Q&A - Part 2

Hello, and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of Storygrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we are continuing to do the Q and A. So a few weeks ago, I took some questions via Twitter and Facebook, and I am just peppering Sean with those questions. So for me, it's been a lot of fun to just kind of hit him with a bunch of random questions and hear his feedback, and I think you'll enjoy it as well. So let's jump in and get started. Okay, Sean, so last week, we did our very first Q and A episode. Again, I was surprised. We had never done this before. And so we've had even more questions come in. So we added to the list that we didn't even get close to completing last week. But we're just going to jump right in and get started. So. So here's one. What are the values at stake for nonfiction?

Oh, that's a great question. Well, the big value at stake for the. For nonfiction is its.

Knowledge, right? It's. It's a revelation plot. So in revelation plots, the. The value is unknowingness to knowledge, so. Or wisdom. I'm trying to pull up from my brain sort of the. The four major, you know, points of the knowledge value. But I'm going to just take a stab at it here. The negation of the negation, meaning, like the most negative value of knowledge is believing something to be true that is false, right? So if we believe something to be a truth that is not true, that is the worst possible case because we're kind of lying to ourselves. So that's the most negative. The other negative is understanding that something is untrue but not doing anything about it. So the first, the most negative is believing an untruth to be true. The next negative is knowing something is untrue and not doing anything about it, not trying to find the truth after it. Now, then we sort of cross the threshold of, you know, the, the x axis if it's a story grid, and the next one that's positive is uncertainty, or what I call cognitive dissonance. And that, what, what that means is that you are starting to believe that your. Your worldview is incorrect. You're getting more and more evidence against your standard operating procedure and it's causing you distress. That's what cognitive dissonance is. It's when you have two competing ideas going on in your brain and you're trying to figure out what to do about it. This is the moment right before you make a decision to change your point of view. And then the most positive in the knowledge sort of revelation plot is, is truth. When you recognize that you know a new truth, a new revelation, then you change your behavior based upon that revelation. So if you look at nonfiction in terms of that value, when, when we read, say an academic book, and I would say that the, the story grid book itself is sort of a, it's. It shades on the side of academic treatment, more so than, you know, probably any. I mean, it has academic how to qualities and big idea qualities. But if I were to say, you know, is this is the story grid a nonfiction book for everyone? I would absolutely say no. It's for people who are very, very interested in learning story structure. And I wrote it that way. So when you're looking at the value of knowledge in terms of an academic treatment, it's very much pointed toward building an argument. There's very much a rational sort of building up of a very logical argument. It's logos driven narrative nonfiction. I always break up my nonfiction into four categories. There's academic, which is for a limited, you know, audience that knows a lot of background. Then there's the how to, which is a prescriptive plan to do something like gardening, a gardening book. Then there's narrative nonfiction, which is story based nonfiction, like the Perfect Storm or something like that, or, you know, the Erik Larson books. The Devil in the White City is a terrific narrative nonfiction book. And then the fourth is the big idea nonfiction book. So logos is what drives the academic movement from something that we believe is true, that is not true, to a new knowledge, a new revelation. So academic is logos driven. Narrative nonfiction is pathos driven, which means story driven. So it's using story to convey the controlling idea throughout. So for example, the narrative nonfiction story the Devil in the White City is about evil posing as good. Beware of, you know, doctors who pretend as if they're good because they may have evil intentions.

Well, I always thought, like, narrative nonfiction would basically be just one of the fiction genres.

Yes, it is. But the difference is that there is underneath the revelation nonfiction internal genre that there's a controlling idea within the narrative nonfiction. It's not just telling the story of the doctor who turns out to be a serial killer. It's also telling Sort of a warning to the reader that they should beware of, you know, believing whole handedly in a professional, you know, disguise that the revelation is beware of, you know, even your doctor. Because there have been really bad instances of doctors taking advantage of people because they place their full trust in them.

So the big idea, of course, is, is a combination of ethos, logos and pathos. And that's why we love it so much. It takes conventional wisdom and proves it wrong through using story pathos, the hard work of the writer, journalist, that's the ethos part. And then the logos part is the rational explanation, using factual information and supportive information to build the case.

Okay, so there's one here that I'm gonna have trouble pronouncing. All right, is it deus ex machina?

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Okay. Is that ever a good thing to use in your story?

Well.

No, I don't think it is ever a good thing in a story.

Can you explain what it is first, you know, for other people? Because I obviously know what it is.

Yeah, obviously. Yeah, just by the way you pronounced it was. Okay. Deus ex machina is a technique that, that happened back in Greek theater. So the ancient Greeks, they used, they had, you know, their belief system and their spiritual beliefs were in gods. And they believed that there were terrestrial or extraterrestrial God like figures who intervened in everyday human capacity. So the playwrights of the era, they would set up these dramas based upon human, you know, foibles and interactions. A lot of them were social dramas about, you know, people getting married or shame of the family or whatever. And so what would happen is by the third act, the ending payoff of the story, the. Because they had this belief system and gods, they would literally bring a God down from, from the sky onto the stage to decide, you know, the resolution of the story. So you would have Zeus descend from the rafters and he would say, now you're gonna marry him, he's gonna marry her, and you two families are going to split the property. I'm just making this up. But what, what that would do is resolve the entire story using a godlike figure as the arbiter of what is right and what is wrong. So deus ex machina today is frowned upon because we don't live in a super spiritual, metaphysical world today, and our belief system is very much in humanism. So bringing a God on stage to decide the fate of, you know, a story would really disappoint your audience. We live in an era in which we believe people solve their own problems and there's rational thought, etc. Etc. So a deus ex machina ending, even for contemporary dystopian fantasy, is a bad idea. And it's a bad idea because it is unbelievable to contemporary audiences. Now if we were, you know, having this podcast in Aristotle's time, that would absolutely be wrong. My, my suggestion not to do Deus ex machine wouldn't make any sense because that culture and that society had a full belief system in the power of God, like figures and trusted in external spiritual beings to. Even though they didn't. I don't. They didn't believe literally all the time that a figure, physical presence of a God would arrive and point out everything that that is wrong in their lives. But what they did believe is that there were, there was another world, another metaphysical world that they could not see that had strong influence on what happened to, to people on Earth.

Well, isn't it used. It's not just when you use it for like godlike stuff. Right. It's also when you basically just make something up that fixes all your problems. Like, my thing is, I hate when movies, they're stringing out all this weird stuff that's going on, then at the end they're like, oh, it's aliens. Just because aliens is can basic. I guess aliens are like throwing in a God because it fix anything. I mean, isn't it any time you just kind of throw something in to fix your problems?

Exactly. And, and that comes. I'll tell you why people use Deus ex machina is because they, they can't figure out scene of their story. They can't figure out the hero at the mercy of the villain scene and the hero at the mercy of the villain scene is. Or whatever the core story, the core event of that particular story is. That is the moment that is very difficult to crack because we need the protagonist to overcome the much more powerful antagonist by releasing an inner gift in a unique and innovative way. So you know when John McClane in Die Hard gets Gruber to laugh for a moment so that he can take out his gun from his back and shoot him, that is using John McClane's particular gift, which is sort of being a wise cracking cop, wise guy that can disarm somebody through their sense of humor. So that works. It's not deus ex machina.

All of a sudden the Third army doesn't arrive and take out Hans Gruber. No, it's John McClane who solves the problem. So deus ex machina, a deus Ex machina solution to Die Hard would be all of a sudden, SWAT team arrives and takes out Hans Gruber and then saves the day. And that would be extremely disappointing to the Viewer Because John McClane has to save the day, not a SWAT team. Because that's the structure of a thriller. If you don't have your protagonist rise to the occasion and release their inner gift, it. It defies the. The purpose of the thriller to begin with, which is a story to reinforce in all of us and. And understanding that we have. We have internal gifts that have to be released and shared with the world. So even though it seems like, oh, that's a fun movie, Die Hard, and I really enjoyed myself, it does have a cultural significance and a social significance beyond entertainment. And when you eliminate that core event and don't release the inner gift of the hero, it strikes the audience and as disappointing. Oh, my gosh. I thought. I thought this was going to end that way. And then the SWAT team came in. That's no good. So that's why you don't want to use Deus ex Machina, because what it does, you know, I saw a Batman movie. Maybe it was the third Batman, where there's Catwoman in it and. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Catwoman ends up saving Batman, which was Deus ex machina, because. Wait a minute, she's not supposed to say Batman. Batman has to say Batman. And so that was the third movie in a trilogy that I think Christopher Nolan directed. And I think he might have run out of some gas at the end of it and just said, you know what?

Just get other problems too.

Okay. All right. So I've got some more kind of. I got a couple kind of more existential ones here to play off the God realm. So, okay, what have you, Sean, learned through this process? Have you changed your mind about anything since working with me?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. A ton of stuff. One of the things that's. The most difficult thing to learn as an editor is, for lack of a better phrase, something called the bedside manner. And, you know, doctors who are really bad at it, you know, they don't do so well with their patients because, you know, patients get better in, you know, when they're. They have an infection or whatever, when they're psychologically strong. There's a lot to this. So if a doctor has a terrible bedside manner, shows up when somebody's sick and. And treats them terribly and just wants to sort of get them off of their checklist of their rounds, that actually has a really bad effect on the patient. Because then the patient's ability to psychologically repair their illness suffers. So the bedside manner for an editor is really important too, because if you don't take the right approach with the client and help them step by step overcome obstacles without debilitating them, they're just going to throw in the towel. So one of the great things I've learned working with you, Tim, is when to modulate deep criticism, when to pull back, when to push. And that is invaluable information because there's a tendency for people just generally when, when you know something that other people don't know, you have a great sense of power. And that sense of power is very, you know, it can make you not do nice things. When we have power, we have to really check ourselves and make sure that we don't abuse it. So there's a lot of editors, a lot of, you know, general people like somebody like, I just read this, this article about Carl Icahn, who's this multi, you know, crazy billionaire investor who was an advisor to President Trump for a while until he, he recently stepped down. And it was in the New Yorker. And it really, it really made this whole sense of power come, come to my mind in a really strong way, because he was basically trying to abuse his role as an advisor to President Trump, that powerful position, to change a lot of regulations that would make him even more rich and to bring him even more power. And it's a really good article in the New Yorker. I think it's the New Yorker about just how he did that and how his entire sort of professional career is about building up more and more and more power through accumulation of wealth to the point where he can affect, you know, millions of people with his power. So as an editor, learning how to scale back criticism and dumping things on, on a client before they're ready for them is a real skill. And I think I've learned how to best approach taking a writer through baby steps of progressions. And the most powerful thing I've learned is really just the importance of scene work, just how important understanding the fundamental unit of storytelling is, because once you started to feel comfortable writing scenes, that's when you were ready to start, you know, thinking about bigger elements. Now everybody, when they start out writing something, they want the answers to the big questions first. Well, what am I doing wrong in the beginning? What am I? Why isn't my ending working? And the truth is you can't answer those questions until you understand the fundamental unit of story, which is the scene. So that's another Huge thing I've learned. And that's really. I think the primary skill of an editor is being able to analyze a scene and explain how a good scene works very succinctly and using a lot of examples. And the more examples that you can bring to the table that are within the genre of the writer you're talking to, the more that writer will be able to understand it. You need to say the same thing 20 different ways. And the best way to do that is to use 20 different examples from 20 different works within the genre that the writer wants to work in.

All right. Okay, so let's do this one. What do you recommend writers do about writer's block?

Well, writer's block has a couple of components to it. The most obvious component is, is the, the resistance to deep thinking. And I was talking to somebody about this the other day and you know, one of my favorite books over the last 10 years, if not my lifetime is. And I think we talked about this last week was Thinking Fast and Slow and so we talked about a couple times. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just, it's changed my life because the deep thinking requires a lot of energy and it requires a lot of self examination that is difficult. It's not exactly enjoyable when you're trying to solve a difficult problem. And it's much more difficult even than, you know, higher math skills.

So deep thinking, there's a great resistance to it. And I think that's a major part of writer's block because.

We have been told since we were young that there are certain magical people who are born with talent and the talent will drive their work. Meaning they just have a particular gift to doing something. They might be a tennis, you know, prodigy or, you know, a musical prodigy. And they're just able to sit down at piano and bang out beautiful music. Well, I don't ever think that that is. That has never been true. I don't think that was true for Mozart. I don't think that was true for Beethoven. I think those guys had a proclivity, a love, a passion, and an internal desire to be great musicians. They weren't born out of, you know, the shell with the ability to play the piano an incredible level. I just don't believe it. I think they, they built that quality at a young age. Yes. But they weren't born with that level of proficiency. So because we're sold this bill of goods that some people have writing talent and they were born with it. And when they sit down, they bang out paragraph after paragraph of prose that Might not be perfect, but it's editable. I think that's a fallacy. I think people who have a certain, you know, passion to write all face writer's block. They all face this not wanting to go deep, not wanting to self examine. Because writing is about asking yourself, what do I think about this? If this happened, what do I think would happen next? That's the general idea about writing. You start with an inciting incident. A shark comes to a small, you know, community in the Hamptons and starts killing people. What would the sheriff do? Well, he'd probably try to kill the shark. But what if the sheriff was afraid of the water? Oh, that's even more interesting. What would he do then? So that's where Peter Benchley kind of began. You know, he's probably on vacation thinking, I wonder what would happen if a shark came and started chewing up all these people at the beach. And that's how he started writing Jaws. And there's, you know, any number of examples where that happens. So my advice about how to combat writer's block is to engage yourself, give come up with a whole bunch of inciting incidents. What would happen if. And they can be causal, meaning what would happen if my brother in law, you know, asked me for $1,000, would I give it to him or wouldn't I give it to him? What would I do with that information?

Go ahead.

In your experience working with authors, Because I'm sure, well, let me just not make the assumption. So, you know, working at all the publishing houses you did and all the different authors, I'm sure there were times that like you had an author that you had a contract with that just could not finish the book, you know, because I'm thinking like, there's one thing, there's to me different situations for writer's block. So there's one where it's like, I've set time aside just to write. I'm not really working on a project. I sit down, I can't think of anything to write. And that I feel like is mostly failure planning. So I've had that situation. What I found is if I plan ahead, I do what you're talking about, where I list a bunch of ideas.

If I have a plan, I can sit down and start working on it. But then there's another type of writer's block, which is I'm halfway through a project and I can't finish it.

Have you dealt with that with writers? And what do you end up like, what have you seen them do? Or what have you done? To get them kind of over that block.

Well, I wish I could say that I could cure people of writer's block, but I can't. And there's only so much, you know, the editor can do for a writer. The writer needs. An editor can work with them developmentally. Meaning if the writer has a sticking point, they can, you know, I would always suggest that the writer call their editor and say, hey, look, I just can't solve this problem. And, and then what happens is just by the Socratic method of the editor asking questions that, you know, he or she would need to know to be able to help. What it does is turns on the editorial vision of the writer too. So asking those six core questions that I always talk about is a great way of jump starting your work. And not only jump starting, but if you're stuck, go back to those six core questions. What's my genre? What are the obligatory scenes and conventions of my genre? What's my point of view, narrative device? What are the objects of desire for my protagonist and my antagonist? What is the controlling idea? And what is the beginning, hook, middle build and ending payoff? Those six questions, if you just, you know, if you get stuck writing scenes. Now, remember, a lot of people think writing is only literally writing a scene. And that is not true. Writing is also contemplating the vision of the book. Steve Pressfield just finished up a really great series called in the Trenches, where he's been writing@stevenpressfield.com about facing these problems that we're talking about right now. He wrote a manuscript, he sent it to me. I told him he had some pretty substantial problems with the manuscript, which sent him sort of over the cliff. And the last seven posts have been how he's started to climb back that up that cliff. And he's at the top now and he's working hard and he's, you know, he's, he's setting down each day's writing goal. But he wouldn't say, oh, just because I haven't been writing scenes, I'm not writing. What he would say is, I'm out in the trenches trying to solve some problems with the manuscript that doesn't work. So there's a big fallacy that writer's block includes the moments when you're contemplating the work and planning the work. And that's not true. A writer is writing when he's thinking about the editorial vision too. So I think your original thing was, how do you get somebody out of writer's block? And if I ever did, the problem with editors at major Publishing houses is that they just don't have the time to do developmental editing with people they're not being paid to. To get a writer out of the writer's block. They're paid to go find the next writer, the next manuscript. And I'm not faulting the publishing houses for that, you know, structure. That's just a business. It's a business over there. So my advice to writers is find someone, even a fellow writer, who you can, you know, shoot the shit with, go through those six core questions. When you get stuck, that's a way of getting out of writer's block. Sometimes another writer's block problem is when you come up with a really mediocre idea.

And you've committed a lot of work to the mediocre idea, and you've hit a reckoning. You've hit the reckoning point. And the reckoning point is when you say to yourself, Robert McKee once, I overheard him give advice to somebody one day, and.

I don't know how he put it, but this guy went through this long explanation of what his screenplay idea was and how he'd been working on it for four years. And McKee, you know, he looked at him, he goes, the problem is that you have.

An elephant pulling, you know, like a little toy truck. Your. Your inciting incident is just not that thrilling. And you've built all of this stuff around this inciting incident that is much larger than what your initial inciting incident was. So you really need to throw out the inciting incident and. And come up with a new one that will support the elephant pulling the cart or start all over again. And it was a moment of revelation for this guy when he felt so good because he got really, really intelligent, quick advice that got him to stop fitzing and futzing on something that just was never going to work. So those are. Those are writer's block problems, too? Yeah.

You know, it's interesting, and I think this is why, because I listened to an interview with Malcolm Gladwell a while back, and he's like, I don't deal with writer's block. He said, you know, he was. He had a job at a newspaper, and writer's block was not an excuse that your editor liked.

But I feel like there's, like, different things here, because I remember the story of and from on Writing, where Stephen King was stuck on the stand, like, halfway through the stand for weeks, and he would. He would go out for his walks, and then eventually it like, popped in his head how to fix the story. And he was able to go do it. And then other times I feel like I get blocked just because I'm afraid of the work. So, you know, I think having, you know, especially working with you and stuff like that, having somebody that can like help you, you know, when you're just being scared, they can tell you to just, you know, cut to it and start writing because you're just scared or like help you think through. Because there is that undergr. Subconscious work that's going on that you just have to work through sometimes. Okay, so let me. So this. I want to get into some more meaty things about genre. So here's one. Can you talk more about the society genre? Does this lend itself better to a mini plot story with multiple protagonists than an arch plot? Or how do you just. How do you think about the society genre? And I would say give some examples of like, books or movies that are good society genres.

Oh, yeah. I mean, some of my favorite novels of all time are in the society genre and what they are when they really work. It's sort of what we were talking about last week in that you kind of have. It's a mini plot with multiple protagonists, but you always have sort of the center of the story. And that's one character that sort of has elements of themselves expressed in other characters. So let me, let me try and give some examples. Societies are. Society novels are really. They're about talking about very deep social issues at a very human level. So one of the great society novels is Ragtime by E.L. doctorow. And the reason why that's such a great novel is that what Doctorow did is he came up with a really wonderful idea. You know, back at the turn of the century, during the Gilded Age, there was a bunch of crime that happened. And there was a big, big moment in time when there was a woman named Evelyn Nesbitt, and she was sort of this showgirl at the Ziegfeld Follies at Madison Square Garden, which used to be in Madison park around 23rd street in Manhattan. And she was this beautiful showgirl who was kind of not that bright, but she was married to a man named Harry Thaw. And Harry Thaw was this rich guy from Pittsburgh. And anyway, she decided to start having an affair with Stanford White, who was this famous famous architect in New York City who designed actually Madison Square Garden. And what he did at the top of Madison Square Garden is he created a sculpture of Evelyn Nesbit in the nude. So it was this big, big scandal where it was obvious that he had used the naked figure of his lover to inspire him to do this beautiful statue that's at the top of Madison Square Garden. Meanwhile, Harry Thaw, who's her husband, freaks out and shoots him, kills him. And so there's this huge trial at the turn of the century about whether or not Harry Thaw will be exonerated for murdering Stanford White. And so EL Doctorow, you know, he went back to this and he thought to himself, this is an amazing time in America. And how can I best explain the rise of. Of multiculturalism in the United States, where we have immigrants from Eastern Europe coming here who are bringing their culture with them? We've got cleaning people from the south who are disenfranchised African Americans who are working for rich families in Westchester County. We've got this very wealthy, you know, aristocracy that is sort of having all this fun and games while other people are suffering tremendously. And he came up with this incredible novel where he featured a one family from Westchester county and how that family changed from the turn of the century. And so what the society novel is, is it's an allegory using one core, very, very specific story to be an allegory for an entire culture or society. So for all those who are interested in the society novel, read Ragtime and you'll. You'll really love that novel. It's fantastic. There's also. They made a movie of it, which is great too. It's. It's just a stunning piece of, you know, big, grand storytelling on an epic scale that features a very, very tight cast that you. You're sympathetic and empathetic for every single character in the novel, which was a brilliant, brilliant piece of work. The second one, which is on a smaller scale but no less large, is of course, George Orwell's allegory, Animal Farm. Now, Animal Farm is.

I mean, forget about it. It's so brilliant in its simplicity, and yet it is so deep in its description of humanity and specifically the Russian Revolution. He takes the Russian Revolution. Now, George Orwell was. I mean, he was a journalist, brilliant writer. He was a socialist. And, you know, he was part of the Spanish Civil War. He fought on the side of the Republicans. I'm sorry, not the Republicans. He fought on the side of the socialists. Anyway.

He felt disenfranchised by the movement of the socialists when Stalin came to power. And so he wrote Animal Farm to express how that may have happened. So in these characters, of these animals in this barn, you know, there's a character that represents sort of this Lenin Trotsky, sort of central character named Snowball, who is a leader of this movement. And then there's another figure named Napoleon, who's also part of the revolution, who slowly takes power. And he uses this allegory using barnyard animals. And it reads kind of like a fun little story until you start putting the pieces together and you see, oh, my gosh, this is exactly the structure of the Russian Revolution and what happened in Stalinist Russia. So society novels and stories can be very intimidating. And they're all about. Usually about major cultural shifts in power. They're all about power. Power shift from one part of society to another. So, for example, in Ragtime, it's about the shift of power from the very, very wealthy Gilded Age aristocrats to this teeming society underneath. That will create jazz. It'll create all the great American things that we all, you know, love about this country. And it's undermining the sort of aristocratic Gilded Age centralized wealth era. In Animal Farm, it's all about the Russian Revolution. It's about the workers overthrowing the owners. And then it's a revolution within the revolution that brings them back to a conspiracy in which the workers end up being exploited by their own compadres or comrades, as they say in the. In the novel. So just to recap, society novels are about power shifts in power major. And the best way to sort of approach them is to think about them in terms of allegory. And when I say allegory, I always think of allegory, meaning telling a simple story that tells a much larger tale. So I don't know much more to say about that without feeling like, have.

You watched the Handmaid's Tale? Would that be a society genre?

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. That's a feminist society. Like a power deal. Yeah. Post. You know, that's another brilliant work, Margaret Atwood. Yeah, incredible.

Okay, so, okay, so here's. I really like this question. How do you go to the quote end of the line in a story like the Accidental Tourist? Clearly, the stakes are not life or death. So how do you show a fate worth a fate worse than death?

Okay, there's. There. I. There's a little bit of confusion about the values. I'll definitely answer that in a second. But every genre does not rest on life and death. Life, life, and. Okay, I guess what it.

Let me try to guess at what you're going to say, and then you tell me. That's why I want to cut you off. So there's. Because there's the moment, the lowest, the all is lost moment. There's an all is lost moment in every story, right?

Yes.

Right. So is that the. Is that a better question is like, so we know the stakes aren't life and death. And in a life or death value, the low point is when they're facing death.

Right.

So in a story like the Accidental Taurus, what would be that low point? What would be that all is lost moment? Or am I asking a different question than what you think was being asked?

No, I think you're on to the question. And the heart of it, the heart of the Accidental Torah specifically is about isolation, really. It's about a character whose all is lost moment occurs when he understands that he has built such a safety sort of chamber around his emotional being that.

He has exiled himself from vanity. And he begins to understand that he's a pathetic creature he's self loathing about. Schmidt is another novel that's similar to the Accidental Tourist where you have a lead character also. Is that all there is or. Yeah, the Jack Nicholson movie. Oh, that's as it gets. As good as it gets.

Yeah.

So what he faces in his all is lost moment is if I continue on this path, I will come to hate myself. I will reach a level of self loathing. And self loathing is a damnation of sorts. So it's also a love story. And it's about a woman who gets this man out. I think Macon Leary is the lead character and the woman is a dog trainer. It's a brilliant novel. And the dog trainer, his dog ends up biting everybody. So he has to take her, take his dog to this dog trainer to get him, you know, trained so he doesn't attack people anymore. And she's a very eccentric, idiosyncratic person and she makes him, you know, really self examine and, you know, so his all is lost moment, the negation of the negation for him is recognizing that if he continues on his isolated exile journey, he will die miserable and unhappy and not really contribute anything to the world beyond. The character writes travel guides for Americans so that they don't have to deal with foreign countries when they go to the foreign countries. So he tells them where the Holiday Inns are, where they can get hamburgers, you know, all the things to protect yourself from other influences of other cultures and people. I mean, it's such a great hook. And he comes to realize that he's got a. He's got to shake things up. You know, his all is lost moment is if I continue on this path, I will die like one of those people that they don't find for six days because nobody cares about them. So when you're dealing with the negation of the negation in sort of that internal global genre, always think of it in terms as the level. The worst possible thing is it's self hatred, it's self loathing that, you know, the character must overcome that level of destruction or they will die miserable and damned.

Okay, how do you track subplot on the full SCAP global story grid? Or is it not something you're worried about at that point?

No, I don't. I don't really do track subplot on the fullscap page because subplot is really a way to. To speak in global terms. One of the ways. One of the uses of subplot plot is either to increase the global plot by sort of putting a spotlight on if they don't. You know, it's like progressively complicating the global plot to make the consequences much larger if it weren't there. Or it's to sort of.

Not distract, but sort of fool the reader into thinking they're getting one story when they're really getting another. And the subplot, and this often happens in a performance story. Performance story are like, you know, movies like Rocky, where the viewer is led to believe this is going to be a great boxing movie. I can't wait until the final fight. And they think that the final fight is really what the entire story is about. And that's a little bit of a faint because the reality is the real story is the, you know, the. The redemption plot or the education plot or the maturation plot of Rocky Balboa. So the performance story ends negatively, he loses the fight, but the global story ends extremely positively where he comes to respect himself. There's another example of a story that rests on the lead character's ability to respect himself and to learn to love himself. So subplots are sort of your. That's a thing that you want to use to add to your global story more than feature on your fool's cap. So if I were doing a fool's cap of Rocky, it would be about Rocky's redemption, not about Rocky's fighting at the end. Now, the big fight at the end will be on the foolscap, because that'll be a climactic scene. But the. The real turning point is the redemption story. So, you know, there's no hard and fast rule about what you want to feature on your foolscap page. But my advice is to always err on the side of the core, core global story, because you Got to remember, you gotta pick one. One genre is your global story. The global story rules. And if you don't solve the global story problems, no matter how good your subplots are, they just, it won't matter. Now if you have great subplots and a terrible global story or just like a global story, it's not going to save the story. But you can have mediocre subplots. But a great global story, like there's some, you know, in a lot of these long form television shows there are subplots that are like, eh, that's all right.

But you hang on for those last five minutes of the show, right, because.

You'Re coming back to the global turning points of the global story. Sometimes like in Mad Men there were episodes where you're kind of like, I don't really like Pete and I don't really care about this subplot. But you hang on because you know, you want to know what's going to happen with Don Draper.

Okay, so this next one is going kind of deep down the genre hole, but fear we'll throw it in. So in the action genre, clock sub genre, the story grid book gives four sub genres with different villain types driving the plot. So you have Ransom, holdout, Countdown and Fate. In Fate, time itself is the villain and the example is Back to the Future. Does that last one apply only to time travel stories? How do time and circumstances differ as clock devices and villains?

So okay, so talk about how time is used in the fate sub, sub genre and what are your kind of options there and how do you make decisions when you're choosing between the different clock sub genres of action?

Well, I will say this about the, you know, I don't have my book in front of me and that is really inside my mind. You don't have it memorized? No, I don't. But Back to the Future was a brilliant piece of work because time is literally the antagonist in that story. And it's hard for me to come up with any more examples that had that characteristic. Now the ransom plot is, you know, we all know the ransom plot. Great movie. Ransom is a great example of it where somebody takes a kidnap somebody and then the clock is they, they say the first Dirty Harry. It has a ransom plot too. So time as a clock. I would. Here's my advice about it. Use the clock element to amplify the, the global action elements. And usually clocks are involved in things like crime stories, horror stories, thrillers. The action story is sort of the primal base, if you will, for all of these ones that concern safety, the.

Action story think of like Mission Impossible, right? They gotta, like, do all these things before the bomb hits, right before the nuke goes off or something like that.

And holdout stories are things like 300, the 300 where you've gotta have. Somebody's got to hold out while other people are regrouping and how, you know, how desperate it is, you know, fighting to the last man so that, you know, they can finish the bulwark that will save humanity. And, you know, the Battle of Thermopylae was that moment in Western civilization where it seemed like all was lost. The Persians are taking over, and if the Greeks can't rally, all of Greece will be taken over by Persia and we would never even have any Greek history or Western ideals or whatever. And so the Battle of Thermopylae was such a pivotal moment and it was a, you know, to the last man stand. That is the holdout, the. The ultimate holdout story. But, you know, it's not really the great thing about Steve's novel Gates of Fire, which deals with the battle with Thermopylae and even the movie, it's not really about the holdout moment. It's about the. The ethos underneath that compelled those men to take on the mission itself. So I don't really want to get into the, you know, more of the clock elements of the fourth sub genre of action, other than to say, think of the sub sub genres as little plot device elements that you can add to your story more than the full, you know, Monty of the driver, of the antagonism. Have the element of time. Be an antagonist, but be a supporting antagonist as opposed to the full antagonist. Because if you use time as the full antagonist, what it becomes is. Is really heady. There's. There's a. A novel that Martin Amos wrote called Time's Arrow, which is a perfect example of this, where it. It's so heady, meaning difficult to follow and understand the projection of time, that you lose the ability to really enjoy the entertainment because you're trying to. Well, if that happens and is. And if Marty McFly's mother was really. If she does have relations with, you know, like, it's ridiculous. You start to overwhelm yourself with the what ifs. That's why Back to the Future was so great, because it had this element of antagonism that usually spells disaster. That actually worked.

Okay, so let's end on this one. Is there an ideal time to engage an editor or beta readers for your story?

Well, there's one of two ways of doing it. Once you have a draft that you sort of throw up your hands and say, you know what? This. I can't really tweak this anymore. I need to get feedback. That is the time to. I'm not a big believer in beta readers unless they're editors that you're paying, because beta readers can really send you off the rails. Because I'm not saying that they don't have a great story sense, because everybody does. What happens often, though, if you're dealing with somebody who's not a professional editor or even a professional editor, is that once you hand them the manuscript and they read it and they come back to you with notes, and their interpretation of what you have written is often differs than your intention. So it's a good idea to engage an editor who will, before they give you their notes, you know, have them do their homework first and then have a phone call with you first to talk about what your intentions were, because then that can direct them in helping you get your intentions more clear on the page. That might seem a little strange, but what I think is a great technique, and it's what I do now is, especially for writers that I don't know who hire me, and trust me, I don't take many of these on if I can help it.

Is that if you don't, if you're the editor and you don't know what the intention of the writer is, the problem is that oftentimes you will see a kernel, or what you see as the global genre of the story is actually not the intention of the writer. And so you'll start giving them advice about writing a crime novel when they really wanted to write a redemption story. And so you start pushing them on the crime stuff, and then the crime overwhelms the redemption story, and then the intention of the writer gets thrown away. And then the writer, you know, mysteriously, through two rewrites, starts to lose their love of the project, because what they really wanted was to write a redemption story. So if you have an early conversation with them and say, hey, what's your global genre? What's your global goal here? What do you really want to write about? And if the writer says, well, I want to talk about how somebody who's really screwed up their life returns to a state of grace, then the editor is going to know, oh, this is a redemption story. But if they say, oh, I want to do this really great mastermind plot where this criminal, you know, plans the perfect murder and almost gets away with it then the editor goes, oh, they want to write a crime story. But if you don't have that conversation, you can get confused as the editor and give, you know, contrary advice to what the. What the writer really wants to do. So my advice about when the best time to seek an editor is either A, when you have a complete draft and you don't know what else to do with it, or B, when you have an idea and you have some notions and you want to get some advice about how to move that idea and notion forward in a way that will make sense. Sort of like the way you and I have been doing the Story Grid podcast, where you had some global notions after we had to throw away that first draft, and then we built it from there. It took a long time, but it was, you know, I think you are much closer to a publisher, publishable novel now than you would have been if you had tweaked that first manuscript until you were blue in the face.

So how do you feel about writers groups? Because, so I was listening to this class, this online YouTube class by Brandon Sanderson, who's a very prolific writer, and he talks about writers groups and he talks about how he, you know, when he was in college. I'm going to not get the specifics right, but basically, when he was a young, young writer, he was in this writers group, and they really stuck it out together. And now, like, four out of five of them are, you know, writing professionally and whatever that means. And so. But then I have always kind of shied away from it. And now, you know, for all those listening rolling their eyes, I know, like, I'm pretty lucky because I get Sean to look at my writing, and not everybody gets that, but I've always kind of shied away from it because I feel like, why do I want to ask other amateurs that don't know what they're talking about any more than I do their opinion on my writing. So how do you feel about writers groups and if people are going to do them, what's the right way to go about them? Would love your input on that.

Well, it's like anything else.

You don't want to get into a group of people that sold purpose is to, you know, getting a pissing contest about, you know, who's a better writer. And unfortunately, a lot of, you know, I'm probably going to take a lot of heat for this, but I think most of the MFA programs are incubators for discontent. You know, they're. They're places where people who don't really know, writing craft, get to take potshots at each other, you know, every single week. And I think, you know, the end result is everybody wants to get teachers approval, right? There's always this brilliant, you know, novelist who's running the MFA program, and everybody vies for that person's approval. So my advice is that a writer's group, unless you're really close friends and you really care about each other, and hopefully you're writing in different genres because you can undermine each other, you know, subconsciously. If you're all trying to write Sherlock Holmes stories, oh, that can be just a recipe for disaster. The other thing that I think is important is that there's value traded here, right? So if you know an editor who has a lot of value and they want to be a writer, too, and you're trading value for their editorial advice, you know, I just. I think the best situation is where you can find an editor who is not emotionally invested in your work beyond wanting to help you get better. And you pay them, and they help you step by step through the process and give you legitimate advice that they can use a lot of examples to back up. So that's why. That's why I'm a great believer in the story grid methodology. It's because it uses very, very clear principles as critical tools. I can't just say to you, tim, I didn't like the third scene. Well, why? I don't know. It just seemed kind of flat. That's terrible. What was that? What are you gonna do with that? And that's the advice we get from writers groups all the time. You know, if a writer. If you're in a writer's group and everybody says to you, you know what, you're inciting incidents, a little weak, and then you never progressively complicate. And I don't see a clear crisis here. And it all seems as if you're writing at the power of two in all your progressive complications. And I think you need to raise the stakes until they're irreversible. And that time comes. Right. You know, at the major moments of your act shifts. Hey, that's, you know, shit, I would. I would love to hear that kind of advice. I just don't think it's out there. So one of the ways to see whether or not the writers group is going to help you or not is to listen to the way they talk about the work. If they're talking about it in terms of. Well, I just didn't feel it was all that, you know, hooky to me. You know you don't need that. That's not going to help you. What you need is very specific advice that cites story structure principles over and over again. Somebody says to you, your inciting incident doesn't work. You know how to fix that. You go out and you think of another inciting incident. Somebody says you're not progressively complicating to an irreversible point. You know how to fix that. You know you got to keep upping the stakes on the progressive complications until there's a moment when it's irreversible. They can't go back now. They've got to move forward. There's the point of no return. And so if you get that advice in your writers groups, great. Take it. But if you don't find somebody who will give it to you.

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