What Good Editors Know

Hello, and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of Storygrid. He wrote the book Storygrid, and he has 25 years experience as an editor, and he is helping me as I struggle through writing my first novel. In this episode, we talk first about his edits on my scene, my first scene. And we really go deeper into what it means to be an editor, what it means to be a mentor and a developmental editor and talk about all the ins and outs of what that means and what a good editor knows. And then, of course, we dive into more of the nitty gritty of how to make my scene better. But if you've wondered about what an editor's job is, what it's like to be a mentor, this is a great episode for you. I think you're really going to enjoy it. Before we jump in and get started, I do want to mention one thing. Sean and I have been invited to speak at Jeff Goins Tribe Conference this coming September. So if you've ever wanted to see me and Sean in person will be doing a talk together, you can come to that conference and meet us in.

Person and watch our talk.

So that is@tribeconference.com if you want to grab a ticket, and I would love to actually meet you in person. Okay, well, let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, last week I named the episode Calibrating youg Scenes, because when I went back through my notes on our conversation and listened.

Re.

Listened to the episode, getting it ready to publish, that's what I felt like we were kind of talking about is, you know, I was going too far here and not far enough here and trying to find that middle ground. And you actually did, like, a full edit of my scene and sent it back to me, and it was really interesting. And I'll post it up so everybody can see your edits and I'll post it with the changes tracked so people can see exactly what you change. But what stood out to me is, like, I tried to go, like, really big, where she's, like, stabbing the guy at the end of my scene. And, like, the end of the scene that you had tweaked was her just saying no.

Yep.

But yet it, like, I was just.

Like, she said no.

And so it just. I think that's what, you know, it's Almost like I'm going to get, like, workout nerdy here. But I last. Last year, I learned how to handstand walk, and it took me, like, three months. And it was either, like, if I went too slow, I would fall, and if I went too fast, I would fall. And, like, learning to find my balance, like, right in the middle of going, like, the right speed is kind of how I'm feeling, where it's like, you know, I'm like, way amping up too early in the book or like, not going far enough because you've called me on not going far enough, you know, so we're like. Anyway, I would just love to hear kind of what you were thinking when you kind of pulled it back and ended the scene with just a word no, instead of, like, somebody getting stabbed and, like, somebody running off into the night.

Well, I've. I've got a whole bunch of things to say to that. And the first thing I want to say is that I just wrote a post on Steve Pressfield's site called Is Good Enough Good Enough? And it's sort of a reflection of what we've been talking about over the past few weeks and how I, as a mentor, have been getting frustrated. And it's not anything that you have done, but I could relate it because the other day I was playing catch with my youngest son, who's a terrific baseball player, a wonderful guy, but I'm trying to get him to throw a proper overhand fastball, and he just hasn't gotten it yet. And I was getting more and more frustrated with him because I was giving him all of these mechanical instructions. I was doing all these sort of drills with him. And yet. And yet. And yet. And it got to the point where I had to say to him, honey, I gotta go in and, you know, make a phone call, because I was getting so frustrated with him, and it wasn't his fault. And the reason I was thinking about it, why? Is what happened there. And I think it's. And I came up with this sort of cheesy formula. And the formula is this. It's M +TE to the nth power equals if that's what the problem is, and that's what you and I are going through right now. So let me explain what this formula means. Okay? All right. So M means mechanics. And in. In our case, it's story mechanics. You know, the five commandments of storytelling. Your inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis, climax, and resolution. So I've been teaching you the mechanics of storytelling for a while now. And you're, you're, you're getting them and they're sinking in. So mechanics plus TE to the nth power. Now, TE stands for trial and error, Trial and error. And N stands for however many times it takes the student to try and fail until they reach a critical moment. That critical moment is when they throw their first fastball overhand and they get the feel of what it means to throw a fastball overhand and where to release it right from the ear. So I can tell my son about throwing fastball until I'm blue in the face, but until he executes his first fastball, he's going to not really be sure what I'm saying all the time. But once he does, and I know this is true because I went through this with my oldest son and my daughter, once they get it, then they're like, oh, dad, oh, I totally. I totally get it now. And then they've got that feeling now. What if means is internal feeling. And that is the cathartic moment that you have after you've thrown your first fastball. And it feels great. So it's the same feeling that somebody gets if they play golf or they shoot a three pointer and they know the second that ball goes off the fingertips, it's in. It's swish, it's nothing but net. They can start running back down the court to play defense because they know that ball's in. It's like Steph Curry and a golfer. He picks up his tee when the ball is still in the air, knowing it's going right down the middle of the fairway. So that's what you want to do as a writer. You want to be able to learn how to throw the Tim Grohl fastball. And what you've been doing before you've been throwing these fastballs is you've been sort of piecing together a herky jerky motion that gets the ball close to the home plate, but not exactly over the plate. You know what I'm saying?

I'm like those famous people that throw.

The first pitches and it, like, lands.

Halfway to the catcher.

No, no, you're not like that at all. But that is a funny image to think about. So what I'm basically teaching you is how to throw your own version of a fastball. I can't throw the fastball for you. I have my own fastball. I can't give you mine. But what I can do is I can show you how other people throw fastballs. I can throw a fastball for you. I Can show you. I can go through it. So anyway, what happened last week in these last couple of weeks when we're sort of grinding down to figure out what the next steps are, is that moment of teaching, mentoring somebody's internal feeling. Now once you start to get this internal feeling when you can read your own work and know, oh, yeah, baby, that's a fastball right down the middle, there's no way anybody's gonna hit that. That's 105 miles an hour. And you know when you're a pro and you're. You're writing all the time, you're gonna recognize those scenes and you're gonna go, yeah, yeah, I know what I'm doing here, so. Yeah, yeah, so I know that feel.

On the other side when I'm writing, like, my blog, like, for my business, like nonfiction or whatever, I think. I can't remember if I talked about it last week, but it was like, I've been grinding on this nonfiction book, and I got some coaching from a friend of mine, and then I wrote a new introduction for the book. And like, I hit period after like 1400 words, and I'm like, I, like, stood up, dropped the mic. I'm like, that's a good chapter, you know, and like, I sent it over to him. He's like, oh, my gosh, this is the best thing you've written far. And like, I knew it. And. But yeah, it's that I haven't been doing this long enough because there's things that, like, I put the period on. Like, that's pretty good. I send it to you. You're like, nope.

And I'm like, okay.

Okay. So that's, that's the first thing. And I, I think that's kind of a. It's a good way to give yourself the freedom to try and fail because you understand. You didn't learn how to write great nonfiction, practical nonfiction overnight. It took you a long time. You probably had to self teach yourself that. And now it's a skill that you can rely on. You. You can get the biofeedback moment when you hit that period and you go, okay, you know, I can tweak this and I can make it even better. But I know I've. I've got my five principles of storytelling down there. It's nailed. So what's fun about working on this one particular scene is that it's such a crucial scene. It's the inciting incident of the entire story. And, you know, instead of us trying to figure out everything, we have a Global, sort of generic understanding of what this story is. We know generally, we know that. We know the genres that you're going to be hitting. We know the lead character, we know the villain, we know the victim, we know the hero. We have a lot of information that we're doing. So now is the time to start to trust all of that nine months of work that we've already done. You already generally know this world. So when you said earlier that you really went for it on this initial scene and you had her using a knife and stabbing and going to the extreme. The reason why I cut all that back was that when I was reading through your work and I was line editing it, going sentence by sentence, the thing that an editor does when they line edit is they want to take away all stuff that doesn't matter, all stuff that is explanatory for no reason, exposition that it's going to bore the reader and they want to load in setups. Setups for future payoffs. So, you know, one of the great tricks that I love to use, and I always, whenever I do use it, it's always.

I'm always surprised that I decide. I'm like, you know what? I'm going to end that right there. And that's going to get people to want to read the next page. And. And that's what I did with your story. We were talking last week about the hero's journey, and you were making some really good points, and I had to really mull them over. When you said, oh, wait a minute, I thought you said, Sean, that the first. The beginning hook of the story should be the hero denies the call, and then slowly they're forced to accept the call. Because that's sort of the generic hero's journey kind of structure. And that is true. And last week I was saying, yeah, but everybody knows that structure. So why don't we try and tweak it and innovate it a little bit and have her, you know, go on that journey immediately. But then, you know, after we got off the phone last week, I was like, you know, I might be rushing this. I might be throwing away and giving him the wrong advice, that we could have a real opportunity to make a transitional moment between the ordinary world to this fresh, strange, brave new world in the future. So what would be a great way of doing that is to have a consequence, a threat, a crisis moment for Jesse in this first scene that has very, very high stakes, but is not life and death yet. But we can tell life and death is going to come into the equation just based upon the setup of the scene. The setup of the scene is that you've got a lead character who's outside the law. She's breaking the law. And she's breaking the law for good reason, because her family needs the food or her community needs the food. And I think you'll notice when I went through your scene, I tried to load in the fact that she didn't take the primary food source of these people she's stealing from. She took the leftovers. She took the second loaf of bread. So that establishes her as a lead character who has to live outside the law, not of her own choice, but out of necessity. But she also has a code. She has an internal code already in place, a moral right and wrong that says, okay, you've got to steal. If you're going to be a thief, you're going to be the best thief they can be. But you're not going to take somebody's last can of who hash. You know, you're not. You're not going to take all of their stuff.

So it's sort of like a Robin Hood figure who, you know, who would take from the wealthier and redistribute to those in greater need. All right, so at the beginning of the story, you've established that your lead character is living outside the law. So the law, you know, the subtext of that is that, oh, there's something weird going on in this society. If the lead character in this story is living outside the law, there must be some, you know, justice, injustice. There must be some kind of wonky value at stake here. And then when you introduce the threat to your hero, which is the interrogator, then, you know, you're establishing this. This very authoritarian figure who's catching somebody in the act of breaking the law. Now, anybody who's ever been caught speeding and gotten a speeding ticket, anybody who's ever experienced being called into the principal's office knows that feeling. We can all relate to the feeling of being caught.

So the stakes are pretty high. Very early on, and it's all through your setup, the setup of this scene, Somebody is stealing from a group of people who are so out of it that they don't even know that the girl is in their house. That's even cool, too. So you have all these layers of interesting stuff percolating that to go all the way to life and death in this opening scene, I thought was too much too soon.

And why is that? Because it's like. It's almost like starting Having your car at too high RPMs, you have nowhere to go. Is it like.

Yeah, this is not a. James. This isn't.

Yeah, so it's not. It's not so much. It's too much for the reader. It's too much for the book.

It's too much for the genre. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Because the genre, the overarching genre of your story, correct me if I'm wrong, is coming of age. It's a maturation plot. Right, Right. So does Harry Potter get to life and death stakes? Of course it does, but not at the beginning.

Yeah, well, it's the last. It's at the end.

Only at the end.

Yeah, but there's death involved in Harry Potter. But it's. You're talking about the, you know, the maturation plot, which is a. Is. It's a movement. The value at stake is, you know, naivete moving from a world where you see the world black and white, meaning there's. There's very clear divisions between people, right and wrong. People don't do certain things. And then, you know, when we all. When we become an adult, we become.

Jaded. We see the gray areas in life. We begin to believe that some people do bad things but are internally okay and vice versa. So there are shades of gray. Maturity is about holding two opposing thoughts in your mind at the same time and not going crazy.

So that's the value at stake, is maturity and naivete. It's moving from naivete to maturity. So it's not life and death. The global genre that you're dealing in is internal. And yes, you're piling a lot of external stuff on it, which is exciting and fun and will go to life and death and will push the edges. But we want the reader to understand at the very beginning of this story, we want them to start to attach themselves emotionally to this lead character.

So when a lead character starts killing people in the first scene, it's not so easy to attach to them.

You know, we don't really attach to James Bond. We look at James Bond and we go, oh, my God, is he cool? If I were only as cool as James Bond, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah. There's no way I'm ever going to say to myself, oh, I feel just like James Bond today.

You don't know that, Sean.

But. But for a maturation story, like, for example, one of the great, great maturation plots of all time is the movie Saturday Night Fever, where you've got this mook, this Italian guy from Brooklyn, who moves from a guy who's never going to get out of the neighborhood, who will never get out of the hardware store. Through an inner genius by the end comes to understand that where he is from is no longer where he should be. And he literally starts in Brooklyn. At the end of the movie he's in Manhattan. And it's an amazing story. That's a great maturation plot where, you know, he's this childish fool at the beginning and at the end he's a world weary young person who, who's ready to go into adulthood. And you know, his, his dreams have been shattered and. But he's ready, you know, he's ready to see the world in a different way. His worldview has changed. So this is what we want to do for Jessie. We want to take her from this very sort of naive but principled person at the beginning to somebody who's world weary at the end. Somebody who goes through a very big emotional mission and, and journey that results in her understanding that everything really isn't what it appears to be. And that life is ambiguous and the people that you trust the most can turn out to be the people that you should trust the least. And all that great stuff. So, so you don't want to jam, you don't want to jam all that in into your first scene. You want to set it up. You want to set it up at the beginning of this story is. It's crucial because it's going to mirror the payoff of the story. So the beginning of this story, we want to establish the genre. We want people to understand internally. I mean, nobody's going to start reading this book and go, oh my gosh, a great maturation plot. I can't wait to read it. They're gonna say, what the hell is going on? I don't know, but this is really cool. I'm gonna, I'm gonna read the next chapter. So that's an immediate goal.

That's more of me learning to pull back and let it slowly burn instead of like trying to move so fast.

Yeah, exactly. You want to pick and choose the moments that you're going to use to reveal facts that you as the godlike author of this story know that the reader doesn't. Why do you want to tell them everything when you can really rock their world later on by a big reveal? Remember that stuff about turning points? Now, turning points are these really incredible moments that shift the valence in a scene from positive to negative or negative to positive or negative to double negative or whatever. And there's a critical moment in every Scene that's called the turning point, and that's when the positive shifts to the negative or the negative shifts to the positive. So turning points happen through one of two ways. The first way is through a character's action. So a character punches somebody in the face just out of the blue. So what had been positive is now negative. Somebody's threatened. So that's a character action that shifts the valence of the scene from positive to negative and is the turning point of the scene. Okay, another one. The only other way to change in a turning point is through what. What you call is revelation. A fact that the reader does not know or the character does not know comes to fruition. So revelation is a way of using information that the. That the author already has about the story that the reader doesn't have, nor should the character necessarily have, and to use that information to turn a major moment in the story. Like, for example, I'm not giving anything away because we've been debating about this. We were talking about when should we have the idea that the brother is alive surface in this story? When should Jesse learn that her brother, who she's been assuming is dead, is actually alive and is being held captive? Now, we could have revealed that in the first part of this inciting incident scene. And in fact, I may have even suggested we do that last week as I was, you know, trying to evaluate your fastball and trying to fix it. But I think. I think our initial gut reaction to make that the major, you know, the turning point of the beginning hook to transition us into the middle build is the right decision. Yeah.

In the email you sent with the scene revisions, you said part of what we're doing is establishing, you know, Jessie as, like. Just emotionally.

I forgot. Exactly.

But, like, emotionally immature and that she's going to dig her heels in just because. Because she's young and doesn't, you know, she only sees the world black and white and all that kind of stuff. And it got me thinking about, like, my oldest son is very kind of compliant to rules. You know, you set a rule, you set consequences. He's like, I'm good. I don't want those consequences. I'll abide by the rule where my youngest son will, like, fall on a sword just to spite the sword, you know, and when you were saying that, that's what I was kind of thinking of is just like she's saying no, just. Just. Cause, like, she's not thinking about the consequences. She's not thinking down the road. She's just not gonna do what she's told. And to me, that sets up this kind of like, it puts the villain in this weird spot where he has to abide by his own laws so he can't just drag her out of the city and make her go. He has to keep upping the stakes to where she finally decides to go. I mean, is that how I'm thinking.

In this first, like, beginning, Hook?

Yes. Yes. And the other thing to think about, and this is one of the great things about, you know, doing your. Doing your full scout page and planning and all the stuff that we've been doing is fantastic preparatory work. You know why? Because it enables you to have so much information about the possibilities, the possibilities of how this story is going to turn. So that whole first draft that you did, it was a way of going down all kinds of different paths. And now we can pick and choose whether or not that particular path is the right way to go. So we didn't really know.

What the right choice was going to be until we saw this scene. And, you know, the scene can probably be improved even more. But for now, I think it's an. It's a good place to start. And it's a very clear scene. It's clear at the end of the scene that Jesse has said to her interrogator, I don't care. I don't care about the consequences. And she's faced with a lesser of two evils choice in her crisis. Does she go to the Capitol and become this big cheese and fight for something that she doesn't believe in? Or does she risk exile? Does she accept exile? And I think it's fun to think about what's the consequence here. Instead of having her just go to the Capitol and get, you know, integrated into the brave new world, why don't we explore the consequences of this world? So she says to the guy, no, I'm not going to go. You're going to have to arrest me, and you're going to have to put me through the shaming or whatever it is. So now this opens up this kind of fun opportunity for you to say to yourself, okay, I get to play around for the next couple of scenes. Now, what would be a fun follow up to this inciting incident scene? Now, the. The inciting incident of our story started positively and the scene ends negatively. So she's given this great opportunity, but she turns it down. So that's a negative ending. So you're going to want to start your next scene sort of a negative space. And because we always want to switch up our valences. You're going to want to end that scene positively.

So your next scene you can think about and you can say to yourself, okay, my lead character just turned down the opportunity of a lifetime and now she's going to face shaming in this society. Wow, I wonder what that means. Well, let me think about this society again. Okay. It's divided. There's no movement. It's very security conscious. The borders are very locked. Wonder what it's like if you're thrown outside of the kingdom's walls. What's that like? What's out there in that big darkness? Is there a big darkness that the government uses to threaten and scare the population into being compliant? In addition to, like, you got to think about the way governments and political factions work. They're carrots and sticks, right? There's the carrot of the game that get people get to play. And I got to tell you, Tim, I thought this whole game concept was a little bit. Might be going a little too far until this whole Pokeman Go thing has started. Are you aware of this?

Yeah, I actually just downloaded it and went out with my kids to do it a couple days ago.

Yeah, I was in the. I was in New York City yesterday and there is a beautiful park, beautiful park right in front of the Plaza Hotel on 57th street and 5th Avenue. And I was watching just a bunch.

Of people standing there looking at their phones, right?

Not just a bunch, it was the entire park.

I'm not kidding, like, and they were all staring at their phones and nobody was looking at the Plaza Hotel or the sky or. And I was saying to myself, gee, Tim's idea about people being so engrossed in a game that they are completely oblivious to the rest of the world is not that far off. It's in fact, it's alive right now. I should have taken a picture of it and we could have posted on the site notes, but it was shocking. It was really shocking. It was disturbing in a way anyway. And that's New York City and it was 12:30 in the afternoon and every kind of person too. You had grandmas and you had Puerto Rican guys and you had black guys and you had white women and you had kids. Every single kind of New York personality was in that park playing that game with their head down. It was weird. So anyway, just to get back to the notion of this next scene, what I like now is that now you kind of get to play around a bit because, you know, okay, my next big trigger point for my story is the revelation that the brother is alive and that she can no longer selfishly sort of play by her own rules. Because now this is like, you know, five, six, seven scenes ahead. When she does learn this, that's going to be a moment where she has to say to herself, oh, man, I guess I have to go. So she's going to have to accept the call once the stakes are raised, when she understands that her brother's in captivity and that she has to do her best to bring him back. Anyway, I don't want to keep going if you have other.

Yeah, no, I had.

I had one more question on the scene before we get any further, is.

Who is the victim in this scene?

Because that was one of the things. Because that's why you were actually leaning towards having the revelation of the brother in the first scene, because then he.

Would be the victim.

So if that's not happening is, you know, we have the hero. It's supposed to be the hero, the villain and the victim. And the villain gets the ball rolling by victimizing the victim.

Yes, yes, absolutely. And that's. Those concepts are extremely important to understand. Here's the tweak, though, that. That is either going to make you very happy or. Or irritate you. But you have to remember that hero, victim and villain is malleable. Meaning it's not just one character is the villain, One character is the hero, one character is the victim. Those roles, they're roles. They're not characters. So the role and the sensibility of a victim on the stage, a villain on the stage, and a hero on the stage has to be present throughout the scene. Yes, absolutely. So let me answer the question. You have Jesse at the beginning of the scene, is.

The villain. She is robbing people who are asleep, essentially. So she plays the villain and the protagonist. So she's playing a dual role at the very, very beginning of this scene. She's hero and villain, and she's victimizing the people who are asleep at their terminals. Okay, That's. That's the beginning of the scene. Then it transitions through conflict.

When she realizes that there's a policeman or, you know, a member of the government who's also in the room watching her. So then we have this nice shift where Jesse, who has been playing the villain and the hero, now transitions into playing the hero and a victim because she's being victimized by the authoritarian figure, the villain played by the guy in the chair. The comatose people are still playing victims. They never transition out of victim. They are present on stage to present the sense that there is a whole population of people who are being victimized. Now, then Jesse begins to transition so that at the very end of the scene, she transitions into the power player over the authoritarian figure, because she says, no. So what you have here is a great dynamic of movement of roles. Now, I'm not going to get too much into this because it's. It's like, even wonky for me. But I've been doing a lot of research about, and I've written a lot about transactional analysis, which was. It's a psychological theory, a therapy that therapists use that was developed by a guy named Eric Byrne back in the 1970s that essentially breaks down social dynamics into those three very amorphous roles, victim, villain, and hero. And what Byrne says is that you can start to look at the way people manipulate one another and the uses of language through that. That prism of looking at who's playing the victim here, who is playing the villain here. How does somebody transition themselves from playing the villain to being the victim? It's a very interesting dynamic when you see people at play and like, if you're in a business meeting and you see somebody go, hey, who has the Fitzwilliams report? Sweeney. Sweeney. I thought you were gonna have that on Tuesday. And then Sweeney transitions from victim being yelled at to villain by saying, oh, I finished that a long time ago. It's actually Jim's fault. And then he, you know, so what. I mean, like, if you look at. If you look at the way things happen and the way conflict shifts and power shifts in a scene and in reality, it's fascinating. So what I'm saying to you, Tim, is that you do present the victim, the villain, and the hero throughout this scene, and you set up that there are a lot of other people at stake in this story. So that's one of the reasons why when I was looking at your scene again and I said to myself, my, well, geez, maybe we do need to reveal that the brother is still alive. And that way we can firmly establish that Jesse has to go on a mission to save the brother's life. And then I said to myself, yeah, but Tim made a really good point that maybe I'm just blowing off, you know, a really important part of the hero's journey, which is denial of the call. Maybe I shouldn't be so cavalier about that. Now, if this was an action story that didn't have a deep internal genre as its global, if this wasn't a maturation plot and this was a James Bond action story, I probably would say, yeah, James Bond doesn't care. You know, he's not going to deny his calling. They tell him, go kill that guy. He goes, right? So you don't need to go through that stuff unless your genre is really, really clue locked in to the hero's journey. And the maturation plot definitely is. So I said to myself, you know, no, we shouldn't push that. We shouldn't ignore denial of the call. That needs to be an important part of the story. And the other thing is, you know, is it really. Does it make sense that, you know, the flunky that they send to bring Jesse to the Capitol is going to know that the brother's alive? No, that guy's just a flunky. Somebody at a higher level is going to pull that tool out of the toolbox to get Jesse to do what they want. That guy doesn't even know that tool exists.

So if you rationally think this stuff through and you think about, okay, what's my global genre again? Okay, it's maturation. No, I don't want my hero to be killing anybody in the first scene because that's gonna make them unsympathetic to my reader. Let's think. Should I really put in a big revelation to establish a third party victim that will put my hero on a mission? You don't necessarily have to get your, your maturation plot to mission stage until they've accepted the call.

So that's why I delayed the revelation that the brother's alive. And I decided to really firmly establish that this is a child. This is a child who says, I don't care. Arrest me. You know, it's like, it's like a naive teenager who's protesting for civil rights in 1967, and they're white and they're from Scarsdale and they're, you know, in Alabama. And the police come down the road and they've got billy clubs and they have dogs. They go, I don't care. Arrest me. And they don't understand the reality that those cops are going to take them back to the jailhouse and beat her within an inch of her life because she's naive. Now, that's kind of what I mean. I'm really going over the top with that, with that example. But I think that's an important thing to establish to the reader that we've got a child here. Yes, she's a great thief, she's really smart, she has a code, but she's a child. She has no idea what she's getting herself into. When she says okay, then okay. It's the third time you've caught me cheating, caught me thieving. I understand. Now I'm going to be exiled from society. Go ahead, exile me. What do I care? And that says to the reader, oh boy, maturation plot. I can't wait to see how she's going to change without, you know, explicitly saying Jesse was a 12 year old girl who really, you know what I mean? You're not doing third, you know, godly exposition like a Charles Dickens would back, you know. So that's why I think the scene is interesting because as you'll recall, I was saying to you, we should do a knock on the door scene. And you tried to knock on the door scene. It didn't work. But instead you found your inner fastball and you're like, you know what? I want to try this thing where she's caught stealing. I think that's going to work. And guess what? You were right.

Yeah, that came from that thing where I basically just did a graph of all of my options.

Oh, I love to hear that. Love to hear that.

Yeah, like I just took, you know, I'm like, okay, who's the guy doing the knock on the door? And like I listed out like two or three. Like, did he come from the brother? Did he come from the government? You know, I forgot everything. And then I'm. Then next to each of those I put nice and mean, you know, they could be a nice person or a mean person. And then I did that with location too. Of like, okay, where does it happen? You know, well, the, the house is the obvious, so we can't do that. And so I just, and one of the things was like when she was out doing her thing, well, what's she doing? So I listed out a bunch of different things she could be doing. And so like I kind of took your, like, list the first 10 things that come to mind in a more kind of systematic way of like taking each character, each location and trying to just come up with all my possibilities, then kind of looking at them of like, well, how could I put them together in an interesting way?

It was really smart because you established an alien world very, very quickly with those people just sitting on their chairs zonked out. You know, we don't know if they're being drugged, we don't know what the situation is. And so you're setting up an explanation of that through action as opposed to in the year 2525. You know, people play games all the time and so you don't have to establish all the realities of this world because you've got a lead character who's actively doing something and is confronted by an authoritarian figure. And you've established hero, victim, villain, the roles in that scene in a dynamic way. Yeah.

You know, it comes back to when you were talking about, like, the frustration, as the mentor reminded me, again, again, I'm going to bring up exercising, but when I was learning how to snatch, which is where you take a barbell from the ground and put it overhead. It's one of the Olympic lifts, my coach at the time kept, you know, talking to me, and he said this one thing that, like, clicked, and all of a sudden, like, my snatch got a lot better. I'm like, yeah, when you said that one thing, it really clicked. He's like. He's like, you know, I've been coaching for a long time. He's like. And what I've realized is I just have to talk a lot and say a lot of different things because each person's going to have something different click. Right. He's like, so that clicked for you. But if I said that to this person over here, like, it would just be more of the noise of me talking. And one of the things that clicked for me, and I mentioned this a.

Few weeks ago, is when I read.

That book, Alice, and realized how little the author explained about anything. And that is part of what kept me in the story, even though I never really knew what was going on. But the thread of the story was.

Strong enough to keep me going.

That was when a lot of what.

You'D been saying clicked.

And I'm like, I need to under explain everything. And so that's where this scene came. And I'm like, I'm just gonna sit people in the chair and, like. And I had him dump them out of the chair to show how inert they were, but have zero explanation. Because both Jesse and him know what's going on.

Right.

So they don't have to talk about it. And so, like, that was a big kind of click in my mind of when I read that, of, like, all this other stuff you've said finally was like, okay, now I'm starting to see what he means by, like, I'm putting too much in. So my next thing is like, okay, where. So I kind of have my point A is this first scene. My next point B is the revelation of the brother, which will spur her to say yes. So I have roughly 14 or 13 other scenes that I've got to write between those two.

Yeah. And I don't think that'll be a problem.

Okay, well, I'm just kind of making sure I understand what's happening next because, you know, if we have them, you know, again, back to the episode on or the chapter in story grid two on the mathematics. You know, you have 60 scenes, 15 are the beginning hook, 30 are the middle build, and 15 are the ending payoff. So my beginning hook, my journey in the beginning hook, is from the refusal of the call in this first scene to acceptance of the call, and that will begin the middle build. Am I thinking about that the right way?

I think so, yeah. And one of the things that I loved about the Hunger Games, that Suzanne Collins did so very well, was she established.

The everyday, very dystopian, sad world of Katniss before she ever went to the. To the Hunger Games, in a way that was organic and interesting in that, you know, she established that here was a provider. Here is a young. A young girl, slash, woman, probably just on the verge of womanhood who, you know, would go out and hunt, and she was able to feed her family, and she was able to. And she would go outside the town limits to do the hunting. And. And so by the time, you know, she goes on the journey to the extraordinary world in the, you know, the Hunger Games arena, in fact, you know, they had the more transitional moments of the preparations for, you know, the event. And it's. It's such a terrific story. And I was thinking for you, I like the idea of exploring the consequences of this young girl's decision, and I think it would be worth it for you to think about, well, what would be the consequences of somebody who's been. Who's broken the rules three times and, by law, has to be exiled, has to be thrown outside of even this really kind of not so great living circumstances where she is now? Maybe the alternative is even worse.

Yeah. I was thinking about this, because the normal way of exile would be to be thrown, like, literally physically outside of the city like that. You know, if you think of, like, the leper colony or, you know, shunning, you know, that kind of thing. What I was thinking was, like, people that are downtrodden.

You know, I'm.

Whatever. I'm just gonna make a generalization.

So people that are downtrodden. I know.

I find myself. Yeah, go ahead.

What?

What?

Nothing more than to think they're better than somebody else. Like, they're so low on the totem pole that they fight for just a little bit of not. I'm not. I'm not as bad off as this person.

Right.

So my thinking is that the exile involves two things. One is she's cut off from the online game. She's not allowed to plug in at all. And she's in charge of taking care.

Of the people that are so, like.

She has to literally clean up the shit that that is dropped while they're.

Plugged into the game.

She has to then do all of the work that. It's almost like they're now the caretakers.

Of the people that are plugged into the game.

Wow.

So they.

They have to, like, provide the food.

Instead of stealing the food.

She's now in charge of providing the food. She's in charge of cleaning up after them because they're in the game doing the work that the faction needs. And so the people that are exiled are doing that, and they're doing it to earn their way back into society.

And so exile is actually. And somehow there's some kind of physical mark or something. But exile is like, they. They're in the middle of the community still doing all. Like, they're now less than the. The least of these.

I like that. I really like the concept of it because it has.

You know, parallels to real life. And, you know, when you can do that in a fictional world that, especially in a science fiction, fantastical, dystopian world, it will have far more emotional resonance to the reader. So. And I say that because, you know, we live in a world of service, the service industry. And you know, the guy who. The valet at the hotel who takes your car when you're on a business trip, you don't even really even look them in the eye. You know, you just sort of throw the keys and you start getting into these habits that. And in India, you know, there's the whole caste system, and the lowest caste on the caste systems are what they call the untouchables and the untouchable people. And it's a genetic line of people who are responsible for the kinds of things that you're talking about. They handle the garbage. And ironically, they also the ones who handle cremation. So if somebody dies in your family, you have to find a crematorium, and it's run by an untouchable family. And they're literally people that you're not supposed to touch because they are on the lowest level of the social spectrum. So this idea that exile means to be completely ignored and treated as if you are beneath contempt is a good one. And I think it's a unique twist. You know, my. You know, I always say that the first inclination that you have is always a cliche. And you just confirmed it for me because mine, mine was, oh, well, you know, we'll throw her outside the city walls and then she's going to have to get food, you know, and that's what you would expect it to be. So it might even be fun in this next scene would be to present a scene that doesn't seem that bad, right? Like she's delivering food and then you discover at the end, oh, wow. Or maybe you even want to do like what Suzanne Collins is so great at doing, making a spectacle, a ceremonial spectacle out of the process.

So there could be some kind of event in the, in the square or online or in the game maybe, I don't know where. You know, your next scene could be the exile process and the things that she has to undergo to be kind of erased from society. In a way, these are all possibilities. I'm not saying you have to do it that way. And kind of the way I'm feeling about it now is that you should start and you are doing this, but you might want to just goof around and map out a scene like you did for this first one, list your possibilities and come up with a follow up here that's going to move from negative to positive in some way by the end.

Yeah, because I was actually the. What I was thinking with it was it would open with her putting food.

In the cupboard.

Because that's now her responsibility. But I haven't thought deeper. That's like all I've got so far.

But no.

So I'll. So would it be better to just write? Because we, you know, my first draft, I've mapped out every scene and we decided we're going to go slower here. So I don't write, you know, 60,000 words before I realize it doesn't work. And so should I just like work on the next scene or should I kind of map out the next 13 scenes? Or like, not like scene by scene, but like where I'm going Or should I just kind of trust that I'll find my way there by going scene by scene and just work on scene two?

I think the right way to do it, the organic way to do it, is to go scene by scene. You know, how to get to Pittsburgh from New York. You know, you've got to hit that mark and you're not necessarily sure quite, quite yet of how you're going to build up to that revelation. So instead of trying to figure that out before you have gotten There. I think if. And I'm going to give you one suggestion just based on one thing you said a minute ago. I don't think you should have her putting food back in a cabinet because that does not progressively complicate the situation.

You need her to serve, she has to be doing a service thing. But you don't want to repeat a motif, okay, you know, right directly after the other one. So progressive complications mean things are getting more and more. The stakes are being raised. So, you know, you want to this next scene. You also want to think about the size of the cast in the scene. And again, this is where Suzanne Collins was really good at doing, is that she had this intuitive sense of when to bring the focus down into a three person scene or even a two person scene and then explode it out into a spectacle scene where everybody's, you know, at the big event and the television cameras are there and then bring it back. So you. It's sort of like seeing a camera's. The eye of a camera focus and pan. So you want to think about that too. As you're progressing to, you know, the end of your middle build. When the big revelation scene comes, you want to say to yourself, okay, I just did a very intense two person scene. Do I want to do another two person scene maybe? Or do I want to go big and do a spectacle scene that will give a bigger taste of just how large and how strange this dystopian world is? That's something to think about too. So not only think about the mechanics of the individual saint, think about the set design, think about how many people are on stage. You know, the great thing about the Silence of the Lambs is that Thomas Harris knew it was a slow boil, right? It was two person scene. It's Starling and Jack Crawford, and then it's, I think Starling goes to the insane asylum and she runs into four people. So the cast slowly gets larger until, you know, and then the big moment at the end of the beginning hook in Silence of the Lambs is when she literally gets on that plane and she leaves Quantico to go look at a body. So think about it in terms of, you know, if you were a movie director, do you want to have 2 shot, 2 shot, 2 shot, 2shot. Or do you want to have big wide shot into a close up? Do you want to do a David Lean kind of big, you know, big scene or a smaller David Mamet kind of confrontation scene between two guys? These are the. This is kind of like the fun thing now because you're, you start to be able to immerse yourself into your imagination. And you, Tim, are. You're Steven Spielberg, right?

You're saying to yourself, oh, yeah, that's.

How I feel about my. You're saying to yourself, well, what would make me excited to see after that scene?

So, anyway, I'm giving you a little bit more bread to chew on now because I think progressively building up to the climax of the beginning hook, which is, hey, by the way, your brother's live. That's going to be a big moment. So you remember, you're going to want to set that up. You're going to want to drop little breadcrumbs in the story as you're doing these scenes that will refer to that brother every now and then, you know.

Nice dead brother, you know, or whatever that people would say to a kid to make her feel bad about it.

Okay.

But yeah, I think let's just do the next scene and just keep asking ourselves what's going to happen next? What is unexpected? We know we're going to go there, but how can I get there in a way that is going to surprise not only my reader, but maybe me?

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. For all things Storygrid. You can go to storygrid.com and sign up for the newsletter to make sure you don't miss anything Storygrid related. If you haven't yet picked up a copy of the book, make sure you go to Amazon. Go to BlackIrishBooks.com and grab a copy of StoryGrid. If you want to find us on Twitter. We are to storygrid for any past episodes and show notes that can all be found@storygrid.com podcast thanks for continuing to listen. Thanks for sharing the show. And if you haven't yet, make sure you drop into itunes and leave a rating and review. That's a big help to us. Lastly, as I mentioned at the top of the show, if you want to come see Sean and I speak in person together, you can find that@tribeconference.com so thanks for listening and we will see you next week.