Shawn rips apart Tim's scene (again)

Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me soon is Sean Coyne. He's the author of the book Storygrid and the creator of the Story Grid system. And he is the editor with 25 plus years experience that is trying to help me avoid all the common pitfalls and mistakes that new writers make.

One of my favorite things about the.

Advice that Sean gives is it's always just so practical. And this episode is packed full of practical advice. Once again, I've written a scene, I send it to Sean and he critiques it and walks me through. And along the way he gives so many specific things that writers can do to make their scenes better. So you're going to love this episode. I do want to mention here, I recorded this when I was still a little sick. If you would remember, I lost my voice. So my voice in this episode isn't quite as silky smooth as you are currently hear hearing.

So bear with us.

But I know you're going to love the content and so we're going to jump right in and get started.

Okay, Sean, so I sent you another first scene of a book I'm working on.

I'd like to just hear your initial thoughts on it.

Okay. Well, it's kind of dependent, of course. My initial thoughts about it is that it has all those things that you need in a scene. It has the five commandments pretty much taken care of. They're all, it's all well delineated. So it's pretty obvious how to figure it out. Any, any layman, I think would be able to, to pull out the inciting incidents and progressive complications, the crisis question, the climax and the resolution. So as a scene, it absolutely works. Now, just to get a little bit deeper into it, the next question you sort of want to ask yourself is, well, this is a question you kind of want to start with. And after you write the scene, you want to go back to it. And that is what is the purpose of this scene? Is it a, you know, like when we talk about the mathematics of storytelling and we have sort of like 15 must have scenes in a story that cover some of the major elements in the beginning hook, middle build and ending payoff of your story. If you're thinking in those terms, then, for instance, this could be this scene that you sent me. It could be the inciting incident of the entire global story in the beginning hook of your novel. I'm suspecting that that might be possible here. Is that what you're thinking?

Yes. So in the scene, I have the character, Ryan Black, he goes to help this guy on the side of the road, and he ends up getting stabbed and then thrown into a trash can. And then he dies at the end of the scene.

Yes.

And so what I was planning on doing with this is the next. So that will be the opening scene of the book. And then, remember we talked about a couple weeks ago, this is why asked you this a couple weeks ago was starting with the scene that's from the middle of the book and then backing up.

Right.

And so my plan was to like, the next scene to say, like two days earlier. And it opens with him alive, and then we're building to him dying, basically. Because the whole thing is I want to write this series like a superhero series. And the whole thing is that he. At the point that he dies in that opening scene, he doesn't know it yet, but he can't die. He dies and then he heals and comes back to life. And so the whole idea is I open with him dying and then I build up to him to that scene, and then the rest of the story is him basically coming back.

Okay.

There's a final kind of payoff where he takes care of the person that came after him.

Okay. You know, that's funny because I suspected this was sort of a superhero story based upon kind of the. The feel of the storytelling, which so globally. What I would say to you is that you. You hit your marks. So that the first scene of your. Of your novel is.

What I always talk about is that when you write a story, you're making a promise to a reader from the very start. And that promise is saying, by the way, I'm writing this, I'm indicating to you what kind of story you're going to get here. And so after reading this first introductory scene, whether you knew it or not, and I'll refrain from using the word intuitive, but.

Whether you knew it or not, you were sort of. You were writing in the conventions and sort of sensibility of a superhero story.

Why did you think that?

Well, a couple of things. Superhero action stories are very externally driven so that the reader is sort of sucked in by the, you know, the immediate action involved. And the other element was. It seemed very.

I don't mean this as an insult, but it was sort of cartoony in that the lead, the two characters you identified very quickly, you gave them names, and you set up a very simple, straightforward scene that is familiar and It's a trope of sorts in which a character cries out for help from another character. Now, we've seen this scene. Readers like myself who have read a zillion things, I've seen this scene set up and paid off a number of times before. And that's okay. It's okay to use something that's been done before. And just specifically, the way you set this up is psychologically, in behavior, when somebody cries for help and you are the only person who hears the cry. Psychologically, through behavioral theory, you are more inclined to help than if you were in a crowd.

That's from a Malcolm Gladwell book. I remember that one of his.

Yeah, exactly. So that's what you did here. You set up a situation where there's sort of a deserted street. A character cries out to somebody else to ask them for help. Hey, buddy, can you lend me a hand here? And this is. This is exactly what Thomas Harris did in the Silence of the Lambs, too, where James Gumm, who ends up being Buffalo Bill, the serial killer, is sort of. He's loading some furniture into the back of his van, right? Yes. And the woman, Catherine Martin, who he ends up abducting, is all alone. And Jane Gumb is really smart. So what he does is he puts a fake cast on his arm. So it appears that he has a broken arm. And he's got this armchair, and he can't seem to manipulate it enough into the back of the van. So he cries out to her. He doesn't even cry out to her. He just makes such a scene of him fumbling with it that she can't help herself. So she goes over to lend a hand, and he says, oh, thank you so much. If you could just jump into the van and. And pull it in through the back, that would be very helpful. And then, of course, she does. And then he drugs her and puts her under and kidnaps her. So the scene that you set up is similar to that in that you have a character who's crying out for help to help change a tire on his bike. And so the other character is thinking to himself. And I liked the way this progressed. The Ryan character, you use free and direct style so that you go into his head and we can hear his thoughts as he's contemplating whether or not to help or not. So the inciting incident of your scene is the following. A character named Rob cries out for help from an alley in a dark alley, saying, hey, buddy, can you help me? My. My bike is broken and I need help. So then it Switches. That's the inciting incident. And so the other character, the protagonist, Ryan, hears the cry, and he starts to undergo some internal progressive complications. And he says to himself, geez, you know, it's very dark out here. I'm not really sure if I could get hurt here. But then again, my dad is always the kind of guy who goes and lends a hand. And so that develops the crisis of the scene, which is, do I help this guy? And if I do, I could get hurt. And the other side is if I don't help him, then I won't live up to the expectations of my father and the way my father brought me up. So what you have here, Tim, is a really nice, solid structural scene that the reader can attach to pretty quickly because we all have those internal thoughts. Okay, so that's the crisis question. And the climax of the scene is when Ryan decides to help. So he makes the choice to help the man in need, which is an active choice. That tells us a lot about Ryan. Ryan is going to overcome his fear, his fear of getting hurt and go and help. So you don't have to say Ryan Black is the kind of guy who would, you know, give you the shirt off of his back because that's meaningless. But to have him actively make a choice that aids another person is very clear. And you don't have to use any exposition to say what kind of person this guy is because his actions speak for himself. So this is nice. You've got a nice thing going here. So then from that point forward, your scene sort of becomes the drama of the action, which is how. How is this, the bad guy, Rob, going to hurt the good guy, Ryan? And you pulled it off pretty well. You. He stabs him and he does some really nasty things to him, and he ends up in a garbage truck. And he's, you know, the scene. The resolution of the entire scene is that it appears as if Ryan has been killed. Now, with that said, so your scene works okay.

I feel like you're building up towards a big but, though.

No, I'm not. Okay, it's not a big but, but it's something to keep in mind. And this is. This is the process. The first thing that you need to do is to create a working scene. And you have that. So you. You're like 80% there. Now that you know that you know how to write a working scene, though, you have to think about further choices and about what this scene is going to do for you in the long run of your global story.

So with that in mind, I think you need to think about a couple of things. The first thing is that anyone familiar with the superhero genre is going to expect that there. There would be a moment where the superhero, Their special talent comes to the fore. It's sort of the truth of the character's special gift becomes clear. So if your story were to be published, the COVID would. Would have some sort of indication to the reader that this is a superhero story. So this very. If you led your story with this very first scene, the expectations of the reader, when they come to this first scene are going to be, oh, man, this is great. This is going to be a superhero story. And then this first scene that you deliver is going to be. It's going to meet their expectations, but it's not necessarily going to surprise them.

So what you need to think about is, how can I meet their expectations but surprise them, too? So at the end of this scene, anybody familiar with superhero storytelling will kind of know, oh, wow, I wonder what he's going to do next. Maybe he's going to do the flashback that leads up to the point where he supposedly dies. Because if your lead character dies in the very first scene of the novel, and it's a superhero story.

9 times out of 10, 10 times out of 10, the reader knows that he's really not dead. He's really going to come back alive. Something special about this guy is going to reveal itself and show that he was able to overcome this supposed death.

So you may have written yourself into almost a corner here with this opening scene, because from this point forward, the reader and your readers, the very first people who are going to read this book are going to be genre fans. They're going to be huge superhero genre fans. So that is your first audience. So if you're a mystery writer, your first audience are going to be people who read a zillion mysteries and know every trick in the book, right? So you really need to think about your reader at this point and say to yourself, will my reader be surprised that my lead character, Ryan, actually lives? Or is there a way to do a scene that accomplishes the same thing, but leaves a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty in the reader's mind that will propel them to the next chapter. Because the next chapter, if it's two days earlier, what could happen? I'm not saying this would happen, but what could happen would be the real genre superhero fan will read the next chapter, and he will actually. Or she will actually turn the page, and it will say, two days later. And then the next Page will be the next scene. And immediately they're going to say to themselves, okay, I know what's going to happen now. Now I'm going to get all the backstory about how this led up to this point.

Do I really want to read this? Or I already kind of know that this is going to be. Let me think. Let me think now. Well, maybe the lead character is sort of a nerdy guy who discovers strange things happening to him, leading up to the point where he gets into a little bit of trouble. And this mysterious person that wants him dead, he somehow insults him. And then that guy hires the rob character to murder him to get him out of his way, and he discovers that he's immortal. Okay, I'm just saying. Just saying it's possible that they could think that.

Okay, yeah, that's pretty accurate.

So let me just back up one major, major backup here. And this is the point where once you reach a certain level of craft and understanding, it's now you've got to sort of jump over the next chasm and you've developed to the point where you understand the structure of the scene. And you wrote a very solid working scene.

Okay, so my jump from the first scene we went over, you know, 10 episodes ago or whatever to this is a legitimate stride forward.

Oh, absolutely. Without a doubt, without a doubt. The previous scene didn't have any of these things. It was just a bunch of people talking. There was no clear lead character. There was no real active choice. It was very fuzzy. We didn't even know what kind of genre we were working in. And this scene is. We know what the genre is. I knew what it was immediately, and I'm not even really a major superhero fan, but I know the form, I know the genre. So it's very clear that you made a very large jump. You're being very, very clear and specific in your writing now. Now comes the time where you say to yourself, okay, I know how to write a scene. I've got a draft here. Is this scene doing the thing that I want it to do? Has this scene, you know, done its job? And the job of the very first scene in a novel is to get the reader to not know what the hell is happening and is so overwhelmed with curiosity and that they can't help but turn the page to the next scene. What I fear with this first scene that you've written is that the reader, a really smart woman or man who's read a lot of superhero books, will immediately know. I know what's going on here. This Guy's not dead.

What if he doesn't die at the end of the scene? What if it's the same scene, but I stop short? Like when he hears the truck coming and he said, that's my cue. And then it ends somewhere around there? So you don't really know what the resolution of that particular scene is. Or am I just nitpicking now when I should just throw it out and come up with something new?

I'm not saying to throw it out. I think there's a way to tweak this that could defy genre conventions but still be surprising and live within the arena. Okay, so what do I mean by that? I think you're playing with it. You're playing with the scene that's familiar. So why don't you use that to your advantage? So everybody who's ever read a lot of these, you know, thrillers or whatever, or superhero stories, they're familiar with the damsel and distress call, and the hero goes to help, Right? And what they're expecting is for the hero to be duped by the bad guy who's luring them into their trap. That's what they expect, and that's what you deliver here. Okay. Okay, so what is.

Which is the problem?

I think it's a problem. But the setup is okay if you tweak it. If you tweak it to the point of it being surprising. So if you play with the convention, then you know that everybody, your primary readers, are going to know what this scene is all about. So why don't you tweak it and twist it and give it a 180? So what I mean by that is, instead of the lead character going into a scene knowing that he's going to get hurt, maybe set it up the exact same way that you have. But instead of this Rob guy getting the better of Ryan, when Ryan goes to hold those clips and Rob goes to go get his knife to stab him in the back, Ryan obviously knows what's going to happen. He's prepared himself for this. He doesn't tell the reader this. And he turns the tables on Rob so that he twirls around and he knows he's got a certain.

Let's assume that Ryan. I'm just making this up as I go. Okay, let's assume that Ryan understands his special gift and he knows that he's not going to die. But we don't have to tell the reader that Ryan knows what Ryan knows. The reader doesn't need to know that. So this is a I forget it. I can't believe I write things myself and I often forget my principles. But this is either suspense or mystery. I think it's mystery. So the mystery is when you have the characters have more information than your reader does.

So Ryan already knows that he's got this special gift, but Rob doesn't know that he has a special gift. Rob is just there to kill him. Right. And the other thing is, I don't know if you really even need to name the assassin. Oftentimes it's better to say the man in the yellow coat or, you know, the guy.

So.

And I struggle with, like, I don't want to go too deep into this to like, I don't want to make this about my story I'm trying to tell. But the idea is, because what I'm trying to do is set up something that could be a long running series.

Sure.

And so the whole thing is that Ryan works for this company that's like the evil, monolithic company, and he's trying to find something. So that's why he's there. But he doesn't realize what he's on to and all of that. And then there's this shadowy character that's after him outside the company who sends this killer.

Right.

So the climax of the entire story was going to be basically Ryan killing Rob at the end and then finding out from Rob the next step towards finding who's after him.

Great. Why don't you just make that happen at the very beginning?

So the beginning is the final scene when he kills Rob.

Yeah. I don't think Rob is going to be all that compelling of a figure. I think he's fine as a hired gun, but you don't want to give your hired gun too much, too much air time because he's serving a purpose. This Rob character serves a purpose. That purpose is to move Ryan to some sort of realization that there's somebody after him.

So this becomes an action story, a mano a mano action story where Ryan is in pursuit of the dark figure who is trying to have him murdered. So you don't want to give too much airtime to, you know, the, the hurdles in the way of Ryan discovering who the bad guy is. So it's okay to dispatch this sort of cheesy guy who's gonna, you know, it's almost funny like Ryan goes into the situation saying, really, you know, I mean, in his mind, really, you're gonna do this deal with me where you're going to lure me into an alley and pretend that Your bike is broken. Seriously, this is how you're going to kill me? What do you think, I'm an idiot?

You know, this is like what makes Shane Black, you know, the screenwriter. A lot of his stuff so great is that he's always playing with the conventions of the genres and setting up scenes where, you know, you have this very familiar scene from, say, Dashiell Hammett or Philip K. Dick, and then he'll twist it like that. Great movie. Kiss Kiss. Bang Bang does this all the time. I mean, that's a terrific movie if you want to see somebody playing with conventions of the crime genre. But back to this story. So Rob, I don't know. I think he could be just one of those, you know, one of those characters that you use as fodder to get to move as a complication for your lead character to discover who's really behind everything. So that doesn't mean that you can't have Ryan because you want to play with this. I think it's okay to have Ryan sort of end up in the trash compactor at the end of the scene still, but you need to layer in more action and more interesting elements to get your reader to go to page, you know, to scene number two and two days later. So I wouldn't end with. I would have Ryan sort of outwit and outsmart Rob. And perhaps I'm making this up. This could be a cliche, but, you know, as he's holding Rob and he calls the police, and the police are on the way, police show up, and Rob feels. Ryan feels pretty smug about all this stuff. He's stopped this bad guy, you know, as he's handing over Rob to the police, the police shoot him, shoot Ryan. So he thinks that they're real police, but they're not. Something like that. And that could be a really interesting surprise because that would say that the force behind Rob is really super powerful. If he's able to intercept a phone call to the police department and have some fake police guys go over there and mop up the scene that Ryan screwed up or Rob screwed up also. I wouldn't. I wouldn't use the same R. Yeah.

I realized that as we've said it over and over, I'm like, it's really hard to.

Exactly. That's why it's. Sometimes, yeah, just. Just use a different name. So you kind of see what I'm saying? It's like you need. You need to set up an expectation and then subvert it and then set up a new expectation and subvert that one. So if you set up the expectation that Rob's going to dupe Ryan into this death trap and Ryan outsmarts him. So then the reader is going to be, oh, this is interesting. So this isn't going to be one of those scenes where the lead character gets duped so early on and then ends up in a trash compactor. So then Ryan outwits Rob and sets him up. And then, you know, the. The cavalry comes in to take Rob away because Ryan's called in the cavalry to take the bad guy away. And guess what? The cavalry's bad, too. That's a really cool, you know, twist that still plays with the genres, the conventions, but still abides them and could get your reader interested in figuring out what the hell did Ryan do to get in this predicament where everyone in this city wants him dead. That's kind of interesting. Okay, so if you escalate it and you. You do some progressive complications and you pull the rug out from the reader a couple of times, twice, three times would get a little bit too much. Then you're progressively escalating the stakes because first it's just this loser kind of assassin, then it becomes some beat cops, some police.

So in the reader's mind, they're like, wow, went from. So the police are involved too. You know, like, then that could be enough to get them to want to go two days before and. And go through all this stuff. Because I'm not saying that you don't do all that stuff that you needed to do before where the lead character who becomes a superhero, you know, starts out one way and then discovers his powers and all that stuff. You do need all that backstory. I'm not saying you don't. But what you need, what you need to do with it is unique. You need to twist it. You need to make it unique and different, not what the reader has read before.

Okay, yeah, I'm thinking so. And there's basically. You're saying you need to do that two times at least, or like you need to do that two times in the stories to go back on what they're assuming is going to happen next. And I'm assuming those are the, like, big scenes that have to be surprising.

Yes, yes. I think they all have to be surprising, actually.

Well.

But in terms of external stakes, you're writing an external genre story that's action driven, so your big scenes are going to need to have big action sequences. So you're. You're. Because you're writing an action story, you're setting yourself up to create and deliver very interesting and exciting action. Now, you may. And we. I'm not. When I say you, I don't mean just you, Tim. I'm saying all writers. All writers, when they begin to write an action story, think that they are going to write a better action story because their lead character has a really interesting backstory and internal sort of genre attached to them. But the problem with that is it doesn't work. Because the bottom line for an action story and a superhero story, people go to them for the great action sequences and for the great twists on conventional action scenes. They don't really care about the internal shifts and arcs of the lead character. You know, we've talked about this before with James Bond, and it wasn't until film number 32, or whatever it was, whatever Quantum of Solace was, that they said to themselves, oh, my gosh, we have burned through so many action sequences, we can't figure out how to get James Bond in a pinch anymore. Let's give him an heart. Let's put in a love interest where he really cares about the woman this time instead of just betting her. So if you're going to write in the action genre, really, you've got to embrace it. You can't say to yourself.

You know, I'm going to write a really great action story because it's not really about the action. Well, bullshit. It's got to be about the action. And so when you write a scene, an action scene where somebody lures somebody into an alley, okay, I'll go with you there. But you got to twist it. Because if you give me what I'm expecting, which is the bad guy who lures the protagonist into the alley and then kills them, I'm going to be like, oh, my gosh, seriously, I've seen this scene a million times. If you're going to play with that scene, play with it. Don't give me what I've seen before. I want to be surprised. I want you to turn these scenes in ways that I have never seen before and to make a turn. The turning point of your scene is when Rob stabs Ryan in the back. And that's not very surprising the way you set it up.

Okay?

Now, Rob could have been like, hey, man, I lured you back here to warn you. That could be surprising. I'm supposed to be killing you, but I don't really want to kill you because the guy who hired me to kill you is going to kill me the minute I finish this job. So why don't we work together, and that could be surprising. Right? So they could team up. It could become like a buddy comedy, a buddy salvation story, too. So there's any number of ways to play with this. Rob could end up being Ryan's partner. It could be like Batman and Robin, because what we're expecting is that Rob is going to stick a knife in the guy's back when he goes to change the tire, and that's what you do. But if Rob instead goes, hey, man, I'm supposed to be killing you now, but actually, I'm here to warn you because I know the second I kill you, the bad guy who's after both of us is going to kill me. So why don't we team up together and I'm going to pretend to kill you. Okay. I don't know. I'm making that up, too. But the reason why I'm making up these things is that it's important to. And I say this over and over again, to dive deeper and deeper and deeper into your mind.

Okay.

Because. And come up with, like, 15 ways that you could twist this scene, and the first 12 aren't going to work. You know why? The first 12 ways you figure out to twist this scene and to turn it in a unique way have been done before. And the reason why they've been done before is that we are weaned on stories. From the minute we are born until we die, we are fed constant stories. So all of the things. The two things that I just came up with were probably from, you know, a special Victims unit from, you know, nine years ago that just popped into my head because that's on the surface of my brain. All the input that we have when we're watching stories lodges itself into our memory banks, and when we're trying to think of interesting, fun story ideas, those come up first.

So I'm trying to wrap my head around this because there's things that we do that are in convention so that as people read it, they're like, yep, I'm with you. Yep, I feel safe. I feel safe. I feel safe. Then you take these, like, kind of climactic moments to just twist it and make them feel unsafe again. But you have to have both, right?

Exactly.

Because I'm thinking of, like, I felt like that with the new Star wars movie, where the reason it was so good was because it was so much like the old ones. And that's why I think there was all these things that made me feel safe. But then there was this new story, and in mine, what I was planning on doing was. I was going to try to do it a little different. But basically I want to get him trapped and get zapped with gamma rays or whatever.

So that he reaches this point of being a superhero in a kind of cliche way. But it helps me tell the story I'm trying to tell, like, you know, what's coming now, but then later I can twist it. Or am I.

No, you have to twist it from page one, my friend.

Okay?

Every. You have to write every scene as if it's your last.

Okay?

And that sounds kind of ridiculous, but it's true. Because, let's face it, superhero stories are cliches. Action stories are cliches. And that's not in a bad way. We like cliches because they're familiar. So it's. Being uniquely familiar is a catchphrase I use a lot. And it's something that seems contradictory, but it's not. Uniquely familiar means giving the reader the scene from Batman. You know, go to the original Batman where I think Michael Keaton was the original Batman. And there's a scene in the alley where the parents go and they get murdered and young Bruce Wayne watches them get murdered. So that the scene in the alley where they get lured to their death is a cliche. We've seen it before. So I'm not saying don't use the cliche to do. To lure your. You want to lure your reader into your story. But. But you have to surprise them because if. If you give them a cliche straight, they're going to say, oh, this guy doesn't know superhero stories. He's given me a cliche that was in Spider Man 9.

If he really knew it, he would have played with it. So that's what I mean. Like, it's okay to use the setup of the scene like the hero at the mercy of the victim scene. I talk about this all the time. It's a huge. That is Obligatory scene. Yeah.

The hero at the mercy. The villain, not the victim.

Yeah, right, sorry. That's an obligatory scene. That's in every thriller. That doesn't mean you can't. That doesn't mean you're allowed not to do it. It means you have to innovate it. You have to come up with something unique and different and fresh. So if you're going to use the being lured into the alley, your inciting incident into your global story, I say, great, do it. But do it in a way that is surprising. Do it in a way that we don't see coming. Because, you know, what's going to happen then is your reader is going to go, oh, my gosh, did you read the opening of Tim Grohl's book? Because he gives you that, you know, that scene where it's in the alley and the bad guy lures. But he completely reinvents it. You gotta check it out. And then in the next scene, he gives you the origin story of the superhero, but in a completely different way. So it's, it's like Harry Potter being, you know, raised underneath the stairs in, you know, in Muggle World. And nobody ever saw that before. That's an origin story of somebody discovering the superpower. Harry Potter and the way J.K. rowling set it up was all completely innovative and fresh. And the same thing with J.J. abrams, they call it. J.J. abrams is the guy that they call in to refreshen these conventions. He gets paid hundreds of millions of dollars to do things.

Where he requires himself to peel off all the stuff at the top of his brain to get down to that unique, different, fresh twist that will reinvent the story. He's done this for Star Trek and now he's done it for Star Wars. The guy knows his stuff, right? If you're gonna have a conversation with J.J. abrams about the conventions and obligatory scenes of Star wars, you better know your stuff. Right? Because he just created a billion, multi billion dollar movie. Reinventing it all, but still giving the Star wars fans something to hold on to. They still have the mythology, but it's fresh and unique and innovative. And that's what you are required to do when you're writing a superhero action story is if you're going to do the gamma ray thing, great. Is there a unique way of doing a gamma ray thing? Maybe it's not an accident. Maybe the guy doses himself on purpose. But then again, maybe that's like the fly. I don't know. This is the fun of being a writer. This is the fun of bringing your vision to a form that you can reinvent. And whenever you get complacent, whenever you say to yourself, oh, I'm just going to do that scene that was from Spider Man 2 and I'll load it in there and that'll be fine. Okay, you can do that in your first draft as a place marker. Bang it out, put it in there and. But no, deep down, as you go through your edits, you're going to find that scene and say, oh my gosh, I can't believe I did. You know, the scene with the, with Batman on the table and the saw is Going to be sawed in half. Oh, my gosh, what am I going to do now?

All right, and so you're. So if you were to give advice about how to make sure I don't do that, is that, like, come up with 15 things?

Yes. And I. And again, I'm gonna go back to this because it's a point that. That I try to make as often as possible, and a lot of people just don't want to hear it. But your memory is what you've seen before. So as a writer, it's your job. Embrace what you've seen before. But it's gonna take you a lot of time. Don't trust your first five solutions to your problem, because your first five solutions, or maybe even 10 solutions, or maybe 12 solutions. This is why writers rooms are so great, because they eliminated all this stuff very early on. A friend of mine wrote for Sex in the City, and she told me that they would walk in, you know, the writers room. There was about 12 of them. And there are all these really smart women who. Mostly women. Michael Patrick King, I think, was the executive producer and showrunner. Great comedian. But they've seen and read every, you know, romantic comedy in their lives. So, you know, while they're storyboarding the entire story bible for a season, somebody would come up with an idea that they'd all seen on love boat from 1972, and they would go, oh, I don't know if that would really work here. And they had a word for these things, and they called them clams. Oh. And so the clams, you want to get rid of the clams. And the great thing about a writer's room is that you have other people who will tell you that you've written a clam, and you don't know you've written a clam until either someone tells you or you sit with the thing for a while. So what you want to do is eliminate the clams and come up with the original swordfish or whatever the oceanic metaphor would be other than clams. So that's the trick is to. Don't beat yourself up for writing clams. You have to write clams. And a lot of people can reinvent a clam and make it really interesting and play off of the fun. That's what Shane Black does. He knows the clams of all the crime stories from the beginning of time. So he plays off of them and he twists them in unique ways. Like, there's a great moment in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and it's the hero at the mercy of the villain scene. And just to give you a quick story here, Robert Downey Jr. Plays this sort of private investigator who's. He doesn't play. He's an amateur private investigator, and he's hooked up with this real private investigator, played by Val Kilmer, who's gay. And Val Kilmer is this great PI and so it's Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr. They're at the. The mercy of this villain. The villain is hooked up these electrodes to the testicles of Robert Downey Jr. And he's squirting a water gun to. To get the electricity to flow. And every time he asks them a question, he doesn't give them the right answer. He jolts Robert Downey Jr. With electricity. Meanwhile, Val Kilmer is there, sort of strapped down in a chair, and he can't help his. His partner. So Val Kilmer plays this gay detective, and what's very funny is that the villain is a really big homophobe. He's like one of those crazy homophobes who thinks, like, every gay guy wants to have sex with him, right?

So Val Kilmer starts to come on to this guy to really freak him out, and because the guy's getting so angry, keeps jolting Robert Downey Jr. And finally, the guy gets so angry at Val Kilmer that Val Kilmer says, here, here, look down in my pants. Look down in my pants. And the guy's like, what are you talking about? I'm not going to look in your pants. And he finally does. And, you know, Shane Black had set up this point long, long. At the beginning of the story, Val Kilmer, the detective, keeps this very tiny gun in his pants, so he shoots the guy through his pants as if it's his, you know, genitalia. And it was so funny because that was a scene that we've seen a million times in crime stories. But it was completely unique. It was playing on all of the tropes that anybody who's read a lot of crime stories would know. And so that was a way for Shane Black to deliver the hero at the mercy of the villain scene in a unique and innovative and compelling way that was not only very active, but funny. That's a comedy action story. Try and pull that off. I mean, very few can. There's 48 hours. There's Beverly Hills Cop. I think Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is right up there with those. Those movies. And so when you're. When you're doing action stories and superhero stories, you really need to dive deeply into, you know, what Those big moments, those big active moments are. And you have to twist and turn them in ways that the reader who's an aficionado of action hasn't seen before. But they have to be familiar, so they're familiarly unique.

That's just such a incredibly hard line to find.

That's right. That's why you're a writer. I mean, that's why. You know, nobody said writing was easy.

I know. I'm not lamenting that. It's more just like. Because as you explain, here's what's so frustrating about it is we get on and we record this and you tell me all this crap to do. And so I'm like, yeah, I got it now. And I go and sit down and I'm like, wait, how do I do this?

You know?

And it's like, you know, in thinking about that of like, okay, I need a scene. You know, What I like that you said is you knew it was a superhero scene.

Right.

So that's good. Yes, but at the same time, if I'm walking, if the tightrope is what I'm trying to walk, and on one side is. It's just confusing. And on the other side, it's cliche, you know, I was. I was walking it and then I fell over into cliche by the end.

Yeah, that's okay, right?

The way I'm trying to. Yeah, go ahead.

No, that's true. And okay, so that's the next problem. This is what the story good's about. It's about finding the problem so that you can figure out how to solve them. So the problem is you've written a working scene that's a cliche now. Okay, so that's the problem. How do you solve a cliche? You innovate it and turn it in a completely different way.

So how do you do that?

I suggest you sit down and you don't write out 15 scenes. What you do is you write out 15 solutions. How do you solve this problem of the cliche? The cliche is man lured into alley to be murdered. So man goes into the alley knowing he's being lured. That could be. And turns the tables. That would be number one. You write that down. Victim turns tables on supposed killer. Okay, how would I do that? Has that been done before? I'm going to write that down as number one. Number two, supposed killer confesses to hero that he's been set up to be murdered. That's a twist. Usually when somebody lures into an alley, they don't tell them, hey, by the Way, I'm here to kill you, and this is all a charade. You need to knock me out now so that the guy who hired me to kill you thinks that you overpowered me. That could be number two. Number three. Could be the police come to save the day. This is from Marathon Man. Brilliant twist. Brilliant twist of an action scene just to quickly do it. Dustin Hoffman plays the brother of a famous assassin in sort of the CIA, and he's being held hostage by this horrible Nazi played by Laurence Olivier. And he's being tortured.

Through his teeth. It's horrifying. So in order to get the information, and they think that Dustin Hoffman is lying to them, so to play with him psychologically, they fake.

His being rescued. So he's in this dentist chair, and all of a sudden this guy breaks in and goes, come with me. I've got you out of here. And he grabs him and he takes them and he throws him in a car and. And he starts driving and he goes, so. So what did you tell him? What did you tell him? He's like, I didn't tell him anything. I don't know anything. What do you mean you don't know anything? I don't know anything. But what did you tell him? I didn't tell him anything. And then the guy drives him back to be tortured some more by the dentist. So Dustin Hoffman thinks that he was being rescued, but he was really being manipulated to give up the goods that he didn't have in the first place. Read Marathon Man. If you want to read a great thriller, it's. William Goldman wrote it. I mean, William Goldman. If there's a pantheon of great thriller action story writers, William Goldman is right up there. But that's an innovation of a scene where you use a rescue to psychologically manipulate the lead character. And that goes to. You know, that's called dramatic irony, where the lead character and the reader don't have all of the information. Somebody else has it. No, dramatic irony is when the reader has more information than the lead character. That's suspense. I apologize. Suspense is when the lead character has the same amount of information as the audience does. This is complicated stuff. I never said it wasn't.

So it sounds like the place that you. That you fix a cliche at the turn.

Yes.

So it's okay to set up as many cliches as you want as long as you turn them in interesting ways.

A lot of people would say conventions and obligatory scenes are cliches. I don't see them that way because I see them as Challenges. So, look, your inciting incident to your story could have been done without the cliche of the guy luring the guy into the alley. I don't necessarily think that it's the wrong choice to use the alley scene as your inciting incident. Why? Because it's familiar. It's something that your reader is going to understand and is going to sort of want to dig their, you know, bottom into the chair and see how you're going to do this. If you do something unfamiliar, you have. There's a chance that you could alienate them and they wouldn't know what this story is going to be about. So if you're going to write a superhero story, it would be my advice to figure out how did the top 10 superhero stories begin and use those scenes and think to yourself, is there one of those scenes that I could use that I could twist and play with in a unique way? It's looking at the masters of the form and saying, how did they solve this problem? Wouldn't that be interesting to know how they saw how Stan Lee would solve this problem? Oh, this is the way Stan Lee solved it. Oh, well, Stan Lee's pretty smart. What if I rift off of what he already did and did something unique but inspired by what he's previously done? You know, there's. Harold Bloom wrote a book called the Anxiety of Influence, and, you know, he was writing about poetry and Walt Whitman and all that stuff. But it's the same thing goes for genre writers, too, in that we are all influenced by what we've previously read and what we've previously seen. And it's not the job of the writer to expunge all that stuff from the brain. It's the job of the writer to wade into it and say to themselves, boy, you know, Hemingway really nailed that one scene. And so did Fitzgerald, and jeez, so did Stan Lee and so did Thomas Harris and so did Judith Krantz. Wonder if I could play with one of their scenes in a way that I could bring my own unique sensibility to it. That's what a writer does, is that they become inspired what has been written before and add to the pantheon. They don't just take and steal and rip off. They make it uniquely their own and innovative and different by their own life experience. That's why specificity of your choices is so important. You have to bring yourself. And I think you're really on a good. You're on a good level, Tim, because when you talk about your writing, you talk about your experiences and how you're going to bring your ideas to the page, and that's a really good way to approach writing, is not to try and be somebody else, but to be yourself and to find ways to tell stories that you find interesting. I might not love superhero stories, but I admire the way you do. So that's what a great editor does and what a great writing instructor does. He don't necessarily have to love the genre that you love, but they have to admire your passion for it, and you have a tremendous amount of passion for this stuff. So my advice is just keep engaging in that and look to the masters of the form to inspire you to do your own unique work.

Thank you once again for listening to this episode of the Story Grid Podcast. Now if you want to download the scene that is mentioned in this episode, you can go to storygrid.com podcast in fact, that's the place that you can go to see all the old episodes, download any notes, see all the show notes, everything about the podcast right there. Now if you're just joining us, make sure you subscribe to this podcast in itunes or Stitcher or whatever it is that you use to listen to podcasts that will make sure you don't miss any episodes. Now I would be remiss to mention that we are currently at 90 reviews inside of itunes, so if you could get us over that 100 mark. If you haven't left a reviewer rating, now is the time. Don't delay, jump into itunes, leave that review and rating anything else that you want story Grid wise. You can find that@storygrid.com make sure you sign up for the email list. Make sure you buy the book if you haven't bought it yet. This podcast is great, but it does not replace the amazing content that's in the book. Okay, once again, thank you for listening and we will see you next week for episode 18.