The Math of Storytelling

Hello, and welcome to the Story Grid 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, we continue diving into the fundamentals of Story Grid and looking in the toolbox, and we look at the math of story.

So one of the ways that Sean likes to change his perspective on looking at a story is to move from this kind of subjective place to a much more objective place so we can get an objective, kind of concrete look on what we're trying to do when we're writing a book. And so it was one of the chapters when I first read Storygrid, that really stood out to me. And so it was fun to dive back into this concept of the math of storytelling. So it's a great episode. I think you'll enjoy it. Let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, a couple weeks ago, we finished going through the six core editor questions, which. It's one of those. The more I come back to it, the more, you know, these things just have so many layers to them. I feel like every time I go back through it, it's like, oh, man, I see something new that I didn't see before, but now I want to get into. What I think we've talked about is, like, everybody's. They ask about it the most, which is the math.

Yeah.

And so just talk a little bit. Because I still remember when I first read the book and saw the chapter heading of the math, and I'm like, what does math have to do with storytelling? And so just talk a little bit about how math applies in Story Grid.

Sure. Okay. So the way I usually talk about the math is to think about stories in a global context, and it's sort of, you know, looking at a story through a different lens. So to look at it, you know, quantitatively as opposed to qualitatively. So one of the tricks I always play with with my son, who's a big baseball fan, is to say to him, you know, imagine if a Martian came down and plopped themselves in a chair and watched a baseball game, several baseball games, and nobody told the Martian, you know, what the rules of the game are. Or actually, they just sort of gave him the simple rules of the game. You know, there's nine innings, nine positions, etc. And then at the end of that, allow the Martian to sort of start parsing out and talking about how one would be able to win that game with the greatest probability of success. And so if you look at baseball like that, this is sort of the evolution of sabermetrics in baseball, which is very quantitative analysis of the events that happen in the baseball game and sort of picking out the truth as opposed to traditional stories that people talk about baseball. So, you know, I won't belabor baseball too much, but I will say in traditional baseball history, it was always taken for granted that the way to measure a hitter was batting average, like how many times they safely reach base through a hit. And that would be the best way to say who was the best hitter. Well, it turned out once sabermetrics came into the game, that it was sort of like this Martian like analysis. Well, it's actually on base percentage, because you can reach base without actually getting a hit. And the more people you have on base, the more runs you score. The more runs you score, the greater the probability of winning. So if you take this sort of way of looking at a phenomena in a different way and you apply it to storytelling, this is sort of how I came up with the math. So I looked at story in terms of, you know, well, geez, if I were a Martian, and someone said to me, here, here's a book contract, you know, you have to deliver this book in nine months. And the Martian would say, well, how many words is that book that I have to deliver? Right? They're going to go, I'm going to, I'm going to hit the minimum viable number of words because the words will equate to amount of effort necessary to meet the minimum viable standard. And so that's what you have in a book contract. It says usually for a novel, 60 to 80,000 words. Great. So that was sort of my starting point. How might someone with a very quantitative approach approach the problem of delivering a 60,000 to 80,000 word novel? And you know, being someone who, who majored in science in college, I said, well, I'd break down that 80,000 or 60,000 words into smaller chunks, right? Because I've got a calendar in front of me and I've got X number of days to deliver the 80,000 words that then I'm going to say to myself, well, geez, if I can break down that 80,000 word problem into, you know, 300 days, then I will know how many words I should be able to commit to the page in order to make that deadline, okay? So this is the rational way I started looking at story, especially novels. And then I said to myself, okay, that's one way a simple, you know, you got to do a thousand words a day for 80 days, and then you've got another 80 days to revise those thousand words, etc. So that's a very practical and prescriptive way of solving a big problem by just breaking it down into word count. But what about that word count? What in those words am I also going to have to deliver? Well, what's the biggest sort of dividing point a story? Well, this is pretty simple too. There's a beginning, there's a middle, and there's an end. It's a three part deal. It goes all the way back to Aristotle, who was trying to solve this problem himself. And he said to himself, well, there's three parts to a story, beginning, middle and end. And the way you break it down is the middle is usually the meaty middle. It's much larger than the other two parts. And he sort of came up with this notion that, you know, a well told story is about 25% beginning, 50% middle and 25% end. Okay, great. So a quarter, half, quarter. So if I break down my 80,000 word manuscript into a quarter, half, quarter, my middle is going to be 40,000 words, my beginning is going to be 20,000 words, and my ending is going to be 20,000 Words. So that's just another quantitative way of looking at a story by using a first principle. Okay, so then you can say, okay, so I've got to do 20,000 beginning, 50,000 middle, 20,000 end. So now I'm starting to think about qualities. What qualities are necessary order to deliver that beginning, middle and end. And maybe if I can figure out different kinds of things that I have to do in each one of those sections, I can break each one of those sections down into a more comprehensive, understandable mathematical problem. So in the book you can basically follow my reasoning into how I broke down, you know, the 20,000 words at the beginning into five critical scenes that must be a part of those. Now, if you have 20,000 words, you can't really write 20,000 scenes because then each scene would be one word. Right? Right. So then I thought to myself, well, what is the average scene length? Like if I were to, you know, take a look at all of the scenes that have been written over the last, say, 30 years, all of the novels, and divide them by the number of scenes, how many words would be the average? And what I discovered is generally it's between a thousand to two thousand words. So I settled in like the 1500 word length. And then I started reading scenes that were about 1500 words. And I said to myself, that's a really nice number of words for a scene because it's not too long, it's not too short, and it's just enough to want you to read another one. So I called it the potato chip length scene. So like potato chips, if the scene is really well done, it's like a potato chip, you want to eat one more. And so that's how another way you can establish narrative drive is by using sort of the, the 1500 word guide as potato chip length scenes. So you take your 20,000 words and you divide it by 1500, which is the average length of a scene. So now I can figure out it's probably I'm looking at between 10 and 15 scenes in the beginning and then I can do the same thing in the middle, which would be between 20 and 30 scenes. And then the ending would be between 10 and 15 scenes. So now I've broken this massive 80,000 word problem into, into smaller and smaller pieces. And so the math for me looking at this story problem quantitatively as opposed to constantly looking at it qualitatively, was a big innovation because it allowed me as an editor to be able to communicate with a writer in a way that they would understand. If I said to them, you know what, your seventh scene is crazy long. It's like 7,000 words. You got to chop that up. They go, why? And then I could actually have an answer for them that would be reasonable, as opposed to saying, well, I just have this feeling that 7,000 words is too long. But if I was able to say to them, hey, you know what? I've analyzed and taken a look at pretty much every X novel in your genre for the past 15 years. And it's been in my experience that of the hundreds of novels that I've read in your genre that the average scene length is between 1500 and 2000 words, then they would say, oh, okay, I get you. I'm really not going to want to mess with that sort of expectation of the audience. So let me cut that 7,000 words either into four different scenes or one scene. That cuts out a lot of descriptive and exposition. So the math in the story grid book is a really critical. It's sort of like a psycho technology, right? That's what math is. It's a way that our minds are creating sort of a prism to look at a problem. So if you use different tools that aren't unexpected to help you solve problems, you can actually get yourself out of your usual frame of mind, which is, oh my God, this book is due in nine months and I have no idea how to finish it.

Well, and this is where actually first I thought, like, is there anywhere, like, has anybody actually fed books into a database where it keeps track of like, how many words are in the book or, you know, divided by scenes or divided by anything like that before?

Well, the, the closest thing is sort of the Hedonometer that we talked about a couple of years ago. And the Hedonometer is a computer software program that some scientists at the University of Vermont, I believe, created to analyze, you know, the, the movement of stories. So the way in which they solved that problem was not qualitative in any real way beyond sort of assigning a valence number to words. So I don't want to get too deeply into it, but the short answer to your question is no, because I do believe that, you know, I'm gonna go a little off track here, but I think it's important that I do. There's this thing, this thing in, in the intellectual world, meaning universities and sort of research laboratories, and it's called the two cultures. And a guy named C.P. snow wrote about the two cultures back in the 1950s. And he was sort of one of these people whose just intellectually curious. And so, you know, he had training in the sciences and he also had training in the humanities. So the science people are people who believe in the quantitative world, right? Anything that you can measure that is the same measurement across time with different numbers of people making the measurements is what they call a scientific fact, right? So if I, if I have a piece of rope and I measure it and I say it's 16 inches and I hand you the rope and you take the same measuring device, you'll find that it's 16 inches too. So that's a scientific fact. So it's the world of matter, right? So all of the things in the world are made up of matter and we can measure them. So scientists see that as sort of their, their global focal point, that anything real is made up of matter. And so they don't really go outside of the world of matter. Now on the opposite side, you have people who, who live in the humanities. What the humanities is about is thinking about what matters, right? So it's the world of the mind, it's the world of story, it's the world of religion, it's the world of philosophy, history, so what matters is the big problem that the humanities are trying to solve. So storytelling has always been sort of sludged into the humanities arena. Now the difficult thing is that, you know, the world is both, right? We have both matter and what matter. So we have the world of. Of everyday things that you can measure. And we also have the world of why we think gold is more precious than dust. It doesn't empirically make sense that gold is more valuable than dust, but it is. Now, we as human beings were the machines of what matters. So we have values now. We value certain things more than other things. We have a spectrum of value, a gradient of value. Some things are more important to us than others. Okay, so the humanities is all about the phenomena of what matters, and science is all about the phenomena of just matter, right? So as you can see, when you look at story from the scientific viewpoint, matter. What is the matter of story? The matter of story? Story is made up of, for lack of a better description, words. And you know, what they put in contracts are we need to see 80,000 words or you are not abiding the contract. So writers say to themselves, well, I'm certainly going to abide that 80,000 word mark, right? So we take the science of story very seriously when it's contractually obligated to, but that kind of falls to the wayside when we approach the problem of story. And so the reason why I came up with the storygrid methodology was to say, in how many different ways and how many different levels of analysis can I use to approach the story problem? And by gosh, I'm not gonna, like, give up science when I'm looking at story, because story is matter as much of it is what matters. So that's how I came up with sort of figuring out how many scenes would. Would traditionally be seen in the average contemporary novel. And I came to the conclusion it's between 40 and 65. Now, if you're doing epic fantasy fiction, it can go up to about 110, 120. So I've sort of lost the question. Other than looking at story from a quantitative point of view is very enriching because it gets you out of worrying about dealing with what matters. So you can, you know, when you're looking at a problem, use one prism at a time, use one level of analysis at a time. Because if you start to mix and match them in your mind as you're examining the problem, you can get wildly confused and you can spiral out of control and you will lose sort of your Ability to be able to solve the micro problem. Focus, like identify the problem and then slice up the problem into little mini problems. And then as you're looking at the mini problem, don't go to the next mini problem until you solve the first one.

So if I'm a writer, if I'm a writer. If I'm a writer looking at, you know, I'm planning out my novel and I've gone through the six core questions so I know what my genre is, I know what my obligatory scenes and conventions are, I know my point of view, all that stuff is the next thing to start thinking about. Like, okay, what are my.

15 scenes that five in the beginning, five are in the middle, build, five are in the ending payoff. Is that kind of the next thing I would want to be mapping out?

That's what I recommend. And the reason why I recommend that is what those five scenes are. Okay, let's go back to what I was saying about value, right? We value more things than we do others. So in a story, a story is about progressively escalating the value at stake, right? So if it's an action story, the value at stake is life and death. So obviously the critical scenes in the story are going to be about that value and we're going to get closer and closer to moving that value from life to death. And in fact, we'll probably cross it least one, if not multiple times in the story. So if you are creating a story, you want to sort of really nail down sort of the big skeletal moments of the story as soon as possible. So that's why I suggest find those five critical scenes at the beginning of your story, five in the middle and five in the end, and at least get like a one sentence idea down about them, right? Like this is the moment when the hero is at the mercy of the villain and has to get out of this situation either using their physical prowess or their mental prowess or a combination of both. So that's a very vague notion of what a scene is, but it's a good starting point. And in fact that's an obligatory scene in an action story and then also a thriller and etc. In multiple genres. That's because it's a critical moment in our life, right? Oftentimes we feel if we're going in to get a raise at work, the villain is basically our boss, right? And we are at the mercy of our boss. We're not going to get anything unless that boss agrees to it, right? So that's where the hero at the mercy of the villain scene came from is that we constantly experience our life in these sort of archetypical roles. And often we're cast, we cast ourselves as the victim in a dramatic situation. So when we go in to ask for a raise from our boss at work, we are dealing with a problem that is terrifying. How do we outwit the villain across the desk who has all of the money and I have very little of it. What can I do? Well, I could beat them up and say, you're going to give me a raise or I'm going to beat you up. Right. That's not going to work very well. So we would have to use psycho technology. We would have to reason with them and say, look, I've analyzed the work I've done in this company. Here is the work I've done. Here's the amount of net profit that has been the result. Here is my salary. I think I deserve more of that net profit than I'm getting now. And that's an argument that your boss is going to. That's a way where you can outwit the villain. Right. So that scene is a critical scene in the ending of a story and especially an action story. So write it down, you know. Well, I got to have one of those scenes at the end. I'm going to put that down and that's probably going to be one of those five major points in the story. And then in the middle you can do the same thing and same at the beginning.

Yeah. When we were going through the spreadsheet for the threshing this last time and analyzing it, it really made me think about this because to me, the whole thing, what you've been describing about breaking a 60 to 80,000 word problem down into smaller, smaller bits is putting constraints so that I can create. Because one of the things that's really hard is if you have no constraints, you don't know where to start. I always think of the example of like one of the, you know, why would you go to like an art class, like an actual show up at a studio and take an art class as opposed to just take online classes or something like that. And it's because, like, if I just walk into a store that sells supplies, it's like I don't even know where to begin or what to do. You know, I don't know what I want to paint. And let's say I pick watercolor. I wouldn't even know where to start. Or, you know, and so having, you know, going to a class and having somebody Say, okay, you're going to use this paintbrush, you're going to use these three colors and you're going to do this. Like, that puts me in a situation where like, okay, that is a solvable problem for me. And when I started thinking through, you know, when we went through and I had to first identify my 15 scenes and then I had to prove that it turned on the value of life and death because I'm writing an action story, like, it got me thinking, like, oh, that would be super helpful in the beginning to just know, like, okay, I have to have an inciting incident to the beginning hook. That's the inciting incident for the story. And it has to turn on life and death. So somebody's life has to be at stake. You know, like, it's just pushing it all the way down into like a 1500 word problem that has really tight constraints on what it can be. Because even if you just say, write 1500 words, it's like, I don't even know what I'm trying to accomplish with those. But it's like once you wrap it in those constraints, it becomes a solvable problem that feels much more clear. Like, you know, I've been, I've done a couple writing contests and I've really enjoyed those because they're like, okay, here's what your story has to be. Write 1500 words, right? 2000 words or whatever. And it's like, okay, that I can do, right? You know, that feels solvable. So.

Well, yeah, I've always liked. That's. That's really a great way of putting it. And in fact, you know, that's the coursework that I'm writing, currently writing now. You know, it's the counter to the, the macro course that, you know, we've done, I did last summer and we did, we ran again in the winter. And this is about micro work, you know, micro storytelling. So part of what I'm doing is creating these very strict constraints that would should. And very confident that they will because they work for me. They should be able to make the people who take the class really understand how to sort of pen themselves in with very specific goals right before they start to work. So for example, one of the things that you and I have done with the threshing is I remember I made you stick in a new column in the spreadsheet called Scene type and what a scene type is. Yeah, So a scene type is everyday scenes that everyone experiences. Right? So stranger knocks at the door, that's a scene type, Right. You're Home. Somebody's knocking on the door. You don't know who it is. It could be the gas man, it could be your long lost friend, you know, whatever. It allows you to have your imagination very focused and run wild. So if you add the scene type with the global point of the scene in terms of story structure, like stranger knocks at the door with hero at the mercy of the villain. Go. Right. So at the very least you've got. Oh, let's see, what could that be? Well, the stranger could be someone pretending to be, you know, and off you go, and you find yourself actually starting to be able to see things in your mind that you wouldn't necessarily be able to do. If I just said, hey, yeah, just bang out a 1500 word scene for me and bring it in next Tuesday. Then you're like, oh my gosh, I don't know, 1500 words. Let's see, word one. Maybe I'll start with the, you know, and then you get into a nightmare situation because it's, it's computationally explosive. Right? So, yeah, I mean, that's how we solve problems.

Well, use. Let's stop right there. So at the editor training a few weeks ago, you used that phrase several times. Explain what that means.

Well, this is like one of those things that everybody already knows, but until you, you point it out, they don't really quite know it at this degree. Okay, so what computationally explosive means is that there are so many different options to move from sort of your, your current state of what is to a future goal state. So let's say I want to move from my kitchen table to the coffee pot, where the coffee is. And this is, this is fascinating when you think about it. Now, there's, there's any number of paths that I can use to get from where I am to where I want to be. And if you think of them in terms of the numbers of like, direction that you can go from here to the coffee pot, you can come up with probably at least just off the top of your head. You know, let's say 12. There's 12 options to start my path toward the coffee pot. So there's 12 options. And then let's say it's going to take 25 different, you know, stages for me to move from my kitchen table to the coffee pot. So 12 options to begin with. And let's say there's always 12 options just to limit ourselves. So if you want to do the computational, like how many options there are for me to get from my kitchen table to the coffee pot, you come up with the number of directions and early moves I can make each time. So that would be the number 12. And if it takes 25 steps to get to the coffee pot, it would be 12 to the 25th power. So if you do that number, it's massive, right? It's like one times ten to the. I don't even know because I haven't, I haven't done the math, but it's at least 20 power, right? So that doesn't make any sense. When you say that, it's like. But then you think about and you go, well, I guess that is true. There are that many paths from that many options, it's computationally explosive. So how is it that we're just able immediately to step up and walk directly to the coffee pot? And. Well, I don't want to get into too much cognitive science, but it's because we have eyes and we're able to focus and we're able to pick out salience. So we understand the shortest path is a direct line because that's the way our bodies move. So we don't go zigzag on our way to the coffee pot because we know from our focus in our, in our eyes that that's where it is. Okay, so when you're creating a scene or a story, you can just think of how computationally explosive that is. Right? So if I, if I say to you, Tim, write a 1500 word scene, you're gonna go, well, I have a lot of options, don't I? I could write a scene that is the first scene in a horror story, or I could write a scene that's the first story in a society story, or a maturation plot, or a western or a love story. Right? And so just from the story grid itself, we have 12, you know, content genres, and that's not even including the other four leafs of the five leaf clover of story. And then you say to yourself, well, geez, if I'm going to write a novel, I need to write at least 60 scenes. So that's 60 steps. So 12 to the 60th power is outrageously large. So the problems that we're dealing with are very, very large. There's no joke about that. And that's why it's so difficult. But the way the story grid works is that it starts to slice out a lot of options for you so that you can really laser focus and go from very large problem to super problem to large problem to medium problem, to small problem to micro problem. So you're using Your levels of analysis to constrain your problem. And then you set out these series of these tiny little problems that you solve, and then you work the problems. So everything that I just said, that's math talk, right? Right. Remember, at the beginning you're like, what's with the math? And how does that relate to story? Well, you know, it doesn't really take a genius to figure out, well, why don't I just apply the other way people look at the world to what I'm looking at, and maybe I'll come up with some insight on how to solve the problems in a brand new way. So the story, I mean, there's a reason why I call it Story grid. Right. Story connotes the humanities, right. And grids connote science. So when you bring the science and humanities together, you can solve problems that you never thought that you would be able to solve before.

Okay, so one of the tools that we reference a lot is the full scop global story grid. And so between the six editor questions and then doing this math and looking at the 15 scenes, is that all you need to fill that out?

Yes. I mean, the. The full scout global story grid is basically at the very top of the full scout page is sort of a checklist, right. It reviews your conventions and obligatory scenes, what you need to have in that story. It also reviews the point of view narrative device, who's telling the story. It tells you what global genre you need to abide. And it also tells you if you have an internal genre, what that sub genre is at play, or vice versa. Right. And so then once you have that top quarter of the full scout page done, you've got global marching orders, so to speak. And then the last, you know, three quarters of the global foolscout page are blowing out the five skeletal scenes in your beginning, your middle, and your end. So I always call it, you know, the purpose of the beginning is to hook. Hook the reader into going on the ride. The middle is about building the tension and narrative interest for the reader so that they get paid off at the end. Right? So with a surprising but inevitable finish. So that's what the Global Foolscap Global story grid is. It's a one page map that you can refer to on your, you know, micro problem movement from scene one to scene 60 or word one to word 80,000. And then, you know, the toolbox to use for mapping out, you know, the micro scenes, you know, that is all about the story grid spreadsheet, which is a means to really slice and dice each scene into its component Parts and to make sure that it's the continuity from scene to scene is consistent so that the world that you're creating is believable. And it also, you know, goes through the very major point in each scene, which is the value shift, the polarity shift of that value, and the major turning point, progressive complication in that scene that moves the value from, you know, one place on the gradient to another. So, yes, it's a very. It's a complex system. I'll be the first one to admit it. But when you think about it in terms of a global idea, it's really not that complex. What StoryGrid is about is taking the computationally explosive problem of writing a novel and breaking it first into two pieces. So we take that big glob and we slice it in half to start. Half of that is what is the micro problem? How are we going to deal with the micro problem? And how are we going to deal with the macro problem? The macro problem is the global movement of story, the content movement, which is solved by using the foolscap global story grid. The micro problem is how do we make our scenes work from scene to scene and build in the appropriate way. And. And that is solved by using the story grid spreadsheet. So, you know, now we did an entire course on which is the macro, just on that, that one half. Right. Which is the 15 core scenes. So that's what we're going to do this summer is we're going to move, we're going to shift our focus from the big picture to micro. We're going to work scenes, we're going to work a lot of scenes. We're going to work 15 scenes, you know, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. And I'm having a lot of fun figuring out how we can mix and match and have some fun while we're working these scenes. But it's going to be very micro driven. So, you know, obviously in order to get the most out of the story grid, to be able to take both of these classes would be, you know, the best. But again, I'm going to say this. The autodidacts out there, you know, you probably are driven to the point where you, you can probably do this yourself. I mean, that's how I came up with the story grid to begin with. Nobody gave me a class in story grid. It didn't exist. Right. So all of the tools that we talk about are just reinforcements in the classwork of global storygrid principles. It doesn't mean that you can't figure it out. Yourself. So I'm not. I'm not here to be selling anyone on courses or dance lessons or anything like that. This is really. You can figure this out yourself. I did it. And, you know, as my wife would tell you, I'm not really that smart.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting because sometimes you just said in passing, you know, you can get really overwhelmed by the story grid system. And that's why I don't really look at it as a system anymore. Because to me, a system is something you do from start to finish. I look at it more of like a tool set. Because everything that I feel like the thing that we do the most consistently whenever I get stuck is figure out a way to look at it from a different point of view where, like, okay, I'm stuck here. So let's, you know, I'm stuck on the micro. So let's zoom out and remind ourselves of the macro. I'm stuck on the macro. Let's zoom in and just take care of something micro. You know, it's like, okay, we've looked at it from, like you had me do of, like, okay, let's put another column in there and look at it from the standpoint of what is this scene in the global kind of list of scenes. And so I feel like it's more like a toolbox that is full of all these great tools, and you get better at. Better at both. Because if you, you know, I've gotten to work alongside people that are really good at woodworking, and they're not only good at using the tools, they're good at knowing what is the right tool to use.

Right.

That's what's really interesting is, like, they'll pull out a tool that I know what that tool's for, but they'll use it at a time or in a certain way that I would have never thought of. And that's kind of how I've come to think of this is like, it's more about learning a tool set that you can apply, and you get better and better at not only applying the tools. Right. So this spreadsheet was easier for me to do than the very first spreadsheet I did years ago, but also getting better at learning. Okay, I'm stuck here. What tool is the best one to kind of get me past this? So to me, if you try to look at it as like, okay, I'm going to use StoryGrid as a system to write the perfect first draft, you know, that is overwhelming. But if you look at it more of like, A tool set that you pull out different tools at different times, then it becomes much less overwhelming in my mind.

Well, let me. Let me just riff on that a little bit and, you know, sort of take a sidestep here and talk about sort of, you know, one of the major themes of contemporary life is sort of people are getting into mindfulness. And what mindfulness is, is essentially, you know, using the teachings of Siddhartha or the Buddha in ways that will allow more insight into, you know, the nature of the world and to make us feel more connected to the world. So basically, what mindfulness does is it has two tools, right? The first tool is meditation. And what meditation is, it's a means by which you start to look at the world through how your. Your mind is actually working. So it's sort of moving between transparency and opacity. So, you know, if I have a pencil and you ask me to sort of, you know, poke something and start to describe the thing that I'm poking if I have to close my eyes, and that's a glass, you know, if I poke it long enough, I'll start to be able to figure out that the nature of what that thing it is that I'm poking. So the pencil actually becomes an extension of my consciousness in a certain way. So that's sort of the meditative practice is to, you know, focus in and out, going from very detailed things to the way your mind is actually interpreting and looking at the world. So that's one big massive tool in the mindfulness arena. The other one is contemplation. Now, contemplation's goal is to take a very big, wide angle look at the world and sort of try and exit the thoughts of your mind. So this toggling between meditation, which, you know, being a science guy, I would say is. Is sort of running on the X axis, right? So you're moving, you know, to point 100 and then to 75 and. And your goal is get as close to zero in your mind as you can. So you start, you know, focusing for a far position and taking it closer and closer in. And then the contemplative practice would be like the Y axis where you're. You're. You're literally trying to. To engage with the order and chaos of the universe. You know, I'm not trying to be cheesy about it, but that is the tool things and what they've discovered and what Buddha discovered was that when you start to get really good at this, insight starts to come to you, meaning things that you. You can't imagine that you would ever think up by yourself walking down the street, just sort of come to you. So that's sort of what the story grid is trying to do. In terms of story, I'm trying to allow people to contemplate meditatively the micro scene structure from scene to scene and really pick apart that stuff in a very linear way. Well, I got to have beginning, middle and end. And so it's very micro detailed from scene to scene. And then the other tool, the contemplative tool, is the Foolscap Global Story grid, which is looking at story from various levels of elevation, for lack of a better metaphor. So you move from the ground level up to 1,000ft, all the way up to the main archetypes of story. Again, chaos and order. Right. Is what is this story about? Is it about order, the power of order or chaos, the tyranny of order? Right. So I don't want to go too much into that. So basically, while you, you call it a toolbox, I think that that is absolutely true and specific, but I think it's more about training yourself, have more insight. And the more insight that you have, the better you'll be able to tell your story. Now, I don't want to go too cheesy on this, but it's true. A great story alters the consciousness of the reader, right? There's just no other way to explain it. When you are deeply engrossed in reading a story or seeing a story on television, or hearing a song or, or whatever, you are literally in a different conscious realm. And when people interrupt you while you're in that realm, you get very irritated because they're literally pulling you out of the experience. So if that's the power of story, you really need to not look at it like a formula. We are not creating a machine. We are creating something that's again, for lack of a better metaphor, it's larger than the sum of its parts. So the way to create that sort of like internal magical thing, it requires a lot of insight. It requires a lot of contemplation of your personal experiences. Get inspired by them, put them on the page, tweak them some. I'm a great believer that writers are actually practicing.

Meditation and contemplation in exactly the same way that Buddha describes it as they're working. And that's why we can get into a flow state when it's humming. That is magical to the point where it keeps driving us back to the desk. I mean, when Steve Pressfield says, you know, I tried other things in my life, and it just didn't work. I needed to be a writer, right? He says that over and over again. Look, I tried not to be a writer. I tried desperately. I did everything in my power not to be a writer, but it just kept pulling me back. And I think it's that, that very meditational, contemplational nature of writing that puts you in a very insightful flow state forever. How small amount of time. It's just so empowering and meaningful that we can't help but keep coming back to it. That's why I'm really A lot of people always say to me, well, geez, you know, you and Tim have gone hour and hour and talked on the podcast and really done all this stuff about storygrid and given all this stuff away for free. Aren't you worried that people will just take all the free stuff? And I don't worry about that because I think once you sort of get locked into this moment where you see the power of writing as a contemplative and meditative process, that you just want to get better at it. And we're sort of like when we give our conferences and we do the classes and the stories and all that stuff, it's a way to help people get into that state faster, with more frequency, and to really explore the depths of what, you know, meaning is to them.

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