The Mathematics of Storytelling

Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is the podcast dedicated to helping you become a better writer. My name is Tim Grall. I'm your host and I am a struggling writer trying to get my first book done and learn how to write a good book, a book that actually works. And Sean Coyne is the expert. 25 plus years editing experience in New York publishing, and he is sharing his expertise with me along the way. The goal of the show is to let you listen in to our conversation so hopefully we both can learn something at the same time. Now, I've really enjoyed going through this process. It's been really interesting to share my scenes with you and to have your feedback along with Sean's. And so if you haven't seen those, if you've listened to the previous episodes, you can go and download the actual scenes that I wrote and then that Sean fixed and you can see all of his comments. Those are in previous show notes@storygrid.com podcast now, as we go through this, I'm hoping that you learn alongside me. I know one of the things that I've learned the most is how to trust the audience and not put too much in the scene and actually learn to draw things out. I always kind of rush things and try to cram too much into every scene instead of letting things draw out and play out. So we talk about that a good bit in this episode as we go over my rewrite of a scene and then we dive into the math. And one of the things that I love about the story grid and why I initially reached out to Sean to do this podcast after reading his book is that I feel like it helps writers that are just getting started, like myself, and even seasoned writers, put some constraints around their work, allow them to have a box that they can work inside of. So there's not too options, there's not too many decisions to make early on. And this discussion on math is really central to this idea. It helps you make decisions early on, helps you know what scenes you should write, how many scenes you should write, what those scenes should be, and we dive into that in this episode. I think you're really going to get a lot out of it. So we're going to jump in and get started and I'll see you on the other side. All right, Shawn. So I hesitate to even ask this question because a couple weeks ago we went over my scene and it was exactly how I wanted it, which is what an editor would say about my scene. But in the back of my mind, I was Thinking thousands of people are going to hear him rip apart my scene. And so you gave me a lot of pointers and again.

We went over them and you can see all of Sean's notes on those in previous show notes. But I rewrote the scene based on your feedback, at least what I think was your feedback, because we always hear different things that are actually said. So I sent that to you and I wanted to hear what you thought.

I'm really glad that you brought this up, because I did read through the revision and I think it's immeasurably better than the first scene. The first draft of the first scene, and there's a few reasons why. And it goes to, you know, all the redlining notes that I put in the. In the program notes from. From last week. And primarily the first. The very first thing is that you've limited the cast. So the only people on stage in this scene are three people. And you also have a central conflict that you. You pull up immediately. So what you decided to do here is to begin what. What I would call in medias res, which means right in the middle of. Of a conflict, which I think is a terrific idea. It's a great way to suck a reader right into a story. So. So again, you have two primary figures at the very beginning of this scene who are debating something. And I think you did a pretty good job of stringing along the reader for a time period for the reader not to know exactly what they're talking about.

Yeah, that was much harder than I assumed it would be.

Yeah, that was because I actually kept going back and, like, taking stuff out to make it string even further along because I spilled the beans in the first, like, you know, hundred words on the first try.

Yeah, exactly. And this. This is a process of learning how to trust your. Your audience and your reader in that, you know, this is something that we. We have seen as. As, you know, creatures of the Western world. We have been exposed to so many stories since birth that by the time, you know, somebody's 20, 25 years old, they really know so much about story and structure without all intuitively. Right. So they're not really even thinking about it, but they know things that the writer is not going to have to put in. So the fact is that, you know, you start here and these two guys are having a discussion, and, you know, I would say at the very first, you should cut the very first sentence of this scene because it says. It says both men look to bend the other to their will to his will. And you don't even need that to put that sentence in there to start the story is a mistake. And I'll tell you why. Because what it does is it says to the reader that there's a third, you know, third person omniscient voice above, above this scene that is evaluating, you know, what these characters are doing on stage. It's a godlike sort of presence. And to say that to a reader, unless you're, you're going for a narrative altitude that is, you know, Dickensian, you know, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

And then slowly panning down into a street level, ground level scene. The message it sends to the reader is that, oh, this is going to kind of be an old fashioned story where there's a narrator telling me, you know, the goings on of this fictional universe. But your strength in the scene is in the conflict between these two men. Are they going to head back because somebody might be seriously ill or are they going to stay the course? That's the central conflict in this scene. And so the question that is going to arise for the reader is who's gonna win? Who's gonna win this argument?

And I think, you know, this is a, this is a terrific first draft of a scene and you've got a lot of things that you can do to, to tweak it and to improve it and to enhance it. I'll tell you the other thing that I really like about the scene is that, you know, the last time we talked, I said to you, hey, you know, you can't. If you write a story that has 10 guys, you know, on a, on a ship and there's no female presence, it's going to have a limited audience.

Because you, you need to have at least one strong female character in a story to attract the widest readership possible. And you know, as I said before, there's, you know, between. Estimates are between 70 to 75% of book readers are women. Most books are bought and read by women. So if you didn't have any female characters in your story, you're basically shutting out 70 to 75% of an audience, which is, you know, that's not a great decision.

And also, also one of the great things about having a man and a woman in a scene is that there's so much subtext that you never even have to put on the page.

Because the minute, you know, there's a man and a woman on a boat and they're alone, there's sexual tension. Whether, you know, it or not. Or whether the writer is putting it in there. The reader is intuiting, oh, that's kind of strange that they're in this kind of locked cabin together. I wonder what's going to happen. And so what you do is you're setting up. You're foreshadowing a relationship that may or may not develop later on between, you know.

The husband's wife and the captain and the captain and the wife and the. And the captain and the husband. So what you're doing, you're setting up a triangle, a triangle of conflict that you're going to be able to play with for the rest of your novel and your story. So all of this is to say that I made a lot of suggestions based upon your first draft that you could have chosen and taken any which way you wanted. And you may even go back to those editorial suggestions later on when you get stuck and say to yourself, hey, you know what? Maybe that is a good idea to try and set up a situation where we have kind of like a front story and a back story. And I'm not sure if you remember, but in my notes, one of the things that I thought might be interesting for you would be to kind of have the very, very beginning of your story be, you know, the discovery of the floating woman at sea. Right.

Yeah. I actually wrote this scene that. The second version of the scene before I saw those notes.

Oh, good.

And I started working on another first scene based on your notes. Great. So I'm gonna rewrite this scene probably 12 times by the time.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you will. But what the really great news here is that you've got a lot of meat on the bone here. You've got a lot of stuff to play with. You've got a central conflict in the scene. You've got an inciting incident. You've got progressive complications. You've got a crisis, a climax and a resolution all in this scene. So. And it begins, you know, the value at stake in this scene would be power. You know, like, it's a. It's a shift of power. There's a struggle for power. At the very beginning of the scene, one character, the customer, seems to have the power. But at the end of the scene, the power shifts to the captain. And what's also interesting is that the critical moment when that power shift happens, the turning point, is when the female character, who's the wife of the passenger, comes on the scene and she sides with the captain. And that's kind of interesting because, you know, when. When you've got a married couple on a boat and a captain, and the husband is saying one thing and the captain saying another thing. You know, usually the wife's gonna side with the husband. You know, that's just the way it usually goes because they have a long history together, and she's gonna trust her husband more than she would this sort of strange captain. But what I liked about your choice in the scene was for her to sort of placate her husband and side with the captain in a way which raises all kinds of wonderful mysteries and tension for the reader. So the reader is gonna. You know, they're gonna say, geez, I wonder what the hell is going on. I'm gonna read the next chapter, you know, and that's kind of the goal of a scene, to get them to read the next chapter. Yeah.

This was the first scene I'd written, thinking through.

Yeah. The inciting incident, you know, building it to the climax and resolution. Because I just kept thinking, you know, I had that goal of 1500 words, and I kept thinking, okay, I got to make it a little bit worse. A little bit worse. You know, a little bit worse. Because at first I tried to think, like, okay, they disagree, but it's not that big a deal. But by the end, like, it's. It's on the verge of coming to blows. Yeah. And I felt like when I brought her in, that was a way to kind of turn it without either one of them, necessarily, because, like, maybe I'm getting too deep. This is all the crap I hate hearing writers talk about, but.

No, but this is.

This is definitely felt in the moment. Yeah.

You got to go through this in your head, though, but keep going. Yeah.

Yeah. So then I was thinking, like, okay, I don't want any of them. I don't want either of them to be the clear victor. Right. Like that. It's like one just finally says, okay, fine. So I thought by bringing her in, it would be a way to let the captain win, because that was the goal. While him, like, not just deciding that he'll give in, like his wife asked him to give in, with the caveat that he'll get his way if certain things don't happen.

Right.

That's right. And that's a turning point that you used based upon.

That's an active turning point where the introduction of the female character into the scene is an active way of turning it. Whereas if you decided to go with a revelatory turning point, what would have happened is they discover something like the, you know, the navigational equipment. Falls overboard or something like that, or they discover that they were going one course of direction, and in fact, they're going in another one. So using and, you know, the revelatory turning point is a perfectly valid way of getting things going and to turn a scene. But I think at the very beginning of your story, it's better to use active turning points, because revelatory turning points are usually those moments that you want to save up for much later on that are kind of beneath the surface, that the characters already know, but the reader doesn't. I wrote something a long time ago for Steve Pressfield about narrative drive. And if you go to stevepressfield.com and search for an article called Narrative Drive that I wrote, I discuss the three ways to generate tension and excitement and mystery and all that kind of stuff. And it's an important thing to think about. And you intuitively knew I should turn this scene in an active way as opposed to, oh, this just in from ABC News, you know, that kind of revelatory turning point. So, all in all, I think, you know, one of the reasons why I wanted us to work through a scene is that, again, this goes back to the whole Russian doll elements of storytelling. The more comfortable you get writing scenes and perfecting them and tweaking them and having the fun that you seem to be having analyzing them and saying to yourself, well, you know, have I really progressively complicated this in the best way possible? The more you get into that, that primary unit of story for a novelist, which is the scene, the better you're going to be able to evaluate not just your scenes, but your sequences and your acts and your. Your major turning points in your global story. But if you try and attack the global story a little bit too soon.

You'Re going to get really deeply into your mind and a little bit too analytical. So I like working on a scene and then taking a step back, doing a little editing, rewriting the scene and then working it that way as opposed to trying to plot out all 58 scenes, you know, without writing anything, just saying, like, Jim goes to the boat, boat capsizes, you know, those sort of shorthand scene descriptions. Yeah, I think what.

You know, what has been the most helpful takeaway for me is.

Trying to do as little as possible in each scene. Well, I guess you probably wouldn't say that, but not trying to do too many things in any given scene. It's almost like you should just have one thing you're trying to do in each scene.

Yes, yes. You want to turn it from one pole of A value to another pole of the value. So, you know, if we're looking at this scene and the other thing about your beginning here is that the reader's not really sure who the protagonist is yet. So that's kind of cool because that's another element that's going to get them to want to read the second scene.

Anyway. So.

So give me the. Give me. You've only given me the good so far. Give me the bad.

Well, the bad is just, you know, it's the line by line stuff. And the dialogue isn't exactly super duper fantastic.

Okay, now what about. Because I end the dialogue. So the resolution is they're not going back. But I keep writing, you know, I go into. He goes downstairs and kind of recap what happened.

Yeah, I don't know that you would want to do that in your final draft because it sort of like.

It'S a telltale sign of the writer covering his ass. You know, sort of like, I am not confident enough in my storytelling skills to leave a lot of open questions here. So what I'm going to do is sort of fill in the blanks so that the reader can really follow. You know, I really want the reader to be able to follow what I'm doing. But again, as I started, when we first. When I first started talking about this, part of the skill of becoming a really good writer is to really start having deep respect for your audience. And your audience is going to know something's up. They don't need to know the specificity of what's up quite, quite yet, especially if this is your inciting incident to your global story. They're just. They want to, you know, they want to just sort of eavesdrop on this conversation on this ship in the middle of nowhere. And these two guys are debating on whether or not they need to turn back or not. And they're not sure what the motivations of these people are. Why is it that, you know, maybe the guy who wants to go back, he wants to go back for a different reason than what he's saying. Because the other thing about dialogue and about storytelling is that.

The subtext is what is going to drive the curiosity of the reader. So here's a, you know, here's a really good thing to remember. The scene is never really about what's being spoken. So this scene, although it's about whether or not they're going to turn back or not, it's not really about that. What it's about is the captain wants something, the passenger wants another thing. And usually the reasons why the passenger wants to head back to shore have nothing to do with the health of the other guy on board.

So those are revelations that are going to drive reader to want to find out what happens next.

So the fact that these guys are arguing about money and they're wondering whether or not, you know, the guy's too ill to continue, what that says to the reader is that, wow, these are pretty good reasons why they're using and having this argument. But I really wonder what the truth is underneath all that.

So when you're writing dialogue, it's. And you can really sort of get mind trippy thinking all through all this stuff. So I hesitate to really start getting into a deep philosophical discussion about dialogue, but you have to remember that dialogue is.

Like, just think about your own life when you want, like, say you don't want to go to the movie that your wife wants to go to.

But you don't want to hurt her feelings. Right. So usually what you'll do is you're not going to say, I don't want to go to your stupid movie because there's no. There's going to be no action in it, and it's going to be a bunch of people talking and somebody's going to end up crying, and I don't want to go see that movie because it's stupid. You're not going to say that to your wife. Instead, you're going to say something like, hey, yeah, that sounds pretty good. The only thing is that I read a review in the New York Times and it said that, you know, it was kind of bad. So. You sure you really want to see that? You know what I'm saying?

It's funny, just yesterday I was listening to this podcast. No, I'm not going to tell you about a conversation between me and my wife.

No, no, please don't.

Yeah, no, I'm going to talk about something else. No, there's this podcast that's relatively new called Hidden Brain, and their first episode was about switch tracking, and it was talking about this idea of how, like, two people have two different motivations, but they're in one conversation. And I think Stephen King talked about this in On Writing is like, he's basically like, people lie.

Yes.

And so the dialogue is the best way to kind of tease that out, because they're going to say things that are lies or half truths, and you're left wondering what's really going on.

Exactly, exactly. Everybody lies all the time.

And it's. It's, you know, the motivations for the lying are often, you know, good intentions. You don't want to hurt anybody's feelings by saying, you know, what you really deep down think, but you also want to get what you want, too. So you. We're all masters of sort of talking around the thing instead of actually formally addressing the thing. And that's, that's why I had you read Hills Like White Elephants, because that's a, that's a masterful.

Way. Hemingway. What Hemingway did was he. He wrote everything but what they were really talking about. At no point does he mention, you know, what they're really, really talking about.

What I felt like my favorite part of that was how hard the man was pushing the woman in that scene.

Yes.

With. When everything he said was, hey, whatever you want, you know.

Exactly. That's what we always do. Right. We always are like, hey, it's totally your decision, but, you know, just think about it. You know, it's gonna be terrible, but it's your decision, you know.

Yeah. That's just one of the all time, you know, that's. That's something that's taught in English literature classes from, you know, sixth grade through postgraduate degrees. It's a great piece of writing.

All right. Okay. So I'm going to take another couple cracks at the scene, clean it up a little bit. But for any of you that want to read my rewrite, it will be in the show notes of this episode, episode 8@storygrid.com podcast. So I want to get into. Because I'm sure everybody is sick of hearing about my one little scene. I want to dive into the episode on math that you talked about. I actually went. I looked it up. What did I look it up for? I was. Oh, I was writing something about how to. How to write a book in 90 days.

For my other website. And I came back to this because it was. I was telling people, like, break everything down into scenes. And I remembered, like, you had, like that, you know, every book has got a. You know, most books. Let's see, what is it? Most books are about 80,000 words long. They have roughly, what is it, 60 scenes.

Yeah, about, about.

And then, you know, ahead of time that you have 15 scenes already that you have to write. What are, what are those? Can you name them all from memory? I have them here.

Sure, sure. Let me test my own knowledge of things I've written before, which.

Okay.

You know, it's dicey sometimes, Right. But this one's pretty easy. Okay.

The thing about the story grid that I love and the thing that you're referencing is a chapter called the Math. And the thing that I really love about the methodology of the story grid is that what it's about is it's breaking down huge, big tasks into manageable, step by step, mini problems that you can, you can say to yourself, hey man, I can write 1500 words. But if somebody says to you, can you write 80,000 words in 90 days? You're like, no, there's no way I'm going to be able to do that. But if you say to somebody, can you write 1500 words in two days? They're like, yeah, I could probably do that. So the whole chapter about math is to break down this monumental, painful, you know, monster problem into easily identifiable tasks that you can actually put on your calendar and say, today's task is to do this scene and it has to be 1500 words. And this is where it needs to start and where it needs to finish. And I've got seven hours to do it. That is something that everybody with a task, you know, when you look outside and you see leaves on your, on your front yard, you go, okay, I need to get my rake and I need to rake up those leaves. It's a very easy thing to measure and picture in your head. So that's what I'm trying to do with the story grid is to make these very esoteric monster problems smaller. So in a story, and I go over this over and over again in the book, you know, very simply, you're going to have a beginning, a middle, and an end to a story. That is just like if you were to distill story structure, that's it. There's three sections to a story. There's a beginning, there's a middle, and there's an end. So you've got three, you know, major movements in a story. It begins, there's middle complications, and then there's an ending payoff. So if you know that you have to write an 80,000 word novel and that.

The scene length today that most people really appreciate is around 1500 to 2000 words, then, you know, you divide 2000 words into 80,000 and you get 40 scenes.

When you call that, like, what do you say, potato chip length?

I do. I call it potato chip length. And it's because.

You know, when we were all back in high school and we had to read those big books like Moby Dick and, you know, it's like, read chapter six tonight. And it's, it's the, you know, the codification of whale classifications. And it's 112 pages. You're about ready to jump off a bridge when you look at chapter six and it goes on 112 pages or whatever it goes on. So what people would prefer, and you know, it's sort of evolved to this point in commercial fiction is to have a scene that they could read in, you know, three to four minutes. And if the scene's great and it's late at night, they'll say, oh, well, then the next chapter is only, you know, six more pages. I'm going to read that chapter. So it's like potato chips, right? So if you eat one potato chip, then you want to eat another. Now if you go from a 1500 word scene, that's say five or six pages in a book and then the next chapter is 42 pages, guess what's going to happen? People are going to stop reading and they're going to go right to bed. So I refer to them as potato chip length because 1500-2000 words. If you do it really well, it will make people say, oh, what the heck, I'll read one more chapter before I go to bed. And, and then if that chapter is even better, then they go, oh my gosh, you know, I can go to bed at 11:30 tonight, I'll read another chapter. And you know, if you do it really, really well, you'll get people to stay up all night reading your book. And that's really, you know, the goal. But if there's a 45 page chapter, they're going to say, okay, I'm definitely going to stop here because I can't commit to reading 42 pages before I go to sleep. Because everybody likes to have a moment of accomplishment before they go to sleep, right? Nobody wants to stop in the middle of a chapter.

I do this with my Kindle. When I realize I'm getting like past about 2/3 into the book, I'll check to see how long it says I have to read to finish the book. And I'm like looking at my clock, playing that like, okay, I'm supposed to get up this early, but I want to, you know, finish the book. I could do that. But then I lose this. I'm like doing all of this, like.

All that negotiation in my head, right?

Yeah.

So I think it's a good. And you know, I say this in, in the book, you know, Silence of The Lambs is 64 scenes. Each one is not more than 2,000 words. And you know, why not take advice from somebody as masterful as Thomas Harris and say to yourself, another Guy who does this is James Patterson. I mean, he'll have a chapter that's 127 words, you know, and he's known for a lot of chapters and a lot of breaks in his storytelling because he wants people to keep reading it. He doesn't want them to get bogged down by one particular chapter. And I think it's a very good choice. So, anyway, so let's get back to the math. All right, so say we have 1500 words. It's 80,000 words is your typical novel.

And you're going to do 1500 word scenes. So you're going to have about 60 chapters. If you're 2000 words, it's going to be 40 chapters. I think 60 chapters of 1500 words is a, you know, that's a good place to start. So.

Now we've got the beginning, we've got the middle and the end. And I go into great detail in the book about why the following fact is, is true. But I'm just going to give you the fact now because I could talk about it for another hour. And the fact is that in a traditional story, the beginning is 25% of the storytelling, the middle is 50% of the storytelling, and the ending is 25% of the storytelling. So it's a 25, 50, 25.

Percentage between beginning, middle and end. And that is just the way storytelling has evolved since the beginning of Time. And again, I have a couple of chapters in there that explore the reasons why that may be. And it's pretty fascinating to me. It might not be fascinating to other people, but just in terms of math, if you say to yourself, okay, 25% of my book is going to be the beginning. It's 80,000 words. So that's going to be about. Oh, yikes, 16.

About 22,000 words is going to be my beginning, and 22,000 words is going to be my end. And the middle is going to be whatever 80,000 minus 44,000 is, which is 36,000. I don't know, something like that.

And then you divide, you know, 1500 words into each of those, into those word counts, and you come up with, you know, between 12 to 15 scenes to begin with, and then about 20.

To 25 scenes in the middle, and then 12 to 15 scenes at the end. So, okay, we've broken down a very big problem already into three distinct units. Your beginning is going to be about 12 scenes, your middle is going to be about 24 scenes, and your end is going to be 12 scenes.

Now, can we break it down even further to give us some more, you know, battle plans to attack this novel. And yes, you can. And this goes to, you know, what we were talking about three minutes ago. Every beginning is going to have to have an inciting incident, progressive complications, a crisis, a climax and a resolution. And each one of those things is going to have to have sort of a scene that's dedicated to that one particular.

Beginnings unit of story. So you're going to have to have one scene that's sort of the inciting incident of the global story. That will be in the beginning of your story. And this is the one that you've been working on, Tim. It's sort of the inciting incident of the entire story. It's also the inciting incident of the beginning of the story. So that one scene you've kind of been tackling over the past couple of weeks, then you're going to have to have a scene in that beginning that really raises and progressively complicates the beginning to a very big crisis point for the. For the beginning hook of your story. So, for example, let's say in your story that progressive complication is they decide not to turn back. And as they are over deep sea diving again.

A storm picks up and the storm wipes out all the navigation equipment and all the guys have to get back on the ship. And now what are they going to do? The crisis will be now are we going to turn back or now are we going to try and find, you know, shelter somewhere else? That would sort of be. And I know that's kind of cliche and it's just off the top of my head, but that would be example of a global.

The beginning hook crisis for the early part of your story. That would be the big crisis in the beginning hook. And it's going to turn the story from, you know, from life at the beginning to the possibility of death. So it's going to go from a positive to a negative at the end of your beginning hook. And then you're going to have a scene that's going to be the climax, that crisis. What choice do they make? They're going to do an entire scene where they deliberate and somebody's going to step forward and say, I'm going to make this decision. The rest of you have to follow me. And this is going to be the way it is. And then you're going to have a short resolution scene to show the result of that climactic decision. So you're going to have five scenes where you have to really pay that off in your beginning. So you're going to have one scene that's dedicated to the inciting incident of the beginning hook. One scene that's dedicated to a progressive complication of the beginning hook. One scene that's dedicated to the crisis of the beginning hook. One scene that's dedicated to the climax of the beginning hook. And one scene that's dedicated to the resolution of the beginning hook. And guess what? You're going to need those same five scenes for the middle build and the ending payoff. So you know from the very beginning, 15 scenes that you're going to have to deliver in your story, right?

So we have 48 scenes, 12 for the beginning, 24 for the middle, 12 for the end. We already have 15 of those laid out because we have five, five and five. So that leaves, oh, geez, 33 scenes that we got to write, right?

And those other 33 scenes, you're going to be able to narrow those down too. Because if you're an expert in your genres and you've already spent a lot of time really deliberating the specific genres that you're going to be writing about, you know that there are obligatory scenes in specific genres. So if you're writing a love story, you're going to say to yourself, oh, I'm going to have to have a scene where the lovers break up. That's in every love story. So that's an obligatory scene in a love story. And then you're going to say to yourself, okay, the lovers breakup scene. Should I have that in the beginning of my story, the middle of my story, or the end of my story? Should I make it say the climax of my middle build? Should I make it the climax of my beginning hook? Or maybe I should just make it the inciting incident of my ending payoff. So these kind of.

But that means you're just overlapping those at that point.

Yes.

Could be the obligatory wonderful. Because they can help you answer a lot of these dilemmas.

And.

You also have to say to yourself, how can I innovate this obligatory scene that everybody knows is coming? How can I make it interesting? How can I make it different from what they're expecting?

And one of the ways that you could possibly do that is to zig when the reader thinks you're going to zag. So if you build up a love story and the reader and you're sort of like, you know, in your subtext, you're saying to your reader, oh, this is leading up to this, this moment where they gonna get married and bang you Pull the rug up from under them, and they decide to break up instead. That's a way of innovating, in a way, and also delivering obligatory scene.

Well, I wonder. I thought of too, like, as you were saying, that, you know, if you're. If the subtext leading up to it is that the woman is unhappy, you know, so you're expecting that she's going to break it off. You have him break it off instead.

Yes.

So I have. So let me. So I have my 12 scenes for my beginning of my book. Got five of those kind of in the bag. Let's say I have a couple more from obligatory scenes or something. So that still leaves me, you know, five to seven scenes that I've got to come up with. I guess in my mind, those would all be progressive complication scenes.

Yes, yes. You're way ahead of me. But, yeah. And okay, you're gonna. You're. You're gonna want to slowly be twisting, you know, twisting the rope. So. And I write about this a lot in the book. You can't go back. You know what I mean? You can't. You can't progressively complicate something and then sort of pull back and progressively complicate it with something that's less than what you've done before.

So you have to think logically, like, how can I keep twisting this and making it more difficult and painful? And how can I build it up to this climactic moment at the end of my beginning hook that's going to pull the rug out from the reader, surprise them.

And.

Really get them driven into the middle build. Now, here's an example. A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that you watch that movie dead calm. Now, I don't know if you had a chance to read it, but watch it. But I can tell you basically the beginning hook of that movie and how it climaxes into the middle build. Okay? So it's very. It's very simple. It's a series of scenes at the very beginning of the movie. It opens with train. On the train are a bunch of Navy guys. And in the background you hear sort of Christmas music. And so this is all in the very first couple seconds of the story. The train pulls into the station, and the very handsome Sam Neill gets off of the train. He's obviously a big deal. The other sailors are saying, have a great Christmas, Captain. And he gets off of the train and he stands there and stops. And he's sort of looking around. Bang. That's the end of the scene. The next scene is the director has made it seem as if time is now gone on. It's like a half an hour later. Sam Neill is still standing there. He's obviously waiting for somebody to come pick him up from the train station, and they haven't arrived yet. And the time is getting longer and longer and longer, and he's starting to get a little upset. So he starts to walk into the main concourse, and he notices that there are two policemen who are looking at a photograph. And they look up at him, they look at each other, and then they start to approach him. That's the cut of that scene. So that's two scenes. Now, the next scene, Sam Neill is being led down a corridor of a hospital.

And in the hospital, we see his wife, Nicole Kidman, is completely, you know, she's under a respirator. She's been in a terrible car accident. And we overhear the doctor say to Sam Neill, sorry, but we could not save your son. So now we understand. This guy was coming home.

From, you know, from leave for Christmas. His wife, Nicole Kidman, was going to pick him up at the train station with their little boy. And they were in a car accident.

And the. The scene with the car accident ends in the hospital with Sam Neill leaning over trying to communicate with his comatose wife, Nicole Kidman. And we pull back and we see the vantage point of the patient, Nicole Kidman, looking up. And we hear Sam Neill say, darling, Darling, are you in there? Now that's the cut. That's the end of the beginning. Hook of Dead calm. The next scene is a flashback scene. The flashback is of Nicole Kidman in the car on the way to the train station. And she's got the little boy in the backseat. And the little boy drops his teddy bear. So he opens up his car seat to lean down to get the teddy bear. And Nicole Kidman says, don't do that, Joey, or whatever his name is, get back in your chair. And it's at that moment she takes her eyes off of the road for a second that she has the car accident and the little boy is killed. Now we hear a shriek. That scene cuts. And obviously now we see Nicole Kidman on a bed, and it's been a dream. So we're getting a lot of great information in this beginning hook. That's really only five minutes of the first, the very beginning of this film. And what we discover is that she's on a boat. And she's on a boat with Sam Neill. They're all alone. And he says to her, we have all the time in the world. We need to be together. We need to get over this. This is the end of the beginning. HOOK of Dead Calm. The climax is Sam Neills decision to take his wife on a week months long vacation on the open sea by themselves with their dog so that they can form their marriage, reform their marriage after the loss of their child.

So this is a really, really terrific beginning Hook. Because now the viewer is really attached to these two people. They sympathize with them. They've lost a child.

The wife is bereft. She can't believe it. She can't sleep at night. She's addicted to painkillers. And the husband has the courage to pull her out of the universe and put her on this boat. And together they're going to go on this journey in this middle build that's going to repair their marriage.

That's the end of the beginning Hook. So the inciting incident of the beginning Hook is wife doesn't show up at train station. Where is she? The progressive complication is oh my God, she's still not here. I've been standing in this train station for two hours. Oh my gosh, here comes policemen. They have a picture of me. What the hell is going on? The crisis is I've lost my son. My wife is comatose. What in the hell am I going to do? The climax is I am going to take my wife on a long, long journey and repair our marriage. The resolution is they're on the boat. Those are five scenes that I just described that were in the beginning HOOK of Dead Calm. The next section is the middle build. And boy, does that really pay off too.

So would a way. Because you know, the whole point of all of this information is to help you map it out and build, you know, put in, you know, these, like you were saying, these bite sized things that I feel like I can accomplish instead of this giant project I can never do.

So what a way to do this. Again, back to the beginning in my 12 scenes and have five laid out is to basically lay out four of them. The inciting incident, the crisis, the climax and the resolution. And so those are like bookends to your beginning. And then I look at the other scenes and say, okay, what is my path gonna be between the inciting incident and the crisis climax and resolution? And those are each of the scenes where I keep like you say, twisting the rope.

Exactly.

To get me to the point where I have to do that. That seems much more doable. You're basically starting with the beginning and end and then filling in yes, exactly.

And it's, it's kind of fun, too, because what you end up doing is sort of telling yourself your own story. You know, like, okay, so what am I gonna. What's, what am I gonna do next? And it's kind of fun, like, and you start to picture these people in your head and say, well, what if that happens? No, that's kind of cheesy. That's been done before. What if I tried this? No. And slowly what you'll do is you'll, you'll start to eliminate all the stuff that's been done a million times the more you think about it. And you'll, you'll chart out your 12 scenes. You'll, you'll sort of, you know, you'll go from your inciting incident, you'll get all the way through, and that'll be your good sort of starting map. And then you'll want to do the same thing for your middle build. And then you're going to want to do the same thing for your ending payoff. And by the time you're done, you'll have sort of 15, you know, major kind of movements that will show you the global path of your story and you'll be able to track the valences of, you know, how the scenes are moving. So if you, if you move a scene from a positive charge to a negative charge in your inciting incident, you know, you're going to want to progressively complicate it in the next scene by moving from negative to positive.

So things are looking terrible at the end of the inciting incident. And then maybe in your case, for your novel, hey, the guy with the bends, he's really feeling a lot better now. Hey, he feels good enough to go. Isn't this a relief? He really doesn't have the bends. Everything is going to be good. So that moves from a negative to a positive in the second scene. And then in the third scene, you're going to want to go from positive negative. He goes back into the water and he has a seizure. You know, something like that. So you're constantly like, you don't want to go positive, negative, positive, negative, positive, negative, positive, negative, because it doesn't seem organic. It doesn't seem like the way life happens. The way life seems to happen. Yeah, go ahead.

Well, so last year I took this.

This online, like, copywriting course, and it taught this idea called the soap Opera Sequence. And basically it's about how to write email marketing copy, marketing copy, and how you open up all of these story threads and then you weave them. You keep weaving them in and out of each other and only resolving them at certain times. So. And the way that they talked about it was in a soap opera. How they tend to do if you watch the scenes is they do it like cliffhanger. Cliffhanger resolution. Cliffhanger, Cliffhanger resolution. So they keep. They'll do a scene and then it's like, you know, the real cheesy pan in on the guy's face and, oh, my gosh, what's even switches to the next scene. But if all you do is cliffhanger is. It doesn't keep people. They don't. It won't keep them engaged because nothing ever gets resolved. So every third or foreseen, they resolve some sort of previous series of cliffhangers, and they keep kind of weaving these things together. It reminded me of that when you're talking about this, of like, if you end every scene on a negative, it will be too much and it'll start to get predictable. So you have to weave in positives, too, even though those positives will eventually turn to a negative.

Exactly. I mean, I just. You're mentioning that when I was a real little boy, I had this dream of writing a story, and I was thinking to myself, oh, I know what I'll do. I'll write a story about a little boy who has a broken arm, and then the next day he breaks his leg, and then the day after that he breaks his other leg. And I. And I thought to myself, as I was, you know, as a little boy, I'm making it worse and worse and worse for the kid. But in fact, I wasn't really, because I was just putting more and more of the same thing on the character instead of, you know, having something go well and then not well, and then well and then not well and so.

And you said before that we can't use the same thing over and over.

Exactly.

So that also broke that rule you gave, I think, last week or the week before, where it's like, you can't keep using the same complication over and over. So you can't get a little bit sicker. A little bit sicker. A little bit sicker. It's. You've got to keep changing up what the actual source of the complication.

Exactly. Exactly.

So. So, I mean, it makes me think of, like.

It just.

You're trying to create this situation where you're just throwing all of this stuff that keeps people off balance.

Right. You know, so. And I'll just. I just want to say this one thing, Tim, because, you know, you and I, we love to pick apart the inciting incidents and the resolutions and the blah and the flu and the climaxes. And the thing that I would always, you know, advise people to do is.

When you're just goofing, you know, when you're thinking in your head and you're walking down the street and you're goofing up scenes, don't worry about identifying these particular moments in the particular time, because what you're going to find is you do this intuitively and what you'll do is you'll just to goof around. You'll say to yourself, okay, I've got these two people, or I've got these three people on a boat. How am I going to play this? What's going to happen? Okay, well, what if one of the people.

You know, jumps overboard and gets eaten by a shark? What are they going to do then? You know, and you just play with all these things in your head and then you kind of map it out. And then after you kind of have a map, then you can look and say, oh, is that my climax? Oh, yeah, okay, that's my climax. So separate your writer head from your editor head and don't mix and match. So when you, like when you're writing your scenes, you're using your, you know, a part of your brain that's about, you know, being creative and inventive and thinking up, you know, things for people to say and all that stuff. And if you're constantly worried about whether or not it's an effective inciting incident, it's gonna hamstring you to the point where you'll be completely lost. So I always, you know, I always say, separate your writer side from your editor side. And, you know, literally I even advise people, like, put on a hat. Like, when you're editing, like, put on a different hat.

You should make, like, story grid editor and writer hats, and people, like, switch them out.

That's a billion dollar idea. Oh, my God, we're gonna make money hand over fist.

What I think about here? So I do. So I do Olympic weightlifting and so. Of course you do.

Yes.

I'm very manly that way.

There's this movement called a snatch where you have a barbell with weights on it and you get down into kind of a squat and your hands are real wide and you have to lift the weight off the ground and then drop back underneath it. Okay. So it's this really complicated movement that have all of these tiny little moving parts right where your Feet are when you, like, explode, when you drop back underneath. Like, it's all these little tiny moving parts. And what I've realized, I've been doing about four years now, is that.

To learn. So what you'll work on is like, okay, today I'm going to work on my footwork. And so you're like, focusing everything on your footwork. And what happens is it kind of throws off everything else. You can't catch the weight, but you're just thinking about your footwork. And your footwork just feels awful through the entire thing because that's all you're thinking about. And you keep like, okay, I'm going to go a little wider. I'm going to point my toes out a little more, whatever. But what you're doing is you're basically cramming it into your subconscious, because then what will happen is a few days later when you go to do one without thinking about your footwork, it's like all of a sudden, your footwork will work.

Exactly.

And so I would. So, you know, I'm not a writer, so I'm gonna try to push back on what you said and tell me if I'm wrong. I feel like it would be a good practice to. Because for me, when I wrote the scene that was much better, the second version, I was thinking through, okay, I have to progressively build this without tell. Without spilling the beans on what's really going on as long as possible. So I kept kind of doing that on purpose, thinking, progressively build, progressively build. And then at the end, I'm like, okay, how am I going to turn this thing without either of them giving up all of their power? And that's when it's like, okay, well, I'll just have the woman come. Maybe that'll work. And I, like, thought through what she'll say. I was like, okay, okay, there's my client. Okay, there's my crisis climax. Okay, and it resolves, okay, yeah, I'm going to write that. So where I want to get to a point where I just sit down and I just like. I have my scene and I automatically kind of comes out. I think there's some good practice.

I hear what you're saying. I hear what you're saying, and I think you're. I think you're right. I think. I think, you know, once you know how to do the. The snatch, then you don't. You don't worry so much about your footwork. But right now you need to get your footwork down and. And thinking of it in those terms, is probably very helpful. So I stand corrected. I think that's for you. That's. That's the right way to go.

Yeah. Because that's what it felt like is. It felt very frustrating in the moment trying to like, cram myself into this form. Right. So I have 15, you know, because.

To me, I've learned through my past mistakes in all my areas of life that, like constraints always increase creativity. So I wanted to say, okay, it's going to be 1500 words. So it's. It's not done until it's 1500 words. And then it's like, okay, I want to do the whole dialogue and not spill the beans on what's going on, because that's what you told me to do. So I'm going to do that. And I got to have these five pieces. My inciting incident through my resolution. Okay, I got to do that. And so cramming myself into that form forced me to think through all of these things in a way I'd never have before.

And.

And what fell out the other end was a much better scene than when I was just kind of willy nilly throwing people in and like, kind of thought I knew where I was going. And my goal is to where I can sit down and write those scenes without thinking through the pieces. But it's horribly frustrating and feels awful while you're doing it. But it's that practice of like, I gotta learn this form the right way before it will become subconscious and I just do it automatically.

That's a very good point, and I salute you. That's exactly. That's the way we learn things. That's called practicing with a purpose.

Again, I stand corrected. I think what you're saying is absolutely true because it's so intuitive to me at this point. I've been doing it for 25 years.

I don't have the perspective that you do. And I think, you know, your idea to do this podcast to begin with was a really good one because it's teaching me that all the things that, you know, I take for granted. Oh, like, of course you're gonna, you're gonna do that. I mean, please. It's not so. It's not so obvious. Yeah.

Cause when's the last time you, you. I mean, when's the last time you really looked at a scene that was written so badly? As my first try, all the time. Really? Because I was thinking like, well, Sean, probably dealing with these professional writers that wouldn't make those kind of mistakes.

Well, that's true. I mean, yeah, I Mean, does Steven Pressfield and David Mamet and those people make these kind of mistakes?

No, they don't.

You can pretty much be guaranteed that their scenes are going to have beginning, middle and end and they're going to turn and they're going to have all the things that we discussed.

But, you know, people who want, who want to become Steven Pressfield and David Mamet, they. You would. The stuff that people send me for me to consider, to represent them is exactly at the level that you wrote your first scene. And so this is one of the reasons why I wrote the Story Grid so that there would be a resource for people to, you know, reach out to read it. And then, then if they keep making the same mistakes, then it's their own fault. But the fact is, when I was, when I was starting out in the business, there was nobody out there saying exactly all the things that I'm saying now. Nobody ever told me about, you know, the inciting incident, the crisis, the climax, the resolution, progressive complications. I had to learn that by reading, you know, Aristotle and Plato and going to Robert McKee's course and transferring his theories into novel writing. Because he's primarily. He writes about screenplays. But it's all the same stuff. It's a story. So.

You taking the time to dedicate yourself, to learn these very grounding principles and etching them in the furrows of your brain is going to pay such dividends. Right now it's really hard and frustrating. Just like learning how to skate or ski or high dive or clean and jerk a barbell is hard, but once you have it, it's, you know, it's like just another. It's like being able to play the guitar, you know, it's great.

Thanks for listening to episode eight of the Story Grid podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. I definitely enjoyed recording this one. As always. If you would like to get more of Story Grid, you can go to storygrid.com sign up for the newsletter. That's where Sean sends all his latest stuff, so you won't want to miss that. If you want to go back and listen to archived episodes, look at show notes, that's all at Story Grid.

I also want to thank those of you that have gone into itunes and left a review, left a rating. Sean and I read everyone and we really appreciate the feedback. If you haven't done that yet, we're just 12 away from hitting that magic 50 number. So if you want to drop into itunes and leave your review, leave your rating, that would be really helpful. Also, if you want to follow us on Twitter, if you want to ask questions, that's the place. We'd love to have you do that. It's@twitter.com storygrid so, as always, thank you for listening. We really enjoy sharing this show with you. We really enjoy recording it every week, and we will look forward to seeing you next week for episode nine.