Who's the Most Guilty Person in Your Story? Hero, Victim, and Villain - Part 2

Hello and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. My name is Tim Grall. I'm the CEO of StoryGrid, and I'm also a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He's the creator and founder of Storygrid and a writer and editor with over 30 years of experience. Along with him is Danielle Kiowski, the chief academic officer of Storygrid University, and Leslie Watts, the editor in chief of StoryGrid Publishing. In this week we continue talking about that whole hero, victim, perpetrator triangle and how they all work together. So that was the homework I was given last week, along with a couple other things. So that's what I worked on on the Scene for this week as I continued to try to iterate on the masterwork scene. Eyewitness by Ed McBain. And it was really interesting where we ended up this week because at the end, Sean talks about, like, he doesn't want me to tackle too many problems at once. And at first I'm kind of thinking in my head like, oh, no, no, no, no, I can do this. You know, I, I, I, I'm going to try to do it all and see if I can do it. And then by the end, once he kind of lays out what the problems are and the different problem spaces, again, this gives me a better understanding of the whole difference between the blue, red and in green levels, because this is something I'm still wrapping my head around too. And it was interesting too, because.

And as you'll see based on last week, I got a lot of the stuff in there, but now I'm struggling with how to make it all kind of work together the right way and make sure the signal is coming through the right way. And this reminded me of a story of one of my sons when he was younger, and he would play in his room and kind of get all his toys out and they were all over the place. And then it was time to clean up. It was just too much. He just couldn't write, wrap his head around everything that he had to do. And so what my wife and I would do is go up and help him kind of group all the toys together in these groups so that it looked like manageable problems. So now I'm going to clean up this group, then I'm going to clean up this group. And that's what I felt like I did, is I kind of got everything in there, and now we've got to sort it out and make sure it all makes sense. So we're continuing to iterate on this. I'm learning a lot. I hope that you're learning a lot with me and continuing to enjoy the podcast. So let's jump in and get started. Started.

Okay, Tim, so here we are again.

Now, this week, what I want to talk about is how well you executed the, the rubric that we gave you at the end of last week. So let me review what we did last week and then we can get into it. So last week, what we, we brought it down to is that the relationship between the victim, the perpetrator, and.

The witness.

Was not clear. So in this case, the.

The. The victim was very much kind of a straw person who didn't really have any.

Oomph on the page. Just sort of like, oh, the poor guy got killed and viciously murdered by the perpetrator, and the witness was in danger because they had seen the crime. And so the point that we made was that we need to know that the victim had relationship with the perpetrator.

And part of that is establishing that the victim is not.

Is not immune to the, the corruption of the environment itself. So all that means is that the victim has to have some level of participation in the, the unjustness of the world itself.

So this is very, very blue. This is, you know, we talk at Storygrid in terms of blue dimensionality, red dimensionality, and green dimensionality. And the blue zone is my specialty. And it's, it's very much the generalized patterns of intelligibility of behavior across all stories, through all times. Right? So when I'm talking about victims, witnesses, and perpetrators, that's a trinity of relationship that happens in all stories. So because it's a very, very dynamic and emotional triangle, because we're, we're being pulled in two directions when we're in a triangle, right? So that's why it's a blue zone problem. And when you do not make sure that those relationships and those connections are on the page, it doesn't feel real to Sam, our single audience member. She needs to intuitively bind to these relationships so that it feels real to her. And nobody is innocent. In our reality, everyone has committed some sort of crime. It doesn't mean that they're. They should be incarcerated or anything. But, you know, we have, we have three sorts of patterns of conformity that we have to live up to, right? We have codes, laws, and norms. So laws are. Let me just go in order. Laws are the. Very much the ordered system of justice in, you know, just judicial systems. So courts there's big, big law books all over the world. And that's what lawyers do. They study the law, the letter of the law.

And then there are norms. And norms are squishy, right? Norms are like, well, if we sneeze on the street, we should probably cover our mouth. And then. So the, the norms have changed dramatically over the last couple of years, right? So norms are patterns of behavior that we as, as social beings accept and conform to so that we can get along. But nobody's going to throw us in jail if we break one of these norms. We just sort of get that stink eye from other people who go, ooh, gross. Or oh, what? That's not what we do here. And so that doesn't, we don't get incarcerated for that, but we do break relationship with the other people in the room when we do something out of the norm. So that's what a norm is. And that's a collective cultural grammar that is translated from groups to individuals in the group. So we all sort of start to get in line and flow together. And you know, Seth go. Godin says these are what, how does he say it again? We, people like us do things like this, something like that, which I think is a very good phrase. So that's what a norm is. Now what's a code? A code is a deep, deep stuff. So these are the deep codes of what it means to be a human being. And these are tricky because they require.

A deep contemplation of what is the most meaningful for thing that we can all share. And so generally my, my point of view and this, this is certainly variant and some people don't even contemplate these things for, but for me it would be the continuation of life. Like life is good, you know, that really cheesy registered trademark, Life is good. That's generally the Platonic notion is that it's good that we are able to relate to each other and ourselves and the world. That there is this channel that enables us to see patterns, to be able to conform to the patterns and to flow with the patterns of change.

So that deep code stuff is, is what emerged in, in sort of religious traditions, right? So.

The codes are it's not cool to kill someone just because you're mad at them, right? So we would all probably go, yeah, I'd sign up for that one. There's other ways to resolve a conflict than murdering someone. This is a deep code, right? This is Cain and Abel. This goes really far back.

So that's what a crime story that has a murder as the center of it is about how do we negotiate this code? How do we deal with the fact that there are people who break the code, the deep nomological code. So this is a long winded way of getting around to. To kind of my point here. And, and Leslie and I were having a discussion the other day, and it really kind of like this bell went off in my head in that when you have a triangle of three relationships and you have a triangle of norms, laws and codes, those three in the triangle should be breaking one specifically for it to feel the most complex and real. So, for example, your perpetrator is breaking the code, the nomological code. He's murdering somebody for God knows why.

Right?

And then you have Randall, who's the witness. Now, he's technically breaking the law because he steals the money from the dead body. So that leaves our victim.

So the victim will probably. If we want to incorporate him into this triangle, we'll need to be breaking a norm. Or you can always switch it up, right? You can always play this game. But if you can cover a breaking of a norm, a breaking of a code, and a breaking of a law, all three, that's complex.

So.

When we were talking last week, what I said to you, it wasn't clear what the victim was breaking. They didn't seem to be breaking any code, norm, or law. They seem to be completely and totally innocent.

So, of course coincidental things happen to us and we can get hurt by them, but. But no one is innocent. So when someone is completely innocent and something coincidental happens to them in a story, in a crime story, specifically a crime story, it doesn't feel like it works. It feels.

Something about that. I just don't. I just didn't buy it.

Right.

So all of this is to say through this lens. Now, I've. I've read the. The revision you did, and I think it's much better, much better.

But I didn't really have the time to specifically think about the three crimes that are on the page here. So would you mind sort of using the lens that I just kind of came up with this code, norm and law, and see if you can map onto Randall, the killer, the lieutenant, and. And then the victim. And does the victim have a name? I'm gonna. I'm gonna turn it over to you now and, and hope that my descriptions were enough for you to. To map and see where we go from there.

Yeah. The victim's name is Barnes.

Yeah, the. The changes I made. Well, so I. I started by doing the same Thing I had done for Randall the week before, where I just wrote down what happened before, what happened in my story. And I felt like it was a little coarse, but I didn't worry too much about it because it wasn't part of the actual story. I just need to have some context. So I changed the setting.

To something. It was funny because I drive by where the original setting was every day, and once I looked at it again through your lens, I was like, yeah, that's not a good place to do that. Anyway, so I changed the setting.

And then.

Put. And then changed the way that they came about each other. So.

I would say that.

Well, they're all breaking the law. Which is. Which one was the law? Was it the code? I should have wrote them down.

They're all breaking the law in some way.

But I think that the, the we would probably say if they're breaking more than one, which one are they breaking the worst. Would you say that?

Yeah.

Which. Which is the emphasis.

So breaking the law, murdering is. Is a code break.

So it's. You're.

You're not only breaking the law, you're breaking a norm, and you're going all the way to the code level. So it's like level. Levels of. Of corruption. So. So when you break code.

You are by definition breaking norm and law simultaneously. So you're doing a triplet. If you're breaking a. A law, you're doing a doublet. A law only.

So let's say you're. You're stealing candy at the store and you're a little kid, and you get caught by the security guard. Now the security guard then has the. The ability to make a judgment about whether or not they should prosecute you or not. But you have literally broken the law and you've broken a norm. But the code, like if you were stealing, let's say you, Your family was, you know, hungry, you had no money, and you stole a loaf of bread.

So you would be breaking a norm and a law. But did you break a code?

Tricky, tricky, right? Probably not. Probably not.

So this is. The beauty of this construct is that when you start talking about, becomes more and more specific and you're. You're getting nuances of. Well, I don't know if that's quite the worst thing. Is that what.

Huh.

And that's. That's the sweet spot of, of creative energy, because now you're able to start applying your own codes, laws and norms of your own personal self onto the situation in a very interesting way. Instead of a utilitarian way. So when I. So, okay, so. And then just breaking a norm would be, you know. You know, you wiped your nose with your hand. You know, like little kids don't. They'll just do that, right?

Yeah, yeah. One, I think. I mean, they. Esk. I feel like they escalate in the scene, too. So.

So let me just kind of walk through this. So I would say a guy meeting, you know, basically hiring a prostitute to, you know, perform sexual acts is breaking the law, but not. I think it breaks probably norms more than anything.

It depends on the context. Right?

Yeah.

Because at the beginning, we don't know.

That the person doing it, the person hiring Wilson, is a cop. So it's just somebody, which, I mean, again, yeah, it gets into what you believe about this stuff, because when I start looking at it from Randall's point of view, it's like he's basically the person stealing bread for his family. So I would say he's breaking a norm, not a code. He's breaking a norm and a law. Same thing for probably the other person, but probably breaking a code. And then.

When the person shows up, when Barnes shows up.

He'S breaking.

All three by blackmailing Wilson. And then, of course, Wilson responds by breaking all three by killing him. And then Randall.

Breaks the law again by not reporting it, by stealing.

But I would say doesn't. I think he breaks a code, too, because he doesn't try to save the guy when he's alive.

So they're all kind of pretty messy at this point.

The.

I want to turn it over to Leslie and Danielle very shortly, but maybe it was just my read, and I'd like them to. To tell me I did not pull out the.

The Barnes blackmail thing from the text. So that's problematic. And also I think it's problematic.

When the. When the victim.

Is as dirty as the perpetrator. It makes the crime less powerful to the audience. So it's a very, very. You've got to thread a very, very tight needle here in that the victim has to be breaking some sort of code, norm, or law.

But not so much so that it is justification for the perpetrator to kill him.

So it's tricky, right? So you've got to have a hierarchy of corruption here. Perpetrator has to be at the top. So Sam has to desire that that perpetrator be. Be, you know, thrown in jail for the rest of their life. Then you've got this. This. Which. Which is worse. Which is more. Is it the victim that should be second or the witness probably your witness should be number two in that hierarchy, and the victim should be the least corrupt.

So it's this tricky part where you want a hierarchy of corruption. The perpetrator is the worst, the witness is number two, and the victim is number three. Right now I think your order is.

Perpetrator and victim are on the same level and witnesses below. So it feels like it's not properly in order. And I'm speaking very generally and very bluish, and I'm also speaking from off the top. So please don't take this as a, as a ironclad rule, but it does seem to me that in order for it to, to work, the victim needs to be at the bottom of the break. Breaking of code, law, norm. The witness needs to be in the middle, and the perpetrator has to be on top. And then you have this judge figure named Watson, who's the detective who's going to piece together this hierarchy and he's going to say to himself, h, where should I put my, my finger on the scale who really deserves to, to suffer, you know, incarceration for the rest of his life? Is it the perpetrator or the witness? Now, the witness is not innocent, and the victim, he wasn't innocent either, but this perpetrator is really our bad guy and I really need to finger point at him. And then, wow, now we're cycling all the way up to your narrative device. Right? So the narrative device is Watson's finger pointing without getting identified as the finger pointer. He's just laying out the facts. And so that police report becomes the tool by which Watson is able to enact justice. So I'm going to stop there and I'm going to turn it over to.

Either, either Danielle or Leslie, whoever jumps in first.

So.

Excuse me.

So I'm so glad you brought this up because, because I think it is a very important thing. And depending on the specific sub genre of the crime story, we're going to get a particular kind of flavor of the, the, the extent to which people are breaking norms, laws and codes. So in a cozy mystery, you're going to have more people breaking norms than you are breaking laws and codes in, in a story like if we're talking about the pattern scene at McBain, everybody's engaging in a certain level of corruption. So to me, that's moving it toward everybody's breaking the law or at least bending it a little bit. You often have the detectives roughing people up or not paying attention to the.

Rules.

By which investigations are governed. And that kind of Thing, So, so I think, you know, because we have Ed McBain, is that in that tradition of noir? And, and so I think it is. It's right. That you're moving it toward that Everybody's breaking the law a little bit. And I think in terms of the hierarchy. Sean, you also touched on what. What I would say, like, whose hierarchy matters, Right. Who's judging the hierarchy? And it is Watson, right? Because he's the. He's the author. He's kind of.

Even if we. We're thinking about this at the level of the narrative device where this is a police report, he's the one controlling what goes in there, what we're looking at, how we're looking all of that. So it's his belief about the hierarchy that matters. And, and so. Because.

And.

And he can play with the facts. Right. So like we've talked about, there's what really happened, and you've delineated that, and then there's what. What goes in the police report. And so.

Watson is going to want to demonstrate that hierarchy.

Because he wants to present the truth, but he's not going to. But he.

He's going to be influencing how the person who reads this is thinking about it. So if we go. If we think about all of that, then what do you think makes sense in terms of the. Right. If everybody's breaking the law.

Then what's the hierarchy of the laws broken?

Well, the hierarchy would be. I think the top is going to be murder, and then the next one down would probably be. In my current scene, would probably be.

Blackmail, and then probably a police.

Well, probably a police. Somebody in the police department paying for sex. Then probably second. Close second to that would be somebody else, somebody paying for sex, because I think those are probably treated differently. And then you have somebody selling sex.

I think that's all of them in the hierarchy. So doing it like that would put the witness at the bottom, the victim in the middle, and then the perpetrator.

At the top, and so would Watson, because Watson wants to see justice done.

And signal, you know, I, I didn't. I left out Randall's theft, which is probably lowest. And then also. But then it's Randall leaving him to die, too. So. And I would actually put that up second to murder over.

Blackmail. But it's not as. Yeah, I'll leave it there because I'm interested in what y' all have to say.

Okay, so what I love about this is that we're exploring, as crime stories should, how do we rank these kinds of things? Right? How do we think about the. The seriousness of various crimes? And one of the things that the, that the pattern scene that Eyewitness does is that.

We.

Right.

We spotted that Struthers was having an affair with the. With the lieutenant's wife, but it's not overt. Right. He doesn't include that and say, you know, it's clear this guy was stepping out with the lieutenant's wife. You know, there's none of that. And so we're picking up on what Capelli in that story, what Capelli thinks, and he's downplaying certain aspects, and he is. He is turning up the volume of the emphasis on other things. So when we're thinking about that.

I think that, that as we read the. The draft now, I think it. We're definitely moving in the right direction, but if we think about it from what's being emphasized and what's not being emphasized because of what Watson is trying to do.

That.

That there may be a step in the process that we want to pick up. So when we give you the instruction.

To, you know, we have to. We have to. We have to know what Barnes is up to and, and. And what his level of culpability is, then you go in and add it. And then I think then the next step is for us to kind of. Is what we're doing now is like. Is to really look at that in terms of the 624 and.

And the narrative device and do all of those adjustments fit after the fact? Because I think.

As I'm reading this, the. This version, I'm finding some noise in the.

In the text. Now that's, that's taking it further away from being a police report or of feeling like a police report. Right. So there's some extra things added in there. So if we take a look at. If we take it back and compare it to, for example, the trope breakdown and the. And the 624 and what the. What Capelli's motivations are both like, what he's. What he's trying to realize, what he's trying to do, and then where he's acting from within himself.

Then I think we would find that there's some. That there was. Would be some tweaks that we would make in those sentences as well. So. Okay, so overall, what I'm saying is I think it's moving in the right direction and we're adding those influences that we had, and there are some tweaks that we can make based on the 624, based on the trope. Breakdown and even based on looking at the spreadsheet for eyewitness and how those inner micro interactions are, are playing out on the page.

I agree. And this takes it right down to the green level of what's actually happening. So when Sean brought up at the beginning that we don't know that Barnes is committing blackmail, I think that's absolutely true. We find that out in the stuff at the bottom. And again, that's why it's really good to have that stuff at the bottom, because then we learn what you intended. So, and I think the narrative device is a really good way to approach this. So we, I would say that Barnes's blackmail is too quiet and Randall's leaving Barnes to die is too loud in terms of the signal in the text. And I love the imagery of.

How does.

Watson, I was trying to say Capelli, how does Watson put his finger on the scale? Because that's exactly what he's doing. So he has, or he should have. Right now he has two moments of revelation. He should have three moments of revelation where he's figuring out what is the culpability of each person. Capelli has two, because the culpability of the wife and Struthers are entwined. But in your story it's going to be three separate ones. And so thinking about those, the.

Signal strength of that moment should be proportionate to how much he wants to blame that person.

And I think that.

Like I said, the signal strength of Randall's guilt is too loud because he calls him out on it. So that does a couple of things. It puts Randall in a place of vulnerability because if this is a police report, they're going to charge multiple people. Right. And so Watson.

Has made a promise to protect Randall because he came in.

So if we want to preserve Watson's judge like quality, he can't break that promise to Randall. Right. Because that makes him culpable. So we want him to preserve that promise and he's going to do that by protecting him. So if we look at the, at the Ed McMahon story, he keeps saying, I'll put you behind a screen, I'll put you behind a screen. And metaphorically, that's what he's doing through his narrative device is he's putting up a screen to protect him. So he's not going to say the medical examiner said he only died an hour before sunrise because that's screaming, hey, put this guy in jail.

What he is going to do is preserve the basic facts and have that continuity. So the tenor of these moments is that he gets information.

And he has a mini breakdown. Oh, okay. And then moves on. And that is enough to give us the signal because he's usually more forthcoming than that, more explanatory than that. And so when he trips up a little bit. Oh. Then that signals that breakdown where we know it's not the information that he expected to hear and that it's subverting what he thinks about people. So I think the. An interesting angle to this is that Watson knows Barnes because they're on the force together. So he has certain notions about where Barnes should be, what Barnes should be doing. And so when he get. He. He can get information early on in Randall's story that lets him know that Barnes wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing. And that'll again, just trip him up. And it's a little stutter step, and that's all we need to know, that something is amiss.

It'll trip up Watson or trip up Randall. Watson trips up Watson.

So Randall only gets tripped up by his own culpability.

So Randall has this script that he wants to deliver.

And his script includes the culpability of Barnes, and it includes the culpability of the captain.

So he's telling this story and.

He's telling what happens and just trying to. So he's lying.

But he wants to stick as close to the truth as possible because that's how he's going to get away with the lie. He doesn't want to change too much stuff, so he's only changing the minimum amount that he needs to get out of the culpability.

So in trying to stick as close to the truth as possible, he goes too far and tells Watson a little bit too much. And that is Watson's stutter step moment for him where, oh, I see, he left this guy to die, but he's not saying that, but he's internalizing it. He's taking it in, and he's understanding what happened. So.

Yeah, so I think in the story where Randall is telling him, he finds out that Barnes isn't where he's supposed to be.

Then he finds out that Randall left him to die. And then he's probably thinking, I'm gonna take this guy in, because that's really bad. And then that's probably a turning point for him when he realizes that it's the captain, and he realizes that it's not only a murder, but it's a murder that signals corruption. That's probably when he says, I'm gonna let Randall off the hook, but Where Capelli. He's gonna let Struthers off the hook the whole time. I don't think that makes sense here. For Watson, he's probably going to.

Place some blame on Randall until he learns that it's his. That it's a police officer who is guilty of the murder.

Yeah, I mean, that's how I was thinking of it was that he was at this point.

Believe at the point where they leave Watson's office. He's thinking that Randall is the one that's culpable for this. Basically, he probably doesn't know if he did the attack, but he plans on holding him responsible for the death. It's a. It's at the. So.

So there needs to be three points of. When you say trip up, are you saying, like, breakdown for Watson?

Yeah, but like, okay, small ones. Not like.

Not lash out. Like the medical examiner said this, and you're going down.

Okay.

Just very small breakdowns.

What, in his freezes. Freezes. Okay. Is the third one at the very end. That one stays the same. Are you referring to that one when he realizes. Wilson. So I need. And then, because last week I didn't have it in enough or at all that the. That Barnes was still alive. Now it's too loud. Right. So I turned it up too much, and then I still. I didn't even think about that. That he would.

Can I pipe in here? Because there's something that's. It's about to explode out of my head. All right, so.

Okay, so when Danielle was talking about the fact that Barnes was left to die, it. It just immediately signaled to me one of, One of the things, and this speaks to what Leslie was talking about in terms of the police report, is that at the very beginning of the story.

Watson is explaining to Randall, hey, it was one of our guys. And, yeah, you can. Our tip line's full. Right. Instead of doing the tip line, which I always felt was kind of like tip line, really, you could drop in. You know, the guy was left to die out there. You know, he, He, He. He was still alive and he suffered, and he was one of our own. Then you drop in that information in exposition very, very early on. And then when the revelation comes that Watson knows that Randall left the guy to die, that will pop as a, As a bang later on. So instead of putting that information in dialogue, use it as exposition to explain to Randall why he can't see the lieutenant. Everyone is really upset here because not only was this guy killed, he suffered for a long time before he died. And that way it levels up the, the intensity of the scene very early on, and then it makes, it escalates Randall's anxiety too. So when Watson does discover that Randall could have saved Barnes's life and didn't do it.

That'S a big, that's a big revelation. And then the final revelation that it was actually, oh my gosh, there's, there's an even worse villain here than Randall, and that's the lieutenant. And that has to be the focus.

Of.

The, the investigation. Anyway, that's, that's a thought that I, I often talk about setups and payoffs. So that could be a revelatory turning point for, for Watson, that just levels up the, the amount of adrenaline for Sam.

I have a little bit different thought on that because when I'm running through the, the simulation, if he tells Randall this guy was left to die, then Randall knows that if he says anything about being in the vicinity, he's going to get pinged for it. But what I'm thinking is about using the conversation with Dawson to do the same thing. And so that way you preserve the informational imbalance between Watson and Randall.

And so I also need to have.

Something in about.

A revelation to Watson that Barnes, something was up with Barnes too.

And this is where it's got to come through. I, I wasn't, I'm not like, tied to the blackmail.

That's what came up, I think, when we talked last week. And I like it. I think it works. It's a reason for him to be following Wilson around the city, watching what he's doing in his off time.

So, I mean.

Even, I think it works. Okay, well, I worry that, like.

Can he just reference it? Because I think the, I think they all would be saying to themselves, what the hell was he doing out there in the middle of the night? You know, why was Barnes out there? I think the question would already be hanging in the air. And so maybe I can reference the fact that that's on Watson's mind in some way. Like he can mention it in some way, but I don't think. Would that be a revelation? Like what? I guess I'm trying to think like. Or like maybe, I guess because the other thing I was, I was getting frustrated with when I was trying to write it is I'm like, well, if he overhears any of this conversation, Randall's going to know that Wilson's a cop because they're discussing cop related things. And so that's why I placed, placed him far enough away where he couldn't hear the conversation, he can only hear the yelling parts. And so I think. I mean, the revelation could be that Barnes knew the person, you know?

You know, Watson could trip over the fact that it wasn't a random killing. You know, Watson showed up there on. Or who are these people? Barnes showed up there on purpose. You know.

So.

There was something else I was going to ask about. Okay, so let me just back up a second. So last week, my two bits of homework were.

Figure out the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator, because we know the relationship between the perpetrator and the witness. Or, no, he and the hero. Right. In our case. So the hero and the perpetrator.

And we need to know what's happening between the perpetrator and the victim. And so I've got that laid out, and you guys seem to like it. I just need to get it more in there. The thing that. The other thing was getting on the page that the cop was still alive, that Barnes was still alive when Randall left him. And so I did that, but it was too noisy.

And then.

And then we're talking about. This is interesting to me that.

I was thinking of it from Randall's perspective, right? So he's trying to tell the truth, the minimum, maximum viable truth that leaves out any culpability on his own. What I have to do from the narrative device part is have Watson trip over. Just have him notice.

Each of the three.

The breaking of the laws, norms, codes of each of the three at some point.

And do it in such a way that as, Sam.

I will. I will forgive the victim because of what the hero did, and then I will forgive the hero because of what the.

The villain did. Right? So I have to, like, put them. Make sure they're ordered correctly so that Sam at the end doesn't wish that, you know, Randall would be the one to go to jail and that we all feel bad for the victim, even though he wasn't totally innocent.

Am I. Am I saying this correctly?

I think so. And.

A thought occurred to me about the black Blackmail. Right? All right, so there's two kinds of blackmail, right? There's the blackmail for personal gain, right? So if I could blackmail you, and I can gain. But there's also blackmail as a power for a greater good.

So the power for a greater good is that Barnes could be a good cop who's trying to nail the lieutenant for his corruption. And so he. He could. He could have been staking out the lieutenant to find him. And. And as he comes on to the. The lieutenant.

The blackmail that he would say is, you're, you're coming with me and you're not going to, you know, I mean, like, he could be working for the goodness of the system to get the corruption to stop, because he would then have leverage to say, if you don't play it straight, I'm going to let people know that you sleep with prostitutes in the woods.

So it could be a good cop getting dirt as fuel to keep somebody constrained and keep their, their behavior under, under, you know, under control.

So it's, and obviously that's a very, very difficult trick because then it becomes a, a war of attrition between getting dirt on each other. But that's part of the inherent corruption of the system itself is that information is power. So Barnes, instead of trying to get a promotion, it's sort of like in, in, you know, Lord of the Rings. Everybody's like, I'm going to get the ring and I'm going to do good things with it. Right? So that's sort of like the really poor choice that people do to justify bad behavior. Blackmail is not a good idea, no matter which way you slice it. But we can justify and give ourselves reasons for doing blackmail things if we go, well, I'm doing it for the greater good. So he, he could be. Barnes could be, and, and that's probably his reputation on the force. He's a little bit earnest. You know, he's a little bit too.

You know, by the book kind of guy. And you might be able to, you.

Know, use.

Use some of that information to qualify Barnes as a being in dialogue between.

You know, even Watson could say to Randall, you know, he was one of the good guys here. You know, he really went, went to the level to keep things straight. And our losing him was, is really, really bad for our, our, our department because he was one of the good guys here. And that, you know, that's a way of signaling to Sam that Barnes was on a mission to, to, to get the lieutenant under control. That's an idea that would make him so, so we could like him more than not like him. So when somebody's using blackmail for personal gain, it's kind of like, oh, that's gross. But if they're like, I'm doing it for a greater good, we can forgive, you know, that, that, that good intention going wrong, if bad intention never, we never forgive. But a good intention that goes wrong, we're more easy to go, well, they, their heart was in the right place, right? Even though they did a bad thing, they did it to justify an end. So that. That's a. That's a way of toning down the. The transgressions of Barnes so that Sam doesn't think, oh, this is a nest of vipers and terrible. There's. There's a hierarchy of breaking of code, and Randall is the least one. Barnes is the middle. It's clear. The signal is clear. If you use that stratagem to define Barnes as of being in your story. And now the victim's starting to have, you know, complexity to him, as opposed to being a straw man who's just beaten senseless by a psychopath. Right. And that adds more weight to the story because this is a short story. So what you want to do is have all of your characters be as complex as possible so that it feels like, wow, that was a little nugget of tightness. That has complexity to it.

So anyway, that's whenever you find yourself. Like, that doesn't feel right if you switch it and go, well, blackmail can be done for the greater good. Even though it's a bad tactic.

It'S not always just for personal sacrifice, like some people. Like, this is a. This is a. A thing that people use in crime stories is the blackmail for good. So let's say someone's blackmailing an innocent, innocent person. Then the hero thinks, I'll just get the dirt on the blackmailer and then I can turn the tables. And then it gets this really sick spiraling downward of people getting more dirt and more dirt. It's a lot of, like, journalism is about that.

This.

So those journalism, crime stories are usually about the digging up of the dirt. Sweet Smell of Success is a great story about that kind of thing, which is kind of a satirical comedy of sorts with Bert Lancaster and Forget the Other Guy. Anyway, I'll. I'll stop there. But that's. That's an idea that you might be able to use.

Okay.

Any.

Anything else. So. So here's what it feels like to me is it feels like.

I've got all the missing pieces in there. I just need to, like, get, you know, turn the dials a little bit to get them coming through the right way.

But one of you also just said, like, there were some things I was doing that was pulling it out of the narrative devices of Police Report.

Could we talk about that a little bit? Because I feel like that's a separate problem.

I have a few examples.

That. Where I'm thinking.

There'S information in there that doesn't seem to be illuminating Sam's problem. So one example is. Is when.

When Dawson swivels his chair back to his monitor and starts stabbing at the keys. Right. We don't.

That's not helping. Sam, who's our.

Right.

Our young officer, our young detective. That's not really what Dawson is doing there. Doesn't really help with that. There's. And. And what's interesting is in the pattern scene, we don't have that sentence in that way. What's happening there is that Capelli turns away. So we have, you know, we see. We see Capelli shift. But what Dawson is doing at that point, we don't really care about.

Let's see, there's another.

I think.

Actually a. A little above that. We get when. When Dawson shrugs.

Right.

We get that it's the. He's. We get the explanation. He'd done his fair share of hurting the homeless before working his way to the desk. And he'd spent the last two days controlling the inordinate chaos in the bullpen.

Blah.

Right. So.

It feels like there's too much justification there. Right. There's a. There's that moment in. In the pattern scene when Capelli says, oh, he's. He's dealt with a lot of taxpayers. And then that's it.

Right.

So. So I think that it's.

The way I read it in the pattern scene is that Capelli is saying what happened, but he's not. He's not trying to. And he's trying to not make Dawson look awful, but he's not going to. He's not doing very much there. Right. He's doing it very. In a very clipped way, and it's very focused on what. What's happening. And there's very little.

Binding.

Right. So.

Yeah, so I added that second line specifically. One of the weeks I was given feedback about this doesn't feel like a place where a cop has been. A precinct where a cop has been killed. And so I specifically put that in to. Because one is. It's the middle of the night. So even with the chaos, it would still be a lull.

But that was my way of inserting that everything has been nuts for two days. And so I could come up with another way to do that, but I think originally I just had the one line, and then I've added the second line as a way to show that, like, they've been dealing with chaos because of. And I'll just say on an aside how it still fascinates me how.

So many times I need to make a major shift in the story. And it's like three Words, you know, I just have to drop in one tiny little thing.

So like, while that still might need to be shifted, I was like, oh, you know, I got one sentence like, like, you guys haven't even mentioned that since I put it in that it doesn't feel like it's a place where a cop has been killed. So I can adjust that. But that is why it's there, right?

Yes. So if we go, then if we think about in the 6:24, the point of view mode is a showing mode. So when we're conveying information, we want to do it through showing as much as possible rather than telling. So the, the binding beats are telling and you need those in there.

Right?

Every story is a balance of showing and telling. But the, but overwhelmingly in this one or, or just, you know, if we're weighing it out, the balance needs to, to tip towards showing. And so thinking about the ways that you can.

Like, okay, so to do this as a, as a practical matter, I would, you know, just like you've done with the.

With what really happened, I would think about what is a. What does this police station look like when one of their own has been.

Has been killed? And, and, and with the, with the knowledge that somebody let him die. Right, so then what is that? Like, what is that? What do you think that looks like? Write that out and then figure out, then look for places where you can add that as a, a way of, of showing what the scene. You know, what would the, what would a reader see if they were actually seeing this play out in a film? And then can you weave those details in there like that? So I think looking at. And there, there are different times to do these kinds of reviews, but overall, every bit of binding that's in here really needs to earn its place because primarily we're showing. Because Capelli can't tell.

The truth.

He has to show the truth. And so that's why the, that's why that narrative device. So every bit of telling that happens has to be covert and very limited.

I'd like to just jump in on that a little bit because.

I think it's very telling that the examples of where the narrative device departs from where it needs to be, those are clustered in that Dawson area. And we've been talking about the main relationships in this story with your triad of people.

And so because we've been focusing on that as the most important dimension, we haven't been talking about Dawson, but I think Dawson is a secondary problem. And because, and the reason for that is that he is as. As we were just talking about. He is an indicator of the context. How does this police station act when one of their own has been killed? But he is also an individual, and I think that that dimension is missing. So if we look at the pattern scene, Magruder has a very clear object of. Magruder wants points. So what he does.

Originally, he tries to get Capelli not to go over and talk to Struthers because he doesn't want Capelli to get more points. Because the thing about points is if somebody else gets points, that means you lost points. Points. So he's trying to maintain his relative points position. So, so he, he, you know, says he eventually agrees because he thinks at that point that Capelli's going to lose points by talking to Struthers. So that whole first trope in the pattern scene is about points, and it's about Magruder trying to keep Capelli in his place.

So once he thinks, okay, he's going to lose points, then when he finds out that Struthers actually knows something, that's when he buzzes Magruder. Capelli buzzes Magruder and he says, hey, get some guys for a lineup. That's all he says. But what Magruder does is he calls the Lieutenant. Now, that is beyond what Capelli told him to do. But the thing is, because we know he wants points with the Lieutenant, he wants to be the one to deliver the message, hey, we've got something. So he takes actions off screen, but then we find out about them later in order to fulfill that object of desire. So Dawson doesn't have his own object of desire, apart from stay out of stuff. But it's a negative object of desire rather than a positive one. So we need something that Dawson is going toward so that he can be acting both as a representative of the context and as a complex human being who exists independently within that context.

I would just like to. To note, Tim, that we just gave you a lot to. To consider, so I'd like you not to consider all of it on your next draft. Right. It's too much. It's too much. So I think the. The primary thing, you know, I'm probably.

Going to try to anyway.

Yeah, I don't want you to. I don't want you to. I want you to focus on.

The signal that Danielle and Leslie were pointing out in terms of the. The moments when Watson discovers the complicity of Randall and the.

What was going on with Barnes.

So. And there's a couple of strategies we. We asked you to think about to establish Barnes as one of the good guys. Perhaps that's one strategy in a conversation with Randall and maybe to establish that Barnes died really horribly in a conversation with.

I forget the other guy, Dawson.

So those are two. And then.

And then in terms of fixing the police report as narrative device, I would hold off on that because those are very, very, very meticulous analytical processes that you literally go sentence by sentence with, and you start slicing out non essentials. And all of Leslie's points are spot on, but if you start going to that level of detail now, it. You could end up rewriting the thing and then we're back at square one again. So just, let's just. The, the signal coming through to Sam is really what's necessary to really clarify right now. And there's essential steps in that clarification. One is we need to lock down the relationship between Barnes between the victim, the hero, and the perpetrator. And so right now it's a little squishy and it's not defined.

And.

And we also need Watson to be able to be able to slice that out and have a pure hierarchy so that he's. His judgment at the very end makes sense because he's figured it out. The worst character here is the perpetrator. Barnes made a mistake, he tried his best, and he suffered and died for it. And Randall is really. He. It's not. It's not on him.

Even though he did, he didn't know that the guy was still alive when he took his wallet. It's tragic, but he didn't really know because I, I think after. That's the thing that gets Randall to come into the station. He didn't know that Barnes was still alive when he took his wallet. And then when he read the papers, he found out that he suffered. And then he's like, I can't live with this. I've got to get that guy some justice. So I think it works and clicks in that that's what drives Randall to the police station. His guilt for not saving the guy, even though he didn't know he was.

He was still alive.

I think that that will work.

Well, that is. That's fine. That's just. That is a change, I think, from what we were doing was he did know. That's what basically sent him running. Was that. Because it was like we even talked like he like, coughed and like some blood came up and.

Yeah, I think that was a mistake. I. I think he probably heard somebody in the woods. And you know when you steal something you want to do it quickly and get the hell out of there as fast as you can. So the fact that he did, I think that would be a second order effect. That that's why it took Randall so long to come into the station because it took him a while to find out that the guy did suffer and he was still alive. That's, that's, that's what I think makes more sense.

Or, or I mean, if, if anybody disagrees, I'm not the, the poobah of being able to arbiter of this stuff. I'm. I'm just investigating it along with you.

I don't disagree with that. I think, you know, Tim, when you get in there, you'll probably figure out what, you know, what it needs to be. The one clarification on the narrative device I want to say is that when you make adjustments, when you make these adjustments as part of the process, I would just, you know, like then go back to the narrative device and think about does this, does this fit within the narrative device for the, you know, does this fit within a. Reasonably within a police report? And that way you're not adding to those things that in the final analysis you'll need to adjust and you're gradually course correcting the actions you take within the text to make sure you're conforming to that. So while you don't want to do that global check for the narrative device sentence by sentence, yet doing it piecemeal is a really good choice.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the StoryGrid podcast. For everything StoryGrid related, check out storygrid.com make sure you sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything happening in the Story Grid universe. To find all the show notes, transcripts, read the scenes that I'm writing each week for these episodes, you can go to storygrid.com podcast if you would like to dig deeper into StoryGrid, you can go to storygrid.com resources and see all of the different resources we have available there. I highly recommend you go to storygrid.com books if you haven't picked up the Story Grid, the main book, make sure you pick pick up a copy of that. If not, check out the beats and masterwork guides that we have available as well. As always, thanks for listening. If you would like to support this show, you can do that by telling another author about the show or by going to Apple Podcasts and leaving a rating and review. Thanks so much and we'll see you next week.