Telling the Truth About Writing: Is this Podcast Worth Doing?

Hello and welcome to the story grid podcast my name is tim grall i'm the ceo of storygrid and i'm a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works joining me shortly is sean coyne he's the creator and founder of storygrid and everything that we teach inside of storygrid is based on his tools and methodology that he's developed over thirty years of being an editor and storyteller along with him is leslie watts our editor in chief of storygrid publishing and danielle kielski the chief academic officer of storygrid university now in this week's episode we had big plans to talk a lot about the guild because right now the guild is open for registration for the new semester instead we kind of went off on this tangent and at first we weren't even planning on making this a part of the podcast but i just hit record just so that we would kind of keep track of it and we were talking about what we're doing with this podcast if it's serving the right purpose and the goal that we have you know we've been running this podcast now if you've been paying attention it's been like seven years right so and again it started seven years ago with sean and i just deciding like hey you know you need content you know i said you need content for your platform i i want to learn how to be a better writer why don't we just start this podcast right and at the time all of story grid was a book right that was all that was story grid a book and a website and now of course it's turned into this amazing platform that it's become that's helping thousands and thousands of writers but it's good to always kind of step back and decide like what are we doing here what are we trying to accomplish is this the best way to do it and again when we were planning on this podcast episode it was going to be kind of to talk about the guild and everything you're going to learn in the guild and i think we actually accomplished that in a better way because we talked about what we're trying to do on this podcast and with me as our sam right the single audience member and then how that also relates to what we're trying to do in the guild as well and so this ended up being what i think is a pretty powerful episode sean me leslie danielle we all kind of get raw with about what we're trying to accomplish and what we're doing here together and i think it's a really it was really important for me to talk about what we're doing here and why this podcast is important to me as a writer and the way that i think about it because i want this to be helpful for you as well so really good episode i do want to mention here that the guild is open for registration now so we do talk about it some of this in this episode but if you want to learn more about the guild what it's all about and how you can take advantage of it you can go to storygrid dot com guild so this is master's level training of writing i think it's the best training that exists in the entire world on figuring out how to write your story how to write at that beat trope and scene level we go deep into all of the tools and methodologies that we've been doing right here on this podcast over the last few months so i highly recommend you go check it out and join us and start the semester with this september fourth so again that's storygrid dot com guild so let's jump into this episode it's really interesting i think you'll enjoy it and i hope that you get a lot out of it and really see our heart behind this pot podcast and everything that we do inside of storygrid so let's jump in and get started what.

What i think i need to bring up is the fact that.

We we reach these moments of kairos in the podcast with with you tim in that we do a lot of work a lot of analytical reasoning and we're sticking to the script right so you're not changing.

Substantially the the words on the page as we're going through it so what happened last week is something that i noticed you've done in the past which is you throw out everything and you start over.

And then what happens is.

We have to rejigger and rethink the entire editorial process because now we've got new stuff signals that we have to evaluate so we're not evaluating the same signal sequences that you had written prior now they're they're altered and so it it puts us in this moment of oh my gosh we got to rejigger our thinking and go back to first principles and start all over again and so this isn't to to criticize you i just noticed this as a pattern and these moments of kairos i think is is when we hit this moment of.

Kind of analytical reasoning has reached its its breaking point for you as the writer so.

It you you're getting to this place and then it's kind of like oh i'm just going to redo it all because i'm hitting this place that makes me uncomfortable and it makes everybody uncomfortable and it's exactly what we were talking about last week when i when i was saying you need to stop looking at your characters as it's right so randall should not be an it for you he should be a thou and the thou comes from some kind of tim experience that you can map onto randall and so those are the moments when all of our and the processes that we use analytically in order to get us to this this place are crucial and it's very very heartwarming to me that we keep hitting it when we we do use the story grid six hundred twenty four and all of our analytical tools because it takes us to this place of okay i've got the structure down i've got the sequences of signals that i would like but the sequences of signals are lacking coherent you know integration and attunement and that is a signal that's a global signal that i have not me i'm speaking when i say i as as the writer i have not mapped my idiosyncratic personal experience into the story so i'm sort of like you know frankensteining the moments instead of you know doing it what would it be like what in my life mirrors this moment so.

I i'm not sure why i'm bringing this up i'm not certainly not trying to make you feel bad because i think this is a this is a pattern that that most creators hit when all of the all of the structure is sort of generally there.

And now they have to i mean this is one way of attacking a story right so you can either do the structural work necessary to build out the tropes and the stuff and the crisis moments and the and now you've got this really nice.

Architecture but now you have to you know paint the walls and and put the clothes in the house and make it your own and that's a tricky part for the analytical types like us now just to juxtapose this against the other approach the other approach is all about the chaotic spewing out of personal idiosyncratic experience that doesn't have structure and so those are sort of what people call the.

The pantsers so the pantsers just do that and then the structuralists start with their structure and i think you need to.

You need to have a discipline to pants right and the dis discipline inherent is the story grid methodology that will constrain that that thing so now you know oh i need to get into a place where i i feel like randall what was it what was it like for me if i had something that i needed to confess something like that.

So this is a really really important place to recognize as a storyteller that you're gonna hit these these moments of turning you're going to have to turn your eye from looking at the structure and organization of the story and start looking through it into your experiential idiosyncratic way of signaling the meaning of that structure and organization into a very coherent whole so i don't understand.

Why you feel like this how does this connect to changing the format of the podcast or.

Like.

So what i what i took away from last week was i think what you were trying to say which is like you got to connect to the story and.

I actually spent a good good amount of time going over this with candace and kind of trying to work through it and i do feel like this is a skill being able to like drop into that place and find that connection is a skill that is.

Is not is not as direct to develop as other types of skills if and so that's kind of where i've been just sitting and i feel like and so because like last week i started to get really frustrated and then.

I realized like this is the same frustration i felt before i feel like i kind of get through something so i was like i'll just calm down and then the last week or so i've just been well we just recorded five days ago so just the last five days i've just been trying to like sit in that place and kind of wait and like i keep poking at it and like can i come at it this way can i come out that way and when it when i feel like i'm hitting a wall i just kind of move on mentally and.

Yeah and it feels like.

Well this story in particular it just feels like i'm having a hard time getting there.

And i don't know why and i don't know what exactly is causing it but i do think it's mine i think it will come.

But then i come back to what we were talking about of like why do you feel like.

I mean this is why i was pretty adamant about leaving our disagreement in from a couple months ago because i feel like what's always been charming about our podcast is that we just we just leave it all on the table and we don't try to make it pretty and we don't try to act like we all know what's going on all the time because that's how it actually works in the real world and so i'm just curious why you feel like it's no longer working as the podcast well.

This goes to.

The six hundred and twenty four itself right so in in a offline discussion that i had with leslie the other day we were discussing well let's look at the podcast like we would like story grid people because geez we're story grid people right so what would we say the medium is here and who who is.

Who is the the single audience member watching the podcast and let's try and look at it from their point of view and see how they are experiencing the podcast and so what we came to the conclusion too was that tim you represent the single audience member because you were the outputer right leslie danielle and i are pumping input into you constantly so you're getting it from three different planes of perception literally three different you're getting a big global you know blue blue pummeling and then leslie gives you the red pummeling and then daniel follows up with the green and so that trinity of a pummeling to you and when i say pummeling i mean just you know energy saying oh you ought to think about this and you ought to think about this and you ought to think about this and then you have to integrate it at all and buh buh so when leslie and i were talking about that leslie made the very very brilliant point like i bet it's not very comfortable for people to watch the podcast because they are sympathizing and empathizing with tim and there there tim is who's trying to do his best like no one would ever say that you're not working hard right and so but you know then when i i had a discussion with you about it you're like i don't agree with you because i think people need to experience what it is to experience being a real person in the trenches writing so it's not exactly all fun and sunshine where you just methodically break through and then you have this incredible story at the end and there are these moments of turning point where you hit a wall and sometimes none of the four of us has the right solution and guess what danielle leslie and i can't solve the experiential problem that you're facing now so when you're talking about how you're going about it what what occurred to me is that there there's sort of like this this liminal space between sort of overt argument right so an overt argument is that i logically walk you through a series of steps right i go okay so the the elephant is gray.

Gray is a you know like a a very logical progression and the elephant is the member of this family therefore all elephants are members of this family something like that right so that's a very overt logical progression of an argument and then you have a covert argument where you know you sort of say to your your your kid oh well you don't want to go to school today let's never go to school then if you don't want to go today so that's like a covert manipulation of sorts where you're trying to make them think and project into the future and make their own decision and you're what you're saying is not overtly true you're trying to use what they call reverse psychology right so in between that we've got this space of what i call play and when you think about little kids this is what they're doing all the time they are getting overt signals meaning people are behaving in front of them in ways that are the way they're behaving right so mom's behaving some way dad's behaving another way when you're little and so you're trying to figure out how to behave so what you do is you put that model of mom and dad in your mind and then you go to your friend's house and you play house and you go will you play the dad yeah i'm going to play the mom today and that's how you play in order to figure out how to behave in the world so this space of play for the writer is a is a tricky place because if you write overtly and you just build an argument in deductive format of analytical reasoning it's not very potent and then if you just tell a bunch of COVID things that nobody can understand that's not very good either so you have to combine them and the means by which you combine them is by taking going into this imaginal serious play space of your mind.

So when you were given the task how was your life like randall's life and what what could you map onto randall what you what you've been doing is is going into this imaginal place space and saying what what is it like if i were really struggling and i had something to confess and i knew if i confessed it would really make my life not so great but the pain of the mental anguish of of holding this thing in my mind is too much what is that like for me so you don't have to say well i'm gonna spend a week as a homeless person to figure that out because that's that's the window dressing on the character that's not the essence of what is going on in this particular story randall needs to confess something because he can't hold it in his mind because it's too painful for him he would rather withstand the the the pain of physical external you know trouble than to withhold the internal pain of what he's holding to confess so when you have that sort of global generalized idea then what you do is you go and you put on a lot of costumes in your mind and you play with it and you say oh what was the what are those things that i would really like to get off my chest but i know i would suffer if i did externally.

And those are tricky because we try and push those down a lot so it requires a playing in a murky kind of dark shadowy place within ourselves because when we do these kinds of things we kind of have to compartmentalize it in a way and this is called we kind of stick it in our unconscious right this is a very jungian idea and so these these things that we've done that we're not so proud of and we really kind of ashamed of and would do anything if somebody could go in with a needle and just take it you know suck it out of our head and we could forget it boy would that be great right or or so we think but what those things are are things that you need to come to terms with you need to break them apart and the writing process itself is a means by which you can do that so when you enter this imaginal play space as a writer it's difficult because you need to individuate in a way you need to go and find those little murky things that you've really tried to jam down and and what's funny not funny but wonderful is when you describe the that that therapy that you've gone through which is exactly the same process you're supposed to go into a sort of altered state of consciousness and just allow and report what you're seeing so that's why i think the fact that you are correct you've been and continue to be courageous in in that ability that were really really close for you to be able to take that ability of being willing to confront things that you're not so proud of about yourself or about experiences that you had that were terrifying and hurtful and traumatic and engaging with them.

And then that's really something because that's the mark of someone who has something to say that's someone who can go and play in there and hopefully map it into these structures that the story grid process enables us to you know shape and map and and tell us what problem we have to solve because this is what story grid's about right solving problems the problem that we're facing now in the podcast is is this transitional before between overt into play so that you can covertly tell a story and covertly telling a story doesn't mean you're manipulating people to to get them to do something it's to enable an insight cascade because if you tell your kid certain things they're not going to listen to you until you tell a story about somebody who did the thing that they want to do and it didn't end very well or it it did end well those are covert stories that mix overt and covert and the way to get them is in this imaginal play space.

Where you get to go into your mind and generate simulations of possibility that you can use and so you some people even use the trick of like saying tim or sean they'll just literally use their name in in place for randall tim didn't like the fact that blah blah blah right and it's real and then then then you can do a switch and you just change the name after you've sort of played on the page or in your mind because it's one thing to play in your mind and another thing to play on the page and what's really you know you're flowing with gas when you're playing in your mind and you're taking dictation and so you're just banging out what's running in your mind in that imaginal space.

So that's kind of what i i always say the power of ten like play ten times in that space with those sort of constraints what and this is so we've we've established what the constraint here is randall has to confess there's something inside his mind that he cannot sit with any longer.

And he has to confess it.

And it has to be a part of the larger system in which he's a witness.

So he's witnessing and he's holding witness to his own.

Injustice he's done some injustice himself sorry to keep jabbering on but i'm trying to delineate overt analytical logical to covert descriptive experiential explanation that has the meaning embedded and the way to get from an overt to a covert and back again is in this imaginal play space so the overt narration is is when we hear directly from the author the COVID narration is when we witness the showing of interaction on the page or on the screen and it's the manipulation back and forth between those that flows the story because the overt narrator can push us in time very quickly whereas the descriptive covert narration is in dialogue and it's in the now.

Anyway i'll stop there.

I i want to get back to the question of what what this has to do with the format too because i think all of that is absolutely true for tim what you need to do is this as the next step in your story and i think last week we got to a place where you know what you have to you know that you have to connect with your avatar and i think for me the problem with the format is that we we go too far too fast and i think part of that is the pressure from knowing that we're recording every week and wanting to make it interesting and things like that and i think that we don't continually.

We don't continually apply the methodology overtly in the way that would be most helpful so like to me it would be to me what not you not i'm not saying that you don't apply it i'm saying that we don't apply it in the recording to me so like you send a draft what we should do i think is just start at the top of the six hundred twenty four and work our way down but sometimes we don't right sometimes we'll pick out a passage that's interesting to talk about or sometimes we'll we'll do other things and so so we don't apply top like from the not top down but like beginning to end all the time and i think leslie made a really good point at the end of last week's episode is that we can find these moments or create a structure in which to work through these moments by going through that methodology step by step and kind of create a box in which to in which to play and innovate and so we got there but i think that.

I think we got there in a way that's not replicable in the way that it would have been had we gone through in a structured way every time but yeah so so like my thing is that's what i meant by more prep is that or you know it might be worth it to do it live but then i simulate like oh if if i'm listening to the podcast and every week i come to it and these people are like well let's start with the five genre leaves i'm going to get really fast and so i have this tension between like what's interesting for the audience and that's cutting through to the most interesting part versus what's right to do in terms of the methodology and that's starting at the beginning and then and then we wouldn't get to draft so fast and we would say okay or maybe we'd we'd have one draft and we would still be iterating on it and we would say you know we get to the protagonist part of the six hundred twenty four and it's clear that you're not connecting with randall and instead of doing that five drafts in maybe we do it when we first look at it and then we get to the same place so that's that's my feeling about see i i.

Don'T know i still i still fundamentally disagree with that because i think that you i think that you believe that there's some sort of magical clean version of doing this and i don't think that exists like go back to when you guys were trying to figure this out a year ago like it was just chaos because you're like trying to figure this out as we go and it's like i feel like we have figured out a lot obviously made huge progress that was super helpful but i think that you i think you think there's some sort of magical clean version and i don't think that like i don't think that if we were not on a recording and we like went systematically through we could have figured out five weeks ago that you weren't you know like i think that this is the right way to do it which is like hey like you know we've looked at this this is what we feel we've applied a little bit of the methodology that we think is the most helpful and this is what we're landing on you didn't switch to the protagonist so go try to switch to the protagonist so i try that and i try that and then it's like oh the reason why you can't switch to the protagonist is because you not just because you don't technically know how to do it you also you're not and i don't think we would have found that without me just banging my head against it three or four more times so like i think that's the thing like that i like about the podcast is it is messy and it is kind of chaotic and like.

I don't think we.

I think the tools.

It'S like.

It'S like there if we're always pushing me to the edge of what i know how to do there's not going to be some magical moment where like we're applying the tools and methodology in such a perfect or you guys are in such a perfect way.

And honestly if we tried to do what you described i would like lose my fucking mind if like i had to like write a draft turn it in and then you guys do like a full six hundred twenty four analysis of the whole thing on top of all the other shit you got to do and so i got to like sit here and wait for you to do that and then we get on and we like systematically go through it where all three of you can read the scene and be like you didn't switch to the protagonist that's a problem and it's like you know i think that when we teach it the way you teach it in the guild doing it in a systematic way the way you do it is the right way to teach everything like you you don't want to teach it chaotically but i think.

I don't i mean maybe i'm wrong but i don't think the goal of all of the methodology is to try to create some sort of non chaotic like there's never going to be a moment where like i'm so good at writing and you guys are so good at editing that we won't hate each other sometimes or get angry or turn in shit and we don't know why it's not working and so we have to like you have to keep sending me back to try again unless i'm just like pulling a a jack reacher or whoever and i'm just writing the same book over and over maybe we could do that but like.

I don't know i like the chaos like i don't like it in the moment but like i like the chaos and i like.

I don't think we would i think we would move slower and make way less progress if we tried to do it systematically and and again this is why i don't think the sam is the person is i think i'm the sam it's me you guys show up every week and give me what i need that's the only goal and i think that is what portrays the reality to everybody and i think that's what people connect with and like i honestly don't care if people think it's too much or it's uncomfortable for them because they also like you say oshawn all the time is like show me what you've written that's world changing and then we'll have a conversation but it's like.

I don't know i i don't know i just like.

I don't i really feel strongly that there's not a clean version of this and what's really nice is you have a whole new structure of tools and like you you asked me how i experience it and it's like i have gotten more out of the last year than probably the previous six years combined because of the the you have formalized this kind of way of like pushing me and pushing me and pushing me in this way that's so like it's so much more like i know what to go home and work on as opposed to when we were staying macro all the time and then sean had to completely rewrite the threshing line by line to make it workable so it was publishable.

This is by the way i think this is really great because it occurred to me that it really goes to the first principles of what we're talking about in the guild and what we're talking about teaching writing and so it's about building up from the bottom up which is an incremental sort of hey try this yeah we're doing well let's go to the next one great we're doing well excellent so that's a buildup of relationship right and yet we can't build up relationship until we break down a masterwork so breaking down is looking at it from the top and then going all the way to the bottom that's what the six hundred twenty four does for us right so we start at the top at that five leaf genre clover and we slowly.

Step by step by step we break that big thing down into its constituent parts and then we want to build up from the bottom so in the podcast we have these great moments of buildup where tim goes i totally understand that that's great i'm going to fix that and then we have breakdowns right so sometimes we're building up and building up and then we have a big breakdown right and that sort of happened last week right and leslie kind of put her finger on it and said i don't know that this is helpful because this breakdown is is traumatic it's chaotic it's it's distorting and tim what you said right now was really important because what you were saying is we can't let the chaos out of the system.

Because the the chaos is required for insights.

So the insight that we're generating now about this podcast is that oh this is not about.

Teaching everyone in the world how to write no no no no this is about teaching tim how to write and to build relationship with tim with build ups and breakdowns so sometimes tim's going to break down sometimes we're going to break down i've i've broken down on the podcast a lot and then in that but being okay with the breaking down is what can build up the risk make the build up even stronger and this is exactly what our story grid logo looks like right build up breakdown build up breakdown you can't eliminate the breakdowns and make a full straight line to the top.

So i mean that's that's a theoretic concept but everything that we teach in the guild is about understanding the the buildups of enlivening complexity and the breakdowns of over overly chaotic or overly ordered so when i'm too ordered it breaks things down when i'm too chaotic it breaks things down but when we're complaining complex we get enlivening movement up and we build up relationship so one of the things leslie and i discuss discussed online is well it's you know the four of us really have tight bonds and relationships and we're operating from a place where we know that we can say certain things without hurting the other person's feelings because we know we're all we all are in good faith dialogos right all of us are trying to enabling each other to get better so we're not just here to help you tim we're here to enable each other different insights along the way and sometimes those insights come in the middle of the process and it's just i'm the first one to blurt out my insights right and i'm like well wait a minute that reminds me of chaos theory and everybody's like can we just stick to switching out the protagonist sean instead of talking about overt covert and play space but i can't help it because those are the breakdowns of the order that enable more complex understanding so that's that's my only point build up and breakdown are central concepts of story grid writing technology this is what we teach people how to do how to build up relationship between avatars and when it gonna when's it gonna break down and guess what you have then a value shift a value shift change yeah.

So.

Let me say i got two more things i want to say and then i want to hear leslie and danielle what you think at this point so the first is i feel like we made a promise to the listener at the very beginning of this seven years ago that is very important to me to keep which is we tell the truth about this process and i feel like if we take this process behind the curtain it breaks that promise if all we're putting out is the clean videos like the crime story genre or whatever else.

It'S like i think that's why people the people that have connected to us connect to us because we don't them because we're like.

Like there's so much out there about the writing process that makes it sound like all you have to do is fill in these blanks and then what it does the actual the actual harm it does is that like.

There'S an actual harm that's done that's worse than just it doesn't work because when people say that this works and they point to all these amazing works of art that have worked on this and then people try it and it doesn't work they feel like it's them.

And that's just not fair and so like to me.

This is hard first of all if i want to be a writer this would be hard no matter what the question is do we put it out publicly and i feel like i would be breaking a promise if we pulled this behind a curtain and then i magically come out with a book for fifteen months from now or two years from now that's fantastic or something.

So that's one big thing and the other is like the scene i wrote based on eyewitness my first draft was the best thing i'd ever written right i did connect with that character i didn't do the thing of switching to the protagonist because i couldn't figure out how to connect to that protagonist but i did connect with my protagonist and you guys were ready to just let me turn that into an entire book like like i've you you guys sean you know over seven years and then the other two of you over the last year have never come close to approving my first draft of anything and that was because we spent all the time breaking it down walking me through it getting me ready and all the work you know we we had done previously.

And.

Like that that was on the other side of you know nine months of breakdown that we did do offline while we were trying to figure out the process and so when i look at that i'm just like well i'll keep showing up and getting pummeled if that's what it takes because that's worth it to me and so again like if we want i don't care if writers come into story grid and they hear this podcast and they're like it's too much and they go back to all the other bullshit artists i'm fine with that i want them to show up for this and i want them to feel the pummeling because that's what it takes and it's like this is also the you know it's like this is the downfall of even as much as i love the book and i reference it all the time it's like.

Stephen king's on writing he forgot how hard it was like it doesn't read the way it actually existed for him when he was getting those rejection letters and it's like and he did tell some of that hard stuff but most writers when they talk about this they're just kind of like oh it was kind of magical and oh yeah it was hard and then now i'm amazing you know and i really think it's just because they forget how hard it was it's kind of like parenting it's like if if any if any parents actually could remember how bad it was with their first kid everybody would have a one child home you know and so it's just like so i want to document this because i will forget you know twenty years from now i'll forget how hard this was but it will stand as a reminder to myself and others how hard it actually is so now i'll stop talking well i'll just.

Follow up and i want to hear what leslie has to say i just got one more follow up and it's short so i just talked about build up and breakdown you know what that builds a bond binds so the binding of buildup and breakdown makes things better or worse and when you said the first draft that you wrote was the best thing you ever wrote that's enough for me and the proof is in the pudding the proof is in your deliberate practice in your courage and i think you're right i think the messiness of these approaches is important for people to see so they can relate to someone who is being pummeled because they are being pummeled so yeah it's disturbing to watch but it's also kind of like oh i'm not alone oh this is the way i feel holy cow.

So that's i i agree with you there's no reason to sugarcoat things and to give.

A perfectly like i think there's a time and a place for perfect broadcast instruction and i think you know the videos that we put out on the on the genres are really terrific because it enables people to see that we're we know of what we speak so this this bottom up process of learning how to write we didn't really i didn't think i needed to create this because as you said tim when i was in publishing in professional new york publishing there were so many gates before the manuscript would ever land on my desk that the line by line writing was solid and it only had macro problems and that's where the story grid started was a macro diagnostic tool to fix structural problems within stories that had solid line by line writing but since we've since learned it's like line by line writing is really difficult to learn so that's how we created the guild and that's how we're approaching teaching how to write specific sentences that can bottom up build up to a macro so i'll i'll stop there but binding breakdown and build up binds people together and so does breakdown because if you can withstand the breakdown in the relationship it fortifies the channel of relationship between two specific people or nodes or.

Whatever okay okay so that was a lot.

And i'm gonna there are several different things i want to respond to and i want to try to.

It'S.

Going to be messy so i'm just going to own that up front but but try to bear with me.

I.

Don'T think we should hide the messiness of the process but i do think we need to.

Make some adjustments so that we are following a process because.

We'Re.

This is not there is a feature list but the feature list is not going to get you and when i say you i mean any writer is not going to get the writer from having an idea oh i've got this cool idea to having a great story that really speaks to writers the feature list will get you from i've got an idea to something that provides an experience of escape but will not help the the reader transcend they will not help the reader solve their problems so it helps them escape their problems but doesn't do what story is fundamentally here to do which is to transform themselves into someone who can solve that problem in their own context.

So the process helps us do that and and following the process is really important.

So.

It'S not that does not mean it's linear it does not mean it's tidy but it does mean that we that it's important that we follow the process and it's it's yeah slow it's messy but it's it's really important and i would say that that draft that you're talking about where you did so well was one where you had.

Even if the whole six hundred and twenty four wasn't filled out it was pretty well fleshed out and the parts that that you understood pretty clearly i felt were the you know the who am i talking to.

Who'S the author who's the single audience member and what's the problem i'm trying to help them solve so what we discovered in that was that you were solving a different problem from the pattern scene so we wanted to pull you back in there constrain you to that that pattern scene because that's what we're that's what we said we're trying to do we want to help you tim iterate this pattern with your own creative essence.

So we're pulling back to the pattern but but then we didn't lock in that narrative device level so.

The model of communication that you're following another way to say it is what's the story you're telling yourself about the story you're writing that enables you to communicate it in such a way that you're sending the signal the message that you want to send the point you want to make to the reader clearly without a bunch of noise in the system because it's the the noise will get in the way of that of that signal every time right like when i'm reading something that's really noisy i experience it as pain which is why i sometimes end up talking about it like this where i'm like it sounds like i'm very angry because there's a part of that's like ah why won't you clarify this signal so.

So i it's not that we need to hide the process but we do need to tighten it up a little bit i think so that we know where we're going and what we're doing so we have a target and that we come back to it you know every episode what are we doing here why are we doing this what's the what's the step in front of us today we may go many different places from there but i think if we don't do that then we're going around in circles.

And so.

I think that that that will actually improve the experience for you help the thing help you move along faster but also make the experience better for the for the mass audience that is is.

Is also listening and and then the thing that i want to own about this process is that.

With the with the mass audience listening i pull my punches.

And i shouldn't do that because that doesn't serve anybody but i do do that and so that's the thing that i want to commit to going forward is i'm not going to pull my punches it may be messy and uncomfortable and for me and for everybody but i really want to if we're going to do this then we should do it and if we're going to do it then i want to follow a process because i think that's the most effective way that we're going to meet the goals that we're setting for ourselves and that means that everybody has to be committed.

And anybody can call anybody out on anything at any time.

So that's all i have to say for now yeah i.

I wanted to add to like something that i've realized about what i'm saying about the process because i also agree that the chaos is really important and that and i i feel like the process gets us to this place where we can have constructive chaos but like for me i think.

I think for me personally it's just more chaotic than i feel like that where i do my best work like i don't think that i'm bringing my best to you every week and that's part of the tension that i feel is that is that i just feel like with more process i would have more productive things to say to you and so that is and and whether that you know if we want to continue in the same vein like that just means that i need to spend a lot more time offline going through formally before and before we meet and and getting to a place where i can.

Where i.

Have that comprehensive view that i feel like i'm craving but that's my experience of it it's just is not that.

It'S.

It'S not that it's your problem like i feel i feel like it's just the setup is not enabling me to.

Or the way i've been participating in the setup i would say is not a hundred percent well i won't.

Be doing any preparation.

Beyond reading the scene because that's my role right my role is to be the blue zone right and it's interesting because we just sort of locked into what what we like where we feel comfortable which i think is important so leslie is in the transformational heroic journey two point zero zone she wants to enable sam to be able to solve her problems and transform her worldview such that she becomes a a general problem solver right and danielle's really about the the iteration of reduction of noise right so danielle really likes to and is very good at and makes her feel comfortable going to the words and saying is the is this noisy is this clear what's the signal what's the point how is this coming through and my my thing is about.

Really connecting to the universal story patterns that are generalizable across all people so all people experience build up breakdown and binding of of their lives and so what what we need to do as storytellers is to show people how buildups and breakdowns can occur in relationships and yet the binding of the people relating to one another gets strong as they get better at signaling to one another what they mean what they want what they need and how they're going about doing getting that target so leslie speaking of targets is is very on point because the target the super duper super position of target is having the ability to form relationships in and of themselves.

Because we're not very good when we can't bind and have moments of breakdown with people that we care about because that binds us together as a unit of like minded people in good faith doing their best to enable the growth of each and every one of us so yes you are the focal you are the focal person that we're focusing on to level up a particular skill called writing but all of us are participating in this growth dialogos in that we're all having our own you know insights that are enabling us to get better at doing this thing called storytelling so.

It'S messy yeah sure but i do think that your idea tim that the necessity of people witnessing four people in good faith doing their best with care in a dedication to find more truth and to create a beautiful expression of that care and truth in a work of art called a story is important because it's not a magical process it requires a lot of breakdown and build up and binding.

With yourself while you're creating and so you got to stick to it you got to know that pain as leslie says is going to come because you're going to write noisy stuff and it's going to hurt when you recognize the noise but guess what we're going to teach you how to recognize the noise so that you can tone it down and get the signal higher so yeah.

I agree about sort of laying out the target the target goal state for each podcast episode is x so we could start each podcast in the future with hey here's where we are the last episode our target was this and unfortunately tim did not hit the target so now we are going to explore how to enable him to hit that target better this time so what's the target the target is for tim to have a clear signal that randall is the most important person in this story and unfortunately that's not quite clear yet because we still feel like the detective is the most important and we tried to solve that problem using technical green stuff and we did it but it still didn't work so now we went up to the red level and now we're seeing well how is randall processing the information of his life maybe that'll help and that's where we got to this point where oh so so randall has cognitive dissonance meaning his actions are not in concert with with the way he thinks about the world so he's got a secret inside his mind that is getting so painful he must release it through his actions so he's no longer having a performative contradiction and all that means is you do one thing and you think another nobody feels very good when that happens because you're constantly trying to get your your actions to mirror your thinking you want your mind and your body to be in tune so that you can overtly move through the world and attain the goal states that you wish without having a lot of noise in your head saying that's not really your goal state be careful don't do that no no no right so that's sort of where we got to and from what i understand you haven't figured that out yet that's okay because it takes a while to get to figure that out what's the cognitive dissonance because then you've got to find you've got to map your own cognitive distance dissonance from your past and give it to randall and it takes a while to find that perfect little piece of cognitive dissonance because the secrets that we all have in our minds we like to keep them that way and so the great thing about storytelling is you can give away your secret through an avatar.

Right and so it's nobody will say this is tim grohl's problem they're going to say wow tim created that avatar who has that really weird secret wow how did he do that well.

Yeah we all know that we're all keeping sort of our own secrets so that's why storytelling as a process itself is a process of self revelation as much as it is self expression you have to do self revelation before you can do self expression and that's the wall we're hitting.

So i think the target goal of the previous couple of episodes was for you to nail randall as the protagonist and you haven't done it yet until you do you're going to be in lock you're going to be locked and so what we're trying to do is give you a transparency to opacity shift so that your framing of randall is not an it your framing of randall is now a thou and you can map your thouness onto randall so instead of seeing randall as a tool to generate a story that's awesome now you're seeing randall as a as a human being who has to release some terrible information that he has in his mind and how how much how far will he go how much personal sacrifice will he make in order to release that or will he hold it that's the big question.

So i hope that that sort of puts a perimeter around our target goal and where we stand in this project right now and it's also a means by which we can solve the riddle of how to iterate the ed mcbain masterwork pattern of a beautiful story called eyewitness.

Now the witnessing function is a very important thing that we all have and this story is about that very thing so.

Where i'm coming down is let's proceed and let's take danielle and leslie's advice here and make it more deliberate and discussive about and frame at the beginning of each podcast and end each podcast with well our goal state was this we got a little closer to it at the end or you know what we leaked a little bit we broke down on our goal state we need to get back on track and each week as long as we have this framing device i think we'll we'll be more helpful to you most importantly and to the broader mass audience too so if anybody has anything else to add there i invite them to bring it but i hope i somehow synthesized what what might be at play here and if i didn't please correct me well i.

Would like i think you did but i would like to bring it home a little bit more to make sure there's not something i could be doing so leslie and danielle when you're saying you'd like a little bit more process first of all i i agree with you so i.

I do agree with you and i can see that and i can also see how that would be more helpful for me too.

So because it is it is like.

Yeah i treat the podcast very selfishly and i think i don't think that will change so i always am filtering it through what this means for me so so i would like to hear like do i need to like.

Get you my scene earlier so that you will.

You will have time to look at it do i need to when i write the scene i need to make sure it when i turn it in i turn it in with the filled out six hundred twenty four.

Or like you know or you'll assign me section or like so let's say i i want to i want to iterate this.

You know what would be the most helpful to you so that when you show up when we show up to do our editing session that just happens to get recorded and put out on the internet would enable you to be the best version the type of you know show up the way you want to show up or right now i feel like what i'm hearing is the way we're running this you guys aren't able to show up the way you want to show up and for sean and i it's always been so off the cuff where like there again this was you know before you guys were on the podcast i would literally like sometimes send him a scene like thirty minutes before we were recording because i knew he just needed to like read it really quick and then he was ready and so.

And so like what do you need from me so that you guys can show up the way that you want to show up i.

Think getting yeah having a standard time and a little more time to review the the scene would be helpful i think that.

Also where you know that's just as a general rule but but then and then i want to have a six hundred twenty four that.

That.

Is the the the the model that we're using for the story and that you update it as needed as we go so we have one document with that and then we have one document that is the scene and you're always making changes to that document since it's a google doc we can keep all of the old iterations.

So or you can make a copy if you want to keep those iterations but working in one document and then and having having those be the central place we go.

So we can keep track of where we're at and where we've been where we are in the process i think those would be some really useful useful.

First steps i agree one hundred percent especially with the model six hundred and twenty four because and i'm really glad that you brought that up because.

My experience being at the green level is that i can see when things aren't working but.

My advice on how to.

How to or whether to change the scene depends on the target and that depends on the blue and red levels of the six hundred twenty four so to do my job effectively i need to know what we're trying to do and i think that's what's been missing for me is so like last week right we talked about well the protagonist still doesn't feel right and we had talked a couple of weeks in a row about well this is how you do it mechanically right this is how you do it and last week.

I was like it doesn't make sense to talk about the green level because your problem is in this scene that you don't like the protagonist enough like you haven't found your way to the protagonist so we need to focus at that red level and i think that's what i mean by.

You know figuring out each time what level we need to focus on because it's not always the green i don't always have i mean i can play the role of talking about the red of course or the blue or whatever but but the green stuff doesn't always have a role in the podcast that sometimes we need to be working at that higher level and not not trying to execute stuff so if i'm preparing.

Sometimes i'll be if we don't have that model i would be working at cross purposes i think because i would have to make assumptions about what we're trying to accomplish with the scene and then that might not be part of the overall vision using the other two levels so that's the most important thing for me is just knowing knowing that target so that i can help you execute effectively at that.

Green level we can start there as you were talking it started to feel like maybe and this is where like.

I'M trying to decide the best way to go about this because as you were talking it starts to feel like you know what i should turn this in you guys should look at it you guys should talk and figure out where is he missing the mark and then when we record again like if you if you were like my editor or again there's no podcast it's just this you guys would probably look at it and then somehow between the three of you be like this is what he needs to work on and then when you present it to me it would be less of you guys kind of feeling around in the dark to figure out what i should be working on and more of just delivering directly to me this is where you're missing.

It.

And so this is where.

You know i don't know maybe it should be every other week maybe it should you know because i'm thinking like i feel pretty comfortable that i could turn around most things most weeks within like two days.

You know like turn it in if we record friday morning turn in by monday morning but then does that give everybody enough time with everything else that you're doing can i just.

I think what you just came up with there between leslie and danielle is.

Something that i think will be useful in a generalized way what do i mean by that what we need is a spec sheet and the spec sheet is the six hundred and twenty four it's sort of it's like the fool's cap you know page for an entire novel but it's very specific to a scene so the fool's cap is extraordinarily valuable to a global editorial process we're talking about an editorial process about a single unit of story called a scene or short story okay so having the six hundred and twenty four and we all it's almost like you know when you go to college and you got to sign that paper that says you read the handbook and you will abide by the spec sheet of the handbook and very you know so it's sort of like you've got to sign off on the spec sheet so as long as everybody has signed off on the spec sheet then you can do comparison measurements right that are generalizable and if you have three people comparing and contrasting the story against the spec sheet then the three people can order the hierarchy of problems.

Right so as danielle was saying hey it's a green problem but not really because it's not a green problem because he's not following the spec he keeps changing the spec and i don't know what the spec is anymore i'm confused right and this happened when you delivered a scene that was really interesting and workable but it did not follow the spec at all.

And we didn't want to beat you up about not following the spec because you wrote a really good scene and so we didn't want to like bludgeon you and say tim you you're not following spec damn it so then you said hey i'm not very happy that you guys didn't bludgeon me for not following specific i want to follow spec so now we went back to it and now you're not following it again right so now we need the spec sheet and i can foresee in the future and you guys already do this in the guild right so you establish the spec first when you go through your scenes you walk it through in minute detail and you establish the spec of the scene and then you say okay here's the spec folks go iterate based upon this spec and leslie and danielle have signed off on the spec and therefore it's really solid and then they can compare and contrast what they did versus the spec so this is a very long winded say thing that i could foresee in the future having a and i know that leslie is working on something like this a workbook that has here's the here are the questions that you have to answer to get your spec down here's the final spec go iterate now compare and contrast and now we're going to do a hierarchy of problems don't solve green problems if you got a massive blue problem if you have no genre you're toast right because the genre is going to tell you the global value right if you don't have a red zone you're toast at the green level so you want to lock your blue make sure it's coherent with the red narrative device point of view right then go down to the green and then if your green isn't working very well then you say to yourself oh i've got to go back up here so that will tell me how to valence the language at the green but if you have no blue and red you can do all the green work you want but you're never going to get from here to there because you don't have your target value set you gotta lock your target you gotta lock your target because you need a spec to judge whether you're getting closer or further away from your target.

So i i think this was really really important because it establishes a better methodology a better process and we're all we're doing is taking story grid one point zero global macro stuff and we're applying it to the nuts and bolts of scene construction and we changed foolscap to something we call a six twenty four so we're not we're not changing story grid method methodology on the fly we are rejiggering it so that it can become a recursive operation across all levels of story and we take this all the way down to the beat level in the concepts of build up breakdown binding build up breakdown binding right.

So this is very very good because what you're establishing is a spec sheet for a scene you lock the spec sheet and then you iterate and you try to get as close to the target of the spec sheet which is located at the top.

In each iteration now what you can do is between danielle leslie and i we can do that hierarchy of problems so we tried to solve a green problem because we assumed you knew the target value and then you switched the target value on us.

Right because the target value is.

You know what what what's the ed mcbain thing.

Justice whatever justice is served when.

Forget the the thing about not revealing.

The better part of valid justice is served when discretion is the better part of valid that is the target value you are not going for that target value you are going for a different target value that's about i it i thou relationships which is a it's a moral or worldview target value so we need to lock you down in discretion is the better part of value valor you gotta iterate that we don't want to hear about how bad it is for certain members of society we went off the rails there because we changed the target value that's why there's noise in our system and both leslie and danielle are like we lost the thread here what's going on and the problem is you changed discretion is the better part of valor and we need to get back to that thanks for.

Listening to this episode of the story grid podcast for everything story grid related you can check out storygrid dot com if you want to check out the transcript for this episode any downloads for this episode or any past episodes you can go to storygrid dot com podcast as i mentioned in the beginning we've opened up registration for the new semester of the storygrid guild and you can see all the information about that at storygrid dot com guild along with that make sure you check out all of our books at storygrid dot com books and we're putting out daily videos on youtube instagram twitter linkedin facebook all of those places so make sure you look for storygrid and follow us there and lastly if you want to support the show you can do that by telling another author about the show and by leaving a rating and review review on apple podcast but thanks so much for being a part of the podcast and we will see you next week.