Rework or Keep Writing?

Hello and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grohl, 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, I continue working through my second draft, and it's going okay, but I keep getting stuck on when I should be reworking scenes, when I should be using old scenes or rewriting them, when I should stop and rework or keep working forward. And I know this is something a lot of writers face is like, when should they keep writing forward and when should they rework what they've already written? So it's a great episode. Sean has some great answers. I think you're really going to enjoy it. So let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, I've been working on the next sequence. So I wrote another three scenes, and it's been interesting as I'm working on the second draft, because there's times where I completely rewrite and then there's times where I, like, copy and paste what I wrote in the first draft into the second draft and, like, weave it into the new stuff I wrote for it. And so I'm going to just kind of tell you where I'm at with it. So the first part is like, each of the three scenes are roughly 1100 words. And I know, like, you always tell me not to worry too much about word count, but what I'm realizing is I'm still rushing everything. And so I started reading the Cuckoo's Calling. It's the book that J.K. rowling wrote under a pen name. It's one of the books she wrote under a pen name. It's a mystery. Yes. And it was funny because I was being. I was getting interviewed for something a couple days ago, and by the way, I'm finding nobody wants to talk to me about my book launch stuff anymore. They just want to talk to me about story grid.

And so we're, like, talking. And I was just talking about how I read the first scene of that book. And I'm, like, devastated because I'm like, this is just so good. And so here's what I'm struggling with is how do I know the difference between putting, like, good stuff to, like, in a scene to fill it out and make it feel alive and just putting, like, shoe leather in? Because I'm always like, okay, I got to get to the action. So I just like, right straight through. And then I go back and read it. I'm like, this thing feels so rushed. But then when I try to fill it out with other stuff, I'm like, well, I'm putting a bunch of stuff in. There's nothing to do with the story. But then I read, you know, people that are really good at that, and it's like, they write all this stuff that, I mean, they could cut, and I would still get the gist of the story, but then it wouldn't be as good. And so I'm just struggling with, like, how to. How to fill out my scenes in a way that aren't, like, isn't boring, I guess, or isn't the stuff that should be cut. So that's kind of where I'm at, is like, I'm really happy with this story. Like, the three scenes I wrote, I'm like, they're working and they're, you know, they're a good, really big step forward from the first draft to the second draft as far as the story and what's happening. But they're just too short and they're rushed, and I don't know how to fill them out in a. In a meaningful way. So that's where I'm at.

Okay, well, you're asking a really good question that doesn't have an immediate, super duper quick answer. That's why I'm sort of stalling for time right now. But my initial reaction is sometimes this is where free indirect style often comes into good to use, in that it allows the writer to reveal what the protagonist is thinking in a way that's interesting and fascinating. One of the things that you did in the earlier. In a couple of the earlier scenes that you hadn't done in the first draft is to have Jesse notice things that she just wasn't noticing before, like where the. The numbered back in New York are. You know, they're pariahs. Nobody wants to see them. They only come out, you know, during the light, while everybody else comes out during the dark. In the extraordinary world, the numbered are actually part of the community in a way that Jesse finds kind of fascinating. Their caregivers to the children of, you know, the privileged. And the privileged children actually have relationships with the numbered, having moments where Jesse is, you know, evaluating her new environment through free and direct style, meaning the reader gets to read the thoughts of your character. The Silence of the Lambs. Clarice Starling does this when she's confronted with that really gross guy at the Psychiatric Institute, Chilton, who is the head of it. And so what Thomas Harris did is, you know, he had a normal everyday meeting where it's a shoe leather scene, right, where Starling has to go and she has to meet with the head of the psychiatric building in order to get access to Hannibal Lecter. So, you know, what did Harris do? He was thinking to himself, geez, I already had a meeting to kick off the entire story. Now I've got to go and have her have another meeting. So instead of having a meeting between.

Someone that she admires, Jack Crawford, at the very beginning of Silence of the Lambs, Harris decided to have kind of a smarmy, gross guy who runs the Psychiatric Institute who's attracted to Starling and comes on to her. And so, you know, everybody knows that kind of guy. And we're finding more and more of them every day. And so Starling in the novel, we get to hear what she's thinking about this guy. How is she going to manipulate him to the point where she can get what she wants without sacrificing her humanity? And it's a brilliant scene because we're not thinking, oh, this is a shoe leather scene. We're thinking, what's the conflict here? What's going on? And she comments on the conflict. This guy is looking at her very lasciviously and he's gross, so how is she going to not offend him and still, you know, have her own self respect? So that becomes the driving point of the scene. And it also reveals Starling's character. It reveals how she is capable of seeing through other people. So in order to answer your question about how do you flesh out the story without it being, you know, she moves here and then moves there and then moves there. Have Jesse notice the peculiar nature of the other people around her. It's like any of us do when, when we're, when we go to the shopping center or we go out to pick up groceries, we see other people at the grocery store. And I don't know about you, but oftentimes I look at somebody and I just, I start concocting a story about who they are, where they live, what they have for dinner. You know, what's it like for them when they go home, why they didn't put on, you know, anything besides a ripped up T shirt to go to the, you know, what motivates these people to appear the way that they are? So when we are given access to somebody's thoughts, we can't help but start thinking, oh, right, I've thought about that thing too that Starling's thinking about. Oh, boy. Or if you're a man and you're reading her point of view, you're saying yourself, oh, my God, there are so many disgusting, smarmy men in this world who are constantly preying on women who are just trying to do their job. What's going on? So I know Jesse's only 12 years old, so this isn't really, you know, the time to do that kind of thing. But have her start to take in more of her environment. And the great. You know, when it really works is when you use those moments of reflection and you pay them off later. So that in terms of Chilton, Starling understands him very early. And then later on, when she has thoughts about him, it pays off about just how evil and wrong and bad this guy really is. So one of the things that people do, you know, it's like when you get a feeling about somebody, isn't something not quite right about that person? I'm not really sure I should trust them, have any specific information, don't have any facts. But I'm going to withhold information. I'm going to withhold myself from this person because I get a bad feeling. It's like getting that hinky feeling about somebody and saying, not somebody. I'm going to reveal anything really too deep about myself to. Because they seem like they could hurt me down the road. So noticing.

Fundamental human behavior and interjecting that human behavior in little small doses is a way of developing character. So Jesse and I do this all the time. I misread people. And oftentimes I will reveal things or do things, believing one thing of a person and then, bang, it slaps me in the face down the road. And they use that information to put me in a compromising position or to extract some kind of favor from me. So think about those things that happen for you. You're like, have you ever been in a position where somebody asks you for help and you're like, yeah, I'll help this person. And then you do. And then later on, it bites you in the ass. I'm sorry to use the.

Nasty word, but. So those are the things that you need to think about adding to the story. And the great thing about it is one of the most difficult things is to get the plot, is to get the movement working so that you know where your character has to be in each scene. You know, the value shifts, all that stuff. The things that I'm talking about kind of the fun parts of writing. These are the parts of writing that people mistake for real writing. These are, you know, putting the hat on the doll or really kind of letting. Letting your own thoughts, giving them voice inside your character's head so that, you know, you might have something nasty that you think about some. Somebody that you would never share with anybody. It's a great way to get rid of that stuff by sticking it in the. In the mouths of characters in your stories. You know, one of the great ways to come up with terrific evil is to think about all the horrible things that you've thought about people that you would never voice out loud. But you say to yourself, you know, as you're walking down the street, oh, my gosh, that guy's blah. You know, I bet X, I bet Y. And to actually give that language to your characters is a way of releasing all that stuff that you're holding around in your own mind. I know I'm speaking vaguely. There isn't any sort of super duper easy example other than this is the time to kind of play around. So basically, the way you would do this is. Is you would say to yourself, okay, I've just ended a really nice sequence, and it's paid off in a really nice active moment. That is terrific. Now what am I going to do now? How can I bring down the pace of the storytelling? This is a good place for some kind of bit about the way Jesse sees the world or the way somebody else behaves. Like maybe she notices some kind of weird tic that Ernst has. You know, maybe he pulls on his hair every time he lies, every time he's sort of stretching the truth, he pulls on his hair. And you could have Jesse notice that in an obvious moment. And then later on, you can use that kind of little bit of detail. She noticed Ernst pull his hair, and that is a tell for her. It's almost like poker, like she is. Think about when you enter an alien environment. Now, Jesse is in an alien environment. Now, it's a utopia of sorts because there's all kinds of great stuff that she's never seen before. But when you enter an alien environment, the thing that you do intuitively and instinctively to assess everything. Oh, that's where. Okay, that's where the bathroom is. All right, So I know that's where I have to go if I have to go to the bathroom. Now, where can I get my food? That's where the food is. That's a person I'm going to want to avoid. So you sort of take inventory when you're in an alien environment. Where do I get the gasoline? Where, you know, all that kind of stuff. Like, you've moved a couple of years ago from one part of the country to another part of the country. What did you do when you got to Nashville? You were like, where, where's the donut shop? Or, you know, where am I going to get a good hamburger? How do I get there? So you kind of do these things intuitively and think about the. The position that she's in. She's in a weird world that she's trying to negotiate. So what's she going to do? What's the most important thing to her? What? She seems to be the kind of person who needs a little, like, place to hide out. Maybe she's going to find some place like that where she can sort through her thoughts and maybe she can contact Balaam in those moments. Do you see what I'm getting at?

Yeah, I think so. So, okay, so I have two more questions about this. So one is, is this something. Because in the first draft you kept telling me not to worry about it and to just keep writing. Is this something I should be worrying about in the second draft? Because my thought is, like, should I. Is it worth my time going back and filling out the last three scenes as a. Like, just to get in the practice, and then I'll go ahead and ask the second question, then hear what you have to say. And as you were talking, I was like, I wonder if it would be a good exercise for me to go back to one of these scenes with 1100 words and force myself to turn it into 2200 words. Even if, you know, it ends up being a bunch of shoe leather. It, like, forces me to learn how to, like, slow down and fill out a scene. Is that, like, something I should. One, is that a good idea to kind of train myself? The second is, is that time well spent in the second draft, or should I just keep rolling through to get to the end of the second draft?

That's a great question. And my advice is to roll through. But. So, no, I think that's a mistake to go back and flesh, you know, put more flesh on the bone before you've got a completely workable draft. You know, we put a lot.

Do I do. When do I do that then?

Oh, you're going to do that, like, in third draft. Okay, third draft, you're. The second draft is really taking all of your notes after all that stuff that you did on the first draft and sort of doing your check. Checklist. How am I. So this is. Go ahead.

So I'm still fixing the story?

Yes. Okay. What you're talking about is really amplifying and adding nuance and depth of character and that I highly recommend that you do, you know, a draft or two of that after you've got your story nailed.

I guess I get like paranoid because I'm always referencing Stephen King's book on writing. And he talked about like one of the turning points from hit for him was when he got feedback from an edit early, early on, before he was published, he got feedback from an editor that was like, second draft equals first draft minus 10%, like word count. And my second draft is going to be like plus like 20 or 30%. And then we're already talking about going back and fleshing it out even more. And so is that just because I'm not gonna.

Stephen King is a different sort of writing technique and I'm not, I'm not gonna. Here's what I think. This is my, this is my guess. I can't speak for Stephen King, but I can, I can sort of. Here's what I think happens. Somebody like Stephen King or Stephen Pressfield or Ken Follett or traditional writers who learn the craft by themselves. And when I see. When I say they learn the craft by themselves, it's absolutely true. That kind of proactive, prescriptive story structure and foundational work was not available. There was no Save the Cat, there was no Robert McKee story. There was no story grid, There was no screenplay by Sid Field. All of those sort of story structure tomes have come, I'm going to say, from 1990 forward. Robert McKee didn't actually write his book and have it available for sale until 10 or 15 years after he'd already been giving his lecture. Sid Field, who I worked with back in 1993, 94, maybe 95, he wrote screenplay, which was a revolutionary book that used the Aristotelian three act structure. Really, he hammered that one home. And that was in the early 90s. So my point is, is that people like Stephen King, who started writing in the 70s and 60s, Steven Pressfield, similarly, they. The way they learned their craft was by doing voluminous drafts, writing just, you know, on a dark and stormy night, the whippoorwill came, you know, like. And then they would just go and they would write and they'd write and write and write and write and then some. At some point they would say, that's enough, the end. And usually Those drafts were 150, 200,000 words.

And then they would go back and they would say to themselves, now what's working here and what's not working here? And so Stephen King and Steven Pressfield learned their craft through very, very difficult trial and error year after year after year after year of, of work. And Steven Pressfield will tell you he didn't really fully understand story structure until he became a screenwriter, until he became full, full scale screenwriter. And when he went to Hollywood, they were like, what's, what's going on in your second act? And he didn't even know what they were talking about. So when Stephen says, Stephen King says the second draft is minus 10%. He's coming from a tradition of, you know, 50,000 words for every 10 that you keep. Now, what you are doing and what the story grid is doing and what story and Save the Cat and all the other Story foundation books, what we're trying to do is say, hey, let's boil down the story into a really lean machine so that we know from action, action, action, movement from the beginning, hook to the middle, build to the ending, payoff what the bare bones, skeleton spine of this thing is. So what Stephen King and Steven Pressfield were doing is they're looking at a massive mountain and they're chipping away at the mountain. What we're doing is we're starting with some blocks and we're building up a hill and we're going to make a really nice tower. They're chipping a mountain down to a tower, whereas we're building one up from the ground. Does that make sense to you?

Yeah.

So your story is going to be very lean to begin with, and then you're going to add more and more layers to it. They have massive amounts of stuff that they're chipping away and throwing away and doing and changing and all that sort of thing. And I'm not. I mean, if you read Misery or you read some of these, my, some of my favorite Stephen King novels or the Shining, what you'll find are some, some beefy passages in there. I'm not trying to, you know, criticize Stephen King, but there's some beefy passages in there that you would say to yourself, hey, you know, he could have, he could have cut that, you know, and those are things that he just didn't chip away enough. And I'm sorry, but nobody's really editing Stephen King anymore because he's Stephen King. What are you gonna say to a guy who sold so many books and is one of the national Treasures. You know, I edit Steve Steven Pressfield, and sometimes he wants to kill me for it. And a lot of people would say, yeah, Sean should not be messing with your stuff. My point is, is that you're writing. Your writing process is completely different than Stephen King. What you need to do is really nail your story. Really, really get it down so that you're feeling like, yes, my hero at the mercy of the villains scene works. Yes, my double ending works. Yes, I'm set up for my next novel. Yes, the maturation plot is working. Yes, the hero's journey is working. Yes, my. My labyrinth plot makes sense and on and on and on. And my middle build doesn't flag. I've reached, you know, I've hit the. The value spectrum in the way that I want. Now then you can say to yourself, okay, I've got a list. I've got a whole, you know, notebook full of little ideas that I had for free and direct style to add into the book. Or maybe just things that she's noticing. You could use third person omniscient without getting into the head of Jesse. You could say she noticed the way Ernst pulled his hair instead of. Look at the way he pulls his hair. You know, that's a very subtle difference. But one's free indirect style, and one isn't. The first one isn't, the second one is. So you can have. What I suggest is to make yourself feel better and not to worry so much is say to yourself, okay, I'm going to fix that later, but in the meantime, I'm going to write down little things that come to me in my notebook that I experience every day that she could use or Ernst could use, or the. The villain could use or. So when you're really angry at somebody and you just sort of, in your mind, I mean, I do this myself, is. I'll sit and I'll. I'll have. Boy, if I could say whatever I wanted to this person to really destroy them, what would I say? And then, you know, I say it in my mind. I'm like, yeah, that would really not be good if I said that to them. But that's absolutely true.

Hopefully there's not a lot of entries for me in that notebook.

No, no. In fact, I should write them down, but it's probably best that I don't. So that's the kind of stuff I'm talking. Like, you have this notebook and you could put, like, character flesh, you know, like little thoughts, little observations, and those are the things that can take a really terrific action story and add so much depth to it, like Stephen King does in Misery. It's amazing the stuff that he does. And also the Shining, where these characters, observations are so on the money that you kind of start to see the world through Jack Torrance's eyes, which is a scary thing because he goes crazy. But you understand how Jack Torrance is thinking and you understand how.

Danny is thinking. Danny and the Shining, who is his son. So don't freak out yet. You know, you're gonna add this stuff later on, and in the meantime, just keep plowing. I mean, the second draft is really. Hopefully it's taking your first draft that doesn't work to work. Your second draft is taking. Doesn't work to work if you're. I always. I like to talk about levels of story because it's just helpful sometimes to go, well, you're at a level two, and you want to get it to a level three. And I think that's where you are. I think your first draft was around, you know, a two on a scale of five mean. And it means that it didn't work. And so what you did on that first draft was you spent a lot of time editing it, going through all these principles that we've talked about, and you wrote down a lot of notes in order to convert your two into a three for your second draft. So now your goal is, I want to make sure my story works by the end of draft two. At the end of draft two, if the story works, then you say to yourself, okay, I've got it at like a 3 minus, can I get it to a 4 by adding even better setups and payoffs? Can I add more free and direct style? Can I add more subtle clues about what's going to happen? Can I add more observations? Can I add more conflict to interpersonal relationships scene by scene? Can I tweak, you know, can I tweak the scene, the meeting scene in the office from pretty good to, oh, my gosh, how is she going to get out of this situation? This guy's a creep. And, you know, I would be convinced that Thomas Harris went through so many drafts on the Silence of the Lambs that he, you know, he really focused on perhaps one character at a time. How can I do a better Crawford? How can I make Crawford more specific? How can I make Chilton more specific? And that's what you're going to do in, like, draft four and five. How do I make Ernst even more specific than he is? Because what you're going to want to do is make sure each one of your characters is so specific that in your reader's mind, they're going to know immediately. They're going to. In their brain, they're going to picture what Ernst looks like, their own version of Ernst. And that version of Ernst is going to be completely different than as. And so in those later drafts, you can really say is as. As, you know, perfectly unique as I want him to be. Maybe I give him a little thing like, for example, one of the big difficulties that Thomas Harris had to have faced when he wrote Silence of the Lambs is how do I make my bad guy, my really evil bad guy, the villain of this story, which is Buffalo Bill, how do I make him unique? And one of the really brilliant things that he did among at least four or five levels of this is, And I noticed this the other day when I was rereading the Hobbit, is that if you read the Hobbit and you go. And you. And first of all, Gollum is one of the greatest, you know, inventions of darkness ever. And Tolkien's introduction of Gollum in the Hobbit is simply brilliant. And what Gollum. One of the things that Gollum does is he. He does not refer to. He speaks to himself in the third person, and he calls himself Precious, right? So it's like, precious. When should we, you know, check out the. What that little thing is over there? Maybe we can eat that thing. And it's really disturbing when you read Gollum because you're like, this thing is weird. What's going on? Where did this guy come from? And what Thomas Harris did, and I noticed this, which was so cool, is, you know what the name of Buffalo Bill's dog is?

No.

Precious. And he talked and he talks about Precious all the time. And he speaks in the third person, too. So when he has the young woman in the cave in the bottom of his house, he never calls her name directly. He always says it puts the lotion on its skin. So Thomas Harris, I would suspect, was inspired by. By JRR Tolkien's depiction of Gollum. And when he was thinking, how do I make Buffalo Bill even creepier and weirder than any other, you know, bad guy in serial killer thrillers, he thought to himself, oh, I wonder what did Tolkien do? Oh, my gosh, that's right. He had that thing with the Precious thing. Why don't I give Buffalo Bill a dog and call him Precious? And Precious will be so important to this killer that that is how the young woman is going to really get on Buffalo Bill's nerves because she understands that if she can capture Precious, sort of like the Ring in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, that she will be able to control Buffalo Bill. And that's what she does and that's what she tries. So anyway, this is all like level four, level five, right now. It's okay to have a couple of stick figures here and there as long as your story moves from. Doesn't work. To work. Don't worry about 1100 words. Great. 1100 words. You can work with that. It's a really nice lump of stuff that you can expand and contract and do all kinds of stuff to.

Yeah, and the other thing I thought as you were talking is I'm really glad I didn't. You know, I listened to you on the first draft. It didn't go back and add a bunch of stuff because I'm cutting so much of what was written. It would have been wasted time anyway. So, yeah, I'd rather wait until you're like, okay, this works. We just now have to make it better.

Let me say one thing. Let me say one thing to try and help you more about this fleshing out. And this is something that is actually part of making sure that your story works. Now, in the labyrinth action plot, what do you think is really important to.

Establish Labyrinth action plot? What's really important for me to establish.

The mechanics of the labyrinth. Right. How does the labyrinth.

Yeah, I was just about to say that.

Yeah.

So just to go Hobbit on you again, like, what happens when, you know, the Hobbit goes to the big mountain where Smaug is the evil dragon? Does Tolkien just have him, you know, shoot right down into the middle of that thing? No. He slowly tells you about the size of the mountain, what it looks like, how, you know, each individual chamber is different, where all the loot is how the Dwarves built that inner city in that mountain. So you get a real sense of what's inside of that mountain before. And he. And he builds it depending upon. We discover it as Bilbo Baggins discovers it. So initially, we. We explore the outside of the mountain. We see it's really craggy. We can't find the hidden door into the sanctum sanctorum of the dragon. And then eventually, after a thousand words of description of these guys going all over the place looking for it, they find the crag where this hidden door is. But then what happens? They can't really get the door open yet. So it takes a long time for them to open the door and all of this establishment is saying, look how complex this labyrinth is, is they can't even find a way in. And when they do find the door, they can't get the door open. You know, and what that establishes to the reader is this thing is serious. This is really an intense labyrinth. And once they do get the door open, that's just the beginning. Once Bilbo Baggins goes down there, it's all this cavernous, incredible.

Area. It's so big that a dragon can. Can walk around down there. So think about the extraordinary world in terms of a labyrinth. You know, you establish there's that door that nobody goes through with the guards. That's neat. That's interesting. Now, you've also established when she walks through the central, sort of like Apple computer doors, there are all these people plugged in, in lounge chairs in the reception area, which is really weird. So what other elements of this labyrinth, of this building, of this universe, of this dome of this world can she explore? And that exploration is. It's not shoe leather. It's bringing us into this very complicated maze that she has to eventually solve. How am I going to find. Where is. I mean, in this labyrinth? What she needs to do is to find the gold, right? Where is the sanctum sanctorum of the faction? Where is the hard drive? I don't know what it is. Where is the place that she needs to dismantle? She might not know that she has to dismantle it until, you know, the point of no Return in the middle build. But we need to know in our brains as readers that there's very, very specific little paths and labyrinths. And that's the thing that Tolkien was a genius at doing, was reinventing these deep caverns and these. All these very strange passageways, either in a forest, in a mountain, in water. So that is a way of putting more flesh into the story for a purpose, especially in a labyrinth action plot. Now, the labyrinth action plot, let me just give a quick overview of that. That is essentially a device that tells the reader there is a secret place here. And once our hero discovers where the secret place is, they have to go there and do something. Either take the treasure from underneath the dragon or, you know, in the Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, they had to get to this place where they could stop the virus from mutating or whatever. And it was this thing, this area that would, you know, kill the virus before it spread or something like that. It's been years since I read it, but that was a labyrinth action Plot. We have to get here. We. First of all, we have to find where it is, and then we have to get there and it's going to be heavily guarded, and then we have to do something there, and then we have to leave. Now we know that Jesse is going to get there and dismantle and destroy the grid, which is going to cause incredible problems. But she doesn't know that. She doesn't even know that's her purpose right now. She's just trying to, you know, get home.

By doing what people are telling her to do because she's immature. She doesn't understand that she's being used yet.

So anyway, the labyrinth is a great thing to think about when you're, you know, worried about. If you. If you say to yourself, well, I'm doing 1100 word scenes and nothing. You can take her on a tangential journey that, you know, she gets stuck somewhere and, you know, luckily gets out.

Of it or something.

But you need to establish the labyrinth. Okay.

No, that's good. I haven't done that enough yet for sure, because in the first draft, I wasn't sure that's what I was writing.

Right.

So now as I rewrite the second, I need to really hone in on that.

Right, Exactly.

Okay. I have so totally different subject. I was talking with some of the story grid editors recently and they wanted. They were questioning on couple things that I think are related that I wasn't sure how to answer either. So one is, how do you. What's the difference between a beat in a scene and the other is when you're evaluating other works of fiction, it's not always clear when one scene ends and the other begins. You know, it's not all, oh, now I'm completely spacing on the name. Like, it's not all, you know, very clear where it's like, see, you know, chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. Sometimes it's these super long. And I remember running into this when I was evaluating Harry Potter and trying to do the story grid spreadsheet for Harry Potter is. I would like read these giant sections and I'm like, I think there's like four scenes in here and I would just kind of go back through and find. Try to figure out where one scene ended and the other began. And so is it like when they, you know, it's not always when they change location or. So how do you go about evaluating when one scene ends and the other's beginning and then, you know, where does a beat end? And we're now talking about a Scene. And I would say, you know my answer that well, a beat's really short so it should be no more than a few sentences. But anyway, would love your thoughts on that.

The way I establish scene breaks especially in old fashioned storytelling where you have 10 chapters or 20 chapters like the Hobbit. I mean it's 16 chapters and it's 80, 90, 100,000 words. I don't even know off the top of my head. But the way I do it is I think about the story value.

The scene value. So for example, at the beginning of, since I just been reading it again, let's say chapter two of the Hobbit. Now chapter one of the Hobbit is a pretty quick scene where Gandalf comes up and sees Bilbo Baggins at his house. It's a hobbit hole. And he says good morning. And then they have all this sort of rhetorical talk about good morning. It's sort of supposed to be funny. It's not all that funny but, but there's, there's beats about. The beats would be in the dialogue between Gandalf and Bilbo. And initially Gandalf doesn't reveal who he is. Bilbo hasn't seen Gandalf since he was a little boy. And then so the big turning point of the scene is when Gandalf says well, I'm Gandalf. And then Bilbo's like oh my gosh, I didn't know it was you. And so that turns out the scene from moving from you know, a guy who's trying to get rid of an intruder who's knocked on his door and bothering him to oh my gosh, how did I insult this wizard? I need to be nice to him, but I don't want to give him what he wants, which is Gandalf wants Bilbo to go on an adventure. And Hobbits never go on adventures. So that's like the first chapter. It's a very sort of easy scene to kind of figure out. It moves from hospitable to dismissive back to invitation because stupidly Bilbo invites Gandalf to tea the next day. And it's sort of one of those things that Bilbo does accidentally like, oh, very good. See you. Goodbye. Oh yeah, yeah, someday come to tea. Yeah, tomorrow. And you know, as the scene ends he realizes oh my gosh, I just invited the guy to tea tomorrow. And so the next scene is a very long chapter that's about 8,000, 9,000 words. And it's when all of the Dwarves show up before Gandalf shows up at tea time. And so the scene breaks after Gandalf arrives. So we have this very long convoluted scene where 14 elves show up when Bilbo wasn't expecting any elves. I'm sorry, Dwarves get Dwarves and elves mixed up. But so these Dwarves show up. Bilbo doesn't know what's going on. And finally Gandalf shows up. Bang. End of scene. And so the whole scene is built upon the tension and the progressive complication of my gosh, who are these people who are coming to my house? And how am I going to get rid of them? So it shifts when Gandalf actually arrives and then they start to spill out the tale of what they want Bilbo to do. So when the value shifts from the moment of hospitality to, you know, recruitment that's when I would break the scene. And then there's about three scenes in chapter two.

Now, how do you know that's where you break the scene? Is it like when the five Commandments have wrapped up?

It's usually as simple as, well, very well, then the next day. And then it transitions, right? Because a lot of, A lot of traditional storytelling they weren't really great at transitional work. So they would basically end something and then they would say the next day Bilbo really didn't. There really isn't a chapter break. But there should be.

Okay.

It's almost. If you think it through and you say, ah, if you trust your instincts you will intuitively know when the scene ends. And the problem is once you start being an editor you start to doubt your instincts. So you'll, you'll beat it. You know, you'll worry about a beat when you really don't have to worry about beats. The beats are only little moments of subtle changes in complication of the scene. So for example, when Gandalf says, what do you mean by good morning? That's a beat. Because he's contradicting the good morning of Bilbo. Now, I can pick anything down to the, to the beat, but it's not. It doesn't really matter because a lot of this stuff only. You only really want to deal with the scene five commandments because the scene is the building unit. There's no real simple answer to when the scene stops. Only when you notice that something has changed. It started, something started and then something changed. And now that's. That is now. Now we're moving on. So once all the Dwarves are in Bilbo's house Once everybody's been given their liquor and their food and they're all sitting down and then the, then things have changed, right? People have come in, they've settled, they've been welcomed. And now what's next? Now let's talk about why we're here. New scene. So that's how you change, how you determine something happens. Something's changed. We're now going to move on. That's when you know a scene has ended.

Literally. Somebody will say, they'll tag it. They'll go, and Bilbo had a drink too. Then Thorn decided, you know, then Thorin went in on an explanation of why the Dwarves were there. And a lot of times it breaks with somebody saying, you know, just an aside that reminds me of the time when. And then they tell the story within the story. So a lot of times young editors will beat this stuff to death and they'll think that they're not doing it the right way. When the most important thing is to just notice the changes of value. Something has changed. What has changed? Once it has changed, then usually the story moves to another change. There's another inciting incident. And beats have inciting incidents too. For example, in the Hobbit, an inciting incident would be like, oh, I don't want any tea. Could you get me some red wine? That's an inciting incident. Because it's an inciting incident in a beat. See how this is? You can just really go crazy with this stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, I've, I've tried to sort of say to the story grid editors, you know, you've got to just keep doing it and you're gonna figure it out. And there's no, the, the beauty of Storygrid is that there's a lot of rules, but there's also a lot of interpretation that allows you to see stories in different ways. So when we, when I was giving the conference on, you know, that week long thing that we did every time when we'd analyze the scene and we went through a good 30 of them, I would say, what do you guys think? And somebody would come up with something that was valid. And I'd say, yes, that's totally valid. But I think if you looked at it this way, you could see it in a different way that would be more applicable to the global genre.

So my advice when you're, when you're parsing scenes is simply think about what's changed. Has it been resolved? Are we on to something else?

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