What do your characters want? (plus, Tim gets frustrated)

Hello and welcome to the StoryGrid 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 soon is Sean Coyne. He's the expert. He's an editor with 25 plus years experience. He created the Story Grid, he wrote the book Story Grid, and in this show he is helping me to stumble through and figure out how to how I can tell a story that works. In this episode, we really start looking at the psychology of the characters in our books. What each one of them wants, the power interaction between each of them, and diving into making sure the motivations for my characters are exactly what they should be. Now, most of the time, these intros are only about a minute long, but I want to stop here and, and talk a little bit about something that's been on my mind since we recorded this episode. So this is the first episode that I got noticeably frustrated with the process. I was getting frustrated with Sean, I was getting frustrated with myself. This entire process is driving me a little crazy. But in the middle of this as well, I've been learning a lot about the idea of deliberate practice. Now, I can't dive into that very much. The original idea was made famous by Malcolm Gladwell's book outliers, about the 10,000 hour rule, how you have to practice something for 10,000 hours to become world class at it. But I've also been looking a lot into the research behind that idea. And one of the biggest things that pops up is this idea of deliberate practice. Now, I really encourage you to go out and look at what deliberate practice really is, how it is defined, and how it can really make you better so much quicker at any skill. But when it comes to what Sean and I are doing, one of the biggest things that I've learned about deliberate practice is the idea of a fast feedback loop. And what that means is as soon as I do something right or wrong, I immediately get feedback on it. Now, you see this showing up in sports and learning music or learning an instrument or any other kind of skills that the best way to get feedback is as soon as you do something wrong, somebody points it out to you and you can correct it. Now, with writing, a lot of times it's different. We will write an entire manuscript before we get any kind of feedback on it. And when we do, the feedback is often vague. So that's the opposite of deliberate practice in two ways. One is you don't get immediate feedback. And the second is that the feedback is vague. You know, something like Sean and I have talked about, like, oh, this story doesn't work, or I didn't really like.

The middle part of that story.

And.

And so what I'm doing with Sean is a much tighter loop where I immediately get feedback on my ideas, I immediately get feedback on scenes. And it's really helpful in that I feel like I'm progressing. But it's also extremely frustrating. There's nothing quite as frustrating as constantly being told you're doing something wrong, but it's also the way that you learn the quickest. And so I just wanted to preface.

This episode with that and really encourage.

You on your own with your writing to learn about what deliberate practice is and how you could apply it to becoming a better writer on your own. You don't want to write for months and months or years and years without getting feedback from an expert and finding out what you're doing wrong. You want to find out what you're doing wrong as quickly as possible so that you can immediately change it. But as you're going to see in this episode, you have to be ready for some frustration when you're living constantly at the edge of what you know, and what you don't know is constantly being exposed to light. It can be frustrating, it can be intimidating, it can be embarrassing. Especially in my case when thousands of people are listening to me struggle through this as well. So as you hear my frustration in this episode and you hear Sean give me such direct and quick feedback, keep that in mind that that's what both Sean and I are shooting for, is this idea of deliberate practice helping me become a better writer much faster than most people can become better writers. So keep that in mind as we dive into this week's episode.

Let's get started. So, Sean, I've been thinking through my homework. I've been thinking through setting. You told me to think about power and especially in this kind of lit RPG world. I've got my copy. I got a paper copy of Ready Player One. I've started working on the story grid for that and thinking hard about what this would look like. I've also been thinking about where I would work best in this, because when I start thinking through, like an RPG world, I much more.

Understand the programming hacker kind of nature of the world more than the gaming side. But I think we could do something similar that feels very much the same without the kind of gaming aspects of it. Anyway, I don't know, should we jump into What I've landed on, or have you been thinking more about the action genre and stuff you want to have me thinking about?

Well, one of the things that I think is very important to just crystallize in your mind before you go step by step solving a lot of problems is what I. You know, it's almost psychological research in a way. And, you know, we've talked about the action genre and that there's, you know, there's four sub genres and then there's four even sub. Sub genres of action. And that's in my book and stuff, and people have talked about it a lot. But what do you kind of come down to when you're looking at action is power. It's a struggle for power. So what I think would be an interesting thing to do now is to just think about how societies and how institutions and how small groups, how that power dynamic kind of works. So when you're trying to build a villain in an action story, I highly recommend that you think about power, because the villain in an action story is usually trying to control the environment. It's trying to control a particular part of society. Like in Hunger Games, you have this tyranny that is using. It's using television and entertainment as a means to quell and keep the population placid and doing what they're supposed to be doing. Right?

Yeah. And like in that movie that came out last year, Mad Max Fury Road, it was all about controlling the water.

Mm. Mm. So it's all about control. So when you're thinking about action stories and you need to create a villain and you need to create, say you're. You have a dream of eventually creating a trilogy of novels or whatever, One of the things to think about is the hierarchy of power, meaning the first thing you have to establish is that the villain has to be far, far more powerful than the hero. The villain has to be almost indestructible because you want to create a real chasm between, you know, because we all root for the underdog, right? Whenever they have the basketball, the March Madness, everybody's so excited when the 16 seed knocks off the number one seed. I don't even know if that's ever happened. But when the 12 knocks off the 5 or the 14, because we're always rooting for that hero against a very large, powerful organization. And that's exactly what drives so much of the narrative in Hunger Games, is that you have this young girl who's 16 years old against this totalitarian regime that keeps everybody very, very under control. So when you're talking about an action story. You think about power structures and how the villain wants to control the world, the society, the group, the whatever it is that the setting is that you're exploring.

So back to the nature of power. What do some tyrannies use to keep people under control is, you know, classically like in the Hunger Games, they use entertainment, right? They use our need and our desire for a dopamine fix.

And, you know, if we look at our world today, what do you see? You see dopamine fix after dopamine fix, right? You've got your phone in your pocket and they've done the neurological studies. And every time you click and you get an email, a small little dopamine rush hits your brain, which distracts you from whatever it is that you were supposed to be doing in the first place. We have online streaming of video libraries of movies and television shows and on and on and on and on. You have YouTube. You have any moment that you want to distract yourself today, it's easy to immediately jump into that distraction pool and keep yourself from having to deal with, oh my gosh, I don't know if I'm going to be able to make my rent this month. Oh, well, why don't I stream a movie and I'll deal with it after that.

So one of the things that I think is appealing about this lit RPG up and coming genre, it's the literary role playing game genre. And it hasn't even really surfaced as a genre, although there have been some very, very big books like Neuromancer by William Gibson, like Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson, like Ready Player One that you're, you're reading and thinking about. Now, those are all books that fall within this realm and they're all about the distractions of technology on the population.

So, you know, when I read your novel, I was thinking, oh, well, he set up a situation where there's a very powerful force that our hero is confronting. Now she's a little bit distracted because you didn't set up a victim at the beginning of your story. But I think if you do progress and you think about a victim and we use a classic way of funneling people into a story and setting up her brother as the victim and she sort of has to go out and save him, that you can build into the reality of the setting whereby, and I understand what you're talking about in terms of the gaming world, I think it's kind of interesting that you're kind of, you're on the hacking side of software More than the generation of the online gaming world. That's interesting to me because when you're trying to enter a new genre or an established genre, in fact, what you want to do is bring something fresh to it and doing another. Creating another online world where your protagonist is called to go into and sort of jack into. Akin to the Matrix or Ready Player One or Snow Crash or any of those other novels that's familiar, but it might be a little bit too familiar. So, anyway, I know I'm talking in generalities right now, but the prime things that we have to think about in the action story is, number one, the villain. The villain and the hierarchy of power in that villainous world is really what's going to drive the narrative for your reader. And I think you've already set up a pretty solid protagonist where she is absolutely vulnerable. She's very intelligent, but she's really, really naive. And she doesn't seem all that powerful at the beginning because you've decided, and I've been thinking more and more of it, that the big reveal of her specialness, her gift, you decided to not reveal that until midpoint of your novel. And I think we can work with that, to make that work in a way that could be really extraordinary. Anyway, I'm rambling on, and I think I'm getting off track. So do you have any questions that you want to focus me on? Yeah.

So one is I'm to the point where I almost feel like I want to take the first draft that I wrote and put it on the shelf somewhere and say, you know what? One day I may come back to that. Because I don't. I feel like every time I try to take, like, the special power of coming back from the dead and, like, put it into something else, I feel like I'm just, like, forcing it. And so let me tell you kind of what I've come up with and where I'm at, and maybe you can help me poke holes in it. So I started thinking hard about. When I think about, like, Ready Player One or Hunger Games or these types of things, it's always this kind of dystopian. Everything fell apart, and now people are just trying to survive. So what I was thinking was the power struggle will be over electricity because all of the fossil fuels have disappeared. All the ways that things are transported, all the ways that we stay connected to the world through travel have become hyper, hyper expensive because the only way to do it is with electricity. And the government now controls the electricity. And so I was trying to think of A way to make everything become hyper local, where the only way to break outside of the little town that you live in because you can't travel, you can't go anywhere, is through this online world that's created and everybody's hooked into it, and the government controls it by, like, letting little sips of electricity out and letting people access it. And if at any time something goes wrong, they pull it all back and everybody's completely cut off from the world because you can't get anywhere. Let me stop there.

I like it. I think establishing something that is parallel to contemporary life in a slightly dystopian way, but using the same social and cultural world that we live in now is exactly the way to go. I like, just as an example, when you said that people are becoming more and more localized, I think that's absolutely true. So if you look at the newspaper of late, you'll have read a lot of stories about the tsa. And the TSA is the organization that controls people going through airports. And the big crisis over the past couple of weeks in the front page of the New York Times is, oh, my gosh, we can't handle the number of passengers anymore. People are waiting, having to wait three or four hours. Right, Right. So there's something interesting that you, I think, have identified. I think what you're trying to do is a good idea is to think of the global universe in which this world is you're going to set. And I like the fact that it's going to become a place where people don't really travel anymore. Yeah.

My thought was it does two things for me. One is it makes it easier to control the people because they can't go anywhere from where they're currently at. It also collapses any kind of, like, I can't order paper online anymore. You know, I can't get manufactured goods as easily. And so everybody's just kind of using this stuff that's been laying around for 20 years, but they can't get anything new, which, again, forces everybody to use this new online world that's gotten even bigger as the only way to create anything, as the only way to communicate with people. Like, if they have family on the other side of the world, they never, ever get to see them, except through this online world. And so whoever controls that online world, and there's all this stuff in the media for years now about who controls the Internet and what kind of are we going to let big companies get faster service, all those kind of things. Like, whoever controls it, if the only access people have to. The outside world is through this. Whoever controls that has all the power.

Yes. And then.

I also like it for another reason is that again, another newspaper article recently in the New York Times was about the gated community phenomenon, where the people who have the wealth in this country have decided that they want to live in gated communities. So it keeps people out, it keeps the riffraff out. So you could build a society that has sort of to. It's like a plutocracy where the very wealthy are the ones who get the special Willy Wonka gold ticket and they pretty much get to move at a much higher, with much more freedom than those who can't, who aren't a part of that world. So if you can create two classes of people in a way where you have the underclass, those who are, who kind of, you know, they're the ones who take care of this fantastical world and occasionally they're allowed to go in.

Yeah, yeah, I've thought some about that because. And to me, what I'm going to do is basically fast forward the widening gap between like the disappearing middle class.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Basically get us to a point where the. And again, the only people that can travel, the only people that can take advantage of this are the super rich. And they are all about keeping their power as well. And there's only, you know, that's the 1% or less than 1%, and everybody else is basically just scraping by. So there's just this huge gap. And so that's kind of the power part of it is like, who owns the power? And it sets up my villain as the government that runs this and keeps everybody controlled by. They're the only ones that run electricity. They're the only ones that run the Internet. And so they'll like punish places by cutting off electricity, cutting off access. That's how they keep everybody quelled down. And people freak out if they don't have access because 20 years ago or whatever, everybody could go anywhere they wanted. And if all of a sudden you're stuck, the only kind of joy you find is in escaping through this Internet world. So again, it fast forwards. To me, it fast forwards the whole Netflix, Facebook kind of phenomenon to like an nth degree because it's truly the only place anybody can find any kind of happiness. So it's the only addiction that matters.

It's the only place that they can find real community. Yeah, so real slash unreal community. So your hero of the story. I still think that you can use a lot of the conceptual ideas that you already did in the first draft here, and here's why. Now if you, if you. Well, go ahead.

Let me tell you where I've landed on that. Because what I'm hoping is I want to tell you where I've landed and let you kind of poke holes in it if I miss some stuff. So what I'm thinking of is basically I'm sticking with the brother disappeared thing, but so the brother disappeared. I'm still a little fuzzy on how, but it has something to do with like the government plucked him because he was this phenomenon and was an amazingly intelligent guy. And so they, they pulled him out and they heard from him, heard from him, heard from him, disappeared. And so, and I'm kind of thinking in terms of serenity. Did you ever watch Firefly Serenity?

No.

Okay, so anyway, the brother disappears. This is where you've said to kind of keep with the family dynamics. And so I'm keeping with the family dynamics of like the mom completely lost her shit. The dad just does everything he can to like keep the mom from like killing herself or whatever, but the mom now constantly tells puts on Jesse that she wishes Jesse had disappeared and not the brother. And so there's all this pressure in that way. And so Jesse is younger now. I'm putting her more in like tween territory. And so she feels like if she can just find her brother and bring him home, everybody will be okay again. And so she has become this world. Well, nobody knows it in the real world, but in the online space she's become a well known hacker and she's basically trying to track down her brother. And so when the book starts, she's trying to narrow it down to a few different organizations that took him where he may be. And that's when the mentor shows up to say, I know where he is and you're going to have to break him out. And the only way she can do that is through this Internet world. But what she's been doing up until the beginning of the book is basically saving up and learning how to do all of these things so she'll eventually have the freedom to actually track down and find her brother and bring him home. And I backed her age up to the tween world because I have a 10 year old and there's such, it's this interesting space where he is learning real things, but there's such naivety to it. And so to me, somewhere between like 10 and 12 years old, she could be an amazing hacker. Like again, a phenomenon, but the naivety of if I just find my brother, my life will go back to normal. And so it creates this really strong desire because then she'll be able to save her mom, she'll be able to save her dad, she'll be able to save her brother, and she'll have a family again if she can just bring him home. And so that's, like, driving it. And she keeps finding, like, traces of him online, and that's the path she's trying to follow to find where he really is. That's where I'm at.

Okay. I think I like it. There's a very nice mystery detective element in there as well, with the clues. It's sort of like, you know, little Easter eggs within the online world. Okay. So I think the beginning setup, the inciting incident, would definitely work. The thing that we've been talking about would work.

Well, I have the first three kind of things lined up, because, again, like, what we talked about last week in the episode and especially in the epilogue, I kind of was like, okay, you know, I have to start trying to solve these problems on my own first. And then you tell me where I go wrong.

So.

So here's where I'm at. These are kind of the first three scenes.

So the first one is I drop you into the Internet world, but you don't know that's where you're at. And so you're following her character, who is completely different from her. She uses a man, so he'll be more respected, like an adult man, to do all of her work inside of this. And so you see her breaking in, which is basically hacking into these different places. I'm kind of thinking of Inception here, where, like, all these secrets, because there's no paper, and there's no, like, paper money anymore. Everything is on the Internet. And so she is a hacker that breaks into places to steal secrets and to steal money. And so that's the first scene, and we see a flicker of her mentor show up that shows up in real life. So the idea there is to drop you into that world.

And then immediately until you get a sense of where she's at. Now that I see it, that's kind of shit. But I'm going to keep going. Then the next scene is where basically we introduce the fact that her mom's crazy, her brother disappeared, and she loses it. And you see this when she loses it on Jesse and knocks her around and basically says, I wish it had been you and not your brother. And then the third part is where I thought the mentor that's Been flickering in and out through the last several months in her online space actually shows up in real life. Or is that too long of a lead in?

I think it's too long of a lead in. I think you need to grab the throne of the reader immediately. And your instinct to do a switcheroo where the reader believes that it's this fantastical online world to begin with, and then pulling back to the reality, that's a good instinct. But the key thing for action is to hook and then watch and race to the end so that you can constantly be setting up things that the reader is going to say, oh, I know what's going to happen next, and then you do the opposite. So I think the surprise element of, oh, no, this isn't the real world, and no, this isn't a man. This is a little girl that you want to set up in chapter two.

I think the reader will be way ahead of you and they'll figure that out before they get to chapter two. And so what I think is there's a very primal. And the other thing that I would suggest is that you never, ever, ever have the mother say, I wish it was you who were gone and not your brother.

Yeah, I've been thinking a ton about. I went back and read the first chapter of the Girl with All the Gifts. And then, you know, I've been working through the first few chapters of Ready Player One and just trying to get cram into my head how to string this stuff along and show. Yeah, it's just gonna. It's gonna take learning it basically, how to do that.

Exactly. And the other thing you have to think about is I think this is a good start. But I think what will really help you is to know who the villain is. What do they want? How is this story going to end? Remember, the ending has to be inevitable so that the reader says, oh, my gosh, I can't believe that I should have figured that out at the beginning. And surprising where they go. Holy moly. So if we had a setup that says, go find your brother. Bring him home, Everything will be safe, then let's think about a way that could help us pull the rug out from the reader. That makes sense. At the end of the beginning, hook.

And then transition into the middle build, which is the meaty part of the story where she learns the new skill set. She has to be indoctrinated into a sort of secret society before they jack her back in and she has her mission. And then how do we make that transition into an all Is lost moment that will leave her feeling, I can't believe I ever did this. Everything is far worse than it could ever be. Life for me will never be the same. Everything I believed before is a lie. And I quit. I have no choice. If I don't do this, then everybody that I care for will be destroyed, and I will never be able to live with myself. So that will transition and propel us into the ending payoff, where she confronts the villain, who is at such a higher level of power than she is, that we set up this incredible, you know, here at the mercy of the villain scene where she is able to outsmart or outpower this powerful villain. That seems insurmountable. And it has to harken back to the beginning hook, meaning what's set up at the very beginning will pay off at the very end. So if you look at all of that stuff and you say to yourself, how do I set that up? Okay, so it's a dystopian world that is parallel to our own world today, and people can't leave their communities, and it's this online, you know, economic system. I don't have the answers to these right off the top of my head, but I do think one of the ways to approach it is to think, what does the villain want? Now, what the villain wants is what is going to start this whole thing. The villain always starts an action story because the villain wants something from the hero, and he lures the hero into action so that he can take it from the hero.

So if we're thinking about, you know, psychologically, I'm sorry to go on a tiny little bit of a tangent here, but I think it'll be helpful. In psychology, there's sort of two ways of thinking about spirituality, in a sense. There's the Freudian way, which believes that every single one of us has deep, dark desires that will destroy us inside of us. And it is our job as human beings to understand this darkness and to learn how to control those impulses in a way that will not express themselves. So it's sort of like trying to keep the dark genie in the bottle. That's the kind of Freudian philosophy. It's a bit out of favor right now, but there's still plenty of Freudians in the world. The other alternative, and this was a theory that was expressed by one of Freud's students, and they had sort of this falling out because Carl Jung, the Jungian, he believes and he believed and they expressed that each one of us was not born with these bad things. Inside of us. We have all kinds of things inside of us. But the most important thing is that we all have a special gift. We were all put on the earth to do something, and we all have something inside of our souls that must be expressed. And it is our job as human beings to find that center of gift, that goodness, and express that and give that gift to the rest of humanity. So you have the Jungian versus the Freudian point of view. And obviously, if we're talking about a villain who does not believe that anybody has any gifts inside of them, but that they're all really dark people deep down and that they must be controlled, that would set up a really strong tyranny of sorts. And it kind of makes sense because we all have dark impulses. So the Freudian point of view is not outrageously inconceivable to us. And we probably all have moments in our lives where we would say, you know what? Everybody sucks. Life is terrible. I've never met anybody who's not out for themselves, who doesn't want what's good for them, and will do anything in their power to get what they want at the expense of other people. And that's kind of, you know, that's my Freudian dark negation of the negation. So if you have that attitude and say you're a villain, then you would say to yourself, ooh, let me twist my mustache and keep all these stupid people under control. No, you would say, these people need control. They require control. They want to be controlled. And I, me, the villainous power, have figured out a way to do that in a way that keeps them docile and happy. I give them community and love in a virtual world. The real world must be under tight controls and restraints so that this society can work.

So those people who are more enlightened and more powerful will arise from this soup of humanity, those who are intelligent enough to help me keep the rest of these idiots under control. I need to find those people because I may not live forever. So I need to find those people with the gifts who can help me create this virtual world in a way that will be so convincing to all the idiots that they'll keep staying in their little hamlets. They won't leave the hamlet zone, and they'll go and they'll jack into this universe when I allow them to. And they'll feel bliss and happiness. And that's how I can keep them under control. If I can control the switch that will allow them to enter this beautiful world, then I can control them. But you Also have to remember, you have to keep the beautiful world going. And if this is one person or two persons or a committee or a star chamber or whatever you eventually decide it to be, that villainous force has to have a really, really good point. Because in every action story and in every thriller, you want to have a moment where the villain gets to state their piece. They get to say to the reader, hey, let's face it, people suck. People need to be controlled. And you want. This is a convention. I'm not just making this up.

Yeah, no, we've talked about that before. Yeah.

So you've got to make that really believable. And you actually so believable that the reader goes, yeah, they have a point.

You know, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have to live in this virtual world. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad. You know, I don't like traveling anyway. I don't like going through the lines and being frisked and there's terrorists all over the place. It sucks. So if you can set up a villain that doesn't think it's a villain, but it is a villain, because if you have a Jungian kind of point of view, and I think to walk around with any kind of humanity today, you do have to have a Jungian point of view. You know, whether or not you believe in a specific religious spiritualism, the Jungian point of view is all inclusive in a way. You know, it's sort of like religion does state that there is a real purity to the soul. There is a soul. It's a belief that there's something deeper and more important than one individual person. There's a soul in each of us that contributes to a collective unconscious. That's Jungian's thing.

Okay, so, I mean, do you want to, like.

So before you solve the problems of scene one, scene two, scene three, I think it's a good idea to think about how is this thing going to end. It doesn't mean you have to solve the scene, but you need to know that Your heroine, who's 10 years old, is going to. Something like Ender in Ender's Game, is going to somehow save her family, her Hamlet, her something. We don't need to specifically know it now, but she's going to save. She's going to. And the way she will do it, she will sacrifice herself, everything that is about her for the good of a collective. So when heroes sacrifice themselves for the greater good, that is the control things. You know, life goes on with goodness, and that is the story that's an action story. The hero sacrifices him or herself for the greater good. And that's why it's such an important genre, because it tells each and every one of us we have to offer something for the rest of the world. We're just not here for ourselves. And this is a timeless myth that has to be retold over and over and over and over again in different ways that rip the heart out of us. Anyway, that's why this is an important story for you to work on. This isn't just Tim goofing around. You know, this is stuff that's important, and you're inside of you. Something inside of you created that character and wrote that first draft. And you know, what I'm doing here, as your editor is telling you, this is the arena of the world that is really, really important to you. And so we're building, piece by piece by piece, a universe that is yours and yours alone, in which you can tell that story your own way.

Okay, so as you've been talking, I've been trying to form some of this in my head. I think it should end with what I think is her brother ended up getting pulled into this higher society where he has access to everything. And it's because he's such a genius and they needed him. But he's also underneath leading the charge to bring the government down. The thing that kicks it off is the fact that Jessie, because she's so young, was sloppy and they found her. And so her brother sends someone to rescue her. And the end of the beginning hook is the fact that her brother isn't lost. Her brother isn't the victim at all. He's the one that's been driving the upheaval against the government in the first place.

That let me think.

So you said the villain's got to kick it off. So the villain kicks it off because Jesse gets sloppy and they figure out who she is and they send people to.

Well, why would they want her?

Because she's been breaking the law. They've been after this hacker for a long time and finally figured out it was her.

Remember, the villain wants something very specific from the hero. The villain is the one that gets the thing moving. The villain just wanting to incarcerate somebody for hacking into the mainframe doesn't make sense, and I'll tell you why. How would this villainous force find the gifted? Do you think they would find the gifted through IQ tests or DNA testing or whatever? Probably not the way they would. They would monitor the universe and see.

And they would set up traps to find them.

Yeah, they would set up these very, very complicated game like not game like they would want to find the great hackers. And so this young girl is just a kick ass hacker, right? So you could do one of two things. You could, you could have them come and arrest her, right? And say, you're under arrest for, you know, breaking Z stroke 13 of the, you know, Hamlet esque, you know, rule book. You have to come with us. And so she's arrested. That's kind of an interesting idea. But what.

And then could they give her a choice? You know, you could come work for us or you could go to this really horrible place that we send people like you and she tells them to go screw themselves, basically. And that's when the rescue steps in to get her.

Yeah, I mean, I think you also need to rethink the brother. And I'll tell you why I think thematically in terms of families, because this is the great thing about storytelling, is that it's a Russian doll within a Russian doll within a Russian doll. And thematically, a family faces a couple of crises in its life. And one of the crises is when the child wants to get the hell out of that family. And they want to do better than the old man did. And they don't want to live in a suburb of Punxsutawney, PA and own a hardware store. They want to go to New York and they want to be the biggest kick ass advertising you can see executive in the United States. So what happens? They do, and guess what? They completely disconnect themselves from their roots. So there is a literal. They don't call anymore, they don't come home. So this is what New York attracts, right? This is what major metropolitan areas attract. People who are so ambitious that they want to break away from their class.

And I grew up in an era where there were very distinct classes in the middle class and the lower middle class and the upper class and the intelligentsia. These were all very specific places for a person to aspire to. Today it's more and more difficult to know who's who and what's what and what's important anymore. But I think your story provides an opportunity to set something up that could be pretty interesting, where the brother is not the golden child. The brother wants nothing to do with that family. He hasn't really disappeared. He just. He made it. He got the hell out of there. And the mother is concocting this fantasy in her mind that he didn't leave of his own Volition he left because he was kidnapped, and he was kidnapped because he's such this good person and this great thing. And, you know, this other kid of hers is just a loser. She does terrible in school. She's never going anywhere. If only my real son would come back. It's the longing for the prodigal son to return and return to the family.

So him being the leader of the resistance doesn't make sense to me because he likes the fact that he made it. He likes being part of that 1%. The last thing he wants to do is lead a resistance against the thing that he aspired to. He busted his ass to get there. So if you think of that psychologically, then you can say to yourself, well, maybe it doesn't make sense that he's this heroic figure.

Maybe the villainous force recognizes an opportunity. Hey, dude, you know, we'd really like your sister to come aboard here. Do you think you can get her to come? Oh, I don't know. I'm good. I'm good, thanks. Well, tell you what. If you don't get your sister to join and become a really great villainous hacker for us, we can see you later, buddy. You know, you're out. So that sets up a crisis in that guy. And I'm talking all about backstory here. So in that brother, he's going to say to himself, oh, what do I do? Do I do what's good for me and co op my sister to join them. You know, it'd be good for her to get away from those stupid parents of ours and that shitty community. That could be good for her, right? Or do I tell them to go fuck off and go home to Schittsville and work at the Schittsville plant? What do you think he's gonna do? He'll concoct some kind of story in his head that will allow him to stay where he is, and then he will somehow figure out a way to get his sister to come in. So sending somebody to. To the house and saying, your brother's in trouble. He needs your help to that little girl will be like candy, right? As you discussed at the very beginning, her desire is to get everybody back together again as a family so that mom doesn't think she's an asshole? And can't we all just go back to the way it was when brother was here and mom was happy and dad, you know, wasn't trying to manage mom, and somebody actually paid attention to me every now and then instead of the way it is now, which we have this ghost in the family, and all my mother does is clean the house and act like a zombie, and my dad is Mr. Chipper and Wise. So what you have is you're setting up something that has an inciting incident that's very interesting because it's saying, there's a victim. You are the only one who can help him, and you need to leave Schitt to come into this world that you're scared of. So, you know. And then, you know, you don't reveal the brother's true nature until the end of your beginning hook.

Okay, so here's my question, as specifically as you can, why does that work and my version doesn't? And I'm really not being like, I don't know. I don't want to be, like, combative about this, but I'm kind of getting. I don't really. I'm not.

No, I get it. I get it.

You know, I'm not trying to hold on to my own ideals, but I'm like, oh, that sounds great. It sounds just as good as what I came up with to me. Like, I don't understand the difference. What levers are you pulling? What knobs are you twisting in your version that I wasn't in mine?

Okay, Number one, I'm subverting conventions and innovating conventions in a way that haven't been done before. Of course they've been done my way. I'm not saying that they aren't. But the reason why I think it's important to load all this psychological subtext underneath is because to have another book about the resistance to a bad, villainous organization, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be looking for, oh, okay, the brother's good, and he's going to be the hero. Oh, the brother's the victim. So, you know, if the victim can become a hero, that the victim can't become a villain. All right? So the reason why I'm doing it and the way I'm picking at it is to come to that universal, revelatory truth that is the climax of sort of the hero's journey, which is the revelationary moment. You know, like that thing we were talking about, the Kubler Ross curve and story. Right, the Kubler Ross curve. At the end, there comes that moment where all is lost, meaning everything that one thought was the truth before has now been changed irrevocably. And the truth, what this young girl believes at the beginning of the story has to change by the end of this story, because what you're setting up is a hero's journey action story where the hero must sacrifice herself for the benefit of the larger community. So you just don't do that unless you have a change of point of view of the world. So whether you know it or not, you have embedded your story with an internal plot, an internal genre, and you have to make sure that the internal genre and your external genre are not clashing. Okay, so if you set up this young girl as the hero at the beginning, right? So she heroically goes into this world to help her brother, and then we discover that the brother's a hero and that, oh, she's gonna subvert herself to another heroic force. She's the hero. The brother's not the hero.

I see.

Don't ever forget who your freaking hero is, all right? You're adding a hero. We already have a hero. We've got one hero. Don't get confused. The brother cannot be the hero. The brother is a pawn. In the villains game, the brother is set up as a victim. Once he gets the girl into the world, then he becomes a mentor, and then he transforms into a villain because he's going to help indoctrinate her into the world. Now, there's probably going to be other mentor figures. There's not only just one mentor. In a structure story like this, there's usually a number of them. You know, there's Obi Wan Kenobi, there's Yoda, there's all kinds of. There's Han Solo. All of these people served as mentors to Luke Skywalker. They just didn't have one mentor. And the same thing for your heroine. She needs to have multiple mentors. And maybe the brother becomes the mentor at the beginning after she, quote, unquote saves him. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The reason why my version is better than yours is it does never ever do you want to make your hero subservient to another heroic force.

Okay, and so we have one hero. So the hero can never change. The victim can change, the villain can change, but the hero is always the hero.

Well, I look at the hero as. As the force of change, the force of good. The person, the being that will have a revelation at the end of your middle build, right? Just at the all is lost moment. When all is lost is when we change, right? When I realized my publishing company, Rugged Land, was just not going to work anymore, I had to change, okay? I couldn't stay and continue Rugged Land because it wasn't gonna work. So I had to change. I had to change who I was. And I had to become a literary agent. I'm sorry to use a personal reference, but I think it's important to think about these moments in our own personal lives when we're telling a story, because I can relate to that. I go, holy shit. Yeah, I can remember that day. I had the chance. I was staring at a bunch of bills. I had two kids under 3 years old. I had to get a job, man. I couldn't be precious. And that's what you want to set up for your hero.

So is the middle build. Like, I'm picturing, like, the hero has one foot on a boat and one foot on the dock, and they're slowly getting further apart. And the all is lost moment is where she's at a point where she's got to pick one.

No, no, the middle build.

I'm so.

No, you're not.

No, you're not lost. I feel like. I feel like everything I come up with is so far off the mark that I'm just like, I have know how to do any. Okay.

No, you're. I mean, you're. You're talking about an analogy there. And it could be. Yeah, I mean, that analogy works, you know, intellectually. I mean, in terms of her. Her worldview. Her worldview. She's clinging to the old ground, and she's got another foot in the boat, and she's eventually going to have to get all of her ass in that boat. Yes. And she has to leave that world. But that's also a metaphor for the transition from her ordinary world to this extraordinary world. And that moment happens when she accepts the hero's call and she agrees to go try and save her brother. So that would happen at the end of the beginning, Hook. And then she goes into this other world, and then she has to learn a whole new sort of skill set. She has mentors who teach her certain things. She faces rivalries and complex, you know, progressive complications. What she thinks she's really good at, she's really not. She discovers, you know, things that were skills that she didn't think she had.

So when she gets there at the end of the beginning, Hook. And realizes her brother's not in trouble, her brother's brought her there.

I don't think that she needs to realize that until. That could be. This is the other thing is, like, don't overdo the major plot points. The big twist at the end of the beginning, Hook. You need to have a big moment. And the big moment could be something like she somehow gets to the place where her brother is suspended in suspended animation or something, I don't know. But I think her realization about her brother and her family and the way.

She is supposed to move up in the world and how that is bullshit that has to happen. At the end of the all is lost moment, the brother reveals himself to be a coward and he's not willing to give up his stuff in order for anybody else to move forward. And she has to make a choice. Do I stay with my brother or do I go against my brother? And then, you know, that would transition into the final showdown against the indomitable villain that we haven't really figured out yet. Unless it becomes her brother. I don't know. Or it could become. I don't know.

I mean, that would be a great thing to know.

Wouldn't the force, the villain be whoever made her brother make that choice in the beginning?

Yes. Yes. And which brings up the MacGuffin as we, you know, we always.

And remind me what the MacGuffin is.

The MacGuffin is the secret sauce that the villain really desperately wants. So while the villain is on the lookout for really bright, smart people to come into the fake world and, you know, make sure the machines work, the villain wants something else. The villain wants something that he knows that girl has that nobody else has. And this is.

Well, I. I mean, my thinking was she would be able to transverse this digital world that they've created in a way that nobody has ever come close to. And so they want her so badly to be able to come in and have her power work for them instead of against them.

Well, that is interesting, but it's a little bit, eh. I don't really get it. So she transverses what. But if it was something far more primal, which is what? I still.

Spit it out. I still like the resurrection.

I still think, yeah, but how does that, how does that work in the digital? Because I don't know how that transverses into the like, lit rpg. Everything's happening online. Like everything that matters is happening in this digital virtual space, right?

What happens when the founder dies? The founder. If you create. Okay, let's just say you're monomaniac.

Who.

Who was the genius? You're like Donald Trump mates Mark Zuckerberg, right?

And say you're the genius who figured out this whole thing, this whole power structure, and you're getting old. Do you want to die? Because if you die, you lose control, right? And not only that, you think, if I die, the world is definitely going to shit, right? Because if everybody's horrible.

Because this is. This is your legacy as you save the world.

Yes. So the villain wants to save the world by keeping the powers that be. He wants to stop change. He wants to defy death. What is death? Death is change. You're alive and then you're dead. That is a change. It's a transitional moment in every human being's life and every living thing on this planet. It's alive and then it dies. And then it either falls into the ground and it becomes part of the earth again. And then grass grows again and then the grass dies. So if this villain refuses to die, he refuses to change. And if this girl has the power not to die, he's going to want to take that from her more than anything.

Oh, and that's when her brother gets plucked out of middle management and becomes special because.

Because she won't die if you die. Here's. Here's the theory that you could set up early on in the story. If you die in the virtual world, you die in the real world. And they find her because she dies in the virtual world, but she wakes up in the real world, so she does not die. That's how they find her. And she is the only one who has not died in the real world after she's died in the virtual world. It's like that old thing in dream. You ever heard of this? Like, if you die in your dreams, you die in real life, right?

That's why you jerk awake before you hit the ground, right?

Yeah. So she doesn't know it. She has a gift. It's actually damnation. But she doesn't know that because I think to be immortal is to be damned. And it is the negation of the negation of life and death. It's the fate worse than death, which is damnation. What is damnation? Never changing. You never get to die. Do you know what a horrible damnation that would be? We all worry about death. We all want to solve death. But if you don't die, you're not part of the natural world. You might as well be a machine.

Okay, okay, so.

So if the MacGuffin is. If the MacGuffin is. The villain has discovered this young girl has not died, and she should have been dead 20 times.

He'S going to say, let me get that girl, get her over here, take her out of Shittsville and bring her into the 1%. And they're like, well, we really can't do that. See, because there's this law that you set up and blah, blah, blah, and you can only have one transit, you know, make up something. Make up something about the universe that makes sense. You can only have one transitional person from Shittsville into the good world one time. So her brother moved into the good world and he lives in the 1%. So her family, their quote is up. So they're like, we can't really do that because her brother's already here. He's like, oh, I got it. Let's arrest the brother and say he's under arrest. And then we'll send Jimmy Smith, who will go and knock on her door and say, the only person that can save this brother is you. Come with us. And then she'll say, I don't want to. And then we'll, you know, think like a villain for a minute. How are you gonna get her there? And you can't break the laws. Even though it's a tyranny. The people believe in this bullshit, right? So if you break the bullshit laws and you're the president, like say President Obama decided to just. I don't like Paul Ryan anymore. He's out. He can't do that. He's the president, but he can't do that because there are rules, right? Okay, so you gotta make a rule. Give me universe.

Alright, so what should I be working on for the next week? That's what I always want to end with is like, okay, you're the teacher, give me homework that I could turn in next week. Like, what? Because I feel like. Here's where I feel like, is like every single thing I come up with. You're like, ah, that doesn't really work. And I'm like, well, damn it, you.

Know, like, well, you wanted to find it, right? In 1 30th of the time, as prose, right?

What? What'd you say?

I said you wanted to learn how to write in 1/30 of the time as the professionals. Do you know what the professionals do? They write a whole freaking manuscript using your idea and they submit it to agents. And the agents go, no, thanks. And something about it just doesn't work for me.

Yeah, I don't, I don't mind that you're shooting down my ideas. The problem is. No, no, no, you're not hurting my feelings as much as like, here's what.

I want you to do. I want you to come up with just very bulleted points, okay? The villain wants this. The hero has this. This is what the villain will do to get what the hero wants. The villain will create a victim in order to lure the Hero into his web. Ultimately, the villain wants to take the gift from the hero and then just fill in the details of what I've just talked about so that you know how this is going to begin and how it's going to end. You know it's going to begin negatively. Your brother is in trouble. Come help him. Right? It's going to end positively. Not only has she saved her brother, she saved her family and maybe her whole Hamlet. Maybe the whole damn thing. Who knows?

So, okay, what if I. What if I took that and I did your whole thing where, like, I got to come up with six different answers, like six different versions or 10 different versions to kind of cut through all the crap? What if I did that?

It's a great idea. Because what it'll do is it'll. And the other thing to remember is, remember when you asked me why was my thing not good and yours was, and I answered it by saying yours transferred power of heroism to a third party. You can't do that.

So when you're looking at your stuff, you need to say to yourself, is my hero always the hero? That doesn't mean that there aren't other people who are helping. But nobody is as heroic as your hero. She has to be the queen of heroes in the story. Nobody can ever subvert her. Her mission has to be extremely clear. Her mission is to save the victim. If she saves the victim, she will get what she wants. That's all you need to know about the hero. She wants to save the victim. You've already set up that the brother is the victim. So I think the primary drive of your story is her attempt to save her brother in this alternative universe. And what she's going to discover is she's either gonna save him or she won't save him. Chances are she's gonna save him, but her life is never gonna be the same. She's not gonna return things to the way they were. She's gonna make them worse. But she doesn't know that or will.

The other.

The other scenario is she saves the world but loses her brother.

That's.

Because it's. It's always. They always have to. She either gets what she wants, but loses something she didn't know she wanted.

See, I think she. I think she gets what she wants, but what she discovers is the truth about herself, which is she's damned. And then you're set up for a sequel. She gets what she wants, she saves the world, but then she discovers she's fucking immortal.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking was she'll learn at the end she's not just immortal in the digital world, she's immortal in the world. Exactly.

Exactly. And then, then you've got an immortal figure who you've set up on. You can set her up on another hero's journey. Why am I immortal? What's going on? You know what I'm saying? So you can. I think that is a very interesting climax of your entire story. She discovers in that climactic moment with the villain that she is immortal both in reality and in the virtual world. And the villain is. Is not. The villain can survive the virtual world, maybe because he's so smart, but he can't survive the real world.

Maybe that's the beginning of the ending. Payoff is he does steal from her the ability to survive the digital world.

Right?

I don't know. Maybe. Maybe.

But it's. What we're talking about is really juicy, meaty stuff. And I know right now your brain seems like you've got this big soup of stuff that you don't know what to do with. But the great thing about becoming a writer and becoming a storyteller and thinking about this stuff is that what you'll discover is that sometimes just letting that stuff marinate in your brain without grinding on it, what it'll do is it'll give you things that you never thought possible. And Steve Pressfield talks about this. It's like the universe self organizes and I think our brains do the same thing. You don't know it, but somehow that stuff will start to coalesce and it will become more and more clear to you. And ideally, what you want is just a really solid roadmap for your next draft. You know, where you've got your foolscap global story grid. You've got the major points going, and then you being you, you'll probably chart out your scenes. But the next iteration of this story for you is going to be a major leap forward because you're dealing with the very deep realities of the genre conventions and obligatory scenes. And you're dealing with the deep psychological underpinnings, the hero's journey in a way that's exciting to you. And it all came from you.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. For everything Storygrid, you can go to storygrid.com make sure you sign up for the newsletter, read the blog. You won't want to miss everything that is available at the website. If you missed any past episodes or want to check out the show notes, all of that is@storygrid.com.

As always, thank you for continuing to share the show with your friends, rate it on itunes. All of that helps us to continue to make this show ad free as we see those numbers keep going up every week. So thanks for listening. Thanks for being a part of our little community here at Story Grid. And we will see you next week.