Specificity for Non-Fiction Storytelling

Hello and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we start off talking a little bit about how it's going for me with the second draft of the novel and some things around that. And then we keep talking through the rewrite of the introduction of my nonfiction book. But more importantly, we talk about just overall specificity and how to tell a great nonfiction story and how it applies to fiction, but also how to do it the right way in nonfiction. So I think you'll really enjoy this. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, before we look at the rewrite of the introduction of the nonfiction book I've been working on, I wanted to talk a little bit. I've been working on the second draft of the novel, and of course, you know, I've been scared of it, so I was procrastinating it, and now I'm finally working on it again. And one of the biggest issues with the first draft was I was rushing everything. In fact, you know, I had Candace. I had my wife Candace, read the book, you know, this was a couple months ago. And like, after, like, the first 10 scenes, she's just like, the whole thing feels rushed, you know, and she doesn't know anything about this stuff. And I was like, yeah, I know. Because, like, all my scenes were like 800 words, 900 words, 700 words, maybe like 1200 words. And so on my first. On the first scene of the second draft, it was a 3,000 word scene. And I was just like, what is taking so long? Like, why is this so much easier? Like, I didn't even try. I'm just like, okay, here's what's got to happen in the scene. And I started writing, and I think it's the. And this is what I wanted your. Your take on is the specificity. Because I've struggled with, like, there's all these things that you tell me, and I understand them in kind of a cerebral, logical way, but I don't really. It's that whole, like, yeah, I got that. And then when I go to do it, I'm like, I don't have no idea what to do. And when we've talked about specificity, I'm like, I'm always kind of like squinting, like, okay, I think I got it. But I've always wondered, like, also is, you know, I don't want to just like, fill the book with facts, you know, about the world, because then you then, oh, that's what I've struggled with is like, well, how does that work with not saying too much and letting the reader fill in the gaps? You know, so how do I be specific but also not overly describe everything? And so. But the biggest thing that made this easier was, you know, we grounded it in into New York City. So now I have something actual, like an actual real place that I need to describe because it doesn't make any sense otherwise. And I fixed a lot of problems that I hadn't figured out in my head. So, like, one of the things was that the people that she was saving at the end of the book, their life actually wasn't that bad. And so that's not good if she's saving a bunch of people that don't need saving. So. So I went back and like, really, like, set them in a place that is just awful and set them up as basically meth head cattle, you know.

And then there's like, so. And then I know the building in New York that my first scene is set in. So, like, I'm going to the website, I'm looking at actually what you can see from that building in New York. And then, you know, that ends up in the book and being. Being able to be much more specific about what's going on. And it just allowed me. I'm just like, I felt like I entered the scene the same way where I'm like, okay, I got to do this, I got to do this, I got to do this, and I'm going to end up here. But that took 3,000 words instead of, you know, 700 or whatever. And I haven't even gotten to, like, that scene did not even include the first scene of the first draft. So I haven't even gotten to that yet. So anyway, yeah, I don't know if I'm asking a question. I just thought it, like, I'm finally understanding, like, that balance between being specific but not over explaining everything. Does that make sense?

Yes, it does. And it also makes sense that the second draft is going to take quite a few more words than the first. And the reason why is that in the first draft, we're searching for the pathway, we're searching for the right set of plot points. So you want to get to the end of the scene as quickly as possible. And nail your five fundamentals, your five commandments of storytelling as soon as you can so that you can move on to the next scene. You're constantly trying to get to the end of the entire novel, and you. You break that down into three big bits, and then each of the three big bits, you break down into scenes, and then you break down. So by the time you get to your second draft, you realize that a lot of the things that were necessary, you had to really fly over. You had to put sort of a. An intellectual to come in your head. Oh, I'll get into the description of, you know, where the. Where the competition happens later on. So the specificity. Don't worry about the reader conjuring the world in their own mind and allowing them to have their own creativity. What you want to do is think about. And this is what I do when I write, you know, try and slow down the pace. Think about the step by step progression of a particular scene. And then you make editorial choices. You make. Do I comment on what the protagonist is seeing in this moment during this conversation? Is that an important detail to put into the story? What time is it? Where are we? What time of year is it? Is it summer, winter, spring, or fall? And when you read Pride and Prejudice or Silence of the Lambs or any of the other books that we've talked about on this show, you see, and if you really keep your mind focused, you'll see that all of those details of time, place, season are in the work. And they're very, very short, little adds to particular sentences. As Wednesday turned to Thursday, you know, Jane realized X. And it's those small little bits and pieces of specificity that really ground the reader. And subconsciously, their ability to conjure your world takes on the know, their own patina. But you are setting the universe. So will. Will my vision of what the apartment looks like in your dystopian world be the same as somebody else's? Absolutely not. But it will be very, very similar in spirit and essence. So specificity is really, really important, because if you just say he was sitting in a chair, it requires the reader to create their own chair and then have that person sit in the chair in their mind. Whereas if you say a specific Louis Quatorze chair that was in great distress, they immediately get that, and the person's already sitting in it. So they don't have to conjure their own. Their own world, because you have specifically laid out the world in which they can create their fantastical universe in their brain. So the specificity allows the reader to allow their brain to use their imagination elsewhere. You don't want to tax the brain of the reader to do all of the specificity work. Or they will say, ah, this guy is just. There's no. I can't understand what he's describing because it just doesn't make any sense to them. So that's why specificity is so important. Specificity breeds universality because each individual person brings their own past, present and future to the reading experience. And. And then they impose their worldview onto your story. So this is why storytelling is so great, is that what's very specific to you is specific in a different way to somebody else. And that's why some people can get different things out of novels than other people, and why my controlling idea for a specific story might be close to someone else's, but they're different. That's okay that there's no correct answer. It's just you. You have to thematically know where you're trying to take your reader and then allow the reader's own imagination to add all the end tables and the mirrors and all the other things into your fictional world. I hope that's a little vague, but no.

And the other thing I noticed was just because I know where the story's going, you know, when I wrote the first scene of the first draft, I didn't. I hadn't come up with the number yet, right? And so now, like, I threw. So there, you know, in this new world, the numbered are going to be living down in the subways. And the first scene opens with her going through the subways to get where she's going. And I have, like, the person on the other end of the radio, one of the other rats, which I'm introducing now, too, because I need them in the story. Like, start saying, like, hey, you know, tell basically tells an urban legend about a friend of a friend who, like, went down there and those people ate them, you know, but they never say the number. They never say, like, anything about them. It just references them and rereading. I started rereading Worm, which we've talked about before. And I've noticed, like, he weaves story elements that do not happen until much later in the book. Like names of people, places, different beings in the universe that I just skipped over early when I read it for the first time because I didn't know what he was referencing, you know, and now I'm like, man, he was telling me things in the first chapter that didn't pay off for a long time. And I didn't even know. And so I'm doing that and I'm weaving. Like I mentioned, I just have one line in there where she talks about her parents, because, you know, that's the theme through the book, too. And so just having all those decisions already made about the world allows me to just dump all of that into the first scene. And I just. I didn't have that yet when I wrote the first scene, the first time. So anyway, I was just. It was. It was a pleasant surprise where I just, like, kept going and kept going and kept going, and I'm like, man, this has taken me a while. Like, usually I'm done in, like, you know, 20 minutes on a scene. So, yeah, it felt. It felt good.

So, yeah, that's a good sign.

You know, the.

The very practical work allows you slowly to build up your ability to imagine different things and the setups and payoffs. This is really the place to start thinking about that where. How can I set up this thing so that this little firecracker is going to go off in 125 pages? And you can talk when I think, too.

Like, I. I'm trying to remember when I wrote the first draft of the first scene. I think it was like nine or ten months ago at this point. And I'm like a different writer than I was then, too.

Right.

So just overall, now I'm feeling more confident in my writing. I'm. Yeah, so it's been. It's been good. So I'm. I'm now, like, excited about getting through this and. And going over it.

I.

You know, I think you're going to be right, that it's going to end up being like a hundred thousand words instead of the 60 that I wrote for the first draft.

Sure. You're going to end up cutting. You'll probably have 120, and we'll have to cut.

Hey, that's a good problem to have compared to what it's been before. Like, this is too short. So. Okay, so let's. Let's. Because we're going to get into that once I have the beginning hook done here in a week or two, and.

And then.

But for now, I rewrote. I did my homework. I rewrote the first. The stories in the first. The introduction to the nonfiction book. So to remind everybody, I wrote a first draft of my nonfiction book, and I basically wrote a how to book. And we've been working on the fact that I need to write a big idea book and really forced me to dig deeper on what I'm trying to say. And I landed on this idea of the journey, the emotional journey, basically, that a creative person goes through. Then, you know, I identified, like, five different steps, and so I wrote an introduction. And you wanted me to go back and rewrite at least, you know, the first half, where I tell some stories and be much more specific and write them as if they were scenes in a novel, basically. So I tried to do that. It was. I had a little. I don't know. I don't. I don't know if it's any better, basically. So I tried to set it up better and run, you know, run through. I tried to give two different scenarios, one when I was very first beginning and then one when I actually had success, to set up the book. So what did you think of the changes I made?

Well, overall, I think you're getting closer and closer to the narrative arc of your big idea book. And I say narrative arc because big idea nonfiction has to have, you know, an arcing story to it, meaning it starts someplace, it goes someplace else, and then it ends up and pays off in a different place. And so just reading your. Your revision, you're getting closer and closer to the arc, which is. Everybody thinks that the most difficult thing about being creative, committing to the work. But what happens is after you commit to the work, you get waylaid by a powerful force that really knocks you on your ass. When you overcome that force, then you think, oh, great, now I. I've got my. My shit together, and I'm really know how to create now, and now I'm gonna do that. And so you are. You successfully move forward and you literally create things, and then you start even getting some success. And it's at that point, most people think that you've reached nirvana, where you've reached this sort of creative place where everything's great. You know how to make things. When you make things, people react to them and they buy them, and you make a living doing it, and everything's wonderful. But your story sort of takes off from that point forward, too, because you say, okay, once you hit this place, what you think you were going to get out of this creative process is not what you think it is. In fact, you have a great sense of sadness, loss, shame, and pain. And you feel almost really disappointed that all of the things that you thought were going to bring you great happiness don't. So it's at that point where you have to take your level, your game up even higher as a creative person in order to overcome that. Is that all There is feeling you have to, yet again, learn some more tools in order order to find the natural way of the creative, which is to understand that every project is a new way of finding and discovering something new about yourself. It's not about, you know, making a sale. Sales are great and they're important, but that's not why you're in the game. So what you're dealing with is a very long, you know, sort of creative arc here. And what's important in your introduction is to really tell a compelling story that will hook your reader to such a degree that they say, that's exactly right. That's exactly what's happened to me. And they don't necessarily have to have gone through all five stages that you're. You're talking about in your book here. But they need to know that this is the same pattern that every creative person goes, that they are not unique when they hit these moments of. Is that all there is? So your introduction really needs to actively engage the reader in a story so that they feel as if they are walking with you as you are stumbling through this process. And so when I read your revision, the first thing that came to me was, oh, my gosh, he's rushing this. He's really flying through everything that's happened to him very quickly. And he's telling, not sort of show telling. That's a really bad way of expressing what I mean. But instead of giving your conclusions about what has happened to you in the past, take a narrative. Use a narrative device that will be more engaging for the reader, and that is to almost tell the story in real time. And what I mean by that is, let me just read kind of the first paragraph of your revision, and I'll do it quickly.

Oh, man. All right.

This is just. This isn't critical. It's just. It is critical.

I'm just thinking, we've been doing this almost two years. You've never actually read any of my stuff to me. Like, I know it's out there. I know people are reading it, but I've never had to listen to it. So I'm just. I'm just stealing myself.

Okay, okay, well, don't worry about it. You'll get over it. Okay, so your very first sentence is, In March of 2006, I finally took the plunge. After a few years of working on my own stuff, I decided to quit my job and go out on my own. My first son had just been born two months before, and with my wife staying home to care for him full time, I decided would Be the best time to quit the job with the steady paycheck and take the leap. Okay, I'm going to stop right there because those first four sentences are so meaty and juicy that I think you're so rushing it. And also you're not being very specific.

I feel like I've had this problem before.

Well, the thing is that you really want the reader to be grounded quickly and then you slowly walk them through to the crisis point. So anyway, here's kind of what I suggest. What day in March is it? So let's say it's March 12, 2006. That's your first sentence. It's March 12, 2006. So immediately the reader is going to know, oh, this is a very specific day. I wonder what meaning that that very specific day has to this book. And then this next sentence would be something like, and I'm making this up. My son is 52 days old. So that, that brings in a whole other, you know, world of thoughts to the reader. Why is this guy talking about his son and the date and he's only 52 years old? Oh, my gosh, that's a newborn baby. So the next paragraph would be, my wife Candice is with him every single moment. He, as he should be, is her number one priority. There isn't any uncertainty about the division of labor in our family. Candace is full time at home. I am the breadwinner. So right there you've established that you have a brand new baby in your house. It's, you know, it's spring of 2006, which is 11 years ago, and your wife has made the decision that she's going to stay home and take care of your son full time. So you have to bring in all the money and her son, your son is now her number one priority. What that means is that you aren't anymore. When people get married, the only priority that they have is the happiness of their partner. When you have children, the wife has to take care of the child first. Now that is all reasonable and wonderful, and we all understand that fact, but when you're the man in the relationship and your wife has a child, it's a. It'll throw you out of your. It'll throw you out of whack. Because all those nights when you came home and your, and your wife says, how was your day? Or she comes home and you say, how's your day? Those, those days are gone. It's not about you anymore. Now you, your job, once you have that child is your primary job, is to bring in the money to take care of your family. And together, you and your wife have made that choice. So right away, I think with a revision to that sort of opener, you're setting up a situation that every person who would want to read this book can understand. I think the market for your book are for people who are very thoughtful, who understand that there's something within them that they need to release, and it's a creative effort. They need to create a new company. They need to create a novel. They need to create a work of art. They need to any number of things. They need to create something from an idea that they have in their head. So one of the things that they're always saying to themselves is, if it weren't for X, Y and Z, I'd create something. And what are the biggest X, Y's and z's are children and spouses. And money.

Yeah, and money. Yeah.

So just to continue this line of thought, I jotted this down. We can keep it in the. We can put it in the show notes. So the next. My next suggestion for this story is to get you into work. That day, March 12, 2006. I'm at work, period. At 9:17am after my first cup of coffee, I walk to my supervisor's office and tap on his open door. Is this a bad time? He clears me to come on in. I'm tendering my resignation. And so you move from, I've got this huge responsibility now, and then you transition to, I just resigned from my job. So this is going to create narrative momentum for you because your reader is going to say, what, the guy just quit his job. Now, when you wrote it earlier, you said the same thing, but you told the reader, oh, I quit my job because I. You were sort of saying it in kind of a funny, fun way. You know, hey, I knew I had a kid at home, and, oh, really? Good time to quit your job, right? Instead, you're actually bringing them into the office and they're witnessing you make a huge mistake or seeming.

So do you see what I mean about specificity? The specificity is take advantage of, you know, taking the reader by the hand and walking them through an experience that is going to be very close to home.

I've never. I've just never done that with nonfiction. I'm like, all of my nonfiction is just like, first this, then this, then this, then this. Okay, now go do that.

Well, this is the art of bringing pathos to nonfiction. It's telling a story with fact, right? The fact is, is that you did Resign. You did have to knock on their boss's door. You did have to physically resign from your job. Right? You didn't just not show up to work one day because then that would. That would have ruined your reputation. That would have hurt your employer who gave you a job when you know you needed one. And so this is what I mean about, like, slowly building into. This is setting. What you're doing is setting up a really nice turning point for your nonfiction. And the turning point we can get to in a second. Let me just go on with what I wrote, because I just jotted this down. Okay, so after I'm tendering my resignation, now you pull back, and now you say now you explain kind of your reasoning. So you open up with setting the scene and a little bit of scene work. And that's done in eight sentences. It's not like you have to do a full scene here. So you. You basically explain your decision now, Now. And I'll read what I wrote now. I'm not especially courageous, and Candice is certainly no idiot. So how did we come to the decision that the best time for me to leave our only source of income, my 9 to 5 steady eddy job, doing what I had trained four years in college to master, was less than two months after having our first child? What it came down to was this. So you've pulled them in, and then you've said, look, I understand this doesn't make any sense, that I just quit my job. How did my. Because. And you're in a partnership. You didn't just quit your job without telling your wife. You and your wife had a discussion, and she said, okay, I support you. Go for it. And so then you wrote the next thing, which is going to speak to the heart of why they're buying your book in the first place. What it came down to was the stress, pain, and, yes, shame of not doing what I knew I could do. Creating Tim Grohl stuff, marketing that stuff, and earning a living selling that stuff had reached intolerable levels. I'd been miserable for years. Not Grinch like miserable. More of a dejected woe is me. I'm not doing what I should be doing. Kind of general malaise. Candice finally lost her patience and told me that if I didn't bet on myself now, when our son was an infant requiring constant supervision but no school tuition, I never would. And then you explain further. Now, before I resigned, I did what reasonable people do. I got my proverbial ducks in a row. I negotiated a barter deal with My church. In exchange for my designing and webmastering a website for the congregation. They'd let me use an old cleaned out closet as my office rent free. With our savings, I had plenty of time to get my new business up and running and also spend more time at home. I had massive motivation. My family depended upon my success. A backlog of great ideas ready to implement. Some terrific leads to get the business off the ground, as well as committed clients and practically zero overhead. Do you know where this is heading? Yes. Complete disaster.

So what you want to do is tell them a little story about their worst fear. Their biggest fear is that they commit to doing something creative. They get all their ducks in a row and then it all blows apart. So what do you want to do in your global thesis? Your global big idea is I'm going to teach you how to be creative without torturing yourself to the point of losing your sanity or your sobriety. That's generally your big idea. You're going to give people a toolbox that they can use to do things that will make them creative, that will allow them to live the creative life. So the first thing that you want to do in your introduction is give them kind of the worst case scenario or the best case scenario in this case. In this instance, I would recommend giving them the worst case scenario. What happens when you have a loving wife, a new child, some savings, confidence, ideas, clients, and you quit your 9 to 5 job to start your own business? It's a disaster. It didn't work out. But what's great is that you wouldn't have been, you won't be, right, you wouldn't have been able to write the shameless creative if you didn't figure out how to fix that problem. Right?

Yeah. So do you want to keep going? I have a couple questions.

No, let's stop there because this is a way of. The first thing you have to do is really just suck in that reader. And the way to suck in a reader with a self help book is to explain to them, I have experienced what you are experiencing right now. And the best way to do that is to tell them a very specific story of a moment in your life that you stare down the problems that they're staring down and that what that will create, they will be, that creates your writer's ethos. They will say, this guy's been where I am so you can have all the marketing success that you want and bestsellers or blah blah, blah, but if you don't tell them this dark moment of the soul that You've stared down like they are. They're going to say, oh, this is just another blowhard guy with a bunch of tips. That isn't really going to work for me because he didn't have a kid, he didn't have a wife, he didn't have. And you're basically saying, dude, I had it all on my back and I blew it. I blew it. And the subtext to that is I'm going to tell you how I got out of it so that you don't blow it either. And that builds a real sympathy for you as the writer. One of the things that Steve Pressfield does so great in the war of art, the first paragraph of the war of art, is he tells you what he does every day. I wake up, I go into my office, I pull on my boots, I make sure I've got my computer, I've got my coffee now. And he tells you the supposedly magical life of a writer. And guess what? It's like going into a coal mine, making sure your pick works and that you have the right jeans on. And then you're ready. You know, you're, you're doing some hazardous work, but you're ready to get going. And so he, he pulls the curtain away from the, the magical writer's life where you're sitting in a cafe jotting down notes, drinking espresso. No, that's not the way it is. So other people can relate to the blue collar lifestyle because that's usually what we're doing in our everyday job. So for you, I think you need to express to people you were, you know, you were a guy who had a job, you had a family, and all of that great stuff wasn't enough for you, and you had to do your own thing. And even when you had the support of your wife, even when you had the support of your little baby boy, even when you have the support of your parents, it still failed. You still hit rock bottom. Anyway, so go ahead, ask your question.

Okay, so my first question is, what if I don't know the specifics? As specific as you're saying, like, I have no idea what day in March it was. Like, make it. Do I make it up?

Okay.

Okay. I didn't. Like, I struggle with, like, yeah, making it up.

I mean, look, here's, here's, here's the thing. And Steve always says this about fiction. Fiction is truth. And what he means by that is that in order for fiction to work, it has to have a universal truth underneath it. And nonfiction is an argument. So when you're trying to make a great argument. If you can use really great storytelling that supports your argument to a degree that is just far better than anything else. This is why narrative nonfiction is such a huge category today. You know, people don't want to read the facts about things. They want the truth.

They want alternative facts.

I'm sorry. I just had to.

They want to know the meaning and the truth underneath them. So, you know, do you know the specific day exactly when you resign from your first job? No. Do you generally know what month it is? Yeah. Do you generally know what year? Yeah. To generally know how you did it. Maybe you didn't knock on the office. Maybe you caught him in the. You know, in the break room and you pulled him aside. I don't know how you did it, but however, whatever way you did it, you know, you just need to get that beat down. You quit as quickly as you possibly can. That's why I tried to do it in, you know, three sentences.

Okay.

And it doesn't matter if it's absolutely accurate, and people can throw me in the river for saying that, but it's true. I mean, this is the thing about memoir. A lot of people.

Debate whether or not a specific thing happened at a very specific time. And I'm all for truthfulness, but it's the effect of the events on the soul that matters more than the event itself.

Okay, so next question is. I felt like. So I'm. I'm trying to turn it on. I made this great leap that you dream about, and then I failed. And here's what it felt like.

You're describing the first stage of the journey. Right.

Right. And then I like the second story I tell, too, which we can talk about the specific. Whatever specificity. I said it right. Like, three times, I can do, but, like, where I then fast forward in time and tell the story of being successful. And then still. And then the turn is. I'm still not any happier than I was when I was failing. Because that, to me, is the most surprising part of the story, is you will become successful and you will be no more happier.

Yes.

And so I want to.

That's the. Okay. Remember how I always talk about how a story has to have a turn? You have to turn the story in an innovative but a surprising but believable way. It's the David Mamet quote. Well, the first part of your introduction is going to turn because you're telling a story at the very beginning about how you left the corporate world and you were perfectly prepared for it. You had the support of your loving wife and your parents. You had plans, you had clients, you had free rent, you had figured it all out, got all your ducks in a row, as people always say, and it didn't work. So people are expecting you to then say, and guess what happened next, folks? After some really nose to the grindstone, hard working and hitting the calls and doing a lot of marketing and at local venues and having coffee with old colleagues, I, you know, I bootstrapped this company into a no. You're saying no, I bombed. I was, I had to bar, you know, I screwed up so much. You don't have to be specific in this because you can save that for later when you pick up the story later on when you're going through phase one. So then you want to do a transition, right? You want to do a transitional paragraph or two to get to the next stage. So here's what I suggest. Here's what I wrote. Okay, let me just take off where I left off. Do you know where this is heading? Yes, complete disaster. Now, obviously when I say, yes, complete disaster, they're going to be thinking the opposite. They're going to think, yes, I, you know, I got a foothold. Why is it that when we do everything, quote unquote, right, meaning we save our pennies and solve it with our loved ones and get indispensable advice, plan our escape perfectly and then actually pull the cord and set out on our journey to self actualization and personal fulfillment? We fall hard. A few months later, our son was twice his size, but we were completely out of money. I shamefully called my parents and asked for help so I wouldn't miss our mortgage payment. What happened? How did I manage to snap out of it? That's the first part of this book. What happened next was even weirder. So you're not going to tell them in the very early introduction the payoff yet. You want them to read your whole book. But you do promise there's a first stage. And I'm going to really tell you how I snapped out of this horrible hole that I was. But what happened to me next is even weirder. And that's when you tell flash forward X years. I'm sitting in this, I'm having a wonderful beer with a friend of mine where everything's great. I just have all this success, you know, my mortgage is. My mortgage payments are on time, I've got a nice new car, the kids are doing great and I'm miserable. What's going on with that? So what you're Doing this is you're setting up success and then twisting it into a failure. The earlier one was setting up failure, setting up a really big leap that's good for you and then turning it into a failure so you want to, you know what I mean? You're flip flopping the storytelling so that what the reader is expecting you to say is the opposite.

And the thing I want to drive home about the first story, because this is where to me the shame comes in, is like, I had set everything up for success and it wasn't a meteor coming from the sky that sunk me. It wasn't that unexpected things arose that sunk me. It was because I screwed up and I couldn't follow through on what I need to do. Because like, I was even just talking to my wife about this, to Candice about this, this last week while we were on vacation, and I was like, that's always my fear is like, if something happens, if the stock market crashes, or like, you know, something out of the blue comes in and just sinks me. It's like, whatever, man. Like, you know, I can't plan for that. But it's me screwing up, me making the wrong decisions, me playing video games half the day instead of like, that is what I want to make. Drive home. The point is, it wasn't. It wasn't because unexpected things happen. It was because I didn't do what I needed to do. And that's where all the shame came from. Because that's the whole thing is like.

Because you were shameful. And it was a great. No one supports the other. When you fear, you don't do. When you don't do, you're shameful for not doing. So. What I suggest is that you set up that payoff. And then the final, you know, four paragraphs of your introduction are the answers to these five stages that you go through. So you would make that point that you just said, guess what? You know, it was all my own fault. I played video games all day. It wasn't, you know, I burned through our savings because I was a fear. You know, I was afraid. And then the next part you say I was miserable because I thought that there is a golden moment when all of your dreams come true. And it was difficult to understand that that's just not the case.

Case.

And then the third one. So you use all the answers to these five dilemmas as your global payoff at the end of your introduction, which is really going to get the reader excited about pushing through to go into your middle build, which is going to Delineate each one of these five stages, very specific ways, and also give the tools necessary to defeat the enemy. You also have to define the enemy at the final payoff of your introduction.

Okay.

You can blame yourself. Yeah, sure. But it's not the real Tim. It's the resistance Tim that's to blame, because the real Tim is the guy who did do the work. Right. That is the real Tim. The Tim that didn't do the work and is fearful and ashamed. That's the, you know, that's the, like the shadow Tim who doesn't want you to do anything. That's Steve's resistance. So, you know, I think the last time we talked, we talked about the primary assault weapons of resistance for the amateur are fear and shame. So he jabs with fear and he body blows with shame. And before you know it, you're sitting on your stool in the. In the ringside and you're not fighting anymore. So what the. What the pro learns is the way you fight fear and shame is X. And you've got a whole set of tools to help fight fear and shame. Right. And then once you start having success and things start turning around for you, then guess what else happens? Oh, is that all there is? That's the second stage. That's where the pro. A lot of people never get beyond that stage. Especially like the big New York Times bestselling writers or, you know, famous actors or whatever, they're constantly worried that the next part's not coming or the next book isn't going to be good or nobody's going to care about them or Star magazine is going to have them on the COVID anymore. That's the. Oh, my God, I got to keep moving my. My goals or, you know, I'm going to realize that what I thought was going to happen isn't going to happen.

Yeah. And I mean, to me, that's the promise of the book, is that you'll be able to get past the place where you are successful and still not happy. Like, that's the big goal, because that's. Most of the people I've worked with that are super successful are, like, brutally unhappy. And more success, the more they're successful, the worse it gets.

Yes, I consider myself one of those people.

But, Tim, don't forget about your market now. The market for your book is really. You don't. You do not want to squeeze out the person who aspires to be creative.

Well, so that is where. So, I mean, what do you. I kind of line out the five. The five places on the journey. And I kind of look at them as, like. I kind of think of them as like a train ride, you know, and you can get off at any stop and just sit there for as long as you want, or you can keep moving. And most people get off long before the final destination. So I feel like I.

That.

Well, I mean, am I writing a book for just the people at the beginning, or. To me, the thing is, like, the people at the beginning, I want them to, like, not be surprised about the third fate. And then the people in the third phase, I want to be like, they're like, that's me.

Yes. You know, yeah, no, of course. I mean, there's no. You do understand that your five stages correspond to the five levels of storytelling. So the inciting incident of your book is for the person who makes the commitment to create something. The progressive complication is when you fail the first couple of times. Then you start, you know, getting some momentum and things are going okay. And then the crisis arises when you reach the point where you think you should be happy. And the crisis is, oh, my gosh, I've got one of two choices. I've got a best bad choice decision. I either keep making stuff and pursuing this nirvana of happiness that will one day you know, appear to me, or I have to recognize that the fruits of the labor are not really that important. It's the labor. So the crisis moment is, you know, best bad choice. Do I believe in the standard more is more and more is better, and I keep have to go after more and I'm a failure if I don't make more? Or is the process the point and not, you know, the product? So that's the crisis, and that's the. That's why you're really. And I think we identified that really well. And I think it's a really compelling moment for your book because not many people talk about this. I mean, I can't think really of many. I mean, Elizabeth Gilbert does, but it's sort of a tangential moment that are in other people's work that aren't the primary, you know, apex of the storytelling.

Well, because most of the people doing this haven't reached it.

That's right.

They're still just as miserable as everybody else.

That's right. They think the next ones going to be it. I got to do better than Star Wars.

Okay. I have another kind of bigger question that I was struggling with as I wrote this. So when I read a book like, so if we're thinking big idea books, there are let's say in my mind there's two ends of this spectrum. One is anecdotal stories that the author is just kind of pulling out of their experience and their head. Right. So I would put the War of Art was from my perspective, I could be wrong. It wasn't like Steve went out and did research and interviews for six months or a year to write this book. Like it all came from his own experience mainly. And then stories he had, like the one about Hitler in the painting.

Right.

And then on the other end of that spectrum is Malcolm gladwell. There's like zero Malcolm Gladwell in that book. And 100% interview and research based in general. So those are those two ends of the spectrum. Yeah, like I'm struggling with. Okay, do I need to, should I be going on the hunt for stories? Should I be looking to hire a research assistant so I can, I don't see myself doing, you know, three years of interviews to write this book. But do I need stronger supporting stories and research than my own anecdotal, who I've worked with in my own story? I'm just wondering, like, I'm struggling with, like, okay, is just my me sharing my experience enough for this with my own kind of like, you know, no science based research behind this thing other than like, you know, here, this, I've seen this, I've seen this, I've seen this. Where do you think, you know, because also when Steve wrote the War of Art, he had, you know, a few years on me, you know, as far as his experience. So where do you think or am I? Like, sometimes I tend to ask questions that I don't need to be asking yet. So where do you think about that?

Well, I think you're correct about that, but I'll answer it anyway. Okay. I think the arena that you're in has, has scads and scads of research already done that's easily pull upable. You know, behavioral psychology is one of the most, you know, fecund sources of these little anecdotal bits that will support your tool base. Your tool base is fundamentally and psychologically extremely strong because you can use behavioral, you know, psychology to support your ideas. And you know, so it's, it's literally like, well, geez, I haven't gotten any, I haven't dropped in any psychological research here or an interview or something in about two or three tools. Let me, you know, let me drop one in here. And then you, you know, you pepper in, you know, five to 10 of them in the entire book, which isn't going to take you all that long to do, do you don't have to be Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell is a, he loves the intrepid journalist point of view and that's sort of he likes, it's not like he's hiding behind it, but that's his authorial voice. He wants to be the guy who, you know, you hang out for the day and he tells you this incredible story of how he discovered, you know, the best way to get people to do things quickly. And he'll, you know, he'll support it with all the people that he talked to. Whereas, you know, Steve is more of the guy who will be like, well, let me tell you a story about when I was in the Marines and we had this old gunnery sergeant and you think to yourself, oh, right, yeah, well, Steve's telling me something personal and Malcolm Gladwell is telling me something that he dug up in a library. They're just two different ways of building an argument. If Steve were trying to be Malcolm Gladwell, it wouldn't work. And if Malcolm Gladwell were trying to be Steve, it probably wouldn't work either. So they discovered, you know, that sweet spot of their authorial voice. And I think you will too. I think you do in your, in your marketing books. You're like straightforward marketing guy. Hey, if you don't trust my system, no sweat. All I know is that it's worked for me and I'm confident it'll work for you too. And then you lay out your system, you say what you do, and it's all very authoritative and easygoing and it's not heavy lifting. And what you're doing in this book, which is a little bit different and a stretch for you, is you're bringing in personal experience to place a context over very prescriptive tools that you've used to get you through this very difficult five step journey. And well, you're like anybody else. You get stuck and you fall back and, you know, it's all well and good to say, just producing is, you know, it's good in itself and it's rewarding if, you know, if you don't make a living at it, then you know you're gonna have to do something else to pay the bill. So there's this paradox of coming to terms with, you know, being a marketer and a seller of your own creative work as well as doing the creative work. But I think the focus of this book is about being creative, reaching these milestones, recognizing the milestones, letting people understand, hey, you know you had a success. It's okay that you don't feel so great about it. In fact, that's a good sign. It means that you're on this path and you have reached a point where you understand that what you thought was going to make you happy isn't the thing. So now you have to deal with it. But to answer your question again, no, I don't think you need 35,000 pieces of footnotes to stick at the back of your book to support your method. I think you can use anecdotal information from your own life and well, it, well, inserted behavioral research from people like Kahneman and Tversky and, you know, on and on. I mean, it's been a growth industry over the last few years. These, the behavioral psychology theorists and books.

Yeah, I've worked with a bunch of them too.

Yeah, and that's the other thing. You've worked with a lot of people who, who can comment on this and you can make a phone call and get a nice quote in, you know, 10 minutes. It's not going to kill you.

So where do you. I mean, should I just. I mean, should I just take another crack at this introduction? Because what it feels like too is that I need to figure out how to tell these stories because I have to do it for the rest of the book. So is taking another crack at this introduction the way I should go?

I think so. I think you want to, like, give yourself an assignment. How can I relate this story in an active way that the reader will feel like they're actually, you know, standing on my shoulder as I'm going through these processes? You know, they're, they're the guy at the bar next to you when you're celebrating and not celebrating.

Yeah, that, that was what was hard because, like, when I'm writing fiction, if I run into a problem, I just make something new up. You know, I'm like, oh, well, I need this to happen. So, oh, this is a rule in the world, you know.

Right.

So it's. I was struggling with like. But I, you know, I think this has been good. I'm to take another crack at it.

Well, think of it in terms of inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis climax and resolution. So the inciting incident at the beginning thing of your introduction is inciting incident decision is. Yeah, it's like you are going to resign from your job and become. And live off of your own creative work. That's a decision that you make. So one of, one of the decisions you make when you, you know, want to tell that story is how can I engage the reader so that they can relate to what decision I had to make. And you know, when you, we said it's March 2006, you're giving a very specific time. You're at a crossroads in your life. You know, you just had a son. So think of it in terms of, you know, the complications leading to a crisis, the climax, and then the resolution. The resolution of your decision to quit be. To quit your job and be creative was the resolution of that was a big fat failure. And that is a payoff that the reader isn't going to see coming. Because most people don't like to tell stories about when they screwed up.

Yeah.

And the next one is you're telling a story of how great and successful you were and the resolution is miserable. And so that's also counterintuitive. Right. Remember I always say big ideas, you want to play with counterintuitive notions. If you can lead in your introduction, which a bunch of counterintuitive notions, it's great because then it's really mysterious and engaging to the reader. So whenever you start a story and you set up the reader to believe it's going to have a happy ending, make it have a sad ending. Whenever you start a story when it seems like everything's going to be terrible, have a happy.

So that's why I need to really. The progressive complications of the first story is everything I did to set up for success.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, now, okay, that clicked because then I twisted at the end with. And I failed.

Yeah.

And then the next complication, the next story is the progressive complications is just taking off thing after success after success after success. I had a six month time span after, you know, you know, six years or whatever of struggling. And. And then the twist is, and I still was just as miserable as ever. Right. In fact, more so.

More so. More so. And I like the way you sort of, if you did it sort of like, you know how we always have a calendar and we stick in a date like deadline, gotta have that done. Gotta have that done. Gotta have that done. And then when you hit the deadlines, you go, huh? Right. Hit the deadline, who cares? But if so, if you structure your got to have a number one New York Times bestseller that's really important for my business. Bang, Done it. Got to get more clients. Bang. Got it. Got to get more, you know, all that stuff. And then if you go, check, check, check, check, miserable, even worse, even deeper misery than I ever experienced when I had to call my parents and that's for my mortgage money. In fact, I kind of like to go back to that time when I called my parents for the mortgage money.

Yeah.

Because then all of the success would have been in my future. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, it's. It's that thing I always talk about, value shift in a scene. Right. You want to start one way and end another. So if you start your story telling the reader, it's going to have a happy ending. You got to turn that mother until it's a bad ending at the end. And then the reader is going to go, whoa, I thought, oh, my gosh, what's going to happen next? So you constantly want to push those valences. Happy, sad, sad, happy, happy, sad. Or life, death, death, life. You know, play off of the value that you're. That you're. That's at stake. The value at stake in your book is the meaning is meaning of creativity. Does creativity provide meaning or success? Both. Which one? What is the value of creativity? That's really the deep, deep question. And your reader is going to buy your book because you're going to tell them how to be financially successful being creative. But what they're going to get at the end is the financial success is really not why you should be creative.

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