Story Grid Trinity

Hello and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. My name is Tim Grall. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. But before we jump in, I feel like for those of you keeping score and paying attention, you know, the podcast has been off for a good while and even before that it was kind of on again, off again. You know, the issue has been that as StoryGrid has changed as it's grown, as I've changed as a writer and grown as a writer, the podcast Sean and I have really just struggled with what should we do with this? Because it was always about me and my writing, right? So I would come on and we would talk about what I was working on or what I was stuck on, or he'd evaluate a scene, or we'd be looking at one of my books. And the problem though is, I mean, it's good for me is that I've gotten better at writing and so now I don't really need his input on a week to week basis. In fact, it's becoming where, you know, writing an entire quadrant of a book or an entire draft before I take it to Sean and get his feedback on it. And so, as all of you know, writing takes a while. And so as I'm working on these drafts, it was just kind of hard to figure out what we should be doing on this podcast on a week to week basis. And so I think we've landed on something that's going to be really good, have a lot of legs to it in the future and involve you as well. And so what we're doing is we're changing the format over to a Q and A. So each week we're going to take a question and I'm going to ask Sean that question and then he's going to answer the question and then that's going to be the episode. So they'll be a little shorter, more like 20 to 30 minutes each. And then the first four of these episodes are on a particular topic, which I'll talk about in a second. But then after that, we need your input. We want to hear what questions you have that you would like Sean to answer. So you can go to storygrid.com podcast and there's going to be a button there where you can click and submit your question to be answered on the podcast. So of course we won't be able to get to all of them, but if you have a question you'd like to hear Sean's answer on, feel free to go there and submit it. And that will be something that we can pull from for future episodes. So, anyway, I really appreciate you. If you're listening to this episode, that means you're coming back on with us and listening with us. And I just really appreciate your patience as we've kind of floundered around and figured out what to do with this podcast. But I'm really excited about this next iteration. I feel like it's now that we've thought of it. I'm like, oh, this is what we should have been able to come up with from the beginning. But somehow it took us months and months and months to figure this out. But anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Hopefully it continues to be really helpful recently. Source for you in this first episode, we're going to talk about this new thing that Sean's been teaching and working on and studying and using to evaluate manuscripts called the Story Grid Trinity. I think it's going to just be revolutionary. I know it has been already for me, so I'm excited for you to learn about it as well. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, last year we kept running into this issue when we were talking about.

How making something work or how does a story work, or how do we know if a story works? And we kept kind of running into this problem where some of the things, some of the stories we're running into, some of the ones we were looking at at StoryGrid Publishing, seem to technically work by story grid genre standards, and yet didn't just, in reading them, didn't actually work. And so in this process, it kind of forced you to take all this research you're doing and put it into this kind of new foundational way of looking at these things. And so I'd like to just start there. Like, when we talk about a story, what is that working? When we talk about a story working, what does that mean exactly? And kind of where that led you?

Yeah, this happened, I think, around October of last year. And quickly, to just give everybody the context here, we had a submission into the publishing house. And the way we've been sort of presenting the means by which you can be considered at StoryGrid Publishing is to prove that you have studied the Story Grid and that you have abided by the conventions and obligatory moments of your particular chosen genre. All right, so that's where we started. And I thought that was a great place to start because it made sense, right? Like, as long as you abide by what the audience of a particular genre is looking for, your story should, quote, unquote, work. And so that's what we've been presenting. And then what we discovered was there were submissions that made very, very good arguments that they were abiding by the conventions and obligatory moments that we had already spelled out in Story Grid. And yet, when Leslie Watts and you were reviewing the material, you were just like, this isn't really compelling. I'm not finding myself engrossed by this story. And we don't know why, because technically, they've checked all the boxes. So then Leslie asked me to take a look at it, and I knew immediately what the problem was. And I'm like, oh, well, it's because it doesn't have this and that and the other thing. And it came to my attention at that point. Oh, I hadn't really deeply considered this level. Beneath story, I mean, beneath genre, right? So genres, as you know, are these 12 categories that we all know. And, well, you know, crime stories, thrillers, action stories, worldview, maturation stories, all these sort of subsets of stories that if you're in a particular mood, you go and you want to read or watch one of those stories. So beneath that, however, there are these foundational elements that I hadn't explicated, and I hadn't even really thought to explicate them because I thought, oh, well, you know, this is just something everybody kind of intuitively knows. And I realized, well, that's not true. And when I started to do some research to figure out if anybody else in, like, sort of the narrative theory universe had explored what's underneath genre, I couldn't find anything. So it occurred to me that I needed to do some more work. And so what I did is I looked at kind of this idea of phase transition, right? So a phase transition is sort of when water freezes into a block of ice. So if you want ice, you've got to put water under certain conditions and constraints in order to get it to turn into a block of ice. So essentially, what we're trying to do at Story Grid is we're trying to get sort of like the amorphous gas within somebody's brain that has this really cool idea to write a story. And so we're trying to encourage people to take sort of that gaseous kind of idea and to sort of start to boil it down so that it turns into. Or not condense it, right? Condense it so it can drip down into, like, water. And that would be kind of like a really terrible first draft, right? So take the stuff that's floating up in your mind and just bang it down on a piece of Paper so that you have some liquid that you can play with, right? So you can actually look at the liquid. And then we use the story grid methodology to try and start to phase transition that liquid into a solid. So we use the techniques of story, and one of the big tools that we use is what kind of liquid are you making? You know, are you making lemonade ice, you know, or are you making strawberry daiquiris? You know, what kind of flavor are you going to put in that water so that the people who are longing for, you know, a lemonade flavored ice will be able to enjoy it? So that's what the story grid methodology. So the first thing we wanted people to understand is, like, what flavor do you want? Do you want strawberry, banana, chocolate, What? That was a really big insight. And I think that's why people are really attracted to storygrid, because we actually tell you what kind of flavors there are, and you can mix and match, right? So anyway, the problem was we were talking about flavors, and we were getting flavored water. We weren't getting ice, right? So the phase transition of the water hadn't reached the place of being a block of ice, which is a working, if you follow the metaphor, a block of ice would be your working draft that is publishable, that people will recognize as a block of, you know, lemonade flavored ice. So we were just getting liquid in. And so Leslie said, we're getting liquid in here. And you said that as long as they put the flavoring in, it would turn into ice. So what's up, Sean? And then I'm like, oh, my God, I forgot about a couple of steps that would freeze and condense the liquid into a phase, transition into a working story. That's ice.

It's interesting when you talk about this, because I think what happened was this kind of foundational level that you're about to talk about was. So it was intuitive to you, because that's the whole thing is when you went into publishing and you thought they were going to give you this amazing bible of how to pick out great stories and make them better, and it didn't exist. And then everybody was just kind of going on intuition. And so even with the spreadsheets and the genres and the looking at it in all these different ways, you know, you were still relying on kind of this base level of intuition. So when you ran into, like, me and Leslie, and we're like, we don't have that intuition. You're like, oh, wait, I'm still relying on something. I need to figure out how to explain. Because intuition's only helpful for you. Or if you can explain it, like how you're making those decisions. Because intuition, the way I think of it, is it's making. It's all the subconscious decisions you make based on years and years of understanding something. And so then that forced you to kind, kind of look inward of like, how do I make these decisions?

That's exactly right. So what you're describing is this guy named Arthur Reber did some experiments in the 60s and 70s, and he came up with this idea of implicit learning. And all implicit learning is when we are exposed to patterns, recognizable patterns, over and over and over again. We get very good at recognizing those patterns without really knowing why. It's kind of like this incredible magical thing that Homo sapiens has. So implicit learning is recognizing and being able to point out patterns of intelligibility.

The more you're exposed to it. So because I spent 30 years in book publishing, I've been exposed to thousands and thousands and thousands of manuscripts. So when I'm reviewing those thousands and thousands of manuscripts, this implicit pattern recognition started to be able to be deeply ingrained within me. This is why the editors at the major publishing houses, they're very good at what they do because they do have this implicit skill, because they have been subjected to thousands and thousands of manuscripts. So they can pinpoint those stories that are abiding by patterns that they recognize, but they can't explicitly explain those patterns to third parties. So when you submit your manuscript to a major publishing house to an editor, oftentimes they'll be like, yeah, it just wasn't for me. I don't, you know, sorry. And you say, well, why wasn't what was wrong? And they go, yeah, it just didn't work for me. And so this is what we faced, right? So it was kind of like this big splash of cold ice water on me because I thought, oh, look, I solved this problem. I told people what's required to create a working manuscript. And here it's actually not going to fly, right? So you can do one of two things at that moment in your life is you can either go, I'm just going to double down on what I've already said for a million years. And I'll just say, well, you just don't get it, and I know better than you, and you haven't done it the right way, right? Or you can look at yourself and say, oh, there's something that I know that I need to translate into language that other people can explicitly learn. I need to move the implicit knowledge that I have into the explicit realm so that Tim Grohl and Leslie Watts can go, oh, I can take that hammer and that screwdriver and those tools, those explicit tools, and I can learn that implicit pattern recognition skill. And then if we're really good at this, we can explain it not only to the publisher and the editor in chief, we can explain it to our storygrid people so that they can really know what to do before they submit. Here's the goal state. This is my fantasy. In five years, every manuscript that comes into StoryGrid is ready to publish. Like, that's crazy, right? But that'd be great if we do our job properly and people are really sort of like intently working through their craft and leveling up their understanding of story and really putting themselves through the paces and not quitting and, you know, working with third party editors to make their stuff better. By the time we get a submission, the phase transition, it's going to be lemonade ice all the time. You know, we're going to have strawberry daiquiris, we're going to have lemonade ice. You know, we're going to have chocolate ice cream. We're going to have all kinds of great solid works of art that we can then market and show the world and say, hey, this is the, you know, we're the Willy Wonka of story, right? We're creating brand new beautiful products all the time, and it's an art, but we love it. And the things that are coming in are coming in with this great phase transition. So here's the question. Well, what's that secret sauce? What is that thing underneath genre? That is actually the thing that will phase, transition, gaseous into liquid, liquid into solid, and then with a lot of great flavoring that nobody has tasted before. That's the question, right? Right. And so that's a very hairy question to answer because you're basically saying, what are the keys to creating excitement, intrigue and catharsis, right? Because that's what you want to generate with your audience. You want to excite them, right? You want to make them want to read the next page, read the next sentence, read the next paragraph. So that's the first thing you got to do. You got to make sure they read the book right? So it's got to be exciting. And then the second thing, it's got to be intriguing. What does intriguing mean? It just means that the audience, they have to wonder what's going to happen next, right. If they know the ending of the story before they start, then it's not going to be very intriguing. And there might be a lot of car chases and stuff in your action, and it might be exciting. But if they know where it's going and they've seen the movie before and they've read this novel before in a different form, they're just going to be like, this is kind of cool, but I've got other things I have to do. All right? So we need it to be exciting, we need it to be intriguing. And the last thing is catharsis. Now, this is the really difficult part. And what catharsis is, it was a term invented by Aristotle, and it's a really cool term because it's extraordinarily powerful. So what catharsis means is that after you have reached a pivotal moment in a story, it's almost as if inside of yourself, from your tippy toes all the way to the top of your head, you experience almost like a ray of enlightenment, of truth, deep truth that flushes away all of your sort of nervousness and unsettledness and not knowing what to do ness about your own life. And you say to yourself, oh, my gosh, that's what happens to me. That's exactly what I've experienced. And it's extraordinary because these are crazy make them up avatars that are coming from somebody who's just having these thought bubbles in their head. And then it gives this deep, cathartic experience to an audience. And it's almost as if it actually is the creator of the story has directly mind melded with a member of their audience so that the audience understands exactly the intention of the storyteller. So the storyteller starts out with an idea of telling a story that they hope will change somebody's life. And then at the end, if you reach catharsis, they. The audience understands exactly what the storyteller was intending to deliver. It's incredible. So you got those three levels, right? It's got to be exciting, it's got to be intriguing, and it's got to provide some catharsis. Now, that's a really high bar, right? That's a bar that we call a masterwork. Right? But, you know, we only have a limited amount of time on the planet here. So we at Story Grid are going to shoot for the stars, right? We're going to shoot for masterwork. Yeah. And so we want people to understand those three levels and shoot for it. Because if you shoot for it and you miss, then you might not hit the top of the pyramid. But you're not going to be at the bottom, but if you never, ever shoot for the top, you're just going to get maybe a little bit better, and then, okay, cool. But we only have a limited amount of time to shoot for that. So we always say to people, if you follow our methodology and you go through this trinity of forms, that I'm gonna. You know, I call it a trinity. And. And the more research that I've done and the more philosophical and scientific research that I've done, and it's just remarkable. The concept of the Trinity is a repeating pattern of intelligibility across multiple domains of experience. So it only makes sense to me that a story has a trinity within it, just as our reality has Trinity is within it. So that's how we've sort of gotten to this new foundational level. It's sort of like these super, super duper elements that make up that next level of genre. Right. So the flavoring is important, but you want to build the right liquid and transform it with the flavoring later on. So it's a step by step process. And I have a clear. A very clear stage of which part of the Trinity to tackle first, which second, and which third, which I think is going to be extraordinarily helpful to people.

Well, so just give me a quick introduction. What are those three levels that are in the Trinity? And then we can dig into them in future episodes.

Sure. Okay. So the other thing that I've discovered is it's really important to give somebody a kind of a vision, you know, so to give them a metaphor so that they can clearly sort of stick it in their brain and. And then pull up that sort of photo. And then the photo, it's like that phrase, a picture's worth a thousand words. So this is the way I'm constructing this Trinity is to really use it as a metaphor for vision. Right. So there are three levels. There's. On the surface, and this is just the motion of the story, the action, the kinesis, the kinetic movement of the objects and subjects in the story. So it's exactly the literal movement of people and things in the story. So, for example, at the beginning of the Hobbit, you have a guy knocking at a door, right?

Yeah. And then this is what you would see if you were watching it happen.

Right.

But had no context and the volumes turned all the way down.

That's exactly right. Okay. So that would be. On the surface, it's the equivalent of sitting in a cafe, having a cup of coffee and just chilling out and looking through the glass and seeing the park in front of you and watching the people move around the park. And you see the little girl kicking the soccer ball to her mom and then the mom kicking it back. And then over here, there's a family that's starting to, you know, create a cookout. And they're putting the charcoal briquettes, you know, in the fireplace. And then over here, there's a softball game going on. And. And there's all this beautiful movement of motion of people and objects moving through time and space, and it's mesmerizing. This is why you get people who. I mean, the entire European culture is about sitting in cafes and watching people walk by. And that's for a very good reason, because it's fascinating. It's watching the motion. And the beauty of things moving through time and space is awesome. So that's on the surface, right? So when we're a storyteller, we want to make that stuff interesting. We don't just want to see the girl kicking the ball to her mom over and over again, because then we get bored, right? We want our vision to be our attention, to move away from that scene and move over to the family that's starting their cookout. And then here comes, you know, somebody up in their car, and they're helping grandma out of the back seat, and she's got a cane, and everybody's smiling, and she's excited to be out for the day. You know, we can start filling in the motion of on the surface, just in our imaginations, which is awesome. All right, so that's primary, right? If you don't make that stuff interesting, nobody's going to care about the next two, right? Yeah. All right, so when I said, I'll give you a series of steps. Step number one, make the motion interesting. Right? Okay. Step number two is what I call above the surface. And what above the surface is is pretty cool, because what it is is that you have these objects and subjects in this spatial dimension in time. And then you, as the storyteller, get to choose, right? And you get to go and say, which one of these people is going to change which one of them. In my tapestry of my diorama of my setting, which one of them is going to change the way that they've behaved? So let's say when the little girl is kicking the soccer ball to the mom, the mom gets kind of frustrated because the little girl's not very good, and so she keeps having to chase the ball and. Huh. Then the mom starts screaming at the little girl to do it the right way. Why aren't you doing it the right way? I taught you something different. Now we've got something interesting right now. We've got an above the surface dimension to the story because it's intriguing. Now, why would the mother yell at a little girl on a Sunday afternoon in the park just because she didn't kick the soccer ball the right way? That's intriguing, isn't it? And so you, as the storyteller, get to say to yourself, how can I change that, mom? How can I get the reader or the audience, the person looking through the glass, to look at that moment and follow her as she goes through a process of literally changing her mind that's above the surface, Right? So now we've got this really interesting thing about how do we change the motions that we enact in the literal space and time of life? So that's an extraordinarily complex dimension. And it's fascinating. It's intriguing to all of us because we sometimes we don't even know why we're doing what we're doing. And maybe that mom doesn't either. And maybe if somebody asked her, why are you yelling at your daughter? She could say, you know what? If you had spent 27 hours working with her to kick the ball properly, I think you would be upset too. And she wouldn't know that there are deeper levels, unconscious things that are driving her behavior. So the above the surface is all about the intrigue of why do people do the things that they do, and how can they change the things that they do that aren't so good anymore? Right. Can they level up and to get more attune with the beauty of the natural world and to actually enjoy that kicking the soccer ball randomly with their daughter on a Sunday afternoon, Wouldn't that be cool if you could tell a story about how somebody could transform, transcend themselves? That's above the surface, and that's the next level. Right? So first we got to make things interesting in terms of motion. And then we need to deal with the energy within the minds of the players that gets them to enact things. So that's the second level. It's above the surface. It's in the, you know, everything above the neck. And it can be anthropomorphic, too. So you can have dogs or, you know, it can be a cartoon.

So, yeah. All right, so that's the second level. Let me get to the third level.

Okay.

The third level is really cool because the third level is beyond the surface. Now Remember I was talking about implicit pattern recognition earlier, about Arthur Reber, and I said it was my job to teach people explicitly about what I know implicitly. That's a big, big problem. Right. All right. So beyond the Surface is about that very thing. How is it that we recognize patterns of things that occur, patterns of behavior through time? So the beyond the Surface is what Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell were talking about. And they were saying, well, there is archetypical sort of behaviors that have been going on forever. And so maybe the mom is enacting her understanding of what it means to be a mentor. So she's enacting a pattern of behavior that, let's say 2,000 years ago in Athens, Greece, or say in India, there's another park and there's another mom and another little girl, and that little girl is kicking a coconut or whatever. Right. That's kind of the beauty of beyond the Surface is that the things that we are dealing with in the present day are abstractly identical to the things that people were dealing with thousands of years ago. Yes, we have cell phones and we have all these other technological advances, but thematically, we are all children of our mothers and our fathers. Right. And so we all have to enact these archetypical things throughout our lives, too, so that we can make sense of it. And so the beyond the Surface is this thing that really can connect somebody. So I'm not a big soccer fan, you know, so I don't really relate to somebody kicking a soccer ball on Sunday. But when there is this beyond the surface component to the story, it doesn't matter. I'll watch the soccer, like Ted Lasso. That's a great show. Right. I'm not a big fan of soccer. It's not. Has nothing to do with soccer. Right. So when you watch that show, you know, in your heart, like, oh, isn't this cool? It's. That's interesting, the whole soccer thing. And it's interesting to see where the locker room is and how they kick the ball and stuff, but it's not really about that.

So that's the beyond the surface stuff. So we've got on the surface, above the surface and beyond the surface. And when you understand those three things, it's going to increase the probability that you're going to phase transition from gaseous ideas to liquid sort of blah. That it doesn't make sense yet to a really beautiful lemonade crystal, you know, that makes a solid lemonade, you know, Italian ice on a hot Sunday afternoon.

Thanks for listening to this episode. Of the Story Grid podcast. For everything StoryGrid related, check out storygrid.com make sure you pick up a copy of the book and sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything happening in the Story Grid universe. Also, make sure you go to storygrid.com books to see all of the other titles we have released through StoryGrid Publishing. If you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any past episodes, all of that can be found@storygrid.com podcast if you would like to reach out to us, you can find us on Twitter StoryGrid. And lastly, if you would like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcasts and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at StoryGrid. We will see you next week.