The Genre Five Leaf Clover: The In-depth Process for Understanding Genre in Your Story

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. So, as you may notice, if you're watching the video version, there's twice as many people on this podcast. For those just listening to the audio, we've added two new people to our group here, and I'm going to talk about why that is in a second. But over the last year, Sean has been deep in the lab with Danielle Kielski and Leslie Watts, working on getting to the bottom of story. And we're calling this story grid 2.0. And in that time, we've done a lot of work and we've gone through a lot of iterations of things, and out of that has come some new tools and methodologies to help us. And we're going to talk a lot more about that over the coming weeks. So I won't get too deep into that, but we're going back to me being the shock monkey, where we work on my writing and leveling me up as a, as a writer, just like we've done in the most through most of the podcast. Just so, again, the goal is always that I stand in for the writer, since I am trying to become a writer, and to help you find, follow along and figure out how to level up your own writing. And so here with me is of course, Sean Coyne, the founder and creator of Story Grid. Along with that, we have Danielle Kielski. She's the chief chief Academic Officer for the Story Grid Guild. And we have Leslie Watts, the editor in chief of Story Grid Publishing. And we're all going to be working here together. And that's a lot of fun for me because then I have three, three people critiquing my writing instead of just one. So, yeah, so that's what it's going to be looking like moving forward. And, you know, we kind of just, just as we've always done, we kind of have a loose structure and idea of the direction we're going that will probably change as we go. But hopefully you'll enjoy this if you are just listening to the podcast, if you're subscribed this, the video version of this is up on YouTube as well. So if you want to watch, Sean's going to be sharing his screen and sharing some things. So if you want to see that, you can go to YouTube and subscribe to the Story Grid channel there as well. But otherwise I'm going to turn it over to you, Sean, to get us started.

Great. Thanks, Tim.

Just to give an introduction of how we're going to be structuring these series of lessons with Tim, we are going to take a look at a masterwork scene. It's actually a short story and it's written by a wonderful writer named Ed McBain. And Ed McBain is sort of the grandfather, if you will, of the police procedural novel. So Ed McBain, his real name was Evan Hunter. He wrote a whole series of wonderful police procedurals called the. I think it's the 87th Precinct novels. Anyway, before that, in the 1950s, he was just starting out, as we all do, and he was writing short stories for mystery magazines and private eye magazines. And the story that we're going to work with, on with Tim is a story called Eyewitness. And it's terrific. I highly recommend everyone to go out and purchase it. It's in a short story collection which we'll put in the notes. I don't have the name of it off the top of my head. Anyway, so what we're going to do is we're going to use the story grid toolbox to take a very deep look at the masterwork short story called Eyewitness. And Tim is going to do that by himself. And then the tribunal of Danielle, Leslie and I are going to walk him through the process of how you use the story grid from the very top down. What that means is that we have a whole series of tools that we use to look at stories and to find the best means to iterate them. So Tim is going to analyze the story along with us, and then eventually he is going to use this story as sort of a model to create his own story that will mirror the Ed McMahon story, but will be completely his own. So he's going to innovate and write a story based on the Ed McBain work. But it's all going to be Tim's. Now, this is all going to make a lot more sense as we get through it. So what I thought would be great to start would be to just walk through the new work that we've been doing over the past year. And it's, it's very strong. It's. It's looking at stories in three different dimensions. And for each of these dimensions, we have tools that enable sort of a way to analyze and then a way to output to someone who's reading the story. So let's just start with the three different kinds of dimensions of story. We have what I call the beyond the surface dimension. Then we have the above the surface dimension, and then we have the on the surface dimension. Now, each of these have sort of color designs in Storygrid. So the beyond the surface is what we call the blue realm. The above the surface is the red realm, and on the surface is the green realm. And then each of these ways of looking at story have separate tools.

And I'm going to get into those tools in a second. But I want to give an overview of what I mean by beyond the surface, above the surface and on the surface generally. Right, okay. So the, the blue section is the beyond the surface. What does this mean? Well, these are what Plato would call the patterns of intelligibility across all stories through and in and through time. These are the big, big archetypical patterns that all stories share. These are sort of the Carl Jungian realms of archetype. So in the history of Homo sapiens on the planet, we've all sort of had mentors, Right. So it doesn't matter if I live in Elizabethan England or 21st century the United States, I'm still going to have a mentor. I'm going to have mentor figures. So the idea of the mentor is sort of an archetype that's a pattern of behavior in and through time. So people in Elizabethan England had parents who were their mentors, and so do we now. So in and through time are these big, big patterns of representation that are very what people call meta. So these are the big, beyond the surface ways of looking at stories in the most generalized way that you could possibly imagine. The big ideas, the big patterns that often seem kind of cliche because they're so general. Right. So the blue realm has two specific kinds of tools to enable understanding of a particular kind of story or a particular novel. And the first one is, you know, it's a story grid 101 tool. This is the five genre leaf analysis. And we're going to walk through this with Tim with the Ed McBain story. Shortly after that, we have what we call the what if analysis. And the what if analysis is. We're going to get into that too. But it's generally what they used to call sort of.

Hollywood kind of high concept. And it doesn't mean that it's cheesy. It just means that these are the big what if kind of setups that we all would be interested in seeing. So they gather a group of people who are interested in a certain kind of story. So for example, something like what if a Detroit cop played by Eddie Murphy goes to Beverly Hills to solve the crime of committed against his best friend. That's not a very good what if right now, but that's the general concept of what if. All right, so we've got the five genre leaf analysis, what if? And now we're going to drop down into what's called the above the surface. Now, above the surface is really where the rubber meets the road in terms of communication. So above the surface is really about the process. How do we figure things out? How do we experience the world? How do we communicate that experience to other people? So as stories are sort of simulations of life, we really need to lock in this above the surface realm. And the way we do that is we separate what we call the author with a single audience member. So we're going to get really deep into the author, single audience member paradigm as these weeks progress. But there are two tools here too. There's the narrative device analysis and the point of view analysis. And these will enable us to really lock in what the above the surface realm is for a particular story. Lastly, we have on the surface, and what on the surface is about are products. These are sort of the causes that create change. So cause and effect. This is very much about, well, when I hand over a dollar, I get an apple. That's a cause. The cause is the transfer of my dollar to someone who has an apple. They take my dollar as a form of value and they hand over another form of value, which is an apple. And so the on the surface realm is really about the problem product of movements from change to move from one value to another. I don't have an apple. Now I do. Right. And these are really on the surface, meaning these are the moments and events in a story that we have to iterate. We have to put them on the page. We have to use language to communicate these events in the clearest possible way. So the way we use the way we get at this level in StoryGrid is we have two tools. One is called the event synthesis analysis, and the other one is called the five commandments analysis. So what we're going to do in the podcast over the next weeks is to walk. We. We call these six categories, and there are 24 questions that we're going to answer. And when we're done with these six categories and 24 questions and answers, we're going to have a comprehensive understanding of the macro and the micro of a particular story, which is going to be pretty cool. So by the time we're done with this with Tim, he's going to really understand what Ed McBain accomplished in his story Eyewitness, and he's also going to have an understanding of what he's going to have to iterate himself. Lastly, after we go through the what we call the 624 analysis, we're going to get into really, really high level, bottom up processing and we're going to show you how this new story grid writing concept works. I don't want to give anything away there right now, but it has to do with information theory and cybernetics. But I hope I didn't bum anybody out by scaring them with those terms. So what we're going to do now is we're going to move through the 624 analysis and we're going to begin by taking a Look at Ed McBain's story Eyewitness. And we're going to start with the series of questions called the five genre leaf analysis. So let's, let's just get into it. So what I'm going to do is I'll ask Tim and then Danielle and Leslie can pipe in too before we lock down the answer to each of these questions. So are you ready, Tim and Leslie and Danielle?

Yeah, as ready as I can be, I guess.

Okay, cool. All right, so let's get to it. All right, so the first one we call the beyond the Surface meta tool number one. And this is five genre leaf analysis. And I'm going to pull up this now. Okay, that thing on the right that I'm showing now is what I call the five leaf analysis genre clover. And this is something that's in Story grid the, the original book. And it's, it's a very primal tool. It's very important and it's really, if you want to get in depth understanding of the five genre leaf clover, I suggest taking a look at the book. But what we're going to do here is we're just going to walk through it very slowly just to remind everybody of these concepts. So what we have here in the five leaf genre clover are five different sort of levels of analysis. These are five concepts that we need to understand about a particular unit of story. And the first one that we're going to talk about is the time genre. So what is the time genre for this short story? Is it short, long or medium?

Well, yeah, I mean I put short because when I went back to the definitions of what you, you know, when I. The time genre definitions you have. Long form is feature length films, documentaries, novels are three acts or more plays. Medium form is episodic television shows or documentaries, novellas, multi thousand word journalism. One act plays in short form was short film, short stories or individual scenes in a play. And so I put Short form. Since this is a short story, that's, I think, what is it, around 1200 words? Something like that?

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's definitely short. And I don't want to belabor this too much, but we do have.

In fact, Leslie asked me this question a while back. Like, is there. Can we get a tighter focus in on the time signature? And we do have a toolbox to do that. But one of the ways to think about time is to think about how long the progression of the. The story is, right? So if you had a short story and there are cuts, meaning you move from one particular event to another one in which is in another arena or another environment, that would be, you know, a longer form story than just a single scene. Now, in the Ed McBain story, what's really fun is that it's a single event that happens over a continuous set of time.

And we're going to talk about this more, but it. It compresses certain events into smaller units that, for example.

There. There are times when the narrator will just explain and describe a series of events that happen in one sentence. So that's a way of collapsing time into sort of a way of telling the audience the relevant event that occurred over a select part of time. So the time genre itself is pretty interesting, and you really need to think about it as a writer, is that how long am I going. What is the duration of this story? For example, the duration of Pride and Prejudice, I think, is over a period about 15 to 16 months. And there are clear delineations of that. That time period, or Jane Austen may have been able to set the entire story within, let's say, a weekend.

And there are stories like that that do take place in a weekend anyway. So the time genre leaf clover is, can. Can get a lot more high resolution than this sort of coarse look. But this is a good place to start. Right? So short. We're just going to go with short as the time signature for this clover. Do you guys have anything to add, Leslie or Danielle?

Well, I think I definitely agree that it's short. And I think just to. To play off of what you were saying, Sean.

That we do collapse this into these three categories, although, as you alluded to with the short story that has more scenes in it, it is really a spectrum. And so we want to keep it simple and keep it to these three categories, but that if we. If we focus on why we look at this and why we categorize stories in this way.

I think getting at what you're talking about, about comparing the duration of the play of the story to the duration of the audience's experience of reading the story gives us some constraints on what the audience will expect, how much we can do, what kind of messages we can communicate to the audience. So I think this is one of those questions that it seems. Seems really simple to categorize it, but it's very important when you're writing, especially to know, going in, what kind of limitations you're putting on yourself so that you can construct your story in a way that's effective for your reader.

Yeah. And just to kind of give the spectrum of what that looks like is that you have a Rose for Emily, which is a story, it's a short story. So in terms of what the reader is actually reading is short, but it spans generations. And then you have a story like Finnegan's Wake that is a huge, really long story, but it spans a very short period of time within those bounds. And so as you say, Danielle, that that determines a lot of constraints for your story, and it's something you want to understand going in.

That's really great because what the two of you just delineated, and I don't think I was being very clear, was the difference between.

The audience's experience reading the story versus.

The simulation itself. So the description and explanation of the story through the point of view of the author. So. And that distinction that you just made, Leslie, between, what is it? A Rose for Emily and Finnegan's Wake, what you have there is Finnegan's Wake is.

This massive novel that takes place in a very short amount of time. And then you have a very short story that takes place in a very large spectrum of duration. So. So the experience of the. Of the audience member is one thing to consider, and then the execution and the description and explanation by the author to that audience member is the other thing to take into consideration. So short, long and medium. I've been using it in, in this Five Leaf Clover. More talking about the experience of the single audience member as opposed to the execution by the author. So one of the key features of StoryGrid is that when in doubt, we always take a look at the experience of the single audience member. So that's our sort of Rosetta Stone of being able to figure out when we get confused. We always say to ourselves, I wonder how we call them Sam. So how is Sam experiencing this story? So that's why our genre Cloverleaf is really about the experience for Sam as opposed to the execution of the author. We have lots of tools to help the author execute. But we always want to put our focus of attention in what are we trying to communicate to Sam, and how is Sam experiencing our communication efforts? That might be a little abstract, but that's really a key feature of Story Grid is that we put our attention on Sam and less so on ourselves. We think about how is Sam experiencing the story versus how painful it is for us to write it. And that's a good place because then you can. You can really get out of your own egocentric experience and just think about, well, what. What is my single audience member feeling right now? Are they feeling good, Are they feeling bad, Are they excited, or what? All right, so the second one on the cloverleaf that we look at is structure. And structure. Structure is either mini plot, arc plot, or anti plot. And I'm just going to give a very global explanation of what I mean by each. And I'll begin with the one that we're all pretty much familiar with the most, because this is sort of the way we experience our life, right? So our plot is usually focused on a single protagonist. And that single protagonist moves from. They change. They. They go on an arc movement. They transform.

Their mind, their body, and their spirit throughout the course of the story.

And that doesn't mean that you have to have these massive changes, only that they do change. They do have a change of perspective by the end of the story. And oftentimes they have other changes too. So archpot is usually about a single protagonist. So Sam, you know, our single audience member experiences the story by sort of attaching to that. That protagonist. And they see the world through the eyes of the protagonist. They see that simulation as the protagonist, experience it throughout the story. So that's our plot. The second kind is mini plot. Now, mini plot is usually sort of what we would call those. Those grand societal stories. Now they don't necessarily have to be that way, but mini plot is generally Sam, our single audience member experiences the story through multiple points of view, multiple perspectives, and there's. There's all kinds of things to do to, to enable that functionality to Sam. But they, they seem to get a feeling for the entire society. And because they look through the eyes of multiple different avatars as they are moving through the story. Now, at Story Grid, we call the. The people who populate stories avatars as opposed to characters. And there's. There's a lot of reasons for that, but I won't get into them now. So if, if you hear me speaking of avatars and you're familiar with the word Characters just. You're going to have to make that switch because that's the way we talk about it. Okay, so mini plot is multiple avatar point of view perspective to the single audience member. An art plot is a single protagonist perspective to the single audience member. Lastly is antiplot. And anti plot is a very strange.

Structural idea. It's generally not conducive to the way we envision the world. Right. So the way we experience the world is very specific and antiplot is very non specific. It's extraordinarily random. It's multi chaotic, sort of.

One of the movements in the 1960s was the French new wave film movement. And one of the proprietors of those was a guy named Jean Luc Godard. And Godard is famous for having films that are very anti plot. So for example, things that would never seem seemingly be able to happen, just start happening without any knowledge of why that was so. There's no sort of functionality or purpose beyond the coincidental random drop in of events. So anti plot is not very popular. And the reason why is because it's extraordinarily difficult to understand or follow. And that's the point. It's sort of like a, a sledgehammer home of, you know, coincidental events that drop into our lives and we can't make heads or tails of them, but you know, you experience them over a period of two hours or 10 hours, depending on your medium of story that you're. You're watching. So Tim, let, let's get, let's get to your answer here. What do you think eyewitness@ed mcbain structure is?

I put arc plot because it's. We have a one clear protagonist that's driving the entire story.

Yeah, I, I buy that.

And I think Leslie and Danielle are going to agree.

Okay, so that's the structure. So so far we have short arc plot. Now let's get into style.

Okay, so the style leaf is, is how. What's the flavoring of the experience that Sam is. Is having? Right. So the flavor, the style is very much a certain kind of performance sensibility. And so we have all kinds of style of storytelling. We have like cartoons, there's stories that can happen in dance, comedy, drama, theatrical. It feels as if it's a play, you know, that would be theatrical, documentary. It feels documentary in format, musical, literary. And literary is very much sort of like a more about the, the semantic stylings of the, the story creator. So that could be sort of very poetic or postmodern or minimalism or sort of story within the story within the story. That's. That's called kind of meta. So literary, has all kinds of tweaks and buzzes and.

All kinds of things and tricks. Other ones. Musical, documentary, cinematic, epistolary, which means in letter form. And I didn't do an exhaustive stylistic guide here on the clover. I just put down the majority of them to cover the most ground. But it's important to identify the style because that's going to enable your understanding of. It's a constraint. Right. So let's say I'm writing a comedy and I decide to put a very dramatic scene in, you know, in one of my event scenes, right? So if I drop in drama in the middle of comedy, Sam, our single audience member, is going to go, what's up? I thought this was a comedy. Right. So it's a constraint that enables Sam to have a consistent, fluid experience so that she doesn't get confused. She doesn't be like, whoa, wait a minute. I don't know why there's all this drama when there was, you know, the Keystone Cops five. Five scenes ago. So this is a way to be able to lock in and to. To make sure that the author who is creating the story for Sam is consistent. So, Tim, did you take a stab at what style the story is in?

Yeah, I chose drama. When I went back and looked at the actual definitions you had for these, it was a tone of solemnity, facing reality as it is. Emotions are truthful and fulfilling. And I. And just in general, I think police procedurals are going to fall into that drama category of style.

Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that's a good starting point for style. I'm wondering if we can get a little bit more specific. Leslie, do you have any thoughts about that?

Yeah, so the. If we're thinking about what it. What it feels like or the effect, it definitely starts with drama. We don't have comedy and we don't have it's not a musical. And those are. Those are very clear. As we get into. As we try to get more specific, it feels very much like a police report, which is kind of consistent with a police procedural. And that you have.

What this does for Sam is it creates a very constrained experience. It's just the facts. And so you wouldn't want it like, in.

A literary drama. You would have a lot of, like, a really lush setting and you would describe people really fully. But here it's very constrained, very focused on the problem at hand. And. And so that's why I think it feels like A police report, it's akin to journalism. But even though it's fiction.

Yeah, yeah, I totally buy that. I think that's.

And that that actually enables. Well, before I go on, Danielle, do you have anything to add on that?

Well, I. I agree with all of that, and I think there. There are a couple of different considerations when we're looking at style.

So.

We'Ve talked about the feeling, and then.

There are different facets within that. So comedy versus drama is about how you treat emotions, I think. And so that's a really good starting point because that can act sort of as a foundational spectrum for this leaf. And then as Leslie's talking about, you can. You can move from there into what specificity you can. You can build in wherever you are on that spectrum. So I definitely agree that it feels like that police report, like that.

Very.

It doesn't get into a lot of emotions. It doesn't get into a lot of perspectives of the people involved, that it's really about the facts. And so that's a constraint in terms of what kind of. Above the surface stuff we're showing.

Above the surface meaning the processing of the avatars and the evaluation. And then there are also constraints in terms of how you present the information, whether it's continuous, meaning we see it play out. And in a short story, you don't get into this as much, but this is something to consider for the style. Something like epistolary, you're constrained by the idea of whatever epistolary medium you have. So a letter.

You would have more of a punctuated telling, where maybe each chapter is a letter, because the letter form is going to give you some structural constraints. So we can start to see, as we get into these questions, how they play with each other and. And how in style, the different components that go into creating this holistic experience for the single audience member, how they draw from different leaves to create that whole feeling.

Yeah, that's great. I think you two have really landed again on almost like a, you know, a pyramid of consideration for. For style. Right. So sort of the. The binary choice at the beginning might be something like comedy or drama. Right. So we. We do have comedic police procedurals like Brooklyn9.9 was a. Is a fantastic one. Right. And it plays off of the. The constraints and, and. And the. The obligatory moments of a police procedural TV show are always in there, but they. They have a real nice comedic sensibility to them. So comedy and drama would sort of be the first division, and then. And then you would also have sort of like the the journalistic documentary approach of a police report.

Very clearly just the facts, and then that would actually be influenced by. That would tell you what kind of literary style to take. Right. So as Leslie said, you're not going to really want.

Very flourishing language here. You're going to want straightforward, like, how would a police detective write? It's as if, how would a police detective write this? And they're not going to be using, you know, flowery language. And they're going to use very simple verbal structure too. So anyway, so I think Tim's right. We've got drama. And then I think the addition of.

Police report journalism is. Is really quite good too. So I think that's a good indication of. Of the style leaf of this short story.

So if nobody has anything to add. Oh, let's move on to the next leaf.

And this is a. This is a tricky one. So the reality genre for the scene, this is the reality leaf. And this is the. The way in which the. The world works. Right. So what is. How is the. How is the story experienced by Sam and in terms of the. The spectrum of reality? So I'm gonna have to go to another screen to sort of flesh this out a little bit. But generally we have, you know, four categories of reality. We've got realism, which means that the story could happen. Factualism, which is sort of like a story that did happen, but it's sort of based upon true events, you know, that kind of thing. So the storyteller is using facts to. To. To write the story. But it's factualism because it's not pure documentary. As, you know, documentary is tricky because is there ever real pure documentary unless it's just a. Like there's a Brooder film. Anyway, fantasy is. Is alternate reality, right? So it. It can be sort of.

You know, fantasy about the past or fantasy about the future. So fantasy about the past would be sort of hobbit like stuff, and fantasy about the future would be science fiction. So were thinking about what could happen in the future in science fiction. And there are all kinds of, you know, axiomatic things that the author does to create that world. Just as, you know, what could have happened in the past were there magic systems in the past, that sort of thing. That. That's part of fantasy too, but that's sort of a nostalgic take. Whereas the science fiction is kind of like.

Utopia or dystopia take of what will happen in the future. So nostalgia for a better past or nostalgia for a grim past, sort of a Hobbesian past. Or a, I think it was Rousseau in past where there was the idealization of the natural world, whereas Hobbes was sort of, it was always dog eat dog and we were all murdering each other all the time. So. So the nostalgic fantasy, you can see where all of those things, the, the science fiction and fantasy category which has been lumped together is all about sort of these alternate realities, these, these simulated realities based upon axiomatic concepts about the. The future or the past. And then lastly is absurdism. And absurdism is very much akin to. It lives inside of the anti plot world generally. But specifically absurdism are drop ins.

Of coincidence that don't make sense.

Anyway, I'm gonna just play on this a little bit longer just to get into what this reality leaf can really break down to. So absurd is if you, if you did a spectrum, you would sort of have factualism and realism sort of right in the middle. These, these are the realms of reality that we experience every day. And then you have fantasy, which is alternate reality that has, that is still rule based, right? There's still a lot of rules. And then there's science fiction, which are future rules, right. And then in between realism and fantasy, you kind of have this, this strange fun place called magical realism where the most of the events are in a realistic nature and then there's magical elements that drop in. So 100 years of solitude is a good example of magical realism. And lastly, you would have absurdism at the very left side of the spectrum, which would mean that it's very chaotic, right? Complete random uncertainty.

And so these are sort of like the gradient of reality genres, right? And these, these all have senses of, that go into order, complexity and chaos, which I don't want to really get too deep into right now. But this is a more further delineated concept for story grid 2o of the, of the reality genre. And I don't want to belabor it, but I thought it would be interesting to, to just share anyway. So, Tim, let's, let's get back to the reality genre for Ed McBain's story. What, what do you, what did you categorize it as?

Well, I put it as realism.

Mainly because it's a police procedural that is set in mo. You know, when it was written, it was set in modern day. It could happen it. But it's not just factualism, right? It's not telling a story that actually did happen. It's definitely not absurdism. And it doesn't, you know, cast into the fantasy realm. So we don't get into magic or science fiction or anything like that. So I said it in realism.

Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I agree. Leslie or Danielle.

Yeah, I. I agree that it's realism. I did have something to add on kind of how you can think about the spectrum, which is about.

You know, we. We talked about rules and chaos, but a way to boil that down is about how does cause and effect work in the world?

Is it a mirror of how it works around us? And it is. He's trying to present something that seems realistic. So that's where we get to realism. And then on the fantasy science fiction side, it's like an extension of cause and effect. So in the real world, I can only go so fast. In a science fiction world, maybe I can go warp speed. So it's. I like to think of it as taking something that we can do and going to the end of the line and you get the cause and effect there. And then on the other side, it's a breakdown of cause and effect. So that's how you create randomness is by breaking that linkage between the causes and the effects. But here in this world.

It operates according to the physical and social laws and norms and codes that we experience in our everyday lives.

Yeah, nice. That's. That's a really good distinction. I like locking it down to. Because we. We have sort of a joke here at story grid 2.0 that each of us has a. A cape. And Danielle's cape is the green cape, mine's the blue cape, and Leslie's is the red cape. And so what Danielle just did there was show her green cape stripes, I guess because she was talking about causality. Right. And what is the operating feature on the surface is cause and effect and causality. And so she was using a trick to figure out the reality genre by discussing, well, what's the relationship between cause and effect in the story? And is it hyper cause and effect, meaning, you know, you've got warp speed instead of regular speed, then that would be sort of in the science fiction fantasy realm, or you can use magic. You know, fantasy is. Usually has some magical system, and then the breakdown of cause and effect is absurdism. So that's. That's really, really helpful.

Just one quick note about. In terms of the red and how we. That. That realism is the effect we want to create for the single audience member. And so that gets into. That plays with the style as well and the effect. Another way to say effect is it's as if this is a police report. It's as if this is realism. This is a real world. You know, it's connected to our world. And so that's how I would pull that in.

Yeah, great. So the as if is a very important factor in the red zone, because oftentimes.

This is a sort of an acting tool, too.

It's difficult to come up with, like, when you plumb the depths of your soul and you're like, I just don't know how I would behave if. But when you add the magical as if, it becomes an easier thing to grip. So I'm not sure if I think Evan Hunter, who was Ed McBain. Ed McBain was his pen name. I think he was a police officer before he started writing full time. But if he wasn't like Michael Connolly, who writes the Harry Bosch novels, he was a journalist, and so he was around police detectives a lot, and then that's how he was doing the as if. I think he was. He was pretending as if he were an LAPD cop when he came up with the concept of Harry Bosch. And also, you know, he based it upon Hieronymus Bosch, which, you know, one of the seminal artistic figures in. In the history of Homo sapiens. And the way he describes how Harry Bosch has to contend with the world is very much. It's kind of this really sweet spot of melding his. His Connolly is a very intelligent person who's very well educated, and so he uses his understanding of perhaps what Hieronymus Bosch was trying to signal to us, which he was very effective at doing it just the difficulties of navigating a complex world. He mapped that onto his LAPD detective, Harry Bosch. So the as if is an extraordinarily powerful tool for the writer. And then Michael Connolly, who's a journalist, he doesn't have to, like, plumb the depths of his soul. He's melding the cops that he knew on the beat with Hieronymus Bosch. And there you go. So that's a really good tool, too, to think about the realism and how to best transmit how real it is from that red zone that Leslie uses to ground her. Okay, so lastly, we have what we call the content genre. Now, this is. This is a. Probably an entire episode in and of itself, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna do the best I can to give a very.

Quick overview of what I'm talking about in. When I talk about content. But there are a lot of storygrid resources that you can go. The website is. Is loaded with. With content about all of these content genres, and there's also a book that I wrote called the Four Core Framework, which I would recommend as a great introduction to all of these. So I'm just going to run through them and then we'll ask Tim what content genre he believes this story is from. All right, so I've separated content into sort of two mega realms. There's what I call the kind of the external content genres, which are all about.

External forces, and then there are the internal content genres, which are emphasizing internal transformations. So external genres are all about primarily.

A change in an external domain from beginning to the end. And the internal ones are really about the change of one particular protagonist. So the internal genres are.

Smaller stories because they're about the change of one particular person. Now, obviously we have dimensionality of externality and internality in all stories, but what we do at StoryGrid is we don't allow people to say, well, it's a little bit of this, it's a little bit of that. It's a. You've got to lock down and, and come to a global genre content choice. So Anyway, we've got 12 of them. I'm going to run through the external content genres. And these actually align with, if anyone's familiar out there, with Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which goes to what these particular genres are all about. What, what value, what universal human value are these stories aligning with such that they can help Sam, you know, confront some problems in her own life concerning these universal values? And again, I'm going to point you toward.

The four core framework to get more information about, you know, value and emotion and all that. All right, so we have action story, we have war story, we have horror story, we have crime, we have thriller, and then we have love story, and then we have.

Performance story, western story, and then society story. Those are sort of our, our global external genres. And then the internal genres are status, morality and worldview. Now, there's a lot of information about all of these genres in story, Grid, book and on the website. So I'm going to stop there and ask Tim.

Which of these genres does he believe.

Eyewitness aligns with?

Yeah. So thinking through the value at stake. So this is kind of the thought process I went through as I was thinking through the content genre. So my knee jerk reaction was to put it in crime because of the conventions at play. Right? So there's a dead body, there's a detective, there's a witness.

But then I started thinking through, well, the witness is scared for his life. He's afraid that if the murderer finds out that he's the one that identifies him, that he's going, you know, the murderer will come and find him and kill him. And so I'm like, well, if life and death is at stake, then it's an action genre because we always want to go with whatever is lowest on Maslow's hierarchy. But then I went back to, well, the protagonists of the story is actually who we're focused on. We want the value at stake for the protagonist. And the protagonist in this story is Detective Capelli. And so for Detective Capelli, what he's trying to do is. Is get justice, right? So he's trying to find out who committed the murder so that he can bring the murder to justice. And so that's why I ultimately came back to crime and landed on crime, because of identifying the protagonist and what value was at stake for the protagonist, which in this case is justice.

Interesting, interesting. I love to hear your thought process. And before I comment.

Let'S hear from Danielle.

Yeah, I also love hearing the process and. And I think it's really important because there are a lot of ways to get to a genre. And then, you know, by checking the process, we can make sure that it's reproducible. We can make sure that we're considering all the right things that are going into it. So.

I agree that it's crime, but I would have a few tweaks to the process. So one thing is.

I think that your. Your impulse to go as low as possible to focus on the more primal genres is great. But I do think we can have. When we're. When we're addressing global genres like this.

What we're looking at is the object of desire more than the stakes. Those are very close. But.

I would say that the avatars in this story are trying to achieve justice. Their question is, how can justice be done? Not how can I survive, which would be an action story. Even though life and death is on the table, it's not central to the object of desire. So looking at what they're trying. Trying to achieve, I think is just a little bit of a tweak to the way that you're looking at what is at stake. Because sometimes you'll have other stories where.

Something is at stake that's more primal than the global genre. So, for example, like Pride and Prejudice, a love story, but poverty and economic safety is on the line. So you wouldn't call that an action story just because of the stake, because of what the object of desire is that's driving the arc of the story. So I would say making a little bit of a tweak to that. And then I know in future episodes we will get very much into who the protagonist is, but. So I'll leave that discussion for then. But, you know, I think that when. When we're evaluating that, I think all of the avatars in the story, the detectives, the eyewitness, they're looking at how can they achieve a just outcome. And the.

The force of antagonism, the main force of antagonism, who's the lieutenant, is looking at how he can escape justice. So I think everyone's looking at the. These sort of outcomes and objects of desire related to that central value spectrum.

What about you, Leslie? Do you have anything to add?

Well, one of the things that.

Is that we. We always want to focus and put the global genre at the top.

Right.

That's the one we pay the most attention to, even if in, you know, in a longer form story, you would have subplots, perhaps, and that kind of thing. But I do see in this story that we have a worldview revelation shift.

That it's a secondary and it's the internal that's acting within the story. And the interesting thing about this.

Is looking at the different ways that worldview can. Can take place in this and our recent discussions about worldview revelation and versus, say, disillusionment or maturation is that the. The revelation is of. Is.

Pure novelty. Right. Is that.

In the other flavors of worldview that we're looking at different types of novelty, but here it's very novel, very novel novelty. So pure novelty. And so I think that's a really interesting thing that McBain has going on within the story.

Yeah, so that's great, Leslie, because that. That brings. That. That speaks to what I was saying earlier about.

In masterwork stories, and I consider this a masterwork story because it is extraordinarily.

Clean, simple, but very. The signal is. Is very tight and fascinating and exactly what someone who would like to know how it works in a police department would. Would be able to understand very cleanly and clearly. All right, so in masterwork stories, what you have is you have a shift of movement across both the external and the internal. So when Leslie was talking about worldview revelation, she was talking about there is a worldview dimensionality in this short story that is very clear and we understand it especially at the end of the story, when it comes to. It really comes on stage. And so the externality of the story is. Is what gives rise to the internal revelation. So. And beyond the Conventions and obligatory stuff of a crime story that, that, you know, tips the balance in defining this as a crime genre story. We'll, we'll get into the determination of the protagonist later. But it, it is, I, I do want to speak to what Danielle was talking about because it's a very, very good point about the pro. And thank you, Tim, for giving us your process, because it's really great. So when, so what Tim was saying is when we're looking at a genre.

We want to make sure that the value at stake, that is the most primal and most clearly definable, that we want to put our attention on that as, as an analyzer of a story. So Tim initially thought, well, or on second thought, he thought, well, maybe this is life and death. Now, action story, each one of these genres, I'm sorry to keep flip flopping around here, but each one of the content genres concerns a specific value, a universal human value. Now, the action story is about life and death. And I think we'd all agree that we all value life, right? So life and death is a universal human value. So it doesn't matter what part of the planet you live on, if you're a human being, you value your life and you value the lives of others. So it's not this big sort of difficult value to understand. So the action story operates under that. That's what can happen. Somebody's life is threatened, they're threatened with close to death. So what Danielle was saying was that while there is.

Life and death is on the table, meaning the, the informant in this case could anticipate getting hurt. That's not really what is driving the scene, because nobody walks in with a gun and says, give me your money or I'm going to kill you. That's the literal action scene where death is externally possible in an event on the page. And that doesn't happen in this scene. Instead, it. Everyone is playing around the game of how do we get justice. So justice is the value at stake in a crime story. So justice, again, is one of those universal human values. We all have an innate understanding of what's fair. Now, we all have variations of what we think is fair, but we all think, we all know when we've been victimized, right? So fairness is at play in all of our experiences. So we're always weighing, is this a fair deal? Is this interaction I'm having with this person fair? Is it fair to me? Is it fair to them? Now, we might not, you know, abstractly stick our minds on evaluating fairness, but it's Always at play. It's a universal human value. So the crime story is, is that story that deals with that difficult problem of what's fair. Well, it's context dependent. Right. Sometimes things are fair for you to give up, you know, your coat if somebody's freezing and you, you know, you only have 10 blocks to get home and you have an extra coat at home. You know, it might be fair for you to lose your coat, you know, who knows? So fairness is one of these ill defined problems. And justice, again, is a value that has to do with fairness. So the crime story concerns the universal human value of what's fair, what's just. So it goes along the spectrum of justice, injustice.

So I definitely agree this is a crime story. And we're going to, in the next series of questions we'll start getting into delineating more specificity about what kind of crime story is this? What, you know, what does this story actually mean? And using this methodology will enable us to really get down to real high, high resolution detail about how Ed McBain actually executed this story, how he wrote it and how he communicated such great signal to Sam. And we've got four SAMs here who are, who have all really put a lot of attention on it. And we're going to come to some agreement about how to move Tim forward to create his own scene like this one, which we call the interrogation scene type.

Well, and before we move on from the, the genre, the five leaf genre clover, could you just talk about like, you know, you mentioned at the beginning we have these six categories of questions. It's a total of 24 questions. So in this particular category there's five. Like, why is this included in the 24 questions that we should be asking about this story? What do I, now that I've gone through this and I've, you know, looked at the five genre leaf clover, I've figured out its realism, I figured out its drama, police procedural, it's crime. What do I have now? Why is this helpful for me to know about a story that I'm looking at as a masterwork?

Oh, great question. Okay, so.

Storytelling is such a.

Incredibly large domain. Right? Right. So when we say something like I really want to tell a story that's very coarse, it, it's very nebulous, it's very abstract. Well, what kind of story? I don't know. One of those ones people buy. Okay, well that's a, I guess you've, you haven't really reigned that thing in very well. Right. So the story problem is a very Big problem. I want to be a writer. Okay, cool. Well, writers do what? Well, they tell stories. Well, that's what I'm going to do then. Well, what kind of story you want to tell? I don't know. You got any suggestions? Well, the story grid has some suggestions, right? So what we've done is we've taken that big, big barrel of story problem and we've separated it so that we can break that big, very large abstract problem down a bit. We can constrain it, bring it into higher resolution so that we can start to think about how to tell that story the best possible way. And the way we do that is we divide it into this five leaf genre category. It's sort of like a very coarse breaker, upper right. Like, if you ever. For years I used to work construction in the summer, right? So what would happen is there would be a quarry, right? And there would be all this limestone. And so what they would do is they'd get these big, big pile drivers and break up the quarry into these big chunks, right? And then they'd take each of the pieces of the big chunks and then they put it in an aggregator who would break it up into smaller chunks and so on and so on and so on until you had sand at the end or, or lime powder. And that's kind of what we're doing with the story problem. It's this big quarry. And so the first thing to do is to break it into these five big chunks that all have to come together. And, you know, we went through the first war, and the content chunk is really important because this is the one that we can really wrap our arms around. We can really start to understand it because the content genre tells us what it's about. About. And what it's about are things that we care about, right? So every person on the planet cares about a certain number of things abstractly. We all care about life and death. We all care about security. We all care about justice and injustice. We all care about love, right? We all care about respect. We all care about honor. We all care about morality, what's good and what's bad. We all care about how we're looking at the world. Are we seeing the world properly or improperly? And we all care about our status, right? So are we. Are we. How are we doing compared to everyone else? Are we doing well? Are we doing poorly? Right? So all of these values lock into the genre content slots, right? And then each one of them. So we can look at each of these content genres and we say, well, why would Sam want to read this, this particular story? Well, this is a story about justice and injustice. So Sam probably has a problem. She might not know it, but she has a problem thinking about, geez, I'm really not sure how, how to evaluate what's fair and not fair in some of my relationships. So a lot of people love crime stories because they have a difficulty trying to negotiate. Am I being victimized? Am I not being victimized? I'm not really sure. I guess it's context dependent, I don't know. So they're drawn to those storytellers who work in this arena that deal with that value of justice and injustice. So what we do with this five genre leaf is like we're at the core quarry and we've got this big, big problem, this big mountain of limestone. And we want to get some limestone powder in order to, you know, build some buildings and make things good. Right? So the first tool that we use is to break down that big story problem into these five categories. And obviously, I'm sure you figured this out by now. They all sort of, they, they tie together, right? They're like a braid. And so when Leslie was talking about, you know, the, the, the importance of the. As if what she was talking about is, you know, the realism has to align with the style, which has to align with the structure, which has to align with the time signature and ultimately with the global content genre. So this five genre cloverleaf is the first stage of breaking down our big problem. And by the time we filter all the way down to the bottom of our green and that last tool, which is the five commandments of storytelling, now we know how to the general stages of being able to iterate, meaning write a story that Sam will understand and Sam will be excited by, will be intrigued by, and then ultimately have some catharsis to get some sort of facilitation to an insight into what is justice in a particular context. So I, I hope that, that, that really gives the, the big picture of where the five leaf genre clover sits. This is a great place to start because it's going to take that big mountain of problem and, and break it down into five really nice hills.

Yeah, that's great. Well, we'll end there for this episode. And so as always, you can see everything about the StoryGrid podcast@storygrid.com podcast. Make sure you go there and sign up to subscribe to the podcast. Also, we're now on YouTube, so we're trying that out. So if you want to check out the visual version of this. We're going to have that up there as well, but thanks as always. And we'll be back next week in your feed with the second part of the 624 analysis. See you then. Thanks, everybody.