What if my writing sucks?

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. Sean Coyne is joining me soon and he is the creator of Story Grid. He's the author of the book the Story Grid, and he is an editor with 25 plus years experience helping authors write best selling books and he's sharing with me all of his secrets. Now, this is a special episode that Sean and I actually recorded in person, sitting across a table from each other. It was the first time we'd actually met in person. So it was a lot of fun for me to actually sit across from him and pepper him with all of my inane questions and the things that we talk about in this episode. The first is how to keep writing when you know your writing sucks. So I reached that wall where I was writing and I was feeling good. And then I picked up a new book and I started reading and I realized everything that was coming out of me was awful, but yet I still had to keep writing. So he walks me through how to do that. We also talk about building a strong antagonist and why that's so important to your story and how to add the right kind of fat to your writing. So it's a really great episode. It was a lot of fun for me and I know you're going to love it, so let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, I am 10,000 little over 10,000 words into my book and it was right at the 8,000 mark that I decided that all of this sucks.

So I made the mistake of I was watching the new miniseries based on Stephen King's book, 112263 and then I was really enjoying it. So I stopped so I could read the book first. And I started reading his book and I'm like, everything I'm doing is horrible. So tell me, like, what are the mental gymnastics that I can do to continue writing when I feel like everything I write is horrible?

Well, the first thing that you need to remember is that it's all about getting a first draft. So even Stephen King's first drafts are probably not anywhere. Well, they're probably pretty good, but.

He even probably has moments of major doubt. And you bring up really good point because there's a book that Steve Pressfield wrote called do the Work. And in that book he talks about a moment that people face while they're doing anything, if they're remodeling their house or if they're starting a new cupcake shop. And he calls it the belly of being in the belly of the beast. And the belly of the beast is a moment when you lose all confidence and you start to panic. And David Mamet actually writes about it in one of his books, too. And the thing is, is that everybody knows before they start a project. Oh, I know I'm probably going to reach a point where I panic. And we all think that we can prepare for it. But as Mamet writes, and I think it's in three Uses of a knife that he writes this, he says that at that moment, we all believe to our bones that this problem, this problem that we are now facing is beyond anything that we'd ever faced before. And that if everybody else just understood that this problem is so severe that there's no way we're going to beat it, then everything will be okay, and then we can quit and everybody will leave us alone. But that's the thing with every project. You're going to hit a moment of despair. So knowing that that moment is coming is a very, very good tool to prepare yourself so that when you do hit it, you say, okay. Okay, this is the belly of the beast. I know this is coming, even though I think I'm not going to be able to overcome it. What now you should do is just say, okay, maybe I won't overcome it. But what I did do before I hit this was I had a plan. Yeah. I had a day by day intention to do a specific scene or a specific task that you need to just keep doing those tasks, and all of those problems in that panic moment will slowly erode. But it's going to take another concerted effort to understand that this is a moment of resistance. It's okay. Everybody faces it. And Stephen King faces it, too. And he's such a pro at this point that he just accepts it and says, oh, hi, I know you're here, but I'm gonna keep moving on. And that's what you need to do, too.

Yeah, it's. I was able to just keep writing, but it feels like what my kids must feel like when they're trying to draw something and they're drawing it, and it's like, what comes out is not what was in their head.

Right. And.

And so I have this, and I keep running into all these issues of, like, last week we talked about specificity. You know, how much do I put in and how much do I leave out? And then I just keep running into, like, not Knowing how to put these pieces of my scene together the way that I feel like they should. And then when I go in and start messing with a scene that I've already written, I feel like I'm just, like, cobbling things together. So it just. The whole thing feels like. I think I had this idea that if I could just plan well enough, it would just come. It would just come, you know? And what I'm finding is, like, actually putting those words together, and I feel like I'm like, man, I'm using the same word over and over. Like, I use. You know, I keep having to go back and take out the. That and the justs and all these, like, filler wor.

Okay, yeah, you got to stop doing that.

This is a key point that you can never lose. You can never forget. You can't edit things that you've written in a first draft. And you have to promise yourself, once I finish this first draft of this scene, I'm not going to go back and fix it until I have an entire first draft. And the reason why. And Steve calls this covering the canvas as quickly and as you possibly can, because you're going to have plenty of time to fix the That's. And the poor word choices and the poor descriptions and the weak inciting incidents. Trust me, you will have so much time to do that that the. The thing that's going to stop you is to get rid of the editor right now. And the editor is what you instinctively rely on as your guide. You feel comfortable. You like the regimentation of the editorial mindset. You want perfection. You want to perfect something and then move on. But the real difficulty in writing is to live with imperfection. And imperfection is what a first draft is. And another thing that I always try and tell myself when I stumble into the same problems that you do is. Is beauty is imperfect. There's a wonderful short story that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, you know, 200 years ago, and I think it's called the Birthmark. And it's this very wonderful story about this man who falls in love with this beautiful woman, except she has one problem. I think I've talked about this before. She has, like, a mole that seems a little off. Not crazy off, but just a little off. So he spends all this time convincing her to remove the mole so that she will become perfect. And she's like, I don't want to do it, and I don't want to do it. But eventually, she gives in. After she marries the man, she has the mold removed and the ending payoff of the story is she dies. She gets an infection and she dies. And what Hawthorne was trying to say is that every piece and wonder in the world is imperfect and to understand. And I think Michelangelo was another one. And you know, I think he was commissioned to do a sculpture and he finished it and it was beautiful.

And the patron said, my gosh, look at that, it's perfect. So Michelangelo, of course, took a hammer and knocked a chunk out of it. And he's like, what are you doing? He goes, beauty cannot be perfect. And so you have to get to a mindset where you say to yourself, it's going to be imperfect. And my job, it's just as important to leave that stuff alone as it is to edit it later on, because editing before you finish the writing is a recipe for disaster. It's going to stop you from finishing the book and you will abandon it because you will torment yourself. Just get that first draft done. Then you can go crazy with the editor. And we've joked about this before, but put on the writer hat and put the editor hat in the closet. Okay?

So one thing, when Stephen King and on writing talks about how like he just writes and writes and writes and writes and then has to cut all this stuff out later. And then when I went back and re read the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books, like I found these parts that should have been cut out of the book.

Yeah.

Like in the first one, there's this whole. It reminded me of something in on writing where he had written this whole thing about what this guy did over the summer. And his wife's like, you need to get rid of that. He's like, and after selling a million copies, not one person emailed me, like, well, what do you do all summer? You know? And there's this one like longish scene or sequence in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo where like he has to go back to prison for a certain period of time because of the incident sighting into the story. And it talks about all this stuff he did in prison. I'm like, I don't care about any of this stuff. Like, it's not doesn't move any of the book forward. But then I'm like, oh, he probably felt like, well, my readers are going to wonder what he did while he was in jail. And it's like, no, we don't care. Okay, he went to jail. You know. So what I'm finding with me is I don't want to put in any filler. Like, I just wanted like, get straight to the point of the story and put in no filler whatsoever. And I thought of this again because we went on another trip. So we were listening to the second book in the Harry Potter series and there's this whole long scene where he goes to this party for a ghost. And it tells you all the different people at the ghost and all this gross food at the party and, like, who was there and, like walking down the hallway to get there. And it's like this really interesting setting and scene and you learn more about the world. But it has nothing to do with the story. The only part that has to do with the story is she needed for them to not be in this part of the castle where all of the other students were. She need them to be on their own, right? And so at the end of this really long scene, they're walking back by themselves and something happens that pushes the story forward. And what I'm struggling with is everything I put in my story, I feel like should push the story forward. I'm having trouble with my word count. Like, I think I'm gonna. At my current pace, I'm gonna come in at like 50,000 words and I won an 80,000 word novel. But when I go and look at my outline, I don't want to put anything in that isn't pushing the story forward. So where is this line of, like, shoe leather, like, you call it? Like, I don't want to watch somebody walk down the sidewalk and turn the doorknob. But, you know, as I read while I'm trying to write, I see all this stuff. Like when I'm reading this new Stephen King book, there's lots of that stuff. Like he's kind of showing you things that don't move the story forward, but, like, they fill in the story in a nice way. Does that make sense? What I'm asking? Like, where's that line of just like putting too much crap in your book? Or like, is that something where, like, later I can go back and add more of that filler?

I think what happens is certain writers fall in love with a particular set piece. And if you look at, you know, ironically, last night I was watching one of those. The movies with the cars, you know, the Fast. The Fast and the Furious.

Okay.

Yeah. And I think it was the latest Fast and the Furious series, but it's wonderful to watch those every now and then because you just see seven sequences. And here's the sequence where the heroes have to get out of the building with the car and they've got to. So in moments, even in that in that franchise was just built on pure action. And it's really well done, I think, because the action is fast and furious and it just keeps going. There are moments of lull in there. And. And I was saying, I was thinking to myself, okay, we need that telephone call scene with the hero calling his sweetheart to tell her, hey, I don't know if I'm gonna make it home. This is this time. I'm telling you, they're really gonna get us this time. So just I wanted to let you know I love you and tell our son, you know, so it's Paul Walker character anyway, so. And I was thinking, oh, man, do we really need that scene? And you do. You do need. And we talked about, I think this last week, you do need moments of lull, of a breather of sorts. And so a lot of this stuff that you're talking about, I want to keep the momentum moving forward in the story. I want to bang, bang, bang, hit my Progressive complication number one. Progressive complication number two. Crisis, climax, resolution. That I think is a good plan. But you also need to say to yourself, I'm gonna plan to put in some. Some small scenic story fat. And Stephen King does that too. And he has a tendency to put a lot of that in. And a great book like Misery still has some padding in there. It's got maybe 50 or 60 pages of wonderful little stuff about actually writing process. There's great passages in there about the lead characters, the way he approaches writing. And I think that was one of the things that inspired him to want to write on writing. But the reason why Stephen King leaves it in there and the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has some fat in it is the writer has to think about his or herself too. So they may or may. I bet they enjoy those passages to write those passages. And they say to themselves, okay, is this really, really essential for my book? Probably not. But I love this set piece. I love this little, little bit I did. It's like comedians sometimes. There's stuff, there's incredible buildup and there's great payoff. And sometimes some of the material doesn't quite work, but they do it anyway because it's part of a larger thematic, organic unit. Like if you watch a Louis CK One hour comedy special, there are moments when you don't quite know where he's going. He's telling something that seems, doesn't seem to fit in, and then he'll bring it back and the payoff is in the big laugh that makes all that setup work. So should you worry if you only have 50,000 words and you've got your beginning hook, middle build and ending payoff? No, you shouldn't worry about that. Get that first draft and then. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a flawed book, but there is some so much compelling stuff inside of it that the reader forgives a lot. And if your goal is to write a straight fastball that doesn't have much shoe leather in it, I think that's a really good goal. And on your second and third draft, you may say to yourself, wow, there's no. Absolutely no let up here. You know, this would be a nice place to insert something that will establish and to think about those moments as larger thematic moments in the hero's journey is a good way to think of them. So if you say to yourself, this is really moving forward very quickly, and I don't know if I've firmly established the transition between the ordinary world and the extraordinary world, maybe I could do a set piece scene where it's a little bit off of the primary thrust of the story, but it will give me a great transitional moment that will really clearly explain to the reader we are moving from the ordinary world to an extraordinary world. Here is a scene that's gonna really, really show that. Like literally the goodbye scene. Like when. When the. In every great war story, there's the goodbye scene. Yeah, the. The hero is at the train station and he's with his girlfriend and she looks at him and. And you need that goodbye scene because if you don't have it, like, what's that? It's a terrific. It's not Persuasion. Anyway. There's a great World War I story. I got to remember it because it's a really good example. They made it into a movie. Anyway, I'll try and remember it. But in the war story, you do need that moment of time when the hero is about to leave, he has to say goodbye. If he doesn't say goodbye and he just shows up, here's. Here's an example. The Deer Hunter, which is a great movie. The Deer Hunter begins with a 50 minute establishment of the ordinary world. It's 50 minutes of a wedding set in Pennsylvania in steelworker territory. It's 50 minutes of these guys going out, getting drunk, going to the wedding. The groom gets married, and then all the other guys go on one final deer hunt before they go to Vietnam. And that establishment of the world is so crucial to that movie working that we forgive the filmmaker because he's establishing where these guys came from. And then Once that wedding scene is over and those guys have finished their deer hunt, it goes to black for about a microsecond. And the next scene is Robert De Niro in the depths of the Vietnam jungle with a flamethrower burning down a village. If we didn't have that 50 minutes of setup in Pittsburgh showing where this guy came from, the extraordinary difference would not be as strong. Okay, so that's it. That's a reason why you give so much time and padding to a particular establishment of a world. So if you look at it in terms of that way and say to yourself, I'm on a fastball, it's bullet fast, you know, from beginning hook to middle build to ending payoff. Where can I give the reader a little backstory and lull that will enrichen the story and bring it depth? Because what you're talking about right now, you're writing a very, very strong externally driven thriller with a superhero, from what I understand. I haven't read any of your stuff. So the global push of your story is going to be driven by external forces, life and death, bad guys attacking good guys, good guys retaliating, all that kind of stuff. So that's your front story. That's really going to drive. Okay, so your story is primarily externally driven. People are going to want to read your book for an external great action adventure thing. So concentrating that on that purpose on your first draft is a great thing to do because that's your primary hook. That's your primary genre. If you don't hook and establish that great externally driven conflict, and if it's not fast, you're not going to satisfy your readership. Okay, now once you have have that done, you have to ask yourself a question about the internal genre in your story. Are you going to have an internal genre? Like the Martian does not have an internal genre with its protagonist? The protagonist begins the story and ends the story in exactly the same way I do.

Let me actually pull up my full scab. So my genre is man against state.

And that's in the action adventure genre.

Right. So it's action epic, man against the state. Because it's this whole thing of this giant evil corporation that she's having to infiltrate to, like, bring down from the inside.

Great.

So, and then the internal genre is worldview belief to disillusion. So the belief that the world is this kind of safe environment where the right people are in charge and you can kind of trust it to seeing that the world is broken and the wrong people are in charge. And you have to. And you can't trust anybody that's above you. That's the internal shift.

It's a disillusionment plot for the internal.

So the internal value at stake is the belief that the world is basically good. So by the end of my story, her mentor tells her from the beginning the world is basically bad, and she doesn't want to believe it. And by the end, she agrees with him. Okay, the basic idea. Yeah, that's what. But I know that the internal genre is not as important as the external genre. And the type of story that I'm telling you, well.

It'S going to be a crucial way for you to innovate your external story. So what I mean by that is the front story of the action is extraordinarily important. And when you get to questions in your second draft, or even now about a particular scene, the first question you need to ask is, is this moving my external genre story forward? Is it delivering the conventions and obligatory scenes that are required of this genre for my readership?

Yeah. And that's been like 95% of what I've thought about, planned out the story.

Great.

And that's why I feel like there's not enough fat in it. Because, like, if it wasn't that, I'm like, it's shoe leather. Get rid of it. You know? But I feel like what I was relying on was that naturally driving the internal genre, because the whole idea of the story, what keeps driving it forward is falling deeper and deeper into this hole of there's a lot of evil going on. And so if she has to deal with each of the things along the way, she's going to have to confront the fact that the way that she saw the world isn't how it really is.

Right, Right. Well, an important way in which the internal and the external come together is in viewing, for example, it's easier to talk in terms of an example than it is globally, theoretically. Okay. In the Silence of the Lambs. What makes that story, beyond the fact that it was sort of the progenitor of the serial killer thriller, what makes it so compelling and deep and moving, is in the internal genre of Clarice Starling. She starts out to be a very big believer in the FBI, and her mentor figure is Jack Crawford, who is the big cheese in this one, very sexy part of the FBI. And she believes that if he takes her under his wing and. And teaches her what he knows, that she may one day become the same status as him. So she. When she enters the world of this story sees Crawford as a pillar of virtue. He is the mentor figure who's going to teach her the things necessary to become a great FBI agent. So she believes, just by that, that assumption, the relationship between her and Crawford becomes a larger thematic metaphor. It means it's the relationship between her and society.

So, like her relationship with Crawford is like a microcosm of how she.

How she sees the world. It's a paternalistic, hierarchical meritocracy, okay, that if the father figure approves of the young daughter and helps her, she will, through merit and hard work, will attain a goal, which is to become an FBI agent. And Crawford is. It's funny, because the way Thomas Harris has Hannibal Lecter describe Crawford and the choice of his name, he will do whatever's necessary to get the bad guy. And Crawford is playing a mind game with Starling from the very, very start. The reality of the FBI is that it is not a meritocracy. It's political. It's a nightmare. It's a quagmire that will destroy somebody's ethics and morals. And we meet that figure in the guise of the guy who runs the psychiatric hospital. But Crawford is a pragmatist. He will do what's necessary to get the bad guy. And we need that kind of figure. So he says to himself, if I can get this young woman who's beautiful to goose Hannibal Lecter to give us information, we'll be able to find the killer. Do I want to mislead this woman and make her think that I'm going to be her mentor in order to get her to do what I need her to do? Yes, I will do that. He doesn't like doing it, but he does it anyway. So even though the external driven story is about finding this killer underneath, we are slowly seeing Starling leave the ordinary world of becoming an FBI recruit and becoming an FBI agent. The first third is her pretty much staying on campus, Right? She stays in the FBI Quantico world, and she does these errands for Crawford, but she doesn't go into the field with Crawford. And the transition from the. From the beginning hook to the middle build is when Crawford says to her, there's another body. You have to come with me now. And we are going to fingerprint. I want you to fingerprint this dead body in West Virginia. So they literally get on a plane and leave the ordinary world into the extraordinary darkness of Buffalo Bill's world. And there's a moment where there's some padding. You feel like maybe Harris is playing this whole getting on the airplane. Do we really need to see Starling being pulled out of class by one of the guys to get on the airplane? Yes, we do, because it's like the goodbye scene in a war story. We need that transitional moment where the woman literally packs her bags. She literally packs her bags, gets onto a plane and goes elsewhere. And she has been being taken there by her mentor figure. I'm going to make one suggestion to you just not knowing anything about your story, but the mentor figure in your story needs to be dynamic. So at the beginning, you mentioned to me, at the beginning of your story, the mentor says to the young.

The world isn't what you think it is. It's not as good in black and white as you think it is. Trust me, he should not be doing that or she should not be doing that. Because you need to look at the point of view of that mentor figure and think of them in terms. Just to use the Crawford example, how is my mentor. Can I make my mentor transition to. In a sort of a fluid pattern with my protagonist? So not only do you have your antagonist who represents the negative theme of what the protagonist is going through, but you need to think of your mentor. You need. Because the mentor figure is such a. We all love the mentor figure because we all want guidance. But we also know that if you have no effect upon your mentor, that you. Your education and your journey through your life is not helping anybody else. So the mentor should, in my opinion, if you can, make the mentor have a change. Yeah.

My plan was to take the mentor from caring about nobody and nothing else except destroying the company, this evil organization, because they did some evil things to him in the past. And he sees her as his way to do it. But by the end of the book, he actually cares about her and comes in to save her at the end, even when it hurt. His overall objective, that was my.

That's pretty good.

Was to have him move from not caring about anybody or anything, including himself, except for bringing this down to at the end, he steps in to save.

Her at the risk of the corporation continuing.

Right.

Perfect. Okay, that works.

And so. Because what I.

So she has an effect on the mentor?

Yes. The only reason he manipulate, like, you know, I don't want to go too deep into my own story, but the whole idea is she didn't even know much about what she was getting into in this company. And behind the scenes, he manipulated it so she would end up there so that he could get her to do what he wants her to do. Right. And so at the very beginning when she first meets him is he's the one that rips her out of the new world or her world, because he's like, look, you're going into this and you have no idea what you're getting into, but I'm going to help you survive it. Right. So he kind. He sets it up so she gets stuck in the situation, but she doesn't realize that he steps in and was like, look, this is a real situation you're getting into and I'm going to help you get through.

Right.

And then hands her. Her object of desire, which is her whole life was ruined when her brother disappeared early on. But she never really knew what happened. All she cared about was getting out of her family because it completely fell apart.

Right.

So her escape out of her family was school and getting a good job out of school. And so she gets this job and. And he steps in and says, your brother actually disappeared at this company. Don't you want to find out what happened to him? And that's what she. He uses to get her to help him bring down the company is like hands. Or her brother was at this company. And she sees it as a coincidence when he set up the whole thing from the time it happened 10 years ago. But what he didn't expect was to actually start caring about her and try to get. Keep her from getting hurt in place the first process. Right. Because he was planning on just burning her down to get what he wanted.

Sure. Sure.

Is that enough?

I think it works.

Okay.

Yeah, I think so.

What you're saying is like every character, it's better the more characters you can have change throughout the book.

No, I'm not saying that.

No.

Key, key characters.

Okay.

A lot of people, like somebody wrote me an email the other day and said you said that all characters have to. All protagonists have to change. And I disagree. That's not true. And the Martian and blah. And that's true.

Yeah.

You don't have to have the protagonist have a huge change, but what you do have to have for the story to have any resonance beyond just a great fun action super adventure. I mean, even Iron man changes. Robert Downey Jr. Changes in that story. He goes from the cad to the caring. Yeah. But in the Martian, for example, you know, the lead character doesn't change, but everybody around him. Yeah, yeah.

His whole crew changes.

They go back for him.

Yeah. And they perform Mutiny, which is what they've been trained since forever not to do. Exactly.

So think stories. And I say this all the time. Stories about are about change, how we confront turbulence in our own lives. We use stories to help us get through difficult times or great times that we're unprepared for. So you've heard of this, you know, the cautionary tale. You know, the cautionary tale is about trying to get people from making mistakes that other people have made. I mean, Oedipus came up with a cautionary tale, and Sophocles is. Oedipus is like one of the great cautionary tales is. It's the. So my point is that the mentor and the mentee, the protagonist and the mentor, have a very close relationship. It's a very parental figure. And the thing is, Crawford changes, but Hannibal Lecter does not change in the story. Hannibal Lecter is oddly, far more consistent a character than anybody else in the book. And he's actually. Even though he's the epitome of evil, he's the only person who doesn't lie to Starling. Yeah. So the great thing that Harris did was he switched, and he switched roles there. He had the very attractive Crawford. So everybody who starts reading that book, and it opens with a meeting between Crawford and Star, and this is the meeting every one of us has always had in our lives. It's when you want to get a job, you want to ask your potential wife's father for permission to marry his daughter. You want something from somebody who is at a higher level of status than you are. And there's nothing more exciting and flattering and wonderful than when that figure looks upon the protagonist and says, not only am I going to help you, I am going to be your mentor. They don't literally say that. They do that by actions. So that relationship is very intense. And being able to manipulate it in your story in a way that's unique and innovative. And this is all about the internal genre, too. This is what's going on underneath the surface of your action adventure, external plot. So to think about those moments, how can I do a set piece or a scene that will feature a transition between the ordinary world to the extraordinary world, or the transition that my mentor goes through? What is the critical moment when Crawford changes? Because Crawford is all about being a stoic, doing what's necessary to move, to get rid of all the external stuff that is going to stop him from doing his job, getting rid of that and doing whatever is necessary in order to get his job done. He stops being that stoic at the death of his wife. And that is, not coincidentally, the end of the mental build. That's the transitional moment from moving from the extraordinary world to the super extraordinary world of literally going into the devil's lair and getting Buffalo Bill. And that requires Starling to go rogue. She has no backup from the FBI. The only person supporting her is Crawford, who says, you know what? Go. Go to Cleveland. Here's my checkbook. Here's every dollar I have in my pocket.

Go.

You need to go. And that's how he changes.

Oh, man.

So, no, don't despair. The reason why I'm saying all this is that what you are doing right now is the right path. You are concentrating full bore on your external story. That is an action adventure, man against state story, that you need to hit certain demarcations in your storyline. And you're 10,000 words in, and you think, oh, my gosh, I'm already into my middle build, and I maybe have 30 to 40,000 left. Is 50,000 really an epic man against state story? I don't think it is. Oh, my God. What am I gonna do?

Yeah.

What I'm saying is get that 50,000 words done and then put the grid on it. See how your story is moving. And guess what? You're gonna discover. You're gonna find moments. Oh, here's a moment that I can really juice up. Let me think of a great scene to insert here that will move my hero's journey and add more depth to it. Maybe my mentor. I need a scene where the mentor changes.

How does that change come about? And I bet Thomas Harris thought on this. How am I going to get Crawford to change? Oh, I know. I'll put his wife in a coma. And at the very beginning of the book, I'll show how he has to take care of his wife, who's literally in between life and death. Right?

Yeah.

Yeah. And then when she dies, that's what's gonna change him.

Well, this comes back to the question I've had before of, like, always, it seems like the best way to. And this. I know this is something after the fact. And I'm gonna have to play between having. You know, because most. Most writers aren't having these conversations while they're trying to get their first draft out. Like, they're just getting the first draft out. Or maybe they are.

But no, they're. They're. What they do. Here's what happens is they get stuck in a moment that you're in right now, and they don't have the resources to talk to anybody like me who can say it's going to be okay, because it will be okay. Yeah, just get the tasks stuff.

Well, what I'm.

Stay the course.

What I'm thinking is like, what it seems like we always come to. This is the way to. So it feels like, you know, most books are going to be like, you know, you can't see as I do this, but like this kind of undulating up and down, you know, these books and the way.

Cosine or sine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And we see that right where like the scene should be minus deposited than, you know, it should be that. But then when you go back through and. And need to make the book better, you basically grab the tops and bottoms of those things and stretch them up and down. Like, you know, I need Crawford to change. So what's the absolute worst thing that I can do to him? I'm going to kill his wife.

But, you know, aggressively.

Right, well, you go back and add it in, right? Where like. So let's assume some things. Like maybe Thomas Harris didn't even put anything about his wife in until he got two thirds of the way into the book and was like, oh, I need to.

Crawford guard is not coming off very well.

Yeah, so I'm gonna kill his wife. But to kill his wife properly, I gotta start her dying at the beginning and put her in a coma. And so you go back and add that in. And that's what I've been seeing too, that Rowling did so well. Like, the main kind of item in book two is this diary. It's Tom Riddle's diary. And it's what kind of forces everything forward at the end and at the very beginning of the book or at the. When we're getting close to the end of the beginning. Hook. All the kids are going to school, and it's this real funny scene where they keep having to go back because everybody forgets things. And one of the things that was forgotten was the. Was the sister's diary. Well, that's the diary that shows up at the end. And so she drops in this diary where you're reading it and you. You just read it like it was one of four other things that was forgotten. It doesn't even pop in your head until the end. You're like, that's the diary from the beginning set up. And I'm sure, like, when she got the diary, she's like, oh, I need to put it in the beginning. So I'm going to add this scene where they keep forgetting things. And one of the things that are forgotten is the diary. So then it looks like it feels.

Like if she didn't do that. What will happen is something called a deus ex machina.

Okay.

And there's that film. And deus ex machina means that God, like, things happen at the very end to tie up your problems.

Okay.

So she probably pan. Not panic, but she's stuck in the diary at the end of the book to solve the problem. Then she said to myself, herself, oh, my gosh, I didn't establish the diary.

Yeah, yeah.

So having it come here is like, God dropped the diary in the middle of my story to solve my problem. So I need to set that up right. If I do it very well, it will pay off, and people will say, oh, that makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

I just.

It's been so fun as we've done the podcast and have gotten into writing. And then as I read, it's like.

As you see the craftsman's edges, you see the tools that they use, because.

I only read, you know, of course, we only read from start to finish. And so at the end, we're like, oh, my God, how'd they pull that off? And then now, as a writer, like, looking at it as a writer now, I'm like, oh, they just went in. They're allowed to just add it back in at the beginning before it goes to the public. Like, they don't. They didn't write it linearly. They wrote it, you know, go back and forth all the way through.

Right.

But so it's. It's fun because I've. As I outlined the book, I kept doing that where I'd hit a spot, and I'm like, okay, I need to do this here, but I need to establish that earlier. So I go back, and I, like, tweak something the way it is here so that it wouldn't be, like, out of the blue. But it was interesting. I was reading that how to write a blockbuster novel. Like we.

Al Zuckerman.

Yeah. And he talked about how, like, if you don't put in basically insane coincidences that would never happen in real life, people won't enjoy your book. There. There's always got to be these things. And that's where I've struggled because I'm such a. Like, I read books, and I don't mind them happening in the books I read of, like, well, that would never happen. But, you know, we suspend our disbelief to do it. But as I plan out my own book, I want everything to be extremely logical. Like, I don't want, like, to look at. Be like, well, that would never happen, you know, and so it's like, that's.

Remember we were talking last week about the MacGuffin. That's where a lot of people get really over the top crazy.

Okay.

Is. Is making their MacGuffin so logical and so perfect that it bores the hell out of people because there's. There's a level of uncertainty and strangeness in our world. And to ignore that and to make everything so rational and logical does not feel real.

Which is funny because it's like, you know, you're walking through the airport in Dallas and you bump into the guy you haven't seen in 15 years. What are the odds of him being in Dallas at the same time? So we do have those in real life, but yeah, it's hard to.

Like, Hitchcock was the master of that. Like, north by Northwest is a great movie, and it's simply the man who is mistaken for someone else. Roger Thornhill is played by Cary Grant is so great. And he's mistaken for the spy because he had on a gray suit and was carrying a black briefcase. So the bad guys thought he was the spy.

But there's that Bill Murray movie.

Oh, the man who Didn't Know. Or. Yeah, he thinks the man who Knew Too Little.

Yeah. Because he thought he was. He thought he was in like an act play, but he happened to pick up the phone at the wrong time. He got sucked into, like, this real thing. Yeah, I love that movie. There's one of my guilty pleasures.

Yeah. Those are the kind of movies that they initially don't perform all that well because they're a little bit too intelligent for their own. I mean, like doing a satire comedy about a MacGuffin. Whoever greenlit that. But the thing works, right? So people watch it. It's like all those movies that bomb and then become cult classics. Now the studios don't want to do any Bond movies anymore, but then we don't. It's hard to find those cult classics because everything is so perfectly wired to appeal to the least common denominator. That's why you have Iron Man 9 and Avengers 37.

Yeah.

But people keep going to watch.

They do. They do. That's the power of action.

Yeah.

So just. Just to give you a little bit of confidence and to inspire you, the action story, and I've written about this a lot, is very difficult. And people say, oh, yeah, it's so easy to just do those silly, you know, Iron man, you know, that is really difficult to innovate an action story that is so purely action driven. The Fast and the Furious franchise keeps reinventing and keeps redoing and they keep coming up with. I mean, the. What the last one was, Was it.

Like some car going between buildings?

Three buildings. Right.

Three buildings.

And it was believable? Oh, I mean, it wasn't believable, but it was fun. Because Vin Diesel, the man with no expressions, I'm going to floor it. I'm going to unleash the beast, or whatever he says. But then they come up with this crazy MacGuffin about God's eye software. And there's a woman who's this genius who's also really attractive, and she's in the. You know, she's in the passenger seat of the car with a laptop, you know, basically controlling satellite communications all over the globe. It's ridiculous, right? There's no way that's going to happen. But because the action is so propulsive and the inciting incidents and the progressive complications and the crises and the climaxes and the resolutions are so tightly controlled, you can't help but be in the world and root for that car to keep getting away from the helicopter.

So what goes wrong? But at the same time, you've seen those movies that don't pull it off, you know.

Yes.

Because there's those exact same things where it's bigger than life and all this kind of stuff, but the whole time you're kind of like.

There'S a lot of alchemy, and it's about casting. It's about a particular. Because the great thing about the Fast and Furious is it has something for everyone. The characters that are in that. Everybody. There's somebody somebody can relate to. Like, certain people relate to Vin Diesel, certain people relate to Paul Walker, certain people Michelle Rodriguez. There's, you know, it's not a coincidence this. This group of six or seven people encapsulate sort of six or seven different kinds of personalities. And, you know, they probably have really smart psychologists saying, okay, let's get that one. You know, Vin Diesel is perfect for this role, but you're not gonna put him in Othello, you know, because he's that perfect kind of character. Oh, the guy who can't talk really that well, Uses his muscle. Yeah, yeah. And he does it perfectly. But some people, if they're miscast, this is the genius of the casting director. They're like, I don't know that Jamie Foxx could play that role perfectly. Jamie Foxx could play this other guy. But the Vin Diesel role is almost. Vin Diesel is the perfect. You know.

Yeah, I've read or seen those things where, like, people Write. I was watching Write for a star. Yes. And Steve always writes a director.

Think about the stars. Who's gonna play this part? Yeah. It's gonna help you characterize that archetype because you know what they are? They're Jungian archetypes of human behavior.

Okay.

So it might. That's like deep psychological stuff to describe what Vin Diesel is. But Vin Diesel is a particular American kind of figure that people around the globe recognize immediately. He's descendant of Clint Eastwood and the man, you know, without a name and those great Sergio Leon Westerns. He's part of a long tradition of the strong silent American who just gets shit done.

Yeah. And that's. Do you think that's helpful in, like, writing a novel, too?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. If you want a great think about. I always say darkness is the key. Think about your antagonist very strongly before you start going nuts about your protagonist, because the greater. The more time and effort you put into creating the force of evil, the force of darkness, you're gonna just have to create an even better protagonist. But if you start with the protagonist and you fall in love with the protagonist, then the force of evil you're kind of afraid to make too great because then you might. Your protagonist. It might not be believable that they could overcome that force.

Okay.

But if you're thinking like horror directors and horror storytellers, they intuitively know, man, I gotta think up a Freddy Krueger kind of terror. I've got to think of the worst possible Hannibal Lecter. Like, is there anybody worse than. You go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, you give them your deepest thoughts, and he turns out. And he eats you.

Yeah, well, because my. My whole thing in my story is that. Well, because what. I want to have this overarching evil that she'll eventually have to overcome and. But she has to kind of at least five bucks. Right. Well, that's the whole idea. But she has to kind of work her way up. Yeah. Evil. And she just is taking care of little pieces of it to get to the big one. So I thought more, though, about that overarching evil than the one particular. Particular one she's dealing with in this book. And I should probably.

Don't forget about your evil, too. Is that the evil has to make a good point. You know what I mean? The evil. I don't want to get too political, but, you know, Donald Trump is appealing to a group of people that are very dissatisfied with the United States in the way it's going right now. And he appeals to them because he reinforces their disappointment. So he's capitalizing upon so much discontent in the country. And the other people who are in the race, they're just, they didn't sort of latch on to that dissatisfaction in a way that is very in your face and so amazingly heated. So he wasn't afraid to go dark. Donald Trump is not afraid of going dark if it means it will further his political ambitions. And you have to think about your, your antagonist in a much similar way. The antagonist needs to have a worldview that kind of makes sense.

So because like one of the like becoming a cliche at this point is the person that wants to destroy the world or wipe out the human race is because we basically become locusts and we take, we're just destroying this person planet and the next step is to just take us all out because look at us, you know, and like this is. This was in Matrix, you know, of just.

Well that I think the Matrix was, was far more nuanced than that because the Matrix genius was in creating an artificial intelligence that was almost symbolic and metaphorical of evolution. So if we create a thing and deus ex machina or ex machina, the movie is like this too. Really great movie. There's a movie that has an example, a great action plot on a very, very small stage that is believable and exciting, but does it's made up of three characters the entire screen time. There's four really. There's kind of two AI robots and two men. And it's great story about politics between men and women. The genius role, the mentor role, the protagonist who wants to be a do gooder and how those guys are no match for two artificially intelligent female bots. They will always win.

Well, we talked about that. You know, the antagonist has to be like his view on the world has to at least make sense. Right. And so this idea that humanity has used up their usefulness and is now destroying everything so it makes sense to just get rid of all of us, you know, and I'm seeing that in like the latest X Files reboot, the latest Mission Impossible movie. It's like that you can make that argument that this world would be better off without humans. And it's like. Yeah, I get that. Right. And so is that kind of what you mean of like the point the antagonist makes is like a good point? You can at least understand what they're saying.

Well, the great point of Darth Vader in the early Star wars movies is we need order. You know, we all can't be special Little fish and have our own little aquariums. We need somebody to keep things in order. And this is sort of the argument that a lot of really great capitalists make. Steve Jobs was an autocratic despot. The guy controlled his company from his own personal vision. If you have no vision in your company, forget about it. Then it will degenerate into a bureaucratic mess where everybody's fighting for political favor and nothing ever gets done. That's a really good point that you can extrapolate to a story. How can I make my bad guy make a really good point? I think we'd all agree you need a leader with vision, somebody who will say, we need to move from here to here. Phones are terrible. Cellular phones are terrible. I'm going to create a new product that will make cell phones superfluous. I'm going to create the perfect machine that will not only be a phone, it'll be a camera. It will be a global positioning system. It will teach you things. It will talk to you. It will make you feel comfortable with yourself. You won't have to type. All you have to do is use one finger and swipe things. And if you look at it and you say, what? What was Steve Jobs speech. You know, this is the great thing about the antagonist needs to have a great speech speech in every great action story. So you need a moment where the antagonist can basically lay it on the line. Look, you idiot, don't you see this? If we don't do this, this is going to happen. If that happens, this will happen. So he rationally takes and walks the reader or the viewer through this dystopian, horrible thing that will happen if he or she doesn't get their way. And you know what? You know who did this very well. Was, you know, in Gone Baby Gone, a great novel by Dennis Lehane, and Ben Affleck made the feature film on it. And it was this amazing story about this poor little girl who was being essentially abused by her mother. She didn't really care about her. And so. So one of the guys said, Morgan Freeman in the movie, who was a police detective, staged her quote, unquote death so that he could raise her in an appropriate environment. So the whole story is about this detective who's hired to investigate the murder of this little girl. And the climax of the story is, the girl's not dead. Yeah, the girl was taken away from her mother because somebody saw that their mother was not a good mother and decided that he would be a better father and a better figure for that little girl. To grow up in. And guess what? That's a good argument. Have you ever walked down the street and seen some unfit father slapping his son and saying to yourself, that father should not have a child. That child should be taken away from that father? But guess what? You can't do it. And the climax of that book, which is very, very disturbing, is that the detective says, sorry, dude, that's not your child. That child has to go back to his mother. And he takes that child and he gives it back to the abusive mother, who looks at the child, goes, oh, great, she's back now. Anyway, I'm going to the bath, and that's the end of the story. And justice is served. But it's a painful justice, but it's a justice nonetheless. We cannot take children away from people because we think that we'd be better for that.

And that's the example of the bad guy. Well, the external story ends in a positive, but the internal story ends.

Exactly. And that's why we. It's right in the solar plexus. When you're at the end of it, you're like, oh, my gosh, that poor little girl. But you know what? A lot of people grow up with parents who aren't the best, and they become great people. You cannot take a child away from her family just because you don't like the way they're being raised. And this is so the bad guy in that movie is Morgan Freeman, who ends up. You have so much sympathy for him. Yeah. But guess what? He's the bad guy. He took a child away from their mother and he staged a death because he thought he was better than that mother. He was being a despot. He was saying, I know better than you do, and I'm going to take away all of your rights and take away your child from you. And that is wrong.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast again. This was the one where Sean and I were actually sitting across from each other at my kitchen table, and you may have even gotten to hear my dog barking in the background. That's a feature that wasn't a mistake. So I hope you really enjoyed the episode. I enjoyed recording it with Sean. And next week we'll be back on Skype where we won't have as much background noise, hopefully. So, anyway, thank you for listening. As always. You can catch everything Story grid related@storygrid.com if you want to see any of the past episodes or the show notes or the downloads we referenced in these episodes, all of that is@storygrid.com podcast. You guys are awesome and keep adding iTunes reviews and ratings even though I'm not begging for them every week. So I'm not going to beg for them now. Even though you probably should go leave a rating or review on itunes if you haven't yet, continue to share it with your friends, continue to share in any online author groups you have. This is what keeps us going. This helps us keep from having advertising on here and we can continue to share these episodes with you. So thanks for listening, thanks for your support of the show, and we will see you next week.