Writing Your 2nd Draft

Hello and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me soon is Sean Coyne. He is an editor with over 25 years experience and he is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and he is helping me to plan out and write my first novel. In this episode, we are finishing up the outline and the preparation so that I can begin writing the second draft of my novel. If you've been following along, you know this has been a long road and we're hoping to get me to a point where I can actually sit down and start writing. This is also the last episode where we're going to be talking about editing for a while because we're doing a couple special segments. So first off, for the next two weeks we're going to do a series with Steven Pressfield. He's the author of the book the War of Art and he's got a brand new book coming out and I'm really excited about it and I think you're going to like it. And Sean and I spend a couple weeks talking through his new book and Resistance and how you can get your writing done. It's a really great set of episodes that I know you're going to enjoy. And after that, we're doing a three part series called Publishing 101 where Shawn and I are going to walk you through the publishing ins and outs of how to get an agent, how to get a book deal, how to work with an editor, and all the ins and outs of publishing your book. It's a really great series that you're going to learn a lot from. And if you're hoping to one day publish a book, then you're going to want to listen to that series. So for the next five weeks we have some really cool episodes coming up that you're not going to want to miss. But for now, going to jump in and get started in this final episode, trying to get me to a point where I can start working on my second draft. So let's get started.

So, Sean, before we take our little summer break, we are going to try to wrap up this full scap, figure out this story I'm trying to tell so I can actually work on the second draft. And so I sent you, I filled out the full scap from storygrid.com I sent that to you and that's going to be at the show Notes as well, if somebody wants to see it, along with just some notes about the world that I was just kind of thinking through. So wanted to get your initial feedback and thoughts of where we're at. A lot of it is what we'd already talked about, and then I've tried to kind of flesh out some of the other details, so would love to hear your thoughts on it.

Okay. The first thing I need to say is that this process has been really, really fun for me and I'm excited about the developments that have happened. And I think the story that's represented in this foolscap versus the first foolscap that you did is extraordinarily better. So with that said, I think there's a couple of things to think about. The first thing I'm going to say to you has nothing to do with foolscap, but I want to get it out there before we go on break because I think this is going to tremendously helpful for you and for other people. And we've talked about this a lot before, but now since you're in the throes of things, I think it's good to reiterate it. And that is to this is something Steve Pressfield, you know, really recommends very highly. And the reason why he recommends this very highly is because it's kind of what turned his career around. And what happens is, if you can figure out what I call the narrative device who is telling this story. A lot of the problems that we're grasping with right now become much more clear. The answers become much easier to come to. And what narrative devices is again, is who is telling the story? How are you going to tell this story? So in this story, there's a couple of things that you could do. You know, just off the top of my head, you could have it in the first person, meaning Jesse, the lead character, is telling the story. So she would be the figure who is literally telling what has happened. That's one way to go. And some thrillers are very good at this technique. Gone Girl is written in two first person voices. One is the point of view of the woman and one is the guy. So another thing to think about is what I call sort of a setup, narration within narration. And this is kind of an interesting thing to think about. An example of this would be Gates of Fire. Now, Gates of Fire is Steve's novel about the Battle of Thermopylae. And what he decided to do to figure out how to tell this story the right way was he created setup and the setup was this. You know, in the Battle of Thermopylae, all the Spartans died. That's the big thing. You know, they all died there. The 300 died. So Steve thought, what if King Xerxes, who was the Persian commander, the leader, the king of all the Persian armies, discovered that there was one survivor? And they pulled this guy out of the piles of dead bodies, and he says to his people, you go get that man. And I want to interview him. I want to know how these Spartans were able to hold us off for so long. I need to know the secrets behind the Spartan army. And that's kind of the setup of the book. So they drag this guy, they give him medical attention, and then he starts to tell the story, and he tells this amazing story, and it's a story within a story. He's telling Xerxes and the Persians the story of the Spartans, which gives it such a strong narrative thread that you can. The reader knows where they are all the time. If they ever get confused, they're like, oh, right, this is that sole survivor telling this story of what happened at the Battle of Thermopylae. You know, there's going to be this great battle at the end. All I have to do is, you know, go with this. And it's like listening to a good friend of yours tell a story. So, you know, one of the things to think about with your project is, is there a way to tell this story that's unique and interesting and different and captivating? Is there a way to do a narration within a narration? Is there a way to do some kind of report? You know, this could be the report from the commission for Rogue, you know, terrorists or whatever. Well, and so this could be like the log of some kind of military police or the police system of this game world or whatever. Or it could be. There's any number of possibilities. But the reason why I'm bringing this up now before we go on break, is if you figure out who's telling the story, maybe the story is being told. Like, for example, in Amadeus, which is this fantastic play which they made into a movie. It's the story of Mozart and this very competitive other composer who basically decides to destroy Mozart because he is so talented that his work is going to become immortal while his work is not going to work. So the story of Amadeus is told from the point of view of Salieri, and Salieri tells. Tells this wonderful story of Mozart, knowing that he says, at the very beginning, I killed him. I destroyed Mozart, and I'm going to Tell you how I did it. And that setup is amazing. Another great example is True Grit, which is an amazing story told by a 14 year old girl. The very first sentence of the novel is, this is the story of how I tracked down that no good son of a bitch who killed my father.

Right? And I don't know if that's the exact line, but then you're like, oh my gosh, I gotta keep reading this. This little girl somehow tracked down the killer of her own father and got revenge. So the reason why I'm bringing this up again is that just to sort of pin parts of your brain to think about, is there an interesting, you know, narrative device that I can use as a means to keep the reader going, to keep surprising the reader, to keep it interesting. And once you do that, you discover these moments will like, well, the guy who's telling this story would kind of hold back that detail until later. And then you're not constantly like getting confused in your brain. How am I going to maintain suspense? Because you're going to almost be channeling this fictional being that is telling this story. And you'll start to hear the voice of this narrator in your dreams. And Steve Pressfield, this is what broke his block. You know, he wrote a lot of manuscripts before he wrote his first published novel called the Legend of Bagger Vance. And I asked him about it and I said, Steve was the breaking point when you discovered your narrator. He goes, absolutely. Once I knew that the narrator of my story is an old man looking back on an event that had happened 50 years prior, and that he was a caddy for two of the greatest golfers of all time and some kind of mystical figure, then I knew then I could play it. And he's telling the story to another golfer who's in a rut. Then I knew my beginning hook, my middle build and my ending payoff. And I knew how this old guy would tell this story. He would sort of ease into it. He would, you know, introduce these figures. He would take little digressions about a particular character and tell little side stories that were really, really entertaining. All the while the narrative thread is just unwinding throughout the story. So when you're thinking about Jesse's story, you know, it could be something like that narrative within a narrative, somebody is explaining what happened. You want to know the story of Jesse? Here's what happened. And that is kind of interesting because whenever we meet a friend for coffee and they go, oh my God, you're not going to believe what happened to Jim. You're like, what? Okay, get your coffee, you're all set now. Okay, here's another great example of this is Broadway Danny Rose, which was a great movie by Woody Allen. And it's the story of this really sort of second rate talent agent in the 1950s. And the narrative device is these bunch of old comics are in Carnegie Deli and they're all telling Broadway Danny Rose stories. And one guy goes, I've got the best Broadway Danny Rose story of all time. Are you guys ready? You have your sandwiches? Because this is going to take a while. And then bang, he goes, okay, this is the story of this. And then you're like, oh, I can't wait till what happens. So. Okay, now I know you're anxious to get to the fool's cap stuff.

No, I have a question on that. So most books are just kind of told in a straight kind of third person or what's the first person Omniscient. Yeah, yeah. Or the. What's the other one that combines, oh.

Free and direct style. Yeah.

So is that a narrative device?

That's absolutely a narrative device.

It's just a standard one, not a like, overly interesting one.

Right. It's an omnipotent sort of godlike. Like Silence of the Lambs is a great example of free indirect style because we get to hear and read what Clarice Starling is thinking and occasionally other characters in the book. But it's told in the third person. Clarice Starling went into Jack Crawford's office. So if you were to take that. And one of the things that I think is a real strength of young adult or, you know, coming of age stories is the narrative device. If you nail the narrative device, it's almost as if the story writes itself. And To Kill a Mockingbird is a great example too, because you had Harper Lee, who wrote a book called Go Set a Watchman. I haven't read it, but that was like an early draft of what became To Kill a Mockingbird. It's substantially different enough that they could publish it as a separate book, but it wasn't until her editor suggested to her, hey, what if you told this story from the point of view of Scout? And it's not Scout like as Scout was as a little girl, but it's Scout looking back at Scout as a. As a woman looking back at what it felt like as a child. And that whole story is exactly that. You kind of fall into this nostalgic voice of somebody recalling a very important. Another great example of that is Stand by Me which is a Stephen King short story about a man talking about the first time he saw a dead body. And, you know, he builds up to it. He said, the first time I saw dead body was when I went camping with my friends, and we deliberately set out to see the dead body. And it's an amazing movie based on the short story. Rob Reiner made the movie. Great movie. I mean, just, you know, rip your throat out. It's so good and it's so funny. And that is a narrative device par excellence. And so what I'm suggesting to you is that a lot of this intellectual stuff that we're wrestling with now becomes a lot clearer when you solve your narrative device situation.

I'm not clear on how that would help solve, like, what actually happens in the story. Okay, I can see how it would solve the perspective of, you know, if the perspective is coming from this one character, then you can kind of get a sense of how they would tell the story, things they would leave till later, things they would kind of obscure, you know, all that kind of stuff. Because we talked about this. I know, back with my shipwreck idea.

Mm.

Where it's like, what if they found the last person and they're interviewing her and she's telling the story from her perspective? And so that answered. But does that drive the actual, like, what I put on this full scap, which is the actual, like, signpost of what happens in the story?

I think it could really substantially affect the choices that you make for these big moments. Yes. And the reason why I say that. Let's just get into the foolscap a little bit, and then I think it'll become more clear what I. What I mean by this. If we talk about the movement of the story. And the movement of this story is. There was a really great comment on the storygrid.com website the other day from. I forget his last name, but a guy named Peter. And Peter suggested. And he made a really good point that we didn't talk about a couple of weeks ago, which was you had asked me what was wrong with your idea where Jesse goes and discovers that her brother is fighting against this thing. And I said, well, you can't change the heroic nature of the character of the core hero of the story has to remain consistent in an action story. And what Peter said at the website was, now if you shifted the global genre to coming of age, then you could use that idea that you had, Tim, where the brother is a force of good who becomes a mentor figure to the lead character. And that was A really good idea and an interesting thing to think about as we're going through your Fool's Cap now. And the idea here is, which genre? Again, we're going back to the genre. Which genre do you really want to be? The global genre. A global. Is this a global action thriller? I mean, a global thriller? Or is this more coming of age? Are we going to be more interested in how this character evolves throughout the story from maturation point of view, someone who's immature and naive to an understanding of the wider, you know, array of human life and, you know, mendacity and goodness too? Or do we want this to be slam bang action, Martian Willy? Or will he not get off of the planet? My gut, from what I've read on your Fool's Cap and from your ancillary material that you sent me, is that what's going to make this story really stand out beyond any great, you know, details that you come up with, the world, etc. Is this internal relationship between a daughter, a mother, a father and a brother. This is sort of. I think this has a level of family conflict, things said and things unsaid that could really drive a lot of the big moments in this story.

So my thing for you to think about and perhaps answer now is do you want to err more on the side of coming of age or do you want this more to be straight action?

I don't know. I mean, if you're saying, would I rather write something that's James Bond esque versus something that's Hunger Games ish, I would lean towards Hunger Games ish, Which.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Okay.

Okay.

Did that answer the question?

That absolutely answers the question.

Okay.

Because, you know, the Matrix is more action than it is anything else. I mean, there's a love story that's pretty important in it, but yeah, Neo isn't really the most dynamic of characters beyond his understanding that he's the one.

You know, I would just say that about anything that Keanu Reeves plays.

Kind of true. Okay, so how do you want to handle this? Do you want to go beginning hook, middle build, ending, payoff? Do you want to talk about the. The big major points in the story?

So if I understand just kind of your past advice, just trying to pull it from memory. Your thing is if you get the genre and you get the major points in your story. Right. Everything else is a little easier to fix down the road.

Yes.

So let's get. And the whole point of the foolscap is to make sure I'm getting My major. My major points in the story nailed down. So I would say that's what we need to do first, because that will. Anything else I'll be able to fix easier later.

Yeah, I mean, you'll be able to build out this virtual world in a way that's very exciting and fun. That's kind of like the fun part. But, you know, let's just take one giant leap back, and I'm gonna explain what a story is again. A story.

Am I that bad?

No, no, no, no, no, no. I do this all the time. I always say to myself, okay, let me go all the way back. What's a story? And the story is. It begins with something that incites the imagination. It incites a question to the reader or to the audience. And that question is, what's going to happen next? And it ends with an inevitable but surprising. That's the crucial part. Surprising way.

So when we think about that, and we've got a lot of really great building blocks already on the machine table that we're building. Let's think about that. How do we. I think our inciting idea is interesting and fun. Where there's a family. Let's just boil it down to brass tacks. There's a family. There's a mother. There's a father, There's a big brother, and there's a little sister. The big brother is gone. They don't know where he is. He's been gone so long that the family has a funeral for him. They do not believe he is ever going to come back. The mother of this family has decided that the loss of that son is so great that she can no longer function properly in society. She's a depressive wreck. Now, the father believes that if he can just handle his wife a certain way with kit gloves and treats her with so much sensitivity that eventually, maybe, perhaps one day, she will be able to snap out of her depression and become the woman that he married to begin with. She can retake the motherly role of this family. Meanwhile, little sister has been basically shunted to the side. She has been indirectly told, you are not important. Your brother was the important one in the family. You are not important whatsoever. And please, if only your brother came back, everything would be fine. But until your brother comes back, we are not going to give you anything. We are not going to give you any comfort or emotional attachment whatsoever. This is kind of this beautiful little conflicting, familiar world that you have already constructed. That is a very strong world. So our inciting incident is Guy comes to house Says to the little girl, hey, your brother's alive, but there's one problem. He needs you to get him safely home.

That's a great insighting incident because what that says to the lead character is, hey, here's a solution to my problem. I just go with this weird guy who showed up at my door and I'll go bring my brother home and everything will go back to normal. So that's kind of our inciting idea of this story. Now, how do we. Let's jump all the way to the freaking end. How can we make the ending of this story absolutely inevitable, but surprising? Now it's going to be inevitable because we all understand that her family is not going to go back to the way it was. It's not going to end perfectly. The brother's not going to come home, the mother's not going to snap out of it. Everybody's not going to go bowling and enjoy the evening. That's not how it's going to end. How it's going to end is that this young girl is going to realize that she's on her own, that her mother and her father are not going to be able to take care of her for the rest of her life, and that her brother is not going to save her. She is going to change as a human being from a naive, immature person who believes that some magical moment that she can bring about by doing the right thing at the right time is going to make everything better again. She is going to move from that place to understanding, hey, shit. We're all in this alone. We have to negotiate the world by ourselves. And we've got to do the best we can by forming the tightest bonds with the right amount of people that we can. But there ain't no magical time or magical event that's going to make our life perfect. It's never going to bring back, you know, perfection. So that is going to be the inevitable conclusion of a maturation plot where we understand the. We grow to understand that the world is a place that we all have to personally navigate. We cannot rely on our mother and father taking care of us for the rest of our lives. Because guess what? Someday we're going to be a mother or father, and we have to pass on any information that we have to make our children stronger than we are now. Her parents are incapable of doing that. She has to come to the realization that. That her parents cannot save her, nor can her brother. So what we discussed the last time we were talking about was how do we make it surprising at the end. And one of the things that I suggested was let's play with the role of the villain. Let's play with that. Now who could the villain be? Now a villain could be a third party corporation that it's almost cliche. The bad corporation like the Monsanto is destroying everything and they're so bad and evil, they just want to take over the world. Now that's one way to go. And that's a way to go. Perhaps in an action story. An action story doesn't necessarily have to plumb the depths of maturation movement, but we're going to do kind of a Hunger Games thing. And the Hunger Games thing is really a character evolution as much as it is an action story. That's what. And it's Harry Potter. Same thing. So what we discussed is why don't we play with the role of the villain and say, hey, maybe the mother is playing a game here. Maybe mom is playing a big fat game and is not who she's pretending to be. Wouldn't that be a big smack in this old stomach, you know, to our lead character and to our audience to discover that this pathetic woman who seems so frail and gentle and just so upset about her baby boy leaving is actually not so nice. She's actually a monomaniac monster. That could be kind of interesting. And that revelation we talked about happening at the end of the middle build.

That mom reveals her true nature to the shock and horror of her daughter at the end of the middle build. So how does it end? It's going to end where the daughter has to confront her mother in a way where the daughter wins but loses. She's going to win the action battle, but she's going to be disillusioned.

So should the crisis of the ending payoff be a decision between. Should the decision be between she could have her family back together, but everything would be awful and she would know all the true things that she could never live with. Or she makes a decision to do the right thing that tears apart her family. Because the thing she wants most in the world is to bring her family back together. Should that be the crisis question?

What do you think?

Yes.

Remember, remember the beauty of a story, a double edged story, that one that works on the surface and one that works underneath. The beauty of a story is that it makes us confront really, really deep painful truths. And given the choice between pretending and living in the truth, that's a really difficult thing because a lot of us love to pretend.

Well, in the. And so, spoiler alert, in the end Of Gone girl, he chooses to pretend.

That's correct.

Okay.

Because he stays with her because of the baby.

That's right. Okay. Now, I would say that that's a heroic choice. That.

That's the heroic choice.

Yes. And the reason why that's the heroic choice is because there's an innocent life at stake. Right. So the choice that he made to stay and live in a lie was for the benefit of the child. That the child, if he leaves and the woman, I forget her name, if the wife raises the child without the influence of him, that child will become, as you know, if you believe in this, that children are a reflection of their parents, that child will be psychologically so psychologically damaged by the mother, who's a sociopath, obviously.

Okay, so is that an example of it reaching damnation?

That's an example of someone sacrificing themselves for the betterment of somebody else. The damnation part is if he didn't stay, he would be damned. Right.

So the final choice came down to yes, because we're talking about life, to unconsciousness, to death, to damnation or sin.

Death. And so before we lose the train of thought on your story, okay, what we want to do is exactly what you said. We want the crisis that the ending payoff of this story is. Hey, sweetheart, we can go back to the way it was. We can make it better than the way it was. We're not gonna live in Shittsville anymore. We're gonna live in the good world. We're gonna. You know, we haven't figured out all the minutiae of all that stuff, but.

Because I was thinking, the mom, if she's the villain, her object of desire is to move her family, move herself from the poor to the 1%. And she sees her daughter as the way to pull that off.

That's correct.

Okay, man, like, I got two in a row.

Yeah.

Now, the wants and the needs are important here. And if we can climactically have her, Jesse, make a choice between her want and her need at the climax of the ending payoff, then we have the opportunity to possibly have a cathartic moment for the reader. So her choice is, do I pretend and live a lie and get what I want, or do I not pretend and get what I need? And what she needs is truth.

So, you know, the thing that you have as your crisis is, does Jesse commit suicide to keep her power safe from evil government? You can make that work within this thing we're talking about. So the mother could say to her, all you have to do, sweetie, is kill yourself.

And because you have the resurrection, you will come back and live. I haven't figured it out yet, but there's something to do with that power that she will have to make a choice that will exile her from her past family. And it's a great climactic moment for the first book in something that you may consider as a possible series in the future, because this is the moment where she becomes, you know, Lone Wolf McQuaid. She chooses exile, then a false sense of community, and that's a heroic act. And the reason why she does that is her exile will make life better for others.

Okay. Because I keep trying to come back. You know, when I was trying to figure out what to do, I was trying to come back to my controlling idea, my theme of life cheats death. When heroes confront their darkest fears and sacrifices themselves for the greater good.

That's exactly what we're talking about.

Right? So that's why I landed on that kind of crisis, because she'll have to sacrifice herself.

Well, the sacrificial moment doesn't necessarily have to be literally sacrificial, meaning she does not have to try suicide. She may decide that she has to live with immortality, so she's accepting a fate worse than death in order that others will benefit, that others will be safe, or. I mean, this is the great thing, Tim, is that. Remember at the very beginning of the podcast, I said, sometimes when you come up with the narrative device, it will help save that problem. So, you know, this could be. I'm just throwing something out. This could be narrated by the brother.

I would.

Okay. It could be a trial. I don't know. It could be.

Yeah, I was. I wish I had said it now. Like, earlier, when you're talking about narrative device, I was thinking, if she escapes, somebody's gonna have to be held responsible for the fact that she got away. And so the brother is being interrogated by the government about what happened with his sister because she's now gone. And so he's telling this story to explain what happened, to try to save himself from the repercussions of the fact that she got away.

I really think that's strong. The only thing. The other great thing about narrative device is that once you make a decision, then you can use it for a big twist. So what you could do is not reveal the narrator, but, no, it's the brother. Right. And then you could do the revelation of who the narrator is at some point in the story. That will really shock. You're basically setting up A payoff of a revelation that will shock the reader.

Now can you have it? Where could that revelation come? At the end of the Middle Build. And now we're back up to real time and the rest of the story is told in real time.

Sure.

So I don't know what that means.

Well, you could structure it so that the first 2/3 of the story.

Is the narration within the narration, where I'm just making stuff up here. The tribunal for blah, blah, blah is now commenced. Interrogator XYZ is interviewing, you know, perpetrator X. And then you do a very short sort of prologue that establishes this narrative device. And then chapter one is the morning we brought in Jesse was the morning of, you know, the 5th of July. And, you know, what's his name went to the door. And then you can sort of transition the storytelling into almost third person omniscient so that it reads as if a third person narrator is telling the story. But then occasionally you'll go back and say, and then the tribunal commenced, you know, took a break. And then at the end of the Middle build, you could have a climactic moment where, you know, Jesse actually comes into the interrogation room and saves the brother from further interrogation or something. So, I mean, I don't want to get into the technicalities of how you can make that work. That's sort of. Okay.

So we've established the inciting incident of the global story. I feel like we're close enough on where it's going to end up that it will resolve itself as I tell the story, since I know I'm getting to a point where she has to decide between pretending and getting what she wants or getting what she needs, which is the truth.

Right. And the other thing that you could do is you could save the big solar plexus revelation that it's the mother the entire time until the crisis of the ending payoff. And you could use that idea that you just came up with with the brother as the, you know, the climax of the middle build, so that it's still within the family you're still playing with. Basically what you want to do is because this is a maturation plot that has to deal with separation from your family, from your parents. Now, you know, a lot. You know, a lot of things that you have to do. The big moments in your story have to hit that emotional charge point of the family. So if you're going to do a climax, it has to. The other thing that you need to think about is you got to bring some death into Here you got to bring in a death moment, and I would suggest you kill the father. Okay. And you might want to kill the father at midpoint or something. But you do have to establish the spectrum of value, and there has to be the stakes of this story have to reach death. So somebody should die, and somebody should die in a shocking way that is set up and paid off in a way that is another great climactic moment in the story. And that's just going to keep the energy going.

And that should be in the middle build, because that's when you move from unconsciousness to death.

Yes. Right.

Okay.

Now you're establishing the threat of death with the inciting incident. But you do need to get the literal death if you're going to really make this thing sing. And that literal death should be a shocking death that will basically mirror the point of no return for the girl. Right. So the point of no return, she. Once that father's dead. Right. She's gonna have to face facts. She'll never have her family back. One member of her family is now dead. She will not be able to get what she wants.

And that will. That could even twist the final crisis where even more. Because now her only family left is this brother and this mom. And if she loses them, she's now. Okay, so should we look at the beginning hook, then closer?

Yeah, sure. Let's see.

Okay. So I'm having whoever the ambassador that is sent for the brother meets up with Jesse, and I have the setup, basically. And I don't need to go through everything here, because if you're listening, you can go through all my notes on the world. But the basic idea is she is breaking and entering and stealing from people while they're jacked into the system. And she knows when they're going to be. And that's where he finds her, is in the middle of that. So then she goes to see her brother. And then the complication is she can't decide what she should do. And then the thing that forces her to make a choice is that she gets caught as the one breaking the law. And so now she has to decide whether or not to stay and face punishment or escape and do what her brother's been asking her to do, because I have to kind of. I can't softly make her make that decision. She has to come to a crisis.

That's a really good choice. She has to. There's a thing in the hero's journey called the hero refuses the call. And that's what a lot of people skip and you're not skipping it, which is good.

When I was thinking, you know, that's the whole, like, Luke Skywalker is not gonna go, and then his family's dead, so he has to go.

Right.

So the resolution of the beginning, Hook, is when she's reunited with her brother for the first time. And since that ends positive, the negative aspect of that is the beginning of her disillusionment, which is where there's some iffy, why didn't he tell her? Why didn't they know that he was alive? Why does he want her there? Like, all of those things kind of come into question, and so it kind of taints the fact that she's finally reunited with her brother.

Yeah, I think that works. Now, the one thing that's getting a little murky is, remember, the villain incites the story. So the villain wants something from Jesse, and we need to establish what that thing may or may not be. I like the idea of escalating. The villain wants something specific from Jesse at the very beginning, and then it goes quantumly larger after the villain discovers that she's got something even better than what she thought she had, which is immortality. How do we set that up when.

We'Re hiding who the villain is?

Oh, okay. So the initial MacGuffin is the brother is being, quote, unquote, held captive in this world, and the only way that he will be released is if she provides a service to the system. And that service I haven't figured out, nor have you have, but it would require some kind of, you know, secondary gift that she has. She's a great breaking and entering person. Okay. You're so good at going into people's houses. You're great at traveling in the real world between, you know, the 1% world and the service world and the. And the shitty world. So let's see how great you are breaking and entering in the game. And so they teach her about the game. And this is the. These are part of the conventions and obligatory scenes necessary to. To abide the lit RPG genre.

Yeah, I read that thing that you sent me. That was that giant list of lit RPG novels. And again, I'll put the link into the show notes for that. And one of the things was, like, they have to level up. That was kind of the main thing that stuck out to me, is they have to basically become better and better and better inside of the game. That will prepare them for the end.

Yes. Now, just a quick thing about what this game could be, which could be interesting, is the game could be the American Dream. What do I mean by that? The game for people in this future world is the only way to rise in society is by winning this electronic virtual game. So if you are really great, you can move ranks of society.

Oh, this could be.

What about each year, a single person or only five people at the top of the game are selected to move up into the elite society.

There you go. That could be something. That could be cool. And then, you know, part of the build up to the climax of this story is, you know, she has to make a choice. She can go into the next level and she can bring her mother and her brother with her, or she can reject that next level and she can hack through a system where anybody can do it. I don't know. I don't know what it is, but I like this concept of the American Dream, which seems to be very viscous today. Meaning it's very, you know, it used to be when I was growing up, the American dream was to do better than your parents and to get a nice house and to have an honorable life where you serve society and you served your fellow man and you raised a good family and you did a little bit better than your family did. Today, people's virtual lives and their real lives are so strangely, you know, bipolar that nobody really. What is the American? Is it to be Kim Kardashian and have a, you know, a sex tape and become famous on a reality television show and make $50 million a year, but never actually create anything of any value but entertainment that's sort of weird and makes you feel strange and icky for watching it. You know what I mean? So it's like this virtual Kim Kardashian is winning the game American Dream, but that game has been morphed in a way that nobody with any past experience can understand anymore. So this new generation of people that you're writing about, this Jessie person, she's being raised in the Kim Kardashian American Dream game, which doesn't have any substance underneath of it. So part of the revelation of this story is her discovering that that American Dream is empty. And the game, the American Dream is a bunch of baloney to get people to behave so thematically. You're dealing with a lot of really fun, interesting stuff at a really subtextual psychological level. And now. But you can do it by creating a really fun online game called American Dream. And because the mother and the brother are so anxious to win that American Dream game at any cost, this girl understands that she is the collateral damage of this game. She is emotionally sterile and has gotten no support from her family because everyone in her family, sans her dad. Her dad is probably the only good figure in the family besides Jesse, Meaning he doesn't care about the American dream. He just wants his family back together again so they can have dinner, you know, so the death of the father at the end of the middle build could be a really revelatory moment for Jesse. Like, holy shit. If my father's values and everything he cares about die with him, what's that going to mean for the rest of us? I can't support this American Dream game, even though I'm the best player, because it's an empty dream. So you got a lot of really cool things to fits and futs with here, not least of which is setting up the RPG of this American Dream game, which could be a great combo plate of reality television and point systems and Fitbit, you know, all that Fitbit stuff where you get points for how many steps you walk during the day. You know, all that baloney, you know, competing against other people.

And so her special power has something to do with how she can basically cheat in the game to win.

Yes. If she wanted to sees through the loopholes of the game.

Okay?

She's got this kind of really, you know, there's a great line from some novel I read, you know, seeing through the game is not the same as winning the game. What that means is that you can see cynically how all these people are manipulated by the game. But that doesn't mean you get to win. Winning the game in this instance would mean material possessions, public adulation, all that stuff that we prize so much in our culture that is empty and meaningless. It's like Donald Trump is the epitome of a winner of the American Dream game, and it terrifies most of us. I'm not going to speak for you. It terrifies me because there's no substance, there's no values. There's no. They're there behind just this land grab for making America great again. I don't know what that means.

Okay? So what I'm worried about is if I have enough to actually start mapping this thing out.

Think about this. Yes. Don't worry so much about mapping out your 60 scenes.

Okay?

Here's what I think you should do. Try and just write this happens, then this happens, then this happens. So you just want to do a very, you know, bare bones. Here's my narrative device. The story begins with a prologue that describes this interrogation. The interrogation will use in the matter of Jesse Fildekamp or whatever.

So it's an interrogation. And then you say, then we move to the beginning of the story. Our storyteller is the brother of Jesse and he is describing how he got into the situation that he is facing now. If he can't help these people find his sister, he will be cast out. And just kind of walk it through logically so that you, you have like a maybe a two page narrative of how you're going to move from the beginning hook to the middle, build to the ending payoff and leave out the details of the world and say things like, Jesse indoctrinates herself into the deep systems of the game TK to come. Descriptions of game players, TK mentoring session with Obi Wan Kenobi figure from the game TK but you want to get a skeleton. You want to get that sort of maturation plot, beginning, middle and end, you know, laid out for yourself. And if you get stuck, one of the things to do is to, to noodle, you know, think about the narrative device, think about how you're going to tell this story. Now if you get stuck there, think about this game. How are you going to structure this game? Do people get credits to, you know, move up to the next level? What do they have to do? They have to. Are there special missions? Do they get dossiers where they have to, you know, rise in their mythical company on this online game? Do they have to, you know, is it like a scavenger hunt? Is it, you know, all that kind of stuff? Okay, but the thing to try and not do is lock yourself completely into.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P. Yeah, I thought with this.

One, I'm not going to try to map out all the scenes first.

Right.

I'm going to have my. Well, what you just described. And I just will write from point to point to point. And I was planning on anyway, like once I finish the beginning hook, like having you look at that before I move on to write the other 75% of the book.

Yeah, that's a good idea.

Okay, so I'm going to do that. I'm going to do, try to create the spine of the story and then we'll go from there.

Great, great.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. As always, for everything Story Grid related. You can see that@storygrid.com and we actually just put up a brand new website. So much easier to find all the old articles. Got some really cool resources up there. I think you'll love it. So make sure you go check out storygrid.com on top of that, if you've missed any past episodes and want to look at show notes, all of that is@storygrid.com podcast and make sure you hang on for the next five weeks as we do the special episodes with Steve Pressfield and the publishing one. Sean and I have been working on those for a while and I think you're really going to enjoy them. Thanks as always for continuing to share the show. Tell your friends about it. If you haven't yet, make sure you go to itunes and leave a rating. Leave a review. That really helps us out. So thanks for listening and we will see you next week for our special episodes with Steve Pressfield.