The Most Important Genre

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 the creator of Storygrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience in this episode. You know, we spent all this time talking about my book and my genre of thriller, and I just was curious what Sean thought of as the most important genre, the one that probably has the widest read. And so I asked him that question, and that starts to tumble us down this rabbit hole of what that genre is, how you can write in that genre, the obligatory scenes, all the things we're talking about with my story, but on a genre that's completely different. So I think you're really going to enjoy it. It's really going to be helpful. So let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, I'm in the midst of the rewrites of the rewrites of the rewrites of my beginning hook. And so this week, I just wanted to step back. As much as everybody seems to enjoy going over my writing, I also want to acknowledge that not everybody writes young adult thrillers. And so I've just been thinking a lot about what other genres are out there. What is the best, you know, what are writers, you know, need to think about when they think about their career, you know, over a long arc. And so if you had to pick just one genre that was like, if you wanted to become a professional, publishable, successful fiction writer and you could only become good at one genre, what would you say that is?

That's a pretty easy answer. And I don't think I'm going to shock anybody by saying the biggest, the most popular, the most commercially successful genre is the love story. So if I were to give advice to somebody about how to break into the business, how to become a publishable writer, if you were able to apply yourself with deliberate practice and learn all of the fundamental, you know, obligatory scenes, conventions, and all that sort of thing, in the love story genre, it would serve you not only to write love stories, but also any other genre. So, for example. Well, first of all, it's important to understand, you know, the global box office of trade publishing. And when I say trade publishing, I'm talking about the books that are in bookstores, Amazon, the books that hit the New York Times bestseller list. I'm not talking about textbooks or specialty Books, I'm talking about all of those books that the big six publish and directly market to people who read popular fiction and nonfiction. Okay, so of that, that market's about $28 billion year. That's a lot of money, by the way. That's a really nice market. And you know, all these people who say, oh, Hollywood's so much cooler, so much better. You know, when you look at the box office dollars, book publishing has a lot going for it. Also, the barriers to entry are so low that, you know, anybody who applies themselves can write a novel and get it into the marketplace. Few of us have the talent to ever create a film and get it in the marketplace. So anyway, so of that 28 billion, about 13 to 15% of that are just pure, pure Love Story. And when I say pure Love Story, I'm talking about, you know, the sort of paperback romance novels that Harlequin publishes, that Bantam publishes, that all the major publishers, their major, major divisions where they had the most editorial talent is in. And I say Love Story because Love Story has a lot of components to it instead of romance. And I can get into this. Yeah, go ahead.

Well, kids, when I think about Love Story, I think about like romantic comedies. I think about like, you know, we've talked about like war stories that have the like, guy goes off to war Love Story. I think about like all the Nicholas Sparks books and then I think about just, you know, those romance novels with the bare chested man holding the woman on the COVID You know, so I mean that it's kind of a big. Is, are you kind of including all of that in the Love Story?

I am, I am. I'll get into kind of. I'll break it down a little bit more in a second. But I think just to go back to the, to the box office involved here, so 15% of 28 billion, that's around what, three and a half billion dollars a year just for the bare chested guy on the paperback. Right? I'm not including Nicholas Sparks really, because Nicholas Sparks is. It's more of a hardcover phenomenon that he tells very homespun love stories from the male point of view in a very sincere way that attracts a lot of women to buy them, but also men buy them too. So anyway, the fact is that if you want to learn a genre that you can apply very quickly commercially, that genre is absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, the Love Story. So, you know, one of the things that a lot of people, you know, what I like to do as an editor and what I Like to do just as a story nerd is to think about why certain things are. Why is it that the love story is such a popular thing? And I have a theory about it, and it's. It's a pretty simple theory. But love stories, I think, are so important to people and men too. You know, let's not kid ourselves. Men love a great love story too. We all say, oh, no, I'm a big action guy. But, you know, all the action films that have love subplots always seem to do a lot better than those that are just, you know, blowing up.

You just gotta. You just gotta wrap it in some, you know, blood and guts.

Exactly.

Can watch a love story.

Exactly, Exactly. So one of the things that I think is so important and one of the most difficult things about being even just a human being is relationships, right? Like, how do I form attachments to other people? And so, you know, if you broke the world down into, you know, sort of two ways of being around. You're either alone or you're with somebody or you're with a group. So, you know, nobody can spend their time alone all of the time. There's. There's a reason why their solitary confinement is used as a. As a. As a way to get people to behave because you will go crazy if you spend all of your time alone. So the thing that moves us from being alone into relationships with not only romantic partners, but in general society at large, and is love, right? So love stories are so important to us because, you know, I always say this. Stories are metaphors that help us learn how to behave. So we go to stories and we attach to stories and we fall in love with stories because we use those stories in our own personal lives to form our own philosophies and behavioral modifications and tactics and all those things to learn how to behave in a proper way. So love stories are so popular because people not only go to them for the entertainment value, but subconsciously they're watching a love story and they're trying to track ways that they can become more lovable and form bonds and relationships with other people. So this is the primal thing about humanity. People don't want to be alone. In fact, you will go crazy if you are alone. So the primary element of survival on the planet is to form relationships with other people. So the love story is so crucial to humanity because that is the first thing we have to do after we get our food and our shelter, is we have to find a clan, we have to find a tribe, then we have to find ourselves A mate. So love is so primal to us that love stories are always going to be at the top of the commercial heap in terms of popularity.

Well, you know, it's funny when you were thinking about that, the movie that popped in my head was Cast Away by Tom Hanks and the love story between Tom Hanks, the soccer ball.

Yes.

Yes.

Because when you're saying, you know, no one wants to be alone, and that's kind of the broad idea of the love story. So the love story is not just between one man and one woman. Right. It's like it's about not being alone. Because I remember I cried when he lost Wilson.

Yeah.

You know, and so. And for those that haven't watched it, I should probably explain. So Tom Hanks, real quick, Tom Hanks gets stranded on a desert island and he gets, you know, finds a few things and one of them is a soccer ball. And he starts talking to the soccer ball and names it Wilson. And then like by the, you know, months go by and he's having full on conversations with Wilson. And then when he finally tries to get off the island, he loses Wilson and Wilson floats away. And it's just, it's devastating. Like. Yeah, that's what makes, you know, it's a great story because I've never cried over somebody losing their soccer ball before. But anyway, so that, I mean, you're including like that kind of a story.

Not really, no. No.

Okay.

Okay.

That's all about not being alone.

It is, but it's. That is a, a story about. That's a survival, life and death action story that has a love story underneath it. But the love story is Wilson is, you know, he represents Tom Hanks's id. You know, he represents his, his internal psychological person. So he just, you know, anthropomorphized his internal self on that soccer ball. So the love story, the love element there is in his coming to terms with his primal self.

Okay.

So that, that story is more of an action story that underneath it has a story arc of the character moving from sort of unreliable, kind of doughy FedEx employee to kick ass. Tough survival, man. And it's a very compelling story because of the acting, the way it was directed, but it's primarily an action story, in my opinion. And the internal movement is coming to terms with our primal selves. So I wouldn't include that as in my big five clover genre thing that I do, I would not include that in the little section that says love story. So let me just, let me clarify more about what I mean about love stories. So the big genre of love story that I discussed in the story grid book, it concerns a relationship between two people that has a romantic element to it, and it includes the possibility of sexual intimacy. So there's romance, the possibility of sex. So a buddy cop movie is, you know, it moves on the value of friendship, right? Friendship and an enemy value stake. So usually in a buddy cop movie, the love story, there's a love between the two cops, but there's never a sexual element, sexual component to it unless somebody will probably make that, that movie at some point. But the love story is all about a relationship between two people that has a sexual component to it. So in that realm of romance, you know, the psychologists have been studying this stuff for a long time. And the general theory out there is that there's, there's sort of a triangle of components to romantic love. And when I tell you that the three things involved here, you'll immediately understand what I'm talking about. Okay, so the first part of romantic love concerns desire. So that's just physical attraction to another person. It's a biological thing. You see somebody, you go, wow, really, you know, a one a person there, I really want to meet them. But that's a physical thing. Desire is number one. And then the second thing is commitment, right? So once you desire somebody and you start talking to them, then if you grow attached to them, you want to make a commitment with them. So you have desire and then you have commitment. And then you have the deepest part of love, which is intimacy. And intimacy is the only part of love that it's truly truthful. And I, we. What I mean by that is the desire part. You know, you'll say anything in a dark room, in a bar room to somebody to get them to be attracted to you. You'll lie to them, you'll whatever, you know. And I'm not saying I do this anymore, but. And men and women do the same thing. They exaggerate their, you know, their triumphs. They say, I'm heavyweight champion of the world. They'll do whatever is necessary to get the other person to pay attention to them. So it's all this little role playing and game playing in the sexual desire kind of arena that truth really does not come into. It's really about the ends justifying the means. The second part, the commitment part again, when people are getting to know one another and they really, really like somebody else, they really don't want them to know about, you know, the bad fungus they have on their toes, right? They're not going to talk about all the things that make them unattractive. So there's a level of, you know, white lies and misleading people to see the best part of who you are as opposed to your true, authentic self. So the commitment element is about courtship. It's about getting to know one another so that you ultimately, you form a relationship and you say, you know what? I'm going to be monogamous. You're the only one for me. Let's stay together. And then ultimately, the most truthful part of love concerns intimacy. And intimacy is that moment when you feel the other person understands who you are at bottom. Your pluses, your minuses, your short temper, they forgive you. They don't freak out if you have an anxiety attack when you get to the train station or whatever it is. So that's what generally people are going through in a love story. There's the desire, there's the commitment, and then there's ultimately the intimacy. So if you had a spectrum of love there, desires at the beginning, commitments at the middle, and intimacy, ideally, is right at the end. So within these three, you know, things of the components of love. Now I'm going to tell you about what the sub genres of the love story, as I define it, are. Now, again, love story is about a romantic relationship between two people. It doesn't necessarily have to be heterosexual. There's a great movie called Brokeback Mountain, which is about two cowboys who fall in love. And it's an amazing story. It's extremely well done, and I highly recommend it. But that's a beautiful love story. Anyway, so those three elements of desire, commitment and intimacy, they break down to the three big sub genres of love story.

So, okay, so remind me what a sub genre is. So we have like, big genres, and then those encapsulate sub genres.

Yeah, yeah. For example, you know, in the crime genre, you have your mystery story, which can feature a master detective, which would be a subgenre of the mystery, or it could feature an amateur sleuth that would be a subgenre. So a sub genre is a classification underneath the big, big silo that divides the territory into further refinements and each of these.

So you have like the action genre. And then under there is like, that's where we have like, man against time or man against government or whatever those different sub genres. I don't have the book in front of me, but that's kind of what you're talking about there.

Yeah, exactly. And each of these subgenres sort of, they come to the fore they become part of our culture at very specific moments of time, and they become popular and not popular depending upon the cultural moment of time. So, like, a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about that question came, you know, why do certain novels become extremely successful when they're not written all that well? I mean, line by line they're not. And the reason being is that you can't really tell what the cultural sensibility of the entire Western culture is as a writer. All you can do is sort of write your own thing and hope that it hits kind of a certain moment in the culture. Like a legal thriller during a crisis in legal justice, or a religious thriller at a crisis of religious faith, that kind of thing.

And that's why you say the love story. I mean, that will always be a thing.

Absolutely. It's the most consistent thing that everybody is constantly worried about their relationships. And we all want to know, oh, do the people at the conference think I was cool? Or, oh, my gosh, what about the. Oh, if I walk into that drugstore, I don't know if anybody's gonna like me in there. It's just. It's just human nature that we want to manage our relationships in the best possible way so that people will think kindly of us or they will respect us, or they will, you know, they will think we're so great. So the love story is the primal thing that, you know, everybody in our culture and our history and Western civilization, love is the magical thing, right? It's what everybody talks about. Well, since you're a little boy and we ask our parents, how did you meet mommy and daddy? And they tell you a story, and they tell you this beautiful, magical story, and they explain to you that love is really the primary meaningful thing in life. If you're looking for meaning in life, the first place people turn is to love. And this is why we have people who are love addicted. Because we have been pounded with sort of these romantic notions that evolved in the romantic era, which is, you know, probably 1500s to probably 1978.

But the romantic era was really about, you know, making love. Very magical thing. And it became even more and more magical the more alienating our culture became. So in the industrial age, it all became like, ah, don't worry about your job, you know, working at the coal mine, as long as you have love at home. So this is the thing that we've kind of been. Biologically, we're programmed to mate. It's just, you know, that's why we had the desire element, which is Kind of to explain desire is to ruin desire, because desire is just a natural thing that we all understand. So biologically we're programmed to mate with people. But it's this element of saying and bringing in, oh, love isn't just about mating and creating a family to tend the farm because you've got a hundred acres that have to be cleared. It's about a magical relationship where two people come together and they merge as opposed to being separate. So it's almost as if we're psychologically merging our souls with somebody else. And that's a very, very powerful thing that, you know, when we're taught this from very young, that is what we think about as we grow older. And when I was a boy, I thought, well, when I'm a, you know, when I'm married and I have kids and I, you know, I would concoct a whole story for the way my life would be when everything was perfect, when I had meaning in my life, when I had my own thing, when I had a wife and kids and I was settled, everything would sort of take care of itself. Now, you and I both know that that's not true, but it's a story that's a very important story. It's a moral story. It's something that, you know, there's no sociopaths and psychopaths. They don't have that story guiding them, you know, and morally, they're corrupt. You know, ethically and morally, those kinds of people are corrupt. So I do think that there's great value in the magical story of love. And it's through this sort of evolution from moving from desire to commitment to intimacy, where the storytelling can really start to affect, you know, the people who consume them.

Okay, so I got us way off track.

That's okay.

Back to the subgenres. You said we have the desire, the commitment and intimacy. And the three sub genres match those.

Yes. What they do is there's a story that's sort of formed around those three components of romantic love. So the first one, we'll just do the, you know, the down and dirty one first. That's desire. And stories of desire, I call them obsession stories. And these are stories that are. The primary value in the obsession story, of course, is love. Love and hate. People are attracted to and despise one another at the beginning of a story, and then they become so sexually attracted to each other that they can't help themselves. And usually the obsession story, 99.99% of the time, ends in tragedy. And the tragedy is usually A death. The obsession goes to so far off the negation of the negation, as Robert McKee says, it goes so off the rails that one of the lovers ends up dead. And, you know, there's a. The classic obsession love story that comes to mind is the Great Gatsby. Now, the Great Gatsby, you know, when it was originally published, did not attract a lot of people. It did not attract a lot of readers. It was commercially a major failure for F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yeah.

Wasn't it one of these books that ended up getting shipped out to everybody in the military and that's how it became popular.

Exactly, because they could. Okay, they had this old thing in the backlist. They went to Fitzgerald and said, hey, do you mind if we give a million copies away to the troops? You're not going to make any money off of it. And he's like, yeah, why not?

And what happened was that's what revitalized the story. And if you. The global story of the Great Gatsby concerns a guy who's obsessed with an old girlfriend. And he's kind of from the other side of the tracks, and she's from high society, and so he has to go to war and he falls in love with her right before he leaves. And after he comes back, he finds out that she met and married some other rich guy. And so he decides, I'm gonna get her back. He becomes obsessed with her. If he can get Daisy back in his clutches, his world will be fine. So, you know, he becomes a gangster and he, you know, he makes a ton of money and then he starts doing these big shows and these big parties to impress this woman who coincidentally, he buys a house right across the dock, right across the river, or the sound from her, so that she can see his big castle. And so eventually he gets her, you know, to take a new interest in him and he ends up dead at the end.

I mean, there's a. There's a lot of social stuff underneath there. It's the great American novel. It's all about the obsession of American success and being belonging to.

A culture that will not have you anyway. But it is an obsessive love story at its core. It's the story of one man's obsession. It's told from the point of view of his next door neighbor, who's the cousin of the obsession figure. But still, globally, it's an obsession love story that ends in a tragedy. So these kinds of stories can be. I mean, come on. The Great Gatsby is incredible, right? But they are not all that attractive to the big global audience of love story seekers who spend $4 billion a year on mass market paperbacks. Yeah.

What was that story? Was it up in the Air? The one with George Clooney?

That movie?

Did you see that one?

Yes, I did.

And I saw this interview with the director and the guy that, you know, wrote the movie, because I'm going to ruin this. So get ready, anybody that's listening. So he basically is this loner guy that travels all the time and he finally finds this kindred spirit and they fall in love, but he's like, scared of it, so he runs away. And then he goes to get her, and when she opens the door, we find out that she's married with a family and he was just the fling. I think she even calls him the footnote in her life.

Right.

And he talked about the director, talked about how he was so surprised that whoever was like, I don't know what it's called, but, you know, whatever house was giving him the money to actually make the movie didn't push him to change the ending. And he said something like, and if I had changed the ending, it would have made a lot more money. So basically, if he had made a movie that had a happy ending instead of a sad ending, he would have made a lot more money. And I, that I. That popped in my head when you said that about this obsession. You know, like, we do. We want it. You know, I don't want a romantic comedy that ends sad.

Well, here's, here's, you know, we always talk about those, those six story arcs and Kurt Vonnegut's brilliant, you know, theory from 1950s and how it's, you know, it's been proven correct through, you know, data research today. But the thing that you have to remember about story arcs is that we become so emotionally attached to the characters that they become our surrogates. And especially in a love story. So when I was watching that movie, I felt like I was George Clooney. You know, I could relate to being George Clooney and having to fire people, but being a nice guy about it and never really wanting to settle down. And, you know, if things had been a little bit different in my life, I could understand being that sort of person. And it's not that that has any truth to it at all. It's just that we get sucked in and we put ourselves in the position of the protagonists. So we are so emotionally invested in them getting what they want that when they don't get, devastates us because it says to us, hey, things aren't always going to work out for you, Sean. You know, it's just some things aren't going to work out. And that's not a message I want to hear.

So even though you admire the art of it and you enjoy it, and I love that movie, I thought it was terrific. I remember the novel too. It was based on. Forget the guy who wrote it, but a friend of mine edited the book. But anyway, my point is, is that the stories of Obsession have difficulty commercially because they have that downer, tragic ending, most of them. Another. Another great example is a movie and a novel called Damage with Jeremy Irons. And it's, it's so. It's a really. I really enjoyed that movie and I don't know why I did, because it just rips your heart out when you see it.

Another.

And I feel like this is the basis of like half of the independent movies out there.

Yeah, yeah.

Cuz like I, I kept trying to be the artistic, holy rounded person. I'm gonna start watching any movies and like every time I watch one I'm like, I am more depressed than when this movie started. I can't do this to myself.

Yeah, it's sort of this reverse snobbery of certain artists who think, oh, well, if I write a love story, I'm certainly not going to let it end well. And that is just snobbery of the worst kind, in my opinion. Because what better challenge is there than. Than to innovate a cliche, right? Everybody knows in a romantic comedy or in a romance novel, hey, those two people are gonna end up together at the end of this book. We know it. It's gonna happen. So what makes people so excited when they do read that is when you innovate the conventions and obligatory scenes of that story in such a way that it zigs when the reader thinks it's going to zag. So that challenge of understanding the craft and the form of the story and really working so hard to make every little piece innovative and wonderful is really what makes people just people want the message. If you are morally righteous person and you have values and ethics and you seek somebody that you think is a kindred spirit, you've got a good chance of getting her or getting him. And that's what a great love story does. And what I'm talking now is the second subgenre. I sort of transitioned without even formally announcing what I was talking about. And the second subgenre of love story is the courtship story. Now the courtship story is the thing that's 90% of what sells. So if you're gonna write a love story and you're gonna be mercenary about it, and I don't think there's anything wrong with setting certain goals and having mercenary intentions at the start of something, even a creative thing, you know, there. There's like when Bruce Springsteen has to deliver a new album, he's got to deliver a new album, right? And if you're a writer and you want to have a career and you say to yourself, well, how can I have a career? What's the biggest genre? What's the most popular sub genre within that genre, then this is your sweet spot. And it's the courtship drama. And the courtship drama is all those things that we love. It's the romantic comedies that. That we see which make fun of the romantic rituals that are endemic in the. In the usual romance story. The difference, you know, I don't want to get too technical here, but there's. The courtship story has two sub genres. The one is the romantic comedy, and the other is the romance novel. Now, the romantic comedy, you can tell it's a romantic comedy because it's funny and it makes fun of stuff. And the romantic. The romance novel is not.

I love that you can tell it's a comedy when it's funny, right?

And the romance novel is serious, right? Now, you can have combinations of. You have comedic elements in a romance novel and serious elements in a romantic comedy, of course, but globally, Wedding Crashers is a romantic comedy, it's not serious. And Pride and Prejudice is a serious courtship drama that has a lot of great comedic elements in it, too. So I'm not saying it's either one or the other, but you should know that. That you do come down on one side. Now, both of the courtship sub subgenres, they always end on a high note, meaning they end positively. Now, sometimes they end with a positive and a frizz on of negative in there, too. And that's dramatically ironic. But, you know, usually at the end of those stories, you want to end it positively. You want the couple to come together. You want them to form that commitment, because you don't want to make a promise to your reader and say, hey, here's a really great romantic comedy, and then deny them the commitment that the two make to each other at the end of the story, because that will really, really, really piss off your reader.

And it'll make them never want to read another thing that you write because you're basically saying, I'm sorry, but I Have contempt for what you like, and I'm not going to do it that way.

Yeah. You know, it was interesting what you said about, you know, forcing yourself to recreate a cliche in a new way. And it reminded me of. I read or heard about when Pixar was doing Toy Story 3, and they, you know, Pixar, you know, just hits home run after home run, and they realized the story was not good enough. And the reason that they realize it is because they said, everybody knows that Woody's gonna make it home at the end. Like, you can't. It's a kid's story. It has to end happy.

Right.

So.

And so how are we going to tell the same story again for the third time and make it work? And so they, like, went off in the woods. I think they, like, went on, like, a retreat or something. Tore the thing apart, put it back together. It's still a story of Woody coming home, but at the end, you were devastated, you know, and, you know, I was thinking of, like, there's not much harder than something like that. But how much work they put into telling the same story for the third time, but yet making it work. Because everything zigs when you think it's going to zag.

Exactly. That's exactly right. And the other thing that you have to remember about courtship dramas is that as readers and viewers, we're looking at the story and reading the story from. You know, I always talk about, you know, those three. Three ways to create narrative drive, and it's all about how much information the reader has. So with courtship stories, the reader is reading the story or watching the story from a position of dramatic irony, meaning they know, just by the very definition of the movie poster or the COVID on the book, how the thing is gonna end. They have information that the characters do not have. So they.

I never thought about it that way.

Yes.

So since the. Okay, cuz. Yeah. We're going back to things we've talked about off and on.

Right.

But. So that's a. I was always thinking of that as, like, the author has given the reader information that the characters don't know.

But you're saying that's an actual convention of the subgenre. When I say convention, it's built in. It's built into the story form. Even, you know, the writer, they can say whatever they want. If they deny them coming together at the end, then they haven't written a courtship drama. It's like saying, I built a car, but it has no carburetor.

Well, I just want to kind of touch on this again, because this was like a light bulb went off in my head. So creating that irony isn't just when the author gives the information that the characters don't have, but it's when the genre precludes that they're going to end up together. So everybody reading already knows that. The characters don't know that. And the author didn't have to tell me.

That's correct. And the trick. The trick for the author is to make the inevitable surprising.

Okay.

And that's the definition of a story, is that it has, you know, it opens with an inciting incident, and the payoff is inevitable but surprising. And I think that's in the first couple of pages of the story grid. That's what a story is. So that's what genres tell us. They tell us what to expect. So when you see. When you read a crime story which is a mystery, you expect the mystery to be solved at the end of the. At the end of the novel or at the end of the movie. And if it's not solved, you're angry.

But you want to be entertained by the surprise of how it comes together in the end. It's the same thing with a courtship drama. So I don't know how we got off on dramatic irony, but always it goes to. Towards Toy Story 3. So what they did is they said, okay, we understand that we have to deliver to our audience, what are you getting home? All right, now, how can we make that surprising? And the way they did it was by adding the negative undertone. Yeah. So that's what you have to think about, too. This is the fun. The great thing about the courtship story is that it has. I don't think we're going to be able. Maybe we should do another episode on this. But it has so many incredible and specific obligatory scenes and conventions that it's really. It's really a process of figuring, of really nailing your characters and the sense of place and putting them through this ringer in a very innovative way. It's like doing a really massive jigsaw puzzle from scratch. So.

Well, so let's come back to that, because I do want to dive into the obligatory scenes, but we have. You said there were three sub genres. We've talked about obsession, which is desire. We've talked about courtship, which is commitment. And what's the last one?

The last one is the marriage story. And this all concerns intimacy. So intimacy is the third component of love. You know, you have your desire, your physical longing for somebody. You have the Commitment. You nail them. You get a commitment from them. You're married now. Now, now comes the real, real part. You know, this is the time when you've made a commitment. You're still passionate for the other person, but you're not. You're not crazy. You know, we all know how we are when we first meet the people that we fall in love with. And we're not like that, you know, 25 years later, physically. So the important thing of the marriage story is that it's about. Of course, it rides on the love hate spectrum of value, but it also concerns issues of things like fidelity and infidelity, truthfulness and deceit. And so what this story is about is coming to a realistic understanding of your partner and loving them anyway. It doesn't mean unconditional love. It means loving them. Like, if you find out that your spouse is killing people, you don't unconditionally love somebody like that. If they're a psychopath, you get them in jail. So this is about understanding the depths of personal stuff of your partner and being empathetic, being able to say to oneself, hey, he just yelled at me because he doesn't want to take the garbage out. I know it's not because he doesn't want to take the garbage out. He doesn't care about taking out the garbage. This is about something else. Instead of me snapping back at him about the garbage. Instead, I'm going to think about what he might be freaking out about that's making him yell. And so I'm going to put myself in his shoes, or vice versa, and have a real discussion here and talk about what's really going on with him. So that's intimacy. Or, for example, it's the same thing for a man or a woman. You know, my wife is yelling at the kids. She's not mad at the kids. Something else is going on. So it's forming this relationship where you know the particular elements of your other partner in a way that is deep, deep, deep. And it's the thing that gets you through really difficult external pressures. So usually in terms of a marriage story, you know, one of the great ones is Kramer versus Kramer. And I talk about it all the time because it's. Every time I see the movie, I just go crazy. But it was also a novel, too, but it's the story of a marriage breaking up. And the deep, dark secret of the entire story is that the husband, played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie, still loves his wife. He still loves his wife, and he's willing at the very end of the movie, you know, if she said to him, you know what honey, I made a mistake and I want to come back to you and our son, he would say, absolutely, come on, let me go get the van and we'll go pick up your stuff. But she doesn't love him anymore. And so part of that story, it's a marriage story. It's about two people who have a very intimate connection who come to different realizations. She realizes that for her self sanity that she can't be with this guy anymore. But he realizes all the things that I thought were important in my life are not important. The things that I neglected, I did at my own distress. Now I've lost my wife, I almost lost my son. And at the end of the movie, he does lose his son, but he has changed. He has arced from a really self centered piece of shit at the beginning of the movie to somebody who is a really good guy. He self sacrifices for other people. And that is the beauty of the marriage story is that it really requires the evolution of a character such that they provide an act of love that is not self centered. So they sacrifice themselves for the good of somebody else. And so this is really the big point about the love story, love stories, the big critical scene in every single love story is what I call the proof of love scene. And the proof of love scene is that moment when one of the lovers does an act of self sacrifice, knowing that they're never going to get that partner back. But they do it out of pure, pure love for the other person.

So the proof of love scene is really the critical moment in any love story. And like in the obsession story, like the Great Gatsby, what does Gatsby do as his proof of love? He says, oh, I was the one who hit Myrtle Wilson with the car. I was the one who killed her. And then Wilson goes and he shoots him and kills him at the end of the, at the estate when whereas Daisy was the one who killed Myrtle Wilson. So his proof of love was in taking the rap for his obsession figure in Pride and Prejudice. A great moment, Mr. Darcy, he sacrifices himself, he goes and he bails out Elizabeth Bennet's stupid sister who gets lured in by this cad. And he ends up paying off this cad to stay married to her. And he knows Elizabeth Bennet, the woman that he adores, wants nothing to do with him. But he doesn't want Elizabeth Bennet to never be able to get married. If her sister's a slut, her family is destroyed. She will never get married. And so what Darcy does, she says, I know she doesn't love me, but I cannot stand to see that woman suffer, even though she doesn't love me. And so that's his proof of love. And, you know, what does that do? Of course, once she discovers that he did that for her, you know, all bets are off. And they come together at the end, and it's a beautiful moment, and it's a great. You know, that is really. To me, Pride and Prejudice is really that.

Big moment, that big book that really brought the courtship love story to a perfect boil. And everything after that has been sort of an imitation of Pride of Prejudice.

Okay, so I'm guessing at this point, we're probably going to have to expand this into two episodes, but before we end this one, can you just touch on those obligatory scenes? Because we've talked about them so much, and it's kind of like last week when I said, you know, you say exposition is ammunition. And I feel like I know what that means, but then if I had to explain it, I'm like, yeah, I don't know what that means. And I feel like that's these obligatory scenes where, like, I can probably, like, watch, you know, a movie and pull out, like, when the new Ghostbusters came out, this one scene, like, popped up, and I'm like, oh, that's. That's where the villain gives his speech.

Right. Okay.

You know, and so I'm starting to recognize them. And, like, with a love story, I think about, like. Because I love romantic comedies. And so, like, one of my favorites is the how to Lose a guy in 10 days with Matthew McConaughey and that chick.

I forgot her name. And. And, like, I think about, like, okay, there's always this scene where, like, the guy runs after the girl, like, at the end. So that's got to be one of the obligatory scenes. And then there's, you know, I've heard of, like, the meet cute scene.

Yeah.

But, like. But we're also talking about all love stories as a whole, not just courtship or romantic comedy. So what would you say? What are the obligatory scenes of the love story? And we'll kind of start there and finish it up in the next episode.

Okay, so quickly, there's about six obligatory scenes. And when I tell them to you, you're going to say, oh, yeah, of course. Okay, there's the lovers meet scene. So this is the big scene with the first meeting between the two lovers. There's the confession of love scene. Now the confession of love Scene. It can sometimes be in the beginning hook of the story, but often it's like the climax of the middle build. It's usually in the, you know. But the confession of love scene is one person says to the other, I'm sorry, I. You know, like in that great moonstruck, you know, when, oh, what's his name? Oh, geez, I can't believe. But it's Cher. And, oh, I can't believe I forgot his name. Anyway, he goes up to her and he's like, I love you, I love you. And she's like, snap out of it. And she slaps him across the face. So the confession of love scene is something to look for in every romantic comedy and every love story. Then there is the first kiss scene. And sometimes the first kiss scene doesn't happen until the very end of the movie or the book or they don't even have it on stage, but it's implied. But first kiss scene is often one of those obligatories that you need, depending upon how you're playing it and what era you're setting your light love story. You know, like, they didn't. People didn't sit around kissing in, you know, 18th century or early 1800s in England. So you don't see a first kiss scene in Pride and Prejudice. But anyway, then you have the lovers breakup scene. The lovers break up is. You've got to get them broken up. There's got to be forces that push them away from each other and they have to say, there's no way we can be together. The lovers breakup scene then, you know, eventually segues into the climactic proof of love scene that I just described with Gatsby and Mr. Dorsey. And then you have, you know, the resolution, the lovers reunite scene where they come together and they, you know, we know that they're committed. We know that they're going to be together at least until the end of the movie or the end of the book. And we know that they're committed to one another. And they kind of look at each other like the end of the Graduate when Dustin Hoffman. And again, I can't. I'm getting older. Dustin Hoffman and the Catherine. Catherine's last name. But they look at each other and they look at each other like, what are we going to do next? But you know that they're committed. So those are the obligatory scenes of love stories you've got. Lovers meet, confession of love scene, first kiss scene, lovers break up, proof of love, and then lovers reunite.

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