Shawn rips apart Tim's scene

Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a podcast dedicated to helping you become a better writer. My name is Tim Krall. I'm the host and I am the struggling writer trying to get started in figuring out how to write a book that works. And Sean Coyne is The expert editor, 25 plus years in the business, author of the book the Story Grid. And he comes on and answers all of my questions, helping me become a better writer. And I'm allowing you to listen in so that you can become a better writer. Next to me, this episode was the hardest so far for us to record, I guess I should say for me to record because we spent most of the time ripping apart one of my scenes. So I wrote a first scene for a book that I want to work on, and I made a whole lot of mistakes in it. And so Sean really dives in with me and helps me figure out what's wrong with the scene and how I can make it better. And you get to listen in as he deconstructs or as I say, rips apart my scene. Also, after we finished recording, we kept on talking as we normally do, and we had a little piece that I wanted to share with you. And so the mic was still rolling and so I decided to add that on as an epilogue. So make sure you hang on past, past the end of the episode to hear the last couple minutes of an epilogue that we put together for you as well. So we're going to jump right in and get started. I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, Sean. So I figured we'll get started talking about the draft of the scene I sent you. So last week I promised I would write a draft and send it to you. Now, you had told us to write 10 versions of it, and I only wrote two because I was lazy slash scared.

So. And I put off sending it to you until like the last minute because I just really didn't want to. But anyway, so I sent that to you and what I did is, so let me set it up for listeners is so this is the inciting incident of my story. And basically in the first scene that I didn't write, I wanted to keep the scene where somebody gets like, there something malfunctions with the scuba diving equipment and they have to kind of shoot to the top. And I use that instead of, you said last week, hey, use weather of why they have to go back. And what I thought was, well, instead I'll use it where one of the people.

Gets the symptoms of the bends from coming up Too fast. And so they need to get back to shore to.

Get him taken care of.

That's good. I like it.

So at the beginning of the scene, it was like, hey, we're heading back because this guy's sick, so we got to cancel this vacation everybody's been looking forward to. So. So anyway, you read it?

I did, yes.

So, thoughts and feedback.

You know.

Well, this is a really great process because.

There'S. There's any number of ways that I can start with sort of helping you on. On this. And the great thing is that you went for it and you wrote a scene that has, you know, at the beginning it's one way and at the end it's another. So the scene, you know, as I described in the story grid, you have to start one place with a value and end another. So the value at the beginning of your scene right now is everybody's alive. And at the end of your scene, and I think you're going to post this, so I'm not giving anything away.

Yeah, you can. Anybody. I'm going to put it in the show notes, a link to the exact draft I sent him. So you can read it. Stop and read it now or read it after you listen.

Okay, great. So at the end of the scene, somebody's dead. So in terms of a scene value, the beginning of the scene, everybody's alive, and at the end of the scene, somebody's dead. So there's an arc. Something happened at the beginning, and, you know, the result at the end is somebody's dead. So that's great. And that's a good start. When I suggested, you know, last week for you to do, you know, write this up 10 times, I didn't mean to necessarily write, you know, 1500 words 10 times. What I was. What I was going for was for you to come up with 10 different scenarios. And I think, luckily you picked a pretty. Pretty good one for this scene as your inciting incident for the global story. Now, from what I. From what I can read from this story, this is a. This is about a group of guys who were out on a sort of like a guy vacation, and somebody dives. They're on a diving excursion probably somewhere off the coast of Australia or maybe the Caribbean. That's a little bit vague right now, which I think you need to think about being more specific.

So anyway, so these guys are on this vacation. They're on a boat. And it opens with a conversation between a bunch of guys on a sun deck. And apparently one of the guys in the group has Taken, taken up ill and they think he might have the bends. The bends is a really interesting way of using.

Of coming up with a way to get the necessity of this boat having. Go. Going back to shore. So the other thing you want to think about, Tim, is like.

The realism here. So you're definitely in the, the terrain of a style of, of, I'm sorry, the reality genre of realism, which means this could happen. So, you know, from this point forward. And this is a first draft, so I'm not, I'm not taking you to the woodshed over this. I'm just, I'm just putting this in your head. When you're dealing with realism, you have to do a little bit of research. Like is there, are there. Is there a place where somebody would go scuba diving? Not scuba diving, but, you know. Yeah, scuba diving. Deep, deep underwater. That, where that the boat would be, say, a day away from land.

Yeah, so actually I did that. They. I'm placing it at. Oh, geez. It's in my notes. It's a. It is off of Australia. And I found a place that they do. These are called Liveaboards, which is basically small cruise ships. Very. In this case, I actually found a company that goes to this remote place that you can only go a couple like during a certain season of the year and you're 12 hours from shore. That's great. And I found, I looked at their boat and I found. I looked at a couple of these and one of them, I wanted to find a smaller boat because some of them can have like 20 people and that would have been too many people. So I found one where it's a 50 foot catamaran and they actually put on it the specs of each floor, like how the entire boat's laid out. So I'm using that as my layout and my location. And I actually looked up, I found a great page that explains all of the references and like, you know, stern and bow and all that kind of stuff on boat so that I can actually use those terms in it, which I threw a couple in the draft. So yeah, have a location, it's remote and so it's places that only more experienced people would go or take you. You can only go a couple times a year and it's remote enough where not a lot of liveaboards go. So they're the, they're going to be the only boat out there.

Okay, great. So you've done your homework. You visualize, you know, in your head have a sense of where all this action is. Taking place, which is terrific. Okay, so, so I'm, I'm talking in terms of genre right now. We just went through the reality genre. And so as your editor, I'm giving you a sense of, hey, you're going to have to tweak this a little bit down the road. Not now. You know, we're kind of doing this a little ass backwards in that you're developing the story and I'm giving you editorial comments as you're developing it, which I would not suggest anybody really do, because you can get so overwhelmed with specificity and editorial vision and all that stuff where it, you know, it kind of sucks the life out of you and you're hamstrung to be able to write. So as I say in the book, you got to wear two hats. You've got to wear your writing hat and your editing hat. And so what you did last week is you put on your writing hat and now you're sharing it with me and I'm playing the role of your editor. So. Alright, so we've gone through realism. You've definitely done that work. You should feel confident that you know what you're talking about, you know, the, the general reality of the situation. That's great. So next up is the content genre. So from what I can read.

What I'm extrapolating here is that you're dealing with the action genre.

And I'm not going to extrapolate and I don't want you to.

Tell me what's going to happen later. Let's just deal with what's on the page now. So right now we're dealing with the action genre. And the action genre has sort of four major components to it. There's the man against nature stories, which are basically, you know, like the.

Situation where you have like Die Hard, where you know.

There'S a labyrinth, you know, that the hero has to get through to be able to save everybody. So you have the man against nature stories. The environment's another one in the man against Nature and Gravity, you know, the movie Gravity would be a good example of that. So the whole purpose is for Sandra Bullock to get out of space and land back on earth. Okay, so the second one is like the man against the state stories. And this is where, you know, you have conspiracy plots and vigilante plots and rebellion plots. And all this of course is in, is in the book, the story grid. The third one is the man against man stories. And these are where you have sort of like a duel between a villain and a hero.

And that's kind of interesting here because I think what you're leading up to in your story is a showdown of some sort between.

One of these characters versus one or more of the other ones. And I'm just going from what I'm reading, and the last one is Man Against Time, which is sort of like there's a clock and there's a deadline. Like a ransom plot. Like that great movie Ransom with Mel Gibson, which was done years ago, was a fantastic movie. And that's where, you know, you have to save the victim before, you know, something terrible happens. Somebody's held for ransom. So from the introduction of your first scene, what I'm saying to myself as I read it was, okay. Tim's dealing with sort of like a terrain of an action story. He's added sort of man against time. And I say man against time because I love the idea of you using the bends as a means to get these characters to have to change course. So as we've talked about before, inciting incidents are all about changing circumstances in the protagonist's life such that the world is thrown out of balance. So the beginning of your story, there's a bunch of guys who have gone on vacation and they're all excited about going scuba diving and really, you know, doing the full nine yards of the scuba diving. And all of a sudden one of the guys gets the bends and they have to head back and get him medical treatment. So that's terrific. That's an inciting incident that works.

Now. So I'm gonna say right now that, you know, if I were to give you a couple examples of other. Of another sort of story that's in your realm, it would be a movie. I don't know if you've ever seen this movie, but it's called Dead Calm. Dead Calm. Dead Calm. C A L M. I'm not very good at enunciating calm, but.

It'S a fantastic movie with Sam Neill. I think it was made in Australia. I forget the name of the director, but Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman are on this boat, and it's very much a deep sea kind of action story.

So, anyway, I would suggest for next week your. Your homework would be to watch that movie and. And think about the obligatory scenes and the conventions that happen in that movie. Another movie to think about watching was the one with Robert Redford. Fantastic movie. It was released last year, I think. It's called all is Lost.

And it's. It's the story of a guy who's out on a ship and you Know, something happens, and he's got to somehow figure out a way to get back. Back to shore.

So the one in my head was.

And then there was one by Agatha Christie.

Sure. Yeah.

So. Which I was looking it up the other day when I was working on this, and then I read that she said it was the hardest book she ever wrote. And I was like, oh, dear God, what have I done? And. But that was kind of what I was thinking, so. And then there was one. I think it was like 13 people end up. Or 10 people end up on an island. They've been summoned there by lots of different reasons, and then they start dying off one by one. And you're trying to figure out who's. Who the bad guy is and who's doing all the killing. And so what. And I was. I wanted to ask you about this because what that means is there's no actual protagonist.

Like, there's not. What I was planning on doing was hopping between all of the people on the boat and telling different sides of the story and trying to. And then people continue to die, but trying to set it up where you don't know which one of these six guys is the bad guy.

Well, I think there's a reason why Agatha Christie said it was the most difficult book for her to write, and that. Is it. Okay.

Is that, like, something I should not be tackling on my first book?

Well, I think you should reconsider it. And the reasons why are.

One of the most important things to always remember is.

As a writer, you need your reader to become emotionally attached to the story. Right. And the way people become emotionally attached to the story is to identify with one particular character. So for the Silence of the Lambs, it's Clarice Starling. Everybody sort of, like, puts themselves in her shoes. And that is a very, very important element to bring because we need to sort of almost experience what the protagonist is experiencing to give us, you know, the narrative drive to keep reading the book. So if you. If you go out with an epic story and you have multiple characters and six characters is a very, very difficult thing to pull off.

The problems that you're going to face is you're going to be trying to create more and more like, pyrotechnic plotting to keep people attached to the story. So they would be more attached to the pyrotechnic plotting than they would emotionally attaching to one particular character. So.

You know, the notion of doing, you know, I think she also wrote one called Ten Little Indians or something that's similar to that.

That was a previous title of the same book.

Oh, it was. Okay.

Yeah.

So.

That'S. You know, that's really difficult. And I think if it's your first novel, what you want to do is to find.

Find a story that you can tell where you're almost writing as if you're in the character's shoes, so that, you know, you can put yourself into one of these persons, one of these characters. You know, you can inhabit their body and tell the experiences that are happening to that person as they. As they go through the story.

And the reason why I suggest that is because it gives the reader somebody to cling to, somebody to really hold on to and fix in their brain if it's very difficult. I don't know about you, Tim, but I'm really bad when I meet somebody to remember their name. And so I've met so many people in my life, and my wife, God bless her, can remember everybody's name. And she'll whisper to me before I see them again, and she'll say, that's sue, you know, and the reason why is that the more people you're exposed to in your life, the. The more difficult it is to place them. So when you're reading a novel, if you have to follow more than one person, it's difficult, and your brain gets a little overwhelmed and a little bit frustrated. So what you do is you kind of start tuning out and say, what. What's going on? Who is this? Why do I care about this person?

Oh, see, I thought I would solve that problem by having only six people.

Well, six people is a lot. Okay.

I guess I was thinking, like, trapping six people. I wouldn't have to deal with other people. But you mean it's a lot as far as. Not the amount of people in the story, but the amount of points of view I've got to cover.

Yeah, not only that, but it's just, you know, it also sets up the problem which I'm gonna address now. Your story begins with a whole bunch of people talking, and we don't know anything about any of them. And so I don't know who Matt is versus Mick versus Tommy versus Chris versus.

You know, the. The other two characters that I can't. Adam is one. So you're setting yourself up for failure when you're. When you're trying to bite off more than you can chew on your. On. On this first kind of exploration. So I would really suggest to you that you come up with a simpler idea.

So like a completely different book idea or Simplify this one.

I. I would simplify this one. And. Because I think the notion of a book that's about, you know, a ship lost at sea that has to desperately get back to shore, somebody's gonna die. And they're not just gonna die, they're gonna be living in hell until they get to shore. Because from what I understand about the bends, it's like excruciating.

Yeah. What happens is, is nitrogen gets stuck in your tissue and basically fizzes up like soda.

Exactly. So you're basically. Yeah, so you're basically rotting from inside a slow rot and you're sort of almost exploding inside. So it's extraordinarily painful. So I like that setup. But I don't think, you know, I don't think the scene is. Is grabbing the reader in the way that it needs to, especially as the first scene in the novel.

And I do think that you need to take advantage of some of the things that, you know, writers have developed over the years. And what I'm talking about is free indirect style. And what that is, is it's being able to write in the third person from a very sort of, you know, global point of view where you can talk about the design of the ship.

You know, the. The past histories of the characters on board that ship, but you can also get inside one particular character's head. So we can actually, as a reader, hear their thoughts. In a way, we read their thoughts. And, you know, Thomas Harris does this extraordinarily well in the Silence of the Lambs, where you get inside the head of Clarice Starling. And he doesn't do it right away, he does it gradually. He introduces, at the very beginning, it's a two person scene. So what I would suggest is you think about making this first scene a two person scene, not a six, seven, eight person scene. And the reason why is that when it's two people, the reader doesn't have to work very hard to place who is who and what is what.

So that's. That's a pretty big suggestion to pull it back to two character scenes. And the other thing is that.

You know, when you're starting out on the first scene of a novel, what you really want to do is really just grab the reader by the throat immediately with really compelling and mysterious.

You know, story tricks.

So what I'm saying. So what I'm sort of saying by that is.

You know, there's. There's a famous line in Ken Follett's book, the Key to Rebecca, and it's the very first line of the novel. And.

It'S. It's. I'm paraphrasing, but I think it's the first camel collapsed at noon. That's the first sentence of the book. I mean, the last camel collapsed at noon. So what does that sentence do for you as a writer? It pulls the reader in because they're like, what? The last camel collapsed at noon. So just that one sentence pulls the reader right into a world like something's going on and all the camels are dead and the very last one has just collapsed. And it's. It's in the height of midday, the midday sun. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. And so what Ken Follett did there was like, pull you right into, like, the middle of a desert with one sentence. So does the.

Does the inciting incident need to be in the first scene?

Yes.

It does.

And you've got, you know, you've got sort of two inciting incidents in your scene.

That's what I was picking. I didn't even think of that till you said that a couple minutes ago. And is that a problem?

It's not necessarily a problem. It depends on how you use it, I think. I think. You know, there's a great short story by Ernest Hemingway called Hills Like White Elephants. And it's this beautiful short story where nobody really understands what's going on until you finish reading it. And what it's about is. It's. It's a man and a woman having a conversation about.

You know, wine and things. And. And you finally figure it out at the end that they're contemplating, you know, whether or not this woman should. Should have an abortion. And they never mention terminating the pregnancy. They never make any mention of that whatsoever. And that short story kind of. It clicked with me when I read yours because I'm like, you know, if Tim were to be able to create a scene where he has two characters and they're talking about things that are kind of really fascinating.

But the big payoff of the scene is discovering that one of the guys on the ship is in tremendous amount of pain, and if they don't get him back to shore, he's gonna die. And he's not gonna just die. He's. I mean, maybe like. So that's another assignment for you is to read Hills Like White Elephants and I. It's a very short story and it's brilliantly done. And the great thing about Hemingway is he doesn't use million dollar words. You know, it's all it's all subtext. And it's a brilliant way of looking at the way a writer can convey things that are never on the page.

So. So anyway, my thinking about it is that.

The other thing that people have a tendency to do when they're writing their first novel or their first short stories, they jam in so much plot, right? They jam in as many plot points as they can into one scene. It's like, not only that, there's zombies, too. The zombies are, you know, they're not just Dracula zombies, they're, you know, alien zombies. And I think you have to have a little patience, Let the scene play out in a way that builds to this sort of moment at the very end where you say, we have to go back. They might be discussing. Well, we do have that. And you would have to do a little bit of research on this. We do have that mini iron lung downstairs. We could stick him in there, you know, like, maybe one guy's like, hey, he's not so bad. You know, he's doing okay. I think he's going to come out of it, you know? And the other guy's like, I'm not so sure. You know.

I've. I've seen people suffer through this and. What do you mean? Well, I've seen. So they're talking about almost the symptoms of the bends. And you never have to say the bends, right? Yeah, until the end, you know, and then the reader is going to be like, oh, my gosh, there's somebody down below writhing in pain. Well, these two guys are basically contemplating whether or not they're going to save his life or not.

Well, so. And I don't. I don't know, we may be boring people out of their mind talking about one story, but Because. So my thinking, though, was like.

So this is how I had it in my head is what I wrote was the second scene. And the first scene was him, like, coming up too fast because of blah, blah, blah. And that's how he got the bins. And now the second scene was them.

Deciding, that's shoe leather. That's called. What I call a shoe leather scene, Tim. Meaning it's unnecessary.

Okay.

The most important thing to remember, too. I mean, listen to me. The most important thing to remember, too.

When you start a story, you want to begin it in the middle of things. It's called enmadius res. It's an old sort of. I think it's either Latin or Greek. Emedias res M E D I A S, R A S. And what that means is you just start it in the middle of the thing so that there's no setup, there's no boy Jim, Good morning. That's all exposition that nobody needs to read.

If you're going to make.

A major thing that first time writers do is they over explain and they think that the reader isn't going to understand unless they give them a lot of exposition. Like I don't mean to. Hold on a second, I'm going to pull up, I'm going to pull up your story. And the first sentence is God damn Matt, I've been looking forward to this trip for a year and he has to go fuck it up. Said Adam. Okay, that first sentence to me reads like exposition, meaning you are telling the reader a whole bunch of information as quickly as you can in one sentence of dialogue, right? So it's sort of like, hey, here we are on this trip and isn't it interesting? And boy Matt really ruined it. Nobody talks like that and nobody, nobody ever says like I don't say to you. When we started the podcast, gee Tim, it's really great that now we're on our sixth episode and things are going really well. What do you think about that? You know, we just, we just start and you say, sean, what do I do now? So to think about that, try not to put any exposition and just write the scene, like almost think that. Pretend, pretend that you are these two guys and go back and forth in your own mind. One time you're, you're Adam and one time you're John or whatever and just write down what you think they would be saying to each other in this circumstance.

So instead of God damn Matt, I've been looking for forward to this trip and he has to go fuck it up. Said Adam.

You know, instead of that, what, what would, what would Adam say? He would probably say.

I'm not, you know, I have to think of it off the top of my head. But you want to start with something like the last camel collapsed at noon. And so that's.

Use that one. Just put that in.

You know, actually Elizabeth Peters used that first line as the title to one of her books and she gives Ken Follett credit. But that, that, that one line is so famous that a really successful best selling crime writer named Elizabeth Peters entitled one of her books the Last Camel died at noon. I think, I think Follett's had collapsed at noon. But anyway.

Now there's two ways to begin. You know.

A novel, a story. One way is to go from like the airplane view 30,000ft in the air. And that's what Follet did, right? He's the narrator of the story. There's a storyteller and the storyteller begins the story by saying, the last camel collapsed at noon. That's one way. There's another way of doing it where you're on the ground and that's what you've done. You've begun your story with dialogue. So one character says something to another character. So that's two different ways to begin. You know, a short story or any, any story whatsoever. And it depends on the personal, you know, tastes of, of the writer. But there are advantages and disadvantages to each. Now, if you think of, if you think of like movies, right, they usually begin with.

I mean, they used to 100% of the time they would begin with a big wide shot. Like think of Lawrence of Arabia, right? I think it begins actually it begins on a motorcycle. But.

You have to think about your point of view when you're starting your story.

Do you want it to be a global point of view.

Or do you want it to be on the ground? And when you go on the ground, it's a little bit. If it's not a two person scene, it gets really confusing very quickly for a reader.

Okay.

But if you begin globally and slowly pan down to a two person scene, that's, that's. You can gradually sort of bring the reader down into that two person scene. Or beginning with dialogue can work very, very well.

It depends. I hope. I know I'm not being very helpful right now, but what I'm trying to do is to sort of get you to look at.

Options, to think about how can you really bring the reader into your world in a way that's gradual and sort of organic and really surprise them at the end? You're dealing with a very interesting subject, a very interesting universe of a world here. And it's, you know, a world on a boat in the middle of nowhere. That's kind of, that's really, that is a very.

Primal sort of world. It's an isolated universe in the middle of, you know, not chaos, but just. We're not really sure, you know, the mysterious universe. So that you've got a lot going for you in your choice of the boat, the scuba diving trip. And you know, this guy who's. Who has the bends and so is.

So say I open it with the scene, the two, two people talking about. And at the end you realize the guy has the bends.

I mean, is it. Because my whole idea was I wanted to put Half dozen people outward, they're stuck. And they're stuck on purpose because somebody's trying to kill the rest of them.

You can still do that. Okay, you can absolutely do that.

But the way to do that is I think through going through the world of one protagonist. I think you need. What you're basically doing is you're thinking about a protagonist.

See, the Agatha Christie thing is about. It's sort of a global point of view, meaning these characters in the Agatha Christie story are really just sort of archetypes in that we don't. As a reader, we're reading, when we, when we read an Agatha Christie novel, we're reading it for the puzzle. We're reading it for. How is the master detective going to solve this mystery? It's not very deep, you know what I mean?

So.

When, when you're doing, if you're doing that on this ship, you're basically trying to do a meld between a crime story and an action adventure story. And here's what I think. I think if you open up a scene with a bunch of guys who are stranded on a boat in the middle of nowhere.

The reader is going to have an expectation, oh boy, I am going to fasten my seatbelt. This is going to be a great action story. This is going to be unbelievably about how these guys are going to get through, you know, incredible storms, through whatever, somebody's going to try and kill somebody. There's going to be. This is going to be a great action story. Right now instead what you're trying to do is to put a crime story on top of an action story and reveal that it's a crime story later on. And I think the reader's expectation is that this is going to be an action adventure story just based upon the setting. Now this is really my Sean Coyne's 20 years in commercial fiction point of view.

So, you know, other people may have a different opinion about that. And you know, there might be a great way of being able to put an Agatha Christie thing on a ship, but it's. It would usually be like a cruise ship, you know what I mean? It would be like, you know, like the Love Boat mystery story. And I don't think that's what you want to write.

So I know I'm sort of like going all over the place. But I think one of the things I talk about in the story grid is to satisfy readers expectations, right? So I think what you're setting up here at the beginning with this boat and these bunch of Guys in the middle of nowhere on a scuba diving trip. First of all, it's a bunch of guys. There's no woman on this boat, which I think is a mistake.

Because 70% of the people who read novels are women. So if you don't have a woman on the ship, first of all, you're losing a very large dynamic of conflict, just male, female conflict. And secondly, women don't really want to read. You know, I know I'm generalizing here, but generally, you know, women aren't going to want to read a book about seven guys on a boat who end up, you know, dying off one by one. They're going to want a much richer cast of people, and they're definitely going to want to have a woman on that boat. They're going to want to have something, some person that they can relate to. And a bunch of guys drinking beers on a. On a boat, they're not going to really relate to that.

All right?

So, I mean, just. Just in terms of casting.

And I think you're going to have a lot of fun thinking about and what the other thing that I always suggest about casting is, you know, do what people don't expect. You know, don't make it like she's the navigator with the PhD from MIT, you know, maybe instead she's like the top, you know, the best mate. You know, she's the one who knows everything about the ship, but she's kind of blue collar, but you know what I'm saying? So, like, don't make it like out of. Out of a Hollywood action story where, you know, there's the hot librarian, like, you know, MIT scientist who's going to come in and say, but, Joe, don't you think H2O is a different molecule than, you know, sodium chloride? You know, you don't want to do that because we've seen that a million.

So go ahead, Tim. I'm starting to.

Yeah, yeah. So you're saying it's a mistake to try to have, like.

One of them killing everybody off while also trying to do a how are we going to survive this boat thing?

No, I think you can do that, and I think. But use it. Don't reveal it. That's like. That's like a major act climax to realize, holy shit, not only are these guys desperately trying to get back to shore in incredible circumstances of weather or whatever, but there's somebody on board who's killing everybody. That's such an act. That's an act climax.

That's like, act. That's like the End of act one.

That's an act. It might be the end of. Yeah, it could be the end of act one. Yeah. Because usually, you know, you want to really. That's a progressive complication that, you know, if you build it the right way, when you realize that.

The reader is going to be like, oh, my God, what's going on? What's really going on? You know, who is the bad guy? Because I thought these guys were just fighting nature. So when I started, you know, when we started this conversation, I was talking about the action, you know, storyline. And basically you have an action clock, man against time with the guy with the bends. And I think to use man against nature is a really great opportunity. That just the setting that you've chosen, the reader is going to expect. They're going to expect something like a monsoon or tornado, something outrageous. You know, you should do some research about this. What, what are some very str. Is there. Is there something interesting, something strange in a weather pattern that could happen to these guys? Like.

You know, like when Wes Craven was. Was trying to figure out something interesting for the horror genre, you know, he's the struggling young writer and he thought to himself, you know, how can I make the horror genre more interesting? What did he come up with? He didn't come up with just another psycho killer. He came up with Freddy Krueger. Right. Which is just such a diabolical, unbelievable twist. That's. That's all he needed. Once Wes Craven figured out Freddy Krueger, I bet his script pretty much wrote itself. But it probably took him a hell of a long time to come up with Freddy Krueger. Like, Freddy Krueger is like this very unique villain, this. This very powerful force. And as I remember, he can only hurt you when you're asleep. Right.

Something had the guts to watch it. So, yeah, no.

Anyway, so my point is, is that to pick around and think like, okay, I'm gonna do an action adventure story, and then I'm gonna add on. I'm gonna progressively complicate it in different ways. So you're gonna start your story by setting up the action man against time thriller. So basically at the end of this first scene, the reader is gonna say to themselves, these guys have to get this other guy to shore or he's going to die. And he's not just going to die easily. He's going to be in excruciating pain. And to withstand that kind of hell is just, you know, it's hard for us to understand.

So that is a. That's A very, very large inciting incident that is going to. I think it's going to get people to start reading Chapter two. And you think of. If you think of your storytelling in these terms, I don't really think you're going to go wrong. So at the end of chapter one, you're going to say to yourself, oh, okay, I'm Tim. I've got this idea at the end, it's revealed somebody is in extraordinary pain. They have the bends. They have to get them to shore. Is that going to get people to read Chapter two? I think it is, and I would agree with that. So what am I going to do in chapter two?

I like that you said I think people will read it, and I agree with that. Like, you just. You just agreed with yourself. Like, yeah, yeah, I'm right.

Yeah. No, this is the way I write. I talk to myself and I say to myself, is this. Is this what I think it is? And I try and look at it rationally and reasonably. So I like, I use my writer side and my editor side. So my writer will come up with an idea, and my editor in my head will evaluate and say, yeah, I think that's going to work.

Okay.

And I would. I recommend people do this, too, whether they want to be schizophrenic or not. I don't know. But it seems to help me when I'm writing something. Is this interesting enough for people to want to read the next sentence?

Well, so let me ask this. So while we're here. So you. Last week when we talked and I was. I asked, how do we get started? And I expected you to talk about the fool's cap. And you said, write a. Write your. Write one of the obligatory scenes. So, you know, at the beginning, you're like, you know, don't get an editor involved, you know, at this stage, because it could really, you know, hurt your progress. But I'm wondering, like, should people write an initial scene like this and take it to a few people and say, what do you, like? What, What. What are your questions? What are your feedback? Do you know, like, ask, like, six questions about the scene? Because to me, if I had tried to. Do you think I would have figured out some of this as I went through the fool's cap? Or. Or, you know, I guess now looking at. I'm like, oh, my gosh, like, I'm so glad I didn't try to write this story before I got your feedback. You know, I'm 1500 words instead of 50,000.

Right, exactly.

I don't Think that's a bad idea.

And again.

I always recommend the opposite of what you think you should do. So, remember last week you said, oh, man, I'm really nervous because I thought you were going to say, you want me to fill out the foolscap Global Story grid? And I was so excited about that because it would keep me from having to write a scene. And instead I said, write a scene. And you're like, oh, boy, okay, I'll write the scene. And now you've written a scene and you're getting my feedback. And I think.

If you have really good friends.

Who can stand to read 1500 words and to honestly say to you, it's really. It's a matter of asking them the right questions.

So what would those questions be?

Well, I think what you would ask is. The first question you would ask is what kind of story you think this is? Do you think.

You know.

And they might say, after reading what you wrote, they might say, I'm not really sure.

Can you tell me more about it? And I think what that's going to say to you is that you might have tried to jam a lot more into that first scene than you had hoped.

Than you really wanted to. They would be confused.

So.

To go and write this scene and ask people's advice.

I think it's better for you to spend your time learning more about genre than to ask people who don't know really the global concepts of genre to give you an opinion. Because everybody's going to have a different opinion. A lot of people like, yeah, that sounds great. I threw Christie on the ship.

So what I think is.

That based upon.

The scene that you wrote, what you can do is fill out, ask yourself the questions that are in the fullscop global story grid. And the first question is always, what is the genre? And this is the question we've been talking about for 45 minutes. So this is no small question. Now, you initially, you know, from what you had described to me, you were describing a crime story mystery to me, like Agatha Christie, Ten Little Indians, or, you know, and that's not what this is. And the reason why it's not that is because of what you've chosen as your setting.

You've chosen not a big. Sort of. Like, if you had said to me, if you had written a scene that took place on Carnival Princess Cruises and there were 3,000 people on board this cruise ship, that would be a different situation. Because then what I would suggest to you is, okay, find a master detective. Find a protagonist that the reader can attach to who's going to sort through all these clues and figure out who the bad guy is and write a mystery story based upon the Agatha Christie principles, which are have a master detective like Ms. Marple or Poirot and put them in the middle of a situation that seems impossible to figure out. And then through their brilliance, have them piece together clues that at the very end of the book, they can stand up in the middle of the cruise ship, you know, amphitheater, and say, it was Captain Stubing who was the killer, you know.

Because that's what people are going to expect from that kind of story. But the idea that you've set up here, which is an inciting incident where a bunch of guys have to go back to shore because somebody has the bends, that doesn't sound like a. That doesn't feel like an Agatha Christie story to me.

Okay, that seems like an action adventure story.

Well, so how could I figure that out on my own?

Well, so this is all about, okay, I'm Joe Schmo, writer. I can't get Sean Coyne on the phone and tell me what genre I'm writing in from some random scene I wrote. Like, how do I go from I wrote this scene to, okay, what genre am I in? And since I'm in that genre, these are the things that don't work.

Well, that's basically what you did, is you said, no, no, no, you're writing for this genre. So here's what doesn't work about what you tried to pull off in 1500 words.

That's right.

This is going to be an answer that people are gonna probably, you know, kick in their. Their computer when they hear it. But I'm gonna give it anyway.

Here's the answer. You've got to be really, really, really well read. And to be a really, really terrific writer, you need to read your genres that you obsessively love. To a degree that all of the things that I said earlier are sort of. They're right there. You can grab them. And when you start writing the scene at the end of it, you would have said to yourself, oh, geez, this isn't a crime story. This is an action adventure story. That's really what I want to write.

And then you would say to yourself, what action adventure story do I want this one to be like? And then you might say to yourself, I'd love it to be something like dead calm. Only this way, dead calm meets ransom. I don't know, maybe the guy who's got the bends is actually faking the Bends? I don't know.

Well, see, that's actually what I was thinking.

Of course you were.

You think I'm stupid. I've been around town. I know what you're doing before you even know it.

And that's a great setup, Right? That's a great reversal, because what you're going to do is you're going to get that guy with the bends a tremendous amount of sympathy from the reader, right? So if you reveal later on this guy is setting up everybody from the very start, it's going to be like one of those, oh, why didn't I see that? That's what you call a surprising but inevitable twist. All right.

Oh, my God, I'm so overwhelmed. It feels like.

It just feels so. Like. Like when I sit down to think about writing a book, I'm thinking, I can do this. And then as we talk through all of these things, I feel like.

I don't know, there's got to be a great metaphor. Just completely overwhelmed by.

Right.

Like, oh, my God, I'm never gonna be able to pull this off. And I guess anything I've done in my life is, like, vacillated between those two things, you know? Like, oh, I got this. Like, oh, my God, I'm never gonna do this.

Exactly. I mean, that's the way we get the courage to do things that we wouldn't even imagine that we would be capable of doing it. I mean, if you're six years old and somebody says to you, you're going to graduate college and then you're going to get a PhD in economics and you're going to win the Nobel Prize, nobody would ever even consider that a possibility. So what I like about the process that we're going through now, Tim, is that, you know, right now you're having that holy shit moment. Like, oh, my God, I'm really. I don't know, you know, what I'm doing right now. I'm not really sure what I want to write. And this is a moment that every writer faces. And what I think.

Something to hold on to is the craft. So what we've been talking about for the past hour is that first question, what is the genre? And if you can lock down what your genre is and think about.

Exactly which one you're going to commit to, then that is going to be extraordinarily powerful for you.

So I feel like, as you said, as we've been talking, that's what I've been, you know, I've read the book, we've talked about genre the last few weeks and. But now I kind of see, like, okay, if I pick one of these and I go and do what we've said, where I read the books, I watch the movies in that genre, that kind of.

Will keep me from like going off the rails and trying to do a detective story at the same time.

Exactly, exactly. And the other thing is I talk a lot about, you know, taking one, one piece at a time. Try not to get so overwhelmed right now with all the massive amount of things that you have to figure out. And just think, like, as I said earlier, okay, I've got an idea for the first chapter. It's going to start here and it's going to end here. Will that drive people to want to read the next chapter? And I think you have a kernel of an idea that will. Now, the scene that you've written is not executed properly yet. It's not there yet. It's. It's a great wild riff that. That's going to give you a lot of information for the future and where your story is going to go.

So I think the next thing to do.

Is not to go back and fill out the foolscap global story grid yet. Okay. I think it's to merely settle on a few things. The first thing is, what's the global genre? I suggest that your global genre is an action adventure story that begins as a sort of a.

Kind of a countdown plot, meaning if these guys don't get this other guy back to shore, he's going to die a terrible death. So that's what it's going to start out at. And it's eventually going to be revealed to be a man against man story.

And that is going to have a protagonist and an antagonist who will somehow duel over, you know, the, the final. Whatever it is. But let's not figure all that out yet.

I think it's.

It would be a good idea to revisit this opening scene and try and get, you know, two characters to talk about the problem that they're facing.

So. So I now attack this first scene.

As if the only thing I'm writing is the inciting incident for a man against clock action adventure. Yeah, okay, that's the. And so the whole goal is.

Okay, so I don't want to over explain anything. I want to reveal things slowly. And the only thing I've got to do is, is by the end, reveal that somebody's got the bins and they got to go back now and drop it in right at the end. That will get people to want to Turn the page and read the next chapter.

Right. And the other thing that I would suggest is that the two characters that you're going to focus on in this scene, one of them wants something and the other one wants the other thing, the opposite. So one of them wants to keep scuba diving and the other one wants to head back to shore.

Yeah. I was thinking it would be between the captain who's in charge and wants to head back to shore, and the other one would be the guy that paid for the trip for everybody to come.

That sounds good. It sounds like a good start.

Okay.

Because what you're setting up here is a really nice conflict because the captain and he should know. And, you know, the guy who's paying for everything should let him know, hey, dude, we head back, you're not getting paid, you know, and so the action that the captain is taking. Or maybe the captain wants to, you know, think about it this way too. Like, think about it one way and then flip it. So think about the scene with the captain wanting to head back because he doesn't want somebody to die on a ship. And then think about the opposite. The captain not wanting to head back because he doesn't want to lose his money.

Ooh. And then maybe the guy who's paying for everything. Think of it. He wants to head back to save his friend. Or he doesn't want to head back because he doesn't want to miss the scuba dive.

So. And now I see why. Trying to cram five people in a scene.

Yeah, yeah.

Because there's like, five dynamics. So. So the problem is, like, five different people want five different things for five different reasons. And I can't do that in a scene.

Right. Think about, you know, there's zip codes, right? 0, 1, 23 0. That's 5, 5, 5 numbers in a zip code. And how many people have five.

Numbered zip codes?

It can. The possibilities are endless with five different, you know, levels of. That was a very obtuse way.

I got you. I got you. Well, I just think of, like, you know, okay, so we just talked about, like, okay, we have two characters. One wants one thing, one once the other. And for me to consider the opposite, I just flip them. But now if I add a third in, that goes up exponentially. I'm not good enough at math. I think I go from. So I have two options to, well, that's a whole.

Not get too off track. But that's. That's the. The basis of a love story is. Is the three. The triangle.

But even in that is like, there's usually two. Like, two women and a man or one woman and two men. And there's still only two choices or three, I guess, like one, the other, neither.

Right. And that's enough to sustain, you know, thousands and thousands of romantic comedies.

Right?

So you don't need. You don't want to have six characters with six different motivations because it's just. It's too overwhelming for us, for just a normal person.

Right? So my error in this was. Because. When my error in this was thinking, okay, because what I'm trying to do is come up with a story that gives me the least possibility to really screw something up, right? So I really. I want to write something that can be successful. So I'm trying to take out anything that. And that's why when I read that that was Agatha Christie's hardest novel, I didn't think, oh, a good challenge. I thought, oh, I think I've made a mistake.

And so you did. And so.

At first, my error was, like, when you said, okay, a cruise boat with 3,000 people. I think, well, I gotta keep track of 3,000 people. But. And that was totally off base because I still only have to keep track of, like, three people.

Right.

And you're saying basically, do the same thing on a boat of six people, which is. You only keep track of, like, one protagonist that is driving the whole thing.

Yes. And make the way to simplify things is to, like, the action story is basically the primal story of all stories.

You know, it's the basis of Greek stories and, you know, all this stuff from the beginning of time. And action stories, you know, there's. You know, again, as I said before, there's like four basic ones. And to choose one of those and having a ship, you're just gonna have you. If you have people on a boat, you gotta have the weather at some point, you know, you just do.

Okay?

Because people are gonna say to themselves, I thought this was like one of those cool boat thrillers where they. And watch all is lost. I mean, there's a guy. There's one character in that entire story, and it's brilliantly done. One character. It's man against nature. And it sustains an hour and a half of filmmaking in a way that is just. Will take your breath away. And Robert Redford has no lines. He does not really speak in the entire movie. But the power of the primal force of a man against the sea. Is he gonna survive? Or is he gonna be swallowed up into the depths of, you know.

A blackness that is such A primal story that, you know, when you start adding things onto it, it sucks the life out of that primal thing. And man against nature and man against man are two, like mano amano, one guy against another guy, one woman against another woman, one woman against a man. Those are really primal stories that we all. When we all face very difficult things in our lives. It's not like we have 17 different people that we have to deal with. It's usually there's one central conflict. We have an argument with our wife, and that argument is destroying our happiness. And we have to figure out a solution to that where we're going to continue to be happy, unhappy. So think about that. When you're telling a story, think about those primal things that really, really dominate our own individual lives and use them to inspire you to keep your storytelling simple. And, you know, like I said, the beginning, this one thing has two huge events. The guy with the bends and the death of the captain. Save that death of the captain for much later on.

Okay.

Okay, I can do that.

Okay. So my homework is I gotta watch Dead Calm. I gotta watch all is Lost, and I gotta rewrite this scene as a conversation between two people.

Yeah. And read Hills Like White Elephants.

Oh, that's right. Yeah, I got that down too.

So. And then, you know, I. If I have the time, I'll. I'll try and tinker a little bit with your story and try and show you what I'm talking about. It's. It's easy for me to say. Well, you know, you're just. It's. You're not going global when you should be specific, and you're too specific when you should be global. That's. That's not as helpful as I'd like it to be. Yeah.

But I think part of that struck. That's a good struggle for me because so many of the things you said.

You know, that I just. I just don't know. Like, the first scene would have been shoe leather, you know, the opening dialogue with too many people, you know, trying to cram two inciting incidents into one scene. You know, I was basically cross pollinating genres in the first scene as well.

So all of those things are things that I didn't even know to think about.

Yeah. And I'll give one more thing to read that is I wrote a post called Narrative Altitude. And it's all about what we were talking about on the ground and above the air. And it's about Malcolm Gladwell's piece in the New Yorker called the Tipping Point, which actually was the inspiration for his book. And.

I made a graph there, which is pretty cool, which will show you when Gladwell shifts from the ground to above the ground to even higher. And you can actually track it by reading the story online and also looking at my graph. And it's really cool because there are little transitions that you do between, you know, the different sort of places in the storytelling. So narrative altitudetorygrid.com is something that you should take a look at, too. And again, I'll try and, you know, if I have time this week, I'll futz a little with your scene and try and, you know, just goof on it for a little, for a little while and see if I can be more specific about what I'm talking about.

Okay, that sounds good.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. As I mentioned at the beginning, there is a small piece that we've added as an epilogue to this show that you can hear just after I'm finished talking here. Before we get there, though, I want to remind you that if you want to stay up on on everything that Sean is doing with the Story Grid, you can do that@storygrid.com, sign up for the email list, read the blog post. You're not going to want to miss any of that. If you haven't yet, you're going to want to also pick up the book, the Story Grid. It's a fantastic read. It's the whole reason I reached out to Sean in the first place, to get his input on my writing and where this podcast came from. So it's a fantastic read and I think you'll really enjoy it, especially, of course, if you're enjoying the podcast already. Lastly, we would love your support in the way of leaving an itunes review or rating. You just go into itunes, search for Story Grid and leave a review of the show. We read them all and it's really helpful for us and of course share it with your friends, put it on Twitter, put on Facebook, put in any writers groups that you're a part of. We would love to continue to have your support for the show as we continue to make the show for free. So thanks again for listening and hang on for that epilogue and then we will see you next week.

No, I understand holding back just because it can be overwhelming, but don't hold back because one is if this wasn't being recorded like that is the ex. I want you to rip me apart at 1500 words instead of 50,000. Right?

So that's a really great that's a great point.

You know, this is, this is what I want. Like if you were my editor and this again, we were just on the phone going over it. That's what, what I want.

Well, that's really it. You know, as we were saying like last week, this is a, this is Russian dolls. You know, if you learn how to write a scene, if you can write a 1500 word scene, that's going to make people go, holy cow, I can't wait to read the next scene. You've got story knocked, man. You're going to be able to nail it. So concentrating on the scene is a really, really great idea. And I think a lot of people, they get lost. And so starting with the scene, I think we stumbled into something that can be very instructive for people and not too overwhelming.