Q&A - Part 3

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 Kral, 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 a creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we continue the Q and A. So this is part three where we continue to just dive into the questions that you've submitted via Twitter and Facebook, and they range all over the map. But we've got a lot of great feedback on these episodes, so we're glad you're enjoying it. So let's just jump in and get started. All right, Sean, so for this part three of our Q and A, I think we may actually get through. Well, we'll see how many we get through, but we're getting towards the end of my initial list of questions, so I'm just going to jump in and start with this one. So Sean and Steve Pressfield have worked together on many epic war novels. What are the most important obligatory scenes and conventions of the war genre?

Oh, okay. Well, the core. The core event, meaning the thing that every reader or listener or watcher of a war film is looking for is the big battle scene. And it's like the hero at the mercy of the villain scene for a thriller, it's like when the first kiss or the breakup scene and the lover's love story, it's really the pivotal moment. So war novels really have to focus on the build up to that, you know, that big battle. For example, in Gates of Fire, Steve came up with the notion of what motivated, what actually got these Spartan people to sacrifice their 300 best warriors in a suicide mission. You know, these 300 Spartans went to Thermopylae, which was this very narrow pass in the mountains, and, you know, they had to hold back the Persian army, which was, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of fighters for as long as possible so that the Greek city states behind them would have time to mobilize and fight the Persians and save Western civilization, basically. And so Steve was always fascinated by that idea. And so his entire novel is building to the moment of the big event, which is the big battle. Now, he can't just have a lot of backstory for 340 pages and then have a great 75 page climax at the end of the book. So the way he approached it and the way war novelists always approach it is to Set up a series of sort of. Are there building block mini moments that will foreshadow the big moment at the very end of the story. So you have mini battles, you have internal conflicts between the warriors themselves. The value at stake in a war story, they used to be very much about propaganda, meaning, you know, all the great war stories and movies from World War II and World War I were always about the righteousness of the army that succeeds in the battle. So the World War II stories always cast the Nazis, you know, believable, that they were the ultimate evil and that it was a good fight, it was a righteous fight when the Allies got together and fought the Axis powers. So then it's sort of at the end of World War II in the 1950s, we started to see other war stories come about, like Paths of Glory, which was a great Stanley Kubrick film, which was about, you know, just this ridiculous battle in World War I where it was an unrighteous decision to have these men slaughtered in. In the trenches. There's been long history of anti war stories like the Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane and the other one from World War I, all quiet on the Western Front. And those stories are really about the grunt, the guy on the ground, the foot soldier who needs to get in line and perform. And the question is, has their life been taken in vain? So those stories are more personal in nature, and they usually follow one platoon, one group of guys, as they are negotiating an entire war story. What Steve did in Gates of Fire and to an even larger degree in Tides of War, which is one of my favorite novels, and I even like it better than Gates of Fire, even though I love Gates of Fire. But what he did was he sort of combined those two. The big battle, the big righteousness of the battle, along with the grunt soldier's point of view. So the obligatory scenes in a war story are usually. They're all about these mini battles that lead up to the great big battle at the end. Oftentimes in a war story, you have a love story subplot where one of the combatants falls in love with somebody and he has to leave his sweetheart before going to war and will or willing not be able to return. That ends up being a subplot. And it. War stories like, oh, boy, I always forget this one. I always forget the name of it. Atonement. In McEwen's novel, Atonement features a. It's a World War I story, but it has a great love story before the guy actually goes to war. And it's all about, you know, the righteousness of the war and the futility of it at the same time, and how it destroys love. So that is really generally what the value shift is. Either it's either propaganda, meaning this war was righteous. We fought it for the right reasons, and here's why. And the ending is usually uplifting, where the good guys defeat the bad guys, or it's, this is an unrighteous war. It's feudal. War is bad. We should not be fighting this kind of war. That would be something like Paths of Glory. And then there's the brotherhood war story. And that's something about the love between the guys fighting in the trenches. And the truth is, if you ask any guy who. Or woman who's been in the military and has seen action, and if you ask them, you know, what. What were you thinking about when you were fighting? And they will inevitably say to you, oh, I was. I didn't want to let the guy down next to me. I was fighting for the guy next to me or the woman next to me. They're not talking about issues of democracy or ISIS or anything like that. They're fighting for their brothers in the trenches. So those stories like Platoon, Gates of Fire has that message very much in it.

This is why the love story. I'm sorry, the war story is really important because it explains why we go to war when we shouldn't go to war and what, you know. The real beauty of war, if there is such a thing, is within the love between the guys in the trenches, the foot soldiers.

How can I use a story grid methodology in relation to short story?

Well, short story depends on how long you want your short story story. But a short story can be anywhere from five words to, you know, 5,000, 10,000 words. Once you get past 10,000, 20,000 is usually a novella length. But my recommendation is the exact same recommendation I would use for somebody plotting a novel, and that is to think of the global story first. What are the big moments in your short story? What's the inciting incident? What's the thing that propels your protagonist into a place where they need to get back to normal? What is that inciting incident? What are the progressive complications that force that protagonist to go through a Kubler Ross kind of change curve such that they reach a place where all is lost and they reach a crisis moment where they understand that they cannot go back in time, they can never live the life that they had before. It's an irreversible change has occurred, and now they have to change themselves. Actively or their worldview in order to metabolize the inciting incident. So they reach a crisis. The climactic moment is when they choose to change their behavior and then you resolve it. So if you're writing a short story that's 2,000 words, you're going to look at this as a single scene, maybe two shorter scenes. But you're definitely going to want to hit those major, major points in the story. There are probably, if you're doing a 2,000 word short story, the Big Eight sort of major points in the short story would be beats. There would be moments when in dialogue between characters or in an act of choice, the protagonist goes through sort of those eight stages of Kubler Ross change until the very end. Also short story, again, I would also say you need to know what your global genre is. I mean, it might be a terrifying short story that's a horror story. What is it? So all of those questions that I always ask about a global story, you need to ask about your short story and then you need to execute them. It's the, it's the same methodology, only you don't have to write 65 scenes. You're probably writing between, you know, one to seven scenes.

Yeah, it makes me think of. We haven't. I don't think you've mentioned it in a while, but especially early on, you talk so much about like the, the doll, what are the. The Russian dolls. Right. So, you know, every part of your story has to have the five commandments, you know, from the full novel all the way down to the individual beats. And so that's how I kind of assumed with short story is. It's just the same thing. It's just, you know, smaller, I guess. But you still have to have all the same points of story grid.

Oh, absolutely. You know, I'm trying to think of some classic short stories that abide everything that I just said. And all of them do. I mean, I think of John Cheever short stories. You know, one of my favorites that he ever wrote was a. I think it's called Farewell My Brother. And it's a story about. It's a family conflict story. It's a family drama. It's about. It's about sort of this schoolteacher who's on vacation at his mother's seaside, you know, house. And he's brought his wife up there. It's the 1950s and everyone in the family is sort of on the same page. You know, they all sort of have their. There are 1, 2, 3, 4, you know, cocktails every Single evening. And then what happens? But the black sheep of the family, his younger brother arrives with his family, and that's the inciting incident. And all of this turmoil and conflict within the family arises throughout the short story to the point where the narrator. Narrator actually slugs his younger brother on the beach and draws blood. And, you know, the guy leaves. And it's a. It's a really amazing story because Cheever, his narrative device is to use the perpetrator as the narrator. So you don't really know it as you're reading the story that you're getting one side of the story and it's being told by the bad guy. But the bad guy sounds pretty. Pretty nice until you realize at the end of the story, oh, my gosh, this guy's kind of a jerk. He just. His brother came to visit and he just, you know, beat him senseless on the beach. What a jerk. But it's a brilliant construction. And I also think of, you know, Good. Good man is Hard to Find. The Flannery o' Connor short story, which is fantastic. And that's as I recall. It's about the battle axe. Old mother, grandmother who's in a car. He's just driving everyone in the car crazy. And it goes on a terrible turn at the very end of the story. So some of the great. When a while back you had me read. Go ahead.

A while back you had me read the Hills Like White Elephants by Hemingway.

Oh, sure. Yeah. That's a killer short story. And it's never explicitly described. That's a great lesson in dialogue where Hemingway left out all of the things that we don't want to say. You know, when you're. You're with somebody, there's a Hills like White Elephants. There's a white elephant in the room and nobody wants to talk about it. Brilliant story. Hemingway's just. And Fitzgerald stories.

Yeah, it's been fun because I just submitted my third story to the right practice. They do quarterly book writing or short story writing contest. And so I just submitted my third one, and it was a love story. And it's been a lot of fun to, like, force myself to put an entire story in less than 1500 words. And I always write. It's been nice because I always write super long. I have to go back and, like, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut to get it down. Small enough. But, yeah, I've found it's the same as writing a scene or anything else is I have to think through all the five parts of, you know, all the five commandments. Okay, so in the horror genre, you put aliens under both uncanny and supernatural. Is that because it depends on how they will be viewed in the story.

Well, yeah, I mean, the, the horror genre. Genre is really about the uncanny nature is. I'm just trying to remember. Hold on a second. I gotta dig up my own book. Yeah. Uncanny horror stories are where the, this, the evil can be explained. So for example, you know, your general Friday the 13th stories where you have the psychopath who's escaped from the insane asylum and is there now slaughtering people because they just enjoy slaughtering. They're overwhelmed by the force of evil. And there's no reasoning with these people. You can't bribe them. All they want is to bring people to their knees. It's a very masochistic, I mean, a sadistic enjoyment by the killer. Now, supernatural stories are where, you know, the, the force of evil isn't, you know, real, meaning it's sort of. It's like an alien force or, you know, the force of evil has, has taken over somebody. So like, for example, like Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm street. And you're never really sure if Freddy Krueger is real or not, right? Because people are tormented by him in their dreams. So is he capable of living outside the dream world becomes, you know, a major plot device within the story. Is he a supernatural sort of new force of evil? So the reason why I put aliens in both uncanny and supernatural is, is because the alien, it's explainable, right? It's an alien force that's come to wipe out this. You know, they picked it up on a planet and its only, you know, desire is to replicate. So it's going to kill everybody on that spaceship and then take the spaceship to another planet and kill everything there. It's, it's a killing machine. It's, you know, incredible. So, yeah, I mean, the question sort of answers itself in that. Is that a supernatural force or is that explainable? It's sort of like in that mystical, metaphysical, you know, is it explainable? Yes, but we really don't understand it all that well. But the thing about horror is that it's really about the force of evil obviously is the most compelling part of a horror story. And discovering what that force of evil, Evil is and what it wants becomes a major, major element of, you know, your middle build. All horror stories begin with an attack by the monster. It might take a little while of setup before that happens. But in Alien, it happens within the first, you know, ten minutes of the, of the movie because Remember, they. They see this planet. They decide to check it out. A couple of people land, and they're looking around, and there's these weird plants, and the plant jumps on a guy's hel helmet, and then they rush them back onto the spaceship and leave. And then it's when you know that plant implanted on the guy's helmet that he infested the guy. And then we're off to the races. But all horror stories begin with an attack. And all those Scream movies. The first Scream movie was really a blast because it was very tongue in cheek because it played on all the conventions and obligatory scenes of the horror genre. And you knew at the beginning that Drew Barrymore, she's usually like, the star of the movie, right? And at the beginning, you're like, she can't die. How's she gonna die? I mean, she's the one in the house, and she's the one who's supposed to die, but she's the box office draw. So how are they gonna kill Drew Barrymore in the first scene? And they do, and it's great. So the horror genre is really about, you know, that initial attack and finding out what the evil source is, discovering what that is. And that's what really pushes you through the middle build. And then the ending payoff is when your central victim has to confront the monster. It's the victim at the mercy of the monster scene, which is the climactic payoff of the story.

Okay, so can the mentor also be the villain?

Absolutely. The thing about the roles in a hero's Journey, and those are the Threshold Guardian, the Mentor, the Shapeshifter, the Herald, the Trickster. There's one or two more that aren't coming to the top of my head, but all those are.

Well, we did a whole episode on those, so go back and listen to that.

But it doesn't mean that those roles cannot be combined in one character. It's just that, like, if your mentor turned out to be the villain, that that mentor would also be your shape shifter. Right? Because in a hero's journey, somebody shape shifts. Somebody portrays themselves as one way, and then their real motivations and their real selves prove otherwise. So you can have the mentor and the shapeshifter in one person or one character. You can also have the mentor be the Threshold Guardian. This is Obi Wan Kenobi. I think in Star wars, it's. I'm not a Star wars expert in any way, shape, or form. And I hate to confess it, I don't even think I saw the original or any of them. I just know them through cultural artifacts. So yes, the answer to the mentor can be the villain is absolutely fine. It's just all of those sort of those story elements in the hero's journey have to be in the story. So somebody shifts. Somebody, shape shifts. Somebody's the trickster, somebody is the herald. And the herald is the person who always sort of says, oh my gosh, what are we going to do now after we lost all that? You know, they're the ones who. Who kind of in a dialogue or a speech or a monologue, sort of update the reader and raise the level of the stakes so that everybody understands what's gonna happen in the third act.

Are there any novels that you recommend for studying the redemption plot and the education plot?

The redemption plot is, you know, the redemption story is often mixed in other external genres. A lot of western novels have the redemption plot where you have sort of the rummy old gunslinger who doesn't want to help anybody, who ends up, you know, redeeming himself at the end. Louis l' Amour probably has a ton of those other redemption stories. I'm trying to think off the top of my head. Education plot. There's. I think it was a novel before it became a movie, but there's. It was called Educating Rita and it was a story of sort of a young woman who is brought up in, you know, sort of blue collar circumstances and wants to become educated. And, you know, an old grizzled old guy played by Michael Caine in the movie, you know, he's an old drunk who's also one of these brilliant professors, you know, teaches her how to become educated. Obviously. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw is the original story where a lot of the education plot comes from. And that's My Fair lady was adapted from Pygmalion. I think that's a play. It might be a novel too. I'm pretty sure it's a play though. The redemption stories are often also subplots where you have a mentor figure. Like in the Hunger Games where Katniss mentor is a drunk who is a former winner of the Hunger Games who has a change of heart and starts to become emotionally invested in Katniss survival by the end of the story. That is a redemption plot where somebody moves from a place of moral degradation to a higher level of moral stature. The education plot can either be a process by which somebody is literally educated. They move from ignorance to, you know, wisdom. Education plots are also when somebody has a very negative point of view about life and by the end it turns positive. So I'm not being very helpful. I know, and having a ton of novels off the top of my head. But I think if you start with Pygmalion for the education plot and be a good redemption story. Oh, a good one would be the Accidental Tourist. That's a redemption story. It's also a love story. The man is redeemed by love. A lot of love stories are redemption stories where one of the lovers sees something in the other that society has rejected and it's through that person's love that the person finds a higher level of moral stature. The Accidental Tourist is highly recommended.

What are practical ways to workshop and come up with story ideas and to find inspiration and then what core components make up a story premise? So I'm going to add to this a little bit. So I think about. When I read this question, I thought about things like Stephen King, where he talks about. He always starts with kind of a what if question. Like, you know, what was it, Cujo? Like, what if a crazy, you know, a demon possessed dog, you know, trapped people in a car or something. And part of me feels like it should be, well, what stories are coming to you? But I think besides inspiration, it's like, okay, well, once you have kind of initial idea, like what are the first few things you start thinking about to figure out if this is a story that's going to work or a story that doesn't really have legs?

Well, you know, I talk about this a little bit in the book and it's the difference between somebody who thinks in terms of global external stuff. Like what if the aliens landed during the World Series? Or like Thomas Harris's novel Black Sunday, what if the terrorists came and blew up a bomb during the Super Bowl? That is very much the external sort of way of looking at it. The other way are sort of character driven stories. And character driven stories, they may be external stories, but they really start with one central character. Often what I think is fun, it's a fun subway game that you sort of. It's an internal gain that you have with yourself, not with other people. Because other people would get very angry if they overheard you. But if you, if you just sort of take a look around in the subway or the bus or at the shopping line at the market, and you just look at somebody for a little while, take a look at their clothes and say to yourself, wonder what that. I wonder how that kind of person would deal with something. Like if somebody came in here, demanded all of our money. How would they handle that situation? And so in the character situation, you're really thinking about how somebody is motivated, what their wants and needs are. And the great thing about humanity is that we all think that we're keeping our cards very close to our chest and nobody knows what's going on with us. We've got it, we've got it all under control. Our mask is really, well, you know, prepared. When we go out in public, nobody knows what's going on. But the reality is just a little bit of study of people. You can see the sorrow in their eyes. You can see people who are under tremendous amounts of stress, people who are dealing with their kids who just want to run away.

All of those things are very helpful when you're thinking about stories. Now, obviously the premise is the thing that will start, you know, it's the jump start to your inciting incident. So the premise of, say, the accidental tourist that I was just talking about, the premise is how would an anal retentive person, really seriously anal retentive, like completely off the charts in terms of obsessive compulsive behavior. How would they deal with the loss of a child? And what would happen if after the loss of a child, their wife left them too? What would happen to them?

And Ann Tyler, you know, I suspect she knows someone, maybe in her family, who is the kind of person who has systems, you know, I've got the perfect system for loading the dishwasher. I've got the perfect system for folding laundry. And these are the kind of people who are absolutely trying to control their universe. And so what she did is she not only knocked them senseless with the loss of a child, but then because they're incapable of really dealing with the emotional trauma of the loss of a child, then she threw on the fact that if that person lost a child, their wife, their spouse is gonna, in a matter of, you know, a year, take off too. Now what happens to them next? So the premise of this story is how do people who have gone off the the edge in terms of trying to control their universe, how do they deal with, you know, violent, emotional solar plexus shots to their midsections? And she got a brilliant novel out of it, and they made a brilliant movie out of it too. So that's my suggestion is to think about people in your. In your world and how they would react to certain circumstances that would force them to change their behavior. So a great way to look at this is like, find people that you are bugged the hell out of you who you think need to change their behavior and think of a way that what would be the thing that could change their behavior? And in the case of Macon Leary, what changed his behavior was a person who saw his inner sorrow and really, really helped him voice it and let it go. And. And she did it through her love of him. It's a great story. So that's my advice.

So this one we kind of touched on last week when we were talking about writers groups and getting feedback on your writing, but it's coming at it from a different angle. Could you describe the process when reading a new book and presenting initial suggestions to a writer? And I know this is broad, and we've talked about this kind of behind the scenes. Some about, like, you know, if you look at a novel that's just completely unworkable or one that has maybe half the scenes are working and the other half isn't, and then, you know, a version where, you know, 90% of the book is working. But how do you think through when you're reading a new manuscript when it comes to presenting those initial suggestions to the writer?

Okay, here's. Here's a universal truth that will either make people.

Happy that they know it, or want to jump off a cliff. Okay.

Okay, okay. The first novel all of us write, the very first thing that we finish, even all those things that we haven't finished that are in our drawers, they're not really about a story. What they're about is that individual person trying to understand themselves better. Now, we all think that there's something inside of us that drives us to write and to be creative and to write novels and tell great stories. And yes, I think that's true. But the first thing that happens is, is we want to explore who's inside of us. And the way we do that is through creative effort. And so those first manuscripts that we write often feature a character, no matter how, you know, what different profession they have, they might have. They might be a different sex, they might be younger than us, they might be older than us. They might be any number of things that are quite different from our usual everyday life, but they're essentially us. So the novels. When I read a novel, I know very quickly if this writer what stage of their sort of creative development they are in. And I'm not ridiculing people who are in that first stage, because it's a crucial stage. And in fact, those are the people who have the most potential to be open to learning more about story structure. So, anyway, the first suggestion I always make to people who are, who are in that stage where they've written a quote unquote novel or story that has no working scenes. When I say it has no working scenes, what I mean is it has none of the five commandments of storytelling. There's no value at stake in the scene. Nothing really happens in the scene. There's a lot of words that are descriptive that don't really mean anything. Being able to describe, you know, the way a flower, you know, blooms in the right shade of spring or sunlight is interesting, but it does not, is not a story. I don't want to read that over and over again and nobody else does. So if your scenes aren't working, the first advice I would say to them is, hey, what kind of story did you want to tell here? And that sounds like a really simple question. And it is a simple question. But a lot of people don't even consider that when they start writing. Instead, when they start writing, they start saying, it was a dark and stormy night, he was not a fat man, not a thin man, sort of in between, you know, and they get into a lot of descriptive stuff and nothing ends up happening. And what they're doing, doing is they're riffing internally. And that's an important part of, you know, becoming a writer. But it's not a story. So for those who do know the story and are generally familiar with the five commandments and say they have some working scenes going there, that is always a global problem. And a global problem is when they're not thinking of their story from 30,000ft, they're thinking of it scene to scene. Well, what should I have next? Oh, that's a good idea. Let me write that. And then they, they string together a whole series of scenes, some that work and some that don't, that don't have a through line and don't have a global beginning, middle and end. So those people I always focus on, what's your genre? What's the beginning of the story? What's the middle of the story, what's the end of the story? And then the higher and higher level of writer, and when I say higher level, I mean more accomplished. They've, they have better craft, they understand the structure of storytelling. Some writers, and there are very, very few of them, some writers have an intuitive gift for the global story and they can write really, really bad scenes, cliche ridden scenes, but their global ideas are so compelling that we can't help reading them. Now those kind of people are rare and far between, but those Ones are often the ones who will not listen to micro editing. They'll say things like, well, I've sold a million copies of my work and what do I need to fix my scenes for? If my global story is working, then I'm not going to go in there and fix every little scene. So those are hard people to reach unless they're really.

They reach a point in their career where they have all the money in the world that they want and they want to become better writers. Stephen King wrote, you know, Misery based upon that kind of writer. Great, great novel.

Really, really gets into the. The heartache of the artist and the creative force. And it's all in a thriller too. So you got plenty of action in it as well. Terrifying action. So I hope that gives you a sense there's sort of like, there's all different levels of problems and the editor needs to understand the level of problem in order to give the best advice.

Alright, so I'm going to pitch out the last question since I'm the host and I can do that. So last night I finished reading this book called A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. And the whole time I'm reading the book, I know what's going to happen. And it's. There's a lot of, you know, there's three tests, you know, just like we've talked about so many times. And you know, there's this point where like, you just, I don't know. The whole time I'm like, okay, I know what's gonna happen, I know how this is gonna end. And I even had a pretty good idea of what the final reveal was gonna be. And yet at the end of the book, I am sobbing as I finish this book. I mean, just tears running down my face. And so I've been thinking about that today and I'm just wondering if you have some thoughts on how, you know, what, what is it about some books that you emotionally connect to and other ones that you might enjoy but you don't? Because I remember there's one trilogy in particular that I think for a year after the trilogy was over, after I finished reading it, I would catch myself wondering how the characters were doing in real time.

Right.

You know, like, I'm like, oh, you know, it's been a few months, I wonder how they're doing. And I feel like it doesn't really affect trying to decide if this is true. I feel like I can enjoy books that I don't emotionally connect with on that level. But I was just kind of surprised in a book That I pretty much knew what was going to happen, could see it coming, had very few surprises in still just like devastated me at the end. So you know what? I'm just curious. How do you have any advice on how to pull readers in emotionally? And do people just do that naturally? Or are there some conventions there of like that you've seen really seem to just go deeper? Because I told Candace about halfway through the book, I know what's going to happen, but I can feel the book's hand tightening around my heart and it's going to rip it out right at the end. And that's exactly what happened. So anyway, that's kind of my question, as I've just been kind of mulling on that all day today. Just what is it about these books that seem to stick with me longer than other ones that I read?

Well, this is a pretty easy answer, believe it or not. It all goes to the Hero's Journey. It all goes to the monomyth. And the monomyth is Joseph Campbell's life's work where he, you know, literally looked at all as many cultures as he possibly could and found, you know, their best stories, you know, what are the ones that were the most popular that people couldn't get enough of. And that what he found was a pattern. And the pattern is the hero's journey. And the hero's journey is so infectious and it grabs our hearts so completely that we can't help ourselves but go on the journey. And the reason why is because the hero's journey provides meaning to us. It makes us understand that each and every person, no matter what, has the opportunity to find meaningful experience in their lives in a way that releases their inner genius into the world so that the world is a little bit better because they were here. Now, we opened this session with Gates of Fire. Now there's a perfect example. Everybody knows how the Battle of Thermopylae ends, right? If somebody were to say, hey, why don't you write a novel about the Battle of Thermopylae? People would say, what are you crazy? Everybody knows how it ended. Those 300 guys died. Yeah, we get go tell the Spartans, standing pastor Spain, blah, blah. You know, here, faithful to their laws, we lie. It's that famous epitaph. But for Steve, that was a real puzzle. How do you make a story that everybody knows the ending to? Completely absorbing and life changing. And what he did was he used a lead character who went on a hero's journey to discover the meaning of the Spartans. And that meaning was that they loved one another and they fought to the death for their brothers, not for democracy, not for the other Greek states. And honor was in defending the life of the man next to them. And that was why they fought. And he came up with that notion and it drives the entire book. And what. And it's just such a moving under, you know, who can imagine sacrificing their life for the. For the guy next to them that they don't even. They probably don't even like. So those, you know, those things in the hero's journey, the things that we were talking about earlier, the extraordinary world, the ordinary world.

The call for action to the hero, the call to adventure, the refusal of the call, all of these things strike our hearts so intently that we can sort of suss out where the plot of the story is going. But we want to know, how is this character going to make it through to the end? And how are they going to change? Because stories, as I always say, are about change. And we love stories because they're prescriptive or they either tell us how to behave or how not to behave. Cautionary. They're either prescriptive or cautionary. I always think of, you know, Jerry Maguire, who says, I'm just going to become another cautionary tale. And those are important too, because we need to know how to deal with things that we're not sure of how to face. And so when we read, it doesn't matter if it's science fiction, love story or whatever, just having another story that's in our minds that we can draw on is a huge gift. This is the storyteller's gift.

Because whenever we're facing things, our minds just go back into the inventory all the stories in our minds to see if there's more that will fit this situation. So the reason why you were moved so much is because that is what you want out of your life. You want to have meaning. You want to leave your gift. You want to do the best that you possibly can. You want to leave it all on the field.

And when you read about a character who does do that, you say to yourself, ah, that's. I'm going to do that too. And that's what moves you, and that's what makes you go to the end of the story, even if you know how it's going to end.

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