The 5 Commandments of Storytelling (Revisited)

Hello and welcome to the Storygrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is a creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, Sean and I start diving back into some of the basic core principles of Storygrid and. And we start with the five commandments of storytelling. I think that's always a great place to start when we're talking about Story Grid. So I get Sean to go back through, talk about these fundamentals and hopefully help you apply them to your work in progress. So I think it's a great episode. It'll really help your understanding of these core principles of storygrid. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, it's been a couple years since we started the podcast. I've come a long way.

And some of these ideas that we've talked about, we either made complete episodes about or of course we've talked about ad nauseam, off and on, on the show through different episodes. I'm kind of wanting to circle back around to them now that I feel like I have a better understanding. And I went out to, I have some of my own questions. I went out to some people in the StoryGrid community to ask questions. And I want to start with just talking about the five commandments of storytelling and see if we can drill down into some questions I have, and some common questions I think people have as they try to apply the five commandments. Because so many times I feel like this stuff, because I know this is true for me, which means I'm sure it's true for so many of our listeners. We're like, I hear you say it and I think I got it. And then I go to actually apply it. And I'm like, I don't know what, I don't know what to do. So first, let's just start with what are the five commandments? And how do you kind of see them as applying to storytelling?

The five commandments are the things that everybody intuitively already knows. These are the foundation of every story from a joke to a 25 novel epic. So the five commandments, there's the inciting incident. The inciting incident is a thing. It's a cause coincidence that throws the life of a character or characters out of balance. So hurricane comes. That's a Coincidence throws somebody's life out of balance. You got to put wood up on your windows, you've got to get shelter, etc. So it throws somebody's life out of balance and they make a change. They have to react to the inciting incident. A causal inciting incident would be something that is caused by another person. You come home and your wife tells you, I've had enough, I'm leaving you. And she leaves. That's a causal inciting incident that completely upends the characters or your life, you know, is completely out of balance at that point. And so the inciting incident pushes a character into trying to get back to the place they were before. So it upends their life in a way that makes them yearn to go back to quote, unquote normal. So that's the inciting incident. That's the key thing that starts every story, crime story, somebody's murdered or the jewels are stolen. That's the inciting incident of a crime story. Okay, the next thing, that's the first commandment. You must have an inciting incident. The second commandment is you must progressively complicate the story. There have to be complications that get progressively more and more difficult or, you know, more and more difficult. You know, I have a whole chapter in the book about this. But a progressive complication would be something like this, the hurricane. You know, a guy hears about a hurricane imminent, so he runs to his shed to get some two by fours to put up some wood. He finds the two by fours, but he can't find any plywood to cover the window. That's a progressive complication. What's he going to do now? So he looks around and he finds an old ping pong table and he says, oh, I'll just cut up this ping pong table to make sure, you know, I cover the window. So he gets out his saw and he cuts the ping pong table and he's got his two by fours. He goes to one of his windows and he discovers that his son has fallen out of the window and his son has now screaming on the ground. That's another progressive complication. He can't fix the window until he tends his son. And it's a serious complication, right? It's bigger than not having plywood. His son is hurt, so he runs into the yard. His son is lying on the ground, he's screaming his head off, and it looks like he's broken his leg. So now he has to solve the problem of the broken leg before he can solve the problem. Of the impending hurricane, and on and on and on. So that is what complications are. Now, the key thing to remember about them is that you don't want to repeat the same complication. You don't want the same level over and over and over again because it's boring. Right? If the guy goes into the garage and he discovers he has no plywood, and then he discovers he has no nails, oh, what am I going to do? I'm going to get some nails. Oh, and then his saw doesn't work. Those are all similar complications that are boring. But when his son falls out the window and breaks his leg, that's a completely different complication. That's at a much higher level of dramatic, you know, difficulty. So complications slowly, slowly build or quickly build, depending upon the story, to the ultimate complication, which is called the turning point. The turning point is not a commandment itself, but sometimes I think I should have had six commandments, because the turning point is really, really important. The turning point is the complication right before.

The crisis question comes to the mind of the character or the characters. So the turning point shifts the value of the scene and makes it move from being safe to being in danger. So in the case of the guy and the ping pong table and the son with the broken leg, Let me try and think of a turning point. Okay, so now after the son breaks his leg, the man knows he has to get his son to the hospital, but he also knows that if he doesn't cover up the windows, his entire house is going to be destroyed. So that brings up a crisis for the man. Right? Yeah.

I'm thinking through.

Yeah, go ahead.

No, no, no. So is the turning point the progressive complication that finally kicks the situation into an actual decision? Right. So, like, it's almost like the person, you know, the protagonist is going in, the inciting incident kicks them into motion. They're moving in one direction.

But things keep complicating. And the complication that finally causes the person to have to make a decision is the turning point. That's just another progressive complication. It's just the one that, like, once it's like, okay, I can fix this, I can fix this, I can fix this. My son falls out the window. Okay? I can't do both things now. I have to decide. And now that kicks it into the crisis.

That's correct. That's a really great point. That's why I think, because one of.

The questions we got is, why isn't the turning point its own commandment? You said sometimes you think it should be. I feel like the turning point.

It's the final progressive complication before the crisis. That's what causes it.

It's the thing that gives rise to the crisis.

Now, so we've talked about. So these things we use the. What are the dolls that go inside each other?

The Russian dolls.

Yes, Y dolls. So these five commandments apply to, you know, every level of storytelling. So beats scenes, acts. Do you call that a. Is that part and then the book itself, the full book. So how do I feel like I get a little squiggly on the progressive complications? I understand them in a scene. Like what you're describing is a scene. Right. You know, but how do I consider progressive complications on the book as a whole?

Okay, well, the way to do that is to think globally. So I'm going to take a leap of faith here before I do to explain that there are three other commandments that I need to go through. There's the crisis, which gives rise to a question. And it's one of two kinds of questions. The best bad choice, meaning do I sacrifice my property to safeguard the leg of my child, or do I let my son writhe in pain while I safeguard the property? Which one is the one that the character is going to choose? Now, everybody always says to me, well, you never talk about characterization. And how do you get characterization involved in story grid? And the answer to that is by the actions that the characters make. Characters. Actions define who they are. They can say whatever they want. I mean, this man who's. Who's dealing with the hurricane, he might say, you know, family is the most important thing to me. And he could say that on and on and on and on. But if he chooses to put up that ping pong table on his window while his kid is screaming, the action speaks louder than the words. Right? It's actually not true. So the. So the best bad choice is you pick the thing that is the least bad to that character. The other one is irreconcilable goods. Now, the thing about these two different things is you can look at the situation from either lens. Irreconcilable goods would be, oh, it's good for me, but it's not good for somebody else. Do I choose what's good for me and not good for somebody else? Or do I choose the thing that's good for somebody else? So just looking at this crisis, the man could say to himself, it's good for me to save my stuff inside my house. It's not so good for my kid. Who's screaming. So that's an irreconcilable good choice as well as a best bad choice. So some people say, well, you know, I don't see any irreconcilable good choices. And the thing is, it's the way you look at the situation from the point of view of the character now. So that's the crisis. The next one is the climax. Now, the climax is the thing that the character chooses to do. It's the action that the character takes after making a decision about the crisis. So the guy goes and he picks up his kid and he rushes him to the car to get him to the hospital, and he abandons, you know, saving his property. That would be the climax of that scene. The last commandment is a resolution. The resolution is the thing that happens after the climax. How was that action? How did that affect the world by taking that action? So the resolution would be either the kid has to lose his leg, which is even more progressively complicated. It resolves the issue, or he gets a cast at the hospital, or it remains unresolved and becomes the inciting incident of the next scene. As he's driving, he gets in an accident. Now, not only does his son have a broken leg, but. But he's in an accident. And you can see how this can, you know, keep moving and moving and moving, and you're driving. More and more tension in the audience because they will keep asking themselves, what's going to happen next? And that's what you want to do. You want to create these moments so that your reader is constantly asking themselves, oh, my God, I thought something else is going to happen. And this happened instead. Okay, so those are the five.

So let me try to, like, say this. So the inciting incident knocks the character out of balance. Progressive complications keep the character out of balance until they reach the turning point, which is the final complication that gives rise to the crisis, which is the question, what is the character going to do in this situation?

The answer to the question is what the character does. That's the climax. So the crisis is the question, the climax is the answer. And the resolution is what happens as a result of the character taking that action.

Yes. Now.

Just to be super, super clear about it, some people will send me a scene and the character chooses to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead of a tuna fish sandwich. And they asked me if that scene works. So the crisis is, which is better, tuna fish or peanut butter? Now, is that really a high stakes, conflicting, difficult element for a character to take? No not especially, but sometimes you need these, Lully. And the other thing is that there has to be a clear value shift in a scene, meaning at the beginning of the scene in the hurricane, he's in danger. At the end of the scene, he's even in more danger. So it goes from a negative to a double negative. And that works. So it doesn't necessarily have to go positive, negative, or negative positive. It can go from positive. Oh, I just found a quarter on the sidewalk to a double positive. I'm going to put this quarter in the slot machine. Oh, my gosh, I just won $3,000. So positive to double positive works, too. Now, you don't want to have your scenes going negative, double negative, double negative, triple negative, triple negative, quadruple negative, because it doesn't seem realistic to the audience. So you want to alternate your scenes in their valences so things move from a negative to a positive, a positive to a negative, a negative to a double negative, a double negative to a positive, and so on and so forth. Just to get back to that question that you mentioned earlier, Tim, about understanding progressive complications leading to turning points in terms of a scene. But it's difficult to consider that in terms of an act or even a global story. I'm going to take a leap of faith here and hope that everybody has seen the movie the Godfather. Have you seen it, Tim?

Yeah.

Okay, so the Godfather is about a ton of different things, but if you want to look at it from the prism of Michael Corleone, who's sort of the central protagonist, he begins the story as someone who. Who has rejected his family. And he comes home and he's got his girlfriend with him. He's an army hero, and he goes to, you know, the wedding of his sister because, you know, he's a good son. He doesn't agree with the family business, but he's going to show up and go to the. To the wedding because he's a good kid. So slowly his life progressively complicates. The inciting incident for Michael is when his father gets shot in the street. So that upends his life, right? He's on this path. He's going to marry Kay, who's his nice, you know, Waspy woman. He's going to settle down, probably in New Hampshire. Bang. His father gets shot in the street. Now his life is out of balance. That's the inciting incident of the Godfather in terms of Michael Corleone and generally the entire movie, too. So then he decides, oh, my gosh, I better get home. And See how my father's doing. He gets home and he discovers that his father was the victim of an assassination attempt. So that's progressively complicating his life. So Michael has to say to himself, oh, my gosh, people are trying to kill my father. What am I going to do about it? Well, I'm just going to hang here for a while. My brothers are going to take care of it. Okay, so he. That's a progressive complication. What am I going to do? My brothers will take care of it. And he sits there a little longer, and he discovers his brothers are kind of screwing up. And his father's supposed to have guards at his bed at the hospital because somebody's going to try and kill him there too. Geez, you know, the guards are away, and oh, my gosh, now the counselor to the family has been abducted. He's being held hostage. What's Michael gonna do? He loves his father. He has to make a choice. His life is getting progressively complicated. His choice is, you know what? I'm gonna go to that hospital. I'm gonna protect my father. So he goes to the hospital to protect his father, and he discovers there aren't any guards there. So he gets his father in his bed, and he wheels him to a different room because he thinks, oh, my gosh, the bad guys know which room he's in. If they've gotten rid of the guards, I better get him in this other room or he's going to get shot. And he does that. And on and on and on and on. These little progressive complications that force Michael to make more and more choices and more best bad choices, more irreconcilable good choices, until he eventually decides at the critical moment at the end of the first act of the Godfather that he is going to kill the men who tried to kill his father. And he has changed from someone who wants nothing to do with the family business to. To. To becoming a martyr. Martyr to the one who gets revenge. So if you look at the arc of that whole first act of the Godfather, you can see these moments, and. And it reaches this turning point. The turning point of the Godfather is when Michael's in the Italian restaurant, and there's Clement, not Clemenza, just the bad guy who. Who met with them, who wanted to run drugs, and also the dirty lieutenant. And Michael's in the bathroom, and they've hidden a gun for him. And there's this moment. The turning point is, oh, my gosh, what am I going to do? Am I really going to go through with this, am I really going to kill these guys? And he does. He makes the choice. The climactic moment is he decides to kill those two men and his life will never be the same. That is a point of no return for Michael Corleone, that he will never be able to go back. He's never going to be able to settle in New Hampshire with, you know, the WASPy woman and live a nice, comfortable middle class life. He is now on the road to becoming his father. And he does assume the role of his father by the end of the movie. So if you're Francis Coppola and you're Mario Puzo and you're trying to map out these scenes, and you've got Mario's, you know, novel there and go, well, what should we cut? This part's not important. You know, this. All this backstory about the woman who's having an affair with Sonny. We can cut that out. What are the major progressive complications of this story? How do I get from A to B to C to D? So to look at the global story in terms of those five commandments is a great idea, too. And if you're having trouble in each of the individual sections, the acts look at the five commandments. What's the beginning of my beginning? Hook. What are the progressive complications of my beginning? Hook. What's the crisis of my beginning? Hook. What's the climax? What's the resolution? The resolution in the Godfather is Michael has to go to Italy. He has to exile himself for a period of time until such time that he will be able to return to New York, but he has to be exiled. That's the end of Act 1. Michael goes to Italy, and then the war begins between the five families. I mean, just watch the Godfather. I mean, that storytelling in that is so crisp, clear, defined, brilliant. And all the characters make actions that define who they are. So that's the way to look at it in terms of the bigger unit of story than just your scene.

Okay, So, I mean, would you suggest then, like, a good exercise for somebody would be to take a book or a movie and, like, say, okay, globally, what's these five things? Okay, the first act. What's these five things? Okay, scene by scene, what's these five things? Like, is that. Would that be a good. Because I feel like that's where I've started to learn some of this. But is that, like, a good way to actually go from, like, I think I understand this. To getting this in your bones?

Oh, absolutely. Especially if you're absolutely, you know, stuck writing Your novel, and you know what your genre is and you know what book it is that you really want to model it on. And you say to yourself, I want to write Moby Dick in the desert. All the. All the sand will, you know, substitute for the water. And there's going to be this big creature in the desert, and you get stuck. What do you do? Well, go pick up Moby Dick and go through all those things that I just talked about. And there, you know, you should be able to sum up a story in three sentences. The beginning hook, the middle build, and the ending payoff. And you could. You should be able to sum it up in five commandments, too. What is the inciting incident of the story? Let's try and do it for the Godfather. The inciting incident of the story for the Godfather is the Godfather. The, you know, the older. The paterfamilias, as they say, gets shot. There's an assassination attempt, progressive complications. So that is the inciting incident of Godfather, progressive complications. No one seems to be able to figure out how to deal with the father's assassination attempt. It gets worse and worse and worse. Sonny wants to shoot everybody. Tom wants to placate everybody. Fredo doesn't even know what to do. Fredo couldn't even pick up his gun and protect his father. So who has to step up? Michael, the one person in the family the father never wanted involved in the family business. Michael's got to step forward. What is he going to do? Well, what Michael is going to do is get revenge. He's going to reassert the power of the Corleone family by having the guts to kill a New York City policeman. He does it. That's, you know, that's the crisis and the climax of Act 1. And then the rest of the movie is all about reassuring the Corleone power. And Michael comes to the. To the fore. And the resolution is, Michael is now the Godfather. Michael, literally, he becomes the godfather of Connie's baby at the end of the movie. And just as his father was a godfather to people, now he is. And at the very end, he wipes out every other family he killed, murders the heads of all the other five families. It's a very, very clear trajectory. So that's a great idea is to always go to the classics, go to the masterworks, work through them. Because as you work through them, you see how the masters solve these impossible problems that we're dealing with, and they can inspire you to come up with your own fixes.

So one of the questions is like, how do you apply these in different types of scenes? Right. So we've described some. So the two examples, the one you made up about the storm and then the Godfather, are both pretty dramatic examples. But there's also scenes that are just a lot of dialogue or it's set up for what's coming next. Or it's. Or it is something, you know, because you talk. We've talked about how, like, the irreversibility. Is that the right word? The irreversibility should go up over time. Well, that means early in the book, a lot of these decisions should be reversible. So maybe choosing what type of sandwich to make is the crisis if the person has allergies or something. I don't know.

So how do you apply these to me? The question is, how do you apply these in scenes that have less at. That are less. Are more like setup scenes for what's to come or lay of the land scenes? Like, do they still apply in those and like. Or do you have to be, like, more subtle with them? I guess, like, thinking about a storm coming, and I gotta get the boards, and then I gotta get this. Like, there may be a scene where it's like, what are some subtle, progressive complications? Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. I mean, it goes back to. It really goes back to thinking through the global story. So at the end of the beginning hook, there's got to be something that's almost completely irreversible. I'm not going to go out and say that every climax of the beginning hook should be an irreversible, complex, irreversible complication that pushes you into the. The middle build. But, you know, it kind of. That's a good rule of thumb. It's a good rule of thumb to say to yourself, I need my character to do something that's irreversible by the end of the beginning hook. Then I need something that's a point of no return by the middle of the middle build of the book. I need another irreversible action at the end of the middle build that pushes me into my ending payoff. And I need an irreversible change in the character by the end of the ending payoff. Why? Why do you need that? Because you need movement of storytelling. So just looking that, you can sort of see the curves that are moving in that story, something knocks somebody off balance, they have to make an irreversible decision by the end of the middle build. By the middle of the book. I'm sorry, at the end of the Beginning hook. By the middle of the book, they have to reach a point of no return. They can never go back to the way things were. And then at the end of the middle build, they have to have another irreversible movement that will push them into the climactic ending. Payoff. Now, what you're saying is, how do you create scenes that are interesting when it's not that big of a progressive complication? And that is really where genre helps you. And I have been talking about the labyrinth plot for an action story. And, you know, one of the great things about a labyrinth plot is you gotta show the labyrinth, right? So in your middle build, you've got to have your character be indoctrinated into this new world. So you got to have the scene where somebody shows her around, right? So that scene doesn't have big progressive complications in it, but it's entertaining all the same because it's entertaining at a different level. It's entertaining with new information.

It makes me think of a while back, I asked you a question about.

My constant struggle with writing scenes that are too short and all that. And you were talking about when they're introduced to the new world and Charlie and the chocolate factory. And it's just all of this interesting setup of what the world is. And it's so, you know, it's like, it's fascinating and it's exciting to read, even though it's not action oriented, right. It's not like a huge jump forward.

In the story, but it does. It is very important because it progressively complicates, right? Each one of the children and Charlie in the chocolate factory has a. Like a. An Achilles heel there. They have a. A deep, you know, dark badness within them. Except Charlie. So what. What Dahl does, Raoul Dahl, who wrote it, is that he presents this beautiful, incredible world. And then he has these kids. They're. They're like, you know, the slovenly kid, you know, like Gunter or whatever, the kid who eats all the time. He. He's, you know, he gets sucked up by that chocolate, you know, hot chocolate pipe because he's. He refuses to listen to Willy Wonka who says, don't drink from my chocolate river. You're going to contaminate it. Then the kid falls in because he's a glutton, and then he gets shot up in that thing. And so, yes, we're seeing the beautiful, magical world of Willy Wonka. But the characterization, these characters are behaving in the ways that make them poor candidates to take over the chocolate factory. And of course, Dahl had this great idea of, oh, well, this is all a ruse for Willy Wonka to find the right kid to take over his factory. So each one of those scenes that moves from, you know, the kid who drinks the hot chocolate and then the next scene is the girl who eats the blueberry and blows up because she's. She refuses to listen to. And. And so each one of these places within the Willy Wonka world challenges a different element of humanity, and these kids fail the test. So, yes, in these scenes, these things aren't hugely at stake, but it kind of is too, because he brings in life and death. Death. Like, is that kid gonna survive when he goes up that pipe? Is that girl who blows up to be a blueberry? Is she gonna survive? So you can be comedic and fun and have fun with it, and you can still have very high stakes. Like in that scene, I talk about where the indoctrination of Peggy Olsen in Mad Men, that's a great scene because the person who's. Who's taking around the advertising agency is trying to seduce her. So he's using this. Oh, let me show you around as a way to get her interested in him. So you're watching the scene on two levels. You're enjoying learning where the, you know, the copy department is and all that stuff. But you're also like, is she gonna fall for this stupid, you know, thing this guy's trying to do? So that's a way to really animate your scenes that don't seem like. There doesn't really seem to be a progressive complication in that scene. But there is, and it. And it rides on. Will Peggy Olsen be seduced by this guy or not? And, you know, Matt Weiner had all of that sort of expositional stuff. He uses that. But he does have a really meaty five commandments seen attached to it.

So another question. Do each of these. I'm looking now, scene specific. Do each of these things have to be on the page?

I'm not sure what you mean on the page.

So, like, sometimes we refer to. Okay, so when we've talked about the Pride and Prejudice and how some of the side characters have their own kind of stories going on and not all aspects of the story have to be on the page for you to understand what's going on. So is there ever a time where, like, the crisis is implied or the cri or the inciting incident already happened off the page and we're now reacting to it, or is this something that needs to explicitly be in each scene?

It has to explicitly be in each scene. Oftentimes we get so heady about this theory that we don't use common sense. And the common sense in the story is you need to entertain people from scene to scene. You've got to mix it up. You've got to have lulls and you all big dramatic moments. You have to drop in exposition. You have to set up things that are later on will be very explosive. But each scene has to. You have to be able to reasonably be able to pull together those five things. Like when I'm. When I'm analyzing a scene in a novel, you know, it's not necessarily all that fun because I like to read the scene and enjoy it. And then after I read the scene, I have to go back and say, what was the inciting incident? Oh, that's when Gandalf, you know, finally shows up. So he comes. That changes everything. And everybody changes their behavior based upon that. Okay, what are the progressive complications? So you have to reasonably be able to walk through those things and you. You'll know whether or not you're fudging it or. But it, it's not that tricky. It really isn't.

Okay, so next question. So I've analyzed a couple books I've gone through. So, you know, last year I did the entire spreadsheet of the first Harry Potter book. And then on my own, like I've done pieces of books just to look at them. And in a lot of books, it's hard to figure out when the scenes begin and end. You know, some of them are super helpful when they're just like chapter one and then it's like the scene and then chapter two and the scene, but a lot of them. And I remember this with Harry Potter, I actually, I had my paper copy and I was going through and like marking them because a chapter in her book actually contained lots of different scenes. So how do you, when you're analyzing another work, how do you find the. Where the scenes break? Because sometimes it's hard to figure that out.

Well, usually I'll just know. It's usually a setting changes or there's a break in the action and time it picks up later. The time will pick up later. It would be hard for me to be able to explain that unless I was going through a particular.

Work. You know, I'm. Right now I'm going through the Hobbit. And each of the chapters has between, you know, one to three or four scenes. And a lot of the scenes are 3,000 words and they're wordy and they've got singing and dialect and all kinds of stuff in it. But I can track. And you can track through your own sort of intuitive sense of, oh, there's a lull. Oh, everybody's gone to sleep. Oh, my gosh. The. The goblins have come out. New scene, you know, like, even though.

What you just described is an inciting incident. So.

Yes.

Is it inciting?

Yeah. You can look for resolutions where. And then they all went to sleep. End of resolution. A crack in the door with the goblins came in. That's an inciting incident. So look for big moments, like the Gollum scene in the Hobbit goes on for 4,000 words. And there's five or six different, you know, moments where they're doing riddles and things. And it's a great scene, but it goes on for a way, and it should go on for a while because Tolkien was really establishing something that was going to really pay off in the Lord of the Rings later on. And this brilliant character needed some stage time. So when, you know, when the scene breaks is usually you get a lull and then excitement and you say, oh. Usually when you say, well, what happened in that chapter? Well, this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. Those are usually three scenes. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So if somebody is in the position that I'm so often in, which is. I've listened to you talk about this. I feel like I understand it, but I want to actually practice my ability to apply the five Commandments. What should I do? What should I do to practice and kind of put my understanding of the five commandments of storytelling to actually help me figure out if I actually know what I'm talking about or practice identifying them or applying them to my own writing? How do I move from this, like, kind of conceptual idea from listening to this episode to actually grounding it in reality in my understanding?

Well, I would suggest having a little fun and just saying to yourself, come up with some crisis questions. So, attack. Attack. The scene from the middle, and the middle is the crisis. Would you rather do this or that? Which is which is worse? Would you rather have your finger cut off or your toe cut off? Think about a character and put them in a situation where they have to make a best bad choice. Do I jump off the bridge and possibly die, but get away from the police who are chasing me and I didn't do anything wrong? Or do I stay and let the police take me and get thrown in jail for the rest of my life? That's The Fugitive. Right. That's the movie the Fugitive. That's the entire crisis of the situation.

Over and over and over.

Yeah. And it works and it's great.

Yeah.

So think about crises. What if. If you were given the chance to have a lottery ticket and you could have all the money yourself, even though somebody gave you the numbers and said that they would split it for you, what would you do? And then walk back. These are global crises. And then you can walk back an inciting incident. The other way to do it is think of an inciting incident and see what kind of crisis arises from it. There's a hurricane coming and your son falls out the window. What do you do? That's not really that difficult of a choice unless you're trying to establish, you know, a negligent father character. It's hard to sympathize with somebody who would rather save their junk than get their kid to the hospital.

Unless that junk is how he feeds his child. So now.

Exactly. You can add in a complication. If I don't save this. What if there are antiquities in their house? What if. Maybe he could find a different way? Maybe he could give the kid a bunch of whiskey. Maybe his pain will go away. I don't know. But this is the way to think about. Think of crises, inciting incidents, and the progressive complications will come. Because it's like once, you know, you want to go to, you know, Vermont, you know, there you got to go over this mountain, that mountain and that mountain to get there. Then you can build the progressive complications and you check your progressive complications by seeing, oh, I can't do the nails thing because I already did the two by four thing. I got to come up with something else. And then, of course, you know, the climax is, what action do they take based upon the crisis? The crisis could be anything. It could be a life and death crisis. It could be a love crisis. If I do this, then my beloved might not like me. If I. If I pretend to be somebody else, she might. Should I pretend to be somebody else or. Or be myself and risk that she won't like my true self? Or do I pretend to be somebody else that she will like and then never trust her love? You know, these are. These novels and epics and operas have been written upon that crisis. Do I pretend I'm somebody that I'm not? How do. How would I get away with a crime? What if I fell down a well and there was a magical world down there? What would I do? These are all the things that writers explore and create, you know, masterpieces based on. So my advice is, if you're having trouble with Five Commandments, just think about these great ideas. What if X happened? What if I was in this situation where Y happened? How would I handle it if everybody was making fun of the kid who had the surgery on his face? Would I stand up for him or not? If I didn't, what would I do instead? You know, and on and on and on. But the thing to remember is have an imagination. And then let your imagination allow you to form a vision of a story that could be interesting. And whenever you think, whatever your first instinct is, reject it. Because you got to. Because you're probably repeating something that you saw on TV and you forgot about. So your first instinct's a good way to get going. But then constantly say, what if I couldn't do it that way? How would I do it instead? You know, everybody would expect this father to help the son. Well, maybe he saves the house first. And we discover later on that in the house was blank. That's the way to goof around with storytelling, because the five Commandments are just making something up and seeing what happens.

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