Where do great story ideas come from?

Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. My name is Tim Grall. I'm your host and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me soon is Sean Coyne. He's the creator of Storygrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with 25 plus years experience. And he is helping me learn how all of this storytelling stuff works. In this episode, we talk about where good book ideas actually come from and how you can come up with them and, and then we dive into character development and how you can create characters that are realistic even when they're characters that are nothing like you. And I have a lot of questions around that and he answered them really well. So I'm excited to share this with you. This is a great episode. I know you're going to love it, so let's jump in and get started.

So I want to talk today a little bit about where story ideas come from. And from what I've learned just reading about other people, this is like the question writers hate the most. So I figure I'll ask it. So in your experience working, you know, writing yourself, working with so many writers, like, how do you, like, where do these ideas come from and how do you know when you've landed on one that's worth pursuing?

Well, that's, I get this question a lot and it's a very good one. I'm going to answer it by recommending a really terrific American Masters edition that had Philip Roth. And the reason why I'm going to recommend this is that Philip Roth, you know, he's a preeminent writer in American letters. And everybody talks about what an amazing literary figure he is. And what was really great about this American Masters, it's about an hour long documentary about him and he, he's basically speaking the entire time. So it's like getting a direct contact with a terrific writer. And the question came up now, his famous book, the one that really took him to the stratosphere, was a novel called Port Noise Complaint. And it's a classic novel which was pretty revolutionary in its time in the 1970s because it was a very frank.

A funny look at sexuality, among other things. It's a coming of age story. And so in the documentary they're asking Roth, you know.

The question that you just asked me, how did you, how did you come to write this book? Where do you get your ideas, etc. And what was fascinating to me about it was that Roth was in this place. He had just divorced his first wife. And things weren't going very well for him, and he hit a wall of writer's block in the 1960s. He wrote a collection of stories, one of which was called Goodbye, Columbus, which became a terrific movie. It's a great story, and it's very, very much about his existence as a younger man. Anyway, so they asked him, how did you come to write Portnoy's Complaint? And he said, well, I was going out with a lot of friends because I was really depressed. And they were all, you know, remarking about how funny I was. And I never really thought myself as a very funny person, but I was under analysis at the time. He was seeing a counselor, a psychologist. And so I tell them stories about, you know, the experiences with the psychiatrist and what I was going through. And they were. They thought it was hilarious. So I was at this place in my life where I had writer's block. I didn't know what to write, and I figured, what am I going to do? And what he decided to do was. And we talked about narrative device a couple of episodes ago, and what he basically did is he solved the problem of narrative device, and he solved the problem of his writer's block by looking at his life in terms of a story. So he said to himself, in my own private life, I'm at this crossroads, and people are finding all of my experiences about going to the psychiatrist very funny. Why don't I write a book where I can be very honest and talk about things that are off the top of my head that are very interesting to me? And what I'll do is I will write as if I am. My lead character is talking to a psychiatrist. And that's what Portnoy's Complaint is. It's this brilliant examination of narrative device. It was a revolutionary idea that the entire story is told as if the lead character is speaking to a psychiatrist. And the reason why I bring this up as an answer to your question about where you get your ideas is that Roth, instead of extrapolating and going external and thinking about, you know, very large what ifs, like what if there was an earthquake in Los Angeles on the Fourth of July, for example, he went internally and he went in his own life experience, and he tried to figure out a way to tell a story that was personal to him, that other people had. Had said to him that this is interesting to me. You are a funny guy. Why don't you write in this way? So this is the way writers often find a way out of their writer's block. And Find an idea that is so specific to them that they're capable of sitting down and writing in that sort of, you know, very heady, banging out 5,000 words a day, 10,000 words a day, and not even really thinking about it. That sweet spot that all writers are always love when they sit down at 9 o' clock in the morning and they, they lift their head up and at six o' clock in the afternoon, at six o' clock at night, and they've got 12,000 words of copy in front of them. And it didn't seem that difficult to write. And all of all the writers that I've worked with, they always say this. You know, there was this funny guy I met a long time ago and, you know, I decided to write a novel based upon what he would have experienced if he were in a certain situation. So when you're looking for an idea, think of things in your own personal experience that sort of zing you internally and make you get butterflies and think, oh boy, I'm not really sure if anybody would really want to read about that specific element of my life because these are the things that are most passionate and powerful to you personally when you sit down to write them here. I'm just going to give you another quick story about Tom Wolfe. Now, Tom Wolfe is the famous, you know, new journalism writer. And he, he was just a regular beat reporter for newspapers for years. And then there was a newspaper strike in the 1960s and he had to get a job because he was broke. And he got Esquire to send him to Los Angeles to do a story about custom made cars. So he was so excited, he goes out there and, and he takes all these great notes. He's got notebook after notebook of these notes of all these experiences he's had looking at these custom made cars. But then he sits down to write the piece and he can't bang it out. He just can't bang it out. So he has to call his editor and apologize and say, I'm not going to make my deadline. I don't know what to do. I just can't seem to write this piece. So the editor takes pity on him and he said, look, we already spent $10,000 getting photographs of all these cars. Just write me a letter and give me all of your research and I'll get some hack in the back room to bang out, you know, a story based upon your research. So Wolf, freed from the, freed from the shackles of having to produce some finished, perfect piece of work, he sits down and he writes 40 pages single spaced of his experiences that are just fantastic and hilarious. And it freed him to be himself. So he sends that to the editor and it's like, dear Bob, here's what happened when I went to Los Angeles. And from that point forward, the editor read it and he said, this is a great piece. And it was sort of Tom Wolfe's introduction to being himself.

So the way to find the best ideas is, you know, psychologically to learn how to be yourself. And once you start to learn and trust yourself in the way you write your naturally. And the more experience you have doing that, the more these ideas that happen to you in your own personal life will come to you and you will be able to create things that you never imagined before.

Now, in On Writing, Stephen King talks a ton about, you know, quote, telling the truth. And I don't know, I kind of have this picture of like the tortured writer, I guess, in my head of like they're pulling from these horrible things that happen in their life and they share those truthfully on the page. Like, how prevalent is that in like actual writing? Like in you see the movies and people like turn these, these horrible stories into a book or something like that. Like, is that a prevalent way? Because then I think about like I went through that masterclass with James Patterson and I don't think he's tortured over his writing, you know.

No, he's having fun.

Yeah. Like.

I guess I wonder. Cause now is like, I'm keeping a journal of like book ideas and things that pop in my head and I'm just, you know, I'm struggling with like, okay, which ones are worth the time and which ones are not. And do I need to somehow like pour the tortured parts of my soul into my books to make them good?

I don't necessarily think that's true. I think trauma, Trauma is a nice well to go to if you're struggling with creating conflict in a particular scene or if you need a climactic moment in a particular act or, you know, in your three part structure. And you need a Big bang moment. But I'll just wing another story here. And Mike Judge. Now Mike Judge is the, the creator of Beavis and Butthead. He's also the creator of King of the Hill. And Mike Judge was, you know, he was raised like a lot of us were. He got a degree in mathematics, he became an engineer, he, he was working at some sort of engineering firm. And he actually created that wonderful movie Office Space. Yeah, I mean, it's just hilarious the stuff that Mike Judge has created So I was listening to him on Howard Stern a couple of weeks ago, and Howard Stern had asked him, how did you come up with Beavis and Butthead? I mean, that's just so out of the blue. Where did you get those voices? And so Judge says, well, there was this really funny moment in high school where there was a new. New teacher came into the building, and it was. She was a former Dallas Cowboy cheerleader. And he said that one of the very strange guys in this class was just, you know, overwhelmed by this.

This arrival of this beautiful stroke of luck.

Yeah, exactly. So this. This guy had this very nervous laugh. So Mike Judge thought it was so funny, and he just sort of lodged it in the back of his brain. And he said to himself, and Mike Judge is a wonderful mimic. So he just put that in the back of his brain. And like, three years later, he was coming up with this idea of Beavis and Butthead, which is sort of these two high school losers who draw cartoons during, you know, school and are kind of goofballs. And when he was creating these cartoons, that laugh of that nervous laugh of that kid, you know, the Beavis laugh, came to Mike Judge, and he said, oh, that's definitely Beavis. You know, I'm going to use that personal experience of that strange guy in the front of the class who was overwhelmed by his excitement by this teacher, and I'm going to put that to use in my art. And so Mike Judge is not someone who's looking at trauma, and he's looking at the funny comedic elements of life, but they're often traumatic, so you don't have to sit around and walk around as a tortured artist and try and plumb the depths of your soul. In order to inspire you to tell a good story. What you need to do is to become engaged. If you become engaged and you think a certain thing is interesting or funny, you have to trust that. Because we all experience things every day. Every day in our life, we walk down the street and we see a zillion different things. And there are certain things that lodge in your brain that are interesting to you and you don't know why. And the fact that you have a notebook now and you're writing things down, that's a really good idea, because we don't always remember those funny moments when somebody's, you know, trying to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks and ends up sneezing, and snot goes all over the. You know, all those funny things you can put to use in your fiction. And when Stephen King Talks about telling the truth. That's what he's talking about. He's saying to himself, how can I use my personal experiences in ways that are truthful to the story? You bring the truth of everyday experience to your storytelling. That doesn't mean that you just go out and. And tape record somebody's conversation and call that dialogue. That is not dialogue. That is people talking.

So it's a very. A lot of writers enjoy the, you know, the sturm and drang of their trauma. And if you're a writer, and that's why you. You want to write, to show the world all the difficult things that you've experienced, you should probably get. Seek professional help.

Before you waste a lot of time being a writer. But that doesn't mean that if a certain thing has happened to you and you can meld it into a larger theme story about courage or about love or about jealousy or about power, the smallest kernel of an instance in somebody's life can, can create, you know, great works of art. Harold Pinter would write very small stories that had very global, deep thoughts beneath them. So I'm not sure if I'm helping you or not, but I think the important thing is to. Is to notice what's going on in your world and to notice those moments that are interesting to you. I'm pretty, pretty confident other people will be interested in those moments too, if you cherry pick those ideas and you put them and place them in specific spots in your story. Now, when I'm an editor and I'm going through somebody's story and I discover a problem.

I'll generally try and offer a solution by using something in my own life. Now, my life and your life are two completely different things. But if I say to you, oh, it's like the other day when I was at the coffee shop and this happened. Yeah. You might not have experienced that, but you'll be able to say, oh, yeah, oh, well, that kind of reminds me of the time that I went to the beach with my son. And that's the way you can use those moments in your life to solve specific problems. And if you have sort of an inventory of interesting little specific truthful anecdotes and people that you've known and strange little peccadilloes of behavior that will add truth and meaning and specificity to your work. That's what Stephen King was talking about, I think.

Yeah. It's interesting you say that.

This is a.

A little bit of a tangent, but, you know, since we've been doing this podcast and you know, learning all this stuff I've taken to when people ask me advice, I think of something that has happened. I tell the story, and then I just don't say anything else.

And have stopped trying to give specific advice and just tell whatever story pops in my head. And the other day, this guy, he's going through a real tough time, and he asked me specific advice on something, and I was really nervous about. I didn't feel like I should give advice in that situation. So I just told this story that I didn't think really applied to it. And he goes, oh, I should totally do X, Y and Z. Which, again, had nothing to do with the story. But I. I'm finding, like, as you keep reiterating this power of story, I'm seeing it show up.

Yeah.

In, like, every area of life. Is that over? And, like, I've, you know, just that what's. What's ringing true in just my overall personal life is that idea of trusting the reader, you know, trusting the person on the other end and just kind of opening up this space with a story so they can translate it into what they already know they should do.

Yes, that's true.

Anyway.

That's true.

So I, you know, I've been thinking about that idea as you were talking about the idea of, you know, using these. These personal stories and thinking about how this applies to the character development thing. Because I, you know, I'm like, well, you know, I've never been a mass murderer, and so how do I put myself in the shoes of a mass murderer to then create a believable character? And, like, what kind of advice would you give there as far as, like, like you've said over and over, like, you know, 70% of readers are women, so put women in your story. I'm like, I don't know how women make decisions. Like, you know, how. How do you. How should writers, like, write characters that are truthful but are outside of, you know, their own personal experience that they can draw from?

Well, there's two parts to it. There's your own personal experience, and then there's analytical research. And to be a. To be a wonderful writer is to be a student of psychology. And what I've discovered is a lot of writers that I know who are very successful, whether or not they're multi millionaires is besides the point. I mean, successful storytellers, they have somewhere in their past some psychology course. And I write a lot about stuff that I think is interesting. And a lot of what I think is interesting has to do with Behavior, human behavior. And that's what psychology is. So I write a lot about Maslow and the hierarchy of needs. And I read a lot about Jung and.

Socrates and all those sort of deep thinking people from the past, Freud, who have thought about what motivates people to do what they do. And if you were to write and this is, you know, the story Grid analyzes the Silence and the Lambs. Now, when you read the Silence and the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill.

Are so believable as characters. And it's not because Thomas Harris is a serial killer that we know of. No, he's absolutely not.

I have never met him. But I do know people who do know him. And they say he's one of the most charming, nicest guys on the planet. But what is interesting about Thomas Harris is that before he became a novelist, he was a reporter for the Associated Press. And at one point he was working in Texas, I think, even before he got to the Associated Press. And he was working the crime beat. And so his experience was, you know, watching these crime scenes and going to these crime scenes and reporting them. And he probably got fascinated by what motivated people to do such horrible things. And he read a lot, obviously. And Hannibal Lecter is the consummate psychiatrist. This is a guy who knows how people behave at a level that none of us could really understand. And he's also a sociopath. He's a Nietzschean uberman who doesn't believe in the everyday human notions of right and wrong. Now, I'm going off a bit of a tangent here, but my point is, is that if you want to write believable and truthful characters, this is another element that Stephen King is talking about. You need to know what motivates people. You need to know, and you have to do a little self exploration. What motivates you, what's interesting to you? How do you behave under certain situations? And the thing that I've discovered recently, very recently that I think is fascinating is this through a lot of psychological experiments, the, like the Stanford prison guard experiment, the. I forget, the Stanley Milgram experiments on people shocking other people. What. What psychiatrists and psychologists have discovered over the last hundred years is that behavior is contextual. Context is everything we are all capable of doing. Very, very strange, horrific, wonderful, all kinds of different behaviors based upon the context in which we are living. So when you're writing a story, and we've talked before about characterization and how, you know, if somebody were to read the story grid, they're not going to get advice about how to create, you know, journals about your characters and their past histories and all that stuff. I firmly believe that character is action and that the actions of your characters are what define them. It's not what they say, it's what they do. And that is a crucial, crucial thing to remember as a writer. And the other thing is contradiction. Think about how your characters say one thing and do another, because that is a big reveal to an audience. That's a great way to establish a great turning point in a scene where somebody's saying, oh, I love you so much, and then on the side, they're cheating on the person or they're lying to them in order to get something. So behavior is contextual. So this all goes back to doing some fun research where you get to read the deep thinkers, the Joseph Campbell's the Youngs, the Socrates, Plato, Maslow, and you can dip into this stuff when you need to. So if you decide to write a crime thriller that features a serial killer, you can type serial killer into Google and find a lot of great articles and books that will tell you how a sociopath behaves and what their trigger points are, and then use that information in your storytelling to. To set up those moments so that it's truthful. People don't just start being a serial killer overnight. Anyway.

Yeah, it's interesting because I just reread the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I remember thinking this at the beginning because Larson was a journalist and of course, the lead character in his book is a journalist. And the way. And then I, you know, paid attention more on this rereading and how so many of the things he talked about were things that he knew only because he was a journalist. Like the. I forget specific examples, but, like, some of the, like, moral decisions that the main character had to make. And then like, all of the different things he went through came because he was a journalist. So he knew exactly what his main character was facing as a journalist. And that reminds me again, I feel like we should just make it a rule to talk about the book on writing every time, or I should every time we do one of these. Because it reminds me of that where King talks about if you're a plumber and you like sci fi, like there's a story somewhere in a plumber that works on a spaceship. And starting with these things that you already know, so it reduces the. You know, because all of this is about for me, like, how do I set myself up for the most success early on? And I feel like picking something that I already know, a good bit about is probably a good path because it reduces my margin for error, like picking like a career or like something. Because early on, when I was doing all my work on, you know, building online followings, I read a bunch of books about cult leaders because I figure if you can get somebody to like, kill themselves for you, you could probably get them to buy your book. And so, like, and I remember doing all of this research and I started thinking, like, I know a lot about cults that most people, you know, not everybody knows, because I've done a lot of research on it and just thinking, like, are there ideas inside of things I already know? Because that kind of gives me a leg up to make it believable because I'll kind of subconsciously put things in that would be really hard for other people to do. And that. It made me think of that when you talked about him putting that into Silence of the Lambs because he had already kind of lived in that as the crime reporter.

Right. I think.

That'S a very solid approach. The other. I'm trying to think of an example that would support that. Oh, here's, here's a, here's a fun example from a friend of mine, Steve Pressfield. Now, Steve, he documents it very clearly in the war of art and turning pro and do the work. He didn't collect a paycheck as a writer. He wrote for 30 years before he earned a penny as a writer.

And his first things that sold were screenplays. And he worked with a terrific screenwriter who wrote Alien. I'm forgetting his name. Anyway, so one day Steve sat down and he was like, geez, I don't know what I'm gonna write today. And what, what he discovered was he knew a lot about golf. And he grew up as a caddy in Westchester county. And he was kind of middle class kid who, you know, spent all summer carrying other guys clubs around the golf course. And he learned a lot about golf. And this idea came to him based upon his love of golf. And it turned out to be his first novel, the Legend of Bagger Vance, which turned into a pretty big movie too. But that speaks directly to what you're talking about. Steve knew the nuances of the game of golf in a way that he could use to tell a larger story. Now, the Legend of Bagger Vance isn't really about golf, although it's great golf action. It's about coming to an understanding of who you are. It's based upon the Bhagavad Gita, which few people would ever really pick up, unless they were Steve Pressfield. So Steve, you know, he's the student of many different things. So what he decided to do was to use his expertise and his passion and knowledge in two very, very different things and meld them in a way thematically. So he had his external. His external genre is this great sports performance story. Will the local hero, golf hero, you know, play as well as the two legendary golfers, Bobby Jones, and.

I'm forgetting golfer, I'm not as young as I used to be. So anyway, what. What that tells me is that if you meld your passions to your goal of telling a very, very interesting story, you will bring a specificity. I always say this. You have to be very, very specific when you write, you know, your stories. So to use worlds that you know, and we talked about this a couple of times, when at the very beginning of the story, you want to introduce your reader to a world and you can, right? So if you know your world extremely well and it's a. It's an attractive world that people will be interested in, or there's a large market for that to, you know, to take it from the commercial point of view. What. What out there. What story out there hasn't been told that people would love to read? That's always a question I like to ask as an editor or an agent or a writer. What book, what story has not been written yet that people would love to read? I think J.K. rowling thought about this kind of question when she came up with Harry Potter, and then she used her. Her passions and her expertise with, you know, legends and myths and British boarding schools and the class system in England and all of those things to the to. And she put all that loaded, all that stuff on this. Oh, I bet people would really love to read a wonderful tale about a wizard who goes to a, you know, a wizard school. And so those simple ideas, if you load your own stuff on top of them, they become more and more intricate and more and more interesting.

Yeah, it makes me think that, like, if you can, you can take kind of these stories that have been told over and over the hero's journey or, you know, even it. This makes me think of the Martian as well, where like, you have just this kind of normal survival story and you just laid it on top of this author who is a complete Mars slash space slash science nerd. And I think of that of, like, you know, looking at, you know, what kind of story do I want to tell that exists out in the world in lots of different ways? That really resonates with me. And then what do I know really, really well already? Like, putting those together, is that, like, a good place to start?

I think it is. And here's, here's another, another thought about it. If the world that you. That you know very, very well seems unlikely to be interesting to anyone, don't give up. Because it probably really is interesting to a lot of people if you put it in the right universe. As you mentioned earlier, the plumber working on a spaceship is an interesting idea. If you know plumbing and you know the systems of plumbing in a way that nobody else does, and you know that all the intricacies of hot and cold water, whatever it is, and you take that information and you put it elsewhere, as Andy Weir did in the Martian. He knew all about physics, he knew about botany, he knew about Mars, and he is excited about it. He's a nerd when it comes to NASA, so he is like, oh, boy, what if I were able to combine all these things that I know in a story about survival? And then it doesn't have to be this big deep thing. It's this real. How. How would somebody survive on Mars if they were running out of food? How would they make their own food? So as you mentioned earlier, Tim, your expertise is extremely valuable externally. Right. Everybody goes to you and they say, tim, make me a best seller. You know, teach me how to market my stuff. Teach me this. But if your lead character is a marketer in a story, is that necessarily so exciting and compelling? Maybe not. But if they. If you use what you know about marketing and convincing people to make a decision to buy something, there's lots of.

Books on that world.

Exactly. But your idea about the cult leader is fascinating because that's what cult leaders do. So.

Yeah, because there's, you know, when you know something that well, you start knowing all of the moral implications of things that not people, people outside of the world don't understand, you know, all of the weird little decisions you have to make, you know, all of this stuff in a way that. And you know, it experientially as opposed to, like, research can only take you so far than actually experiencing. Because I had another idea because my, my actual, like, school training was in computer science. And so I did programming for a long time, still do it. And for a while I got into a little bit of, like, trying to hack stuff. And I did some.

Things I'd rather not talk about in college, you know, and so I had this idea of, like, I think you're the first Person.

Who'S done things they didn't want to talk about.

Yeah, right. You know, computer related.

No, I understand.

Low end crimes. And, and so I had this idea of like, well, what if like you had this guy that was, you know, kind of a, you know, bored kind of husband, 40 hour a week cubicle job, not a great marriage, kids who don't really like him and this couple moved in door in next to him and he was able to hack into their router and their computers. Like what kind of mischief could you cause in a marriage by just messing with their electronics? And so I actually started sketching out this story idea of like. And so, and I was thinking like, I know enough about this world that I could tell a very like realistic story on top of a kind of sadistic trying to mess with somebody's marriage through their electronic devices. And as we're talking about that, that idea kind of popped back in my head of like, you know, that's something that I can write in a way that not everybody can write because I understand that world in a way that not everybody does.

That's true.

You had said something a few minutes ago, I made a note about that I think is really important to talk about here. You know, one of the great things about, you know, the Internet and everybody being connected is that you can find all of the weird people that are interested in the same things you're interested in, right? So like there's this great online store called, oh, it's geek something. And it's like all these like really geeky like Star Trek like toys and there's T shirts with like coding, like, like programming jokes on them that you would only get if like you knew programming and you know all this stuff. And now if you took that store and made it a physical store in Lynchburg, Virginia where I used to live, it wouldn't, it wouldn't survive a month. You know, there's just not enough people to support that. But you put it online and you can get all of the geeks in one place. And I think that's what's really neat now about the Amazon marketplace and being able to reach all the readers in one place is you don't have to write a book that's mainstream enough to stay on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. You can like write these obscure weird things and all you need is like, you know that a thousand true fans kind of mantra from Kevin Kelly and you just have to find them and they can be anywhere. And so this idea that you have to, you can Go like, super niche and deep and weird and find a big enough audience to sustain you as a writer.

Yes, I'd agree with that. It's all about managing your own expectations. And the thing about storytelling is it's such an intuitive craft that a lot of us just assume that it can be learned and perfected quickly and it can't. So.

I see. Even, I think it's important to define what intuitive means because we use this word. And to me, and I would. I would be interested if you agree with this. Like, to me, all the word intuitive means is I've shoved enough stuff in my head that my subconscious can put things together for me. Like, that's what I see as intuitive, because intuitive, I think people use it and it's like, you know, intuitive means this. I pulled this out of the universe. And what I've seen, working with the creative people I do is what it means is like we've just talked about, like, these people that have studied all this random stuff and they just kind of shove it into their head over the years, and then all of a sudden they're subconscious, conscious, puts these things together and hands it to them as a story. So there's a ton of work to. To becoming intuitive.

There is, there is. But there's also very clear evidence that children, Babies are born with an understanding of narrative structure. And there has been psychological studies where, you know, as adults, we. We sit. We tend to think that kids are stupid.

Right?

They don't really. You can't really tell them a sophisticated story because they're really not going to get it. All they want to do is look at the giraffe and the, you know, the. The playmobile above their crib. But the. The research indicates that these children, these babies, from the moment they can learn how to speak, they understand story. So when I say intuitive, I mean in addition to what you're talking about, which. Which I would say is more taking in everything and then doing an analysis of it and then letting your subconscious tell you bring those things back to you is more integrative than intuitive. Intuitive to me means it's within your. Yourself. And you did not specifically analyze works to program it into yourself. So anyway, we're splicing a word's definition and. No, but I think.

See, I think this is an important discussion.

Okay, okay.

Because remember a few weeks ago we talked about, like, how, you know, you were like, well, just sit down and write and then you can kind of look at it later. And I was like, no, I think there's Something to be said, said for like, kind of forcing yourselves to do a certain way so that over time it becomes normal. And I put that over. I put that on top of, like, when I work out and do these complicated lifts, like, it's really excruciating to think about every movement, but you have to do that long enough so you can do it without thinking. And I get really uncomfortable with these conversations.

So.

And I love this conversation, but this idea that, like, you're born with it. If I'm born with it, there's nothing I can do about it.

You're born with the ability to be a critical judge. That's what I'm saying. You're born. I can put something in front of you and you can tell me whether that story works or doesn't work. But you're not going to tell me that the crisis point is there's no crisis, or that the writer didn't put in an obligatory scene. What you're going to say to me is, that story didn't work. That story does not move me. It did not interest me. So the masses, every human being on the planet has an instinctive, intuitive understanding of when a story works and when it doesn't work. Are there degrees of. Some people think something works and some people don't. Absolutely. But everybody has a critical ability in their. They're born with it, to evaluate whether or not a story works. That doesn't mean they can write a story. That just means that they can be critic. They can criticize the story. This is why everybody has an opinion about somebody's creative work. Because they believe that they. Because they were born with this.

It's like a thumb. They know how to use a thumb. They know how. Whether or not a story works or not, to a certain degree. So I am not arguing with you that it is a crucial craft methodology to learn story structure and to, you know, crank it into your brain through repetition and grinding it. I think that's absolutely true, and I think our best writers always do that. But there's a. There's a yin and a yang. There's the intuitive sense where something magically will. Something will connect in your brain that you didn't anticipate. So for Mike Judge, it was when he was saying to himself, I want to be on mtv, I want to create a cartoon. What am I going to do next? That strange laugh from that kid in high school came into his brain that. And he built a character based upon that strange moment in his past history. And he was able to be Inspired by that moment. These are the mystical things that nobody can really explain. People call them muses. They call them inspirations. They call them what have you. Some people call them biophysical accidents that some piece of dopamine landed in a strange neurotransmitter and fired unexpectedly chaotically. And it caused this terrific, you know, impulse for somebody to craft some creativity. It doesn't matter what you think of it. It is a moment that is inspirational. So you become more inspired. The more craft work that you do, the harder you work learning how to lift and clean and jerk a barbell, the more weight you're going to be able to do eventually. And it's the same thing with Storycraft. This is why we do this podcast in the first place, is to encourage people to do this work, to do this thinking, to think about the psychology and behavioral choices that people make under certain situations, because you can use that information when you're faced with a moment when you say, my seventh scene has a terrible climax, what am I going to do about it? Yeah.

So that's my thing, because I really, like. It really drives me crazy. So there's this. This kind of example I use because people talk about getting lucky, and it drives me absolutely insane when. Because so many writers talk about how they got lucky.

And.

And so I have this kind of example of, like, okay, you know, somebody tells a story of, like, I just got lucky because I had. You know, I was at this conference, and I just happened to get on the elevator with Tony Robbins, and we started talking, and, you know, he invited me to do this thing, and it totally transformed my business. So I just got lucky.

Mm.

And what people hear is, that's not lucky. Well, I need to walk around and wait for luck to hit me when they hear that.

Oh, you're right.

And what I think. And what I think is this kind of false sense of humility we seem to love in the United States of, like, you know, not actually taking credit for things. And because I'm like, okay, first of all, you were at the conference and not sitting at home watching tv. Second of all, you opened your mouth and talked to Tony Robbins when most people would not say anything. Also, you had enough good ideas that you'd worked really hard on that you had something worthwhile to say to him when you opened your mouth to talk.

Right.

And, you know, and so it's like, what I've. What, you know, what I want, you know, what I see and what I've seen in, you know, my own life is just like, Grinding away. Set you up so that when, you know, you get on the elevator with Tony Robbins, it can actually turn into something useful. Instead of you just asking for his autograph, right?

Or to ask him to solve your problems for you, which nobody can solve anybody else's problems, and nobody can solve somebody's writing problems either. They have to be worked out internally. You have to grind on it. It doesn't have to be this hellish, horrible experience if you love to write, even if you don't love it every single moment you're writing. I mean, there's. It's sort of like a friend of mine who goes to the gym all the time. Somebody asked him, well, how do you do that? And he said, well, there's only one thing worse than going to the gym, and that's not going to the gym. And if that's the attitude you have about your work, and if you're a writer or creative person, you. We all understand this. If you don't do your art, if you don't put some time into it every single day, even if it means taking 10 minutes, you know, and going into the car and thinking about something, you don't feel right. You just don't feel like your day was very productive. Even if you did all the laundry in the house and you cleaned it and you took the dog for the walk, for 10 walks, if you did not have a moment where you started figuring out and piecing together some creative, you know, thought, you just feel like you blew it that day. And so all of these moments, this is about training yourself to. To trust your instincts and then analyze the hell out of them. Say, oh, well, that isn't gonna work for this. I'm gonna file that thing. And maybe my experience as a marketer isn't going to be the right element to put into this character. I'm gonna save that bit. Or that. That really funny thing that happened to me at that conference. I'll save that for the third act. I don't want to bring that out in the first act. So I agree with you, Tim. I think a lot of people think, think. A lot of people contact me and they say, can you edit? Can you fix my book? Can you give me advice? Can you teach me how to be a writer? And I can do up to a degree, but if you're not going to put your bottom in the chair and do the work, I. I don't really have much to give you to offer you. And it's like Tony Robbins, he can. He can't help you in an elevator, you know, he's be the first one to tell you that.

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's interesting because I also think there's something around.

Setting yourself up. It's funny you use that gym analogy because. So I've been working out consistently for about four years, and I'm 34, so I spent most of my 20s getting really overweight and out of shape. In fact, a buddy of mine found this picture of me, like, when I was like, at my biggest and I was holding a ham sandwich when he took a picture.

And so I had done. I spent my entire 20s doing all of this. You know, I was like, okay, I'm gonna start running. And then I don't run. Okay, I got a gym membership. And I go for a little bit and then I stop. And then I tried all this stuff. And then I started doing this thing called CrossFit and it just stuck like glue. And the things that I talk about that made it stick are the community where you work out the same people every day, the fact that you don't have to plan it, you just show up and do whatever workout and there's some competition there where you. Since you work out the same people every day, if you don't show up, they're going to be now one day more in shape than you.

Right.

And I was thinking of that and like, in thinking about, like, the group, I know there's a bunch of writers, but everybody remembers C.S. lewis and Tolkien. But there was that group of them that constantly met up together. And I just think there's got to be something around, like, you know, that whole, you know, you're the. You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And all that kind of stuff is like, you know, what have you seen in writers lives that have set them up for success and how they kind of order their life and the people around them.

Wow, that's a good question. It's been my experience that the writers that I've worked with were introverts. These are people who prefer to spend more time alone than in a group. And they live a lot of their days and hours are spent internally. Some people.

Really enjoy the camaraderie of a small group or even a larger group. It's been my experience that the writers with.

The stuff to sit down every day, they're okay being alone. They prefer it. Writers groups can be very helpful, but they can also quickly turn into a power status thing where everybody shits on somebody else's work, but they don't really know what they're talking about. They just know they don't like it. And I've taught small groups, and I need to figure out there needs to be some sort of structural thing to evolve, to limit that. So, you know, Tolkien and C.S. lewis and those. Those guys were pros. You know, they didn't get together to talk about the climax of that, you know, of Act 3. These guys had put in their time. So when they got together, I think it was probably a lot of blowing off steam more than craft talk. Did they talk about their works in progress? I doubt they did. I mean, maybe I'm. I'm just speaking off the top of my head because I haven't done any of the research, but I think writers, for the most part, are introverts who like to spend a lot of time alone. And then once they have something to share, then they're hungry for intelligent analysis and criticism that can make them be better. But they don't seek. They don't seek editorial comment or any of that until they've got something that they feel relatively safe about. They don't want people to see their. Their gobbledygook. That's just been my experience. On the other side of the equation, television writer rooms are wonderful places that create incredible stories. And those are the contributions of individuals working together on a global story bible. And then I don't. I'm not sure if you know how this works, Tim, but they. They get together for about three months before they shoot anything, and they come up with a story bible. It's usually about 10 to 20 writers. They sit in a room, they drink coffee, and they say, okay, what are we going to do this season? And they plot out 13 to 22 episodes and major story shifts. And then once they sort of have this story bible for the entire season, then they divide up the episodes among the guys and women in the room, and they hand out and they say, your assignment is episode six. You're episode five. And then individually, they'll go out and they'll bang out a draft of an episode, and then they share it. And then all those people look at it and they say, I think you need to tweak here and here and here. And they get editorial advice after they've created the initial draft. So they do a big global story to begin with, sort of like their fool's cap global story grid for an entire season. And then they. They're divided up and they have to do their individual episodes. So each one is assigned an act to write, and then they bring the acts back and then they work together again to tweak them, to make them better. And that process is really being tremendously honed right now. So you have Breaking Bad, you have these stories, these long form stories that have tremendous momentum from episode to episode to episode, and they have a global story attached to them. So there's two methods. You know, there's the introverted novelist who's probably on the wane, and there's the group episodic television sort of way of writing story too.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. If you'd like more StoryGrid stuff, you can find that@storygrid.com for all of the past episodes of this podcast, you can go to storygrid.com podcast. That's where all the episodes are. The show notes, any downloads we reference. You can see all of that right there. To continue supporting the show, just tell an author that you love the show, put it in your Facebook group, put it on Twitter, put a rating review in itunes. Those are all things that continue to spread the word. It grows our listenership and it makes it more and more fun for us to continue doing this without ads, without charging anything. It's just something we love to do. So thanks for being a part of this podcast and we will see you next week.