World Building in Your Novel

Hello and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grohl, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book StoryGrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we continue into my.

Middle build, but we kind of have to stop and take a step back.

As we so often do on this show, and have me stop writing scenes and actually plan out what my world looks like and do the actual world building part so I can know what these scenes, where these scenes are actually living.

So it's a really good episode that.

Dives into an important topic that we're.

All going to need for our novels.

Which is planning out the world that our characters are living in. So I think you'll really enjoy it. Let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, I went back and reworked the one scene based on some, you know, what we talked about last week, and then wrote two more and sent them over to you. And overall, I'm not thrilled with what I sent you. I felt like every time I tried to wrap my head around what this is supposed to be, I just couldn't really see much. So I'm interested to hear your feedback. So I sent you the three scenes and I'll post those in the show notes. But basically it was a rewrite of the scene I did last week that, you know, had some of the things we talked about and then a scene where she kind of had a conversation with the guy in charge and then a scene where she was back in training again. Anyway, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I think you kind of hit a bit of a wall here, and it's not anything that you can't overcome. But I was just trying to think before we got on the phone what the best advice is here. So before we get into the scene by scene discussion, I was thinking about, well, how should you approach doing a brand new kind of section of your novel? Because there's a certain elation and happiness that happens after you finish your, your bare bones, you know, beginning hook and, you know, I think the beginning hook was somewhere around 11 scenes. And, you know, when you go back, when we go back after, you know, we've got a first draft done, we'll be able to add things and subtract things and tweak and do all kinds of stuff to make it even better. But I think you've got a really nice, solid thing going there. So how do you get the middle build? And here's. Here's kind of what I think is a good idea, the middle build. And this goes to the discussions we had with Andy Reagan at the University of New Hampshire a couple of months ago. The middle build is emotionally a Cinderella arc. And what I mean by that is that it rises, it falls, and then it rises again. So emotionally, you want to take your character and take them on a path where they rise, they gain confidence, they're feeling better, you know, the floor falls out from under them, and then they have to rejigger their worldview and rise again. So if we sort of possible to think about the beginning hook out of our minds, let's try and get that completely out of our minds and say to ourselves, we're going to write a novella here. So what's going to be the inciting incident of this smaller unit of story? And that way, now it's not going to have to be as big as the inciting incident for the beginning hook. So that's one of the things we should think about. Like, what can we think about in terms of this middle build as a beginning, a middle and end of this middle build section? And the other thing about the mental build is that it's the place where you can expand your world a little bit. You can get into more detail about the everyday environment of what's going on. And as this is the new movement into the magical world, what your reader is going to want is a very clear understanding of what this magical world looks like, feels like, sounds like, is like, etc. So these scenes that you sent me are very much actively moving the character from one event to another event to another event. And that's really good. And I'm not saying that that's a mistake for you to focus on, but what I do think you need to do is to settle in a little bit like we did. You know, that scene when I had you have Jesse talk to 61 and 61, told her some stories about his life, and it was a little bit of a slower moving scene. It was more. It was a softer kind of movement from being friendless to having a new friend or being accepted as opposed to being not accepted and alienated. And I think this is the opportunity here to do a lot of different things. Now, the inciting incident of this story for the middle build, we discussed as being Jesse sort of in the world itself. And I think that. I think that's a good idea because, you know, a lot of people have done those wonderful scenes before where we go on the train or we go on the bus, or we sort of transition slowly from the ordinary world to the. To the new magical world. And I'm not saying that, you know, on further reflection later on, we might want to put one of those scenes in there. But for now, I like the idea of her being locked in this world and her actually doing something in this world. The problem that arises after this first scene is that it comes off as very confusing to the reader. Now, that works to an advantage, but it can be a very big disadvantage, too. The advantage is, is that it shocks them into a new kind of reality, a new sensibility. And I think that's a good thing. The problem, though, is that after you come out of that mystical sort of matrix, like world where Jesse is doing things is all of a sudden she's. She's into a new thing. There's another sort of pretty big shift of story that happens where she's called into the office of.

The leader of this training faction and read the riot act. But instead, I think you need to slowly move to that scene instead of bang, bang, bang. So what could you do? Is the question.

So let me stop you there. So my concern was not having enough action because I was in this mindset of like, well, this is an action story. I don't want to bore my reader with a bunch of dialogue or, I don't know, I guess I was trying. So I'm just. I'm just moving too fast again.

Yes, you are. And you have to remember that you have to do a lot of setting up for future action scenes. And what do I mean by that? The thing about the magical world is you have to somehow integrate a lot of exposition about this mystical world that's only in Tim Grohl's brain right now. And you have to use that information. You know, if you're like me, you've probably thought about how this world works, what this threshing is all about, who the factions are, where in space time. And this is all. This stuff happens. And that's information that the reader desperately wants to know. But if you did a chapter that was purely exposition, you would really irritate the reader and they would get very bored very quickly. So the trick is to somehow figure out scenes that move that also put in a lot of exposition.

Is this like the scene where you had me. Instead of them just having coffee and explaining it, you know, they're actually moving through the world. So you get to see this stuff?

Yes.

Is that what.

Okay, yeah. And the way to sort of approach this and the way I approach it is to think about something in your own life and in other people's life, Some rite of passage that we all go through and take yourself back to that time and use your own personal experiences in those moments as ammunition to come up with scenes. What do I mean by that? Okay. Everybody at one time or another has to leave home and go someplace new. It might be college. Now, when you. When I went to college, it was sort of, here's, here's your stuff, son. Bye. And everybody I knew and loved was gone. And I. I look in a room and there's three other guys who've just experienced the same thing that I have. And it's this moment when you reinvent yourself. It's a moment when you realize these people know nothing about me. I now have the opportunity to create my own self in a way that I never would have had back home. Because everybody back home knows, has known me since I was in kindergarten. They've known the fights that I've been in with my friends. They've known, you know, how many sports I played, how many awards I've had, how many times I got in trouble with the principal. Everybody has a very clear understanding of who I am and what I'm about from the old, from the old world. But when you go to college, it's this remarkable moment when you realize I can be whoever I want. I don't have to be the jock from high school anymore. I can maybe, maybe I can find a group of friends who like, you know, to play guitar. I could be a guitar playing guy now. I don't. Maybe I don't have to wear this jean jacket anymore. Maybe I can try on a flannel shirt. You know, it's these simple.

You should definitely not wear the jean jacket.

You should see pictures of me in college. Yeah. And you would absolutely agree. So the reason why I bring this up is that if you think about these moments in your own life when you were faced with a brand new experience in a whole new world and a whole new place, you had to integrate. You had to learn, right? You had to learn very quickly. Oh, my gosh, where do I eat? Where's, where's, where's the, you know, where's the cafeteria? Who am I going to eat with? Do you think these guys will eat with me? These my, my new roommates, whoever the hell they are. I wonder what they're about. And what do you find is the first week of college, everybody is so nice, right? Everybody is. You want to be everybody's friend because everybody is really welcoming and nice, and they're asking you lots of question questions, and you're. You're answering them and you're asking them questions, and it's a really nice communal feeling. And then at the end, and it's always usually like, freshman week, right? And then at the end of freshman week, the real character of everybody starts to emerge. And by the time that first week is over, you're pretty locked into your microcosm of your school life. And guess what usually happens is that you find those other football players, you find those guitar players that you were, because you feel comfortable in those worlds. So this is the moment to sort of reflect on that experience and say to yourself, what would Jesse experience? She's just been through so much trauma. Not only that, she started to slowly integrate into a community, and now she's ripped out again. So. And she's going to a place that she's very fearful of. And that's the same thing about college. Even though we all talk about how great it's going to be to go to college, it's a scary situation because when you go to college, you're on your own. Nobody's going to say, hey, Sean, did you do your homework tonight? No one's going to tell, you know, say, hey, you're bombing this class. If you don't, you know, get an A on this next test, you're going to get. You're going to get an E. It's all. It starts to become internally your own responsibility. And because this is overall a maturation plot, this is a moment where you can have Jesse sort of facing these situations and slowly, you know, I see that that scene that you sent, the second scene where the head of the department comes and says, you know, you're not. I've seen your potential, and you're not giving us what you have. That's a scene that you can wait three or four scenes and build up this other stuff before you get to that place. And you can even go another two scenes before 81 shows up or 83 shows up. So this is kind of. This is the moment where you want to do Cinderella's Rise. And what's great about this is Jesse is terrified of this place, right? So when she gets there, what she's going to discover is, it's easy, man. She thought this place was going to be hard. This place is a joke.

You know what I mean, like, when I remember my first math class in college, I had. For some reason, there was some, you know, I had to take some class that was a. And I took it and it was so easy and I felt so confident. And then, you know, the math class after that was when it really hit me, you know, a shovel in the face. But it's sort of like this warm water integration into this new world. So we want to see, like, Jesse just as this. As the guy says in the second scene, we want to see her doing the least amount possible and still winning. So let's get back to. Let's get to practicality. So I think if you think of these opening. Now, remember, you're going to be doing 20 to 25 scenes in your middle bill. So you've got some room here to really have some fun and to work on the way Jesse deals with other people. Work on. Like in your first. In the draft of the book that you wrote previously, there was a lot of really nice moments where you've got the rival who's like, yeah, you're gonna be terrible at this. And then the rival has his, you know, the henchmen who go, yeah, you're gonna be terrible. So, you know, you could have fun with that sort of predicament. And if you treat this as a college experience or. Or a higher institutional learning experience, that would be kind of a cool thing to do. So after this first scene, usually, you know, what happens in the military or in other places where they train before they go off to a conflict is they have an after action report, right? They have an after action review of what happened. So like in the FBI, if you go through Quantico training and you do some sort of test, at the end of the test, you all go into a classroom and there's, you know, the professor who stands at the front and goes, why did you do that? Why did you do that? What happened here? Explain yourself. If you're on a football team, one of the worst things, worst experiences you can have when you play football is that is the day after the game. Because that's when the films come in. And when the films come in, you have to sit into a dark room and have a coach scream at you for all the mistakes that you made in the previous game. Even if you win the game, they just rake you over the coals.

So that is a moment that you could use here. And it's an instructional moment where we can get to know the way the school works, the way this institution works, the people who Serve these kids. Because we also don't really know right now how great this world is, how much better it is than living with the numbered in the bunker. She's got to have her stuff. Somebody's got to be polishing her shoes, all of her stuff. When you play Division 1 football or something, you go into the locker room and it's like going into Caesar's Palace. They've got your uniform there.

Your cleats are perfectly polished, your helmet is sparkling. And playing high school football when you had to drag all your crap yourself, it's just this magical moment, like, wow, man, I'm pretty cool. So I think those are the moments that you can play with here and move her through a day. Think about, is there some regimental program? Like, is it Navy SEAL training? What do they do? Or is there some sort of institutional program that trains people for a particular task that has a set of very, you know, like you and I are going to be doing this story grid seminar. And what I'm doing is I'm planning that proto. That protocol, right? I'm planning what is the best way to get these, these students integrated into the story grid methodology. And I'm breaking up the time, and I'm thinking of when they need to go to the bathroom and when we're going to have sandwiches. All these things are very important. Are they going to have time to talk to you? Are they. Are we going to be able to, you know, is there. Should we have treats? All of these things are really important because when somebody goes into an atmosphere where it's very, very intense learning, they need to know there's a very strict pattern of behavior and things that are required of me, things that I must require of the instructor, all that kind of stuff. So this is kind of the fun part for you as, as somebody who plans. I mean, you've had your own conference, you've planned your own coursework, you've done your own courses online. There's a very. When you plan something, you just go, then I'll talk about this. You don't you say, what's the best way for these people to absorb my, you know, my program so that they retain as much information as possible at the very end? So think about it from the point of view of the faction. How do I train these young, hopeful, unknown, unproven talents? How do I train their natural ability to a place that is, I can call upon it at any time, and they're going to produce the result I want them to produce? That's an interesting way Of. Because everybody can relate to that. Everybody's been in that experience. No matter the age, if you get a new job, Right. Your first job, everybody wants to know, well, who am I going to eat with at lunch? That's the biggest questions that we face are the stresses of everyday life. Life. Like, where's the bathroom? Is it okay to take the water out of the refrigerator? Or do I have to pay for it? Is this soda free? Or what about the pretzels in the. In the snack room? Can I have those or. No. Those stupid questions are really important. Do you get it?

Yeah. I mean, as much as I can get this without actually trying to go do it, but. So do you feel like I need to just kind of like. So does my very first scene not work as the first scene of the middle Bill? Do I need to ease us into this a little bit more?

I don't think that would hurt. And because we don't know what. In order for us to really understand what she's doing in the Matrix world that she's plugged into, we need to know, you know, what is the mission? What is the test? What is the training mission? So I was fortunate to work with a very, you know, incredible Green Beret.

And he told me, what do you have to do to become a Green Beret? And it was just. I just could not believe what they had to do. You know, they would. They would just drop them in the middle of nowhere, and they would give them an impossible task, like, you need to move 500 pounds of gear over there in 10 minutes, and they have to figure it out. So anyway, that's kind of like the fun little bit of research that you can do for this kind of novel is to adapt a really intense regimental program that, like, there's Green Berets, there's the Navy Seals, there's going to a job interview at Google. There's MIT's sort of computational. You know, if you want to go into a special program at mit, you have to pass a lot of interviews and tests. I remember when my brother got out of college, he was interviewing for, you know, jobs on Wall street. And there was a famous program at Salomon Brothers, which is no longer but Solomon Brothers. It was essentially, you had to interview with 36 people over an entire day. And the 36 guy would ask you the same question that the first guy did, and if you didn't give the same answer, they would say, this guy's inconsistent. We shouldn't hire him. So it was like this crazy, you know, thing and, you know, it was all just a sort of like a corporate hazing process. But what's more interesting is not the hazing process. It's the process, you know, like in that great movie Full Metal Jacket, where they, you know, the sergeant screaming at all the guys is like, we are going to teach you. We're going to strip away your personality and teach you to be a killing machine. And this is the way we're going to do it. And you watch that first half of a Full Metal Jacket, and by the end, you're ready to go fight with those guys yourself. So that's the kind of thing that could be really cool. Also. Another great movie to watch that has this kind of thing is An Officer and a Gentleman with Richard Gere, where he wants to be a naval officer and he's going to naval officer training, and he's got to change his entire personality and who he is and what he does. And he's very, very competent in what he does. But what he has to learn is how to care about the guy next to him. So there are any number of wonderful examples of training programs that you could use and steal and adapt for this one Ender's Game.

And is this where, too, I should introduce, like, the boy and the rival and, like, start setting up those people as well?

Exactly, exactly. Like in your. In. In your old draft of your book, you did this intuitively with a whole bunch of guys like that. And then there was that rival. You know, one. One lab was a rival of the other lab. I mean, go back to that, look at that stuff and see what you can steal and take from that. You know, this could be a process where they train many cells. You know, they could train four people in a cell to operate together. And the other thing that you can do is you can have all of this stuff explained in an academic setting. So you can have a character who's like, you know, the drill sergeant who comes out and says, let me go over you. Let me go over some statistics with you pukes. You know, you all think you're pretty cool now. You were all townies. Well, you know, if you want to be coders, you got to do this. And here's here, let me show you what happened in the last threshing. And then, you know, you describe some incredible visionary thing that's on the screen that shows these maneuvers of these people that these. These kids have no clue of how to do now, what went wrong there? And so you can do that kind of Socratic dialogue between the instructor and the pupils and Jesse. Jesse's arc here, remember, is she's going to rise and reach a level of really extreme competence. And then something's going to happen that's going to knock the wind out of her sails. And the other thing you have to remember, and you don't have to do this now, but you got to bring this, you know, sort of stage by stage. And then there's got to be a crisis. There has to be like, okay, we know you're supposed to be training for 46 weeks, but they've moved up the threshing. So the threshing is now two years earlier, and we've got 12 weeks to get ready. And you are the front line. You are a frontline defense against, you know, whatever the other threshing is. And then you can explain the protocols of the threshing, where it happens, how it happens, who's, you know, who they're facing, what, what the rules of the threshing are. So do you see what I mean? Like, this is the opportunity. This is the meaty middle build where you get to get really wonky and fun and create just your own sort of strange, technocratic, weird, tyrannical government that takes the cream of the crop from the population and manipulates that cream of the crop to do the bidding for them in the future. And this is the process by which these kids undergo to become these great threshers or however you're gonna talk about it. But. But Jessie, I think to think of her going to college is a good analogy for these scenes. And to think about the moments when you went to college and the stresses that were involved and the alliances you made quickly. And then there was probably some guy across campus who was cooler than everybody else that you didn't like, and he became your rival or whatever. That's kind of where you want to get this place. Because this is kind of what the reader is expecting at this point. They're expecting her to be going into a program that has very strict rules, and there's a beginning, middle and end in the program. And she is going to end up being a very integral part of this entire unifactional, you know, defense.

Okay.

And so in this next sequence, I'm really focused on just introducing the world, introducing the player, the allies and enemies, and just kind of getting her settled.

Yeah. And then.

So the other thing. I'm kind of struggling with two things here. One, I. One thing I was thinking was, with writing the last few scenes, and it's like, I feel like there's a couple things that are a little bland because I'm not sure what to do. So one is, am I making out the faction to be evil enough or good enough? I feel like it's just kind of middle of the road. Like they're not doing anything super crazy except for what they did to her. And so that's one worry I've had. And then I'm struggling with, like, how is she approaching this? Like, is she going to walk in and think, well, this is all kind of dumb, you know, it's way easier than I thought it was, you know, because she, you know, she lived in a vacuum where she didn't realize how good she was. Or is she trying to subvert it by like doing the bare minimum? You know, that's where I was trying to put in that one thing, like trying to tie her fate to somebody else because she doesn't really seem to care so much about herself. So we need to tie her fate to somebody else so she'll actually get up and do something. So those I've been struggling with, like.

Well, yeah, you have to establish, you have to establish the villain and the victim here. So you do need that, that victim element where she. Remember this is an action story and the hero's job, the villain gets the action, sets the action in motion at the middle build and it gives rise to the object of desire in the hero. So the good thing about the action story is that these are conventions. The villain raises the specter of a victim and the hero then makes it their mission to protect the victim from the villain. So you don't have to escalate the, you don't have to make the villain this sort of mustache twitching person in, in the off, you know, who, who runs the faction yet. But you do have to establish a villain. And you did that, you actually did this in your, in your first draft of the other book where the rival guy served as the villain to the woman who ran her own lab. So as long as there is now, Jesse went to the Capitol so that she could protect the number before. So what she's going to want to know. Just like we all know when we go to college, we know we're out of there in four years, right? So we know what our job is when we go to college. So Jesse is not really sure what her job is. So one of the questions that she's going to want to have answered is when do I get to leave? What do I have to do here to leave? And a thing that you could set up which could be fun is they say, well, you've got to complete this training session and then you graduate. And then she'll think graduation means I get to go home. And then of course it does. So, and if you gave rise to a victim, like the kid that you describe in his name, Justin or something. Yeah. If you use him as the person that she has to defend while she's just muddling through until she graduates, that will work because he will serve as the victim. The villain will be the rivals, the rival cell or whatever to, you know, maybe she's part of a four man team or a six man team or whatever and they all have to compete against one another. So there's a whole bunch of cells, faction cells, and she's assigned, you know, the first day she goes into her, you know, the headquarters of this cell and she, you know, she sees how incredible it is. There's, you know, all the food they could ever want to eat. There's televisions you don't even have to turn on. All you have to do is think you make it all up. But. And then she discovers, you know, the weakness of one of them. And so I'm not trying to write your story for you, but what I am trying to do is to give you the freedom and the room to get Jesse to rise in this middle build and to become competent and to protect somebody and to get a lot of information about this, this entire world on the page before you bring in the guy that says, okay, either you give me everything that you have or Justin goes back to Shittsville.

Can I quote that?

So, and this is where like, you know, good reestablishing these things that I feel like you've told me a dozen times or probably more if we went back and listened. But like, because when I hear you say, you know, villain, victim and hero and she's got a step into like I hear, like it has to be a big kind of like fight or something. And it's, it can be small where it just establishes that she's going to put herself in between the victim and the villain.

Have to be big, progressive complications. That's really what we're talking about. And what progressive complications mean is that they slowly escalate. So you have a tendency to go from 0 to 150 miles an hour. So if you can think of these little speed bombs that escalate and slowly the onion is peeled further and further back and we see that making it up. But maybe, you know, there comes a critical moment where she, it's Going to be probably at her bottom fall, which she reveals her specialness. She reveals that she doesn't die in the game and she thinks she's hit rock bottom. But that's when, oh my gosh, here she is. Let's get her. That's when the real evil comes in. And remember, you want this to be a believable system. And nobody rises, nobody evil rises without having some good explanations. So there's going to be some really good explanations about why these children are being trained to fight, why the threshing happens, why it's necessary that there's such a hierarchy of society so that we, these are basically building to the speech and praise of the villain later on. And I'm sure you haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but the movie network has the greatest praise and speech and praise of the villain probably ever. But that is sort of what you're building to. So it's progressively moving up the, you know, up the pyramid of complication and evil until, you know, the, the real tyrant emerges.

Okay, so I think too here one thing I failed to do is just really think hard about what, what this world looks like. You know, I just jumped into writing the next scenes instead of figuring out. It's so hard to know when to stop and plan and when to just write the next scene and hope that it comes to you.

Right?

So, because as you were talking about, like, is it like this or is it like this or maybe this happens. I'm like, I don't know any of that.

Don't you know you're not supposed to tell me that. You're supposed to go, oh, yes, of course, I've got this all worked out. You should see the spreadsheets I have up on my wall.

But for me, this is, this is the fun, kind of the fun part because you, Tim, get to create this utopia slash dystopia in any way you want and you can think about, well, geez, wouldn't it be cool to meld, you know, what Rasputin did in the tsar reign with the water break in guys did or whatever. It's kind of a fun way of building the rules of this world. And also what's great about it is that when you do this, you're going to discover that there's a lot of really good reasons why the faction does what it does. Because if you think about this big society that they're trying to control, how do you control masses of people? How do you, you know, how do you get, keep people in line to do their work? How do you assign the work? How do you get the things done that you need to get done? How do you defend, you know, the, the country or the nation or whatever it is against a rival nation? How, how did this happen? You know, why do they have this threshing? And there's a lot of fun answers that you can think about for that. I mean, to me, this threshing seems like a great way to get rid of the, the smartest people in society so that you can maintain control. So if you let all the, if you pick off the smartest people in society and you train them to kill one another, then you can maintain your iron grip on everybody else. Because if everybody else watches all the people who seem to be the smartest and the best get picked and then never come back, they're not going to want to be so smart. So they're going to be docile, you know, little citizens and they're going to do what they're told and they're going to want to have their credits on their video machines. This, this could be part of the speech of that the villain gives later on. You know, this is, just think about it, what are we supposed to do? We have to maintain the population control. There's only so much food for everybody. You know, everybody's down to the bare minimum of sustenance because our planet's a mess. We only have limited food. So what we do have unlimited supply of is fantasy. So we have to give fantasy to the people so that they stay docile and that they are happy with the little food that we give them. And then anybody who questions whatever it is that we need to get done, we, you know, we have them kill each other. Simple should.

The next thing I work on is basically just sketching out the rules of the rules and what's going on in this world and why it's going on and the factions point of view and the people's point of view of view. And just fleshing that out before I try to write anything else, I would.

Do that because you're reaching the point now where this is, this is where Jesse gets indoctrinated into the big machine. She's going to be given a crash course in her role in this world. And her role is to die for the faction. So this whole process of her going to become a coder and all that stuff is a way to get her to die for her quote unquote country or whatever. So you need to know how they're going to do that, what Psychological manipulations will they use to get a 12 year old to do what they want them to want her to do. And the other thing that you have to remember, and I write a lot about this in in the Silence of the Lambs story grid book, is that when you're young and you're just starting out, and you're starting out on a job or you're in college, you believe in the system. You believe in it. So you take it at face value. Oh, I'm supposed to get A's here. Okay, what do I have to do to get my A? So that when I have all of my A's racked up, then I can get into a good medical school and then I can get A's in medical school. And then I became. And then I get my MD and then I become a doctor and then I play golf every Wednesday afternoon. How do I do that? So you believe in the system. So part of the arc of Jesse, part of the arc of maturation is reaching a point of disillusionment with the system. The disillusionment plot is usually, you know, it's sort of the adult maturation plot in my, you know, theory. It's sort of when adults have to change their worldview, understanding that the way that they thought things were isn't really the way it works. So that was a very long winded answer to your question. But I think taking the time to sketch out what is. If you had to write a 20 page mini history of the rise of the faction and where it came from, how would you do that? How would you like? We have in the United States, we have three branches of government. We have the executive branch, we have Congress, and we have the Supreme Court. So there's a very, very hierarchical structure of the United States government as there are in most other governments around the world. How can you, Tim, create something similar to that? That would make sense.

So I, you know, I'm thinking of like Tolkien here and how much he planned, how much he built the world that never actually made it into the book, but informed consistently the decisions he made throughout the story.

Yeah, and it's George Lucas did that too. I mean, for how many years did he sit around with probably clay models of Obi Wan Kenobi in his backyard?

Probably a lot.

Yeah. So basically I need to think about the history and the rise of the faction. I need to think about the threshing and what that really is. I need to think about, you know, how they're controlling the population. What's really going on behind the scenes, who's in charge at the very top. You know, probably I need to think too, some more about just the overall technology that's in play and where that came from. You know, I'm starting to lean towards the idea that the threshing and the fight against other factions is all a myth. Kind of like in 1984. Wait, is that the name of the book?

1984? Yeah, that's. Yeah, that's.

Yeah. Where they're like bombing their own people so that they would have somebody for them to fight against. Am I remembering that right? It's been a little while since I've read that.

Well, that's very much such a disturbing story of. It's Big Brother. It's similar in a lot of ways to your stuff, but it's, it's. It's about two people who fall in love and then they discover that they were set up to fall in love so that they would betray one another. Because love is the one thing that can destroy Big Brother. And it's really horrifying interrogation scenes. And it's very. Yeah, it's an internal, more of an internal story that has a lot of like, I think Big Brother does report on the terror and the bombings and all that stuff, but we never go to the battlefield because it's really about these two people who come together in a loving relationship and how that love is deformed and destroyed and made to be a tool of the tyranny. And it's so dark that I would not. I think my gut is that when you're doing this sort of 12 year old journey, the threshing has to be a real thing. You can't. Because what you're going to do, if you write a book that has a 12 year old protagonist, you must assume that you're going to have 10 year olds reading it at one point. And 10 year olds don't like irony all that much.

You know, if you promise them that there's going to be ice cream on Saturday and there's not ice cream, but there's a fruit salad, they don't like that they want the ice cream. So if you're promising a big threshing conflagration where Jesse has to fight her way out of something and you don't deliver that, that's not gonna be cool. So I would think about how can you get. Is there a story in history that you can rip off? And when I say rip off, I'm just saying that would inspire you.

That is an nicer Way to put it.

Yeah, like, you know, the Spartacus story where there's the one. You know, the one guy who has to fight so many different people. Is there. Joan of Arc is a. Could be one where, you know, the French armies were getting clobbered until she showed up. Something like that. And model the threshing sort of tactical war on something in history. Like, you bring up Tolkien. Tolkien, you know, he was around during World War I, and that stuff was just horrifying. And it was the war to end all wars because there was so much death and destruction and blood and the trench warfare. It felt as if people were literally going into Middle Earth, you know, to save themselves. World War I was horrifying with the mustard gas. And so he was obviously inspired by World War I for the magical worlds that he created.

So, you know, I don't get too fancy, is what you're saying. Like, yeah, tell. Tell the story. But. But doing it in a completely new and surprising way.

Yeah, yeah. It's as simple as that. No, what I am saying is that don't try and create something whole cloth. Fantasy and science fiction are in many. They're commentaries on prior historical events that could come back and haunt us in many ways. So use the historical record as inspiration for your. Like, for instance, Planet of the Apes, you know, one of the great science fiction movies of all time with Charlton Heston, you know, that came out, I think, in 1967, 1968. And it was. It was all about this dystopian world where man had been superseded by apes. So apes were smarter than we were and they controlled the world. And this astronaut lands on the planet and all these apes are controlling this thing, and he doesn't know what to do, and he's. He's held captive, he's enslaved. And, you know, the ending of the movie is so great because we understand the irony of it, but that. That was a movie about the historical. You know, if. If you enslave people, you will eventually, you know, be enslaved yourself. I don't want to get too deep about it, but science fiction and fantasy and this kind of story in this dystopian world that you're creating, these are sort of fun action stories that do have very strong roots in the historical record. So when you create something whole cloth, you really aren't. Because we're all. You know, we all have so many stories stuck in our heads. But if you can think of something specific, like the Battle of Thermopylae or the Battle of Marathon or Verdun, or something where one person had a major effect on a particular battle or war or something, then you can use that, that story in a way to inspire you for the, for the other one, the one that you're making.

Well, is the other thing. I mean, the other approach is the using it as a way to like look at something that's going on in society and then take that to its natural conclusion and almost like a warning. I mean, that's what stories are too.

Yeah, absolutely. And you're absolutely playing with that theme. You're playing with the theme of our insatiable desire to be entertained and how corporations and governments have figured out as long as we give, you know, a major. We have a 60 inch screen. I read an article the other day and the headline of the article was three TVs and no food. And it was the story of family that couldn't afford food but somehow was able to keep the TVs on. And that struck me as interesting that.

That'S a word for it.

So that's what I mean. That's why I think your book has some real nice stuff going for it, because it's talking about things that make us uncomfortable and nobody feels comfortable by when, if they ever tallied up how much time they're in front of a screen during a day, they wouldn't like that number.

Okay, so I will work on that and put that in some kind of form for you to look at and for us to go over next week.

Great.

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