Narrative Device: This Affects Every Single Word You Write

Hello and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. My name is Tim Grall, I'm the host and I'm a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne, the creator and founder of StoryGrid and an editor and writer with over 30 years of experience. Along with him is Danielle Kielski, the chief Academic Officer of the Story Grid Guild, and Leslie Watts, the editor in chief of of StoryGrid Publishing. Now this week we're following up, of course, on last week when we were asking this question of is the podcast something we need to keep doing and if so, how can we make it work for everybody that's involved? And I think what you'll see in this week is that the new structure we're bringing to it is a lot more helpful. It's was a lot more helpful for me. I think it was a lot more helpful for the three of them as well. And of course we're using these red, blue and green levels of being able to start at one level and work our way through to see what's working and not working in the story. And as you'll see, I have a lot of really clear insights on what's happening in my scene, what should be happening in my scene, and I think set me up to start making some real progress to actually get this scene working in the way that we want it to work. And so it was a really great episode. I think you're going to enjoy it. Before we jump in, I just want to mention one more time that right now registration for the Story Grid Guild is still open just for two more days. When this comes out, you can go to storygrid.com guild to see all of the information there. I'm really excited about this new semester. We have a lot of great things planned and if you're interested in learning how to write really great line by line writing that builds into scenes and really learning a lot of what we're doing on the podcast and how to apply it to your own writing. This is what you need to do is join us inside of the guild again. There's only two more days to register for the new semester. All right, that's it. Let's go ahead and jump in and get started.

Okay. So Tim, what we'd like to do, and we've, we've had some, you know, off page conversations about this in terms of the structure of being able to give you feedback that makes more sense and isn't sort of higgledy piggledy Is there's this, there's this metaphor that I have that I think might be helpful. So let's say, let's say it's me because this is a little bit disturbing. Let's say I have a sore on my arm, okay. And I go in to see my general doctor. Well, what, what she's going to do is she's going to take out her flashlight and she's going to put on her glasses that have a little light on it. She's going to let me take a look at it. Right. And so she'll take a look at the sore and she will poke around it and she will go, I'm not really sure. Is this a local problem? Like maybe you got bit by a, you know, some kind of insect out in the woods and it's going to clear up on itself, or is this a medium kind of thing? Like maybe this is going to infect the rest of your arm and we need to take care of it now. Or is this a global systemic problem of your entire body and that if we don't take care of it immediately, you could be in risk of losing your life? Right. So she's going to do that diagnosis by the evidence of the sore. Right. That's where she starts. She's going to look at the soar itself and then she will determine which level of analysis is this going to be the most threatening. So if it's a local issue, then that's, that's something that she would give me a topical ointment and then it would probably go away in five or six days. Right. But if it's a medium sized issue, then she's going to probably give me some kind of antibiotic or something. And then if it's a larger issue, she's going to send me to a specialist. Right. And she's going to make sure that my life isn't threatened. So this is sort of the means by which we can talk about the blue, the red and the green in terms of storytelling. Right. So the blue is a life threatening issue. That's big systemic problems that have to do with controlling ideas, genres, values, those, all those big things in the blue zone. Right. And then the red zone is more like up downstream from that. But it's very, very important if you don't get it, because then it just might sort of work, but it won't get people to be really invested in the story. And then the green level is the actual localized word choice of that particular conflict of the skin irritation. So that's my Global kind of blue way of framing this problem. And I want to. I want to turn it over to Leslie and Danielle. Leslie first, because she's our red zone specialist. And then we'll get down to the topical, you know, investigation of the actual.

Discoloration of the skin with Danielle. Sorry, Danielle, you're our. You're our local dermatologist at this point. So let me turn it over to Leslie and then maybe she has some thoughts about this metaphor so that we can best diagnose the problem and fix the problem where the problem is and not go higgledy piggledy all over the place. All right, so I'm going to turn it over to Leslie now.

Okay. Yes. So I'm going to talk about this in a similar way, but with my red glasses on. So the problems in the text, right. Can be a problem with. That could be addressed with copy editing or proofreading, right?

The.

They could be at that level that, you know, where everything else is working. But there are a few words out of place. But of course, words that are not working, sentences that are not working can also be a sign of a problem that's upstream and meaning that we have to go to a higher level of analysis. So I was thinking about this, and I was thinking about, well, you need a way to tell the difference. And so when I. When I looked at the. The manuscript that we have for today, I was thinking about, well, if you have multiple problems at the beat level, then you want to go up to the tropes. If you have trouble in the tropes, then you want to go up to the scene, event synthesis or the five Commandments, and look there, there. And if you have trouble with them, you go up to the narrative device. And if you have trouble with the narrative device, you discover a problem there. Then you move up to the. The pop. The. That proposition of possibility where we're looking at the. The context, the protagonist, the inciting incident, and the goal. So all of those things, when you've got a problem, if it's just one little problem or it's, you know, only happening every so often at a certain level, then you can address it at that level. But if you'. More, then you want to go up and you've got to keep going up until you find where the real problem is, right? Which is very similar to what the protagonist has to do, right? The inciting incident happens. There's an aspect of that they can't see. And so they have to keep trying, pursuing their goal until the turning point. Progressive complication. Happens when they make sense of. Of what that inciting incident was. So that's the same kind of thing. When we spot problems in the manuscript, we've got to moving until we figure out what level we're talking about.

Great. Yeah. At the green level, I just would echo what you both said that, that it really is about finding out.

Finding out what the proper level is to address all of the things that I'm seeing. So when I read, I come up with a list of things that are.

Off somehow, and then I can start to triage then and say, yes, this one I can adjust with just a couple of words. Or this is.

I think of them as failures in execution versus failures in.

I don't have a good concrete word for it, but maybe motivation, something like that, where it's an upstream problem versus a localized problem. And so I think we're all talking about things in the same way. And so this is about starting from the bottom, rather than starting from the top and working down and saying, well, did you execute the controlling idea? Things like that. We're looking at the bottom layer and we're saying we're going to look at the evidence first and then work backward so that we're starting from the draft, we're starting from something that is new every time. And then we are, as needed, going up to the other levels to see what's going on there so that we can target just those parts of the 624 that are off. And then from there they may have horizontal implications in terms of requiring changes in other, other parts of the 624. But we're going at it with this targeted approach so we can get started by, I think, looking at some of the things that are going on in the draft and then we can address them one at a time. I have a prioritized list that we can go through, starting with the most important and then start to diagnose each one of those.

So I think overall.

Can I just pop in for one quick second there? So I think what you. What you just figured out and what the three of us just figured out is that when Tim changes every word and he says, I just started from the start again, and I rewrote the entire scene, that's what's been throwing us off, because we can't start from the bottom when it's brand new bottom each time. And that's why we keep getting sort of a little bit.

You know, vertigo. We're not really sure where to go on the stuff because the words keep Changing. So I think this is a really important point is when you are editing a particular scene as a writer, stop yourself from rewriting the entire scene and going step by step with editorial guidance, such that you're working from the same conditions in each subsequent draft.

So when there's an identification of word choices that need to be fixed, make a note, but don't fix them until you've addressed higher order problems because then you're just getting in your own way. So I'll stop there.

Well, I think that if you have something foundational like a problem with the controlling idea or a problem with the essential tactic in particular, you might want to rewrite. It's just once we get down to those green level execution problems, I think we wouldn't want to. Okay, so yeah, let's get started with our list to go through. So, you know, overall, some, some good direction is happening in, in this draft. So in particular, I thought that the Breezeway passage had a lot of improvement in it and I was seeing better execution there than before. So I think that's an area that you were really focusing on and it paid off. But now it's exposing other places that are, that we need to bring up to that level to start to make everything align. So the biggest thing that I, I think is, is the issue in this draft is that when Randall goes into.

Watson's office and is telling him the story, we don't have the proper dynamic that everything is overt. So we don't have that moment where he accidentally overshares and then has to bring it back. Instead, he's just very upfront, like, yes, I was working on the street, this guy was one of my regulars. It's, it was very.

He wasn't worried about self incrimination, so he put it out there. And so there was no progression from the planned script to an accidental slip. So that was the first, the first issue that I wanted to address and talk about where that needs to.

Go, which level of analysis.

So to start maybe talking about.

How you see that moment and what, what Randall's thought process is going into that interview, what is his plan script and where can you create some.

Limitations on what he's willing to say? What's his culpability here?

So one thing when I wrote this was.

One of the last pieces of direction that Sean said in, last, last week was to just go back to the original controlling idea. And so when I wrote this, I was just less concerned with those nuanced things like that and just it's been such A struggle for me to switch the protagonist and then stay with that protagonist and do it with a controlling idea that isn't, you know, worldview is what we landed on, right? We need to stay in crime. And so honestly, I, I, there was a moment where I thought like, hey, I haven't really, like, I don't have him hiding something that he accidentally shares, but I'm like, I just want to see if I can get the controlling idea and the right protagonist to work first before I go back. Because that seems like something that, well, actually just based on what you've said today, but it was kind of just like a sixth sense to me. I'm like, I can. That's an easier fix later if I get the controlling idea and the protagonist. Right. Pulling some information out and then having it slip in accidentally seems like a 20 minute fix later if I get the big pieces in. Right? So I didn't, and I'll say this too is every time you guys have talked about that, I don't totally understand it, where it happens and how that happens, because again, you pulled out the fact that he was probably having an affair with her. And I still don't really see that on the page. Like, I can get there, but I would have never gotten there. Like, if you tell me that, I can read it and be like, oh, okay, yeah, I can see that. But I would have never pulled that out on my own. So there's still a level of like, I don't really know where that happens and why it's so clear to you and it's not clear to me. And so that was another reason why I just like put it on a list of solve that problem later. Because then I would be moving into solving a problem I don't understand. And I, I, there's this great quote I heard a pastor say one time. If you try to fix a problem you don't understand, you'll create a problem you don't know how to fix. So I just let it be.

Okay, great. Well, that's good to know. It's good to know that you had that impulse too, that maybe you needed to fix this. But, you know, I think.

I think that it's critical because it goes back to Randall's.

Reason for being there.

Why does he feel guilty? Why does he feel like he needs to come to the police station? And so I see this as not just an execution problem, not just to fix it in 20 minutes, but as going up to that red level. So it's going to influence his essential tactic and how. And then even to the blue level, how he interacts with the double factor problem. So one of the double factors in Eyewitness is about the corruption that is endemic in the environment. Now, corruption touches everyone because it's one of those factors. So everyone is dealing with corruption. Everyone is dealing with their own position relative to corruption. So even Capelli, who is not, as far as we know, touched by that. He is trying to be an. A responsible officer. He has to deal with complicity, right? Because he is working within a system that he then knows to be corrupt. So at the end, when he lets the lieutenant slide, even for that moment, he is participating in that corruption. And for Struthers, it's even worse because his corruption is in that. And we can look at eventually on the page how you do that, how to communicate that he has this secret, but his secret, his corruption is having that affair with the lieutenant's wife. And.

And that corruption ties him into the story universe. So right now, Randall is separated from it. He's not locked in to. And. And I think there are problems with other avatars being locked in as well. But that's why I think that's. It's. It's not that problem of execution that we need to go up to red or even blue. So I think maybe we want to discuss it next at that level and talk about how to.

Address the root causes of not having that. Those layers of. Layers of revelation going on from Randall.

So what I would say to that is you're spot on. And when you're talking about corruption, you're talking. Sorry, lean forward there. So I absolutely agree with Danielle on that. And when she's talking about corruption, what. Corruption is another word for injustice, right? So justice is the value at stake in a crime story.

So when you are in search of justice, it's like there has to be a polar opposite, right? In order for you to attain justice, there has to be evidence of injustice in the system.

So when Danielle was talking about Randall's sort of disconnection from the corruption, injustice, dimensionality of the story in your version versus Struthers, there is a clear distinction that Struthers is wrangling with that problem of his own corruption, his own unjust, psycho, you know, psychological development. So he's carrying this burden of he probably thinks he's a good, decent person, as we all do, right? But he's also the kind of guy who cheats on his family, you know, and he not only cheats on his family, it caused another person's death. The woman that he supposedly cared about. So that injustice within Struthers in the Ed McBain story is so rife and very, very delicate balance that he knows the only way he's going to get any salvation whatsoever is to try and.

Get some. Some level of justice for this senseless death of this woman. And that's the only way he will be able to live with himself. But he. He's also very, very selfish, right? So he doesn't want to cause personal harm to himself or his family because he's. He's in relationships beyond himself at this point. So it's a very hairy double factor problem that is right on target in terms of the value of justice and injustice for Struthers, who is the witness to this murder. Now, every other person in the Ed McBain story is also negotiating how they're navigating this very difficult gradient of injustice and justice or corruption and justice. So every player in the story is trying to make sense of how do you live in a world that is both just and unjust, right? And this is. This is the central problem of crime stories, that we're all. This is what attracts us as readers to crime stories. How do I navigate a world that is both just and unjust? It's not fair. And sometimes it is fair. So how do I. How do I know what to do when something unfair happens to me? How do I metabolize that injustice in this world?

So that is the big blue of a crime story. How do I work? How do I make my way through this world when I cause a lot of unjust things in the world myself? I am a source of injustice as much as I am a source of justice. And that is in. In the red zone of my own mind, right? So that's. That's what Plato was talking about, is to have a just psychodynamic balance of your interiority such that you can make the best of bad and good situations. So, Randall, in your story, you, first of all, let me just say you've come a long way. So I'm not trying to denigrate the work that you already done. So yay for Tim. But I also know that.

You want to hear the truth and you want to make it even better, right? So in this case, Danielle has hit the point here, is that it's not just about fixing this small, overt covert problem in the locality of that particular section of the story. It's really thinking about what has driven Randall to this place. And it can't be, oh, I was ashamed of the work That I do, because shame. He's not overcoming shame here. He's overcoming his own contribution to the injustice justice spectrum. So he has to be in some way contributing to the injustice in the world by his behavior. And it reaches a tipping point for him such that he's going to even put his own life in jeopardy by going to the police station and doing his best to right that wrong. And so that's why the red zone is really the point here. This is the problem with Randall, is if you can solve this, how is he dealing with justice? Not shame, but justice? So right now it reads like he's. He's. I'm a little ashamed of what I do to be able to eat. It's not. It's not. I don't like it, and I have to do what I have to do. That's shame. That's on the value of shame. It's not on the value of I did something bad that caused someone to die.

Right? Struthers did something bad that caused someone to die. He stepped out on his family, slept with a woman.

Who was married to the lieutenant of the police department, that the lieutenant found out he killed her in a rage.

And now he got away with it because the lieutenant knew he could get away with killing his wife, but he probably couldn't get away with killing Strother.

And he has to walk around with that for the rest of his life. That's what drives him to the police station. Hey, maybe I can get a best bad choice here. Maybe the lieutenant can go away if I identify him and tell the police that he's the killer, and then I can run away and be safe. And that's the Beauty of the McBain Story, because. No, no, no, no, no. You're not. You're never safe, dude. You're never going to run away from your unjust mental condition. You have to set your internality straight, bro, in order for you to be able to navigate this just unjust world in a way that's honorable, good, true, and beautiful.

So I. Yeah, I always flush up to the. To the top of the blue zone here. But I. I just wanted to really say that I think Danielle's nailed here, and I want to hear from Leslie because she's our red zone person, but I think it's a red zone problem that will. Will. Will be something that can help the blue and the green. So what Danielle's point is, let's find the area that we need to emphasize to. That will fix the other two zones.

Right? So if you can Fix this red zone. It's going to fix your blue and your green simultaneously. If you. I hope that's what Danielle was pointing to, and I think it is. So let me turn it over to Leslie now. But I think that's really good.

Yeah, I love this discussion and I love where we're going with it. So I want to, at the risk of piling on a little more chaos, I want to bring a couple of other examples from the manuscript for us to talk about to help clarify the red. So when, you know, when I'm going through this, in that, that second sentence, we've got his stale scent of layered sweat and piss still hung in the air. And so for me, immediately being kind of red focused, I'm like, what is this? What is this showing Sam? So what is Watson trying to show Sam about Randall here? So that's a question, you know, just let's shelve that for a second. And then when we're getting down into, you know, another place, when they're back in the office. So this is pretty far into the story we have Watson. I draped my jacket over the back of my chair and eased down.

So, you know, again, I'm like, I'm thinking, what are. Why does Sam need to know this?

Right?

And if we, we go back, Sam is a young officer who wants to increase the probability of justice without experiencing the blowback from that. Right. So plausible deniability. And as Sean has mentioned, there's that, that twist of he has, you know, we, we need to help the Sam. We need to help Sam, our single audience member, that young officer, do this in spite of the fact that he has his own. He's participated in the corruption in injustice as well. So it's like he's got to get his head straight and take the risk.

So when we're looking at these examples.

And thinking about, you know, sweat and piss probably aren't the way that Watson wants to describe the experience and what he's trying to accomplish in that first, those first sentences.

Those are probably not the words, right? And so that's a word level, but, but I take that up to the red because I'm thinking about what does Watson want to show this young officer about what he's observing. So that's one piece. We want to be thinking about our words and that in that way. But I was thinking about this also in terms of what kinds of world building.

Are we including, what kinds of actions, what kinds of agent qualifications, what kinds of arena qualifications are going to be relevant to Sam and This is just kind of.

Again, I'm throwing chaos on you, but I'm going to bring it around. Hopefully. Fingers crossed. Okay, so what got me thinking about this were that Agent Qualif. Agent qualifications for Watson are irrelevant here. So what that means is Watson's past is not relevant in the context of a police report, is not relevant in the context of.

Of trying to show the witness. I mean, sorry, excuse me, trying to show the young officer how to increase the probability of, of justice. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does.

I wonder. The first thing that comes to mind is, and I don't think I did this in that, but.

Would it in the way where like he's showing.

Would there be a space here for him to show his complicity in the corruption by some of his actions? Or does it just not matter? Because this isn't about him.

I think this is not about him.

So Watson is serving as a witness who has the potential to right the wrong. And so we're seeing everything through his eyes. So you know, and we know about that, right? On a, on a very clear level, easy level, we can see any. In terms of relevance, anything that Watson can't observe doesn't go in here. Can't observe, can't know otherwise, doesn't go in here. He's the eyes through which we are seeing the events. So he's not. Unless he's looking at himself in a mirror. And why would he do that? In the context of this? We're not looking at his agent qualifications. So agent qualifications are, you know, the things that.

The descriptions of, of an avatar, right, Physically or things that are like evidence of past decisions that they've made. Like so what they're wearing and you know, it can even be like we give the example in the guild from Treasure island, the captain, the, the evidence of his hard life is all over him. Okay, so we want to know what Watson does.

That'S important because the young officer needs to see that, but his agent qualifications are not. His agent qualifications are going to indicate problems for an indigenous member of the pond.

Right? And we've decided that our protagonist here, and therefore our Sam, are. They're fish out of water. So we're not going to focus on any qualifications that indicate problems that are related to that aspect.

So then if we go, if we look at Randall though, those agent qualifications, like what Watson sees is relevant, both because he's testing him, but also because they, he's the protagonist. And it's what Sam, our young officer, needs to see.

In order to make the make the shift we want Sam to have to. So to illuminate Sam's problem, Sam has to be able to see.

That, needs to be able to see Randall.

So those are just some, some things that, to, to kind of indicate what kinds of qualifications, what kind of world building, what kinds of details we need to include. And then it also goes to the dialogue as well. Right. So they're always.

They'Re pursuing the same essential tactic in, through what they say and, and that, and those essential tactics are again, they're consistent until they change for a specific reason.

Something'S happened that changes the way that they see that or what they're pursuing the way they're pursuing it.

And so I got, I lost my train of thought.

But, but all of this is coming back to when we're focusing on Sam and Sam's problem and the, then we can, we can figure out things like which words should we use to describe Randall and what, you know, what aspects of Randall are important. Watson is sizing him up. Right. So, so those kinds of details are the ones that are going to be important. And.

Yeah, I got, I'm a little lost, but what I, but so okay, so how is that, how is that landing for you? Does that make sense? Does that help clarify a little bit the narrative device and then what changes you might make from that position?

Yeah, I think if I think back to the, the masterwork story, you know, those initial qualifications of.

Struthers like ties into how he did his reporting. So they were early indications of how he was going to be approaching this entire problem because he, everything was so precise and clean cut and so.

No, that makes sense. That part makes sense. I like, I've really liked what you said about pulling out the agent qualifications because it's not about him and we don't need the background on Watson.

And.

Yeah, I mean, so I like that I still.

Am unsure of.

What to do. I mean, I, I feel like I can, I can come up with something he's hiding and we could talk about that and maybe that will help solve some of these problems. But it sounds like it's more than just knowing what he's hiding and how he goes about hiding it. It sounds like there's some other problems you, you're identifying as. Well.

Yeah, so I think what's, what's happening here.

This is my hunch. I don't, you know, see how it feels is that you're understanding the narrative device intellectually and that when you're, then when you're in there, you're Going, you're still going from your gut and you're not sure how to test what you're writing against the narrative device.

Is that accurate, do you think?

Yeah, I mean it sounds like what you're saying is like, I don't know how yet to like.

How to put the narrative device on the page.

I had a thought on, on.

Thinking about this in connection with the other topic a little bit.

Because I, I noticed some of those words going through like that poor man and things like that. And I had that just written down as evaluative words that we talked about a little bit last time. And I love the ones that you're bringing up too, Leslie. And I was thinking about it. I don't know if this will be helpful to you, Tim, but in terms of if it's as if it's in a police report, then maybe it would work to work backwards from it. So the police report is, is addressing the question, why did that guy run out? So imagine that you are telling somebody that somebody did something. So you say, oh, I was talking to this guy and he just ran out on me. And there are certain people who will look at you and they'll say, well what did you do, Tim? What'd you do? You know, instead of just assuming that the other guy was irrational. Right. And so the police report is attempting to answer the question, why did this guy run out? And so we see Watson insofar as he contributes to the guy running out. Right. And his contribution to the guy running out is that he exposes that corruption that the guy had. We see the Lieutenant Wilson. I just want to say we might need some name diversity here because we got a lot of like sons going on. But we have Wilson and he, we only see him insofar as he contributes to the guy running out by being a murderer. He has quite a hefty contribution to this action. And then we see Dawson insofar as he contributes to the guy running out. And what does he do? He has his own self serving agenda which we'll talk about at another time. But he is instrumental in the chain of events that leads to Wilson coming into the precinct and causing the guy to run out. So we only meet people insofar as they answer this central question addressed in the report.

And like the minimum viable, like you just want to know what is the chain of events that led to this. So like Leslie, when you bring up Randall's agent qualifications, I think that's addressing.

Is it more or less likely that he's going to take this Action in an unfounded way. And so the more that we see that he's thinking clearly, that he's taking logical actions, because if we meet him at first and he's rocking and he's acting erratically and then he runs out, okay, end of, end of report, right? But if we see throughout the, throughout the process that he's thinking about these things, he's making chains of cause and effect. By the end of it, we know he's not running out because he has some sort of, you know, underlying issue going on. We know that he's making those connections and he's making logical choices.

So I thought that might be a way to sort of back into the narrative device using that textual evidence at the end.

Right. If I hear you correctly, what you're talking about is there are actually two parallel questions that, that the reader is.

Is wondering about. And one is provided by the pop, right? It's a, it's the narrative question. And then there's one provided by the, the form of the narrative device. So the narrative device, right, it's created because.

Because.

Watson needs to explain what happened, right? The police are always, they want to keep records on what has happened in case they need it for later, right? So, so we have, so we have that question, why did this guy run out? Is running parallel to. Or is justice going to be, Are we going to see justice happen here in this, in this story? Because it's a crime story. So we always have those two parallel questions.

Running. And perhaps in some, with some narrative devices and stories, it's, they're one, they're just one and the same. But here we have those two. And both need to be satisfied in order to create that, the coherent narrative.

So that the reader experiences the story and has that, that sharp cathartic moment at the end that takes them back to the beginning of the story.

So that it's, everything's working together.

To deliver that, that experience.

Let me just pile on to those concepts that you guys have been exploring. And I think they're very, very strong. And it goes to.

It goes to.

The idea of enabling of insight generation by a third party.

Through the use of COVID narrative action. So what that means is that.

What the narrator of this story is doing is he's telling Sam. And Sam is not an amorphous just reader. Sam is a young officer who needs to learn how to make it work so that he is not in cognitive dissonance when he's at work in a very unjust place.

So the question is, why did that Guy run out. Here's how to answer that question. Such that you can increase the probability of justice. So the narrator of the story doesn't tell the person how to write the report. He hands him or her the report. And the report will cause it enables insight generation. So the overt language of the report is, this happened and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.

The end.

End of my report. And then you read the report and you go, holy crap.

The lieutenant's the killer.

So it's a covert. This is all. All narrative is this. It's a covert means to enable insight in Sam without telling Sam the answer. Hey, Sam, the lieutenant was the killer. Hey, what do you think about that? Hey, there's a lot of corruption in the police department, huh? That's not very interesting to anyone. They want to discover that fact for themselves in an insight that provides a cathartic moment.

Why?

Because no one on the planet tells you overtly their motivations in real life.

Right. Because it's impossible for us to do that because we're all living our own narrative. Right. So I am doing things overtly that have covert stuff in them that I don't. I can't even recognize. That's what Freud discovered in the unconscious. Right. So anyway, the. That the narration is a covert means by answering the question, why did that guy run out of the police department?

And it's only putting in the relevant moments that will enable the. The catharsis from Sam. So it's a covert means and the overt language is a facilitator of insight. That's why Leslie's saying, is it really important that we hear the guy. The guy tells us that he put his jacket over the back of his chair. No, it's not. Is it important that we think that Randall is kind of a stinky guy who is. Is probably, you know, shaky in terms of his mental health? Yeah. That is because we want Randall. We don't want the. The reader to be confused and think that Randall is not worthy of our belief.

So you might want to. So the tweaking of the language is, you know, it might be like.

You.

Could smell his homelessness underneath the Old Spice. Right. So maybe he had gone to get some deodorant or whatever to. And he combed his hair and he's putting on his best face because he wants to be taken seriously and not as a homeless person. I don't know. But those are, those are things that you would try and put into a police report so that the person reading the police report would go, oh, wait a minute, this wasn't a homeless guy. This was someone who, who lives on the street who had some really important information.

So the way you describe Randall is going to be really important for Sam because Sam is then going to draw conclusions. Oh, this isn't your run of the mill stereotypical person who comes off of the street. This is someone who's right and this is a red problem. So Danielle was right. This is a red problem.

You're getting close to making sure that the double factor problem of corruption, the endemic corruption of the police department is there. But you know, you made a sidestep and you move from worldview to shame. And shame is about performance and self respect and third party respect. So you moved the genre is, is a little jig jaggy here because it should be about.

The double factor problem of corruption.

So again, I went blue and I always lose people when I go up here. But I hope that overt and covert is an important thing to think about. Because what is the report, police report's purpose? To tell what happened, why the guy ran out. And so a really smart detective will put the COVID thing to facilitate. Oh, we've got a bad apple as our lieutenant. And anyone in internal affairs who reads that report will go, oh, let's take a look at the lieutenant. And they're not going to say, oh, it was just some homeless guy who came in for 10 bucks.

So it ruins that justification system through the COVID action of the narration.

That, yeah, that is super helpful. I feel like asking the question, the, the reports there to answer the question, why did Randall run out? And then thinking of it in this way of.

The plausible. I mean, these are all things I think we've talked about, but I forget them in the process of like the plausible deniability of the report where, you know, at the end of this, Watson can just say like, I just wrote the report. I didn't, you know, that's all I did was tell you what happened.

Where like Dawson would probably write a different, a different report.

That's really important what you just said. Tim Dawson would write a different report. So that was a big insight that you just had because now you've got very specific on your narrator. And so now you're getting better in your red zone because you're understanding who was telling who what, who was talking to whom and why. And if Dawson had written that report, he'd be like, hey dude, here's how you cover up for the lieutenant. You tell them that it's a Homeless guy who smelled of sweat and pissed, who was rocking back and forth and was completely unreliable and a mess.

So Dawson. That's the report Dawson would write. The report that Watson will write will be like, this guy was on the level.

He went. He went the extra, you know, amount of time necessary for us to take him seriously. He turned down the $10. He turned down the oatmeal. He gave me justifications of why he was there. He combed his hair. He did his best. He was acting in the best interest of passing on this information. And then all of a sudden, this guy who was really doing his best freaked out and ran away when he saw the lieutenant. Draw your own conclusions, folks. That's the report that will get the lieutenant in jail, not the report that will talk about how he smelled like piss and sweat. That's a Dawson report. That's not a Watson report.

I mean, so it's my next steps to take this draft, not rewrite it from the ground up, but start working to change the sentences to match what we're talking about.

Okay, all three of us are nodding there because. Yes. And what I want you to do is go sentence by sentence and change the words, but keep the sentence structure the way it is as best you can. So I want you to do your best and not restructuring what you've already written with new sentence structure.

Right. So that we can compare and contrast using the exact same format as the previous one. So I. Next week, I. If you say to me, I just started from the beginning again, I'm going to say, we're not doing the podcast this week. Okay.

So keep that in mind. And we're going to hold you to it. And it's fine if we skip a week on the podcast, but this is going to really, really help you understand the red zone. And this is. This is. This is a really important thing that we've discovered here at Story Grid, and we're doing the. The Narrative Path, you know, a seminar, the workshop in November to really get this red zone under control so that people can have tools and can slow themselves down and just concentrate on what's the difference between a police report from Dawson and Watson with very specific ways to be able to track that.

What.

What. Why do I. What. What is the value in the blue have to do with the red? Oh, well, that's very important, right? How. Because it goes to the green. These are all tightly wound. They're like threads, and each thread winds around the other. It's like a double helix.

And so the red is really the place where the communication zone lands. It's the channel from the blue to the green is the red. And the red really needs to be constrained. And it's like Leslie and I talk about this sort of like an internal combustion engine, right? You have a piston and then you have a spark that sends gas to drive the piston through a cylinder, which turns the crankshaft of the car. So if you have no cylinder to constrain the piston, the piston will flip flop all over and your car doesn't move because all of the energy is just being dissipated into a million different places. So that cylinder, metaphorically, is the red zone. It constrains the piston moving forward, upward so that the crankshaft can turn the car. So you want to make that cylinder super well constructed. And parts that make up the cylinder are the value shifts. These questions, we talk about the narrative device. It's Sam, it's the author. It's all of this beautiful stuff that you, the, you're sort of like creating the cylinder of the engine of your car when you are talking about the red zone. And the green zone is the gas, your sparks, spark, spark, spark, spark, spark. Right? And the blue, that's the car.

The car is going from one place to another to show how change happens.

And it's an enabling function for your single audience member that will enable them to navigate their own car of their own mind when they face the same double factor problem in their own lives. These double factor problems are inescapable. We have a lot of them. We have like 12 of them. Those are the genres, right? And those 12 are constantly on the table for us as we navigate the world. So the red zone is super important because it's the constraining function that makes sure that the piston is going in the right direction after you apply the gas of the green so that the blue car can move from Chicago to Los Angeles or wherever.

So you're concentrating now. You're, you've got the piston and the piston's good, but your cylinder is a little wacky. So when you fire the gas at the bottom, it goes and it sort of moves the car. And it does move, but it's flip floppy and it's not coherent. It's noisy. You got a knock in your engine, right? So we want to fix the cylinders that are constraining your pistons so that they're very, very perfectly aligned so that it's very efficient in the up, down movement of the energy transfer that drives the car.

And I would just add one thing to that, one adjustment to the assignment for next week is to. Even if you only get a couple of tropes done or a couple of tropes worth of the manuscript done, that's fine. Like, really focus on going slowly and applying your understanding of the. Of the narrative device to what you're reading. Because it'll be better to do, you know, do those that a little bit very carefully than try to do the whole thing and not nail it.

Yeah, I think the thing that keeps running through my head now is I'm like, I could see now, like.

Watson getting home from work before he's written the report, and he's just like, oh, fuck, you know, like, now I've got this thing and now what do I do? And I could see him like the conversation he has with his wife where he's like, look, I know what's going on here, but if I, like, try to do this, I don't have a witness that anybody will listen to. But I know exactly what happened. You know, what the am I going to do, you know? And I can see his wife being like, I've seen you do this before. Just write the report, but write it in a way where any idiot would know exactly what happened. And so then that starts getting. Is like he's trying with. And that's getting into the word choice and what you're getting at with the sentence by sentence of like, every single sentence sees to scream it's the lieutenant without him saying it.

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