think of other speeches in praise of the villain, but they're really fun to put in. They're really. I like to think of them. Oh, here's. Here's what I was thinking. In Apocalypse now, there's a great. They do the same thing. Martin Sheen, when he's on the boat going upriver to find Colonel Kurtz, he gets the army records of Kurtz. And in voiceover, he's thinking about what caused this great guy, this Army Ranger, to lose his mind. And so he talks about, you know, this guy's career, where he came from, how, you know, he's the most decorated Army Ranger, and blah, blah, blah. And it's a great moment because we. The reason why you have the speech and praise of the villain is that it allows the reader to empathize or to admire or to understand the evil point of view and just how, you know, how they got to be where they are and why they have the worldview that they have. So it's really important to have them now. You don't really have one for Randy, do you?

Well, I do. I have. Oh, so I had part of one, and I cut it when we. I rewrote one scene. And then I have part. Part where he is trying to get Jesse to understand why he's done everything he has, but there is no. Well, one of the things I realize is missing is when he actually takes over from Marcus. And that's. I thought, when I could make a much stronger one.

That's a good idea, is to have. It's always a good idea to have the villain explain.

Their thinking, because the smarter it is, the better informed it is, the more convincing it is, the better it is for the reader. A speech in praise of the villain. I think you need somebody else to tell Jesse or tell as. Or have it become part of their training where they talk about the last threshing and how Randy ingeniously, you know, solved the puzzle and solved the riddle and how brilliant he was and. And make it a big mystery about where he is now so that, you know, I would make a note to myself that you need to. You could have, you know, one of the numbered. Tell Jesse when she's there about, you know, the guy who won the last threshing. Maybe 61 could do it or whoever. But that's something that you really want to build up so that when we do meet Randy, we have a certain offer him and fear of him because he's physically weak, but he's mentally strong. Okay.

So the next is the stakes must become personal for the hero. So I feel like I did that one.

Yeah.

Because she does become the victim and, you know, the people around her are threatened based on what she does or doesn't do.

Yeah, I think you definitely have that done. Okay.

There must be a hero at the mercy of the villain scene. So I have this, but it's not super strong. There's not really an extended period of time where we're like, oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh, what's gonna happen? It's kind of like it's over. That's one of the things I put in my notes is it's just over too fast and it's a little weak, but it's there.

Yeah.

It needs to definitely be stronger.

Right.

And then the false ending, there must be two endings. I don't have that.

Right.

Yeah, and we mentioned that before when I was finishing up the draft.

So I think now you can. We've only gone through the first, you know, six or so pieces of information that we have to figure out for the Foolscap page. And I think you could see what I meant when I said, you know, if you do the Foolscap page first when you're self editing and you get a big hole, you're going to have a big temptation to go and, oh, my gosh, I'm going to go do that false ending right now and get that off of my list. And again, you really don't want to do that because the false ending will probably come to you in a moment when you're taking a shower or going on a walk or something, or driving. And the way it's going to percolate up to you is by, you know, knowing your scenes as deeply as you do now by doing that. That micro spreadsheet.

Okay, so I will. Because we've got kind of most of the top done. I think I can. Should I try to fill out the rest myself?

Yeah. And then we'll go over it next week.

Okay, I'll do that.

Great.

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