NaNoWriMo and Story Grid

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 Shawn Coyne. He is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book StoryGrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, with next month being National Novel Writing Month, Sean and I wanted to talk about the best way to prepare to write an entire novel in one month. And so Sean walks us through the first few questions you need to answer as you prepare to outline your story for NaNoWriMo. So I think it's a great episode. It's a really great one too, where he takes a lot of kind of vast Story Grid advice and packs it all down into just one episode. So whether you're doing NaNoWriMo or not, if you're preparing to write a new novel, this is a great episode. I think you'll really enjoy it. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, I'm looking at the calendar and I'm a little appalled that it is already October. I'm not sure what happened to the year. And so thinking through this, that means in just a couple weeks it's going to be November, which means nanowrimos coming up. And so I was thinking about, like, so I've won NaNoWriMo twice where I've actually, you know, written a 50,000 word manuscript in the 30 days of November.

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't good, but, you know, I got the words in. What? Yeah, one of them. So one of the early. One of them was. I can't remember if it was the first or second I had this. It was like this time travel thing where you don't know, it's a time travel thing to the end, but the villain is like from the future and he brought futuristic weapons, like back to medieval times. And so everybody thought he was like a wizard because he had like all these instruments of death that would seem like, what is that thing about, like any misunderstood technology seems like magic or something like that? Oh, yeah, yeah, you know, so I had him as the villain anyway. It's not very good, but anyway. So thinking about NaNoWriMo and like, how when you get started, when I. The first time I did it. So that was the second time. So the first time I did it, I literally planned nothing. Just November 1st, I'm like scene one and just started writing. And so thinking about planning for NaNoWriMo, where you could actually make a plan and then enact the plan for those 30 days when people start thinking about what they're going to write next month, like, what's the first question do you think that they should be asking themselves about, like, okay, if I'm going to plan this out, what's the first decision I need to make?

That's. That's a great question. And it's. It's the first question that every editor asks themselves after they read a manuscript. So the first question you have to ask is, what kind of story do I want to write? What. What, you know, what's the genre? Is. Is the first question that every editor and writer really needs to consider at the very beginning. And Steve Pressfield told me a story which I thought was really great, is that, you know, back in his Hollywood screenwriter days, he had a partner and a writing partner, a very successful guy who, you know, one of the guys who wrote Alien, Ron Shassette. And so Steve and Ron used to get together after they finished a project, and they didn't have anything, you know, hot on the table. They. They would just have coffee and they would say, well, what kind of. What kind of movie do we want to see? What's the thing that we want we'd really like to watch or see? And so that's the first question they would ask each other. Do we want to do a detective story? Do we want to do a love story? What's the kind of thing that would really interest us? And so from that first question.

What is the genre? You may say to yourself, well, I don't really know what genre means. You know, I don't know what coming of age.

External, blah, blah, all that story grid stuff. And that's okay because there's some very simple, you know, classifications of genre that I'll just sort of rattle off. Right now, you basically have 12 choices, because every book, every story, every movie, when it comes right down to it, is classified by one genre. So Star wars, even though it's an epic maturation plot, it's a science fiction war movie, right? It's science fiction. So in these. In these genres, there's 12 of them. So let me just run them down for fun. And all those crazy people out there can. Can write them down if they want. Okay, so the first one is the action story, and the action story is, you know, it could be Iron man or it could be Jaws, or it could be Die Hard. Those are action stories that, that feature, you know, a hero, a villain, and A victim. Everything starts and stops from there. The next kind of story is a crime story. Now, a crime story could be something like Ocean's Eleven or a Sherlock Holmes mystery or even something like all the President's Men. You know, the crime stories are all about justice. You know, will. Will the criminal get away with it or won't he? The third kind of genre is the horror story. And these are things like Carrie or A Nightmare on Elm street or even Alien, what I talked about earlier, which is a science fiction horror story. And these are all about the attack of the monster. And then you have the thriller, which is sort of a mixture of all the three above. The action, crime and horror story and thrillers are things like the Bourne Identity or Red Dragon or Marathon Man. It's when the hero becomes the victim.

After that, we have the love story. So you have Pride and Prejudice, Terms of Endearment or Kramer versus Kramer. These are stories about love. And, you know, I did a big thing on Pride and Prejudice. So, you know, if you want to check out love, you can always check into the Pride and Prejudice storygrid stuff. The next one is the performance story. And the performance story is obviously all about a big event at the end of the story. Something like Rocky or Whiplash, which was a great story about a young drummer. Or even something like Trading Places, which is a very funny movie with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy. And it's a comedy. But the performance is. Will they be able to game the stock market and overcome, you know, the nasty white guys are trying to keep them down. After that, you have the society story. Society stories are about revolutions in power. Novels like Animal Farm or ragtime or even E.M. forster's Howards End, which is about the underclass rising during. I think it's Edwardian. Edwardian England, or maybe it's Victorian. But it's around turn of the century or just before the turn of the century. After society, you have the war story. And war stories are things like Gates of Fire or the Killer Angels or All Quiet on the Western Front. These are like the performance story in that there's a big event. There's a big battle at the end of the story that readers are really excited to get to. And how the writer builds to that big climactic battle is the thing that really makes the war story work. Then you have the Western, which is sort of an antiquated form. Nobody really writes many Westerns anymore because the Western was really about the individual striking out on his own or her own in unchartered territory and eventually how society tries to rein them back in. So you have stories like High Noon or the Great Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood's great movie, or even those old spaghetti westerns like the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, another Clint story. Okay, so those are kind of like your big external, you know, genres. Those are the ones that we all know and love. And then we have things like the internal stories. These are about people who are changing their worldview. And that's the first, you know, genre in the internal genres is the worldview change story. So a worldview change story is something like Saturday Night Fever or Charlotte's Web or even Farmer Boy or To Kill a Mockingbird, all those classic coming of age novels that we love. The Catcher in the Rye is a worldview shift change, a morality change story. This is when somebody turns bad or turns good. They move from a moral one moral place on a spectrum to another. So morality change stories are things like the Verdict or the Color of Money or that movie with Harvey Keitel years ago, Bad lieutenant These are stories where good guy turns bad or bad guy turns good. Lastly is sort of the status change story. And this is when you have somebody who's. Who moves up in society or moves down in society. These are stories like how to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, American Tragedy and even that classic movie, All About Eve, that's a status, you know, story. So all this stuff, I've talked about it a million times and even, you know, even saying it again, I get confused.

So if I were to give somebody advice and they don't really want to listen to me, you know, go on for 45 minutes about the different 12 different genres. What I suggest is that the trick when you're trying to start a new novel or a new story, the trick is to do what Steve and Ron Shussett did and ask yourself, what story do I want to tell? What kind of story is really going to give me a lot of energy to get to the end of 50,000 words? And what I'm suggesting is that you find favorite novel or your favorite story and really say to yourself, you know what? I'm going to write a book like, say, Charlotte's Web. Charlotte's Web, no matter what anybody says, is just such a classic. It's wonderful. It reads at a level, at every single level. It's good for kids, it's good for old people. It's good for everyone. It's just this great, really terrific story that's universal. So let's say, say you're going to do NaNoWriMo. And again, it's not. I think it's maybe 40,000 words, maybe 50,000 words. I don't know off the top of my head. But it's not this big epic story like Howards End or War and Peace. It's a very contained, beautiful construction that has simple, simple movements to it that are put together like a Swiss, Swiss watch. The story structure and foundation in Charlotte's Web is just extraordinary. So say to yourself, okay, I want to write something like Charlotte's Web. So that will give you a really, really strong understanding of the kind of book that you want to write. So maybe it's not Charlotte's Web. Maybe it's the Old man and the Sea, or maybe it's a classic love story, like Love Story by Eric Siegel. Whatever it is, make a decision. Say to yourself, I want to write a book just like X and fill in the blank. And once you do that, your brain is going to lock in on that story in ways that you. You're not even conscious of. So.

Anyway, that would be the very first question I would answer if I were going to do NaNoWriMo. I want to find that masterwork, that one story that I love to death, and say to myself, I'm going to do one like that.

So why is that the first question you're asking?

When I think about the questions I'm asking, it's like, you know, we love the map metaphor, or maybe we just keep using it but don't actually love it. But anyway, you know, when I think about, like, okay, I'm in Nashville, the first question is, where am I going? Right? And so it's like, California. Okay, well, that means I'm heading west, right? So that's my first big decision. Like, what is genre doing for you? That's such an important decision that it's the first one that you're looking at, oh, it's great.

It's a great question, and it's an easy answer. When you say Charlotte's Web, you immediately, if you've read the novel or if you've seen the show when you're a little kid, the animated movie, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's like Los Angeles. If you say Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's. It's literally its own universe that has a clear, clear meaning to the writer. So it is. The map analogy still works if you're nowhere and somebody says to you, what kind of book do you want to write? And you say Charlotte's Web. That is an amazing decision because that tells you what your final destination is. It doesn't tell you how to get there yet, but it tells you what your destination is. Finding the masterwork that you would like to use as your model is a huge leap. It takes you from, oh, I don't know. I kind of like. I like a good mystery on a rainy day, but I also like love stories. And war is pretty good. You're moving from that kind of vagueness to. To specificity. You're moving to a clear destination. So genre is the godsend that allows us to understand what our clear destination is.

Okay, so let's see. I've picked the book, so I want to write a book like Charlotte's Web. I've made that decision. Now what do I do?

Okay, well, the next thing you want to do is kind of get a global sense of what Charlotte's Web is all about, right? So you want to say to yourself, now, you don't have to get all intellectual about it. Instead, what you need to think about are what are the things in Charlotte's Web? What are the scenes? What are the moments in the book that really speak to me? So what I'm talking about is, what I often talk about is conventions and obligatory scenes. A lot of people get really, really stressed out about conventions and obligatory scenes. So what I want to do now, if you're planning NaNoWriMo, is to really boil down conventions and obligatory scenes to very easy to understand principles. Now, NaNoWriMo is not about writing a perfect book, right? It's about writing a really solid beginning. It's a draft. You want a first draft. You want 50,000 words of stuff that you can fix. It's not about a final draft. So you have to go into the process, understanding the purpose of the process. The purpose of NaNoWriMo is to get you to start at the beginning and finish 50,000 words later at the end. And there will be a trajectory from that beginning to the end. And after you finish that 50,000 words, now you have clay. Now you have something to mold so that it can become better and better and better. So when I talk about conventions and obligatory scenes, people get really, really plugged in about it, and they want to know every detail about every genre. They want all the specificity of every single convention and obligatory scene for every single genre, Sub genre, sub, sub genre, and on and on and on. And I can understand that because I'm similar. I'm a similar being I want to know what, what, what do I have to do? What are the answers that I have to give on the test?

Right.

But what I'm saying to that is that we need to pull back, especially for NaNoWriMo, and especially for somebody who's.

Said they always wanted to write, but they don't have any craft yet. They're not really sure, but they want to try it, and that's perfectly legitimate. That's what everybody does when they start writing. So how can we make NaNoWriMo successful for people who don't have massive amounts of craft, haven't listened to the 2000 hours of the Story Grid podcast, How can we make it easier for that? So with the conventions and obligatory scenes, here's the simple, simple way to kind of get to the core of it. Okay, You've chosen your book. We're going to. We're going to do Charlotte's Web. All right? So you're going to do. Use model. You're going to model Charlotte's Web. So what you need to do is to get a notebook and you have to sit down with the novel and you have to read it again. And as you're reading it, what you want to do is pick out the moments in the story that really struck you as wonderful. For example.

Oh, I like, I. I've never thought of it that way. Yeah, I've always like, okay, what are the. What are the scenes that matter?

And.

And you're saying to kind of let almost like your subconscious pick those meat. You know, which ones do you remember? Like, which ones? When you read again, you're like, oh, my gosh, like, that's what you're looking for.

Exactly. Because those are the ones that are the obligatory scenes and conventions of the genre. You just don't know it. You know, there's something called, you know, unknown knowns, and that is what story is. What unknown knowns are, are things that we as individuals know deep down in our souls, but we can't articulate them. We just know it. And so psychologists and behavioral psychologists have, you know, all these categories, and one of them is the unknown known. And story is unknown knowns. And with the process, the whole thing of StoryGrid is making those unknown knowns known to us so that we can recreate them.

You need to say that four times fast.

That's great sales copy. Right. The unknown known is known to you. But that's. That's my point. When you're reading and something strikes you as, oh, my gosh, I remember. That is incredible. Write it down. And your goal is really kind of like, within the first, you know, quarter of the book. So if it's, you know, it's 200 pages, the first 50 pages of the book, you want to find, like, two moments in those first 50 pages that really struck you as great. And then in the next hundred pages, you want to find four. Find four of those moments, write them down, and then in the last 50 pages, find two more. So at the end of your read, you'll have, like, eight really good, solid moments from that story. And chances are those are eight major obligatory scenes of the genre that have been really, really finely done. Now, this is why you want to use a novel like Charlotte's Web or the Silence of the Lambs or Pride and Prejudice or the Old man and the Sea or the Great Gatsby. You want to use the masterworks, because these things really. These stories work. They work year after year after year after year. So, you know, I'm going to plumb the depths of my Charlotte's Web. Now, I have kids, so I've read this story a million times. So let me think of, like, if I can think of, like, eight of the moments at the beginning of the story, okay? The first thing that's really huge is when Fern, you know, the little girl, she saves the little pig Wilbur, from death, right? Her father's got a hatchet. Wilbur is a little pig that's been born. He's the run of the litter. And her father's a farmer, so he knows you got to kill the run of the litter because they're gonna, you know, they're not gonna make it. And they're gonna eat food that the other pigs can use. So it's. It's nature, right? The farmer is, you know, he's part of nature, and he decides he has to kill Wilbur. Fearne intervenes, and she saves Wilbur's life. So that's a big moment, right? That's in the beginning of the story now. So she saves his life, and then it comes to the point where Wilbur gets a little bit too big for the house, and he's in this box. And so now it's time to sell Wilbur. And the farmer's like, hey, Fern, you know, I let you save the pig. You did a nice job. Now we got to sell them. We got to bring in some money into the farm. And then Fern again figures out a way to save Wilbur, and she goes and she gets her uncle to buy Wilbur from her father. And the uncle agrees to buy Wilbur, and he also agrees to let Fern come visit whenever she wants. So that's kind of like the beginning of Charlotte's web. It's a very simple beginning. First she saves Wilbur from the axe. Then she saves him from being alienated and leaving the community. And then the next thing is the big moment, sort of the transitional moment. Wilbur goes to the. The uncle's farm.

And he's lonely, right? Fern can't come every day. She has school. Sometimes she comes, sometimes she can't. And he's kind of lonely. And the other animals in the barn aren't really into him. They think he's kind of irritating. And all of a sudden, Wilbur meets Charlotte. Charlotte the spider speaks to Wilbur because she sees that he's depressed, and she tries to cheer him up. So that's a big moment when Wilbur meets Charlotte. Now we get further on into the story, and there's a great moment that I thought was just so well done. Is that E.B. white, who wrote it? He figured, you know what? Fearne is going to be able to understand what the animals say in the barn. She's going to be able to hear what they say amongst each other, because she hasn't been destroyed by society yet. So it's only. And it's wonderful the way he presents it. It's just, you know, a fait accompli. Fearne walks in the barn. She hears the animals talking. She can understand them. So there's this great moment in the middle of the book when Fearne comes home and she tells her parents, oh, well, Templeton said this today in the barn. And. And then Wilbur said this, and Charlotte said this, and they're like, who are you talking about? She's like, oh, well, Templeton's a rat and Charlotte's the spider, and they think she's nuts. So that was a really nice moment, too. So I would write that one down. Then, probably about midpoint, after Wilbur's been saved so many times, he comes to understand that he's not saved yet. Fact, he's being fat. He's been. They're feeding him because he's going to be a fall pig, meaning they're going to slaughter him for the winter food. So he learns this by hearing the other animals talk? Yeah. Enjoy that food, Wilbur, because you're going to die at the end of the summer. And so, of course, that sends him in a real tailspin, and it brings back life and death back onto the table. Now, Charlotte the spider is very upset, too, because she loves Wilbur, and so Wilbur's very upset, and he says, Charlotte, I don't want to die. What am I going to do? How am I going to live? And Charlotte says, don't worry, Wilbur. I'm going to figure something out. And the next scene is when the miraculous web appears, and Charlotte spins a web that says some pig, and it's right above Wilbur's, you know, sleeping area. And all the farmers come, and they can't believe it, and Charlotte keeps doing it so that they recognize that Wilbur is a special kind of pig. Now, that's sort of the end of the middle build of the. Of Charlotte's web. And the scene that kind of gets us into the ending is when the farmer says to himself, oh, my gosh, I've got this incredible pig. I'm going to enter him in the county fair. So, you know, I'm going to want him to win a big prize at the county fair. So the ending payoff is they all go to the county fair, and Wilbur is up for, you know, prize pig. And, well, he doesn't win, you know, the big award. He wins a very big award. That is not ordinary. It's an extraordinary award, all thanks to Charlotte. So that's kind of like the seventh big moment in the story. And the last moment is pretty much the end of the book. And it's a killer. It's a literal killer. And that's when Wilbur is beside himself with happiness. His life has been saved. He's now a special pig. There's no way they're going to slaughter him. He's going to be able to live on the farm. He's famous. Everything's great. And then he discovers that Charlotte's going to die. And Charlotte explains to him, this is the way the world is. People live and they die. It's now my turn to die. And we have a great moment at the end when Wilbur decides, oh, I understand now, but what I'm going to do is make sure that your children are protected, just like you protected me. And he ensures that Charlotte's children go back to the farm with him. And it's a great ending. It's a great circular story. It has a great payoff. And so those eight big eight moments are the things that I would write down after, as I was reading the book. So when I'm starting NaNoWriMo, I'll know. Geez, I'll have at least eight things that I know I'll have to deliver in this story if I'm gonna write it like Charlotte's Web. And knowing those eight sort of moments, it's gonna Be extraordinarily helpful. So those are what kind of represent the obligatory scenes and conventions of the story. Are they all of them? No, of course they're not all of them. But what they do is they give you really strong handles on driving your story from the beginning to the middle to the end in a way that is commensurate with the work that you're using to model your own work on.

Okay, so we have our genre. We have our masterwork in the genre. We've gone through and picked out our eight scenes that give us kind of some guideposts along the way. So what's. Yeah, this may be jumping the gun, but my question is, like, how far should I go? Like, how. I'm sure it's different for each person, but how far do you recommend going down this path? Like, should I. At the end of this, am I looking to have, like, every scene in my book mapped out and ready to go when I get started, or should I just. I guess, should I be filling out just like a full SCAP story, story grid, or should I be looking to actually have every scene mapped out?

Well, here's what I recommend, and I. This is something that I did a while back. I think it was around May, but what I would do is have sort of the blueprint. And the blueprint is really, really math. It's math oriented. And we can put this in the show notes. But I did a spreadsheet that basically outlines all the scenes. If your scenes are about 1500 words, you'll need like, something like 32 or 33 scenes for your entire story. So know the math. Like, know that you should. Do you know, if there are 33 scenes, a quarter of them should be your beginning, half of them should be your middle, and a quarter should be the end. And then break it down that way and then figure out from that point. Okay, well, let's see. A quarter of 30 is. I don't know, eight. Is that right? Yeah, something like that.

Sure.

So, like, eight or nine scenes are going to be your beginning hook. And we just talked about eight scenes, right? And we know that two of them are going to be sort of in our beginning. So of those eight scenes, two of them are going to be something where somebody saves somebody else from certain death. If we're doing something like Charlotte's Web.

And then, you know, it progressively complicates so that after they've saved them from death, they really haven't saved them because they're going somewhere else or there's a problem.

So Those two scenes can be the things to start and think about as you're transitioning into the nanowrimo. So say it's day one of nanowrimo. You're going to say, I've got eight scenes that I have to write of, 33 that I know. Let me pick one of them that is the most exciting to me and write that scene. After you've written that scene, then you would say to yourself, what would have happened before this scene or what's going to happen after this scene? And so you'll kind of fill in the missing scenes knowing those eight way stations. So you could begin, you know, writing all eight of those scenes and then filling in, you know, the meat and potatoes around each one of those. That's one strategy. Or you could, but to know how many scenes you need to create with the approximate word length, how many scenes are in each? The beginning, the middle and the end. This is all great information to have. Now, do you want to figure out every single scene before you start writing? I don't think so. I think you want to pick a really compelling scene that you're excited to write and write that scene. And guess what's going to happen is that you're going to be motivated to write either a scene that comes before it or later. And that will push you into the next moment. And you can sort of map your way and use your inspiration that comes to you in the writing process to guide you. But you'll also have diagram of what ultimately you have to accomplish.

Okay, so we have our eight scenes kind of laid out. If we're doing 30 scenes for a 50,000 word novel, we know where to start. So what kind of advice do you give? Okay, so now it's November 15th and I'm facing my dark Night of the Soul where I've written. Let's say you're running behind, right? So you've only written 20,000 words. You're halfway through the month, you're wondering, is this even worth it? All of this probably sucks anyway. Like, you get on the phone with that writer, like, what do you start telling them?

Well, what I would start telling them is, well, I'd need to know of the 20,000 words, you know, where are you meaning have you written from page one to have you done 20,000 consecutive words? Or do you have piecemeal 20,000 words? And if it's they have consecutive 20,000 words, I would ask them, well, how many of those eight scenes have you created? Do you have eight scenes? What are your final two scenes? Can you write those now and then, you know, go back and fill in the blanks? I would give the same advice to somebody who is, you know, hitting that wall on November 15th as I would to somebody who's beginning. I would just remind them, hey, you can. You can bang out words. It's not difficult to bang out words. What's difficult is to follow your plan and also understand it's not going to be perfect. You are not going to write a perfect novel in a month. What you're going to write is something that's extremely imperfect. It's not going to work, but it's going to be a big step forward toward what ultimately you want to create. So, you know, knock off the, oh, I'm so terrible. I have only done 20,000 words. Just knock that crap out and just understand. The goal is to use the 8 mile markers, finish your mile markers and fill in the rest. And that is going to be a big, big step forward.

So I'm trying to think if there's anything I should. Else, I. What is there? Because I want to talk about. I want to talk about what to do on Dec.1st. But before that, is there anything else that, like, you're, like, you should have asked me this question or anything else that. Because when they fill out, when they get those eight scenes, like, is filling out the full scap before you write, like, is that something they should spend some time doing, too? That way they have it all in one place.

I would do a much simpler fool's cap process. So, okay, you know, after you have the obligatory scenes, your eight things, and you have your genre choice, the next thing you should really decide is, what's my point of view? Right. Who's going to tell this story? Is there a narrative device that can really help me out here? A narrative device is something like, you know, Fitzgerald used the guy who lives next door to Jay Gatsby to tell the story. He had any number of choices to narrate the Great Gatsby, but he chose writing in the first person from the point of view of the guy who lives in the small house next to the, you know, extravagant millionaire Jay Gabson. And it was a great choice. Sure, it took him a long time to figure that out, but once he made that decision, then a lot of his scenes were already automatically, you know, he knew he had to write, like, he had to write the moment when the guy meets Jay Gatsby, right? So there's a scene he's got to write. He's got to write the moment when Gatsby tries to become his friend, and why he tries to become his friend. So the narrative device is a really important. And point of view is a really important decision. Now, E.B. white decided to write in the voice of a very omniscient almost.

It's almost as if a grandfather were telling the story to his. His grandson or granddaughter. It's.

Which is another popular narrative device, right?

Absolutely. And that is a wonderful way. The Princess Bride is literally a grandfather telling a grandson a story. That's a really great device. Another one is, from the point of view of a child. To Kill a Mockingbird is that voice. It's actually a woman writing.

The reflections of what it was like when she was a child. So that you can use, you know, more, you know, elaborate language. So think about who's telling the story and why am I making that choice? You need to understand why your storyteller is telling the story. They need to be able to explain something. Like in Charlotte's Web, the narrator is. If we think about it, the narrator is trying to explain something to somebody else. This is the nature of life. It's beautiful, but it involves death. Death is always around the corner. We can't escape death. Nobody can. Now, to say that to a little kid is impossible, Right? They're gonna. What are you talking about? I'm not gonna die. But if you tell the story about a beautiful, wonderful little pig and his friend the spider, they go, oh, I totally get it. We're all gonna die. I'm gonna die someday. I understand.

And so that choice was perfect for Charlotte's Web. And the choice of Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby was perfect, too. So think about what is the perfect point of view or narrative device that I can use for my story. Now, if you're writing a story like Charlotte's Web, taking the grandfatherly or grandmotherly voice is a pretty good decision, because what you're going to do is say, hey, I don't know what to do. What did E.B. white do? Oh, he used the grandfather voice. That's what I'm going to do, too. That's a really good idea, is to take advice from the masters. You know, what did Hemingway do in the Old Man?

Old man the Sea?

Yeah, yeah. He used a very, very loving but godlike voice. He explains what it's like for this. It's almost as if God is talking to one of his angels when he's telling you the Santiago story. Hey, you got to hear this story about this guy. This guy refused to die. I'll tell you what, this fisherman down in Cuba was starving to death, and he hadn't had a fish forever. And God is telling one of the angels. And, you know, I can't just give thought fish to Santiago. So I watched this guy, and this is what happened. And it's almost as if God is telling an angel with the easiest language possible, the story. And when you read it again with that perspective, you say to yourself, yeah, I could hear God talking an angel in that way. And it's. It's. It's very matter of fact journalistic, but Adam, you know, admiring at the same time. So point of view and narrative device is a great way to ground you as you're writing because you can always say, who's writing this again? What would they do? What would, you know? What would a grandfather tell his grandkid? How would he tell this story? How would Nick Carraway tell his future wife what happened to him in Long island on that summer? How would he tell that story? That way you can externalize yourself and start worrying about you, the writer, and think about your narrator. Give the narrator an anthropomorphized sensibility so that you can extract yourself from all the baloney of worrying about how many words you're writing. And that way you can almost like tune into another person's talking to you. So after. Yeah, so after you have your point of view is that this.

Is that basically asking the sync. It seems like a similar question to, like, what point of view? Right. So my. Yeah, right.

Because.

But point of view only has a few options, and what you're talking about has more options.

Well, it's very. It's a very specific way of looking at point of view. Point of view. Yeah, you can tell it in first person, second person, or third person. And then there's also free indirect style, which allows you to mix first and third. That's kind of not very exciting to think about when you're writing like, oh, juniors, is this first person or third person? I'm gonna go with third person. You know, that's not really. That isn't gonna save you when you're 10,000 words behind. What will save you is when you say, this is being written and this story is being told by this person, what would they say next? So ask yourself what somebody else would do, and you will come up with an answer because you'll start thinking about that other presence and how they would answer the question. Not about first person, second person, third person, free indirect style, blah, blah, blah. So try and get away from the story grid stuff and make it really rich and personal to you, and that will push you through when you hit walls. Okay, well, there are two more things that you need to ask yourself to sort of fill in this six. It's kind of like your six question fool's cap. You know, shorthand. They're the six core questions an editor always asks when. When they're reviewing a work. And the fifth question is, what, what. What do the characters want and what do they need? So, you know, for. For Wilbur, what. What Wilbur wants is to survive. And what he. What he needs is understanding. He needs to understand that he's going to die.

Somebody has to teach Wilbur about the facts of life. He needs to mature. He needs to reach a level of wisdom. So what he wants is to survive. So that's all Wilbur talks about. But deep down, until he understands that he's going to die, no matter what intervention he gets, he's not going to be mature.

So that's a great thing to know in your story because when you get stuck and Wilbur has a revelation in the fourth scene that everyone dies and it's okay, where do you go from there? You can't go nowhere from there because that's the payoff of the entire story. So if you don't know what Wilbur wants and what he needs, you can make a huge mistake and paint yourself into a corner. Write yourself into a corner in the beginning Hook. So remind yourself, he wants, he wants, he wants, he wants until he finally gets what he needs at the end.

So knowing the wants and the needs are really important because they will stop you from making rash decisions that. That will. We all have a tendency to over plot and overthink and try and keep, you know, adding plot pyrotechnics. But the wants and the needs are things that are. That take a long time to. To shift. It's like anything else in life. We think we want one thing. We work for years to get it. Years and years and years and years. Then when we get it, we discuss. We discover it's not really what we needed. And it's depressing, but that's. That's.

Yeah. I was. I was talking to this guy and we were talking about what we wanted in the future, and he's like. He's like, the only thing he could come up with is one day he will own a Lamborghini.

I was like, oh, that's going to be a sad day when you get that thing.

Anyway, sorry I devolved. Yeah. Okay. And so you've gone through each of these steps. You've written the book. You have a beer on the last day in November because you finally finished. Or you have a beer at 12:03am on December 1st because you finally finished. I have this lump of clay. And let's see, you know, we've been talking. Now you've got 10 minutes to tell me what to do with this lump of clay. Like, what's the first thing I do with this first draft to start figuring out what to do next?

Well, the first thing that you would do is, is to look at each of the scenes that you have created, each of the 33 scenes, and take the time to analyze them to see if they work.

Now, the way to tell if something works or not is to clearly be able to fill in a story grid spreadsheet. And before you even do that.

The best, easiest way to see if they work is to test them for the five Commandments. Does the scene have an inciting incident? Does it progressively complicate? Does the progressive complication lead to a turning point that pushes the scene into a crisis? Is the crisis a best bad choice or an irreconcilable good? Does that question lead to a active decision by the protagonist or the lead character in that scene such that it's a climactic action? The climax is the fourth of the five. And does that climax lead to a resolution that clearly lets the reader know how things are different than how they started? So those five things, the inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis, climax, and resolution, are the five things to check each one of your scenes. So what you're gonna find after you do a $50,000. $50,000 word. $50,000. Wow. Got a dollar a word. What you're gonna find is that a lot of your scenes aren't gonna work. And the next thing to do after understanding is that you will have a quick, complete understanding of what in your manuscript is working and what is not working. Now, here's a big, big helpful hint. The scenes that don't work are probably the reason why they don't work is that they have gone off theme. You were just banging it out. And the reason why the scene didn't work is because it doesn't fit your genre choice.

And so probably eight of your scenes are gonna work because those are the eight scenes that you picked out in this big sort of story grid map at the very beginning. And then you're going to find other ones that do work too. So maybe of your 33 scenes, you've got. I don't know, maybe 15 work. That's pretty good. Then you take those 15 that do work and you look at them in terms of your masterwork and say, how do they support my 8 central scenes? And what you're going to discover is that you're going to have to do more work in terms of your global genre. So you're going to put the work away for a while, you're not going to panic, and then you're going to pick up other books like Charlotte's Web and further, you know, look at the conventions and obligatory scenes of that global genre, and you're going to do more story gridding, you're going to read the book again, you're going to do more story grid effort, and that is going to teach you how to write the second draft. Now, we've spent, I don't know, 20 weeks on the second draft of your novel. So if these people get stuck, they can look and see what we did after you had a first draft and it took a long time, right? You had to do lists and you had to do spreadsheets and you had.

To do lists and spreadsheets. And lists and spreadsheets. Yeah, yeah.

And here is journey stuff and archetypes and all kinds of stuff. But all that stuff, you built a basic, a very voluminous to do list for your second draft, right? And that's what you're doing now is you have taken the 20 weeks of work that you did to analyze your story to figure out how to make it better, and now you're putting all that stuff in your writing the second draft. So December 1st or December 2nd or December 3rd or whatever. That's the time to start thinking about your story from an editor's point of view, looking at it from micro and macro and adding them together so that you have a really voluminous list of to do's for each scene that you reconstruct in your second draft. All right?

Yeah. You know, it's funny, as I was thinking about this episode, I was thinking, okay, I wanted to do something where we just talk through for people that are getting ready for NaNoWriMo to write their first draft. And I know a lot of people are probably listening to the show thinking, okay, I'm gonna do it this year, I'm gonna finish it. And I was like, okay, what could we do to just make it a little bit easier? Cause I remember getting halfway through the month and just being like, this is awful. Why am I doing this to myself? Yeah. So hopefully this will be helpful to people as they think through, like where to start, starting with the masterwork, figuring out obligatory scenes and starting there and just kind of working out from there. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast and before I ended, I just wanted to give you one more chance to share with us what the podcast has meant to you. So we've been doing this just about two years. We're coming up on the hundredth episode and we wanted to put together collection of recordings from you, the listeners, sharing with us what the podcast has meant to you. So Sean has been doing this week in and week out sharing his knowledge with all of you and I would love to put together the hundredth episode with a bunch of recordings of what the podcast has meant to you, what you've learned, how it's helped with your writing. So I put up a webpage. It's storygrid.com tell me. And I actually put in a little widget so you'll be able to record it right there on the webpage. You don't have to figure out how to record it and upload your own. So again, go ahead, do that now. I need you to do it in the next few days for us to have time to put together the hundredth episode. So go ahead and do that@storygrid.com tell so for everything StoryGrid related, you can find that@storygrid.com make sure you pick up a copy of the book and sign up for the newsletter you so you don't miss anything happening in the StoryGrid universe. If you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any past episodes, all of that can be found@storygrid.com podcast if you would like to reach out to us, you can find us on Twitter torygrid. Lastly, if you would like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on itunes and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at StoryGrid. We will see you next week.