Planning Your Middle Build

Hello, and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we start diving into the middle build of my story. And so, as you recall, last episode, we called the beginning hook and decided I had finished with that. And I got tossed into the deep end of trying to figure out what my middle build is. So I wrote the first scene, sent it to Sean, and we talked through not only my scene, but the overarching picture of what the middle build is for. So I think it's a really great episode. All of us have to write a middle build at some point, and Sean gives some really good feedback on how to wade into that pool and figure out how to tell a middle build that works. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, this whole moving into the middle build thing took me by surprise because I still felt like I had a while and wrapping my head around it was just really hard trying to figure out, because the beginning hook kept taking all these turns that I wasn't planning on. I just stopped thinking about what the middle build could be. And so when I actually sat down and started planning it, you know, I kind of was looking at, you know, roughly 30 scenes. You know, I'm thinking the kind of middle point of the middle build will be something with the brother. And so I was trying to think, okay, well, how do we get to that point? And then I was going back and, like, reading through all this stuff on the hero's journey again, and I feel like we're in the Allies, enemies, and test kind of phase. So I was kind of thinking about that, and then I sat down and wrote out, like, kind of what we've talked about before, where it's like, okay, well, what are all my options? So I wrote out things like, okay, well, what's the time frame? You know, so is this immediately after the last scene? Is this a month after the last scene? Is it maybe right after her arrival in the Capitol? You know, where. When is it? And then I was thinking of, like, settings, you know, where could this take place, all the different options there. And then thinking again about, well, who's going to be there? Like, what are the people in play? What people came along from the beginning? Hook and what people are going to be new. And so I decided the biggest thing that we haven't introduced. And I actually want to touch on this at some point while we talk today, I want to go back and touch on a change I think we need to make to the first scene of the book. You know, I was thinking, well, the biggest shift is we're now entering the new world. And so I decided it might be good to do that in a really dramatic way. So I started the scene inside of like the Matrix or whatever we're going to call this thing, but inside of the simulation and just kind of dropped you into it without really understanding what's going on. And then tried to build this scene that kind of introduced some new people and introduce kind of the. The new world, introduce some of the consequences of the new world. And at the end of writing this scene, I couldn't because I thought I would actually send you like a sequence, three scenes at least. And I couldn't come up with what to write next. I was just completely stuck. So I just did this scene and sent it to you. So that's kind of what I was thinking and how I arrived at what I ended up sending you. And again, I'll put it in the show notes for everybody to take a look at.

Well, okay. All of that stuff makes perfect sense. And the fact that you were confused at the beginning makes sense, too. We've been concentrating on the beginning hook and the beginning hook. Let's take a couple of really big steps backwards just so that we can look at the world from a very high perspective. One of my favorite films of all time is a film called the power of 10. And if you haven't seen it, check it out on YouTube. It was created by Charles Eames, you know, the guy who created the Eames chair. And anyway, the reason why I love this movie is that it takes you on powers of 10 far, far, far above this. It begins, the movie begins with this couple on this blanket in this park in Chicago. And then they slowly scan back, you know, 10 meters and then 100 meters and then thousand meters. And every power of a 10 up to like 10 to the 24th power when you're at the edge of the Milky Way. So I always like to use that sort of power of 10 movie to help me whenever I get stumped at a particular level of consciousness. And when you're talking about story, there are so many different levels operating and there's so many micro elements that you have to deal with all the thing. All those Things that you started talking about that you can quickly lose your bearings. So whenever I lose my bearings on a story, I do the opposite thing. So you lost your bearings because you were trying to map the micro story scene by scene. You wanted to sort of get yourself an outline of things that are going to happen sequence by sequence, scene by scene, over a period of 30 scenes. And that makes perfect sense because we've been working scene by scene, sequence by sequence over the last month or so. So now that we're moving, though, from the beginning hook, which I think is in, is in very good shape, and we're moving and transitioning into the middle build. The thing to do now is to say to yourself, okay, what's my beginning hook, middle build, ending payoff all about? Again, how am I going to relate that to the genres I've chosen? What's my overall purpose in the middle build? What? Are there any conventions and obligatory scenes in my genres that I've chosen that can help me when I dive deep, you know, back into the scene by scene stuff? Let's take, you know, let's go out a couple of powers of 10 and take a look at the story from a wide angle, the macro point of view, and see if we can get some answers. And that will help you get back on course and on track in your micro. Now, before I go any further, I do want to say that the scene that you created was very good. Whether or not it stays exactly the same way it is is another question. But what. When I read it, I found myself saying, what's going on? What's going to happen next? What's this all about? And when I was reading it, I was like, hey, this is nice, because it's unexpected, which means that you're surprising your reader with a different sensibility than what's ever come before. The sensibility of the character seems a bit different too. She seems much more comfortable in this world. She seems stronger. So I'm just going to say that off the top so that you don't worry that I'm going to slap you around for writing a shitty scene at the end of this, at the end of the step back, but we should step back. And this is a place where people can go wildly off the rails, especially once they've established the fact that they're comfortable creating scenes. So these are the moments when sort of fly by the pants. Writers really go wildly off track and they have such a sense of confidence from the work they've done previously that they trust the organic flow of their Thoughts. And whenever you start to trust the organic flow of your thoughts, it's time to get very analytical.

I would never do that.

Okay, so let's just take a wide angle, step back and remind ourselves of the genres that we're dealing with now. What is the global genre that you're writing in this book?

The thriller.

That's the external one. That's the external genre, content genre that you've decided to focus on in the story.

But the coming of age, yes, this.

Is a maturation plot. It's an internal genre and it's really, really important. You know, I was writing something the other day, preparing for something I had to do and I had to explicitly say that when you're writing, you have to choose one overarching global genre. And the reason why is this. You cannot tell your reader. You can't have it both ways. You can't say, oh, it's a thriller and a coming of age story, although it has elements of both. And the thriller element is very strong. At the end of the day, you as the writer have to make a choice and you have to say to yourself, the most important genre that I'm writing in is going to be the maturation plot. And the reason why you have to do that is because you need the reader to really anticipate your ending payoff. And the ending payoff of a maturation plot is different than the ending payoff of a thriller. Now there are elements that you can play with where you can deliver both at the same time. But the big, big, you know, punch to the stomach, the cathartic experience to the reader has to come on the maturation plot. And the reason why is because you chose a 12 year old character. If you had chosen another character who was an adult, who hasn't gone through, who wasn't in the process of understanding that the world is a complicated place and that, you know, moving from naivete to worldliness. If you hadn't established a character who was 12, then you could make the choice that it's just a thriller. And I don't mean just a thriller. I love thriller. So anyway, we know that the ending payoff of this story is going to be the revelatory moment when your character comes to realize that she is not the center of the universe and that people are not black or white, they have gradations of moral character. That is the maturation process. When you come to understand that there are not magical people in the world who have all the answers, which is sort of the way we think our parents are when we're younger, when we come to realize that our parents are not the magical creatures who can ensure our happiness. That's a moment of maturation. So we know, you know, you are going to have to deliver at the ending payoff a moment of truth to this character that will blow her world apart. It will change her way of looking at the world. So I'm not saying you have to figure out what that scene is yet. And I think what's going to happen is it's going to become obvious as we proceed through this story, but knowing that you have to get there is a really important thing to understand. Okay?

Okay.

So now, because you were writing a maturation plot that also affected the beginning Hook. And as you'll recall, when we started the beginning Hook, we pulled out a lot of things that went too far in terms of action. We did not go to death, remember? We decided after going through scenes, you know what? Death is not a good thing here. What's really important in this beginning hook is to establish this character's childishness and that her childishness is getting her into deep trouble. So the beginning hook began with two men in a whole sequences, which means somebody makes a decision that is catastrophic. It has a level of catastrophic, you know, consequences to it. So her first catastrophic decision was to not accept the position in the Capitol. And what that did is it threw her in a hole. She got thrown out of just being a townie, and now she's unnumbered. Then once she became unnumbered, she fell in another hole because she panicked, as everybody does, and decided, oh, my gosh, I didn't mean to make that decision. I'm just going to go home. And that panic threw her in another hole, which caused not only her own personal pain, but she brought pain to other people. And then you tied off the man in the hole sequence. You got her out of that hole by her making an active choice to surrender and to go to the Capitol.

Now, that didn't happen on the page, though.

It's okay, though.

Okay.

That is a decision that you did not have to put on the page, because the action brought us to that inevitable conclusion. And you could have put it on the page, but you would have ripped it out in your fifth draft because you would have said to yourself, we don't need this. My readers aren't stupid. My readers can understand what happened here. They understand what I'm doing. So the final scene in the beginning Hook ends with this moment between 83 and Jesse, where 83 looks at Jesse after Having heard the news that Jesse can leave the number at any time she wants and that she's just being a petulant little child. So at that point, you know, as you said at the beginning of your. Of your discussion, the temptation as a writer is to gild the lily, meaning do a little bit more stuff before, you know, she actually does go to the. To the magical world. But what I said, we talked about.

Not doing that, of just, like, dropping her right in instead of, like, all of this. Like, now she's made the decision, now she's on her way, and now she's finally arrived.

Yes. It's a way of using a climactic, active moment as a cliffhanger, and it's not something you should do all the time. But remember, you're transitioning from the beginning hook to the middle Bill. You need a big moment here. You need a big moment for the reader so that they intuitively know, oh, now all bets are off. So because you did not put in the resolution where she says, okay, I'll go, you use the technique of creating a cliffhanger by suspending the active decision and the resolution of that decision. You just didn't write that. So you. You cut off. You cut us off at the cliff at the end of your beginning hook. And so your instinct in this beginning of your middle build is a good one. Your instinct is, oh, I don't want to do the scene where she's in the train and she has a nice, delicious, you know, milkshake, and everybody's nice to her, and this is the new magical world. You didn't want to do that scene because we've seen that scene before and others have done it very well, you know, so what's the point in trying to do a scene better than, you know, Suzanne Collins or J.K. rowling? You know, let them have that scene. They did that scene really well. So your. Your choice was to start it in medias res, meaning in the middle of things. It's now some time in the future. She's already been in the magical world, and here she is living in the magical world, doing magical things. And that works because it is a different. It's a completely different world than where we've been. The scene that you created that you just sent me yesterday or the day before is a completely different sensibility than what you had created before. So you're, you know, you're in a.

That's a good thing or a bad thing.

It's a very good thing. It's a good thing. Because you're in terms of the hero's journey. This is the moment where she has passed the gatekeeper of the old world, which was herself, ironically. And now she's in the magical world. So you need to create a different world so that the reader understands, hey, we're not in Kansas anymore. You know, the house has landed. She's in the magical world. Okay, but this is our global universe. We've got this maturation plot that is our heart and soul of the story. We've moved our character from being childish to making her first adult decision. And that adult decision is going to foreshadow a very big, big decision later on. So, so her first adult decision was motivated by the pain she was bringing other people. Which is great because that is creating her character in an organic way. She makes mistake, she makes a bigger mistake. She changes. She is showing the capacity to change. So you are signaling to the audience, hey, hang on. This character is changing. Wait till you see what's going to happen later on. So you're establishing this pattern where you're showing the reader that this character is somebody to follow. This is somebody who's just like the rest of us. She makes bad decisions, but when push comes to shove, she makes the right choice. Okay, so that's the beginning hook. It's in good shape. You, you have a great instinctual sense of what to do in the first scene of the middle build. Great. Now the problem with the first scene is all about global reasoning. And the global reasoning is this. The middle build is the moment for the antagonist. There's a saying, I don't know who said it. It was probably somebody a lot smarter than me. But they said the middle build is the villain. That's the villains terrain. They own the mental bill. So the villain needs to be firmly established as quickly as possible. And when you're dealing with a villain in this kind of story, which has a maturation plot as the global story, but the external is thriller, then we need to put a villain that is right out of central casting in the thriller. And the thriller is a combination of action and one of the internal genres. So you're already, you're already in good shape because you've established that the internal genre is maturation. So thriller just means action plus maturation plot. And the protagonist becomes the victim. Now what's great again is that you've already established her as a victim. So we don't have to work so hard in the middle build establishing her as a victim. But what we do need to do is to firmly establish the forces of antagonism that are bearing down on her. So the questions that you need to focus on right now are the following. Who's the villain? And remember, a villain is not just a character. For example, a villain can move and morph and can have many heads. So in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a great, great thriller, one of the best, there are three villains that form a three headed monster that are opposing Indiana Jones. Right?

Okay, so there are three villains. There's some Gestapo officer, there's a general, a Nazi general, and then there's that really despicable Nazi archaeologist. So all three of those evil forces, they come into Indiana's life and create. Create havoc at each and every stage. And the climax of Indiana Jones takes care of all three of those bastards in one fell swoop. It's a brilliant ending. Payoff. So the reason why I bring up Raiders of the Lost Ark is that you already have a really solid villain presence in the. What do you call them? The Ambassador faction.

Oh yeah, Captain Mason.

Captain Mason, right. Captain Mason is the liaison between the faction and the townies. So he's. His job is to go down and pull out the best townie coders who work in the underground and bring them for more training to the capitol.

So he's serving the faction. And the faction is this sort of nebulous force that controls society. It's in control. So the faction as an institution is a villain, but it's not very specific. So the fact that you have the captain as a representative of the faction is extremely important because we need to have specific personal antagonism in order for scenes to work. So my suggestion to you is to think about. Now remember what I said, the villain owns the middle bill. And in action stories and thrillers, what happens is that the hero, the protagonist, eventually morphs into the victim, and the villain is responsible for creating an object of desire in the hero. Now this is probably sounding very complicated, but the great thing about action stories is that the answers to these questions are already solved for you. So in action, they're conventions, in other words. So in an action story, the villain, their plan affects the hero in such a way that the hero develops an object of desire. The object of desire in a thriller is for the hero to protect the victim. So here we go again. We're going to talk about those three forces that have to be in a thriller. The hero, the victim, and the villain. So the villain has an evil plan. Remember, the villain's plan has a lot of great, reasonable things to it.

Too.

Especially in a story like this where you're talking about social strata and the political universe of this dystopia, there has to be some things that. That can make sense to the reader in the villain's plan. And I have some ideas that I'll share with you about what I think the villain's plan is. But it's important to understand what the villain wants. And what the villain wants will create a desire in the hero to protect a victim of the villain's wants. So we've got the captain, and I think what you should do is think about Raiders of the Lost Ark. Let's not reinvent the wheel here. Is there another forceful, antagonistic character from the faction that can be introduced here? And perhaps there might be another one later on. I'm not sure, but I think there's a level of, you know, once she gets to this magical world, the captain was a little bit scary in the beginning, Hook. Now, you gotta up your game. You've got to come up with some. Some person or force. I would make it personal, and you do hint at that person in the scene that you wrote, but you're gonna have to flesh out that character in a way.

Okay.

The villain creates the object of desire in the hero. So the villain has to have. Have to want something. And what the villain wants in a thriller is something that the hero has. So the villain wants something the hero has. Okay, so let's think about this. Let's think about this world. What I think is interesting is that just through our conversations, you use sort of like this ceremonial, you know, event that you've talked about called the threshing, right?

Yes.

Okay, so just for fun, I looked up the definition of threshing. And threshing means to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's a way of, you know, separating grains so that you get rid of all the stuff that isn't good so that you can have, you know, great bread. And it's. It's an agricultural term. So that gave me an idea. And the idea is this. One of the things that totalitarian states, or tyrannies, fear the most are uprisings by very charismatic figures, figures who have skills and ways of talking and ways of motivating people that can threaten, you know, the power of the tyranny. So what is kind of interesting to me is that we had this captain go back to the townie land where sort of all of the proletariat live, and the captain's job is to find the best in that townie world. And to pull them out of the townie world and to give them entree into the upper class of society, which is in the capital. So if I were a power structure in a dystopia, one of the things that I would want to do would be to protect my power base by cutting off any possibility of uprising. And the way you would cut off what's interesting, the way you've set up this story, is that the way to cut off uprising would be to appeal to the baser instincts and the baser wants of those people who could possibly destroy you. And that sounds kind of esoteric, but basically what I mean is, if you want to stop somebody who's really great at doing something, you give them a nice car, or you. You give them all kinds of little treats to make them feel that they're superior to everybody else and keeps them docile and complacent and unwilling or unmotivated to help their fellow man. So what could be cool in your story is to use this faction as this power base that is really, really intelligent. And the way it keeps its power is by telling a story to the community. And the story is this. We are under constant attack. This is the story that the faction could be telling the people in the town and the people in the Capitol and. And the numbered and etc. Etc. We are under a constant attack. And every four years, we have to reassert our inviolability in a contest. And our power base has to fight other power bases around the planet or the Earth or however you want to structure it. I think you want to keep it, you know, on Earth.

Yeah.

So what we have to do is pull out and find the most talented people from wherever they are. We don't care if you're poor or if you're a townie or whatever. We are going to find the best of the best, bring them to the Capitol, train them, and then they can fight for us in this competition so that we can keep everybody safe. So that's the story that the people kind of understand, and they support it. So the fact that Jesse doesn't support this plan and rejected her call to action is disturbing to the faction because even though she's doing it out of sort of childish petulance and fear of losing her family, there's somebody who turns down a trip to go have ice cream every day you got to worry about. And so it kind of causes this red flag. And so they send this captain to monitor the situation after she's been shamed, etc, etc. And what they discover is that the only thing that's going to motivate this girl to do what we want her to do is to hurt other people. It's almost as if she's immune to being hurt herself. But when you start to hurt other people, her moral center arises and it glows and it makes her. It forces her to make choices that are heroic. When she does go to the Capitol, she's targeted even more closely. And now the villain is saying to themselves, aha, here's one of those uprising sort of personalities, a charismatic figure who could lead uprising against our power base. So what I want from them is to destroy them publicly. I want to make them a cautionary tale for the rest of society. So.

Okay, Liz, I got several thoughts. Okay. So I'll just jump in.

Please do.

Yeah. A lot of this I like, because I was thinking too, things like, basically the way they find these people is by hooking everybody up to. It's basically, you know, a socialistic environment where the government provides everything as long as you're doing what you need to do. And so everybody gets hooked up to the same system to do the mining. And then the way that they find people to bring them up is by anomalies in that system. This was what I was thinking. We may go back to the first scene and redo is maybe instead of her stealing food, she's siphoning off mining credits. Or she's basically hooked into the system and stealing from people in the system so that it shows early on that she knows how to work this system in ways that everybody else doesn't. And that's what threw the red flag to go get her in the first place.

Okay.

Because I still am nervous that we did not introduce anything about the digital world until the middle build.

Right.

And also, I think that, again, weaves into this bigger story. Instead of just like, oh, she was stealing food, like, she, to me, needs to be breaking some kind of rule in the system that threw the red flag that got her invited up anyway, because that's what this entire thing is doing is basically looking for these people.

Yes.

Does that make sense?

Yes, it does.

And most of them, when you come and find them and they're caught doing something they shouldn't, or even if they're just really good at something and you offer them this awesome prize, they just say yes. And so, like, you were saying this, you know, her saying no throws a red flag. And you said, there's one way to deal with them is to destroy them. The other way to deal with Them would be to try to give them more power, but inside of a system you control.

Yes. To co op them. Yes.

I was thinking more like they would start grooming her because she's showing promise, start grooming her to be some kind of, like, upper person. And that actually gives her the access she needs later to wreak havoc for them.

That's a good idea, too. And when you said that, it reminded me of a classic movie that if you haven't seen, you need to see it. It's called Network. Have you ever seen it?

I can't remember. I'm thinking of the one with Sandra Bullock.

No, no, that's the net. A network is a dystopian media universe created by an amazing writer named Paddy Chayefsky. And essentially, it's the story of the manipulation of the public using media and popular culture. And you should definitely see it. It was made in the 70s, and when you watch it, you're going to think to yourself, oh, this is just like the way media is today. But the point I'm making is that what happens in that movie is exactly what you were talking about. The Media Corporation creates a figure that is very popular for the nation. And there comes a point where that figure, who's played by an amazing actor who died shortly after making the movie, he plays this sort of preacher, slash, you know, fire and brimstone kind of news anchor named Howard Beale. And the character essentially goes crazy because he's getting older and the entire universe he's living in is absurd. And there comes a point where he decides to that everybody should turn off their television. And so, of course, this goes right to the heart of the power base of this corporation. And there's an amazing scene in the movie where Howard Beale goes in to see the chief executive officer of this news corporation, and the CEO closes, and he's played by Ned Beatty, who's just the sweetest sort of sensibility. When you look at him and. And you feel that this meeting is, you know, the guy's going to say to him, you know, Howard, you're really not helping us here. If you're doing these things and telling people to turn off their television, you should really help us out. Instead. What happens is one of the greatest speeches in movie history where the CEO closes the doors and speaks as if he is God because he knows Howard Beale has gone crazy. So he uses the voice of God and he says, you are messing with the fundamental, you know, systems of the universe. And so what happens is then that character just becomes completely co opted by this corporation and slowly, you know, does what he is told. And the ending payoff of the movie is so over the top and so brilliantly constructed that it's both funny and tragic at the same time. It's one of the greatest movies made. It's one of the greatest writing, you know, performances of all time. So I highly recommend that you go watch that movie. And I'm not saying to rip it off in any way, but what I am saying is that it firmly establishes the victim and the villain. The problem is, is that we lose heroes in this movie. The people that we think are heroic in the movie turn out to be slowly destroyed. So the ending of the film is extremely tragic, but the trajectory of the storytelling is so well constructed that we can't help but watch anyway. So back to your story. Yes. There are two ways to deal with somebody with incredible amount of talent and charisma. You can either make them a cautionary tale for everybody else and destroy them publicly, or you can co opt them to do your work for you. And I think you're right. I think that your story, because we're dealing with a 12 year old girl here and the villain is going to make the mistake of thinking, oh, it's just a kid.

Yeah, I feel like trying to. She hasn't done anything worth destroying yet, right?

No, Your instincts are much better than mine on that thing. And you're right, they should reward her constantly, groom her constantly, let her know that she's special, to let her know that she's got this special gift and that she's going to be a big part of the faction. And when the threshing comes, you know, we're, they're hoping that she's going to be one of the major players in the defense of the country, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff that gets us excited about being very important people. So in your middle build now, you kind of starting to see maybe in your head some sequences that will allow you to establish these sort of villain, victim, hero triangles.

So. Can I back up a second?

Sure.

You know, this was something we talked about early on in the beginning. Hook too. And I think we touched on it like last week or the week before when you were saying like we need, you know, maybe she's not quite a special snowflake yet. Like she's just getting like scooped up in the same system everybody else is getting scooped up in, which I think works.

Yes.

So the villain does get things started, but the villain doesn't get things started pointed at Jesse. The villain wants to find anybody with Jesse's talents and bring them in and she just happens to be one of them.

That's correct. And you've already done that.

Right. So the villain did get things going because you said, you know, the villain drives the story, but now it has to kind of shift because the villain got what it wanted. And if the villain keeps getting what it wants, then we don't really have a story. Right. There's no tension.

No, that's not exactly true. The tension here is going to be provided internally, scene by scene, through the maturation plot and also through the external scenes that you create scene to scene. What I mean by that is the scene that you wrote, it has a victim and it has a villain, but it doesn't really. And it has a. It doesn't really have a hero. The scene that you wrote, let me just walk everybody through it quickly. It's a scene where Jessie's in the Matrix and she's doing a task and she discovers while she's in there that she needs to knock out one of her competitors. So she figures out where she can get a virtual rolling pin. And she goes and she bangs.

I kept laughing when I would use that.

Well, it's fine. It works. So anyway, so she knocks the kid out, who's her competition while he's at the computer. Now who's the villain there? Who's the villain in that scene?

Well, Jesse.

Yeah, Jesse's playing the villain in the scene. And the victim wakes up vomiting after it's all done, he's very ill. Jesse at the end of the scene gets caught and she is sort of tased by an authority figure and she wakes up and she's got a nosebleed. She plays the villain and she's playing. She's been playing the protagonist of the story. So your reader is going to believe that she is the person that they should have sympathy and empathy for. And instead what happens is in this scene she plays the villain and she hurts somebody else. And when she wakes up, she has sort of other friends in this sort of competitive environment. And she doesn't like the kid that she hit, some kid named Justin. Right. Or something like that. So you do have a victim and a villain, but the hero element.

Not quite clear. Maybe it works because what you're signaling to the audience is that, hey, time has passed and our little 12 year old sweetheart who sacrificed herself so that she would stop all the pain with her friends, is now kind of a bully. And that works as long as you understand that you are Establishing early on a pattern of behavior that seems to be something that you're gonna want to build to as opposed to drop in immediately, do you know what I'm saying? Okay. Because we kind of still.

So it's, it's too much of a, oh, I don't know, whiplash to go from like this poor girl that's, you know, falling into three different holes or whatever to now she's like beating people up.

Exactly.

Which has been my pattern of making that mistake.

Well, it's a perfectly reasonable choice. But it might be too early. That's my only point. And it might be the world is so strange. It's sort of like you have to pick one element of the story to stress at the beginning of your middle build. You don't want to try and bite off more than you can chew. And what you've done here is you've established this really weird world and then you've done it even one bigger by having a pretty major shift in character of your protagonist. And I think it's too much too soon, basically.

Okay.

Now, later on, maybe not. So, you know, I think what you need to think about is going back to that, you know, that idea that we had last week when we said that she wasn't any really special snowflake. Instead of doing this big sort of character change scene, what you were talking about last week was to make her sort of more sympathetic and have her pretend to be terrible at what she's doing. So maybe instead of her being like this kick ass intelligent coder in this first scene, she, she gets in a situation that she can't control, Seemingly can't control. You know, it could be a situation where she's in the Matrix and there are kind of like game controllers, right? And the game controllers monitor the children on those beds who have been sort of locked in, into this, this game world. And so the game controllers. It might be a scene where the game controllers are monitoring the children. So instead of taking it into the, into Jesse's personal world so quickly in the middle build. Instead you give the stage to the villainous forces. In a sense, these are sort of the minor villains of this tyranny. These are the everyday workers who kind of make sure that everything's going as planned. So they're kind of like the guys on the alien spaceship who go and pick up garbage, the garbage men of space. These are the game controllers who are monitoring this group of kids, these 27 or 28 kids on beds who are plugged into the Matrix. So you could Begin the scene where, you know, number 17's you know, her oxygen, blood oxygen levels falling. Let's monitor that. You know, and they're eating sandwiches, they're talking about something, I don't know. And then we see, you know, from their point of view, one. One girl's just completely fritzing out. You know, she's not doing well. You know, they have to make a decision, should we pull her out of the game or not pull her out of the game or what? And that way you kind of establish that Jesse's in a very competitive environment, that she's not really doing all that. All that. Well, the reason why I'm suggesting is this is that you set up the scene with that moment between Jesse and 61 earlier, where 61 tells her about how he being one of the tough guys, one of the faction leaders got duped by this incredible player, right, who kept losing and losing and losing. And so the guy started to take the guy for granted. And then he switched the, you know, he switched it up on him and he ended up losing. Remember that scene?

Yeah. I'm trying to wrap my head around this, so let me try to repeat some of this back to you.

Okay?

So I need to establish in this first scene, the new villain, the new object of desire of the villain, and that they want something from our hero. And I also have to establish the victim. Now, does the victim still. Does it need to be somebody besides. So here's what popped in my head as you were talking. So if we still have Jesse kind of being petulant and not really working as hard as she can, and we've already established the way to get her to do anything is to hurt somebody she cares about. Could this be a situation where she's losing? She's losing, and then a friend of hers is losing and she like, steps in and fixes things to save her friend, and that's what tips off the faction, that she's actually really good. Because I'm also trying to think, should I even be thinking about, like, where I need to be in 15 scenes to introduce her brother, or am I not worried about that right now? Because I'm thinking too, like. Because also with the scene that you described, that breaks the kind of rule we set, that everything is going to be from Jesse's perspective.

That's true, but there comes a time when, especially when you're struggling to map. If you threw in a third person omniscience scene from another point of view at the beginning of your middle build, you could probably get Away with it. And the reason why you could get away with it is, and Thomas Harris does this in the Silence of the Lambs, is that occasionally we need to see the way the world views our protagonist, or we need to see a larger social context.

And because the middle build is the domain of the villain, it's really important that the reader understand that there is a villain, that there is a force that wants something, and that there are systems in place so that that force is constantly satisfied. The beginning of this mental build, it's a crucial scene because we want the reader to say to themselves, oh, my gosh, this is a whole level of a world that I can't believe this is even possible. So you're upping the stakes of the universe and putting your protagonist into a very, very difficult situation. And also, you know, it's kind of a Cinderella arc in the middle build here, because you want to build her up. Build her up, build her up and then see her fall and then have her build her up at the end. So you want a rise, fall, rise, emotional arc in your middle build. And one of the ways to do that. I like the idea that you came up with where she's sort of playing possum and not really giving it her all in this game, and then somebody else is threatened and she comes to the rescue. That sounds like a much more in character storyline for her at the beginning of the middle build. And slowly in the middle build, you can erode. You can have the faction start to teach her about the realities of the game. Jesse, we can't always go back and help our comrade when we're in the middle of a fight, now can we? If you're going over a wall and your comrade gets caught in the wire, if you go back to get your comrade, both of you die. Not just the one of you. Both of you die. And that hurts everybody. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah.

And would that establish to. That would get the faction, whoever's in charge, whoever the drill sergeant person is, that would catch their attention. That all of a sudden this person that they've been thinking about kicking out of the system.

Exactly.

Does something amazing. And so scene two could be in the real world where he's basically like, what the hell is this about?

Yes. And that's the kind of moment you bring in Obi Wan Kenobi to train, you know, the. The new warrior, you know. Well.

And that's where I think we. I was planning on bringing. Because you had thrown in, like, maybe person that 61 was describing wasn't her brother. It was 53.

83.

Yeah, yeah, 83.

So you bring 83 back. This is where you bring 83 back in the middle.

The mentor again.

Exactly.

And because that's what I thought that all of these middle tests are going to be is basically squeezing them in different ways to see what they're really capable of. And some of them get squeezed so hard that they, you know, get scrambled up and they're thrown out of the system, but they're trying to find the best of the best so that they can win this threshing. And I was thinking, you had mentioned several weeks ago too, of just thinking of the three book arc. And I figured that the third book would be the threshing.

Well, no, I think, I think you need a threshing. If you're promising a threshing in this first book, you got to have a threshing at the end, bro.

Okay, I can't. No, don't think about it. But. Okay, but you can't, you can't say, like, when Steven Pressfield wrote Gates of Fire, he didn't say, oh, there's this great battle, the battle of Thermopylae is coming up at the end. But I'm gonna stop the book right now and you're gonna have to buy a second book to get that scene. You know, the whole war genre is based upon the big battle at the end.

Well, I guess I was thinking in terms of like the, like Star wars. There they win the. They beat the Death Star, but they don't really put it into the dark side until the end, the third.

Well, it depends on how you want to. You want to arc this three book arc. I mean, if you look at the reality of.

Tyranny is that it's a lot of lies, man. You know, maybe this threshing thing is just sort of it's real, but it's not real. You know what I mean? So there was this.

So have you heard of Brandon Sanderson? He wrote. Oh, man, I'm going to look it up. He wrote this trilogy that was just amazing. Hold on. Brandon Sanderson? The Mistborn. The Mistborn trilogy. So the whole first book was basically overthrowing the government, the tyranny. And at the very end, they, you know, kill the guy that's been the tyrannical leader. And he does his speech, and in his speech he's basically saying, you have no idea what hell you're unleashing by killing me. And then the following two books is them dealing with the hell that they've unleashed by killing him.

And so I was kind of thinking, this first book. So maybe we're three years out from the threshing. This first book, she is so pissed off with the faction by the end that she just rips it off. She rips it to shreds. But now they're left with nothing, and they're facing the threshing even without their faction. So now what do they do? That was kind of the arc in my mind is this one. She destroys her faction, but that. That opens up this bigger can of worms of now they're going to get taken over by an even worse faction or, you know, because it's all. It's a competition between different powers in the world. And so what she realizes at the end, once she destroys her faction, is that was actually the best one of the group that she just tore.

That works. I think that can work.

So that was my long. You said. Then you have the middle book that's all prep. And then the final book is all about the final battle. Was my Kind of. In my head, this one was. She's gonna go get so pissed off with the fat. The powers that be in her faction that she's just gonna rip it, like, eviscerate it. But then that leaves this power gap, because in Mistborn, the whole thing was he was keeping at bay this really evil thing. He had become evil to pull that off. And so when he disappeared, it was like taking the stopper out of the.

Well, I think you accomplish the same thing and also deliver the expectation to the audience if you have the final, you know, ending payoff of this book, be the actual threshing. And in the actual threshing, she outmaneuvers her faction and brings it down. And then, you know, the next book. So she wins, but she loses, too, because the pain she brings after bringing down her own faction is going to, you know, come to fruition in the next book or so, sort of. I mean, you don't have to make this decision now, but it's.

I know, but it's more fun to talk about this than, like, the actual.

So anyway, so let's actually get back to that. So I need to think about a sequence that establishes the villain and their object of desire. And they want something that the hero has. And in this case, Jesse's still not. I was thinking in this sequence, this is. She would reveal herself as perhaps maybe a special snowflake, right? So up until now, she's just one of the many townies that they've pulled in. Some are getting, you know, thrown out. Some are doing okay. And then all of a sudden, she catches the eye, and they. That makes them want to push her harder, to see what she's really made of.

Yeah, I mean, I see this. This is your Cinderella arc. The beginning is she comes to the aid of one of the other victims of her group. She's identified by one of the members of the factions as somebody to keep their eye on. They bring in 83 to train her so that she can get to the next level. She goes to the next level. She does extremely well. She rises. She rises. She rises, and then there's the, you know, the big audition or whatever, and she falls. So you're going to have a rise and then a fall. And that fall, she dies in that battle. But she doesn't die. So she falls and she thinks she's in deep trouble. She wakes up and she discovers that, and the villain discovers she lives even when dying in the game. So that shows her special, special, special snowflake. Then things really take off. She rises again, and then your ending payoff is sort of a tragic fall. Anyway, I'm getting way ahead, but I think thinking of it in terms of progressively moving her from. She's one of the special ones. Oh, my gosh. She's really pretty good. Maybe we should bring her into the next level. Let's bring in a mentor. They bring in 83. We learn more and more about the society. As she starts to train with 83, 83 tells some backstory. Then we move into a big super duper event where she has to square off against, you know, five samurai level game players. She goes to that level. She does. She beats all five. She goes to the next level and dies in that level and thinks that she's in trouble and she's going to get thrown out of the program. And the fact is, is that she, in her losing and her ability to rise from that death gives her a super special thing that identifies her as the chosen one to the villain. And then, you know, you do your final sort of climax of the middle build where Jesse has to come to a very deep, dark revelation that the villain is the villain and that she can't do their bidding anymore. And that pumps you into your ending payoff. We should stop there before your brain explodes.

No, no. That gives me. I mean, to have a general direction. And then, so basically, the scene I wrote, I feel like could work with some tweaks. So instead of her just out and out attacking this dude, she. She Realizes her friend's in trouble and like does something, you know, kind of outside of the norm to save her.

Yeah. And I would make her friend the boy, not the girl.

Oh yeah. No girls against boys here.

No, I think, I think you want a level of very, a level of very soft, platonic romance. I'm not saying you want to go crazy love story or anything, but I think an alliance between a 12 year old girl and an 11 year old boy is more interesting than girls against the boys.

Okay.

Because she, she likes boys. Her brother was a boy. You know, she, she's not afraid of boys. You know, the other girls are afraid of boys and they stay, stay away from them. But she's not like that because she had a really nice brother, you know.

Okay, so do you think my instincts. Right on that, that like to see the scene I've set up, I could read?

Yeah, just don't, just don't try and do too much in it, you know, do it. Don't have somebody die at the end. Don't have, you know, you know what I mean? It was a really good scene because it showed that you're thinking, your mind is really thinking of how do I progressively complicate this? And you did, but you just did too much, too, too quickly.

Okay.

And, but your instincts are right on target. That's why you need, when you make a mistake like that, it's hard to understand that you made the mistake and you keep writing and then you get into a deeper and deeper hole and instead it's always good when you're starting a brand new section. You know, you've got your beginning hook, you're starting your middle bill. You've got to think of it globally first before you start, you know, tinkering with the micro. Think of what, what is my goal here? What do I have to do? How do I have to supply, you know, how do I have to satisfy the conventions and obligatory scenes of my chosen genres? Where should I put them? How should I structure this? How should I do my emotional arcs? How should I do my Kurt Vonnegut kind of, you know, which of the six emotional arcs do I want to concentrate here? And you know, the middle build's a great place to do a Cinderella story, which is rise, fall, rise. So let's think of it in that terms. I want to start out, you know, move her up the chain and then have a big fall and then have her come back. That's what my middle build is going to be. So now that we have that global sensibility now you can sort of start pecking away at the micro.

Okay, I'll get to work. Thanks for listening to this episode of the StoryGrid podcast. For everything StoryGrid related, check out storygrid.com make sure you pick up a copy of the book and sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything happening in the Story Grid universe. If you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any 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.