Restarting an Old Project

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 talking about what it takes to restart an old project. If you've been following along. You know, I've been finishing up my nonfiction book, running down a dream, but now that that's done and heading off to the copy editor, I actually have to go back and restart my old project. Have to get back into the threshing, and I'm only about halfway through the second draft, and just I'm having trouble wanting to step in, know where to start, and know where to get going with it again. So I start off there with Sean, and then we talk about a lot of different things, and then we end with talk about something really exciting we're working on here at StoryGrid. So I think you'll enjoy this episode. So let's jump in and get started. So Sean locked down the book, running down a dream, manuscripts locked, finished the appendix, finished the acknowledgments yesterday. So that's like, the writing part of that's pretty much done. That's going to the copy editor. And you said, once that happens, I'm not allowed to make changes, which is wonderful to have somebody say that I'm not allowed to make any more changes. So now I'm staring down, entering back into working on the novel. I haven't touched it in several months as I've tried to finish up the nonfiction book, which, by the way, the next time I decide I want to write two books at the same time, I would really appreciate if you could talk me out of that. So, anyway, so diving back into the novel, and so I'm sure that I am not alone. And people that have, like, started a book, stopped it, and it's been sitting in their drawer for three months, a year, five years. What kind of advice do you give to somebody as they step back into a novel that they've worked on but haven't worked on in a while?

Well, that's a really important question, because a lot of people ask me that, and I've been thinking about it for a long time now, and I'm going to sort of play around with some things I've been working on in my own work. And I think the best way to approach, you know, restarting a project is to really take, you know, the highest level of abstraction of your story that you possibly can. And what I mean by that, Instead of like 10,000 foot view or 20,000 foot view, you really want to sort of go up to the highest level. The, the global, you know, view. And especially for you, what that global view really, you know, comes down to is really three main archetypes. And this, I think I spoke about this a while back, generally, and these three archetypes. An archetype is just sort of like an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction. So, you know, Carl Jung, you know, after working with Freud and all and doing all this deep research, he came up with this concept. And also after reviewing mythology and stories from multiple, multiple cultures, from, you know, Mesopotamia to the Egyptians to the Christian, Judeo, Christian, you know, Holy Trinity, is that he came up with this concept which I think is really, really great. Anyway, so if you look at the world in terms of two things, and I, you and I always have this joke where people always say, well, the world can be divided into two things. You know, those who understand story grid and those who don't, or those who like boxing and those who don't. But the two things are essentially order and chaos. So order is the natural sort of movement towards sorting things out so that they are predictable. So society and cultures are very ordered, and the more ordered they are, the more predictable they are. So, you know, we're both on the Internet right now recording a phone call, and it's very predictable that the electrons are going to keep firing and the electricity is going to keep going and the lights will keep going on and that the recording will, will work. And that's because we have an extremely complex culture and society that holds everything together. Now, that wasn't the way it was at the very start of humanity. Right at the very beginning of humanity, it was essentially chaos. It was every man for themselves. They were dealing with predators constantly. They lived in trees mostly. So the chaotic world is that moment when you don't know what to do. Things are hitting you at obstacles and opportunities. You don't know to go left, you don't know to go right. And a lot of times what we do when we're overwhelmed by our culture and the complexity of it is that we sort of turn off our functioning brain and we sort of generate into chaos. It's sort of like that moment when you were creating your company and you couldn't deal with it. So you Went and you played video games. So that's when sort of your, the circuits of your brain are overwhelmed and you fall into chaos. And chaos can really, you can dig a very, very deep hole when you hit chaos. So essentially, if you look at the world in terms of order and chaos, you know, the ideal situation is that you, you live a very orderly, predictable sort of life. But if you only do order constantly, you don't get any opportunities, right? Because within chaos comes opportunity. And chaos is great peril, but it's also great opportunity. All right, so we have order and we have chaos. So what Jung said is that traditionally, and this isn't any sort of like commentary about the genders, it's just based upon storytelling over eons. Traditionally, the order realm is a paternal, male fatherly sort of sensibility. And the chaotic realm where opportunity and great peril lie in has had a feminine side. Now that great question, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Is pretty much answered by Jung when he says order comes out of chaos. So the feminine gives rise to, you know, the things that become ordered. So women give birth to men. Women are the force that brings on and continues humanity. So those two forces, the female chaotic sensibility and the male orderly sensibility, also have a child, right? And the child is the individual human being in society in the orderly world, as well as navigating chaotic moments in their lives. So this is sort of like super duper meta, meta thinking, right? So what you want to do is say to yourself, I have a novel here. Can I delineate? Can I figure out the following elements? Is there a paternal orderly force in my novel? Meaning, do I have the good side of order, which would be sort of like the wise king. The wise king is a very orderly person who also listens to his subjects and changes the structure of the kingdom when he hears that change is necessary. He's not afraid of chaos interrupting the community and giving rise to opportunity. He's open to that. He's wise. He shares his wisdom with his people. The wise king is a good father. He listens to his children. He doesn't beat them down in tyrannical, you know, yelling and forcing them to do things that he thinks are the right thing. So the wise king is sort of the, on the end of the very positive end of the spectrum. And on the other side of the spectrum is the tyrannical sort of nasty, autocratic totalitarian leader of. He's like sort of the Stalin or the Hitler esque version of the orderly realm. So to think about your Novel, you want to say, do I have those two forces at play? Do I have a force in the novel that is sort of the wise king? And do I have a force that is the tyrannical sort of side of order and the other side of it is in the feminine side? Do I have a force where the maternal sensibility, the helpful, the nurturing sensibility is valid, a place of opportunity, and do I have a destructive force? You know that. That idea of Mother Nature, right? You don't want to get upset. You don't want to upset Mother Nature or she will destroy, right? So on the two sides of those things are, you know, the, the nurturing mother force and. And the destructive, vengeful side of nature. So those are two archetypes, right? You've got the wise king and the tyrant. You've got the destructive feminine and also the motherly feminine on the chaotic side. One is opportunity, one is peril, and then the third element is the individual, and that is represented by the protagonist of your story. The protagonist has two sensibilities too. It has the hero, who is willing to sacrifice for the good of all, and also the adversary the adversary is against is the one that's filled with resentment and only one's vengeance. So if you were to look at your novel again, you would, you know, what I would suggest is to say, can I identify these six forces in the story? Are they clear now? They don't have to manifest themselves as one individual character. The. The force of order could be, for example, you know, a group of people who force somebody to conform with the way that they are, or they'll be cast out of the group. That could be a tyrannical force in your novel. So it doesn't have to be one individual character. It's a sort of like a archetypical force that should be within the story. And the reason why is that the global meta. Meta story is the story of the individual falling into chaos and resurrecting with a revelatory understanding of the world in a different way than everybody else. And then that hero returning to her place and sharing the gift with the people. So that is, of course, the hero's journey, right? But the hero's journey lies underneath this panoply of meta. Three forces that must be inside of, you know, your global story. Now, it doesn't mean that the hero has to win every time, but those are. Those are the things that we're dealing with in our everyday life. The reason why we love stories is they give us possible ways of behaving that will bring us some level of security and contentment. So that's why we go to the story. The narrative structure is a structure that has an inherent moral sensibility to it. This is why I always say, your story has to mean something. It has to have a controlling idea. There has to be a value at stake because stories are moral. And when I say moral, what I'm talking about, a moral platform is a way in which you adopt something in order to behave. The way you behave in the world is a moral structure. And the way, you know, the way humans have been doing that forever is through dominance hierarchies. You know, we. We look at things that we value, and we say, I want to go to the top of that hierarchy. So there are innumerable hierarchies that don't have anything to do with the traditional hierarchies that everybody talks about, which are, you know, riches and money and status. There's also the hierarchy of, you know, great truth holding up a standard of work that is almost the ideal. Right? And to me, we're all writers here. We're all talking about stories. We're all talking about what's important to us. And for me, and I think for most of our listeners and for you, there's a level of. The highest level of story is a story that will live longer than I do. You know, if I. If someone were to say to Sean Coyne, what would you want by, you know, on your deathbed and among, you know, my love of my family and a lot of everybody I care about around me, saying, hey, you know, you did good work here on Earth. I would also want. If given the chance, I would want to have written Moby Dick or Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice, or I would like to have my name on something that would last even 10 minutes longer than I did. So for kind of what we're doing here at the story grid, our dominance hierarchy is not about a number one New York Times bestseller. It's not about pumping out a novel every three months and tweaking the algorithm at Amazon in order to throw off the most dollar revenue per month. That's not our ultimate hierarchy. Our. Our thing that. Our value that we're holding up as the preeminent, you know, thing that we're all that we will probably never achieve. But, boy, it's nice to have it up there, right? It's nice to say, you know what? I'm not getting that boulder to the top of the mountain, but I got it up a little Bit further today. And that's what gets me up in the morning. That's what I think gets you up in the morning now, especially after reading Running Down a Dream, is that eventually I think we come to a realization that the hierarchies that we were born into that we think are really important. And what. What sort of the. The tyrannical element of our own culture puts forth is this sense that I need to have a great car, I need to be the top dog at the health club, I need to be the strongest one. You know, all those things. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with, you know, trying to raise yourself on a financial hierarchy. I think that's great, you know, but when push comes to shove, you have to make a choice. And do what do you sacrifice? What's the top of your hierarchy? If it's money, I think you're playing a loser's game. Honestly. I think it's not going to give you what you think it will, and you'll constantly be chasing it. And if you never realize that that's not really going to make you feel better about yourself, then that's tragedy, in my opinion. But anyway, I know the question was about how do I approach my novel after it sat in a drawer for six months? And the answer to that is, ask yourself, why am I running this thing? What is the deal here? Stories are about helping people navigate really horrific, chaotic moments. So I need to make sure that my character gets thrust and falls down the shaft into a massive pile of chaos. And at the end of the story, I have to realize that she needs to rise above the surface again, stronger than she once was. She's moving from a very difficult, unbearable presentation to a better future. And how am I doing that? Is this clear? Is it clear that she doesn't? Is she's, you know, falling into a chaotic spiral? Is it clear that she has taken stock of herself and had an all is lost moment and is rising from the ashes and coming to a different interpretation of the world, a different worldview. Is that clear? So just taking that really broad thing and meta idea and applying it to something that you haven't worked on for a while is going to flesh out the panic of, oh, my gosh, I don't know if chapter nine is as good as chapter 15.

Yeah, no, that's good. Because another thing that I've wondered is, you know, I. I thought a lot about, you know, those couple episodes where I feel like I finally found the book and how hard that was and then. And Rewriting, doing this final rewrite of the book, of how I really had to kind of sink down into kind of some dark places. And recently I was talking with a buddy of mine about this stuff, and we were talking about this other author we kind of mutually know, and we were talking about how they're always trying to just pull the right lever. Okay, if I pull this lever and I pull this lever and I pull this lever, then everything's gonna work out for the marketing, for creating the book, for the publishing, all of that stuff. And there's always been something kind of about the way that this person approaches their projects that have always kind of bugged me. And when, you know, I was talking about it, I was like, you know, it's like they keep thinking they can just be emotionally kind of removed from the whole thing. Like, I don't actually have to sink down into places. You know, I'm going to kind of stay up here and just learn all the levers, and I'll just pull the levers. And then I can be, like, this amazing author that I want to be. And I know the author that they want to be. I'm like, dude, that guy is a nutcase. Like, when it comes to his art, like, he goes to the dark places. So then as I'm now looking at the fact that I've got to step back into this novel, I feel like I've kind of done that, and I think that's normal. As you learn a new skill, you kind of have to intellectually go about it. But now I'm like, do I need to bring that same kind of sensibility to this project? Because you, you know, you hear about these writers that, you know, suffer for their work, and, like, they really go to the. You know, they go to the dark places. They, like, mine, their sou. To tell these stories. I'm reading this book called Kill Creek, and the main characters are all authors. And one of them, like, all her books are based on her own, like, trauma in her life. And. But they're all novels that she's writing, you know, and so I'm wondering, like, one, if that's something I need to be bringing to this, which I think I know the answer to. And then two, like, how do I start? Kind of. Because it's one thing to go to those emotional places and tell my true stories about things that happened to me, but how do I bring that same sensibility into fiction writing? Because I feel like running down a dream is the best thing I've ever written. It's the most personal thing I've ever written. And it's the scariest thing I've ever. It's all the things you want to be able to say about stuff you've written right before anybody sees it and it gets reviewed and all that stuff. Like, how do I bring that into fiction? I think is my question, because I don't think I've been doing that.

This is a great question. And I think it's the biggest, biggest problem with writing education today. And I'll get into that in a second. But okay. For me, I think the perfect place to be, which is very difficult to get to, is this place where you have a very ordered life, right? And so you navigate on this road, and it's almost like, you know, that story that you tell in Running Down a dream where you're riding your bike, you're riding your bike over that dam, and there's only 6 inches of space to keep your wheel. And it's a really, really great story for me because that's kind of the way I think we need to navigate our lives. Not just our artistic lives, but our lives in general. And the whole meta, meta story thing, it's really wonderful to be able to look at it from the point of view of, you know, a story guy, because, you know, it separates me from the truth that the order and the chaos is the same thing in my own life as the thing I'm talking about for story structure. Because stories are basically, they're little, you know, like, experiments in what could happen if certain things happened in the world. That's all they are. They're sort of like experimental beginning, middles and ends of things that could happen in your life. Like, if I were to win the lottery, what could happen to me? And then somebody writes a novel about a guy who wins the lottery, and then I can actually read that novel and think, oh, good things and bad things will happen. And then I will have some sort of frame of reference if I were ever to win the lottery. Now, that's a very broad example, but that's why we read trauma novels and dark thrillers and we enjoy them. But we also say to ourselves, wow, that's interesting because that's sort of like the thing that happened to me 25 years ago. And now I can process through that thing that really bugged me. And now it's much better. But my point about what to do is, what you want to do is navigate that very narrow passage between a very orderly existence. I get up at X, I do my work Here. But then you also need to dip yourself into the quagmire. You need to dip yourself into the chaotic universe every now and then, because that's the place where. Where opportunities come as well as peril. So the chaotic symbol of femininity is opportunity as well as peril. And the figure that is most connected to the chaotic universe is the dragon. And the dragon hoards gold, right? So the St. George story, you know, this guy has to go outside of the castle to kill the dragon to save order the town. The town represents the order of the universe. And the individual has to leave the castle to fight the dragon. And if the. The guy wins or the woman warrior wins the battle with the dragon, what do they get? They get gold, and they bring the gold back to the castle and share it with the community. So that's what you do when you write a story, too. You have to think of yourself as that character who has to leave the sanctuary of your little life and your ordered life. And you sit down in front of your keyboard and you say to yourself, I'm going to dip into chaos right now. Now I've got an ordered outline of what I'd like to do. But now it says, scene nine. This is the inciting incident of the middle built. And what I need to do is to have a big flush of chaos in this scene that happens to my character, huh? What do I do from there? So then what do you do? You fantasize in your own mind, possible, you know, things, possible experiments that could happen if one person were flushed into chaos. And the beautiful thing about writers is that they allow the right side of their brain to go into the dark pits. And when that right side of the brain starts to fantasize, wild, crazy, imaginative stuff that can feed, you know, your story. So you literally are like a knight going to fight a dragon when you're writing. And this is not taught at writing schools, because what. What they do at writing schools is they assume that you produce, like, I'm talking about MFA programs, really great MFA programs. And if you're a great enough writer to be admitted into the Iowa Writers Workshop, they assume, because you've had to deliver something that expresses that, you know, story, they assume you already know story structure. So when you go there, they're not going to teach it to you because they assume you already know it. So story structure, to me, is that ordered, you know, wall. That's the wall that will help you when you go into the darkness. When you're in the darkness, you can go, oh, I can always head back to that wall. If I get stuck, I know I can run back, go inside the castle, rework my stuff, and I can go out again. So it's this great sort of movement between order and chaos, and it's this pendulum swing back and forth during your writing day that, you know, that delivers the gold. Now, it takes a lot of work. It is not easy. It is really difficult. And, you know, there are a lot of. A lot of wonderful people have done a lot of wonderful courses about how they specifically, you know, slayed their dragons and created their novels. And they tell you what they did, but they didn't, you know, take an abstraction from what they did and go up and say, but how does that apply to the global story universe? They're just saying, hey, I was able to write my novel in three months, and this is the way I did it. Pay me X amount of dollars and I will teach you what I did. And I think a lot of those people are really genuinely trying to help people, but they're not sort of going up the abstraction level and saying, but what is the point of writing a novel in three months? Where does it end? What is the big deal? And for me, and this is something that you and I have been talking about for months, I think we need a new way of looking at writing. We need to set up a value structure that is really the pinnacle of what stories are. Really. The best stories last, right? The best stories live longer than we do. So what if we structured a writing program and learning situation about slowly, incrementally, through hard work and hard effort, reviewing the really fundamental story structure so that we build up a really great wall, that we can walk on that wall and jump into the chaos and come back to the wall when we need to. And so I think that's really the third magical moment of the writing thing, is teaching the fundamental truth of story structure so that when you have that under your belt, then you've got some great, you know, understanding of the world that you can go into darkness, into the right side of your brain, and fantasize new concepts, innovative ideas, innovative opportunities and perils for your characters. So it's all about incrementally leveling up your skill set so that you become more and more brave to head into the darkness and then come back with some gold.

Well, you know, you said, you know, off and on throughout this process that you've just working with me, you know, it's been two and a half years now, more than, you know, you've learned what it means to teach this to somebody, right? Because you've mostly, you know, worked with people that are already kind of further down the road or, you know, you've been an editor for writers for a long time, but you've never really like taken somebody that was abysmal and helped them incrementally improve, you know. So like, looking back, is there like, are you starting to put together, like this is what I would do to get somebody, you know, up and running, I guess is the best way to say.

Well, it's funny that you mentioned that because a couple of weeks ago, actually it was a couple months ago during spring training, Steve Pressfield went to Arizona. You know, he'd never been to spring training before, so he wanted to check out the Dodgers. So he went to spring training and he came back and we had our weekly call and he said, you know, what was really incredible was he saw all these sort of, you know, 17, 18 year old, amazingly gifted, you know, physical specimen guys and these 20 year olds and they were doing these incredible drills. And you know, Steve was like, of course Steve wasn't watching, you know, the superstars playing the games. He's watching the guys do the drills, right? And so he comes back, he goes, you know, what's really amazing to me is, is the intensity of the player development in major league baseball. Like these guys, they don't come in like Gary Sanchez or you know, Aaron Judge hitting 500 foot home runs. They're in like the minor leagues for a good four years and they train them and get them to the place where they can be successful in the major leagues. And he was just fascinated by this idea of player development. And he said, do you think that could ever kind of be applied the player development concept to writing? And I stupidly said, yeah, yeah, I think that could work. And he said, well, why don't you do it?

Which really made me reconsider all of the story grid stuff in a new light. Sort of. If an angel came down from heaven and pulled me aside and said, look, you know, I've got this special mission for you and what you need to do is create a system that you think will make somebody get incrementally better as a writer or a storyteller, how would you go about structuring this sort of progression? What's the first thing you would teach them? At what level of resolution would you look at a story? And that would be most effective to someone who's just starting out, not someone who's like, who's never tried to be a writer before or who had no intention of being writer, but someone who always deep down knew that they really wanted to write. And when they did write, they felt good about themselves, but they find that it's very, very difficult and they're not sure of whether or not they're making progress or not. And. And they have no way of being able to check it. How would you figure that out? How would you structure something? And the goal cannot be to short term goal, it can't be a short term goal, meaning, you know, write a book in 30 days or, you know, get on the New York Times bestseller list or get ICM to represent you as a writer or all that stuff. That is the fodder of really innumerable courses to be bought or enrolled in across the globe. It really has to be. If you hold this value so highly, Sean, people having the capacity to create timeless works of story that would live longer than they would being, if that's your ideal, how would you start getting people down into the sub basement of that pyramid? How would you welcome them into the sub basement of the pyramid and say, hey, guys, our goal is to build, you know, sort of a lattice work up to the top. You know, I can't do it alone. You guys can't do it alone. But maybe if we all work together, I've got some plans here and we're going to have to, you know, fix them up as they go because I don't know if they're all gonna. It's. It's gonna be a perfect layout. But I'm pretty confident that I've got some good stuff here, that we can at least get a good foundation going and then we can level ourselves up to the top of this pyramid. What do you say? And that's kind of what I think. Don't worry. An angel didn't really come down. At least maybe I. Maybe maybe they just did and gave me that story as possible. But that's kind of. If somebody were to say me, say, ask me, what do you want? What is the thing that you would like to do next? Because I've had New York Times bestsellers. I've written, you know, stuff that is bestseller material, fiction and nonfiction, a lot of it ghostwritten. And that was great. I loved it. It was wonderful. But what for me could be really something, would be to build a system that would be much bigger than me. I would just sort of be one of the people who. Who drives it and helps it grow and is there, for lack of a better term, a wise King of sorts. Somebody who has a ton of experience and some ideas, but is absolutely open to chaos and opportunity. That's what, you know, writer development is to me. It's not an MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop. It's not, write a book in 30 days and I'll give you my outline plan. It's, hey, let's recognize that this is really, really difficult. Let's start there. Okay. You know, a lot of things are really, really difficult. Okay. And what is our goal? All right. Our goal is for all of us to write timeless works of art. Okay. Are we all going to do it? Probably not, but maybe one of us will. Maybe one of us will get enough energy and they can stand on all of our shoulders and get to the top of that pyramid. That, to me, you know, that would be pretty great. So that's kind of what I want to do. And thank God I have you. And we can, you know, we can try and put this thing together and find some other people to join us, because I think it could be really, really cool.

Yeah, I mean, we've been talking about this. I would say we've been trying to figure this out for a year, where we keep talking about, like, what is the best way to bring people into this, to get them started in this. Because we didn't want to just churn out something else, right? Something else that we could put out into the world, something else that we could invite people into. You know, everything that we've done with Storygrid has been very thoughtful and very much towards this goal. It was interesting when you said that about.

Our goal being to create these timeless works of art. It's like the goal. That goal is so stupidly audacious that I would have never even thought to say it out loud. But I feel like that is. I mean, you can. If you're looking at churning out words to make a living, there are ways to do that. And I think we can help in some ways, but that's not really what we're doing here. You know, we are trying. You know, that's what I want to do. I don't want to just become somebody that can churn out a book. Like, I want to write something that I'm proud of that I think will last a long time, that will hopefully go, you know, far beyond wherever I can push it and put it myself. And so, as we've talked about this, and when you told me about that kind of challenge from Steve of, like, you know, okay, we'll go figure this out, it was Exciting when you started putting it together.

Well, the other thing I want to say about it is that, you know, when we did the love story course, I absolutely learned so much doing it. And one of the things I learned, beyond the fact that, you know, Jane Austen is just over the top, incredible, was that the difficulty I found was I did not want to keep doing courses in which I would have to review fundamental material over and over again. So when we did the story grid editor certification, one of the requirements that we had of the attendees was they needed to do all that work themselves, right? They needed to come to Nashville when we did this last fall, fully prepared to. They already knew the five fundamentals of storytelling. They knew beginning hook, middle build, ending, payoff. They knew the units of story. They knew all of that stuff that is in the story grid. So I didn't have to review that again. Now, that's great, but a lot of people aren't at the level of the story grid editors. So what I thought was, what if I did? Like, it's almost like the course catalog of a really good university. And you go in and there's the core curriculum, right? These are all the fundamental courses, the bedrock of raising higher hiring, raising your education. That's why they call it higher education, not flatline education, right?

You go in there, you get the fundamental courses, and then you start piling on top of that. So when I was in college, I was a biology major, so I took the fundamental biology course and I liked it. And I kept going. And then I did cell bio, and then. Then I eventually went up to like biochemistry and microbiology. And. And I got further and further deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. And that's what the concept of this sort of leveling up your craft concept is about. It's. I will do these really solid fundamental things, and I want to make them entertaining, not boring lectures. So there'll be a lot of great stuff in them that's actually entertaining to watch. And then I can start leveling up on top of that so that people could come into this coursework at any level that they felt comfortable, but they would have to take these fundamental courses first. And then slowly I can build up, you know, the love story course that wouldn't have to go over the five fundamentals of storytelling. You know, I can begin at the big global meta love story level that is, you know, at a much more higher resolution than having to build from the foundation up each time I give a lecture. So what I want, I didn't want to do is to keep repeating myself and trumpeting the same, you know, story grids, five fundamentals and five commandments of storytelling. And not. I mean, I don't worry about doing that. I can do that, and I'm happy to do it as many times as I want to, but I don't want to keep offering the same course with different trappings of genre just loaded on top of it. What I want to do is build a curriculum of storytelling that, you know, people can add another level of understanding with each and every course that I design and offer. So, anyway, that's. I'm sorry, I'm. I'm droning on about my grand.

No, no, that's good. I mean, because that's. I feel like that's what we want. When you and I talk about what we're trying to accomplish with Storygrid, it always comes back to this idea of leveling up your writing, of teaching something in a way where after I do this, my writing will never be the same. I remember one of the questions we got one time was about, well, there's all these authors churning out a book every three months. That's how they're making a living, is they're putting out a new book every three months. How do you square that with taking a year and a half to learn story grid to write a single novel or longer? And I was like, well, I don't think the former is bad, but if you take the time to actually dig in and learn Storygrid to write your next novel, it will make every novel you write after that better. Right? It goes back to that years ago, several years ago, when I switched my keyboard layout, and it was excruciating and hard, and it took me months to recover any kind of typing speed. But then once I got it back, I Now type over 10 words per minute faster than I did before. And now I do that for. For the rest of my life, right? So for the rest of my life, I will type faster. And that's what I feel like as you dig into these, like, stackable storygrid principles, is each time you take the time to dig in and, like, learn it and go through the kind of chaotic process of learning something new. At the end, you're different and you're better forever, right? So everything changes. So you've already developed the first kind of series, and I'll tell everybody about that at the end of this. But just tell me a little bit about what we're doing this summer and what you're going to be teaching.

Okay. All right. So what we decided is when I was in high school, some kids would take summer school because they got into trouble. But a lot of kids would take summer school. Like, I took an AP Chemistry class in summer school so that, you know, I could get it out of the way and have more fun my senior year of high school. And so what summer school is is sort of like Memorial Day to Labor Day. So the concept of this. This class is it's 15 weeks of lecture. So each Monday, people will get a lecture from me. It'll be posted however you do it. I don't know how you do it, but I'll film, like, anywhere from. It'll probably be between 35 to 60 minutes of lecture that will cover one of the 15 scenes that that story grid sees as the. The 15 scenes of a spine for a story. And I'll. I'll just, you know, go over them. Right now. It's. It's very simple. There's the beginning hook, the middle build, and the ending payoff, which within each of those three really important parts of a global story, there are five scenes. Those scenes are the global inciting incident for the entire story, a progressive complication, turning point scene in the beginning hook, the crisis of the beginning hook, the climax of the beginning hook, and the resolution of the beginning hook. And it's the exact same thing for the middle build and ending payoff. So you have an inciting incident, turning point, progressive complication that pushes the story into the crisis scene. Then you have the climax scene, and then you have the resolution scene. So five. Five of those scenes for each of the beginning hook, middle build, and ending payoff. And what I'll do is I'll analyze each One of those 15 scenes, one of the lectures, and I will do it through the prism of three masterworks. And I chose these very, very distinctly because the first one is Bridget Jones Diary, which is a wonderful novel and film adaptation. And then the second one is the Martian. Now, Bridget Jones Diary is a love story, and the Martian is an action story. And they're pretty. They're wonderfully designed stories that are not overly complicated, right? So there's not a ton of subplot beyond, you know, a traditional love and action story. Okay? So those two are really, really fun, interesting. And so I'll analyze each one of the 15 scenes for each one of those. Then the third one, this story is really, really complicated and complex. It's Fight Club. Now, Fight Club is a thriller, and it's a bunch of other things, too. So the reason why I chose Fight Club is that it's sort of a level up of complexity in the storytelling than Bridget Jones Diary and the Martian. So you'll get these really good, fundamental, you know, stories that are really well told. And then you're going to get this thing that is riddled with all kinds of different kind of genres within the genre. It's a, it's a really amazing work of art that is very chaotic and it, it's a punch to the stomach if you're not prepared for Fight Club. But I think if you invest the energy going through it with me, you'll really, really get something a lot out of it. And you'll get a lot out of the Martian and Bridget Jones Diary too. So at the end of the 15 weeks that's going to be around Labor Day, then, you know, the culmination is I'll have full scrap global story grids for each of these three things. And the reason why I'm starting with the macro storytelling is that if you don't have your macro figured out, it's the fundamental, indispensable thing that you must understand in order to tell a really great story. So 15, you know, individual scenes are really, to me, the skeleton that anyone who really wants to understand story can really gain the most from. And using three different genres, I think a lot of people are going to get a lot out of it. I know I already have and I'm just about done with all the curriculum and now I just have to start filming the episodes. But I'm really excited about it. It's really great stuff.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. Now, when we started recording this episode, we weren't really planning on talking about what we were working on here at StoryGrid and the new summer semester thing. But if you want to get an early crack at that, you can go see more information about that@storygrid.com summer so we'll be sending you more information about that and we'll probably talk some more about it on the podcast. But again, if you want to learn a little bit more about what it is and maybe jump in and go ahead and grab your spot for the summer, you can do that@storygrid.com summer now for everything StoryGrid related, you can 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. And 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 Apple Podcasts 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.