Spreadsheeting the First Draft

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 a creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we continue working through the first draft and looking at what it takes to move from a first draft to a second draft. So I've never done this before, and it's been a really interesting process. I don't know what I was picturing, but it was not this. So it's been really fun to work with Sean through this, and I feel like this is where Story Grid really shines because it gives you this systematic way to move beyond your first draft.

Right?

So anybody can just bang out a first draft of something. You know, how do you get that first draft to something that's actually working and you're ready to publish? And so I'm excited to be diving into this part of the process. And I think you're really going to enjoy this episode and especially the episodes that are coming as we continue to take this first draft and turn it into something that's working. So let's dive in and get started.

So, Sean, I started working through the spreadsheet and have been surprised at what a slog it is to get through this. I kept thinking, like, I'm going to sit down and, like, bang out, you know, 10 scenes, and an hour later, I've got, like, four scenes that I've worked through. And so I'm through. I'm going to put the link to the spreadsheet in the show notes because it's on the Google Drive thing. And so what I did is I got the spreadsheet on one tab and the to do list on another tab, and I'm through scene 25, and I have 66 to do items or brainstorm items or whatever. So just like, the. The amount of just sitting, staring at the screen, thinking about, like, all this stuff. So, like, I'm having fun because it's fun to come up with new ideas, but then it's just like, it's just a slog.

It is a slog. And that's what the StoryGrid spreadsheet is meant to be. It's meant to be a very micro, meticulous, thoughtful examination of the choices that you've made as a writer. And when you do it, when you have a first draft, and I quickly went through your spreadsheet and your notes, your to do list. And I think this is spot on what you want to do as your own editor. Because what you've done in your. In your to do list notes is to really evaluate each scene from a very objective point of view. You're not looking at these scenes and saying, oh, that scene's bad, bad. This is terrible. Instead you're saying, okay, well, what works here? Yeah, that works, but what could I do to make it better? So, you know, the notes that you have are very, very spot on. And I also noticed that you. You've asked yourself a bunch of questions in the notes. Things like, do I want to, you know, change or be more specific about, you know, the world in which the people who are plugged in live. And that's a great question. That's a question that when you answer it, is going to affect every other choice that you make later on in each of the other scenes. So it's supposed to be a slog. So good. And it's not the kind of thing that you want to hire an editor to do for you, because the editor is going to do. It's just like anybody else. An editor is a human being. And what they're going to want to do is do the least amount of work for the most financial reward. Right. They want to do the critical mass of work that will get you the client satisfied, but they don't want to do much more than that because then they're starting to burn their own value in order to help you. So you, as the purchaser of an editor's time, you only get a certain amount of their capacity. You understand that, right? It's like anything else, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've been a consultant before. I know how that goes.

Yeah, exactly. And you want to, you know, make the client satisfied, but you don't want to overdo it so that, you know, you can't take on another client. Service businesses are about managing time and managing resources, and you want to give the appropriate amount of value for the appropriate amount of compensation. And editors are service business contractors. They are giving you their brain and their thoughts and their ideas and their analysis. And depending upon how much they're charging you, you're only going to get so much. But if you hire yourself as an editor first, you're given everything that you have. You're coming up with every idea and you're writing down every single idea. An editor is probably going to give maybe one Idea every three scenes. And you'll be happy with that. They'll say, yeah, scene one's fine.

Yeah, it's been interesting because, you know, reading it again, right? So I haven't read it straight through since I wrote it. So that's been interesting. And then there's been entire parts that I'm like, oh, yeah, I didn't. I completely forgot about that. Like, there's just, like, one little thing was I did this pretty, like. I mean, for me long, like, explanation of, like, the table that she's put on and the straps that are done around her and all this, like, contraptions. And then I never put that in another scene. And at the very end, she's not strapped down at all. And so I'm like, oh, well, I don't remember writing that.

And then, yeah, it feels like. It feels kind of like, you know, like when your kids are a baby and you're, like, changing the diapers and you're making the food and you're, like, trying to get their clothes on, and it's all this really, like, just shitty work. Right? But, like, if you hired a nanny to do that, like, you would miss so much.

Right?

Right. So there's, like, none of it's fun, but yet it's the part that you look back on with fondness somehow. And that's kind of what I would. I was feeling the same thing of, like, none of this is super fun to like, go through this and just, you know, churn through it and come up with ideas and da, da, da, da, da. But, yeah, if I gave this to somebody else, I feel like it would no longer be mine. You know, once I have the book the way I want it, I can bring an editor in to fix all this stuff that's actually broken. But right now it's still just. It's not even. I don't know, it's not even what it's going to be yet, if that makes sense.

No, it does. It does make sense. And I think your analogy, the analogy about having a young child is a very apt one. And doing the work to tend to a young thing is exactly the kind of work that you're doing now. And yeah, you're right, it's not fun. But every now and then I see in your notes something. The muse speaks to you and you come up with a really, really interesting idea. For example, in one of the early scenes, you say, should I consider placing the people who are working for credits in a large metropolis as opposed to the sort of vagu Small townish sensibility that's. That's presently in the book and that, you know, most people would freak out at that kind of change. But because this first draft that we've written is very much at the embryonic stage, you can certainly go back and, you know, get that stuff in there, do a couple of tweaks, and before you know it, the world has completely shifted.

Yeah, I really like that idea, honestly, the more I've thought about it, because I just kind of put it down. But, you know, like, right now, in real time, more and more and more people are moving to bigger cities and outlying. And then I was thinking, like, if there's limited resources, it's always better to, like, batch those resources into smaller places. And so that's. Anyway, I like that idea. And it does. It completely changes it, but in a good way. Yeah. And I also remember, like, when I was writing at the beginning, I was super tentative about being specific about anything because I didn't really know what I was writing. And, you know, nine months ago, I was a different writer than I am now. And so now going back through it, I feel more confident of, like, okay, I have a story now. How I can. Can I make it better by being more specific? And, like, I put in my. I kept, like, putting in my notes. I rushed the scene. I rushed the scene. And then finally I wrote down. I'm not gonna say it anymore. Just assume all the scenes are rushed. And then the next scene, I'm like, okay, I've rushed this scene too. You're like, you know, just so. There's so many places I'm already seeing of, like, I always keep thinking of. Like, one time I was asking you about. About, like, how do you make these scenes longer? Like, what do you put in here? If you. If you're just getting the person from putting point A to point B. That doesn't take 1500 words. And you talked about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or whatever the original book was called, and how, like, you put in all of this fanciful stuff that readers love to, like, really ground the world. And as I'm reading through it, I see how I was just, like, rushing all of that for lots of different reasons. And so.

Well, I would say. I would say that the reasons why I encouraged you to rush it. And. And there's a reason why I encourage you to rush it. And it goes to. Again, I always cite Steve Pressfield, but it's very apt here. It goes to resistance. And what. Resistance has two main sort of thrusts that. That hurt the writer or the creative person. And the first one is to sort of, you know, it's self talk that is very negative. Oh, I'll never be able to do that. Oh, geez, this is terrible. I should just quit. So the negative self talk we all immediately recognize as resistance. But here's the thing. Once you start to get some writing momentum, resistance starts to kick into another gear. And instead of saying to you, oh, this is never going to work, it starts saying to you, you really need to spend more time developing this idea in chapter three, because what you're writing is just so unspecific that nobody's going to care. So what happens is that your writing pace and your momentum to get to the finish line gets really sucked out and you lose the gas and you lose the momentum and you start going into so much detail that you lose the forest from the trees and you never finish the book. So the thing that I tried to get across to you as you were writing this first draft, it was, don't worry about word count. Just get your scenes down, get to the end as fast as you can. Because you needed to get, you know, you needed to birth the first draft. And now you can go back and think about all of those things that we just glossed over. And a lot of times I would get comments on the StoryGrid website or, you know, in the comments on the podcast that, what about this?

What about that?

Sean, you're completely avoiding this. What about character development? What about this and that? And I, my, it's my thinking that it's far more important to get that first draft down than it is to start obsessing about the minutia of the craft. Now we're going to really, I mean, you're in for a lot of craft talk and a lot of work, but now you've got some confidence and, you know, hey, I've got a first draft done. I made choices. I was able to construct 60 odd scenes that have the five commandments. Some are better than others. Some, you know, I'm going to have to tweak them and I'm going to have to make them better. I'm going to have to analyze them in a big global whole as well as the minutiae of the story grid spreadsheet. But now you can start thinking about the specificity of each scene and the world. You know, I wrote something a long time ago. Specificity begets universality. And that's something that people have a hard time grasping. The more specific you are in your story, the Specific clothes, somebody's wear, the specific place they're in, the specific timing, the more universal it is to the reader. So this is why To Kill a Mockingbird is so universal. It's a universal story, at least in the United States, that speaks to anybody who reads it, is moved tremendously by, by the book. And it's because it's so specific. It's set in a small town in Alabama. It's told from the point of view of a, you know, a five year old girl who's precocious. And because it's so on the money in terms of those, those very specific choices, we can all say we picture it in our minds. It's almost as if our minds are playing the movie as we're reading it. And this is why some of the great, those great specific novels like To Kill a Mockingbird, Silence of the Lambs, the Wizard of Oz, they were so specific that the, you know, the movie almost follows, you know, the very, the novel almost to the letter. So now is the time to make all those notes about making it specific later. And what you'll see in your chapter by chapter notes and what I've, what I gleaned was that your muse, you're giving the mu. You're listening now. You're listening to ideas from yourself. Whereas before you were obsessed with just finishing and I, you know, I'll, I'll stick this in your face again. But throughout the process of doing this first draft, you kept worrying about your word count. You kept freaking out. You're like, oh, I don't know, this is only going to be 50,000 words. And I kept saying to you, don't worry about it because the word count is going to come and I wouldn't be surprised if this goes over a hundred thousand words by the time you're done.

Yeah, I was thinking that today because I've already put in my notes too. Like I'm going to need to add a couple scenes in the beginning. Like if we keep, I'm like, if I keep these things in the story, I got to ground them in the beginning hook. And they're not even there. And so I've got to figure out a way to do, you know, all this different stuff. And I've liked to have like, I've gone super specific where I'm like, okay, this particular thing needs to be fixed. And I've tried to like zoom out to be like, do I want to? Because a couple places I've thought like, what if I just completely flip this over and look at it from a different perspective. Perspective. Would that make it more interesting? Right. So, yeah, I've enjoyed those parts for sure. It's just much slower than I thought it would be. You know, I'm used to just sitting down and churning stuff out. And I'm. I'm like. I keep them, like. Like I said, the amount of time just staring at my screen, not do like, not typing anything, just thinking is just long. So I do have a couple specific questions that I'm running into. So I added a column to the spreadsheet because you have the turning point. That one's already in there. And I went back and reread the chapter in Story Grid about it turning on action or revelation and how you don't want to have too many of one or the other in a row. And so I added a column for turns on. So turns on action or revelation. And so I kind of got stuck. I didn't overthink it, but I was like, I don't know which of these it is. So if somebody makes a decision, is that action or revelation?

An action is when a choice is made based upon something that happens in that moment.

So, like, there's a scene I have in the first Severing where Jesse gets caught by two of the other coders. And they're going to just go ahead and get rid of her. And she is trying to convince them that they should keep her alive. And then it comes down to the point where they have to decide, are we going to keep her or not? And they decide to keep her. Right. So that's a decision. And I write that down. That's an action.

Okay, A revelation.

Yeah.

That's when new information is given.

Yes.

Right. So in the scene where Jesse meets the real president for the first time and it's in his office, which when reading back through so far, that's been one of my favorite scenes. It's also. It's scene 24, and I put this in my notes too. It's scene 24. It's the first scene that was over 1500 words. But I'm not going to obsess about word count, but I still wrote it down. And anyway, so like, there's this whole build up and then at the very end, he lets her know, like, if you don't fall in line, I'm going to hurt these other. You know, I'm going to hurt Ernst and Alex. And so that would be a revelation because he's giving her information, right?

Yes, he's revealing that. Another way to look at it is. Revelation is a reveal of information that the character does not have. So she does not understand at that moment that this man has the power and is capable of using it for, you know, negative consequences to her friends. So he's. That's also, you know, how they always say that character is action. That Revelation is. Is also an active way of establishing the president's character. What kind of person, you know, hurts somebody else if he doesn't get what he wants from. From a third party. That's a despot, that's a tyrant. That's someone who says, if you don't give me what I want, I'm going to hurt your sister. That's, you know, that's a really terrible, you know, negative person. So revelation is also when, you know, like when Randy reveals himself to. To Jesse, the revelation is that he's alive and he's. He's been imprisoned and he's. He's figured out a way to communicate with her. Now, in terms of, you know, I do pick out Revelation and Action. The differences in the turning points, I just didn't give it a separate column. I would just put it under turning point. I would put action and then the thing. But it's perfectly cool to add another column because then you can just scroll. Exactly. And see, you know, how are your scenes turning? And I see you have a lot of action turns, but you got to remember at the beginning of your story, especially in a thriller or an action story, your scenes are going to turn on action. Right. Because we don't know anything yet. And if you start turning scenes on Revelations, it doesn't work because it sounds cheesy. Like it says, if somebody comes in and says, your brother's in prison, and Jesse, your brother's in prison in scene two would ruin the story because you're like, well, I don't. It's too early to know that. So act.

Yeah, I'm pretty happy, actually. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with my spread. Like, it's. I've got more action than Revelation, but they're, like, peppered back and forth pretty well. There's, like, one where I have four runs of Revelation that I thought might be a problem. But overall, again, like, I know that's. I'm not overly concerned about that right now because I know we're going to be messing with all these scenes. So I'm not, like, going to start read, you know, I'm not changing it. I've even stopped fixing typos since you told me that last week. So I'm literally not touching the scenes. I'm just making notes on everything. So. But I was. That's one of the things I've been pleasantly surprised is both the polarity shift and turning on action versus revelation seem to have a nice kind of rhythm to it. I'm not like six scenes of one or the other.

Right.

So. And I've had a couple scenes where like, I've had a real trouble figuring out where it turned or like, if it. I'm like, I think it turned here, but it just is way too soft. So there's like several points in my notes where I'm like, you know, I really gotta drive this home so that, you know, when it turns we can see that. Or like, I really gotta drive this point home so that later when. Because again, this early in the book, I was really soft. I didn't know who was going to do what and what they were going to end up doing. And so I wrote that way of like hedging my bets constantly. So now that I know how all the characters are going to end up at the end, I can come back and be like, okay, I really need a hammer home this point. I really need a hammer home this point. And like, I saw in my writing that like Alex, every time he cares for Jesse, it's outward, right? So he's protecting her against other people and he tells other people what he thinks about her where Ernst is all directed at her, where he's caring for her directly and he tells her what he like how he feels about her. Right. And so I'm like, oh, well, that's kind of a nice juxtaposition between her friends is like one is all outward show, like caring. And so I've like made notes of where I can, you know, up, up that in different scenes too. So yeah, it's been fun to look at it from this viewpoint and go, go scene by scene like this. And I think I had another question. Let me see here. Yeah, I mean, there's just a lot of stuff about, I don't know, like, if we're going to keep Balaam, like, I've got to work him in in different places. So I think my longest note is in regards to him and what kind of role he's playing and you know, what he wants and just trying to dump everything that comes into my head into the spreadsheet so we can make decisions later.

Yeah, that's exactly the purpose of this first round of editing is to, to do exactly that. Just pile on as many questions and ideas into A to do list that you can. And I also like the way you put, you know, each question is, you know, is separate. So you're not just having a one run on paragraph for each chapter. You're literally, you know, each one has its own little box. Okay, which is great. That's because what's going to happen the next stage, which we'll. We'll get into after you've done sort of this vomiting of ideas and analysis of possibility, is to look at a couple of things. You know, I hesitate to go into it now because I think it's great. You're in a great place right now to be really anal retentive about each and every scene, each and every problem or opportunity that to take it to the next level of analysis too soon could just confuse you. And I always. I'm a great believer in really choosing a particular focus and staying with that particular thought. You know, psychologists and psychiatrists have done a lot of research, and the notion that you can do more than one thing at once is a lie. There's no such thing as multitasking. So every time you choose, you change your point of view from micro to macro or macro to micro. There's a pause that you literally have to rejigger and reboot your brain. So if you keep going back and forth and back and forth, what happens is you get exhausted and you're incapable of doing either, you know, operation with any, you know, great clarity. So I always think, stay focused on either the micro or the macro. And when you get a completely obliterated and you can't do one or the other, you get stumped. Then you step back, you change, and you switch to the other thing. So right now what you're doing is the micro. And the micro in storage grid, story grid spreadsheeting is right. It's very meticulous, and it can feel like a real slog. And it takes 20 times longer than you think it will.

Yeah, it was funny because I was talking to one of the people that came to our workshop about it, and she was like, well, how long has this taken you? I was like, oh, probably like three hours to get to this point. And then, like, I was working on it and I look back and I'm like, I've been sitting here for an hour and 15 minutes working on this. I've gotten through four scenes. And I'm like, oh, God, this is taking way longer than I thought thought it was taking, you know, so, yeah, but it's just. But it feels. I mean, it's One of those, like, you know, it feels, it's grinding, but it feels good. It's like a good grind. You know, it feels like I'm accomplishing something because I'm getting to look at it in a way that I wouldn't be able to see it if I didn't do this.

Well, this is exactly the thing I go through when I story grid spreadsheet, Pride and Prejudice or working on the wizard of Oz now, and it's only a 40,000 word novel, the original wizard of Oz and I can get through. Maybe I actually stop myself after doing three to four a day. I usually say to myself, okay, I'm going to block out an hour and a half and I set an alarm on my iPhone and I'm going to stop after I do an hour and a half of this intense, you know, work. And I usually can do three to four scenes in that amount of time because what, what I'm doing is, is not just doing the spreadsheet, but I'm picking out, you know, the inciting incident, the progressive complications, the crisis, the climax and the resolution in each and every scene so that, you know, I'm, I'm a great believer in checking my own work. And all of my theories aren't so great if they don't hold up by looking at some of the classic literature. And also the wizard of Oz is probably one of the best examples of the hero's journey that you're going to come across. So I'm going to do a story grid edition of the wizard of Oz and I hope to have that up soon so people can check it out. But you know, I don't like doing it either. And you know, a lot of people freak out when they hear how much I charge as a freelance editor. And the reason why I charge so much is because it really sucks the life out of you.

You know, when you're doing this meticulous work, you can't help but have a lot of thoughts about it. Well, why did Baum do that that way? Why did he choose a scarecrow? You know, how did he come up with the idea of the lion and the Tin man and the scarecrow? What are those in terms of psychological theory? You know, all this stuff? Why did he choose a young girl who is the wizard of Oz? What does he want? Why are these people wearing, you know, green tinted glasses?

So all of those questions come to me when I'm story gridding a book and when you're storygridding your own. That is gold, man. That is the stuff. This is a way to get the muse to talk to you is by doing this, this blue collar, sloggy, you know, marine in, you know, in the hinterland work.

So, you know, keep going.

All right. Yeah. So, Mike, I'm going to try to finish this up because I'm a few scenes away from halfway done. So I'm going to try to finish this up by next week so that we can move on to whatever's next and keep going here because again, I feel good about being able to move into a new realm just for the listeners sake. Like, as we were getting towards the end of my book there, I'm like, oh man, we got to do something new or this. We're just going to lose everybody, right? So, so no, I'm excited and this is. And I feel like too, you know, as I've learned Story Grid, it obviously has made my writing better, but I feel like this is the point I wanted to get to really put the stuff you teach into practice of taking a first draft and turning it into something that really works. So this is the part I've been excited about is getting, is to really see, you know, because there's so much stuff out there about how to. How to write a great story, right? There's books, all kinds of books, all kinds of systems, all kinds of courses which are, you know, some are. A few are good and most of them suck. But it's like. But none of them teach you how to take what you've created and turn it into something better, you know. And so that's what I'm excited to dig into this part because I already, like, I put in my notes, I've already come up with things that I think are going to make it a lot more interesting, you know, like if we do end up like, setting the beginning hook in, you know, in a version of New York City, I'm like, that's way more interesting than, you know, nondescript town, you know.

Exactly.

And so anyway, so I'm excited about it and so I'm going to try to get this done and then we'll go from there next week.

Sounds good.

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