Units of Story (beats, scenes, acts, etc)

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'm the struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works on the show with me is Sean Coyne, the creator of the Story Grid, the author of the book the Story Grid, and an editor with 25 plus years experience. He's taking all of my questions and all of my just floundering around trying to figure out how to do this writing thing. And he's helping put me on the right path and hopefully along the way, put you on the right path as well. In this episode, we talk about the units of story, talk about the beat, the scene, the sequence, the act subplot, all the different units of the story and how they all work together to make sure that you write a story that works. This is one of the more complicated parts of the story grid for me, and I get a little confused. But Sean does a good job walking me through how each of these things work and which things I need to pay attention to before the writing and which things I need to pay attention to once I'm in editor mode and the manuscript's done. I think you're going to learn a lot in this episode, so we're going to jump right in and get started.

So, Sean, I want to start this episode and go into. It's a new part of the book. So we just came through the five commandments of storytelling, and now it's the units of the story. So talk a little bit about what the different units are first, and then I have a plethora of questions.

Okay, well, this goes. The units of story is sort of a way that I, as an editor.

Try and figure out sort of the global tracking of a story. So the units are pretty simple. There's the beat. Now, what the beat is. If anybody's ever taken an acting class, a beat is a sort of a moment in a scene where something happens, an event happens that makes one of the characters change their behavior or their action.

So it's very similar to what we've been talking about, these five units of storytelling. And the one thing that all of these units of storytelling have in common is you have to have those five commandments of storytelling with each one of the. Within each one of the units. So in a beat, you're going to have an inciting incident to a beat, you're going to have progressive complication to a beat, a crisis, a climax, and a resolution. Now, beats are Very, very small units. And they're very much in the realm of the actors sort of world. This is the. The trade that actors.

You know, what they do is they create very, very dynamic beats that all add up to the sum total of a particular characterization. So I don't want to really go crazy about the beat right now. If, you know, I think I mentioned last week that I could have done a beat by beat analysis of the Silence of the Lambs. But I thought, you know, that's really getting over the top, you know, compulsive about this stuff. So I refrain from doing that. But you absolutely could. And this. This speaks also to this concept of Russian dolls that I talk about all the time. The beat is the tiny, tiny, tiny little baby inside the larger Russian doll. So the beat, you know, you could have anywhere from one to four to 20 beats in a particular scene. And a scene is the next unit of story. Beats add up to scenes to a scene. And the scene is really the primary unit of storytelling for a novelist, for a screenwriter, for a dramatist, a short story writer. The scene is really what I think everybody should be concentrating on almost 95% of their energy. Because the reason is you can create very dynamic scenes. The rest of the units of storytelling that I'll get to in a second, they almost take care of themselves in that scenes add up to particular larger units of story. But if your scenes are really crystal clear and dynamic and terrific, the other things are almost. You kind of tweak them at the final stages of editing and they kind of take care of themselves. All right, so after the scene, what you have is the next unit of story is what's called a sequence. And a sequence is sort of a series of scenes that add up to a larger active moment in your story. For instance, a sequence could be something like getting the job. Getting the job would be a sequence of a global story. So you would perhaps have three to four scenes that would build to this climactic moment in a sequence where the lead character sort of gets a job. So you might have an interview scene. You might have a preparation for second interview scene. And then you might have, you know, a scene where the lead character is tested as to whether or not they're going to get a job, a particular job, or not. And those three scenes would add up to a larger unit called a sequence.

I do go into sequence, I think, very well in the book. And what I do is I sort of pick apart the movie version of Stephen King's wonderful thriller Misery, and show you exactly what a sequence is in the book. And maybe we can get to it a little bit later. I'll have to refresh my memory about it. But so after the sequence you have the act. And the act is really like a very, very large moment in the story. It's, you know, wife leaves husband.

Husband quits job. These are the sort of the major movements, the major moments in a particular story that really sort of climactically move the story forward in a way that's very large. So an act is traditionally.

A lot of professors and a lot of story experts, they talk about the three act structure. And what the three act structure is, is essentially the Aristotelian kind of beginning, middle, end. And I use the terms beginning hook, middle build and ending payoff. And the thing about the act is that you can have more than three acts.

In your story. Your middle build may comprise, you know, three little mini acts and your, you know, your beginning hook could be one act and your ending payoff could be one act. You could have a five act story. There are seven act stories. There's any number of complications that you can come up with in terms of act. David Lean famously was a proponent of seven, you know, major story movements in his stories. And those would basically be seven acts.

Now after the act.

You have something that sort of integrates within the global story itself and I call it the subplot. And the subplot is sort of.

A smaller story unit than the global story itself, but larger than an F. So, for instance, if you had.

You know, I don't really want to get into multi character, mini, you know, mini stories that all build together, like Pulp Fiction is an example of that. And also that, that Christmas movie Love actually, which has, you know, eight, eight to ten mini stories that all build up to a global story. But, you know, let me use that since I'm on that topic, sort of as a, as an example of a subplot. A subplot would be, you know, if you were to look at the movie Love actually, which is a fun Christmas movie that, you know, is.

You know, it's light hearted fare, but there's some good stuff in it. I enjoyed it when I saw it. There's 10 mini stories or so that all add up to the global story, which is about finding love in a very difficult world today. And one of those features Hugh Grant playing, I think he plays the Prime Minister of England who falls in love and he falls in love with one of the women in his office. And then there are, you know, six or seven or eight even smaller little units of story that build up, you know, at the same time as the Hugh Grant story. I think there's a story about somebody falls in love with his best friend's fiance, played by Keira Knightley. It's a fun movie. It's. Especially at Christmas time. And then there's a really nice bromance story featuring Bill Nighy, I think.

Yeah, I hated that movie.

Yeah, well, you know, you gotta be in the right mood. Well.

I think that says a lot about you.

Well, I don't like. I just didn't like it for so many different reasons that are outside the scope of this show.

Okay. Okay. So anyway, love actually is a series of subplots that build to a global story. And obviously the largest unit of story that you have is the global story. Now, another example of sort of subplots. I'm not like a huge Star wars guy, but there are, you know, there are all those subunits of story within Star Wars. There's the. The original trilogy of story, and then there's the three prequels, and now they're beginning three sequels to the original. So there are nine, from what I understand, there are at least nine sort of, you know, bigger stories that you could consider be subplots of a global story, which is the Star wars universe. So the reason why I break down everything into units of story, it's not to confuse everybody. It's actually to clarify things so that you can pinpoint those particular moments in your work that you need to focus on. And oftentimes what happens is if your scenes are really tight and well constructed, what you might find after you examine, you go through your story grid rigmarole. At the end of your first draft, you might find that you're not hitting a particular moment for an act strong enough, strongly enough. So what you'll do is you'll find that scene that is that critical moment in your act, and you will tweak that scene to increase the stakes or whatever for that particular moment. But if your scenes are really well constructed, the editing and the work of the global larger units is a lot easier than if you have a bunch of scenes that are really half baked. Don't go anywhere. You can often get lost in the larger units of story when your real, real deep down problems are scene to scene. So again, I always go back, always concentrate on your scenes. And it's almost the harder you work on your scenes, the better your skill set will become with the larger units of scale story.

Yeah, because I get I get confused by some of this. So the beats add up to a scene. And I honestly don't really know what a beat is yet, but you kind of make it sound like that's not something to focus on while you're writing.

And then you have the sequence in the act. So what is the difference between a sequence and an act?

Well, a sequence is a smaller unit than an act, so.

Well, I guess let me back up and say, how do you use these? So I can sense the scene. Right. That's what we're. Right. You know, when you're writing your book, you're writing these individual scenes, and I can wrap my head around that. But what is the point of paying attention to sequences or acts?

Well, the reason why you want to do it is.

It'S, again, like throwing down those mile markers on your map.

Let's assume that you haven't written a first draft. Let's assume that you're planning your work and you're planning your work on writing your first try.

The reason why you want to think about sequences and acts and.

Subplots and global story elements is that they will become your. Pittsburgh's. Your Nebraska. I don't know, a city in Nebraska. How pathetic is that?

You notice I don't know one either.

Yeah, you're Pittsburgh, you're Lincoln, Nebraska, you're, you know, South Dakota again, Sioux City, South Dakota. There's one. So these are mile markers on your map. And they will also help you when, you know, we were talking last week about progressive complications and escalating stakes and things of that sort. They will help you do that before you start your scene work. So, for example, if you know the climax of your beginning hook is going to be.

I'll just think of something fun. Let's say a curmudgeon.

Your lead character, sort of a curmudgeon, like the guy that Jack Nicholson plays and as good as it gets, or the guy that you know.

Okay, so let's say I love that movie.

Okay, good. Okay, let's talk fully remember it. But there. There's a moment. Oh, there's another one. The Accidental Tourist. And William Hurt, in the film, plays the lead character. And it's a terrific novel if I can't recommend it highly enough. It's by Ann Tyler, who's a wonderful. She's one of those people who can. Who, you know, critics call literary, but you and I call a great storyteller. And the Accidental Tourist is about this. This man who loses his wife at the very beginning of the story because They've lost their child. The child has died. It's the beginning of the. Of the story. The child has died and the. And the husband and the wife, they just. They're so filled with grief that they can't keep it together. So the wife decides to leave the husband and she leaves the husband with the dog. And he doesn't really like the dog.

But.

He'S stuck with the dog. And so, like, the climax of one of the sequences early on is that.

The lead character falls off of a.

Ladder and breaks his arm or breaks his leg. And so the build up to that moment, to that sequence would be you're trying to progressively complicate the lead character's life. Now, the lead character is one of these people who has systems for everything, right? He's sort of obsessive compulsive. He's sort of filed away his grief in the back of his mind, and he's trying to live his life sort of day by day, you know, one task at a time. So Ann Tyler was brilliant in that she progressively complicated his life by giving him a dog. Now, dogs aren't going to do things in the way that human beings want them to do. They just. They act and they behave in the way that they want to behave. And then she also gave him this handicap where he breaks his leg. I think he does break his leg, you know, trying to find some sort of toy for the dog. So a sequence to think about would be when Ann Tyler was writing this book, she might have said to herself, I want to get my lead character at the beginning of this story to be emotionally.

Basically cut off. He's emotionally sterile, and by the end of my story, I want him to be emotionally vulnerable. I want him to be back in the world, not healed from his grief, but prepared to take a chance on love again.

He's basically given up his search for love. So she was probably sitting in a writer's room saying, okay, I know this sort of guy. How am I going to do this?

And it's funny because a couple of weeks ago we talked about narrative device. And what Ann Tyler decided to do, which was a brilliant decision for this narrative device, was to make this lead character a travel writer. And not just any travel writer. He's an American travel writer. And he makes his living by writing travel stories for Americans so that they never have to experience the culture that they have to go to. For example, if he has to go to France, he writes about how to go to France and find the local McDonald's.

How to avoid all of the things that are unique and precious and different about other cultures. That's why the book is called the Accidental Taurus. So the narrative device in the book is.

You get some of these columns within the storytelling that describe the kind of person he is through the way he writes travel stories. So Anne Tyler had to figure out a lot of things. So part of the sequences that she thought were, you know, before this thing starts, before this story starts, I want to bring this man to the point of complete emotional loss.

I'm gonna start this story with the death of his beloved son. And then I'm gonna complicate things even further by having his wife leave him because he's incapable of showing any emotional, you know, reactions.

So the mile markers that she would set out were, how do I do the opening scene? How do I create the tension that will show exactly what kind of man this is? And the way she does it is brilliant. It's a. It's a. I believe the husband and the wife are coming back from some sort of vacation, and they're driving in the car, and there's a rainstorm, and.

And the lead character is driving the car, and the wife wants him to pull over because the rain is getting almost dangerous, but he is refusing to let the rain stop him. So we're in this car with these two characters, and we discover who they are very quickly by their reactions to the danger of the weather conditions.

And at the end of the scene, she. She basically says to him that I can't be married to you anymore. And he stoically moves forward, and the next scene is he's all alone in the house now.

So anyway, the purpose of the reason why I'm telling you this is that when Ann Tyler started to think about this story, she had to think about.

The big moments in the story. Like, she had to say to herself, I've got to get this guy romantically involved with somebody. He's got to meet somebody who will force him to open up his heart again. So she probably wrote down, you know, climax of Act 1, lead character meets woman who will change his life.

So since she knows this is going to be a love story, she knows the genre conventions of Love Story, and she's going to say to herself, well, the end of my middle build, or probably the climax of my middle build will be the two characters fall in love and they express love for each other. And the climax of my middle build will be they break up. Because you. You've got to. You know, you've. In a Love story. The people have to come together. There has to be some sort of tension and conflict that breaks them apart. They break apart, and then the climax of the story is they come back together or they don't. That's basically a love story.

So we have the acts which are the major things. Yes, we have the sequences which are the series of events that get us to the actual. And the scenes are the individual scenes of that sequence.

Exactly, exactly. So the sequence. There could be a sequence that, you know, in the example I was talking about, you know, our lead character meets the woman. And what Ann Tyler did is the dog ends up being a menace. So he is forced. The lead character is forced to get the dog lessons to, you know, get his temperament under control. So he has to take the dog to a dog trainer. And guess what? The dog trainer is this very, you know, charismatic but strange woman who will become the love interest. So Ann Tyler was saying to herself, how do I get a really interesting love interest? I'm going to have to have a sequence of scenes.

A sequence made up of scenes that get my lead character to this dog trainer. So the dog has to bite somebody in the neighborhood. The lead character has to deal with that conflict, and then the lead character has to deal with the fact that he's going to have to get this dog lessons in behavior or they're going to euthanize the dog. So he has to make a choice. I could have my dog killed and this problem will be over for me, or I can go get him some, you know, training. And that's a beautiful moment because what that reveals to the reader and to the viewer, this guy, you know, he has the capacity for love. He didn't just have this dog killed. He went and he got the training lessons, and then he finds this strange woman. I think her name is Muriel Pritchett, which is one of those great names that authors can come up with. It's very Dickensian. And he falls in love with her. And that's like the end of act one. So Ann Tyler, when she was writing the book, she didn't just start the book and say, oh, okay, I'm going to start the book in this rainstorm in the car and see where it goes. I doubt she did that. I doubt she just sat down and had a thought about two people in a car during a rainstorm and just said, oh, what if I make their child die? What if I. I think she had a greater plan.

Than, you know, just winging it from a terrific scene in a car. And that's why you need to know the units of story. That's why you need to know what acts are for, what sequences are for, what subplots are for. Because you want to. You want to lay down these signposts for yourself before you begin your work so that you know, oh, I need to get to the dog trainer. It's like, you know, name that tune. How many scenes is it going to take me to get to that dog trainer that are interesting and will not bore the hell out of my audience? Can I do it in three scenes? Can I do it in two? Maybe I could do it in one. Who knows? And I think she ends up doing it in maybe two or three scenes, which will be a sequence that gets us from the lead character to the dog trainer. And that is a note that she would have on her outline that says to her, get protagonist to dog trainer. She might not solve that problem when she's laying out her outline, but she's going to know the major movements in her story before she constructs it.

So what is the difference between. So you have your beginning hook, middle bill, and ending payoff. What's the difference between. How do acts interact with those three?

See, here's what I do with acts. I don't worry about acts, okay? The reason why I. I talk about acts in the book is because it's nomenclature that we're all familiar with. And a lot of. If you worry about acts all the time, it's just. I think it's a waste of time. I think there's three primary things you have to worry about, and that's the beginning hook, middle build, and ending payoff. And within those three sort of big major movements of your story, you can have as many acts or sequences as you wish. You know, I highly recommend that a quarter of your story be your beginning hook, 50% be your middle build, and a quarter be the ending payoff of your story. That's just based upon analyzing stories and story gurus for 25 years. That seems to be a structure that people enjoy and are used to, and they like the rhythm of it. It's in our DNA. So 25% of your story should be the beginning hook, 50% should be your middle build, and 25% should be your ending payoff within that opening beginning hook. I think we talked about this a few weeks ago. The math, you have to play with somewhere between eight to 13 scenes. Now, within those eight to 13 scenes, you may have two sequences or three sequences. So you would have a bunch of scenes that lead and build to a sequence that goes to a major movement, a very major movement at the end of the climax of your beginning hook. Should be surprising and interesting enough to propel you into the middle build. It's almost like you take a breather at the beginning of the middle build. You know, let's talk about dead calm. You know, when we. When we analyze that movie or even the Martian. You know, when we were talking about the Martian. The end of the beginning hook is.

That transitional moment. There's the climax where Mark Watney almost accidentally blows himself up. While he's trying to make water to grow his potatoes. That climactic moment is the end of the beginning hook of the Martian. And then it transitions right into the beginning of the middle build, which is, hey, we're back on Earth, and we're at NASA. And the NASA scientists are dealing with the fact that they abandoned a guy on Mars. So we get this explosive moment. Literally, in the explosive moment at the end of the beginning hook. Andy Weird did that. And then that transitions into the beginning inciting incident of the middle build, which is what's going on on Earth.

So if I'm trying to turn this into actual, like, useful things.

Which, I mean, they're all useful. But so if I'm planning out my story and I use the full scap. So if I'm looking at the. Let's see. I still have your full scap right here from.

From the Martian.

So we have, like you just said, the end of the beginning hook is the, you know, the explosion. And then the inciting incident of the middle build is the fact that they realize that Mark Watney's still alive on Mars. And then that moves into all of that. And then you have the rich Purcell movement maneuver as the climax. So there's, like, all this space in between those two things. And so is that, like, once you have that down in your full scap of, like. Okay, this is. This is the. The five pieces of the three different parts of the book. Is that when you start saying, okay, what kind of sequences am I going to have to fill in?

Yes, you nailed it. That's exactly right.

So now, because at this point, would you call, like, what's happening on Earth, what's happening with Mark Watney on Mars, and then what's happening with the crew still on the Hermes? Those are three different subplots.

Yeah. Yeah, I would say so.

Okay.

They're all three different settings. They're all three different storylines. There's.

Yeah, those are all three subplots. Now, the Global plot is, of course, the Watney story. Are we gonna get him home?

Okay.

And then the two subplots. So I would say Watney is the global story because he's the protagonist of the story, even though he doesn't change.

Again, I'll say it again. You don't. Your protagonist does not have to change in an action.

But you better. Better have some great action and some great details to propel a story like Andy Weir did.

Or it's going to get boring very quickly. What drives the Martian is really the action sequences and the deep scientific science fiction, hard science fiction elements that he puts in the storytelling.

Okay, so a sequence of the Martian would be like when he did his first test drive out to pick up that satellite.

Exactly.

That would be a sequence. So he's looking at. So we're looking at the fact that we need to get from, you know, Watney survives the explosion to Watney heads out for.

Because the. The ending payoff is when he travels at 3,000km to get to the launch site. So then we basically backfill it with sequences to get us to that point. And then we go into those sequences and say, okay, well, how many scenes am I going to need to tell this story exactly?

The thing about action movies, they're built on sequences. They're very easy to identify in an action scene.

Because.

Sequences, there's something wonderful about them is that they. They. They're like little. Little. Again, they're little units of story that have a beginning, middle and end. And they have a payoff. So the payoffs of those sequences that you were talking about in the Martian. Will Watney figure out how to grow his potatoes?

That has a beginning, middle and end. That sequence itself. Will Watney figure out how to communicate with Earth? That's a sequence. Right.

And then there's a sequence back on Earth.

Will the Jet Propulsion Lab be able to build out a rocket in time to fill it with provisions to get to Mars on point? That's a sequence.

Yeah. You know, this is an interesting way to look at it because a lot of what I've read.

On how to plot out your story is.

I feel like this sequence step is an extra step that's not usually in there. Usually what it is is like figure out the, you know, middle or the beginning, middle, end of your story and then kind of fill it in with all your scenes, which I have gotten snarled in the couple times I've tried to do that. Because it's like all of a sudden I'm going from this general Idea of where the story's going to, trying to map out 60, or in my case, since I write like 100 word scenes, 120 scenes or whatever. But what I'm thinking is this is a nicer kind of slower pace to that planning where like, okay, now I don't have to plan out my scenes yet. I just have to figure out a loose structure of the different things that are going to get me from point A to point B.

Exactly. So again, you know, I'm going to Los Angeles, right? My first stop is going to be Pittsburgh. I'm going to sleep in Pittsburgh. And then the next stop is going to be Lincoln, Nebraska.

So you remembered one.

Yeah, well, because I am originally from Pittsburgh, so that's kind of a cheat, but go ahead.

Well, you know, so if like you were starting in New York and going to, you know, going to la, and we say, okay, you know, we're going to stop in Chicago.

And we know we're going to do that. And then that allows us to back up and say, okay, now we're going to go through Pittsburgh, go through another city and get to Chicago.

What interstates are we going to use?

Yeah, and then we get down to what interstates we're going to use and where are we going to stop?

Where am I going to get gas? So these are all great metaphors to look at your global story. And it's. You remember.

I mentioned a little while ago that old TV show called Name that Tune. And I remember this thing when I was a kid and you're way probably way too young for this show, but, Tim, there was this show on TV and it was called Name that Tune.

Now I'm familiar. I actually grew up watching like the Dick Van Dyke show Taxi. Like, I didn't. All I watched was like, Nick at night all the time. So, yeah, I'm familiar with the, with the shows of your old generation.

Okay, good. In Name that Tune, there are two contestants and there's, there's another contestant that is in sort of a soundproof room. And they play a song for these two contestants. And it's something like, you know, happy birthday to you. And then they start competing. They say, I can name that tune in, you know, five notes. And the other one says four notes. And they go down and then they'll, they'll do the Name that tune and they'll play the. However many notes. It usually is down to like three notes. You need three notes to figure out every song. I don't know why anybody. I would always start with an even number so that you could always go down. But. So this is the way you should think about your scenes. Like how can you name that sequence in the fewest number of scenes? Because you don't want to drag out a sequence where Mark Watney, you know, you know, you don't want a scene where Mark Watney, you know, communicates with Earth to ask them how you make hydrazine or how you burn hydrazine. You want him to know that intuitively so that you don't have to burn that scene in order to make the sequence work. So the reason why sequences and acts and major movements in your story, there are ways to get from A to C and to figure out B. And from A to B, you want to go in the fewest legs as possible. You want to do the fewest scenes as possible to get that to that place.

You know, this reminds me of something else says, I remember. So in the Martian there were these couple moments where he really builds up this mystery, right? So he starts driving, but he doesn't tell you where he's driving yet. And then all the people back at NASA are freaking out, wondering where he's going. And it kind of like builds and builds and builds. And then you realize, oh, he's going to get the, the, the satellite or yeah, that, that crashed. And so. And there's a couple of those moments where some, most of it he's like, okay, I need to make water. Here's how I'm going to make water. And then there's these moments where he builds up the tension. And it reminded me of this author named Joe Conrath, who's written a ton about writing and he's a big self publishing guy and I remember him talking about like doing that kind of stuff on purpose. He's like, so for instance, if you're. You've got a scene where the people are getting in a truck to go somewhere, have them put a, put a box in the back seat, but don't tell anybody what the box is. And then, you know, and then like mention the box a couple more times and all of a sudden the box is like a crux of the story, you know? Yeah. So I mean, how, like, I don't know if I have a specific question other than like, you know, is that.

What you're talking about? What you're talking about is building narrative drive. And you know, I like that you.

Have names for all of these things.

Well, this is the thing, Tim, is I had to create a language and a, and a way of speaking about this stuff so that when I would communicate with writers and I would try to explain to them what was wrong with their manuscripts, I couldn't just say, oh, I just didn't find it very suspenseful.

I don't know. How do you act on a comment like that if you're a writer? So over my career, I learned, and I made up these terms that I would share with the writers that I was working with so that we could have a common language. And so when I said, I think your narrative drive is flagging here, they would understand what I mean. And I did. I wrote a piece for Steven Pressfield's website, stevenpressfield.com called Narrative Drive, which I would recommend everybody read.

I'll put it in the show notes@storygrid.com.

Good, because.

There are three ways about how to build narrative drive. In a way, there's mystery, there's dramatic irony, and there's suspense. And I'm not going to. I won't go into them. But part of it's all about how much the reader knows and how much your characters know and how much you share with the reader. Do you want your reader to have more information than the characters on the page? If you do, that's. That's called dramatic irony. Do you want them to have the same amount of information at the same time that suspense?

Or do you want the characters on the page to know more than your reader? That's mystery. And making these decisions while you're crafting your scenes. These are things to rely on while you're crafting scenes. And when you're thinking about major movements, you could say to yourself, well, how do I make it interesting that.

Let'S see that my lead character's brother.

Is actually.

The murderer?

Part of what you would do is figure out how you could make that revelation in your story. The most effective. Do I let the reader know that information before it's revealed to the people in the story?

And this happens a lot in those great slasher movies. You know, the audience learns before the people on. On stage in the movie.

Yeah, yeah.

That the guy's the psychopath. And then they, you know, the psychopath says, hey, Jim, why don't you come on in for a cup of coffee? I just made a pot of coffee. And then the guy comes in.

No, no, don't go.

Yeah. And Hitchcock was the master of it.

Oh, I loved. I loved. I used to watch Hitchcock Presents all the time.

So these are all wonderful little tricks that aren't that difficult, but you need to know you need to have a plan, right? You need to, as a writer, have the fun to create these little moments in your story through your scenes. And they. These, you know, energize your scenes in ways that are just terrific.

Now, would you say.

Are any of these, like, better or easier? You know, the three you mentioned, you know, is there something that, you know? Because if you say to an author, you know, this is flagging a little bit. You need more narrative drive. Do you have, like, a recommendation usually of like, well, do this.

It. It's story to story. And these, these are the things, narrative drive, choices and all of that stuff. These are sort of, if your story is not working.

Fundamentally meaning, you don't. You haven't done your obligatory scenes. You haven't lived up conventions of the genre that you want to be writing in. If you're.

If you're having. If you're calling scenes that go nowhere scenes, if you're just writing exposition.

If your story doesn't work. No, I'm not going to get into the details of narrative drive with you. You need to learn fundamental storytelling principles before we get into that. But for somebody like, you know, when I worked with Robert Crace years ago.

I could have that conversation with him very early on and say, hey, what about that thing? You know, how about a little dramatic irony, you know, in Act 3? And he would say, oh, my gosh, that's a great idea. Yeah, I didn't think of that. And so you can start to speak in shorthand. Once you become a professional in the story skill set, then you start, you know, tweaking the carbure writer. You know, I'm mixing all of my metaphors, but if a story is an engine and.

You know, it turns over and it works, that's. That's the first thing, right? You want to make sure your. Your engine is going to turn on to drive your car. Now, for all those engine nuts out there, they also know that some engines are, you know, very efficient and some are terrible. And you can tweak them, and you tweak them with the carburetor and the fuel injection and the. All that stuff. I'm not a car guy, but there's a million different little tricks that you can use to make that engine hum and to convert more power to the drivetrain, but you need to have the engine start first. So when we're talking about the units of story, and when we're talking about the five commandments of storytelling, and we're talking about beginning, hook, middle, build, ending, payoff, we're talking about the engine block, you know.

The starter key, the fuel injection system. We're talking about the major building blocks of your story's engine. And we need to get you to learn how to make an engine that will turn over and run before we can tweak it out so that, you know, you're winning the Indy 500. Right. Okay.

So it's. It's something that you kind of pause on. Again, this is something because one of the things that's, you know, with your book, there's both sides. There's before you write and then after you write. And so this would be more of a decision, once you're going back through and tweaking everything, to make it perfect is where you would have discussions about narrative drive.

Yes. Okay. Yes, absolutely. You know, suggestions that I've made in the past to people would be, hey, why don't you tweak that scene? And instead. And we did this at the very beginning of your story with the guys on the book, instead of it being this, let's let the reader know that, you know, there's. There's a pirate ship on the way before, and these characters don't know. And that's a way of doing dramatic irony where the reader knows more than the crew or the crew knows that, you know, one of the guys is deathly ill. But they don't want to tell the captain because if the captain finds out, then they'll have to turn around and go back. That's the guy with the. With the bends. So all these little things you can tweak and trick out after you have your. Your scene where protagonist takes dog to dog trainer, you need to have that short sort of those mile markers in place before you can trick out your scene. And I always say, you know, write a bad scene just to get your sequences down. And then you can tweak your scenes. You can rip some out that you don't need. You can steal some bits from one that aren't working and put them in another and do a mystery scene as opposed to a suspense scene as opposed to a dramatically ironic scene just to mix up your narrative drive. You can end with cliffhangers. There's a million different combinations. It's like, how many notes are there in a scale to create music? There aren't that many. 12 notes. I don't know. And it's the same thing with storytelling.

But the units of story, since we're really focusing on the units of story now, the units of story are really important. Again, I'm going to say it again. The scene is the. Really. You got to nail your scenes, but you need to know your big, big moments in your story.

And.

And then you need to know your little medium moments that will get you to your big moments. And those little medium moments are usually the climaxes of sequences, okay?

And so I want to go back and talk about the beat. So does every scene need to have a beat in it? And how do I even know a beat has happened?

You know, Tim, I think it's best to. Especially for writers just starting out. Don't worry about beats, okay? Because you are going to write beats intuitively. Just knowing. If you just follow the rules of the five commandments of storytelling and know that you need an inciting incident, progressive complications, climax.

I'm sorry, crisis, climax, and resolution. All of the beats are going to take care of themselves if you have those things in your scene. If you have those five things in your scene, those beats are going to be in there and you won't even know it. But I would be able to walk you through your beats after the fact. And I could say to you, a beat usually happens in dialogue. Somebody says.

My brother owns a Pontiac Firebird. And somebody else might say, that's not true. It's a Camaro. Those two things are a beat. Somebody has contradicted somebody else, introducing conflict, which is an inciting incident. And all in a. In a very precise moment in the actual scene. So beats are again, because I was an actor, I know what a beat is. Because if you don't know what a beat is when you're an actor, you're a terrible actor.

Because beats are those things that we watch when we watch a movie and we see a great actor perform. And it's like he turns a certain way or he shrugs, or she stifles a laugh. And we know exactly what she's communicating as an actress when she stifles a laugh, when somebody is trying to tell her that he loves her. If you see on camera somebody, you know, saying to somebody, I love you. Will you marry me? And you see out of the corner of your eye that the actress is stifling a laugh. That's a B, right? You know, something has dramatically changed. The character sees that the person is stifling a laugh when he's proposed to her, it changes the. His. Not. That's a. That's a beat that could also be the climax of an entire global story, but it's also a beat, okay? Do you know what I'm saying?

I think so. Yeah. And, I mean, it makes me feel better. I. Whenever you tell me to do something intuitively or that I will do something intuitively, I start to get stressed out because, you know, I feel like when we say we do something intuitively, all that means is we know it so well, we don't think about it, you know? And I guess you're saying to trust the fact that I've been so indoctrinated in stories more than the fact that I haven't written much.

That's correct. And here's an analogy. When I say to you.

You intuitively know how to walk across the room.

You say, yeah, sure. Because if you have the intention in your brain, I'm going to go to the kitchen and get a cup of coffee. Before you know it, you're in the kitchen and you're pouring a cup of coffee. You're not thinking about how you picked up. You adjusted the mass of your body such that you. You pushed it from your bottom to the top of your legs and then propelled yourself through, pushing against the inanimate floor to get to. You know what I'm saying? And so that's what storytelling. This is why everybody thinks. Everybody thinks, oh, man, you know, if I just had a weekend, I could bang out a great script. Because we all know intuitively what storytelling is.

So the difference is, an amateur knows how to walk. Perhaps. Maybe they know how to tell a good little anecdote in a bar or to their friend over coffee, but they can't run like Usain Bolt right now, a great writer can run like Usain Bolt with a pen, but you can't become Usain Bolt if you're an amateur. But you do know how to walk. You do know how to run. But will you be Usain Bolt? Probably not. So this is why, when I say something, you do something intuitively. You need to trust that you know how to walk, you know how to talk, and those are intuitive things in your life. And you also know how to tell a story intuitively. You've been learning stories since you were a baby. This is how we communicate. This is how we make friends. This is how we make enemies. So beats you every day. There are millions of beats that occur in your everyday life. Your son, you know, will say.

Dad, will you take me to McDonald's? And you'd be like, no, I'm not taking to McDonald's. And there's conflict there. And then he gets upset, and then you don't want to make him upset, so you do something else. And so you're constantly changing your actions based upon Beats that happen in your own life. And when you're writing and you're writing a scene, you intuitively put Beats within that scene. Whether or not they're the best choices is another question. And you can always tweak them. But what I'm saying is, don't worry about the beats. The Beats.

The beats are like draft nine, you know, they're like the final run that you go through your manuscript and say, ah, that's a little flat. Let me change that little thing so that it's not so flat.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast, as always. If you would like more Story Grid stuff, you can find that@storygrid.com make sure you sign up for Sean's email newsletter. You can see all the past episodes of this podcast. And of course, Sean has lots and lots of amazing content there to help you become a better writer. Also, if you'd like to continue to support the show, go into itunes, leave a rating, leave a review. This helps spread the word about the show. As of this recording, we are at 79 reviews, which is just absolutely amazing. We're so close to three figures that I'm just gonna have to bug you.

Until you get on there and add.

Your own rating and review and get us above that hundred mark.

That would mean a lot to us.

Along with that, you can find us on Twitter under the handle storygrid. If you have questions for future episodes, drop them in there and we will do our best to answer as many of them as possible. The best way that you can support this show is just to tell a friend about the show. We do this for free. No advertising. We don't plan to take any advertising. We do it because we love to talk about story. And selfishly, for me, I want to become a better writer. So if you know a struggling writer that's trying to write a better story, pass this podcast along. I know they'll love it. Okay, that's it for us here at the StoryGrid podcast and we will see you next week.