The 5 Commandments of Storytelling

Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. I'm your host, Tim Grall, the struggling writer trying to figure out what it means to tell a good story. Sean Coyne is going to join me soon. He is the creator of the Story Grid, the author of the book the Story Grid, and he has 25 plus years as an editor and he shares all of his insights with me so that you and I can learn together. In this episode, we talk about the five commandments of storytelling. We walk through what each of the commandments is and why every piece that he talks about has to be in every story to make sure it works. It's a really great episode. I know you're going to learn a lot. I did while talking through it with Sean. So we're just going to jump right in and get started. So, Sean, we finally reached that point in the Story grid where we have to talk about the five commandments of storytelling. So this is feeling like very biblical and rule based. So tell me why you call them the five commandments of Storytelling.

Well, for that very reason that it does sound very authoritative and dictatory because storytelling really does go back. The mother of all stories is, you know, the Bible is, you know, a great example of classic storytelling. And so the way we communicate as human beings is through stories. And that's kind of what separates us from every other living thing. So I use the word commandments because they are sort of, you know, in my opinion, they're holy, they're mystical, they're. They're things that are really part of our metaphysical life. So I wanted to use the word commandment to make the point that these aren't suggestions. These are not, oh, I'll take a little bit of this and a little bit of that and it'll be fine. No, you've got to really take these commandments seriously because if you don't, you're just an amateur. You're not dealing with reality, you're not dealing with the craft.

And they are that important. And it's really essential that you understand what they are.

So the first one we actually touched on a few weeks ago, we talked about how you have to have an inciting incident.

And so just say again, like what? Why is that? The first commandment we come to is that you have to have an inciting incident. Or as you put it, thou must have an inciting incident.

Okay, I'll use an example here. Okay.

It was a dark and stormy night. The wind came out of the west at 26 miles per hour. When the darkness hit Jim Smith, it was really dark, and the grass that he was standing on was wet, and the wetness was really wet. And I could go on and on and on and on with descriptive passages of nothing. An inciting incident, however, can be as simple as.

The last camel died at noon. Because that's a very active statement that says and implies that something has just happened that has upended the universe.

So the difference if you don't have an inciting incident, you're just basically describing. You're just writing exposition that nobody cares about.

So as we talked about before, inciting incidents can either be causal or coincidence. Causal means it was caused by some person doing something active to another person. Coincidence is something falls out of the sky or there's a snowstorm. The universe is behaving indifferently but upending the world of the protagonist or the group of protagonists. Those are the only two ways to have an inciting incident. And the other thing to remember about them is that you intuitively know whether or not.

You'Re cooking with gas when you're writing. And you intuitively know because you have an inciting incident. You start it. Usually people talk of, especially Hollywood, they talk of what ifs? You know, like, what if the president of the United States daughter was kidnapped? That's an inciting incident. Right. These are global high concepts that Hollywood, you know, this is.

The trade. This is what they talk about all the time. And a lot of people say, oh, I'm not Hollywood, I don't do high concepts. Well, you should think in those terms because what those high concepts are are inciting incidents. And the more interesting, like the high concept of the book that we, you know, went through over the Christmas holiday was the Martian. And the high concept was, what if somebody gets stranded on Mars? How is he going to survive? That's a great inciting incident.

Well, and you say that you have to have an inciting incident in every unit of your story. The beat, the scene, the sequence, the act, and the global story.

Yes.

So, I mean, obviously some of those are going to overlap.

Of course they are. And again, this is also about the whole Russian doll concept that I talk about a lot, which is the beat feeds the scene, which feeds the sequence, which feeds the act, which feeds the. The beginning hook, middle builder, ending payoff, which feeds the global story. So you can have an inciting incident for the global story that is also the inciting incident of your scene and also the inciting incident of a beat. And, you know, when I was writing the story, grid one of the, you know, you Talk about this a lot, Tim, and I can't agree with you more. And what you always say is the way to be the most creative is to put a lot of constraints on yourself. It's like you want to build that box around yourself so that you can find a way to get out of it. But if you don't have a box, then you're just sort of spitting into the wind. You don't know what you're doing. So the inciting incident. So when I was writing the story grid, I was thinking, oh, you know what would be really cool is if I could diagram entire novel from beat to scene, to sequence, to act. And people would literally see sort of the.

Pyramid that these things all build up to. And someday I will do that. But it's almost like obsessive compulsive to a degree that some people will really appreciate, but most people would find crazy.

But I may do that because I did spend maybe three days deconstructing maybe the first six or seven scenes of the Silence of the Lambs in this way. And just going sentence by sentence and word by word to look at the beat which feeds the scene is kind of fascinating. So this is all to say that you're correct in citing incidents. You don't have to have a unique one all the time. And intuitively you're going to know. I always talk about the scene as being the primary unit of storytelling for novels and screenplays, etc. And plays, basically all narrative. The scene is really the thing that people. Because we live our lives in scenes, right? There's the scene of you when you wake up in the morning going to the gym or taking a shower. You plot your daily life in terms of scenes, and we call them like internal checklists of things that we have to get accomplished in a particular day. But those, if you look at them, you say to yourself, oh, that's the scene where I give my son his evening bath. And there's always something that happens in your day that you're not expecting, right? So you have to shift your life based upon things that happen to you for good or for ill. And so that's why the scene, we all connect to it so easily because our days are made up of these little units of scenes.

Yeah. And when you say in, you say here that an inciting incident must. What it must do is arouse a reaction by your protagonist. So. So we have to have an inciting incident. But is there also good and bad inciting incidents?

Oh, sure. Yeah. There's, you know, it's like everyday life. Sometimes the inciting incident's fantastic, or it seems to be fantastic. You win the lottery or you get that great new job, or.

The woman that you're in love with says that she'll marry you. And then there are terrible ones too. Your dog gets hit by a car, you know, so, yeah, inciting incidents. And it's also a good idea to mix them up. You know, you don't want constant negative and you don't want constant positive inciting incidents. You want things that are, you know, dynamic.

Yeah. And that. So that leads to, you know, mixing it up and stuff. It makes, it leads to commandment number two. So you say that the conflict has to escalate, that the protagonist is facing.

Yes.

So does that mean it has to get like worse and worse and worse and worse?

No, not, not. Not exactly. What it means is that it has to get complicated, progressively complicated. Meaning.

You know, it's like.

It can, it can complicate positively and negatively. So, you know, when something happens, I'm just gonna try off the top of my head to think of some kind of scenario that, that I, that will explain this. Okay, say.

Say you wake up in the morning and you have a plan to go to the gym at five o' clock in the morning. You want to get it over with, so you set your alarm for 4:30 the night before. But what often happens is your alarm doesn't go off. For some reason you screwed up the way you did it. So it goes off at 6:30. So you wake up and you're an hour and a half behind schedule. That's a negative complication to your plan. And it's an inciting incident too. So what are you going to do? Do you skip the gym or do you rush to the gym and try and get it in before your 9 o', clock, your first 9 o' clock appointment?

No, you absolutely skip it. That's what you do.

Let's say you're crazy and you decide to, you know, run to the gym and get it over with. So when you get to the gym, you say to yourself, I'm going to cut my, my usual workout of 45 minutes down to 20 minutes. Do I do the cardio or do I do weights? And then you notice that the cardio, all the cardio machines that you like the best are taken. So there you go, you have to shift your want, you want to do cardio, but now you're going to have to do weights. So you do the weights and then as you're getting done with the weights you noticed, and you go into the locker room to get ready to go to work and all the water's out. Now, this happens all the time in Manhattan, by the way. So what you do, all the hot water is gone. So now you have to make another choice. Do I rush home and try and take a shower or do I go to my first appointment and hope that they don't notice that I haven't showered? So that's a negative. But then just as you're about to make that decision, the hot water turns back on. So that's a positive and things are getting better for you. So you do get the shower and. And then when you do get to the meeting, the guy doesn't show up on time. So you have a few more minutes to check your email and get everything straight and get your head clear before your meeting. That's another positive thing. So these are the kinds of things that happen to you every, every day. Now, you can't build a novel, an entire novel based upon these inane, you know, happenstances of everyday life because you're going to bore the hell out of your reader. But these are the things that you should think about when you're thinking about complicating progressively the day's events or the time periods, events of your lead character. You need things to happen for good and for ill, and they have to get worse or better as you can't go back. For example, I write in the book about a lot of people, and this happens when you're an agent or a publisher. You get submissions from people whose books start out really well. It begins like this. Jim Smith gets a job. It's his dream job, and it's fantastic, and it's a really good start to the narrative. And then he loses the job, and then he gets another job that's even. That's just as good as the other one. And then he loses that job, and then he gets another job. So you have the three, three similar things, complications that happen again and again and again. And a lot of writers will say to you, oh, well, the first job wasn't as good as the second job, right? So I did progressively complicate it. And the answer to that is, no, you didn't. You just used the exact same mechanism and change the parameters. Oh, it's a little bit better job. And I mean, that is not interesting to a reader to repeat or go back in escalation of tension. So you have to constantly be raising the stakes to these major movements in your story. So that there are climactic moments that change everything.

I guess when I hear the word complicate, that's bad. But I guess I'm having trouble wrapping my head around. So you said the stakes have to get bigger. So, like, the choices matter more and more each time.

Yes, exactly.

The choice between whether or not you're going to take a shower at the beginning of your story has to escalate to whether or not you're going to steal from your employer to be able to make your rent.

You know. You know, it's sort of where I'm going here. It has to. You can't. One of the ways that I.

Consequences of your decision.

Yes. So in the book, what I do is I come up with this sort of like the power of 10. And, you know, when I analyze a story, I'll assign a number like between 1 and 10 to the reversibility of the decision. Now, what the reversibility means is, is the character going to be able to be. Okay, can they reverse their decision? And what are the consequences if they can't? So can you reverse the decision? Okay, I think one example I use in the book is this. You're at a party.

Your friend is drinking too much, and you kind of have to make a decision. Am I going to take his car keys and not let him drive and save his life, possibly save his life, not only his life, but other people's life, or am I going to not have the courage to get into sort of like a verbal confrontation with the guy? Because drunks always think that they're fine, right? So no matter what anybody says, if they've been drinking and you say you've been drinking too much, and I don't think you should be. You're. You should drive home. A drunk is always going to say, no, I'm fine. Seriously, I'm totally fine. And they'll slur their words and they'll, you know, it's just what you do when you drink too much. That's why you should never drink and drive. That's why you should always, if you're going to a party, go with a friend and make sure you have a ride home. But anyway, the point of it is.

If that person goes and drives and gets killed in a car accident, you cannot reverse that decision. You cannot reverse the decision of taking the keys away. But.

A lesser decision would be, say, at first, you say to yourself, you know, I think he's only had, like, a beer. Maybe a beer and a half. I'm not going to confront him about it. But then, you see he has another beer. You can reverse that decision, right? You can say, oh, I see, he's already had another beer. You know, now's the time for me to go talk to him. So that's a reversible decision. The other one is irreversible.

And so, in general, at the beginning of my story, I start with reversible decisions and move closer and closer to irreversible decisions.

Well, you want to mix it up, and you also want to save those irreversible decisions. Those are the ones where the stakes are very high.

Right? So if the protagonist has to choose between saving his son or his wife, and that's in the second scene, and that's the worst decision he has to make in the book. That's a problem.

Yeah, yeah. But like, for example, William Styron didn't have Sophie make the choice between her daughter or her son at the beginning of the novel. I mean, you spend 400 pages, you know, reading that brilliant novel to discover what Sophie's choice actually was. He didn't just drop that bomb on page one. I mean, that's the climax of the entire novel. So these irreversible decisions, you. I mean, if you think of a great irreversible conundrum, use it for the major points in your story. Don't blow them early on. Yeah, you're going to hook somebody with an irreversible decision at the very beginning of the book, but save the really, really amazing ones for the climax of your middle build and ultimately the climax of your entire global story. You don't want an irreversible decision at the very end of your story because you know what will happen? People will be really bummed out. You're going to bum out your reader if they can reverse the decision at the very end of the story.

Okay, so you do want an irreversible decision at the end. Okay.

Yes, you do.

So. So when I'm progressively complicating the story, I'm. I'm constantly moving towards. I'm trying to say this in a way where I actually understand what's going on, because I feel like.

You. So at the beginning, we want to grab them with something. So, like, Back to the Martian that we went over last week, you know, an irreversible decision was that they left Mark Watney behind.

And that was.

Well, no, because they went back for him.

Oh.

Irreversible decision in the Martian is when Mark Watney lights the match to start the hydrazine drip. Okay, you can't stop the fire.

Well, but then the downside was much lower than the decisions he had to make later in the book.

That's right.

So is that kind of like the. Again, maybe I said already. But the consequences of the decision continue to grow and grow and grow. Yes, because the consequences of them turning.

They still have to be high. Right.

Like we talked about this in the Martian, there are two major explosions. The book, there actually might be even more than that. There might be. I think there's probably three or four. Now, the first explosion that is critical is the one where he discovers that he's been breathing oxygen into the air, too much oxygen into the air, and he does a miscalculation and he almost blows himself up at the very beginning of the book. Right. Now, the climax, one of the climaxes of. Of the ending payoff is when the captain discovers that the only way that she's going to be able to slow down the ship is to rig an explosion on the spaceship to stop the momentum so that they can slow down to pick up Mark Watney. That's an irreversible decision, too.

But it's at a much higher level because there are more lives at stake. Right, Right. So Mark's the only life at stake at the very beginning is Mark, and that's an irreversible, dangerous decision. That's actually the climax of the beginning hook of the story.

Now, very much later on, there's an explosion on that ship which is irreversible. That is a much higher level of stakes because six people could die as opposed to just one.

Right.

And it's a completely different kind of explosion. I mean, it's the same mechanism, but it's not like a new job. It's a completely different reason. Like, the one explosion is to generate water to make food. The other explosion is to slow a spaceship down. So while they're both explosions, they're different because of the stakes.

Okay. And so that's what kind of builds throughout the book.

Right.

Okay. So if those were opposite, where there was this major decision to, you know, blow up the spaceship to, you know, early in the book and then at the end was, you know, to get water, it would feel off. It would feel counterbalanced the wrong way.

Yeah, it would. It would feel like. And I'm sure you've had this experience. I've had it a lot. Where a book starts out like a bat out of hell and then it just fizzes into who Cares? You know? Yeah, I don't. I don't really want to give any examples? I really can't. I can't really think of one off the top of my head. And that's a good thing, because usually what happens in that is the minute it starts to fizz, you throw the book out, you know, you stop.

Yeah, Yeah. I started a while ago giving myself permission to stop reading sooner than later.

Yeah, there's just too much. Too much other stuff to read.

So you give the little buddy of commandment number two, and you say it's about turning points. Right. So every scene is. Every scene has to have a turning point.

Yes.

So talk about what a turning point is.

Well, the turning point is when.

Oh, you know what, Tim? I've got to think for a minute because the turning point and the climax are.

Kind of similar, and I'm gonna have to reference my own book. No, that's fine.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay. So here's the situation with turning points. Turning points are the moment when the scene and the polarity of the story shifts dramatically. So, you know, when we talk about polar values in a scene something like life to death, you know, the beginning of the story, the beginning of a scene, somebody's alive and then something happens, and they're either threatened with death or they die. That's a turning point. So it's that moment where things move drastically from the value of life to death. Now, I give an example in the book about. You know, there's a great scene in Zero Dark Thirty, which is that. That wonderful movie about.

Finding and assassinating Osama bin Laden. And there's a scene in there where.

The lead character, played by Jessica Chastain, is out to. She goes out finally, she's, like, sort of obsessively trying to find the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. And one night she's asked by one of her friends in the CIA to have dinner at the hotel in Pakistan, I think, and it's the only Western hotel around. So she reluctantly decides I should really make friends here. There aren't many women in the CIA. This woman's really nice. I'm gonna go. So, you know, the scene opens with the friend waiting expectantly at the hotel. And the setup for the scene for the viewer is like, oh, this is gonna be one of those really soft, you know, really nice scenes where two people get to know each other and it's gonna be kind of a girl talk kind of thing where they talk about the misogynists in the CIA and how tough it is. And so you're kind of as a reader or a Viewer, you're expecting a certain kind of scene. And so finally, Jessica Chastain arrives, and, you know, there's some tension, there's some conflict because the other woman had to wait for her. They decide to have a glass of wine, they start to talk, things are chilling out, and then, bang, there's an explosion. And that is the turning point of that scene. It's a complete reversal of the expectation of the audience in that we're expecting a particular kind of soft scene. And then all of a sudden, in action.

It completely changes the tenor of the scene. This is a scene that's now about life and death, and are they going to escape this, you know, the firestorm that comes off of this explosion? So the turning point there is the moment when that thing goes off. And that is an active turning point, meaning something happens.

That's one kind of turning point. The other kind of turning point is through what I call revelation. And this goes back to, you know, I think we were talking about a couple of weeks ago about one of your scenes where, you know, you wanted to get in all this information, all this exposition in your scene, I think, was on the boat. And one of the things I mentioned to you is Something that Robert McKee talks about is exposition as ammunition. Now, the way to turn a scene sometimes, and usually this is deep into the story, is to use a revelation of something that all the characters know, but the audience, the reader doesn't. And it's like an exposition fact. Like the classic example is from Chinatown, when Jake Gittis goes to confront the femme fatale of the story, Evelyn Mulray. He believes that she has kidnapped this young girl who was the lover of her now dead husband. So he confronts her and he says, who's the girl? And Evelyn Mulren. Mulrae says, she's my sister. And he slaps her. He goes, no, tell me for truth. And she says, she's my daughter. And he slaps her again and goes, no, that's not the truth. Tell me the truth. And she looks at him and she says, she's my sister and my daughter. And that completely not only turns that scene, it turns the entire story. I mean, this is the revelatory moment of the movie and its exposition as ammunition. We finally spin back and we discover that this poor woman was raped by her father, gave birth to her sister, and is now protecting her sister from the wrath and pedophilia of her father. And it makes that story just, like, grab you in the gut. So that's a revelatory Turning point that changes the complete tenor of the scene and the tenor of the entire story in a way that is so surprising but inevitable because once you think about it, you think about all the things that happened prior to that moment, it all spins back and you say to yourself, oh my gosh, of course. And that's what storytelling is. It's, you know, something that's surprising but inevitable, you know, well, can you give.

So I feel like it's easy in a way to come up with these kind of, you know, big examples, but, you know, with 60 something scenes in a book, not every one of them can be like, oh, she's my sister. And you know, no, of course. And so give examples of what smaller turns would be in kind of the in between scenes. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does.

Or am I asking the wrong question?

Well, no, here's a revelatory turning point that we talked about a second ago. It's the guy who's at the gym who discovers that the hot water is out.

That's a turning point.

Like, so that say that's leading to the point where he steps out in the street and gets hit by a cab. And if the hot water had not been out, he wouldn't have got hit by the cab. But in that previous scene, the water being out and him having to make a different decision, that's the turning point.

Yes, exactly.

Okay, so now why an active turning point?

That, that's like a revelatory turning point where you discover, oh, what I was expecting is not the truth. So you're confronted with a truth that isn't an expectation of what the truth will be. An active turning point is he goes to.

To take his shower and on his way, somebody trips him and he falls and is knocked unconscious. That would be an active turning point because the reader's not expecting him to trip and fall on his way to the shower, but there's somebody there who trips him. So that actively changes the polarity of the scene.

Does that make sense?

Yeah. Now why do you put Commandment 2 and then the little buddy of Commandment 2? So why do you have progressively complex every, you know, you have to progressively complicate. And then the little buddy is every scene has to have a turning point. Why do you put those two together?

Well, because in order to complicate, you need to turn it. So and the way to turn it is through revelation or for act or action. So it's a little buddy that helps you.

Like if you say to yourself, if I'm progressively complicating and.

I don't know.

How to do it, and I don't know whether or not these are being progressive or not. Then you ask yourself a question. Is this a reversible decision or an irreversible decision? How have I turned this scene? Is this scene being turned by revelation or is it being turned by action? Are these revelation or actions reversible? To what degree? So these are all ways of taking a look at the anatomy of your story, assigning sort of, you know, a power of 10 to the reversibility of a particular scene and its turn and seeing. Then you can say, oh, I've got. This scene is a 2. It's completely reversible. The stakes aren't that high. This scene is a four. So four after the two sounds like a good progression. The next one's a five, the next one's a six, and on and on and on. So you don't want to go from two to four to two.

Okay.

And would another question that you can ask your. Because these are. These sound like the questions you should be asking after it's all written and you're going back and looking at each and, you know, while you're writing, could you just kind of start out saying, okay, what if at, you know, halfway through this scene, what are people expecting it to do? And could I do the opposite?

Exactly. Exactly what, what, you know, what would a normal person listening to this story expect to happen next? Because you can usually answer that question because it's usually the first thing off the top of your head that you're going to do. So if you're, if you're planning your story and you've written a great scene and you go, oh, the next thing I'll do is I'll have the scene where the car chase happens. You can count on it that everybody who starts to read your story is going to expect to see a car chase in that next scene. So what you do is you don't do the car chase or you hide the car chase in another way. So if they're expecting, like they did in Zero Dark Thirty, if they set up a scene that looks like it's going to be an intimate dialogue exposition scene between two women, they, they, they zig. I mean, they zag it and they, they turn that scene into a very active, explosive moment. So these are ways to think about when you're writing that first instinct you have, you know, live with it and then say, how can I make this unpredictable? How can I innovate this so that it is not it's going to surprise the reader, but it's also going to be progressively moving my story forward.

Well, can you do the opposite where. Because we, you know, with the scene where it seems like it's going to be this kind of easy conversational scene and a bomb goes off. I mean, can you do the opposite where I'm, I'm thinking like a bomb's about to go off and then it fizzles, you know, I mean again, is that, is that maybe I'm getting too much in the weeds, but I'm trying to think of all the different ways.

Well, there's a great, there's a great moment in Star wars that, that describes that very thing. It's that moment when Han Solo is confronted by the, the guy with the scimitar, right. And the guy with the scimitar starts wheeling around that thing and he's 6 foot 9 and not Han Solo. I'm sorry, this is Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I was like, I was like, I don't remember that scene in Star Wars. You got the actor right though.

Yeah, I was thinking of Harrison Ford and I just. It's not Han Solo, it's.

Lynn. What's his name again? Indiana Jones.

Indiana Jones, yeah.

So yeah, the guy with the scimitar and then Indiana Jones looking and just takes out a gun and shoots him. And so it's, it's funny because you're expecting this big hand to hand combat and instead it's like, oh geez, yeah, I just shoot this guy.

Have you heard the story of that scene?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, tell it again.

Okay, so he, he's got, is it, he's got some kind of stomach bug because they're out in some country and he doesn't the foods messing with it, something like that. And so he's been really sick. So it was, it was supposed to be this whole scene where he pulls out his whip and he does this like big fight thing where you know, he's fighting the guy with the sword, but he felt so bad that he just as a joke took out his gun and you know, shot the guy. And it was so funny. They left it in the movie. They ended up putting it in the movie.

I love that. That's, that's why Spielberg's such a genius director. You know, he always finds that little way of tweaking the action either through a point of view shot or something that is unexpected.

Did you ever read that?

It came out like last year, the year before that. They found a recording of Spielberg actually coming up with Indiana Jones. Did you read that?

No.

Wow. I'll have to. If I can't find it, I know a buddy that'll have it and I'll put it in the show notes. But it's really fascinating because they were talking about like, well, he, he can't, you know, he can't be perfect. He's got to have these things. And like, maybe it'd be cool if he carried around a whip. You know, that'd be cool. And it was this look at like, oh, you know, the, the magic gods don't come down and just download this into Spielberg's brain either. No, he actually has to work through and come up with this stuff because you know, you have this idea of like the even, you know, that character is so perfect as well.

And that, you know, it just kind of, it seems like it's just so. Again, I was having a discussion with a friend a while ago and he was talking about, you know, he makes films and he said, you know, the problem is that the film people think it's easy to do this. And I said something like, you know, I think that's the mark of becoming, you know, being doing something. Well, that from the outside it looks easy.

Yeah.

You know, so you look at Indiana Jones, you're like, of course he's this way, but you know, to actually hear Spielberg and I forgot who he's having a discussion with, actually banter back and forth and like form. This character is really interesting.

Yeah, I mean that's, that's an example of a story that it feels like, oh yeah, I know this story because it's so familiar and yet so innovative. I mean those are, what he did is he took the beauty of those old serials from the 1940s and he, and he twist and he put a new spin on it and he got a great, you know, lead character and he added that sort of three headed siber, you know, that three headed villain of the Nazis and oh, it was so good. That's such a great movie.

Yeah. Oh man, it makes me want to go watch him again. I know, I know.

I want to go watch it now.

So let's, so let's keep going here. So that's where two commandments in. And your, your third commandment is thou must have a crisis. So, so talk about that a little bit.

Well, the crisis is it's the deliberation moment. It's the deliberation where.

The, the lead character or the character that you're featuring in the particular scene has to face a very Dilemma. And I always boil down the crisis into a question. And the question is between irreconcilable goods or the best bad decision. So.

When you are moving toward.

You'Re beginning at a, you're beginning with an inciting incident that throws the lead character's life out of balance and it progressively complicates to the point where they have a crisis question that they have to answer. You know, a while back we were talking about Kramer versus Kramer and the crisis question that he faces early on in the story is do I continue on my professional path and become a big shot CEO of an advertising agency or do I take a lesser job so I can spend more time with my kid? And so that's a best bad choice situation. From his point of view, if I don't pursue the big job, not going to feel very self fulfilled perhaps. And if I don't spend any time with my kid, my kid's going to feel abandoned. So there are two bad situations there. If I choose for myself, my kid suffers. If I choose for my kid, I suffer. So you know, that is a crisis. And the choice that he makes is the choice that, that shows his character, his active choices show who he is. It's not what anybody says, it's what they do. So the crisis is a crucial moment. And you have to be very clear in your mind. You don't have to explicitly, you know, have dialogue. I mean, you never hear in the movie Kramer vs Kramer in the book, oh, do I do this or do I do that? Let me think. You know, they don't do that. It's implicit in the setup of the story. So, you know, there's a moment and that's where the turning point comes in. You know, it brings in the boil of the revelation or the action that forces that choice on the character. They, they're confronted with the crisis. So I hope that's so again, there's irreconcilable goods and there's best bad choice choices. And a lot of people get confused by these. And my advice is, you know, you can look at any situation in one of two ways. You can look at it as a best, you know, a best bad choice situation or irreconcilable goods. It just depends. But basically somebody has to lose, somebody has to lose something, somebody has to win something and the other person has to lose. So in the Kramer versus The Kramer, he believes that he's losing when he makes the choice to take a lousy job so that he can pick up his kid at school.

And the kid wins because now he's got his dad picking him up at school and not just a nanny.

So in that Zero Dark Thirty example, the bomb going off would be the turning point. And then what she decides to do next is that the crisis, the crisis.

Of that situation is what do I do now? Do I run for my life and forget about this newfound friend? Or do we join? Do I try and help her get out too? Do I help other people who are in this cafe who just were hit with shrapnel? What do I do? What's the crisis? What's good for me? What's good for other people? What choice am I going to make? And so what, the choice that the two of them make is that they help each other out.

Together.

They find the way, the passageway out, and they help other people get out too. So that crisis situation is all about do I take care of myself first or do I help other people first? And so the choices that those two characters make tell us about who they are. These are two women who are, you know, they're going to fight the world together, they're going to find the way out together. And so that active choice of the blow up of the hotel, it shows who those women are. So all that talk, you know, that we were expecting at their dinner, the talk doesn't matter at all, right? They could say, oh, well, you know, I really just have to take care of myself and my own career when that bomb goes off. The two of them get to work and they help each other get out.

And that's where we've talked about how.

You see who a character is by what they do.

Exactly. And a lot of people love to put down words and dialogue and exposition and say he wasn't the kind of man who would do this. Don't do that. Have, have them actively make choices and have those choices show the reader who they are, not tell them who they are. I'm not the kind. You know, another example I always talk about is years ago there was a hockey player. I forget who it was, but he was brought up on charges by his, by his wife or his companion for spousal abuse. And, you know, it was all over the news and there was photos of the poor woman had, you know, bruises all over her. And so he's, he, he does this press conference and he says, the first thing he says is, I'm not the kind of man who beats his wife. And it's like, no, you are. You obviously are the kind of man who beats his wife because there's evidence that shows that he is. So he doesn't, in his heart of hearts, see himself as the kind of person who would hit his wife, but in actuality, he is. His actions show who he is, not his words. Because we're all liars and we all think we're different than who we really are. It's our actions that speak for us. I can say to you, you know, Tim, I'm really courageous. You know, I'm not. I afraid of anything. But, you know, if. If an alarm goes off and I'm the first guy to run out of the movie theater, who's who you think is all that courageous? I can say that until I'm blue in the face, but my actions speak louder than anything that I said. And that's such an obvious point. But you have to remember this as a writer, because a lot of times we think that, oh, well, I had the character say that he stands for justice.

But that doesn't mean anything. You know, a lot of people say, I stand up for justice. And they're the first ones to run when any kind of injustice happens. They're not going to stand for justice if it means that they're going to have. They're going to lose something for that.

So stringing these together so far, we have the inciting incident that happens at the beginning, and that's what throws. And so I'm going to look at the scene. So we have an inciting incident that throws something out of whack, and we have to. And the progressive complications are basically me trying to get. Get back what I lost with the inciting incident.

Yes. We don't like to change. So we always come up with these strategies that will get us back to equilibrium. Right. When we can't get the shower, we think of, well, when am I going to shower later? You know, how am I going to get back to equilibrium? I like to shower at least, you know, twice a day. I like to shower in the morning and then after I work out in the afternoon. And if I miss one of those showers, I try and make up for it. And if I don't get to have that shower, I don't feel right.

Right.

I want to get back to equal delivery. Yeah, go ahead.

So. So almost sounds like these progressive complications.

They build and they build until the turning point is almost like, I can't take this anymore. Something has to give. So.

The progressive complications build towards this point where it's like, look, something happens that finally puts me over the edge where I now am facing A decision that I have to. To figure out what I'm gonna do. So I've been thinking about the rewrite of my scene on the boat where the protagonist and the boat captain are arguing over whether or not to go back. And they keep kind of bouncing back and forth on this thing, and it keeps getting complicated and more complicated. And then the wife walks in and forces a decision, and that's the turning point. When she walks in.

Yes.

Okay. And then that leads us to commandment number four, which is the climax. So there has to be a climax where there's an active answer to the question raised by the crisis.

Yes, exactly. The climax is what they do, the decision they make, and how they actively make that choice. And a lot of people get confused by this because sometimes you have a character like Hamlet who actively chooses not to do anything.

Meaning that they refuse to choose. And this is strange, but that is a choice. That is a choice that says something about the character.

It shows their character. Their inability to make a choice is a choice. So, you know, that is a very important point because, you know, if you're going to make that choice as a writer, to have one of your characters refuse to make a choice, that's a perfectly valid decision. But, you know, you need to know that you've made that choice. Because if you just, you know, skip it or it's out of character for something that you're trying to create, long term, it's going to feel weird and it's not going to resolve the scene in a way that's organic and feels correct.

So that's a little in the air. And it's hard for me not to come up with specificity, but I mean, the whole play, Hamlet, is a process of this guy refusing to confront his stepfather who murdered his father. You know, he's supposed to go and, you know, get some vengeance, man. You know, take out that guy. He killed your father, and he took your mother away from your father. Go kill a guy. But the whole play is about him. I don't know. Should I do it or shouldn't I do it?

Yeah.

So I'm kind of getting stuck because. So the. The fifth commandment is that you have a resolution. And those are the five parts of the story. Now we have the inciting incident, the progressive complications, the climax, climax, crisis, and then the resolution.

Yes.

So you're saying that every part of your story has to have that.

Yes.

So what about.

Because we talked before, like, cliffhanging. Right. So there's this one author I love. I've mentioned before, his name's Brent Weeks. And one of the reasons I like it so much is he always, like, so many of his scenes end in, like, a cliffhanger. And to me, the cliffhanger is reaching the crisis and then stopping.

Yeah, but he picks up later, so.

Right, so he picks up later. But so. So then it's out of order now, though. Right. So then you have climax, resolution, inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis. If you ended another cliff, I mean, does that make sense? Like, that's what I'm asking is like. So if you're saying every scene's got to have all five pieces, that's your commandments. But if my scene has a resident, you know, or inciting incident, progressive complication and the crisis, and then ends. Or am I thinking too literal about what a scene is?

It doesn't end. It doesn't end. You're. You're basically what you're talking about here, here's. Here's the structure of a cliffhanger. You're correct. You have an inciting incident. It progressively complicates to a crisis. These are like, you know, Batman scenes. You know, is Batman going to get out of the. The quicksand before the, you know, before he dies? And these old Batman shows, when I was a kid, they would always end on a cliffhanger. Now, the next episode would be.

The climax from the previous scene and the resolution how Batman got out of the quicksand. And then it resolves. He gets out of the quicksand, and now he's going to go chase the Riddler. So all that is is an editing technique. And you can do cliffhangers if you have multiple strands of story, if you have subplots. So a lot of people do, you know, like, one of the things I suggested in your story is to use the technique of time. You know, you have a front story and a backstory. You have, say, a sole survivor of a terrible tragedy who's being interviewed by, you know, the police department or her psychiatrist or whoever. And so use the narrative device of sort of this interview. And this is what true detective did so well in that first season. Reason is that you use that narrative device, and then you can set up cliffhangers in that particular, you know, interview sequence and then flash back to a previous time period or flash forward the usual suspects. That's another example of this technique.

So when you're saying scene, that doesn't mean the scene can't be interrupted. That's correct.

Okay.

I guess I'm being extremely literal and What I'm like, a scene is like chapter one, that's a scene, and then chapter two is the next scene. So you're thinking basically, now what a scene is, is anything that has those five pieces.

Yes.

Okay.

And, and it, it has a linearity to it. You know.

There'S a beginning and there's a middle and there's an end. And the beginning is. Is the inciting incident the middle, or the, or the progressive complications leading to the crisis, which goes to the climax. And then the resolution is the ending payoff, what happens after the active climax. So resolutions.

You know, they're really, really important to have. And for example, like we talked in the Martian about the Martian at the end of the story, you know, he. He has a moment on the park bench or something like that, right, where the, where the kid comes and asks him if he's ever going to go back to Mars. And you said, you know, I'm not really sure why he had that. Well, you needed to come down from the climax of the, of the story in a way that, that settles you as a reader. You need to know, okay, he's back on Earth. He's reflecting back on what happened to him. He says he's never going to go back. Great. Now I'm. Now I've metabolized the story and I can move on with my life. And so those resolutions are really important because if you just end on the climax and the action, there's a certain sense of I don't know what's going to happen. So the resolutions are important because it helps. It's necessary for the reader or for the viewer to get an end to the anxiety. It's a way of coming down from the sugar high of the story.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. I hope you enjoyed walking through the five commandments of storytelling alongside me and that it helps your writing become better than ever. If you missed last episode, you're going to want to go back and listen to that. That's where we take the movie the Martian, the book the Martian and the book the Christmas Carol and run it through the story grid method. It was a lot of fun. Make sure you go back and listen to that one. As always, we can use your help with the show to continue to provide it to you for free by just sharing it with your friends. We love doing this every week and we love sharing it with you, so please spread the word with other writers. So any Facebook groups, you in email lists, you're on writers that you know that you think will get a lot out of this, please pass along to them. If you want to ask any questions that we can answer in future episodes, you can find us on Twitter @StoryGrid. Also, you can leave a review and a rating inside of itunes. That helps the show get out to more people. Also, if you don't do anything else, make sure you visit storygrid.com Sign up for Sean's email list. You want to make sure you don't miss anything that he comes out with. All right, we'll leave you there and we'll see you next week.