There are only 6 stories

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, who is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. And he is walking me through how to write my first novel, a novel that will actually work in this episode. We start out by looking at scene two of my story that I sent Shawn. And I was pretty surprised by his feedback. And then we dive into the six different basic story types and some really cool new research that has come out about these six basic types of stories. It's kind of heady stuff, but it's really good to look at these things and see that these basic stories have been told over and over and over. And it is a beginning place that we can start with our own stories. So I think you're really going to enjoy it. Let's jump in and get started.

So Sean, I was. Took all of what we talked about last week and I kind of rolled that in to a new scene, which was hard. I wrote about half of it and got stuck and had a like, backup and write like a whole beginning because I, you know, I have this thing where like I start writing a scene and it gets, it's over in like 500 words. So I got to figure out something. So anyway, I sent that to you. Wanted your feedback on where I went with it.

Well, I can only tell you what, I only read it one time and what, what editors. The first test of a, of a story is whether or not you want to read the next thing. And that's it. Just a pure. Anybody any, you know, a five year old kid, if you tell them a story, if they have wrapped attention, then you know the story's working. And I'll tell you, after I finished reading the second scene, I wanted to know what was going to happen next. So the very first thing is that you're keeping the momentum of the storytelling moving forward. So with that inciting incident scene, you establish, you know, your hero is defying the societal norms. And so the next scene that you have that the reader is going to expect is the repercussions of that action. And I think your scene is really, really weird and really in a good way, in a really good way. It establishes a lot of things very quickly. And it, it also seeds in a lot of curiosity, mystery and doubt for the reader to know what is going on here. And it also uses a lot of imagery and metaphor that have a lot of internal, you know, people can identify with the imagery and the metaphor that you're. You're playing with. So, you know, to have one of the things that's happened throughout time is when especially girls or women have gotten into trouble in a culture, one of the things that the tribe in a culture does is to cut off their hair. And to use that imagery here, I thought was a brilliant idea. I also like the fact that you expanded the, you know, the camera lens to include a very large mob of people that are nameless. But the fact is, is that you're allowing the reader to fill in that mob in their own brain without describing 10 people in the mob. So, all in all, I think the scene works extremely well, and I think it gets you on a course that the reader is going to say to themselves, what's going to happen next? Oh, my gosh, who are these people who just came to rescue her? What's with this weird helmet on their heads? What is going on? Why did her father abandon her? Why was the mayor so nice? Why do they really want her in the Capitol? So all of these questions are, what are going to propel readers to want to read the next scene? So when I read it, I was like, oh, boy. He's starting to lock in on letting the story almost organically flow through him as he's writing it, as opposed to overly planning and knowing exactly each and every scene, as opposed to knowing the big roadblocks, which is something we've been talking about over the past couple of weeks. Like, how do we go back and get you to write a second draft in a different way than you wrote the first draft, but take a step forward? And I think we're landing on something that's working that I did not really even know myself, because this is sort of the first time I'm doing this too. I don't usually go scene by scene with writers when I develop their work. Usually they'll send me drafts or they'll send me very large chunks. So I think there's really something to this process. But I will also say this. There's no way you would have been able to do what you're doing now if you hadn't gone through the pain of the first draft and incorporating all the things in the story grid stuff beforehand. I really believe that. I don't think we could have gotten here so quickly without having done all that preparatory work beforehand.

Okay. Yeah, so yeah, I tried to do. Because I'm trying to keep all this stuff in mind. I've really been thinking a lot about our last episode about calibrate or two episodes ago, the calibrating the scene and then what we talked about last week with like, know, spanning back to see a crowd of people. Because it's one thing to read, you know, you have to, you have to go back and forth. You have to go in positive, then in negative and vice versa. And you got it. But, but even I never thought of like, well, there's something to like staying small with one or two people, then going big with like a crowd and then going back down halfway, you know? You know, like even that is because that was actually the part I wrote first, was the part in front of the crowd. But I finished in like 600 words. So I went back and like wrote the beginning because what I was going to do was end the scene with her dad coming to rescue her. But I realized that's like the opposite of how he would act.

Yes.

And so I instead started the scene with him abandoning her so that she was on her own.

The other thing that you did, which is important and I didn't even really tell you to do this last week, was you intuitively figured out that you needed to transition. You transitioned from a two person scene, which was the first scene in the book, the inciting incident scene. And then instead of just going directly into the crowd scene, which could have been a shocker to the reader, you transitioned into it by having a two on two conversation between Jesse and her father prior to the big event of her public humiliation. And so that's something that I could say to you a million times and you say, oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense. But until you actually did it yourself, you wouldn't really know what I mean, or it would have come off kind of stiff. But because this was organically grown, you're starting to get the feel of a writer, of what a writer feels. And that's the one thing I can't teach you, is your own internal feels. Feelings. It's like, you know, I don't want to belabor the point, but I. I wrote something about teaching my son how to throw a fastball.

Yeah, we talked about that last week with the M plus te exact power.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So what you're doing is you've thrown a few fastballs and you're starting to get the feel of it. And so when you're off, your body is telling you that's 500 words. It's too short. I'm going to let that sit for a second. And then your writerly instincts started to help you and worked offline while you were probably cutting the grass or something. And when you came back to it, you probably said to yourself, oh, oh, why don't I start it with the father and Jesse? And he's dropping her off to be humiliated, and he's trying to get her to just change her mind because this is silly. She's going to experience an incredible. And I also like the fact that the reader doesn't know just what a terrible thing the father did until the end of the scene. And the mayor, the person who has to perform this act on the young girl, that's the last thing he wants to do. So you're doing a really nice balance of zagging when people are expecting a zig. So people expect the father to be the good guy in the good presence because he's the father. But instead you said, I'm not going to make him an evil person. I'm just going to make him weak. And then I'm going to have the mayor, who everybody expects to be the villain, to be sympathetic. So what you're doing is when we were talking about value systems and how you had to have the roles of villain, victim and villain in each scene, but not necessarily each character embodies those things, but the. The essence of those roles transfers and moves from scene to scene. You did that this time intuitively, in a way that was really surprising and innovative. And it's. You know, I gotta say, I was. When I read it, I was like, geez, wow, Tim's really nailed it.

Good. Yeah, yeah, I. Well, you. I went through the same process as the first scene where, like, I listed out all the roles I needed to fill and kept trying to, like, figure out who should do them and then what their attitude is. And that's kind of where I landed because, you know, I liked what I'm trying. You know, what I enjoyed with the first scene that I was trying to do again in this scene is like, combining this kind of old Western world with new. Like, they've had to revert back so they have some technology, but not much.

Right.

So that's why I kind of like the scene in the town square with her in the stocks. Kind of goes way back, but it still ends with like, you know, a technology thing.

Yeah. It has a Salem Salem witch trial sensibility to it, which is very. You know, every American knows the Salem witch trials in a way that it's deeply ingrained in them. Also, what I really liked at the end is that it starts negative and it ends positive. And the way you ended this scene was positive. You know, oh, my gosh, there are people who are going to help her or. And she's. They're strangers and they've got these weird helmets on too. But she's. She was rescued at the end in. In a. In a manner which raises more curiosity.

Yeah, I struggled with that because I didn't feel like it was very positive. That was one of my questions I was going to ask you is like, I felt like I ended negative.

No, no, no, no, no. You have to remember that when you have such a traumatic action element in your scene that's negative or even very positive, you don't have to have the equal. It's not a Newtonian equation. You don't have to have an equal and opposite positive to balance that. Rather, you just need to have a shift in the positive. So you just had a shift, a minor shift, but it's a huge shift too, because this poor girl was just abandoned by her father and her mother. She obviously has a deep will and is strong, stronger than she even knows herself, to withstand this horrible shunning and painful episode and to have these other people come out of the woodwork to sort of bring her in. It's also, you know, it also is a very strong element in the hero's journey where, you know, Joseph Campbell writes, when. When the hero is struggling, there are forces that come to. To the hero's aid, and those forces are gatekeepers or tricksters or any number of, you know, different kinds of things depending upon the culture. But so you're. What's really nice here is that it has that, you know, that hero's journey, coming of age, maturation sensibility to it. And you're only 2,000 words into the book, and you've clearly, in my estimation, you have clearly shown the reader what this story is, what the genre is and where it's going to end up. You've already established to the reader expectations that they're going to want to have answered. What they are going to want to know is, what in the hell is going on? A, B, how is this girl going to get out of the situation she's in? And C, how is that going to change her? Is she going to succeed? Is she going to thrive, or is she going to fail in her journey? And, you know, that's. That's a hell of a lot to accomplish in 2000 words. And you will. You'll understand, too, when I tell you there's not one second or one word in those 2000 that states any of that stuff. So it's. What you leave out is crucial, is as important as what you put in. And you, you know, like all beginning writers, you had a tendency to over explain and give exposition until the nth degree. And instead, you're now starting to get the feeling like, oh, I'm just going to sort of put my mind's camera onto a scene and just play the scene the way I see it in my mind. And I'm not going to get nervous and explain all this stuff that the reader doesn't want it. They want to fill in those details themselves. They don't want it. They don't want to hear your version of the crowd. They have a crowd in their mind that they want to put in there for themselves.

So that's a strength, not a weakness. Not overly explaining.

Yeah. The two things I. Well, first of all, I find myself, like, that's what I'm, like, backspacing more than anything is like, I start to explain something and then I back off. The other thing is, I've decided I'm going to keep leaving as much out as I possibly can until you tell me it's too much. Like, because I've swung so far to the other end, I'd rather you be like, I have no idea what's going on in this. You need to explain something. You know, like. So I've been trying to just pull all of that back. And that is the kind of trick that's been helpful, is like, when he pulls out the little cap thing and fiddles with it to turn on the light. Like, that's all I say about it, because that's all I know about it, because I'm just watching what's happening.

Yep. Yep. That doesn't surprise me that that detail came to you. We've talked about before, the idea of the muse and the, you know, the inner genius in each and every one of us. And you and I are more on the side of, oh, just shut up and do your work. But the. The point that our friend Steve Pressfield always makes is that don't, you know, don't forget about the muse, because the muse gives you gifts all of the time, but she only gives them to you when you're working hard. So all of that time that you spent writing that first draft and all that frustration that you've had over the past nine months with me saying no, that's not right. No, that's not right. You're not doing it right. All of that stuff is. Is now, you know, deeply embedded in you, and the muse is starting to feel sorry for you.

She's giving you these great little things. And the. The wonderful thing is, you know, that's not true. I absolutely think that, you know, there are these wonderful things that come to all of us all the time, and the muse is trying to. To contact us constantly, but we're always so deeply distracted in our own minds that we don't listen to a damn thing that the muse is telling us. And, you know, the more craft you gain and the better writer you become, the more you start to let it go. And when you start letting go, meaning, you know, I gotta say, I doubt that when you started the second scene that you were like, oh, okay, what's my crisis going to be here? And what's the climax of this scene? Instead, you're. You kind of gave yourself this world, and you said, okay, Sean says I need to have a scene where the consequences of her decision from the previous scene present themselves. So. And he also said it might be cool to do a larger scene. So let me think. Well, what could I have her do? Oh, well, it could be like, you know, when they used to stone people. Oh, that would be good. Well, what can I do on top of that? And so instead of worrying about the mechanics, you were allowing yourself to let your imagination work. And the imagination is the most valuable player for any writer. You know, this is really nice because you're starting to get a sense and a feel for.

Allowing the story to present itself to you while also knowing your craft. So you didn't just stop after that 500 words. You're like, yeah, that's something. There's something there. But it's not a scene yet. It's not quite a scene yet. And you didn't know what exactly what you had to do, but you knew it wasn't quite right yet. And so that's when you went back and you added, you know, the. The introduction with the father. And then the crisis moment again is, hey, we're giving you one last chance here. Are you gonna. You're gonna go in the Capitol, honey? Or are you really gonna go in there and get stoned? And the fact that the. The girl was like, no, I'm not going. I'm not a wimp. I'm not like you are. I'm gonna take the consequences. I'm going in. I'm not going to be a tool. And so that just makes the reader like that girl all the more, because every single one of us would have gone to the Capitol.

And so this might be a terrible transition, but I would like to bring up one thing that I've kind of discovered, which I think is pretty fascinating.

And it has to do with, you know, the stage of the work that you're at now. Now, I don't know the. And I should have prepared better, but there were three professors at the University of Vermont who created something called. I'm probably mispronouncing it, the hedometer. And what it does is it. It's. It's this machine, this computer program that evaluates positive and negative feelings. And what they did is they started by analyzing when Americans are happiest throughout the year. And so they sort of went on Twitter and they analyzed the kind of language in the tweets to discover happy language versus sad language. I'm really oversimplifying here, but essentially what they were able to do is graph this entire year of American sense of whether they feel good or whether they feel poorly. And it's this really kind of cool heartbeat kind of graph where, you know, at Christmas time, Everybody's happy. At Fourth of July, people are happy. At the anniversary of 9, 11, everybody's sad, that kind of thing. So what they did is they took that tool and they. They started to say to themselves, what if we analyzed, you know, Kurt Vonnegut's six core story arcs? And if you're not familiar with this Kurt Vonnegut, you know, the famous writer who. You know, fantastic writer, science fiction, literary, all kinds of things. When he was back at the University of Chicago, he was writing a thesis, and it got rejected because it was too simple. But this. The simple nature of Kurt Vonnegut's thesis was that there are only six story arcs ever, which is kind of interesting. So these guys, these professors, decided to analyze 1700 stories in the English language novels that are part of this Gutenberg project, that are online and free and everything. So what they did is they plugged 1700 books into the heat O meter and analyze to see if Kurt Vonnegut's theory made sense. And guess what? It did. And the thing that really, really made me excited was that it absolutely mirrors the kind of sine cosine curve that I discovered and thought about for the story grid. So the reason I'm bringing this up is that a lot of times we're trying to. We struggle for, you know, I wonder what the real emotional arcing the most resonant emotional arcs are for people. And so what these professors did is they analyzed these six stories, and let me tell you what the six different stories are. And when I tell you, you're going to say, oh, yeah, that's totally obvious. Okay, so the first story that we all can relate to and we all think is great is the rags to riches story. And that's simply a steady rise from a point of not exactly negativity, but kind of like blahness, to, you know, riches. They could be real riches or they could be emotional riches. So it's a rise from a negative to a positive. So that's one simple emotional arc that you can have in a story. A second one is the opposite of that, which is the riches to rag story, where there's a steady fall in the emotional arc. And this is a great example of that is like Faust, the Faust story, where, you know, Goethe wrote this story about this very. You know, Goethe was the German literary figure from hundreds of years ago. I'm blanking on what his era was. I think it was around 1700 or so. And he wrote the Faust story, which is adapted over and over and over again and retold where there's a very wealthy person who just doesn't seem to find enough, you know, greatness in the world. So he makes a pact with the devil. And the devil says, I will give you complete knowledge if you, you know, give me your soul. And Faust makes that bargain and discovers, you know, he had made the stupidest mistake of his life. So it's this fall, this steady fall from riches to rags. That's the second kind of story. Now, the third kind of story is called the. The man falls into the whole story.

And this is something that I wrote about in the story grid. And the man falls into the whole story and is somebody gets themselves into trouble, and then the rest of the story is how they get out of that trouble. So it's. It. It has nothing to do with whether or not a man falls into the hole, but the reason why we use man falls into a hole because it makes sense. You know, he falls into a hole, and he's got to do all kinds of things to get himself out of it. So that's a fall with a rise at the end. The fourth kind of story is the Icarus story, which is a rise and then a fall. And then the fifth is the one that we all recognize as the Cinderella story. And this is the rise, the fall and the rise. So Cinderella starts, you know, she's this poor, poor Girl who has to do all this housework and her evil stepmother and stepsisters abuse her. And then all of a sudden, the fairy godmother comes and makes her a princess. And she gets to go to this beautiful ball. But unfortunately, after she meets the prince and has this amazing dance, it strikes midnight and she turns back into Cinderella. So she rises and then she falls back to where she was before. And then, of course, in the end, the prince travels around the land. He's got the shoe that she left, discovers that Cinderella is actually. The princess is actually Cinderella, and they live happily ever after. So that's the Rise, Fall, Rise story. And that's a great one that everybody loves. And the last one, of course, is the Fall, the Rise and the Fall. And that's the Oedipus story, which I don't. I can't. I can't be as quick about describing as I can Cinderella because it's. It's a Greek play by Sophocles, but it concerns this horrible thing that happens to this guy who. Who becomes king. And he loses his eyes and he ends up you.

These terrible things happen to him. And at the end, he. He discovers that he cannot fight the universe, and the universe will always win. So those are the six stories. You have the rags, the riches, the riches, the rags, the man falls into the hole, the Rise, Fall of Icarus, the Rise, Fall, Rise of Cinderella, and the Fall, Rise, Fall of Oedipus. Now, the reason. I'm sorry this is going on so long, Tim, but the reason why I'm explaining this to you is that what these professors discovered was that there is one sort of grouping of narrative that is really, really popular, and it's this. You start with a man into a hole, you follow it up with a man into a hole. You then have a Cinderella, and then you end with a Faust.

So say that like all in one story.

Yes. This would be. This would sum up sort of like your beginning hook, your middle build, and your ending payoff is that you go, man into a hole. Somebody gets themselves into a terrible problem, and they get out of it. And then the next sequence of scenes is they get into a bigger problem and they get out of that one. And then they're rewarded in a Cinderella fashion. They are moved. They move up in social rank from a lower order to a higher order because of a whole set of circumstances. A fairy godmother comes and grants her wishes. And then bang, something terrible happens and they fall again. And then the Faust is. They realize that everything that they once Held dear. Thought was true is not true. So the reason why I'm bringing this up is that we have sort of structured your. Your story in a similar fashion. And these first two scenes are representing the first man in a hole sequence for your novel. So Jesse begins by getting herself into some trouble. She's stealing from people's, you know, cupboards. She gets caught, and now she's. She's hit the fall point. And your second, you know, your second scene is the repercussions of that man in the whole narrative. So the reason why I'm bringing this up is that if we look at your story and the progression of it, and if we get stuck and remember, okay, we're progressively complicating this story and make it richer and richer and richer. Let's also not forget this, you know, this global narrative arc that we. We would like to make sure is also underneath the storytelling. And I don't. I didn't bring this up to make you confused or freak you out. I brought it up because it was fascinating to me to read about this article. I'll get you the information for the story notes so that people can read about this. This computer program and about these professors, and you can put it in the story notes. But it's very interesting to me that, you know, through 1700 works of English literature, these six core narrative arcs, which I, you know, broke down even more into what I call the internal genres in the story grid. These are nothing less than, you know, the internal genres. The internal genres are sort of even more subsets of these six core stories. It's just really fascinating to me that the intuition and the hard work of 25 years of being an editor and creating the storygrid methodology syncs with the work of Vonnegut and this computer and these three professors and the Joseph Campbell hero's journey path, all these things are coming together in a way that just more and more tells me that the structure of storytelling is so deeply ingrained in each one of us that our expectations for each story that we begin to read are so firmly embedded in us that when the writer does not abide them, we reject them almost instantaneously. So the more you know about this stuff, the better equipped you'll be to be able to make these things come true to life in your own work.

So let's.

Why don't you. Because I don't still fully understand what you were going for with the man falls in the hole and then this, and then this. So why don't you transition me into like, so my job, my next job is to, like, figure out where I'm going with, you know, the beginning hook of my story. We know we're going to the point where it's revealed her brother's alive, and that's what gets us into the middle build. Because that was my next question.

Right.

Is we have, you know, roughly 60 scenes in the book. I don't think we want to go scene by scene this way. Otherwise, my book will be done sometime in the fall of 2017. So at some point, I want to, like, actually write more than a scene at a time that you look at.

Sure.

So where I'm struggling now because I kind of came up with, you know, this is the part of me that's, like, screaming that I don't have a plan because I came up with this whole these people that came to save them kind of save her at the end and take her away.

It just popped in my head, so I wrote it down, but I have no idea how they're playing into the story, you know, what kind of advice would you give me now? Because now I've got roughly 13 more scenes to write in the beginning hook. What should I do next?

Well, I think the thing to do next does tie into what I was talking about earlier, and I obviously didn't explain it well enough, but.

Well, it's one of those things. Like, it's like so much of this is when you say it, I'm like, okay, yeah, I see that.

Right, right.

But when I'm, like, actually trying to think how that applies to my story, I'm like, I don't know what to do.

Okay, well, it's like what you were saying last week or the week before about your trainer who said, I just come up with 17 different ways of saying the same thing, and one's gonna click. So let me take a half step to the side and just go back to the hero's journey, which we've talked about before. The hero's journey, you know, uses this man in a hole. Man in a hole. Cinderella, Faust. In a way that people are most familiar with. So, you know, because I'm a story nerd, when I read that, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's just a hero's journey. And I can piece together all of these things that obviously are not so obvious to people who haven't been studying it for 20 years. So what's going to happen next is that you intuitively put in the next stage of the hero's journey, which is after the refusal of the call. The hero undergoes some trials and tribulations that will force them to actually heed the call. And so when you brought in those people at the end of the scene, these are what Campbell would call, you know, messengers or gatekeepers or helpers who come to the hero. Hold on a second. I have a quote from Campbell on my computer that might help. Okay. The hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms where he must survive a succession of trials. The hero is covertly aided by the advice amulets and secret agents of the supernatural, helpers who he met before his entrance into this region. So just to clarify, those people who came to help her at the end of scene two are the secret agents of the supernatural, helpers who come to the hero in the hero's journey to aid them before they have to go on their big trial.

So what's going to happen next for you is you are going to explore how these helpers are going to teach Jesse some skill or some intellectual, you know, skill that she can use further on down the road. They are going to transition her from being, you know, sort of this really cool hacker who can do whatever she wants to the lowest form of. Of form in society. They're going to teach her the ways of those poor people who have to serve everybody else. So it's sort of like they will be her guides into this desolate world that we can't even begin to understand how horrible it'll be. So instead of you worrying about, oh, my God, how am I going to get to the scene at the end of my beginning Hook, where she discovers that her brother's alive and that she has to go to the Capitol and actually has to heed the call instead. Give yourself a little room. You've got another, what, eight, nine, ten scenes to get you there. So allow yourself to think about what happens next. Now, Jesse has just gone through a terrible ordeal. She's fallen into a hole. She never really realized how bad this hole was, and now she is at the pit of despair. And so supernatural forces, in the guise of these two people who come to her aid, they come to her aid. They're going to take her somewhere. I don't know where. They're going to take her to a cave. They're going to take her underground. They're going to take her somewhere that is a form of exile from the rest of society. And they're going to say to her, okay, this is what our lives are, and this is what you have to do in order to survive. And it is Our job to get you to survival mode and to hook you up with the right family or whatever it is that you come up with. And you are going to have to do a service. Your life now is now devoted to service. And you will never get out of this world, so get used to it. And you know that helmet on your head and the green light? You better hope it never turns to yellow. And if it turns to yellow, if it turns to red, you're really in deep shit. I don't know. I'm making this up. But they are going to guide her. They're going to be her, you know, mentors through this darkness.

And they are going to move the story forward in such a way that will take Jesse to a course that will lead to a place where she has to go to the Capitol. She has to find her brother. Okay, and then. So if you think of that in terms of eight scenes or 10 scenes, and you think to yourself, okay, do I want her to? What you've kind of set up here is kind of fun, too, because what it brings up to me is you've set up the possibility that Jesse actually does heed the call to go to the Capitol, but she doesn't do it on the terms of the Power.

What makes her heed the call is the realization that her brother needs her help. So maybe she goes to the Capitol. Not, as, you know, super smart, great hacker who's going to be in the special program. Maybe she uses some kind of underground railroad amongst the people with skull helmets to make her way there. And then she has to figure out a way to get inside and find her brother. That's just the thought. So these are the kinds of things, instead of worrying, you know, you've got that signpost of revelation, brother is alive. That's going to be a big. That's going to be the end of the beginning hook of your story. And that's going to be the time when she leaves the tried. She's going to leave that world that she's in now, and she's going to go on a journey, and she's going to go to the capital, and she's going to find her brother. So that's the beginning of the middle build. When she heeds the call and goes for, you know, the big event of trying to find her brother and trying to get his release and trying to bring her family back. Does that make sense?

Yes.

So, I mean, is this a situation where I should just.

Write the next scene? I mean, just what do I see happening next? And Trust that I'll kind of find myself at the place where I'm going.

If you feel comfortable. And I think it's time. I think you should write scene three through scene 12. Or you write to the end of the beginning of the. Of the beginning Hook. Okay. And remember.

That ending of the beginning Hook has to be. You have to build it so that it's almost. It's a holy shit moment for the reader.

How do I do that?

I don't know.

The way you're gonna do that is in the second scene, you referred again to the brother and continuing to see the fact that this guy's dead. We think he's dead. Oh, it's terrible. Your brother's dead. That is a way of. Now, you don't want to overdo it, but.

Right.

But if you can subtly put. Set up the revelation. Oh, you don't think your brother's dead, are you? Somebody's gonna say that to her. Somebody's gonna say, hey, sweetheart, your brother's not dead. He's still in the Capitol. Who do you think's doing X, Y, and Z? Who do you think they're using for X, Y, and Z? I'm just making this up. But somebody's going to say to her, somebody that.

She'S either going to look up to them as a mentor or they're going to be a very big rival who's going to use the information to rip her heart out. That's what's called exposition as ammunition. So if you can set up somebody using the information that her brother is still alive to turn the beginning hook into a middle build.

You know, you've done something. Think of it in terms of somebody saying to Jesse, oh, you poor little stupid girl.

Do you really think your brother's dead? Why do you think that they need you in the Capitol? Your brother is. Blah. I don't know. I'm. This is. This is where you're the writer. You have to handle this. But what I'm saying is that that is a way of turning. And also, remember, the end of the beginning Hook has to have a kind of a positive valence because the inciting incident was negative.

So the positive thing is the brother is alive. So a lot of people would use that information to hurt her because they don't think she has what it takes to actually do something about the fact that the brother's alive. So if you can turn it so that somebody's using that as ammunition to hurt her, and instead of it hurting her, it empowers her, then you will create a holy shit moment for the reader, and they're going to say to themselves, oh, my God, what's going to happen next? How is she going to get to the Capitol with the skull helmet on in the middle of, you know. And you don't know this yet either, but what's great is that your muse is setting up progressive complications for you. She's seeding them in for you, and she's putting these super. You know, Joseph Campbell wrote.

Secret Agents of the Supernatural Helpers who he met before his entrance into this region. This is very similar to the Writer's Journey. For some reason, some kind of supernatural thing came to Tim Grohl to say, have two people come out at the end of the scene and lead her out of the square, the town square. You didn't know you were going to write that.

So there's a level of trust and fun. Part of the fun is discovering this yourself. But I think just, you know, go. Go to the beginning hook, the end of the beginning hook, and see what you can do. And then you're going to. You're going to have, you know, 25% odd, you know, maybe 18% who knows of your book done and what it should feel not done, but, you know, you're going to have a good solid draft to get you into the middle build. And then, then we can talk about what's going to happen in the middle build and what journey she's going to have to go on and how. And this, this just goes back. And I'm, you know, I'm half regretting telling the. This story about the University of Vermont professors and the heat o meter, but the reason why I did bring that up is because what, what I was trying to say to you is that you intuitively put a man in the hole narrative arc to start your sequence of story. And then, you know, that is going to transition into the man in the hole, you know, a progressively complicated man in the hole. That will be the first sequence of your middle build. And then it'll go in Cinderella and then a Faust at the ending payoff. But. But just feel confident that I know where you're going and I can, I can help guide you. And when you get off track, I can say, no, you're. You're not. It's not working that way. But I think it's. I think it's a good idea for the next couple of weeks or however long it takes you, for you to map out that.

Those next eight to nine scenes, and then when you're done with those, you can send them to me and then we can have a conversation about those. Okay.

Okay. So I wanted. Before get off the phone here, I wanted to ask one more question. So when I went back months ago when I did the story grid for Harry Potter, one of the, the interesting things was that the entire book is only told from his point of view. Pretty much. Like there's like a scene at the beginning of the fourth book that Harry's not a part of, but, like the whole book is just what's happening to Harry the entire time. And then of course, you know, most books aren't like that. Like, I'm in the middle of this book called the Darker Shade of Magic. And, you know, they introduce one character, then they introduce another, and like at the end of the beginning, hook is when they cross paths and run into each other. And so I know we've talked a lot about narrative device. I've kind of fallen into something that's not too out there. But what should I do as far as like, you know, should I be introducing other points of view into this besides Jesse's? Like, should I be like, showing the villains, trying to figure out how to get her to come over to their side, or should I just kind of stick with telling it from Jesse's? You know, just, just watching Jesse, as I've been doing, just watch her go and tell that story. Like, how do you make those decisions?

Well, sometimes the. Well, there's. There's two ways to make the decision. One is to use the genre conventions of your chosen genre. And my initial reaction is that this very much in the tradition of Harry Potter and also Hunger Games, which also followed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was always a Katniss point of view. And I think third person omniscient is working for you. And third person omniscient you should think of as your inner Steven Spielberg. And I think that's a good, a good way of explaining third person omniscient to people so that they, they can kind of understand you're using one person point of view, third person omniscient. So it's sort of you're following one character on their journey. It's like you've got a camera on their shoulder and we're watching things happen to them. Now, this doesn't mean that you don't want to plan when the villain is going to do things to this character. Rather, you're gonna do that off book. You're gonna do that like you do when you plan your scenes and you go, well, what if I had the character do this? No, I'll try this. What about this way? What are the six ways they could do it? So you want to think to yourself, okay, my villain wants something. My villain needs something. My villain needs Jesse in the Capitol hacking the system. My villain has been denied that. And my villain doesn't want Jesse living the life of a. Of an unwanted person at the bottom of this social order. How would my. Yeah, how would my villain make things work to his or her advantage? So you want to think about that. Would the villain be smart and say to themselves, okay, well, the carrot's not working. The stick didn't work. What am I gonna have to do? Because, remember, the carrot was you get to go to the Capitol and live the life of a, you know, a pampered princess. And the stick was, you're gonna get beaten and shunned, and a helmet's gonna be stuck on your head. Okay, well, the carrot didn't work. And she's still alive, and she's got the helmet on, and she still hasn't begged to come to the Capitol. So that hasn't worked either. What's the villain gonna do? And you think about how the villain would make that happen. Would the villain send emissaries to psychologically manipulate Jesse into doing his or her, you know, what they want in a way that Jesse thinks that she's doing it for herself. Is that a possibility? Probably. Because you want to have a villain who's really smart. Right? And if. If I say to you, tim, I'll give you $100 if you design my redesign my website. You're like, no, thanks. You go. And I'll say, well, if you don't do it, Tim, I'm not going to help you with your book anymore. You go, no, I still don't want to do it. Then I'm going to have to manipulate you somehow to do my website psychologically so that it's your idea. I'm just making this up. I didn't. I didn't do that in any way, shape, or form.

Yeah, no, I'm. Yeah, I was thinking that. Because what was running through my head, too, was like, you know, she's going to fall into this way of life and just suck it up and deal with it. And so, again, the villain's gonna have to move the story forward. Right?

Exactly. Oh, my gosh. That's exactly right.

Okay.

And maybe these really nice emissaries. Maybe one of them. It's like, you know, the Joey Pantolino character in the Matrix. You know, he's this fun loving guy, member of the crew who's actually not so cool. So you gotta, you gotta plant those. And that's all in Joseph Campbell too. You know, you have the two headed, they have the Trickster. And you know, you don't want to be obvious about it, but you also have to think about how is the villain going to get Jesse to the Capitol? Well, the villain's going to know. Jesse would really like to know the information that her brother's alive because Jesse thinks he's he. Or she suspects that if she can just bring back the brother, Mom's going to be okay and dad will be okay too. And then she can go on with her life and, you know, she can solve everybody's problems.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, I've got some more work to do. Yeah, no, I'm looking. I'm just gonna write the next scene and write the next scene and write the next scene and just kind of hope, like it. It was encouraging that I ended up in a good place at the end of this scene when I didn't really know where I was going with it.

Yeah, trust that.

So let me try this for the next eight or nine scenes and see where I end up.

Sounds good.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. As I mentioned last week, Sean and I are going to be speaking at an upcoming conference this September. The conference is called Tribe Conference and you can see more@tribeconference.com as always, for everything StoryGrid related, you can go to StoryGrid. And if you haven't signed up for the email list, make sure you do that. That's where we send all the latest and greatest Story Grid stuff. And of course, if you haven't picked up a copy of the book, you should do that now as well to take a look at past episodes or the show notes for this episode, including the scene two that Sean and I discussed. You can get all of that@storygrid.com podcast thanks as always for continuing to share the show. Leaving a rating and review on itunes, all of that is extremely helpful for us. If you want to reach out to us, you can find us on Twitter torygrid. So thanks for listening and we will see you next week.