THE

ST O RY
GRID
What Good Editors Know

SH AW N
C O YN E
THE
ST O RY
GRID
What Good Editors Know

SH AW N
C O YN E

Bla ck Ir ish Ente r ta inment L L C

NE W Y ORK LOS ANGE LE S

 BLACK IRISH ENTERTAINMENT LLC

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COPYRIGHT © 2015 SHAWN COYNE

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FIRST BLACK IRISH ENTERTAINMENT EDITION APRIL 2015

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ISBN: 978-1-936891-35-1

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
For Bibb, Bleecker, Waverly and Crosby
Contents
Preface: For the Ramen Noodle Eaters.............................................................. 1

Introduction: Becoming Our Own Editors ....................................................... 3

Part 1: Who I Am and Why I Am Here ............................................................. 9

1. What I Do................................................................................... 11

2. What Is the Story Grid? ............................................................... 13

3. Where Did the Story Grid Come From?....................................... 14

4. The Autodidact’s Dilemma .......................................................... 16

5. Literary and Commercial ............................................................ 17

6. Where I Turned to Learn How to Edit .......................................... 22

7. Works, Doesn’t Work .................................................................. 24

8. Your Own Worst Enemy .............................................................. 28

9. Knowing the Rules So You Can Break Them ................................ 33

10. The Realpolitik of Book Publishing ........................................... 35

11. Flash Forward: The Story Grid in Action .................................... 38

Part 2: Genre ..................................................................................................... 43

12. Genre Is Not a Four-Letter Word ............................................... 45

13. Genres Have Conventions ....................................................... 47

14. Genres Have Obligatory Scenes ............................................... 50

15. The Keys to Innovation.............................................................. 53

16. Genre’s Five-Leaf Clover ........................................................... 55

17. Choosing Your Genres............................................................... 62

 18. The Story Bell Curve ................................................................. 64

19. Arch-Plot ................................................................................. 67

20. Mini-Plot ................................................................................. 71

21. Anti-Plot .................................................................................. 74

22. Conflict and Objects of Desire .................................................. 78

23. Plot Driven or Character Driven? .............................................. 83

24. External Content Genres ........................................................... 85

25. Internal Content Genres ............................................................ 99

26. The “A” Story and the “B” Story............................................... 103

Part 3: The Foolscap Global Story Grid ........................................................ 107

27. The Foolscap Method.............................................................. 109

28. An Editor’s Six Core Questions ................................................ 112

29. The Universal Appeal of the Thriller ....................................... 116

30. The Power of Negative Thinking .............................................. 120

31. The Obligatory Scenes and Conventions of the Thriller ........... 125

32. Point of View .......................................................................... 129

33. Free Indirect Style ................................................................... 133

34. Controlling Idea/Theme .......................................................... 136

35. Beginning Hook, Middle Build and Ending Payoff ................... 140

36. The Math ................................................................................ 142

37. The Kubler-Ross Change Curve for Story and the Math............ 147

38. Flash Forward: The Foolscap Global Story Grid in Action ........ 152

Part 4: Story Form ........................................................................................... 155

39. The Five Commandments of Storytelling ................................. 157

40. Commandment Number One ................................................. 160

 41. Commandment Number Two .................................................. 164

42. The Little Buddy of Commandment Number Two .................... 168

43. Commandment Number Three ................................................ 173

44. The Best Bad Choice Crisis ..................................................... 178

45. The Irreconcilable Goods Crisis .............................................. 182

46. Commandment Number Four ................................................. 184

47. Commandment Number Five .................................................. 190

Part 5: The Units of Story ............................................................................... 195

48. The Beat ................................................................................. 197

49. The Scene .............................................................................. 203

50. The Sequence ......................................................................... 207

51. The Act ................................................................................... 211

52. The Subplot ............................................................................ 215

53. The Global Story ..................................................................... 219

Part 6: The Story Grid Spreadsheet .............................................................. 221

54. Where Editors Begin ............................................................... 223

55. Tracking the Global Story........................................................ 224

56. Tracking the Scene .................................................................. 229

57. Tracking Continuity................................................................. 232

58. The Story Grid Spreadsheet for The Silence of the Lambs ........ 235

59. From Micro to Macro .............................................................. 254

Part 7: Building the Foolscap Global Story Grid.......................................... 255

60. Back to Genre ......................................................................... 257

61. Filling in the Foolscap ............................................................. 262

62. The Internal Content Genre of The Silence of the Lambs ......... 268
 63. The Obligatory Scenes and Conventions of
The Silence of the Lambs ......................................................... 274

64. Point of View and Controlling Idea in

The Silence of the Lambs ......................................................... 276

65. Finishing the Foolscap for The Silence of the Lambs ................ 281

Part 8: The Story Grid .................................................................................... 289

66. Putting It All Together .............................................................. 291

67. The Beginning Hook of The Silence of the Lambs.................... 293

68. The Middle Build of The Silence of the Lambs......................... 300

69. The Ending Payoff of The Silence of the Lambs ........................ 322

70. The Final Tweaks..................................................................... 327

Epilogue: A Tool, Not a Formula!.................................................................... 331

Acknowledgments ........................................................................................... 334

 In the days, months and years to come, it is my intention
to map out Story Grids for as many novels (and some key
nonfiction works) as possible. You can follow my work at
Preface www.storygrid.com and get free access to everything I do.
FOR
FOR THE RAMEN No joke. It’s free.
NOODLE EATERS Would I prefer that you buy this expensive textbook instead?
Pay even more to view or attend lectures? Hire me for an
outrageous sum to give you personal tips?

Well, sure I would.

But, here’s the thing:

When I started out, there were very few people in book

publishing who shared what they knew. Almost no one
would. So I had to learn 99.9% of what I know and what I
write about in this book myself. It took me twenty-two years
to do that. And three years to write this book.

I can only wonder what I would have been able to do if I

were given access to this information all those years ago.
For Free!

I was broke back then. I walked a lot of times to work

because I didn’t want to spend the subway fare to get there.
And I spent practically every weekend at my desk at the
publishing office because where I lived was…dark, dank and
depressing. Plus it had no air conditioning in the summer
and poor heat in the winter.

But I would have done the same thing even if I had lived in
the penthouse of Trump Tower.

I love what I do and I’m not complaining about my life’s

path or work. I just think it would have been incredible if
there were something like The Story Grid available to me
back then.

1
 2

So if you’re that man or woman eating ramen noodles every night and staying
THE STORY GRID

every waking hour at the office trying to figure out how to write a great Story or
edit a great Story, go to www.storygrid.com and dive into the archives. You’ll get
everything you need there. And after you’ve sold your novel or gotten that big
job, buy a copy of this book and give it to someone like you were…before you
made it big or even just big enough. And continue the conversation.

Stories are the most important thing we humans can create.

We need more Story nerds! As one to another, I hope you get something out of
this book to make your work better.

Shawn Coyne
New York
March 2015
Introduction
It was the great Maxwell Perkins, if I’m not mistaken, who
told Hemingway to get rid of the first two chapters of The
Sun Also Rises. Hemingway did. The book made him famous.

BECOMING OUR Perkins got Thomas Wolfe to cut ninety thousand words from
Look Homeward, Angel. He whipped twenty shoeboxes of
OWN EDITORS raw manuscript into Of Time and the River.
E\6WHYHQ3UHVVŵHOG
Do you know what an editor does? I don’t either. All I know
is it’s make-or-break, do-or-die, indispensable, can’t-do-
without, gotta-have-it.

But there’s one problem:

Editors don’t exist any more, at least not in the grand Old
School sense.

These days if you’re lucky enough to get your book picked

up by a major publisher, you may get taken to lunch by your
editor. You may receive a few consultatory e-mails. You may
even get a three-page memo of “notes.”

But you will not get Maxwell Perkins.

If you’re indie-publishing or self-publishing, you’ll get no

editor at all.

It’s a hard fact of the twenty-first-century book biz that the

writer, for all intents and purposes, has to be her own editor.

You and I are expected to deliver a Story that works, a

manuscript that’s flawless, a book that’s ready for the printer.

That’s editing. (Or, more accurately, self-editing.)

But what is editing?

Is it correcting grammar? Spell-checking? Syntax tweaking?

When I was working on my third book, Tides of War, Shawn

Coyne was my editor at Doubleday in New York. He read
the manuscript (which was almost nine hundred pages

3
 4

long). He studied it. He lived with it. Then he got on a plane and flew out to Los
THE STORY GRID

Angeles, where I live. Shawn stayed with me for three days. He worked with me
around the clock, explaining what was working in the Story and what wasn’t and
why—and, more importantly, showing me what I needed to do to fix it. He left
me with a twenty-six-page single-spaced memo. I still have it.

It took me four more drafts and nine months before Shawn accepted the
manuscript.

That’s editing.

Over a twenty-five-year career as editor, publisher, agent, manager and writer,

Shawn has been part of more than 350 books, 97 of which have become national
bestsellers in North America. Books he has edited or published have sold over
fifteen million copies. But until I began working with Shawn as a partner in
our own small publishing company, I had no idea of the depth of an editor’s
contribution.

A great editor sees the Story globally and microscopically at the same time. He
has x-ray vision. He looks down from thirty thousand feet. A great editor can
break down a narrative into themes, concepts, acts, sequences, scenes, lines,
beats. A great editor has studied narrative from Homer to Shakespeare to Quentin
Tarantino. He can tell you what needs fixing, and he can tell you how to fix it.

How many editors of that caliber are working today? I’m guessing now. A dozen?
Two? No more.

But what about us, the writers? How many novels have we written that are near-
brilliant, almost-great, wildly-promising-but-not-quite-fulfilled? What’s missing?
What did we get wrong?

What’s missing is editing. Story analysis. Concept, character, and narrative

breakdown.

But how do you learn editing? They don’t teach it at Harvard and they don’t
school you at Random House.

A great editor has to teach himself. He learns through experience, through

manuscript after manuscript and book after book.

A great editor develops a system, a philosophy. He distills the arcane and the
academic into a working model that’s clear, practical, and usable.

Shawn did that.

He calls his method The Story Grid.

 5

It took me twenty-two years [Shawn writes] to figure out The Story Grid was

BECOMING OUR OWN EDITORS

not something that any other book editor I knew used. After innumerable
lunch and drink dates, I found out that they didn’t create their own method
to evaluate work by studying Story structure. And they thought I was kind
of a nerd for doing that myself.

The writer is allowed to be crazy. She’s permitted to wing it, to plunge ahead on
instinct, to follow her Muse and let her Story rip. But it’s the editor who has to
take that Story and make it work.

A great editor has to fathom the narrative’s underlying design (of which the artist
is often blissfully unaware), and if there is no design, he has to draw one forth
from the existing material. He has to chart the Story’s movements, conflicts,
themes and counter-themes, its values and the valences of those values. He’s the
mechanic. He’s the surgeon. His left brain makes the artist’s right brain work.

Who is the editor today?

He’s you.

You have to master the editor’s skills. You have to know how to break down your
own Story, before you begin (hopefully) and after you’re done (if necessary). Art is
not enough. Genius is not enough. Editing and Story analysis are not some extra
goodies affixed at the end of the banging-out-the-pages work; they are the heart
and soul of Storytelling. You, the writer, have to know them.

How do you learn?

The book in your hand is the place to start.

Steven Pressfield
Los Angeles
March 2015
THE
ST O RY
GRID
PART ONE

WHO I AM
AND WHY
I AM HERE
1
W hen a person meets me for the first time and learns
that I make my living as a literary editor, the first
question he invariably asks is:

WHAT I DO “What exactly is it that you do?”

This book is the long answer.

The short answer is this:

When a manuscript that intrigues me arrives, I read it. I don’t

take notes. I just read it. If I finish the entire book— twenty-
four times out of twenty-five, I’ll abandon it early on as the
obvious work of an amateur—I will start to think seriously
about its publishability. Does it work? Will it sell?

My editorial juices have started flowing now. Already I’m

beginning to analyze and break down the manuscript’s
narrative. My decades of experience are telling me where,
more or less, the Story is working and where it’s not.

So far my process is identical to that of every other

professional editor. But now, at this stage, I’ll do something
that no one else does.

I will run the manuscript through The Story Grid.

I’ll do this as deeply as necessary and as many times as

required to identify the problems, to evolve suggested
solutions, to hone the Story and shape it and elevate it to the
highest level of Storytelling craft.

Over a twenty-five-year career as an editor and independent

publisher (as well as a writer, agent and manager) I’ve
used this method to bring hundreds of works from raw
manuscripts into A-level published fiction and nonfiction.
Books that I have edited and published have grossed more
than one hundred million dollars. But more importantly,
these books have changed people. They’ve changed the
lives of readers and they’ve revolutionized the lives of the
writers who authored them.
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12

The Story Grid is a tool. It’s a technique. It can’t make something out of nothing,
THE STORY GRID

but it can make something out of almost-something, out of not-quite-something,

out of two-inches-away-from-something.

And it can inspire a work from idea to first draft.

What The Story Grid offers is a way for you, the writer, to evaluate whether or not
your Story is working at the level of a publishable professional. If it is, The Story
Grid will make it even better. If it isn’t, The Story Grid will show you where and
why it isn’t working—and how to fix what’s broken.

What follows is how you can become your own editor.

2
T he Story Grid is a tool I’ve developed as an editor to
analyze and provide helpful editorial comments. It’s like
a CT scan that takes a photo of the global Story and tells
me what is working, what’s not, and what must be done
WHAT IS to fix it. When I show The Story Grid to writers, they love
THE STORY GRID? it because it allows them to break down the component
parts of their novels (or narrative nonfiction) to see where
their Storytelling went off track. Identifying the problems in
a Story is almost as difficult as the writing of the Story itself
(maybe even more difficult).

The Story Grid is a tool with many applications:

1. It will tell the writer if a Story “works” or “doesn’t

work.”

2. It pinpoints problems but does not emotionally abuse

the writer, revealing exactly where a Story (not the
person creating the Story…the Story) has failed.

3. It will tell the writer the specific work necessary to fix

that Story’s problems.

4. It is a tool to re-envision and resuscitate a seemingly

irredeemable pile of paper stuck in an attic drawer.

5. It is a tool that can inspire an original creation.

13
3
W hen I began my editorial career at one of the major
New York publishing houses, there was no systematic
process to learn how to edit a Story. That is, how to read
a Story, diagnose its strengths and vulnerabilities, and then
WHERE DID help the creator heighten the highs and eliminate the lows.
THE STORY GRID There was no training program at the publishing houses.
COME FROM?
There was no course in college or in graduate school.

You couldn’t sign up for Editing 101.

While there were (and still are) hoity toity finishing schools
for recent college grads to matriculate through in order to
secure an entry-level position in the field, these summer
programs were more attuned to the business side of
publishing than to the art.

The assumption was (and still is) that the capacity to edit a
Story is a mystical combination of intellectual rigor (one must
be well-read and well-schooled in comparative literature,
the classics etc.) and an intuitive je ne sais quoi, a flawless
internal Geiger counter that can magically sort radioactive
literary or commercial works out of the inert rubble piles
where they are hidden.

To learn the editorial craft, one had to apprentice. One

would sit in the presence of and serve someone who had
the magical editorial hand, and by osmosis, the mentor’s
skills would pass on to the neophyte. Like a cobbler or a
blacksmith, one learned how to do by watching someone
else do it well and then applying the lessons from those
observations in one’s own work. Under the tutelage of an
expert who would redirect the pupil when he went off
course, editors were made. This is the way it has worked for
decades, even centuries.

But apprenticeship as vocational training is highly dependent

upon the “master” role in the relationship. And unfortunately
 15

the editing masters of my era, and even more so today, are overwhelmed with

WHERE DID THE STORY GRID COME FROM?

the business of book publishing. They just didn’t have an hour a day or an hour a
week for that matter to devote to training editorial assistants. Their time was spent
finding books that the company could publish successfully, reading submissions
and competing with likeminded editors at other publishing houses for the best
properties. And when they weren’t hustling acquisitions, they had to attend
meeting after meeting and prepare thousands of words of editorial copy to sell
the books into the marketplace.

So what separated the good editors from the great editors? And how could I find
a way to put myself in the latter category?

There are amazing editors out there who have a knack for finding the Story that
will become the next big thing. And there are extremely charismatic editors who
can dazzle sales forces and book reviewers in ways that make their projects
reach the widest possible audience. But the ones I admire most are what I would
call the “Hail Mary” editors. These are the ones that publishers call in when a
project is in deep trouble. These editors can take a book that almost works or is
even sometimes a complete disaster and retool it with the author in such a way
that it not just works, but oftentimes it reaches frontlist bestsellerdom and then
backlist nirvana.

Frontlist sales come at the front, those that result from the initial splash of
publication, the reviews by the big newspapers, the ad campaigns, the marketing
programs etc. Backlist sales are titles that come quietly day after day, month
after month and year after year, from word of mouth recommendation, from one
reader to another. Backlist classics build publishing houses.

Hail Mary editors help create the classics.

This is the kind of editor I set out to be.

All I had to do was learn how to Edit with a capital E. And then hone my skills to
razor sharpness. There was only one problem. There was no book called How to
Edit. I’d have to figure it out myself.

The result of this decades-long exploration is The Story Grid. It came out of my
life’s work and is my attempt to create that How to Edit book that I needed way
back when…
1
4
F aced with the reality that the editors with whom I was
apprenticing (very respected, very talented, and very
generous) did not have the time or the textbooks necessary
to teach me how to Edit, I set out to teach myself. The primary
FOR
THE AUTODIDACT’S dilemma we face with a task that is foreign to us is “where
do I begin?”
DILEMMA
Where you begin is a personal choice and as long as it
pushes you to dive deeper into or zoom out from a particular
discipline, it matters little if you start at the sentence-by-
sentence editorial level or the global Big Picture elevation. As
someone with a science background, I like to begin at the top
of the mountain (a grand hypothesis) and chip my way down
to sea level (a series of experiments to test the hypothesis)
and eventually into the basements and subbasements (the
tactical approach to setting up the experiments themselves).

Knowing that editing was dependent upon understanding

Story, the first question I asked myself was:

“What is the primary divide in the long form Story business?”

If you were to create a flow chart of how book publishing

works with a box at the top that says STORY IN BOOK
FORM, what would be directly underneath? How many
secondary classifications would there be?

This turned out to be a simple question to answer.

There are two categories in book publishing, like yin and

yang, light and dark, wet and dry. There is “literary” and
“commercial.” The divide seems ridiculous of course, akin
to the old chicken and egg debate. Obviously, what is
literary must be commercial too and what is commercial
is also literary. But these two global designations define the
two cultures of book publishing. As a practical matter, it’s
crucial to understand exactly what each is and why there is
a distinction in the first place.

STORY IN BOOK FORM

LITERARY COMMERCIAL
5
If you are a writer, an editor or a publisher in traditional
trade book publishing, you have to decide which of these
two cultures you want to align yourself with.

The literary culture is represented by publishers like Alfred

LITERARY AND A. Knopf, Farrar Straus and Giroux, Scribner, Random
COMMERCIAL House, Riverhead, Penguin Press and a number of other
houses both independent and corporate owned.  These
houses are known for the high end literary stuff—Cormac
McCarthy, Robert Caro, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen,
Anne Lamott, Richard Powers, Zadie Smith, Don DeLillo,
Thomas Pynchon, etc. Young English Lit grad editorial
assistant wannabes long to land a job at one of these houses.
Working at these shops grants entrée to Paris Review parties
and publishing street cred that says, “I’m in it for the right
reasons…to nurture tomorrow’s great American novelists.”
Acquiring a writer who ends up on The New Yorker’s 20
under 40 can get you a promotion. A rave in The New York
Review of Books or The Atlantic puts a swagger in your step.

On the other side of the street is the “commercial” culture,

often referred to as Genre fiction (even though every
great Story abides by Genre conventions) and in the case
of nonfiction, “Merch” like self-help, how-to, celebrity
biography, etc. Future editors in the commercial arena are
the nerds you see reading The Hobbit, The Da Vinci Code,
How to Win Friends and Influence People, Jaws, Rich Dad,
Poor Dad, Twilight, Lace or Dune on the beach while the
other kids are body surfing. They often come from that
wonderful crop of college graduates who don’t know what
to do with their lives, so decide to find work that pays
them to read. They don’t care so much about line-by-line
writing perfection, deep universal truths, or post-modern
metafiction pyrotechnics, these editors are just addicted to
narrative velocity—stories that grab you by the throat and
won’t let you go.

17
18

At the top of commercial pyramid is Women’s fiction—big bestselling books

THE STORY GRID

like The Help, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, etc. Women’s
fiction doesn’t mean that male writers are excluded from the category. But rather
that the books written by men must have themes, characters, or plotlines that
women enjoy. They scale and can reach the million-copy-sold mark if not with
ease, at least with greater regularity than a war novel.

Estimates reach as high as 70% of the entire book buying market being women. So
in order to really hit a book out of the park, a writer/publisher needs to bring
women to the party. The male writers who do count women as devoted readers
write stories that often include a love Story within their overarching plot. Nicholas
Sparks is a terrific example of a male writer embraced by a female audience.

Male writers with female readers also feature strong female characters in their
novels. Stieg Larsson’s Girl… thrillers are an example. So too are works by James
Patterson, John Grisham, Pat Conroy, David Baldacci, and Dan Brown. These
guys are not seen as “boys’ book” writers. They have BIG crossover appeal.

Talent and desire aren’t enough to make the registers ring at retail. For that, you
need to have identified your audience and have written your book in such a way
as to give them the reason, or “hook,” to buy it.

Ultimately, the question Who’s the target reader, and why? must be answered by
everyone in the publishing chain (writer, editor, marketer, publicist, publisher).
Identifying the audience (the people who will buy your book) defines which of
these two cultures “Literary” or “Commercial” you belong to.

I see commercial publishers and editors as the empiricists of the industry.

Whether they consciously know it or not, they use data from previous successes
to support their editorial selections. They think about markets and Genres and
make as informed decisions as possible when choosing whether or not to publish
a particular novel.

For example, years ago I was put in charge of acquiring the rights to mystery novels
for Dell Publishing and later St. Martin’s Paperbacks. I was given a limited budget
and told to publish two, and later three, mysteries in mass market paperback
every month. That’s right…twenty-four and then thirty-six titles per year.

How did I do it?

First, I familiarized myself with all of the Subgenres of the mystery Genre. There
are quite a few…Hardboiled Private Eye, Cozy, Amateur Sleuth, Domestic,
Locked Room, Historical, and Police Procedural. (I’ve probably forgotten one or
two.) Then I looked at the sales figures for previous mysteries the company had
 19

published in each of these Subgenres over as many years as I could get data for

LITERARY AND COMMERCIAL

(back then, mid 1990s, about seven years). What I found was pretty interesting.

For the most part, each of these Subgenres was profitable, but inconsistent. One
year private eye novels would be on top by a wide margin, and cozies were all
red ink. A few years later, cozies were in the black, and private eyes took it on the
chin. Armed with this information, I decided that the best course of action would
be to publish a wide net of Subgenre mysteries. So I literally divided the number
of Subgenres into the number of titles I had to publish each year and came up
with a number—eight Subgenres, twenty-four titles needed per year. I’d publish
three novels in each Subgenre each year.

Then I looked at the historical performance of the Subgenres. I wasn’t the only
editor publishing mysteries. I had competitors at every other major publishing
house. What they published would influence the marketplace too. One year the
market would be flooded with cat cozies (yes there is a Sub-subgenre of mystery
that features a cat as a lead protagonist), and while the top brand-name writers
in the Subgenre would still perform in big numbers (Lilian Jackson Braun, Rita
Mae Brown, Carole Nelson Douglas…they all had three names for some reason),
the unknowns found themselves scrambling. The cat cozy market was just about
fixed. If there were too many books offered to that limited market, many would
fail.

So I made the leap that each Genre of mystery had a fixed number of fans. If I
knew that one Subgenre was being abandoned by my competitors (back then it
was the hardboiled private eye on the ropes), I’d publish more of those kinds of
books into the marketplace and fewer of ones that seemed to be “overpublished.”
The fan base would be starved for more hardboiled mysteries and I would be the
only one offering them. I used this method to justify publishing some extremely
talented writers who had just not found their audience yet—Harlan Coben and
Ian Rankin among them.

So, that year, even if your cat cozy mystery was exceptional, better than even the
best one on the market, your agent would have a tough sell to me. But if you had
a compelling lead private eye mystery in a unique setting and a head-scratching
plot, even if you weren’t the best thing since sliced bread, you’d get yourself a
contract. And perhaps vice versa the next year. Commercial editors listen to the
market as best they can and then try and find the best books to fill a particular
void.

While I can’t attest that every commercial editor uses this sort of model to help
them choose which books to get behind, I can say that each one of them has
some sort of inner empirical strategy.
20

About two years after I moved out of mystery Genre publishing and into the big
THE STORY GRID

ticket lead commercial hardcover fiction arena, I read Steve Pressfield’s Gates of
Fire on submission. I loved the book. I thought it was extremely well written and
the sense of time and place were remarkable. But what was the “hook?” Who
was the audience? If I couldn’t answer those questions when my publisher and
the sales force asked me, there was no way in hell I’d be able to acquire the book.

I went back to my mystery model.

I looked at the arena. How many war novels were being published in 1996?
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara was a big bestselling book and his son Jeff’s
prequel Gods and Generals was climbing the charts too. W.E.B. Griffin’s military
novels continued to sell in big numbers year after year. And of course Tim O’Brien
and James Webb’s Vietnam novels were evergreen backlist bestsellers. But few
other titles stood out.

After doing the research, I learned that the military fiction market was under-
published at that time.

And as the Spartans were the epitome of warrior culture with Thermopylae
holding the preeminent place in western military history, Gates of Fire could
reach an audience starved for a brilliantly told historical war novel. The men
who read Griffin, O’Brien, Webb, Shaara, even Conroy (his early novels The Boo
and The Lords of Discipline are “boy book” military themed classics), and every
military nonfiction book sold would love this book.

The argument worked.

But I was pitching to a commercial publisher and a commercial sales force. If

I had been pitching Gates of Fire in a literary house back in 1996, and used
these same arguments, I may have been granted approval to acquire the novel,
but I don’t think the literary house that published it would have targeted the
wide swath of readers we did at Doubleday. That is, they would have “packaged
it” (cover treatment, positioning to sales force and retailers, and eventually the
message to the consumer) as something compelling for an intellectual crowd as
opposed to a good old fashioned sword and sandal epic.

Back to the two cultures (Commercial and Literary) and why I think they are
beginning to merge. Publishers can no longer afford to rely purely on the literary
category. The audience for literary books has shrunk considerably over the twenty
years I’ve been in the business. I think it’s because there is no longer that select
New York based media industry intelligentsia that can influence booksellers and
book reviewers (both rapidly vanishing) to push a particular novel based on
subjective aesthetic literary excellence.
 21

There was a time when the book publishing industry was obsessed with finding

LITERARY AND COMMERCIAL

the next great American novelist and while there certainly continues to be a
longing for such a thing (Jonathan Franzen, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer,
etc.), grooming one is expensive.  Every publisher wants one of these tasteful
literary figures to prop up as proof that their lists are fully rounded, but the fact
is they just don’t sell like they used to. As for scale, they will never approach a
book like The Da Vinci Code.

That doesn’t mean there is no place for the literary anymore. It just means that
publishers have had to move the pendulum closer to the commercial. Knopf
publishes the Stieg Larsson trilogy and has sold millions. And Knopf’s paperback
arm, Vintage, publishes the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy.  They publish certain
kinds of commercial fiction because they can pay the bills while they search for
the next Roberto Bolaño.

What this means is that there is a great demand for novels that can be positioned
at the top of the commercial list—thrillers and/or dramas that women will want
to read. All of the big publishers (with a contracting list of exceptions) are on the
hunt for a female friendly literary/commercial commodity. They don’t care about
Genre so much as “will it scale?” A crime novel from a National Book Award
nominee or a literary novelist taking a crack at a vampire trilogy is the result.

If you are a screenwriter, LITERARY AND COMMERCIAL translates to

INDEPENDENT AND STUDIO. If you are a playwright, LITERARY AND
COMMERCIAL translates to CHARACTER DRIVEN AND PLOT DRIVEN. If you
are a nonfiction writer LITERARY AND COMMERCIAL translates to JOURNALISM
AND NARRATIVE NONFICTION. No matter your intended Story career path, the
divide remains…and always will.

More on all of this later when I write about INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL forces
of Antagonism.
6
J ust about everywhere.

I asked seasoned book editors who told me that editing

depended on what kind of Story was being told. You didn’t
WHERE I edit a mystery the same way you edited a love story or a
thriller or a coming of age novel. Each kind of Story has its
TURNED TO own conventions and obligatory scenes.
LEARN HOW
There are also two kinds of editing—global and line-by-line.
TO EDIT Copyediting is a separate discipline—a grammar, spelling,
and punctuation checking stage that Story Editors left to the
specialists. I breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t much care for
that kind of stuff. I wanted to decipher what made me burn
through books like The Bourne Identity and Red Dragon far
more than knowing the best use for a semicolon.

Okay, so editing first depended on the kind of Story being

told and what Genre it fit into. That made sense, but weren’t
there some hard and fast principles that all Stories had in
common? Was there some sort of fundamental unit of Story
that could be deconstructed? How would you do that?

Prior to entering book publishing, in one of my past

enthusiasms after college, I studied acting. During that
humbling experience, I’d learned how to break down a
scene. How to figure out what the intention of the writer
was and then extrapolate truthful actions that I could take
to make the purpose of the scene clear to the audience. At
its most basic, a scene starts one place and ends another. It
starts with a positive (man meets woman of his dreams) and
ends with a negative (woman rejects man’s advances). Or
it starts with a negative (rejected man calls his best friend
for consolation) and ends with a positive (friend convinces
rejected man to get a dog and try again). It can also begin
negative and end double negative (someone falls…and then
gets hit by a car) or positive and end double positive (man
wins a hand of blackjack, puts it all on a number at roulette
table and wins big)… That’s about it.
 23

Simple, but I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read where the scenes just never

WHERE I TURNED TO LEARN HOW TO EDIT

shift valences. They never turn. And when a scene doesn’t turn, it’s not a scene.

I was attracted to a newish acting philosophy that came out of a bunch of classes
that David Mamet and William H. Macy taught at New York University in the
early 1980s. It was called the Practical Aesthetics Workshop. Mamet and Macy
were (and still are) all about de-bullshitting stuff. Mamet’s love of language and
the crystal clear dramatic confrontations in his work always appealed to me.
What he and Macy put forth just made sense. They offered a means to make the
theory of acting (how to authentically give an audience a truth while living in a
lie of fake circumstances) practical. They gave me a process to make choices and
then a means to practice those choices. They gave me tangible things to do so
that I could get better on stage. If you want to get stronger, you don’t think about
the proper way to lift weights. You learn the proper way and then you actually lift
weights. Pretty simple.

We need this approach for editing too. Figure out the work and then do it.

PAW is a stoic, blue-collar, no-talent-required-if-you-work-your-ass-off kind of

philosophy. And while I eventually abandoned my quest to become the next
Daniel Day-Lewis, the training proved incredibly helpful when I did find my
calling. I’ll get more into what I learned at PAW and why it is such a crucial skill
for an editor to have later on when I take a deep dive into the scene. But for now,
suffice it to say that Mamet and Macy’s method to deconstruct the fundamental
unit of a novelist, a playwright or a screenwriter’s Storytelling is a Godsend. Read
A Practical Handbook for the Actor, the meat of what came out of Mamet and
Macy’s lectures and the foundation of The Atlantic Theater Company in New
York. It’s so simple, direct and easy to understand, it’s mind blowing.

Now understanding how to throw a knuckleball is one thing. Doing it well is

another. Same with acting. And writing of course. But understanding lends itself
to repetition of action, which is the only way to get good at anything.

So with a skill I thought was a waste of time learning after I left the drudgery of
living the starving New York actor life, I was able to apply a rigor to analyzing
scenes in the novels that crossed my boss’ desk.

I knew when a scene worked and when it didn’t. And that has made all of the
difference in my career.
7
H ow many times have you read this snippet of a book
review, either on Amazon.com or in a major newspaper
or blog?

WORKS, This book is badly in need of an editor.

DOESN’T WORK It is not without irony that these sorts of reviews are most
often attached to titles that have sold hundreds of thousands
of copies. Rare is the “where was the editor?” decree for a
work of meta-fiction from the writer with an MFA from the
Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Why is that?

Beyond The Emperor’s New Clothes factor many reviewers

succumb to, an Alfred A. Knopf press release or advance
praise from last year’s bright young thing is often enough
to move a snooze of a book to the top of the superlative
review pile. “Literary” works are given a much wider
critical berth than the commercially appealing salted
peanuts kind of Storytelling. The reason is that there is no
comprehensive formal education available for learning
the essential fundamentals of Story. Let alone how to take
those fundamentals and turn them into clear tasks capable
of being objectively (or better still subjectively) evaluated.
While reviewers, by the very nature of their critical point
of view, profess to have such knowledge, most do not. They
just don’t get “works, doesn’t work.”

It’s as if a person alien to the qualities of life were presented

with a live mongoose and a perfectly preserved taxidermy
of a mongoose and asked which one is “better.” The stuffed
carcass, while perfectly quaffed and “life-like” is impressive.
But given a choice of having to look at a dead mongoose
stuck to a plank of cedar and a live mongoose in its natural
habitat for four hours, which choice would you make? I’ll
take the wild thing over the pretty thing every day of the
 25

week. Even if it has only one eye, its hair is matted, and it has an uncontrollable

WORKS, DOESN’T WORK

rabidity. Sometimes, especially because it has those immediately recognizable
scars and afflictions.

Others say, quite volubly, that they would choose to contemplate the stuffed
animal. (I think they’re putting on airs no matter what they say…)

For me, as long as the thing is alive and I have no idea what it’s going to do next,
I’m in.

There are plenty of ways to praise or critique a writer’s sentences, or a taxidermist’s

fur fluffing for that matter, but few critics are capable of explaining why some
novels or histories or narrative nonfictions read like bats out of hell while others
put you right to sleep.

It’s easier to attack the bestsellers than it is to de-bullshit MFA fiction. And deep
down, the “where was the editor” reviews are not really there to shame the bold
name writers who know how to spin a wildly intoxicating tale but are not the
best sentence to sentence. They are to show off how erudite the reviewer is, be it
a Wall Street Journal review or the 1123rd amateur review at Amazon.com.

The subtext, of course, is that editors aren’t doing their job at the very least and
publishers are idiots at the worst. Why don’t they help the poor Story savants out
and teach them how to write a proper sentence? If they did, the collective culture
wouldn’t be subjected to such pablum is the ad nauseam refrain.

But, the reality is that editors are doing their jobs. Very well in fact.

You just need to remember one primary tenet of business to understand why this
is so. People collect pay when they satisfy their employers. Editors at publishing
houses don’t work for writers. They work for for-profit corporations. So, you might
reasonably ask, if these editors are doing their jobs, how in the world do such
books escape the editorial process?

How do these cheesy, poorly drawn line-by-line writers escape without being
re-written?

The answer is that a Story either works or doesn’t work. It either engages the
reader or it doesn’t. It’s alive or it’s dead, like our mongooses. And the last thing
an editor wants to do is kill a living Story, no matter how mangy.

And thus, the oath of the professional editor is like that of the physician, a
Hippocratic one.

First, do no harm!
26

But there’s a catch. And the catch is the hypocrisy of the business.
THE STORY GRID

Working “literarily” and working “commercially” can be two very different things.
A Story can take the reader through expertly crafted sentences with innovative
metaphors that would be the envy of Proust. Technically, its sentence-by-sentence
craftsmanship is beyond reproach. And perhaps many novels are honed to line-
by-line perfection through a dynamic relationship between the writer and a
word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence editor. But for all of the minutial skill of
these novels, the Story may have absolutely no narrative drive.

This book may “work” literarily, but in no way does it work as a Story. These
books are the equivalent of our perfectly preserved mongooses.

This is not to say that these well tended corpses can’t sell a lot of copies and
become bestsellers through the forces of the previously mentioned The Emperor’s
New Clothes phenomenon…If everyone says it’s great, it must be great even
though I can’t get past page nine. And there are some editors who are experts
at finding these properties that today’s Emperor’s Court will lavish praise upon
and make the work that year’s must read…or that is, must buy. But as there are
fewer and fewer trusted arbiters of genius in the media these days (there are only
a handful of newspapers that even review books anymore), it’s getting more and
more difficult to sell copies of a book based purely on its literary cachet.

Mind you, there are writers who take on a project knowing that they are more
interested in fluffing fur than caretaking a wild beast. For them, a success is defined
almost academically. That is, they know they are experimenting with technique
and know that getting the attention of likeminded intellectuals is their preferred
goal…not necessarily The New York Times bestseller list. They’re pushing the
boundaries of form intentionally and understand when they make that decision
they will inherently limit their audience. They’re pros though and thus, they’re
cool with it.

Knowing exactly what it is you are doing is the key.

And making a conscious decision about your project as best fits your goals
for that project is crucial to managing your own private expectations. I think it
doubtful that James Joyce thought he’d make a killing writing Finnegans Wake or
that Samuel Beckett put down a deposit for a beach house while he was writing
Waiting for Godot. They knew what they were doing—breaking Story form and
taking the chance that the project would die in a desk drawer.

You better believe they knew the form, though, before they broke it. Just as
Beethoven knew symphonic form before he smashed it with his Ninth Symphony.
 27

Those form breaks were so well constructed that they pushed Story structure’s

WORKS, DOESN’T WORK

edges out further.

On the other end of the spectrum, a writer’s prose that wouldn’t challenge an
eight-year-old’s vocabulary or ability to follow a sentence can be impossible to
stop reading. And when one finishes that book, it’s most often disingenuous for
the reader to say that he wasn’t satisfied. He may have quibbles, but he read the
whole thing to the very last word. That’s a Story that abides Story form but will not
end up in the pantheon of Western civilization.

So what’s the bottom line here?

Learn the form. Master the form. Then if you want to try and write the next
Gravity’s Rainbow, knock yourself out.
8
A few years ago, a very talented line-by-line writer came
to me for help.

A publisher I respected had recommended her to me. The

YOUR OWN publisher believed (rightfully) that the woman had what it
took to write bestselling thrillers. The publisher had passed
WORST ENEMY on a number of her books…not because he didn’t find them
compelling, but because ultimately they “didn’t work.”

The writer asked me to work with her from first idea to

final draft. That is, she wanted to start from scratch…seek
my opinion about the right kind of character to feature,
the particular Genre of thriller that I felt was the most
underserved and to basically engineer a new novel from
start to finish using The Story Grid.

She could not afford to pay my usual editorial fee, but I too
believed in her, so we came to a profit sharing relationship.
We would be business partners, just like a couple of
scientists figuring out how to create a new kind of light bulb.
I’d done this sort of thing before with narrative nonfiction as
well as fiction, and while the work required a multiple year
commitment, I’ve never regretted taking it on. I always learn
something new.

We got to work.

I walked her through The Story Grid, how I work, etc. and
she was over the moon. It turned out that she was as much
of a Story nerd as I was. She had read and studied many of
the same Story experts I had as I developed my editorial
method, so we spoke the same language. She immediately
understood my principles and jumped right into the process.

We began by both agreeing that she’d write a contemporary

thriller that would introduce a brand new series character,
a woman with a Jason Bourne-like ignorance of her past.
While the External Genre was “spy thriller,” the Internal
Genre of the book would be a “disillusionment plot.” (More
 29

on this later.) Coincidentally, she told me she had a draft of a book she’d written

YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY

with a similar character in her closet.

She suggested that we begin with that draft to see if there was anything salvageable
from it.

This is when I started to get nervous. But I relented. Maybe the manuscript could
give us some direction…never say never, right? Why reinvent something that
works?

I read the book and it had some really great moments. Innovative turns of phrase,
some seriously frightening scenes. Overall, it gave me even more confidence in
her abilities. But it most certainly did not work. It never paid off the promise of
the hook in an inevitable, yet surprising way. She did not disagree.

I ran it through The Story Grid and then we sat down to go through the places where
it went off the rails. Weeks later, I thought we had a very clear understanding that
the new lead character for our reverse engineering project would not be based
on the character from her previous, unsold novel. Rather we’d use a few of the
scenes from the novel that really worked and perhaps adapt them to suit as major
turning points for the new novel. I left her with a working map of about sixty
scenes/chapters that included all of the conventions and obligatory scenes of the
spy thriller form (more on this later). I thought the conventions and obligatory
scenes that we’d sketched out were uniquely twisted and innovative to a degree
that would delight a thriller fan.

I even cold pitched the Story, like Hollywood screenwriters do, to a few friends
who held very high editorial positions at Big Five publishing houses. These friends
had purchased millions of dollars’ worth of stories from me before, so I knew they
had zero interest in humoring me. They wanted me to give them the first crack at
the book for their publishing houses, so they were happy to give me quick notes
and/or tell me what worked and didn’t work. This is what happens at agent/editor
lunches sometimes and it’s the only reason I still have them.

I finished my job as a sort of “co-creator/editor/agent” and now it was time for my

business partner to do hers.

We shook hands and she walked away with the road map to complete the novel.
Keep in mind that it took us a good nine months to get to this point. We debated
scene after scene until we both felt it was the best solution we could come up
with at the time. Were they turning correctly? Were we mixing up the positive
and negative resolutions enough? Did we progressively complicate the Story
effectively? Did we pay off the hook?
30

We both recognized there would be a very great chance that what we anticipated
THE STORY GRID

to work would need to be completely re-thought after we had a draft in hand. But
as a reference guide to write a workable thriller, it was spot on.

She came back six months later with a book far closer to the original manuscript
she pulled out of her closet than I thought possible. While scenes were changed,
the very problems that made it unworkable a year and a quarter before riddled
the narrative. And an obligatory scene—the hero at the mercy of the villain scene,
crucial to nail in a thriller—was gone entirely.

I took a deep breath and went through her draft scene by scene again and
confronted her about the lack of the crucial obligatory scene.

“Well, I wrote it, but then I didn’t like it, so I cut it,” she said.

I explained that it was fine to do the scene differently, but without it, the book
wouldn’t work.

“That’s not true, I read THE LATEST THRILLER BESTSELLER BY A BESTSELLING

AUTHOR and he didn’t have that scene…why do I have to?”

So that was when I knew this project would never come to fruition. I now knew
the reason why this very talented writer kept getting to the one-yard line and
was never able to score a touchdown—a working thriller. Instead of dedicating
herself to nailing the form of the thriller/Story, she decided she was above it. She
wanted the fruits of the labor (bestsellerdom) more than the labor itself (writing
a brilliant and innovative hero at the mercy of the villain scene no matter if the
book was ever published or not). She wanted to be a bestselling thriller writer so
badly, she decided doing what BESTSELLING THRILLER WRITERS did was more
important than abiding by centuries-old Story form.

In her mind, conventions and obligatory scenes were all well and good, but
because a BESTSELLING THRILLER WRITER was able to ignore one or two in his
novel and still become a bestseller, she felt she must do that too. No matter how
hard I tried to explain that she couldn’t copy what a BESTSELLING THRILLER
WRITER did and get the same result, she refused to change her mind. Over and
over again, I told her there was no Formula, just Form.

Her argument of course was that if a BESTSELLING THRILLER WRITER was able
to break the conventions of the form, she should be able to as well.

Here’s a difficult concept to grasp and I’m sure I’ll go to my grave trying to explain
it. Just because a book becomes a bestseller doesn’t make it something to emulate.
There are a myriad of reasons why some books become bestsellers and still don’t
 31

work as Stories (See The Emperor’s New Clothes phenomenon). Sometimes,

YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY

there’s just a hunger for a particular kind of book (Vampires, Zombies, BDSM
novels) based on some ephemeral need in humanity’s collective subconscious
that drives sales. Trying to write one of those books that get swept up in the tide or
even, the ultimate for some, a book seen as the cause of the tide, is folly. It’s like
selling your house and putting all of your money on number seven at the roulette
table because you have a feeling number seven is going to hit!

Chasing the vagaries of the bestseller list (believing in formula and not form) is
the mark of the amateur. That’s putting the by-product of the Story (money, fame,
etc.) ahead of the Story itself. Your contempt for form and lust for formula may
even give you what you want. You write the next huge thing that makes you
hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now what? That kind of writing is equivalent to winning a lottery.

Why not just play the lottery?

The truth is I don’t think my business partner really had contempt for Story
form. I think it scared her. She had the stuff to write a terrific Story that played
off of century-old themes, but to do so required adherence to fundamentals.
Not formulaic rules. Despite all of their desire to live by their own lone wolf
ways, ironically what amateur writers really want is a recipe. And certainty. And
guarantees.

Form scares the big bestselling writers too. That’s why they often write books that
do not abide by the obligatory scenes and conventions of their Genres. But just
because they have a wide audience that will buy whatever they write does not
mean they wrote a Story that worked.

In their desire to be unique and powerful, creative people become their own
worst enemies. To abide by “rules” seems antithetical to why we’re artists in
the first place. So when presented with things that look like rules (form) we
subconsciously rebel. We resist it with everything we have. And even when we
talk ourselves off of the “I’m not going to write that scene because it’s stupid”
cliff, it’s really hard to actually see the form for what it really is—an opportunity.
Form gives you the place to throw down your best stuff.

Take the Hero at the Mercy of the Villain scene. It’s been done to death. Try not
picturing Bruce Willis or Liam Neeson chained to a pipe and being tortured
when you hear “hero at the mercy of the villain.” How do you keep from writing
that setup, but instead, innovate it and still deliver the form?
32

Thomas Harris did it in The Silence of the Lambs. He didn’t run away from it.
THE STORY GRID

Instead, he probably wrote two hundred versions of it and none of them worked.
He probably didn’t really figure it out until his tenth draft. What’s important to
remember is that he didn’t quit until his thriller WORKED. And working means
abiding by conventions and obligatory scenes of Genres.

The writer/business partner and I never did get on the same page about her
thriller and we parted ways. Unfortunately, it’s five years later and she still hasn’t
been able to get a publisher to take her on. I think about her every day and have
faith that she will one day set aside her Resistance to form and create something
remarkable.
9
T here is a reason why I first divided long form Story into
business terms. A very good reason, and believe it or
not, it has more to do with Art than Commerce.

KNOWING THE Every writer wants to be read. And the best way to learn
whether your Story is reaching people is to tally the number
RULES SO YOU of them willing to part with their hard-earned cash to
CAN BREAK experience your work. Understanding exactly how and
THEM why certain kinds of Stories find an audience much faster
than others allows an artist to make informed choices. Long
form Story creation requires years of devotion. Knowing the
general sense of how many people will want to read your
Story before you set off to do the work will help manage
your expectations.

That is, wouldn’t it be better knowing up front that your novel

about the conquest of an adolescent by a pedophile will in
all likelihood fail to reach a wide readership no matter its
packaging?

The Professional writer, whether consciously or

subconsciously, knows exactly where his idea sits on the
Literary and Commercial spectrum long before he starts to
work.

Some even take on the challenge to prove a commercial

“truth” wrong. They succeed or fail based on their Story
Craft. Incredibly inventive line-by-line writing matched with
superlative Story form charts new ground, while lackluster
line-by-line matched with derivative Story execution fails to
do much of anything.

There are innumerable reasons why the premise of Lolita

(pedophile pursues adolescent and gets his conquest) should
alienate an audience, but for the great majority of readers,
it doesn’t. Vladimir Nabokov probably didn’t literally say to
himself, “I know this book I’m writing will be impossible
to actually sell, but I gotta be me. I’m gonna do it anyway.”

33
34

But I’m confident he did set out to challenge himself in a way no one else would
THE STORY GRID

dare. He knew that writing about a taboo subject, not just writing about it, but
writing about it from the point of view of the predator, was a ridiculous business
decision. It was obvious in his day, and even today I don’t see many who’d be
willing to go down that road.

Nabokov wasn’t a part of our postmodern, digital age either. There weren’t three
hundred thousand books coming out every year vying for the attentions of literary
agents, editors and publishers. There was no way to effectively “self-publish.”
The marketplace was much smaller then and the business elements far more
Draconian. And his chances of getting his novel published pre-e-book pale in
comparison to today.

But he refused to allow the impossible odds of his book reaching a critical mass
of readers to stop him from writing it. Instead he probably used the unlikelihood
of Lolita making it to the front table of the equivalent of Barnes and Noble in his
day to free his inner darkness. The result was that we got a game-changing novel
that proved the irresistible nature of human longing as narrative.

To know the rules of the Story Business and of the Story Craft gives you the
freedom to break them. Not knowing the rules is a recipe for disaster. Trust me,
Nabokov knew the rules of Story and the rules of publishing. That is why he was
able to break them so skillfully.

Lolita is a classic “quest/hero’s journey” Story, the one that is so deeply ingrained
within our cells that we can’t help but root for even the most despicable protagonist
like Humbert Humbert to get what he wants. Nabokov knew that the structure of
the Quest Story is irresistible to readers. He knew that with a lot of hard work, he
could use it to get people to not just sympathize with a monster like Humbert,
he’d get them to even empathize with him. Talk about powerful. The book was so
good it was banned.

The point is that you should know what you are getting yourself into before you
dive in. Nabokov did. That’s why he used the power of Story form to beat the
odds.
10
W hen a Story “works,” it makes you want to keep
listening to it, or reading it or watching it. And what
will happen next, while completely in keeping with its initial
promise (a Western, a Bildungsroman, a ghost Story around
THE a campfire, whatever), delights over and over again. But the
REALPOLITIK kicker is that the climax will be utterly refreshing. By Story’s
end, the listener or reader or watcher has to be at the very
OF BOOK least surprised and satisfied by the payoff of the Story’s initial
PUBLISHING promise.

And sometimes, rarely unfortunately, the ending can bring

an emotional catharsis large enough to change the way
we see our world and even make us change our behavior
because of it.

This from David Mamet’s Bambi vs. Godzilla on what makes

a Story work. “They start with a simple premise and proceed
logically, and inevitably, toward a conclusion both surprising
and inevitable.”1

A Story has the exact same structure as a joke. When

someone tells us a joke, the Genre (“knock-knock,” “a
horse walks into a bar,” “take my wife”) sets us up for an
expectation. When the payoff is inevitable, but surprising,
“orange you glad I didn’t say banana,” “Why the long face,”
“PLEASE”), we laugh.

Later on in the book, I will ask you to outline the major scenes
in your long form Story (The Foolscap Method). Now, if you
wish to know if your Story will “work” before you bang out
a hundred-thousand-word manuscript, or revise a hundred-
thousand-word manuscript, I suggest you take someone out
to dinner (someone you trust who won’t tell you what you
want to hear, but won’t undermine you either) and tell them
the fifteen crucial movements from your Foolscap Page.

1 Mamet, David. Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and

Practice of the Movie Business (Vintage) (Kindle Locations 1028-1029).
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

35
36

In Hollywood, this is called a “pitch.”

THE STORY GRID

You will know if your Story works if the person across the table actually
pays attention. If your Beginning Hook doesn’t grab him, you’ll know it in a
microsecond just by his expression. If your Middle Build doesn’t raise the tension
and make him desperate to know what they hell is going to happen, you’ll know.
And obviously, if your Ending Payoff is flat, he’ll be trying to get the waiter’s
attention to get the check.

But if your Story works, he will beg you to write it for others. In Hollywood, that’s
called “buying it in the meeting” and it is nothing short of Nirvana. To speak for
twenty minutes and to walk out of a meeting with the promise of tens of millions
of dollars, if not hundreds of millions, committed to putting the stuff inside your
head into the global marketplace must be both exhilarating and terrifying.

But the screenwriter knows that if he delivers what he pitched, he’ll be fine. Even
if the movie never gets made…

Is it possible to bring both great line-by-line and cathartic Story work to a project?
Can there be an innovative literary novel that is also a barnburner of a read? Or a
potboiler that is exquisitely written? Such is the Holy Grail of publishing.

And of course, the answer is a resounding “YES.”

When line-by-line and global Story magic come together, our jaws drop. It’s why
we pick up any book, hoping that this one will join the short list of those that
have changed our lives.

I will run you through The Story Grid of such a novel at the end of this book,
Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs. You’ll see the sixty-four pieces of his
puzzle and how he was able to put them together in perfect order, all the while
staying truer than true to Story form. And he ended up innovating the conventions
and obligatory scenes of his chosen Genres too.

And guess what? You can run any novel (or narrative nonfiction) through The
Story Grid and see the same kinds of pieces and choices.

But back to the state of editing in today’s book-publishing landscape.

Can you expect that the book you’ve written, which was good enough to attract
an agent and also good enough to be acquired by a publishing house, will be
raised to a higher level by your new editor? Remember, editors are paid by the
publisher.

The primary job of the Big Five publishing editor and/or independent publisher
hanging on by his financial fingernails is to concern himself with whether or not
 37

the book works commercially. That is, will the book excite and satisfy a critical

THE REALPOLITIK OF BOOK PUBLISHING

mass of readers who will fork over their hard-earned cash to experience the
Story? Will they come back for the author’s next book too? Will the Story in its
present form make money?

If the answer to that question is yes, the Big Five or independent publisher will
invariably deem it ready to go. However, if the editor at the Big Five house or
independent publisher suspects that the core audience for the book may reject
it based upon the fact that the critical conventions and obligatory scenes in the
book (more on this later) are not surprising enough, he’ll put the writer through
the editorial process. He’ll make the writer re-write the clunkers and get them to
a place where he believes the Story will satisfy its core audience.

The truth of the matter is that today there are so many Stories vying for the
validation of major publishing that Big Five editors don’t even acquire books
that have clunker obligatory scenes or conventions anymore. The editor passes
on them because there are enough books coming in to him that are ready to go.
Why waste time fixing something when you’ve got plenty of things on offer that
already work?

Remember that the Big Five or Independent publishing editor’s first job is not to
bring a Story to its creative epitome. It’s to make the damn thing good enough to
sell.

In my career I’ve seen the number of full-time editorial positions and full-
functioning publishing companies cut in half, while the number of titles published
and imprints started has at least doubled. Do the math on how much time an
editor today can indulge his desire to understand Story. So give your editor some
slack and remember that the first rule for him is DO NO HARM!

If he thinks your book can sell ten thousand copies as is (the usual place that will
send a book into profitability, and they would not have offered you a contract if
they didn’t think it would sell ten thousand) he isn’t going to ask you to re-write
the act 2 climax. He may not even know what that is. If he did ask you to do that
work, and you do, and your book sells 9,999 copies, it’s going to be his fault.

And even if the book sells 12,500 after you’ve fixed the scene, who do you think
will get the credit? The editor? Not so much. In fact, there will probably be a
bunch of reviews about the book asking, Where was the editor? You’ll forget
about his contribution and think that the marketing team hit it out of the park.

So will everyone else. Even him. Trust me.

This is the realpolitik of book publishing and it’s one you need to understand.

This is why you need to become your own editor.

11
Just for fun, the next two-page spread is what The Story
Grid infographic for the writer looks like for Thomas
Harris’ novel The Silence of the Lambs.

Don’t panic. It’s not nearly as complicated as it looks.

FLASH FORWARD:
THE STORY GRID Like a human being, a Story has global systems from which
extremely specific features develop.
IN ACTION
The Story Grid, at its most fundamental, concerns just six
questions that you will ask yourself over and over again. My
business partner, Steven Pressfield, has an organizational
technique he uses before he starts any novel or narrative
nonfiction piece. He calls it The Foolscap Method because
the whole thing fits on a single sheet of yellow foolscap
paper.

The Foolscap Method is The Story Grid in miniature. It’s a

one-page version of The Story Grid and it is the first stop on
the way to creating the big matrix that tracks all the pieces
of a Story. We’ll go through it in depth in part 3.

In The Foolscap Method, we ask ourselves just half a dozen

questions of the Story we’re about to write, or have already
written…over and over again:

1. What’s the Genre?

2. What are the conventions and obligatory scenes for

that Genre?

3. What’s the point of view?

4. What are the protagonist’s objects of desire?

5. What’s the controlling idea/theme?

6. What is the Beginning Hook, the Middle Build, and

Ending Payoff?
 39

Do you think of your Story in these terms? Do you ask yourself these questions?

FLASH FORWARD:THE STORY GRID IN ACTION

This is how an editor works to make a Story work. This is how they identify
problems and how they discover the fixes for them.

In part 6, I will use The Story Grid Spreadsheet to break down, scene by scene,
Thomas Harris’ masterpiece The Silence of the Lambs. But before we get into
such post-graduate detail, let’s start with the absolute basics.
40 THE STORY GRID
41

FLASH FORWARD:THE STORY GRID IN ACTION

PART TWO

GENRE
12
W hen we hear a book or movie described as “Genre,”
the speaker is usually denigrating the Story. The
designation connotes cheesy slasher films, lame mysteries,
Ed Wood-esque science fiction, and bargain-bin romances.
GENRE IS NOT
When all of the above can be categorized as one of a
A FOUR-LETTER particular kind of Genre, Genre is not limited to pulp fiction.
WORD
Genre’s an incredibly broad way of cataloguing all Stories.
Like the category Coffee includes all varieties from Sumatra
to Folgers, Genre includes War and Peace as well as the
pedestrian (to some people) entertainments described above.

Genre choices are the most important decisions you need

to make.

Those choices will tell the reader what they are in for if they
pick up your book. They will direct all efforts from your
publisher from the front cover art to the publicity tour. If you
are not writing in “Genre,” you’re lost. Every Story ever told
has Genre classifications.

The Corrections is a Realistic, Long form, Mini-plot, Society,

Domestic Drama.

Moby Dick is a Realistic, Long form, Arch-plot, Action,

Adventure, Monster Drama.

The Iliad is a Fantastic, Long form, Arch-plot, War/Education,

Literary Story.

Deciding what Genre(s) your Story will inhabit will also tell
you exactly what you need to do to satisfy your potential
audience’s expectations. Genre will tell you the crucial
conventions and obligatory scenes you must have in your
novel. Knowing Genre is the single best way to avoid doing
a helluva lot of work for naught. If you don’t know you are
writing a horror novel and you spend four months working
on a character’s past history for an epic flashback, you’re

45
46

wasting your time. Better to know up front what Genre best fits the idea or theme
THE STORY GRID

you want to convey to your audience before setting off on the work, no?

Most importantly, if you fail to abide by your Genre’s requirements, you will not
write a Story that works.

The only way to write a Story that works is to know exactly what Genre(s) you are
exploring and deliver exactly what is required from those Genres. You must know
what your reader is expecting before you can possibly satisfy her. And yes, if you
are writing a Story, you must think of your audience. A Story means nothing if it is
not experienced. If you do the work exceptionally well, you do that thing that we
all dream of, you’ll overdeliver on audience expectations. You won’t just satisfy
them, you’ll shock and invigorate them. And the reader will have an experience
that she will never forget.

The first questions we need to ask ourselves are, “What are the Genres of our
Story?” and, “What will we have to do to meet those Genres’ expectations?”
13
If I hand you my novel and tell you it’s a murder mystery,
what would you expect from the book before you even
turned the title page?

GENRES HAVE • You’d expect a dead body.

CONVENTIONS • You’d expect that an investigator—a police officer, an

amateur sleuth, a PI, a cat—will set out to solve the
crime.

• You’d expect certain stock characters to appear

throughout the novel. The “Watson” to the novel’s
Sherlock Holmes or the “prime suspect” for example.

• You’d expect false clues in the plot otherwise known

as “red herrings.”

These are a few of the conventions of the mystery Genre.

They are elements in the Story that must be there or the
reader will be confused, unsettled or so bored out of their
skull that no matter how beautiful the sentences, they’ll quit
reading.

Conventions are not obligatory scenes, which I’ll cover in the

next chapter. Rather they are specific requirements in terms
of the Story’s cast or methods in moving the plot forward
(minor revelatory turning points that must be there but can
be weaved into the Story at the writer’s discretion). For
example, the Gothic mystery would require the convention
of being set in or around an ancient castle circa nineteenth
or late eighteenth century. The mystery Genre evolves as
new writers try out new kinds of conventions.

Agatha Christie took a tried and true convention (her brilliant

sleuth like Hercule Poirot) and freshened it up when she
created the amateur sleuth Miss Marple. But you’ll notice
that Christie did not eliminate the central clue-hunter from

47
48

her Story. She just changed the personality and background of the investigator.
THE STORY GRID

She abided by the convention, but innovated its execution.

To go back to the joke analogy as emblematic of Story, a convention in a “knock-

knock” joke would be having the punch line revealed as a play on words.

Knock-Knock

Who’s There?

Banana

Banana Who?

Knock-Knock

Who’s There?

Banana

Banana Who?

Knock-Knock

Who’s There?

Orange

Orange Who?

Orange you glad I didn’t say Banana?

The convention of the knock-knock joke is satisfied with punch line word play. It
can change from Banana to Orange or from Boo to Boo Who? Doesn’t matter as
long as there is word play.

Knock-Knock

Who’s There?

Boo

Boo Who?

Don’t cry… it’s just a Knock-Knock joke.

 49

But the “Knock-Knock” and “Who’s there?” elements of the joke are obligatory.

GENRES HAVE CONVENTIONS

They have to be there literally. In their exact form. These obligatory elements are
so familiar and identifiable to the listener/reader that they immediately induce an
expectation. Once we hear “Knock-Knock,” we expect the convention of the joke
form…a fun play on words payoff. If we don’t get the play on words convention,
the listener won’t laugh. The joke will die. It doesn’t work.

Similarly, to not give the listener the actual “Knock-Knock” and “Who’s there?”
obligatory elements for the joke is ridiculous right? The punch lines, Orange you
glad I didn’t say Banana or Don’t cry…it’s just a Knock-Knock joke, mean nothing
without the obligatory setup of Knock-Knock and Who’s there.

Whenever you start mulling whether or not to include a convention or obligatory

scene in your Story, think of the “Knock-Knock” joke and what it would be like
without a play on words punch line or “Who’s there?”
14
W hile conventions of particular Genres often concern
a Story’s cast of characters (the best friend sidekick
in a love Story or the monster in a horror Story), setting (the
labyrinthine castle setting in a Gothic romance) or method
GENRES HAVE of turning plot (red herrings in a mystery/crime novel),
OBLIGATORY obligatory scenes are the must-have elements to pay off
the raised expectations of those conventions. They are the
SCENES equivalent of the place markers, “knock-knock” and “who’s
there?” in a knock-knock joke.

Back to our mystery novel:

• You’d expect a “discovery of the body scene.”

• You’d expect an eventual confrontation between

the investigator and the murderer—what I call the
“J’accuse” scene.

• You’d expect an ending scene that clearly results in

justice (the murderer pays for his crime), injustice (the
murderer gets away) or irony (the investigator gets his
man, but loses someone or something in the process
or the investigator does not get his man, but the loss
results in a greater good).

So what happens if I fail to deliver even just one of these

obligatory scenes from the above list?

I haven’t written a mystery novel. I’ve written a book that

doesn’t work.

There is nothing more infuriating to blue-collar novelist pros

than listening to amateurs who obviously haven’t done the
work necessary to know their art form. You can’t help but
lose respect for them. It’s akin to your cousin Lou who makes
“Pot-au-feu” without meat or vegetables calling himself a
French chef.
 51

In order to write a professional novel, you must know the conventions and

GENRES HAVE OBLIGATORY SCENES

obligatory scenes of your chosen Genre. (I’ll detail those of the thriller Genre
later on when I dive into The Silence of the Lambs in part 7.) If you don’t know
the conventions and obligatory scenes for your chosen Genre(s), learn them.

How do you do that?

Read the top novels in the Genre (yes, the most commercially successful ones)
and write down what they all have in common. And “literary novels” are of a
Genre too… If you are going to write a Testing Plot novel about endurance and
tenacity, you better read The Old Man and the Sea and Deliverance.

Once you know them, how do you go about writing obligatory scenes?

Obligatory scenes are the most difficult ones for a writer to crack—the discovery
of the dead body scene, the hero at the mercy of the villain scene, the first kiss
scene, the attack of the monster scene, etc. The reason is that these scenes
can easily devolve into cliché. They’ve been done to death. To come up with
something fresh and surprising is an extremely difficult task.

A lot of writers have contempt for obligatory scenes for the very reasons I described
above. They don’t want to write them because they find them cheesy. A few even
insist that their work is so intellectually challenging and above “Genre,” that they
are exempt from having to fulfill these expectations. They’ll tell you that their
work is more of homage to a Genre, not really part of the Genre, etc. Which is
complete bullshit.

If the writer’s global Inciting Incident is one associated with a particular Genre
and she doesn’t innovatively pay it off in the way that the Genre demands, the
book won’t work. People won’t buy it.

Other writers (some call them hacks) love Genre because they think they can just
recycle old scenes from the Genre’s vault to fulfill these obligations. But if you
rehash something you saw on a Mannix episode from the 1970s, you will sorely
disappoint your reader. They may not have seen that particular episode, but they
will easily be able to tell that what you’ve written is unoriginal. If you’re re-using
the setup and payoff of a particular obligatory scene from the past, chances are
someone else has too.

Remember that the earliest readers in a particular Genre are experts.

When I ran mystery programs at the major publishing houses, you can be sure
I was aware of the thousands of hardcore crime readers. I couldn’t help but run
into them at conventions and specialty bookstores. These readers are desperate
52

for innovation. Their first question is always, “What’s new?” These core two to
THE STORY GRID

four thousand readers will give new writers a shot. If the writer creates something
unique, the aficionado will buy the next book too. And the book after that if the
second one pays off too. This is how careers were made back in the day. Still are,
even with the big publishing houses abandoning core Story categories for the big
book. There’s a reason why Amazon.com’s most successful publishing programs
all involve the core Genres.

But if the writer is rewarming old Rex Stout plotlines and somehow makes it into
a big house without being found out, rest assured these first readers will know.
They pride themselves on their expertise and if they find you lacking, they’ll tell
their fellow mystery junkies to skip the book. It’s “meh,” not worth their time.
They won’t brag about having a first edition of your first novel. They won’t look
forward to your next book. They won’t give you another chance.

But what about those hugely successful novels that defy what I’m saying? What
about those books that don’t deliver fresh obligatory scenes and are still huge
bestsellers?

Sometimes, an influential group of readers (usually critics) fall in the love with a
book or just its prose and talk it up incessantly. The sophisticated and The New
York Times reading metropolitan cocktail crowd (a dying tribe if there ever was
one in the new connected age of “Weird”) hear the chatter. Wanting to be “in the
know,” the swells repeat the hubbub and quite a number of books are bought and
displayed on coffee tables across the country. But many if not most go unread.

Writing for that kind of attention is not going to fill the hole in your soul. It’s
certainly not a business plan. Again, it’s like buying a lottery ticket.

Instead write for the Genre nerds desperate for new stories. They won’t desert
you when you push the envelope too far, either. Just knowing where the envelope
ends will warm their hearts.
15
G enre craft demands innovation. And that innovation
is found in the way a writer handles audience
expectations…the obligatory scenes and conventions of
your chosen Genres.
THE KEYS TO
This requirement is exactly the same thing that Steve Jobs
INNOVATION and Apple faced when they decided to create a new cell
phone. Jobs knew that the iPhone had to be compatible with
cellular networks, at least one of them. He knew that it had
to “ring.” He knew that the connections between callers had
to be clear. And tens of other obligations and conventions
(a North/South hearing and speaking convention) had to
be met. So the question Jobs asked himself was not, “How
do I make something completely unique and change the
way people speak to each other?” but, “How do I build on
and reinvent those things that phone users demand while
also giving them an intoxicating original experience?” Jobs
worked inside the phone “Genre,” and then moved the
Genre forward.

As you’ll remember, the first generation of iPhones had a

tendency to disconnect in the middle of calls. The obligatory
antenna required in the phone did not deliver. It wasn’t until
Apple fixed that problem that the iPhone moved from Apple
baseline cult first generation adopters (its Genre experts) to
middle managers abandoning their BlackBerrys. The core
fanatics cut Apple some slack on the first iteration of the
iPhone, but they didn’t evangelize to non-cult members
until all of the bugs were out of it.

It’s the very same thing for books.

Win over the experts and keep banging away at the keyboard.
When you’ve knocked out something extraordinary, the
experts will beat down their neighbors’ doors to get them to
read your book.

53
54

I know one thing is for sure. Apple opened up every single cell phone they could
THE STORY GRID

find to see what they all did and how they did it before they started working on
the prototype of the iPhone. Shouldn’t writers do the same thing?

There’s no shame in not knowing something. The only shame is when you willfully
ignore and then blame the educated for your failures.
16
G enre is the one of the most difficult foundations of Story
to wrap your mind around. There are so many theories
and categorizations of Genre, the editor/Story student can
easily fall into an intellectual whirlpool. I’ve been sucked in
GENRE’S so many times by so many different ways to look at Genres
that my head spins thinking about it.
FIVE-LEAF
I’m so susceptible to Genre inside baseball that I even named
CLOVER my literary agency Genre Management Inc. to remind myself
of its importance.
Not surprisingly, where I finally come out on Genre serves
the purposes of my method of editing a Story. My goal is and
always has been to take comprehensive theory and make it
practical. So I started my deep dive into Genre with a few
core goals.
• What combination of Genre theories can best serve
the writer adrift at his desk?
• How can the conventions of a particular Genre be
codified and written down as a list of must-have
obligatory scenes or conventional characteristics?
• How can we use those conventions and obligatory
scenes inherent in Genres to best effect?
• How can we make practical use (taking an idea and
extrapolating a “doable” and “testable” task) of the
deep thinking about Genre in order to best evaluate
our work?

So my exploration of Genre is purely practical.

What follows is a combination plate of theories from
many different sources from Aristotle and Plato, to Goethe,
Georges Polti, Norman Friedman, Will Wright and others.
But the biggest influence on my thinking is Robert McKee,
bestselling author of Story: Style, Structure, Substance and
the Principles of Screenwriting, and his colleague Bassim El-
Wakil. When McKee and El-Wakil release their own book on
Genre, I will, without hesitation, recommend that you read

55
56

and digest everything they have to say about it. But until we get their masterwork,
THE STORY GRID

here is a crash course from my experience to get you started.

The most ingenious ideas that McKee and El-Wakil put forth revolve around the
interplay of their five distinct categories of Genre, which I will explain shortly.
But before I do, just to keep us on track, here is a working definition of Genre so
that we know exactly what we’re breaking down:
A Genre is a label that tells the reader/audience what to expect. Genres simply
manage audience expectations.  It’s really that simple. Don’t let the French
etymology and pronunciation scare you.
We all know what to expect from a mystery novel, a love Story, or an action
movie. These categories tell us what we’re in for when we pick up a book or go
to the movies or the theater. But what are those buried specific expectations that
must be satisfied before a Story lands with us? What do we expect to know about
a Story before we’ll even consider listening or reading or watching it? As per
McKee and El-Wakil, there are five primary expectations of the audience.
1. We expect to know how long the Story will last.
2. We expect to know how far we’ll need to suspend our disbelief.
3. We expect to know the style, the particular experience of the Story.
4. We expect to know how the Story will be structured.
5. We expect to know what the general content of the Story will be.

With these five questions in mind, McKee and El-Wakil sorted the myriad of
familiar Genres we all know intuitively into five major categories.
I find it helpful to think visually and with most of the blood flowing through
my veins being of Irish origin (the book publishing company I co-founded with
Steven Pressfield is called Black Irish Books) I think of the five categories as
leaves on a five-leaf clover. Each of the five leaves nourishes the central locus of
the clover, the Global Story.
In order to manage the most primal of reader/audience expectations, writers must
make at least five clear choices, at least one from each leaf. And more often
than not, with secondary and tertiary subplots, they’ll use more than one from a
particular offshoot. But more on those choices later.
Here is how I define McKee and El-Wakil’s five big categories, our leaves on the
five-leaf clover that answer each of the questions above.
1. TIME GENRES answer how long the Story will be.
2. REALITY GENRES answer how far the audience will have to suspend their
disbelief.
 57

3. STYLE GENRES answer how we’ll experience the Story.

GENRE’S FIVE-LEAF CLOVER

4. STRUCTURE GENRES answer how broad or minimalist or nontraditional
the global telling of the Story will be.

The last leaf, the CONTENT GENRES, are the ones everyone thinks of when they
think of Genre. I further divide CONTENT into two sub categories, which I call
the EXTERNAL and the INTERNAL. More on why I do this later on.
5. CONTENT GENRES answer the theme/controlling idea of the Story.
a. EXTERNAL CONTENT GENRES determine the conscious object of
desire for the protagonist(s). More on objects of desire later on.
b. INTERNAL CONTENT GENRES determine the subconscious object of
desire for the protagonist(s).

And here are specific choices a writer has at his disposal for each of the big
categories. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it’s comprehensive for our
purposes.
1. TIME GENRES
A. Short Form—short films, short stories, or individual scenes in a play.
B. Medium Form—episodic television shows or documentaries, novellas,
multi thousand-word journalism, one act plays.
C. Long Form—feature length films/documentaries, novels, or three acts or
more plays.
2. REALITY GENRES
A. Factualism—stories that refer to facts of history or biography. They refer
to part of the historical record implying “This Story Did Happen,” like the
movie Argo or 12 Years a Slave or Serpico.
B. Realism—stories that could happen in real life, but are imagined, Law and
Order, the crime novels of Ian Rankin, etc.
C. Absurdism—stories that are not remotely real, like Eugene Ionesco’s play
The Bald Soprano or Looney Tunes
D. Fantasy—stories of wonder and imagination that require a comprehensive
suspension of disbelief, the type of which is delineated by three Subgenres.
1. Human—anthropomorphized reality like George Orwell’s novel
Animal Farm or fantastical experience like the movie Groundhog Day
that can be set in one of two time periods.
58

a. Contemporary
THE STORY GRID

b. Historical
2. Magical—stories about fantastical worlds with magical laws that can
be mastered by certain beings, but not everyone, like The Lord of the
Rings.
3. Science Fiction—stories about technology turning into magic with
no special requirements of the user. That is, it is not necessary to be
a wizard or an elf to employ the magic. Anyone with access to the
technology can use the magic. Examples include the Sub-subgenres:
a. Alternate History, Watchmen by Alan Moore
b. Cyberpunk, Neuromancer by William Gibson
c. Hard Science, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
d. Military, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
e. Post-Apocalyptic/Dystopian, The Road by Cormac McCarthy
f. Romantic, Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
g. Soft Science, Star Trek
h. Space Opera, Star Wars
3. STYLE GENRES—the various ways in which we experience a Story.
A. Drama—a tone of solemnity, facing reality as it is. Emotions are truthful
and fulfilling.
B. Comedy—funny, making jokes at the worst possible time in order to avoid
truthful emotion.
C. Documentary—fact based tone like the film The Battle of Algiers or
“mockumentary” styles like This is Spinal Tap.
D. Musical—characters breaking into song,
E. Dance—Martial arts films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
F. Literary—a sensibility of “high art” as pronounced by a particular
intelligentsia
1. Poetry—Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
2. Minimalism—short fiction from writers like Raymond Carver, Will You
Please Be Quiet, Please?
3. Meta—self-referential works that present stories about stories, like The
Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon or Infinite Jest by David Foster
Wallace.
 59

4. Postmodern—fragmented and subversive of formal Story Structure,

GENRE’S FIVE-LEAF CLOVER

Naked Lunch By William Burroughs.
G. Theatrical—qualities of the theater.
H. Cinematic—qualities of film.
I. Epistolary—qualities of letters.
J. Cartoons—anthropomorphized silliness.
4. STRUCTURE GENRES—more on these later.
A. Arch-plot
B. Mini-plot
C. Anti-plot
5. CONTENT GENRES—more on these later.
A. EXTERNAL CONTENT GENRES—stories driven by a global external value
and its positive and negative charge as outlined for each below.
1. Action—Life/Death
2. Horror—Life/Fate Worse than Death (Damnation)
3. Crime—Justice/Injustice
4. Western—Individual/Society, Freedom/Civilization
5. War—Righteous/Corrupt
6. Thriller—Life/Death…possibility of damnation with a combination of
Justice/Injustice (a merging of Action, Horror and Crime)
7. Society—the value at stake determines the Subgenre, for example the
Domestic Story is about the Individual/Family dynamic.
8. Love—Love/Hate/Self-Hate/Hate masquerading as Love
9. Performance—Respect/Shame
B. INTERNAL CONTENT GENRES—stories driven by the nature of the
protagonists’ inner conflict.
1. Status—Success/Failure moving from one ladder of society to another.
2. Worldview—a change in life experience from one value charge to its
opposite
3. Morality—a change/revolution of the protagonist’s inner moral
compass
60 THE STORY GRID
61

GENRE’S FIVE-LEAF CLOVER

17
Y ou probably have a general idea of the kind of Story
you’ve already written or the one you want to write.
You know it in generic terms. Now is the time to reconsider
and clearly define your choices. Doing so will ground your
CHOOSING YOUR work so that when you get stuck, you can always go back
GENRES to these choices and evaluate whether you’ve abided their
conventions and/or obligatory scenes.

On the first leaf of our Five-Leaf Genre Clover are the TIME
GENRES, which are usually self-evident. You want to write
a novel or a short Story or a screenplay for a short film. Any
one of them is valid. Any one is easy to label. The same Story
and Story Grid principles abide for all of the time Genres.

Chances are you’ve picked from the REALITY and STYLE

leaves too without thinking too much about them. And that’s
fine. Micromanaging the choices you make in Time, Reality
and Style can result in paralysis by analysis. Remember,
The Story Grid and everything it entails is a tool. It is not
an end in itself. So to obsess about whether your Story is a
drama with comedic elements or a comedy with dramatic
elements is time best spent elsewhere. Terms of Endearment,
the novel and the film, use both comedy and drama in the
telling. You can too with your Story. But when push comes
to shove, I think we’d all agree that Terms of Endearment is
globally a drama. It concerns itself with real emotional truth.
Whereas, the global comedy, There’s Something about Mary
relentlessly avoids emotional truth.

It’s important though to clearly write down exactly what

choices you’ve made. Doing so will allow you to go back
later on and make sure that you consistently abided by the
conventions of those choices.

For the nature of the REALITY leaf, if your lead character is

anthropomorphized, you’re definitely working in the fantasy
arena. If it’s a novel based on a historical event, you’re in the
FACTUALISM arena.
 63

Again, what’s important is to write all of the choices down.

CHOOSING YOUR GENRES

I’ll suggest a one-page Foolscap Global Story Grid, a phrase I’ve borrowed from
Steven Pressfield and his mentor Norm Stahl, later on that you’ll use as a lifeline
to track your global Story. It will be the thirty-thousand-foot view that will put you
back up in the sky and settle your nerves when you inevitably panic and think
you’ve crashed your Story. You’ll use the Foolscap Global Story Grid along with
The Story Grid Spreadsheet (which tracks the micro movements in your Story) to
create your final Story Grid infographic.

Now with the first three leaves of our Five-Leaf Genre Clover considered (TIME,
REALITY and STYLE), we’re ready to detail the complementary relationship
between the fourth leaf—STRUCTURE—and the fifth leaf—CONTENT.
18
If you were to somehow plot all of the Stories that have ever
been told, what would it look like?

It would look a lot like other natural phenomena such as

THE STORY the distribution of height of human beings, or blood type
or women’s shoe sizes. Which makes sense because Stories
BELL CURVE are as natural to human beings as air and water. The graph
would look like a bell curve, in statistics what’s called a
normal distribution (or Gaussian distribution).

In order to map “Story” though, the first thing you’d need to

do is figure out how to judge the stories, right? How about
we evaluate the global popularity/commercial appeal of a
particular Story along the vertical axis, or the y-axis, versus
the three different Story Genre structures from the fourth leaf
of our Five-Leaf Genre Clover on the x-axis?

So the further up the y-axis you move, the more appealing

the Story will be to larger and larger audiences. That is, the
y-axis is a reflection of the relative popularity of every kind
of Story ever written…one where each Story perfectly aligns
with its content Genre’s conventions. Needless to say, no
Story ever aligns perfectly with a single Genre, and like
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the closer you analyze
and pick at a particular Story to classify it, the more it moves
away from your microscope. Also remember that those
structures and their corresponding content Genres with the
greatest potential for a large audience are also those that are
the most difficult to innovate.

On our graph, let’s make the East/West x-axis, the horizontal

one, represent the three main structures—Arch-plot, Mini-
plot (often referred to as Minimalism) and Anti-plot. (More
on these three structures in the next three chapters.) Let’s put
the oldest structure, the Arch-plot, in the middle, the Mini-
plot on the left hand corner and the Anti-plot on the right
hand corner. So the East/West x-axis progression moves
from the purest qualities of a Global Mini-plot to the purest
 65

qualities of a Global Arch-plot to the purest qualities of a Global Anti-plot. The

THE STORY BELL CURVE

further you move from left to right on the x-axis, the closer you move toward the
qualities of the next Global Story Structure and the further away you move from
the qualities of the previous structure.

Here’s what it would look like:

I recommend that you consider where your Story sits on this Story bell curve
before you write it and after you have your first draft. Is it a pure Arch-plot? A pure
Mini-plot? Can you shift the focus of your Story to find a sweet spot between your
literary ambitions and a critical mass of audience who’d be interested?

It’s important because the coordinates of your Story will be immeasurably helpful
for you to home in or choose your global content Genre and any supporting
content Subgenres. Knowing the relationship between the CONTENT Genres
and the STRUCTURE Genres will save you from much pain later on. More on
these relationships in the next chapters, but generally the External Content Genres
(action, horror, crime, thriller, love, performance, society, war and western)
live inside the meaty middle of the Story bell curve, while the Internal Content
66

Genres (worldview, morality and status) tend to move toward the outlying/thinner
THE STORY GRID

sections of the curve.

No matter how incredible an Anti-plot war Story may be, the potential audience
for it is very small. Which is fine as long as you know what you’re getting into
before you sit down to write it. Charlie Kaufman doesn’t write screenplays that
he expects will do over a hundred million dollars in the box office their first
weekend. So when they don’t, he’s not disappointed. If you’re going after the
idiosyncratic and you find that many readers of your work just don’t “get it,” don’t
fret. But don’t expect to reach number one on The New York Times bestseller list
either.

In addition to avoiding unnecessary work, understanding to whom your work

will eventually be marketed and why will prepare you for the business of selling
your Story to either a publisher or a select group of readers. But most importantly
a comprehensive understanding of the Story bell curve will help you match what
you want to say with the best way to say it.

For example, at the onset you may think the horror Genre best serves your
controlling idea (we’ll review controlling ideas later on) about the insidious nature
of mass media. But after refreshing your knowledge of horror, you may find that it
really would be much better served if you approached your work as a love Story/
political social drama instead. Perhaps Paddy Chayefsky had that debate before
he began writing Network. Knowing the breadth of Story possibilities and the
limitations of each Genre will focus your energy and pinpoint exactly where your
Story will best live.

Let’s now review the qualities of these three Story structures. I’m going to begin
in the middle, the big meat of Story and then progress to the left tail and then the
right tail.
19
T he middle of the Story Bell Curve is Arch-plot, the
classic Story form, sometimes referred to as the “quest”
narrative.

ARCH-PLOT In summary, it has the following qualities:

In a consistent and cause/effect reality like the one we all

inhabit in our everyday lives, Arch-plots feature a single
active protagonist. This lead character pursues an object of
desire (a new job, the love of his life, a college education etc.)
while confronting primarily external forces of antagonism
(more qualified candidates, a better-looking suitor, a high
school teacher out to get him). The Story ends “closed”
with absolute and irreversible change in the life of the
protagonist. There is no going back to the way things were at
the beginning of the Story. Novels like The Firm, Sense and
Sensibility, Carrie, The Hobbit and movies like The Fugitive,
Chinatown, Kramer vs. Kramer and plays like Death of a
Salesman, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Importance of Being
Ernest are all Arch-plots.

Arch-plot is human life Story, the one we all use to evaluate

and direct our own lives. This is why Arch-plot has the
greatest potential for the largest possible audience. Every
person on the planet is a potential reader/viewer.

The Arch-plot is the narrative form made famous and

delineated so well by Joseph Campbell in his seminal work
The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Having evolved over thousands of years, it has the structure

that every single human being on earth can relate to. We see
our own lives within the frame of Arch-plot. We all strive to
fulfill our desires, be they material, romantic, or professional
and believe that there are forces aligned against us to keep
us from what we really want and deserve. It is only through
active confrontation and defeat of these antagonistic forces
that we believe we achieve anything of value.

67
68

Once we achieve or fail to achieve our desires however, we find that we can’t go
THE STORY GRID

back again. Once we’ve left our hometown and conquered the big city or fallen
flat on our face, going back to the way things used to be is impossible. It is like
Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge. At the end of a particular quest—
getting into college, finding the right mate—we can’t reverse course and go back
to the way we saw and felt before we successfully attained or unsuccessfully
botched it.

Arch-plot is linear. This is the way we view our own lives.

We love Arch-plots because they mirror the way we choose to privately examine
ourselves. There is nothing more powerful in a Story than having a lead character
desperately pursuing something. The reader or viewer cannot help but attach
himself to that character because he has objects of desire too. If the lead character
in a Story gets what he wants, our brains are wired to believe that we can too.
Stories fuel our courage and offer the cautions that we believe will help guide
our own paths.

Whether you know it or not, your desire to write comes from the urge to not just
be “creative,” it’s a need (one every human being on earth has) to help others. A
well-told Story is a gift to the reader/listener/viewer because it teaches them how
to confront their own discomforts.

In his wonderful book The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves,
psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz tells the Story of Marissa Panigrosso, who worked on
the ninety-eighth floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She recalled
that when the first plane hit the North Tower on September 11, 2001, a wave of
hot air came through her glass windows as intense as opening a pizza oven.

Panigrosso did not hesitate. She didn’t even pick up her purse, make a phone
call or turn off her computer. She walked quickly to the nearest emergency exit,
pushed through the door and began the ninety-eight-floor stairway descent to
the ground. What she found curious was that far more people chose to stay right
where they were. They made outside calls and even an entire group of colleagues
went into their previously scheduled meeting.

Why would they choose to stay in such a vulnerable place in such an extreme
circumstance?

Because they were human beings and human beings find change to be extremely
difficult, practically impossible. To leave without being instructed to leave was
a risk. What were the chances of another plane hitting their tower, really? And
if they did leave, wouldn’t their colleagues think that they were over-reacting,
running in fear? They should stay calm and wait for help, they must have thought
to themselves, maintain an even keel. And that’s what they did. I probably would
have too.
 69

Grosz suggests that the reason every single person in the South Tower didn’t

ARCH-PLOT
immediately leave the building is that they did not have a familiar Story in their
minds to guide them. This from his book:

We are vehemently faithful to our own view of the world, our Story. We
want to know what new Story we’re stepping into before we exit the old
one. We don’t want an exit if we don’t know exactly where it is going to
take us, even – or perhaps especially – in an emergency. This is so, I hasten
to add, whether we are patients or psychoanalysts.2

Even among those people who chose to leave, there were some who went back
to the floor to retrieve personal belongings they couldn’t bear to part with. One
woman was walking down alongside Panigrosso when she stopped herself and
went back upstairs to get the baby pictures of her children left on her desk. To
lose them was too much for her to accept.

That decision was fatal.

When human beings are faced with chaotic circumstances, our impulse is to stay
safe by doing what we’ve always done before. To change our course of action
seems far riskier than to keep on keeping on. To change anything about our lives,
even our choice of toothpaste, causes great anxiety.

How we are convinced finally to change is by hearing stories of other people

who risked and triumphed. Not some easy triumph, either. But a hard fought one
that takes every ounce of the protagonist’s inner fortitude. Because that’s what it
takes in real life to leave a dysfunctional relationship, move to a new city, or quit
your job. It takes guts, moxie, inner fire, the stuff of heroes.

Change, no matter how small, requires loss. And the prospect of loss is far more
powerful than potential gain. It’s difficult to imagine what a change will do to us.
This is why we need stories so desperately.

Stories give us scripts to follow. It’s no different than young boys hearing the
Story of how an orphan in Baltimore dedicated himself to the love of a game and
ended up the greatest baseball player of all time. If George Herman Ruth could
find his life’s work and succeed from such humble origins, maybe they could
become big league ball players too.

We need stories to temper our anxieties, either as supporting messages to stay as

we are or inspiring road maps to get us to take a chance. Experiencing stories that
tell the tale of protagonists for whom we can empathize gives us the courage to
examine our own lives and change them.

2 Grosz, Stephen. The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (p.123) W. W. Nor-
ton & Company
70

So if your Story doesn’t change your lead character irrevocably from beginning to
THE STORY GRID

end, no one will deeply care about it. It may entertain them, but it will have little
effect on them. It will be forgotten. We want characters in stories that take on the
myriad of challenges to change their lives and somehow make it through, with
invaluable experience. Stories give us the courage to act when we face confusing
circumstances that require decisiveness.

These circumstances are called CONFLICTS. What we do or don’t do when we

face conflict is the engine of Storytelling.

What I’m describing is the Arch-plot’s inherent quest. It is the structural narrative
of humanity and it’s irresistible. Primal Arch-plot (from cave drawings to oral
tradition) is all about external antagonism. There is little, if any internal struggle
in the lead character. Which makes sense. When life’s concerns are all about
finding water, food and shelter, there is very little time to indulge one’s inner
development. The equivalent Arch-plots today live inside the External Action
Genre.

Pure action Genre protagonists are not plagued by inner doubts or perversions
or deeply seated anxieties. In these Stories, a heroic protagonist overcomes arch
Villains and/or nature and ultimately sacrifices himself in order to save another
human being or even the entire planet from annihilation. While often derided,
the action/comic book Story is one of the most difficult to write/innovate and thus
is rife with cliché. It’s been with us since the first campfire Story, so it ain’t easy
to reinvent.

The commercial Story marketplace is Arch-plot central and is the stuff of two-
hundred-million-dollar movie budgets from film studios and blockbuster novels
from big publishing. Pure Arch-plot is all about external conflicts. And there is
nothing wrong with a great fastball external-only Arch-plot Story. When done
well, they’re better than peanuts and popcorn.

But, Arch-plot can also be used to explore inner conflict. The way a writer can
do so is to combine a big External Content Genre with a compelling Internal
Content Genre. This is exactly what Thomas Harris chose to do in The Silence of
the Lambs. The result is an Arch-plot structure for his global External and Internal
Content Genres. The conventions and obligatory scenes of the serial killer thriller
drive the external, while the internal hinges on the progression of the protagonist
from blind belief to disillusionment. Much more on both the External and Internal
Content Genres to come.

But next up is the second structural Genre, Mini-plot.

20
W hile the Arch-plot is the stuff of tent-pole action movies
and master detective murder mysteries, Mini-plot is
most often associated with the literary Story culture. Moving
to the left from the fat middle of Arch-plot on the Story Bell
MINI-PLOT Curve, we come to Mini-plot, which is best thought of in
terms of internal antagonism.

The content Genres most associated with Mini-plot are the

Internal ones—Status, Worldview, and Morality. And as the
Internal Content Genres concern the trials and tribulations
of the individual, Mini-plot concerns the inner wars of
internal antagonism.

Here are the qualities of Mini-plot:

Lead characters, and often multiple protagonists, face off

with their inner demons. As opposed to the Arch-plot’s
action oriented lead character who battles people and the
natural world around him on his quest for an external object
of desire (and sometimes, as in the case of The Silence of the
Lambs, an added internal one), Mini-plot characters passively
move through the world avoiding external confrontation at
all costs. These characters are passive, not active.

Inside, however, these characters are in a fight for their lives.

Their inner voices (those of their merciless inner parent, their

pragmatic negotiator self, and their rebellious authentic self)
are at odds. Oftentimes their inner confrontations are so
violent that the character presents a practical catatonia to
the physical world. Think of Anne Tyler’s protagonist Macon
Leary in her novel, The Accidental Tourist. To take on any
external drama is to risk melting down entirely.

That is, until the Story forces them to overcome or succumb

to the struggle within.

The Mini-plot also differs from the Arch-plot in that it has an

“open” ending. There is no happily ever after or life sentence

71
72

of misery at the end of a Mini-plot. Questions remain unanswered. It’s open

THE STORY GRID

to interpretation by the reader/audience. And thus Mini-plot demands a deeper

connection to the protagonist from the audience than just the dopamine rush
of an action Arch-plot Story like Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger or J.C. Chandor’s film
All is Lost. We don’t really mind the fact that James Bond is a superficial human
being or that we have no idea why Robert Redford’s character in the film has no
backstory beyond an unnecessary voiceover at the beginning of the movie. (I bet
the producer made Chandor stick that in.) We’re overjoyed just to find out what
happens next.

While the Arch-plot produces an irreversible external change by Story’s end that
answers all of the questions raised throughout the Story concretely and satisfies all
of the curiosities of its audience, the Mini-plot (while it does produce irreversible
internal change in a character) leaves one or two questions unanswered by
the Story’s end. It leaves its audience with a level of uncertainty to debate and
contemplate what could happen to the lives of the characters after the “ending.”
Something to talk about after the experience beyond the Chris Farley-esque
declaration “That was Awesome!”

Time can also be played with in the Mini-plot Story.

The Story can move from the ending to the beginning like Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.
Playing with time is not a feature of the Arch-plot, which must be linear in design.
But like the Arch-plot, the Mini-plot still must have the traditional beginning,
middle and end. That is, the writer can put the end at the beginning, the beginning
in the middle, and the middle at the end, but the Mini-plot cannot just stop the
Story in medias res without satisfying the requirements of global Story form. It
must abide by the logical (or illogical) rationale of the Reality Genre choice. A
good example of Mini-plot virtuosity is the realistic, long form, but time playing
Story Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino.

Adherence to philosophical causality, crucial in Arch-plot, is not absolutely

necessary in Mini-plot.

Causality is our innate belief that all Causes produce Effects in the world.
Something happens and then something else results. An ill character coughs
into his hand and then greets another character with a handshake. The cause of
putting germs into one hand and transferring them to another creates the effect of
the second character contracting the disease of the first.

One counter cause/effect philosophy often explored in Mini-plot stories is the

idea that Character is Destiny; that our fates have been sealed at birth. The Greek
classics like Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex take that concept to unforgettable extremes.
 73

Another notion is that the universe is indifferent to the actions of man…that one

MINI-PLOT
person’s moral and/or ethical choices in the world amount to nothing. There is
no damnation or salvation. We don’t reap what we sow because in fact there is
no farm. Deep stuff.

In order to effectively dramatize this kind of philosophical exploration, though,

the Story often needs a wide net of characters to reinforce this underlying big
controlling idea/theme. Here’s why:

With just a single point of view, the reader intuitively expects Arch-plot. We just
can’t help it. The reader will attach himself to that POV and expect a palpable
external object of desire for that protagonist, one closely associated with the
External Content Genres. If no such object of desire reveals itself in like the first
scene or two, many readers/viewers get turned off.

Mini-plot masters like Raymond Carver, John Cheever, George Sanders, and Alice
Munro, who live at the top of the “short Story writer” pyramid, are capable of
creating entire universes with multiple characters confronting the absurdity and/
or sterility of existence. There is a reason why many short Story writers never
write the single Big Novel that becomes their masterwork. It’s because their entire
body of work and the core themes they are exploring require precision and tight
spaces. To expand a perfectly executed short Story into a novel just won’t work.

So they don’t try to do that.

But if you add up all of the short stories from these masters, you’ll find a
consistency of compelling and multifaceted philosophies about life and its
contents and discontents within. Take a look at Robert Altman’s movie Short Cuts,
an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short stories spliced together as only Altman
could do, to see what I mean.

So Arch-plot is all about Active Single Protagonists facing down External

Antagonism and is the domain of the Commercial Book Culture, the Studio
system in Hollywood, Narrative Nonfiction in journalism, and the Plot Driven
Play.

Mini-plot is all about Passive Single (or Multiple) Protagonists contending with
Internal Sturm and Drang and is the domain of the Literary Book Culture, the
Independent Film world, Long Form Journalism in Nonfiction, and the “Character”
Driven play.

Next up? Anti-plot.

 
21
If Arch-plot is the structural backbone of the External
Content Genres and Mini-plot serves the Internal Content
Genres (see Genre’s Five-Leaf Clover), what’s the deal with
the third structural Genre, Anti-plot?
ANTI-PLOT
This is the kind of question a Story nerd like myself loves to
noodle.

The Anti-plot came of age in the bloody twentieth century.

Faced with the realities of mass impersonal slaughter from

two global wars and the very real prospect of complete
annihilation of the human race, a coterie of artists stared
down the prospect of the end of civilization. They dug deeply
into the foundations of Story form to respond. Was there as
much potential darkness as light in Storytelling? In fact, was
Storytelling itself complicit in the systematized murder—not
just of soldiers—but also of innocent civilians whose only
“crime” was the content of their as yet quantified, let alone
unqualified, genetic material?

There is no question that masterful propagandists can use

Story form to ultimately horrific effect. In 388 BC, Plato
urged Athenian leaders to exile poets and Storytellers. He
understood how powerful a well-turned Story is. Plato would
not have been shocked that convincing entire populations
of their hegemony while arguing the necessity of eradicating
defective human specimens who would degrade their
omnipotent bloodlines would prove chillingly manageable
with the use of a finely spun Arch-plot.

The rise of mass media (the printing press, film, radio and
eventually television and now the Internet) to trumpet Stories
visually and wirelessly moved the form from a linear to an
exponential phenomenon as quickly as the technological
adoption allowed. And how hard really is it to get people to
adopt “entertainment” technology? Modern/civilized man
no longer heard stories from just a small group of fellow
 75

tribe members. He heard them from third-party authority figures and beautiful

ANTI-PLOT
new gods called “stars” from the screen and radio. Just as it did way back in
Greece, the well-turned message from a charismatic presence proved irresistible.

They still do. Ask any child today who “Elsa” is or their adult parent what’s going
on with Angelina Jolie…

The Post WWI and WWII artists understood that Arch-plot—the dominant Story
form and the communication device of Tyranny as well as Public Relations/
Advertising/Salesmanship—requires causality. Which means that one event
causes another. I sneeze without covering my mouth. The germs reach the air.
They travel to your nose and you get a cold. My sneeze causes your infection.
They understood too that Mini-plot also (predominantly) requires causality, albeit
at an internal level. For example, in stories of the time one’s inability to control
a sexual desire caused an effect…that wonderful go-to event used by nineteenth
and early twentieth century Storytellers, hysterical fainting.

What baffled artists in the post-war years was that to attribute a single “cause” for
mass-murder was ridiculous. That is, if the artist did not believe the rationale of
the eugenists, the national socialists, the communists, the capitalists, the Vatican,
or any other figure of authority or social movement, they’d find themselves at a
loss when trying to conceive of a work of art to express their point of view.

The two Story structures available to them, (Arch-plot and Mini-plot) proved
practically impossible to convey the absurdity.

To abide by the Arch-plot conventions, artists wishing to examine and/or comment

on the state of the world were confronted with coming up with some sort of
“explanation” for inexplicable human behavior. Unless one was writing pure
propaganda [and a lot of people do write pure propaganda, yes even today] the
notion of blaming the victims for their own extermination (they did x, therefore
they got y) proved maddening.

As a response, Mini-plot first came to the forefront of Story, especially in

intellectual circles.

But soon even the Mini-plot’s fail safe big idea themes proved insufficient to
describe just what sort of world we lived in. Character as Destiny drama relied on
unseen higher powers to imbue humanity individual by individual with a certain
outcome. Some were just flat-out “evil” and born that way. While the Indifferent
Universe Story required multi-player casts and the specificity of bourgeois angst
and navel gazing to realize—and nothing deadens a Story faster than authorial
pontificating—try and read Clifford Odets today.
76

The big idea Mini-plots proved banal. Storytellers could choose from only two
THE STORY GRID

columns of Mini-plot’s thematic Chinese Menu. There were Supernatural forces

at play or there weren’t. So if Stories intent on supporting the notion of a higher
power or no higher power at play in the travails of human existence proved
insufficient, perhaps Story structure itself required a new approach.

And it is such failures of traditional Story form that gave rise to Anti-plot, the
rebellion against Story itself.

Anti-plot breaks all of the rules.

• There is no requirement that there be a consistent reality.

• There is no requirement of causality.

• There is no requirement to adhere to any time constraints.

• The protagonist(s) at the end of the Story are the same as they were at the
beginning.

• The characters neither defeat nor surrender to external or internal

antagonistic forces. They just remain as they ever were, like plants with
voices.

Anti-plot gave birth to the Theater of the Absurd, Existentialism, The Beats, Meta-
Fiction, and countless masterpieces on canvas. It changed the way the world saw
itself. Man was no longer the rational progressively improving being he thought
he was. All of his fundamental beliefs were called into question and scrutinized.

And the verdict was not so comforting. Masterwork Anti-plot Stories like Waiting
for Godot and No Exit cut humanity to the quick.

Anti-plot sounds like fun, right?

You can break all of Story’s rules and in the process become an avant-garde Artist
with a capital “A” by doing whatever you wish. Just call yourself a serious writer
and you don’t have to deal with any of that “Genre” nonsense. Why learn Classic
Story form when you’re just going to throw away all of its rules?

The reason why is that you will never be able to achieve anything close to
universality using the Anti-plot form if you do not know what it is rebelling against.
Writing Anti-plot with no knowledge of Arch-plot or Mini-plot is the equivalent
of trying to build a car with no understanding of the drivetrain.
 77

As fair warning, The Story Grid derives from the principles of Story form for

ANTI-PLOT
Arch-plot and Mini-plot. It will be of limited use to the Anti-plot Story beyond as
an exercise to check that particular Story’s consistency breaking the rules and/or
achieving some sort of inspired randomness. That is, as a method to make sure
that you have not accidentally built a cause/effect relationship into a particular
moment or have changed any of the lives of the characters.

But once you have a comprehensive knowledge of the Arch-plot and Mini-plot
forms, writing the next The Trial will be far easier. You’ll know what “not” to do. If
you never learn the “rules” of those forms, though, you’ll never be able to break
them.

 
22
I f we boiled every Arch-plot and Mini-plot STRUCTURE
GENRE down to its component parts we’d find that the
chain of events in each is very much in keeping with what
Joseph Campbell referred to as The Hero’s Journey.
CONFLICT AND
A protagonist or multi-protagonists go on a mission at the
OBJECTS OF beginning and by Story’s end, after overcoming or not
DESIRE overcoming forces of antagonism (inner, personal or extra-
personal conflicts), he or they are irrevocably changed.
That’s it.

Well not quite it.

Something must happen at the very beginning of the Story—

an event that throws the lead character’s life out of balance.
That something is the Inciting Incident (more on this down
the road).

Either a good thing happens or a bad thing happens. The

event can be a random coincidence [aliens attack] or a
causal occurrence [your lead character’s wife leaves him].
A positive change or a negative change in the life of the
character unsettles his world and requires that the character
do something to get back to “normal.” Just like we do when
our world gets weird.

This event gives rise to an object of desire in your lead

character’s conscious and often subconscious mind, a
tangible object (a conscious want) and something intangible
(a subconscious need). Perhaps he wants to stop the aliens
from destroying earth (conscious) while he needs to prove
to his family that he’s worthy of their love (subconscious).
Depending on your choice of Genre, the balance of these
desires (which one dominates and which one is underneath
the telling of the Story) varies. The key thing is that the lead
character believes if he attains his conscious object of desire
(his want), all will right itself in his world. Whether or not
that is true is a whole other ball of wax.
 79

For example, let’s say that at the beginning of a Story, a lead character’s father-

CONFLICT AND OBJECTS OF DESIRE

in-law confesses to him that he only has enough money to take care of himself
for six months. After that, the father-in-law will need the lead character’s help
to not just survive but keep up appearances as a respectable wealthy man. This
Inciting Incident (family member desperately demanding help) throws the lead
character’s life out of whack.

He has to do something.

And doing nothing is doing something too.

Let’s say the lead character chooses to blow off the father-in-law. He nods his
head during the heart to heart talk but takes zero action afterward. So, the father-
in-law turns up the heat. He tells his daughter about his predicament. The heat
from her father (I went to your husband for help and he’s done nothing!) puts her
under a great deal of stress. She’s now torn between her love and obligation to
her father and the love and obligation she has to her husband.

Perhaps after the lead character is confronted by his wife’s Daddy says you won’t
help him! duress, he chooses to do something. He decides to find a way to get
the meddlesome father-in-law out of his life…for good. Let’s say the conscious/
tangible/external object of desire the protagonist chooses in this case is to get his
hands on a lot of money. Once he has the money and gives it to his father-in-law,
he’ll get his life back.

Now, we could stop right here and map out an entire Arch-plot Story based on
this Inciting Incident. We could come up with a crime Story or action Story or
horror Story to drive the narrative velocity in such a way that the reader/viewer/
listener will be held spellbound about what will happen next. The entire Story
will ride on whether or not the lead character will succeed in getting the money.
That’s fine. (Check out the film Sexy Beast which has a similar setup, except it’s
an old “co-conspirator” who visits with some demands.) But you better be sure
that you have wonderful turns of external plot to keep the reader/viewer/listener
engaged. Sexy Beast certainly does.

If you want to explore the moral or internal conflicts inherent in a father-in-law

using his son-in-law’s love for his daughter as a means to maintain his country
club lifestyle, though, you better add an internal element to the Storytelling. The
way to do that is to build in a subconscious object of desire.

So what could be the subconscious/intangible object of desire for this lead

character?
80

It could be a lot of things. And again, it will depend upon the Genre you’ve
THE STORY GRID

chosen to tell this Story, or alternatively you could choose the Genre that best fits
the subconscious desire you wish to explore and make the Story less externally
Arch-plot driven and more internally Mini-plot driven.

He could want his father-in-law to at long last give him the respect he deserves.
Subconsciously the protagonist may believe that if he hands over a chunk of
cash to the old man, he’ll at long last gain his approval—for not only taking
such good care of his daughter, but for now providing for him too. In this case,
the subconscious desire could be to place an authority figure in debt as proof of
inner power. This would be a choice to explore among the options in the Internal
Status Genre—pathetic, admiration, tragic, or sentimental. (More on the Internal
Status Genre to come.)

Or, the protagonist could want his wife to finally appreciate just how difficult it
is for him to provide the lifestyle to which she has grown accustomed. Perhaps
if she sees how he makes the sausage, she will no longer take for granted his
hard work and sacrifice. In this case his subconscious desire could be to gain
unconditional love. That would be an Internal Status Genre choice as well.

It is these two objects of desire, Money and Respect (or Unconditional Love)
that will drive the two “plots” within the global Story. These two strands are what
screenwriters refer to as Storyline A and Storyline B.

Storyline A is the external Story to achieve the conscious object of desire.

Storyline B is the internal Story to achieve the subconscious object of desire.

After an Inciting Incident that throws your character’s life out of balance, he will
go on a quest to achieve his objects of desire. He’s got to make plans and execute
the plans. But once he takes up the quest, forces of antagonism ally against him.
His plans go wrong. He adjusts. His next plans go wrong. He adjusts. The stakes
escalate until he’s at the point of no return. His life will never be the same if he
achieves or doesn’t achieve his goals.

There are three levels of conflict that can thwart his plans to get his external and
internal objects of desire.

1. Inner conflict is the Hamlet-esque inside-our-head dithering that we all do

whenever faced with a difficult task. If we can’t beat down the Resistance
coming from the voices in our heads, we’ll never get anything done.
 81

2. Personal conflict is provided by an antagonist character or characters in

CONFLICT AND OBJECTS OF DESIRE

the Story. And there must be a living and breathing character or characters
intent on keeping our hero from reaching his goal. Without them, the Story
gets more difficult to pull off than Finnegans Wake.

3. Extra-personal conflict is the threat of being ostracized by society at large

or one’s particular tribe of eccentrics. Or, it’s a naturally occurring force
like a hurricane or a frigid winter. Acts of God are extra-personal as are
group and peer pressure in general.

You must take great pains to make the conflicts in your Story varied and surprising.
How varied depends upon your choice of global content Genre. Again which of
the three kinds of antagonism become the focal point of your Story is dependent
upon your choice of Genre. A coming of age Story will hinge on Inner conflict,
while a James Bond movie will be far more concerned with Personal conflict and
a survival thriller on Extra-Personal conflict.

The quest for the external (conscious) and internal (subconscious) objects of desire
is the heart and soul of Story. What the character wants (money) versus what the
character needs (unconditional love). It’s the foundation. And whenever you get
stumped, you need to evaluate how surprising and interesting your character’s
quest to achieve his wants and needs are.

Here’s the big takeaway:

Focusing on the struggle to get objects of desire will make up for almost every
other kind of Story misstep.

But wishy-washy choices for the objects of desire will destroy the most stunning
secondary subplots. Without fail.

The reader/viewer/listener has to attach and invest themselves in the Story’s

protagonist(s). And the way he attaches is through the fictional character’s pursuit
of objects of desire. There’s no secret to the fact that we’re all striving to get what
we want. So it’s only natural that we’ll invest ourselves in characters pursuing
someone or something that they think will raise their circumstances. Even if we
don’t like what they’re going after.

Just about every one of Edith Wharton’s novels features a lead character who
is not a particularly appealing human being. Would any one of us want to step
into Lily Bart’s shoes in The House of Mirth? But, despite her shortcomings, her
82

longing to be accepted in High Society is irresistible to us. We simply root for her
THE STORY GRID

even as she makes mistake after mistake after mistake.

No matter what Story you are writing—a sci-fi love Story, a master detective
mystery, a fantastical allegory etc.—you must have compelling objects of desire
for your lead protagonist. If the protagonist doesn’t want anything or doesn’t need
anything, you don’t have a Story. The book won’t work.

So obviously, the first job you have as your own editor is to specify exactly what
your lead character(s) want and what they need. What they will strive to attain
and what it subconsciously represents to them in their deepest self must be clearly
defined. If it isn’t clear to you as the writer, there is no possibility that it will be
clear to the reader.

The rough manuscript that you have in your drawer or the one you are preparing
to write may be perfectly well crafted and may have compelling events, but
without the foundation quests for an external and internal object of desire, it
will not “feel” right to a reader or viewer. It will not compel people. It will seem
sterile…too intellectual…too uninvolving. It just won’t work.

Whenever you get stuck telling your Story…go back to the foundation…the
quest for conscious external and subconscious internal objects of desire. Are you
making those quests in your lead character clear? If you aren’t, you must call up
your inner demolition crew, break up that old cracked foundation and throw it
away. And then go back to these two questions:

What does my character want?

What does my character need?

23
W hat comes first when you set out to tell a Story? The
kind of plot you want to tell or the lead character
you have in mind? This question is the equivalent of that old
debate about whether something is plot driven or character
PLOT DRIVEN driven. The distinction is meaningless, really, as a character’s
OR CHARACTER actions are what determine the plot and the plot is the sum
total of a character’s actions.
DRIVEN?
But what can be helpful when you are in the early stages of
crafting a global Story or editing the one you have is to think
about what excites your personal imagination. What kind
of “What if?” do you like best? Some of us think in terms
of external “What ifs?” while others of us think in terms of
internal “What ifs?” Figure out which kind of person you
are and this will help you immeasurably. Either way works.
And finding the most exciting “What if?” will also be the
key to creating your Story’s Inciting Incident…the event that
throws your protagonist’s life out of balance.

If you are an external “What if?” thinker, you are probably a

comic book fan, an action fan, a mystery fan, a horror fan or
a thriller fan. You fantasize “What ifs?” like “what if a tidal
wave hit New York in the middle of a U.N. assembly?”

If you are an internal “What if?” thinker, you are probably a

coming of age novel, love Story, redemption Story, education
Story or family saga kind of fan. You think of “What ifs?” like
“what if a woman’s husband leaves her on the same day she
finds out she has Stage Four ovarian cancer?” “What if a
mother didn’t love her son but refused to acknowledge it?”

The first “What if?” is the thinking of someone who wants

to write, for lack of a better expression, a plot driven Story.
The second example is someone who wants to write, again
for lack of a better expression, a character driven Story. One
loves big Arch-plot while the other favors minimalism.

83
84

The truth though is that it just doesn’t matter what kind of “What if?” you dream
THE STORY GRID

of exploring. The best “plot driven” Stories have compelling protagonists that
chase subconscious internal objects of desire while they are also trying to get
the President of the United States out of the U.N. before the tidal wave hits. And
“character driven” Stories also require compelling quests for conscious external
objects of desire, remission from cancer for example, while the lead character
struggles with deep subconscious internal objects of desire like the need to attain
some kind of meaningfulness before death.

STRUCTURE AND CONTENT are intimately related. No matter how you slice it,
the Arch-plot and Mini-plot STRUCTURE GENRES require a foundational quest,
which in turn requires an external conscious and internal subconscious object of
desire. The ways in which the writer reveals those external and internal objects of
desire is by making crucial choices.

These choices begin and end in the last Genre category, the CONTENT GENRES.

I’ve divided CONTENT GENRES into two distinct types.

1. EXTERNAL CONTENT GENRES define your protagonist(s) external objects

of desire.

What they want.

2. INTERNAL CONTENT GENRES define your protagonist(s) internal objects

of desire.

What they need.

24
T he External Content Genres are what we think of when
we hear the word Genre—action, horror, crime, western,
thriller, war, love etc. We know one from the other because
each has its particular characteristics and because each has
EXTERNAL very straightforward forces of conflict at play.
CONTENT The External Content Genres are driven primarily by
GENRES extra-personal and/or personal conflict. These forces of
antagonism are direct and easy to identify: the villains in
crime and action stories, the potential mates in love stories,
the monsters in horror stories, or the environment in action
man against nature stories.

External conflict is the sizzle that gets bottoms in movie

seats and books on bestseller lists.

As consumers, we have concrete expectations of these

Genres as we’ve all been exposed to thousands of them
since birth. Again, Genre conventions and obligatory scenes
satisfy those expectations. While a reader/viewer may not
be able to pinpoint what exactly it is they want from a Story,
they know it when it’s not there. Immediately.

Anyone who has ever been to a mind-numbingly bad play

can tell you that. The writer needs to know and understand
these Story requirements consciously and deliberately. If he
doesn’t know them, how can he possibly set them up and
pay them off?

The External Content Genres are driven by Arch-plot quests

to attain your lead character’s conscious object of desire.
The conscious object of desire is the tangible thing that the
protagonist wants and actively pursues from the Inciting
Incident of the Story forward. What’s extremely helpful
when considering whether to drive your entire Story by an
External Content Genre is the fact that these objects of desire
are conventions particular to each of the Genres.

85
86

That is, your protagonist’s conscious object of desire is predetermined based

THE STORY GRID

upon your choice of External Content Genre.

The pursuit of the subconscious object of desire, however, drives the Internal
Content Genres.

Perhaps you’re working on an action Story or want to write an action Story. The
conscious external object of desire in an action Story is a convention. The hero/
protagonist (another convention in an action Story is that the protagonist must be
a hero, someone who sacrifices himself to save others) wants to stop the Story’s
villain(s) and save the life of a victim or victims.

Perhaps you’ve written a love Story or want to write a love Story. The conscious
external object of desire in a love Story is a convention. The protagonist pursues
or runs away from an intimate bond with another human being—that’s her object
of desire, an intimate relationship.

Perhaps you’ve written a crime Story or want to write a crime Story. The conscious
external object of desire in a crime Story is a convention. The protagonist wants
to bring a criminal to justice.

Obviously the choice you make about your global External Content Genre is
critical. It will drive the literal narrative of your Story.

Remember that readers don’t have the capacity to read a man against time action
thriller and then tell their friends not to bother with it because it didn’t innovate
“the hero at the mercy of the villain” scene. Instead, readers tell their friends that
the book didn’t work. It was missing something. It seemed thin. Don’t buy it.

If you don’t study the conventions and obligatory scenes of your chosen content
Genre and don’t know how writers before you satisfied them, how can you be
sure that you’ve written anything remotely original? Just as to be a bodybuilder,
you need to be a weightlifter first, to be a writer, you need to be a reader first.

If you want to write a particular kind of novel, you must dive deep into the history
of the Genre itself…find the best books, read them, study them and understand
intellectually how each of the conventions and obligatory scenes of the Genre
were satisfied. The Story Grid is the perfect way to map out just how each writer
did so. And having multiple Story Grids for your chosen Genre at hand will be an
invaluable reference kit for your future work.

I’ll show you how to create your own Story Grids later on when I put together
The Story Grid for the thriller, The Silence of the Lambs. The thriller combines the
 87

conventions and obligatory scenes of three External Genres, action, horror and

EXTERNAL CONTENT GENRES

crime. So when I do analyze the conventions and obligatory scenes of the thriller,
you’ll also get a foundation in action, horror, and crime. I plan to offer analysis
for the other Genres as well, but I just haven’t written those works yet.

But with all of the above said, Genres are fluid.

They morph and combine and adapt to the tenor of time. That is, Genres shift
and change to reflect the anxieties of the particular historical period. I’ll make a
case later on that the thriller is the dominant Story form today because it serves
the largest segment of society, those overwhelmed by the threats of modern life.

I label the following External Content Genres because they concern primarily
external forces of antagonism—other people or societal or natural forces—on a
single protagonist. They primarily have closed endings, are causal, and happen
in linear time in a consistent reality. Arch-plots. I write “primarily” because there
are a number of works within these large Genres that move down the curve and
approach Mini-plot.

These Arch-plot/Mini-plot stories still have an External Content Genre, but they
have shifted the emphasis of the Global Storytelling to the subconscious object
of desire. In these, the global Story is driven by the Internal Content Genre. The
external one in these cases is usually used to grab the reader early on, only to
shift later to deal with deeper internal issues within the lead character.

That is part and parcel of Genre fluidity.

Every once and a while, a writer like Thomas Harris comes along and abides
by most of the conventions of a particular External Genre but tweaks them by
morphing them with another Genre. In Harris’ case, he melded the action Story
with the crime Story and added horror to create the modern serial killer thriller
with his second novel, Red Dragon.

Or, the writer places greater emphasis on an underlying Internal Genre beneath
the external, like a crime novel laced with an overriding redemption plot, like one
of my favorites, Bait by Kenneth Abel. Obviously, the more intimately you know
more than one particular Genre, the better your chances of creating something
fresh and unique by combining elements of both.

Here is an overview of the EXTERNAL CONTENT GENRES, along with a bit

more description of each. These descriptions are by no means exhaustive. Each
and every one of these could have an entire book devoted to its conventions and
nuances.
88

EXTERNAL CONTENT GENRES are stories driven by a global external value

THE STORY GRID

(justice/injustice, life/death, love/hate) and its positive and negative charge.

The Action Genre

The core value at stake in an action Story is life/death. The core emotion is
excitement and the most important event in the book is “the hero at the mercy
of the villain” scene. Action is the primal Genre, the stuff of Gilgamesh, Homer’s
canon and Beowulf.

For more on this Genre, I highly recommend Robert McKee and Bassim El-Wakil’s
upcoming book Action: The Art of Excitement from which the Subgenres below
are referenced. The key element to remember about action is that the villain is the
driving force. He/she/it is the source of all conflict and antagonism in the Story
and thus action can be broken down into the four Subgenres of extra-personal
conflict.

Not to confuse you too much, but these four extra-personal varieties of conflict
and their particular plot devices listed below can also be applied to the other
External Genres. That is, you could create a horror Story that uses the Labyrinth
Plot device, a crime Story that uses the Conspiracy Plot device, a thriller that uses
the Savior Plot device etc. The action Genre is primal and its plot devices can
easily be used to drive the other Genres.

1. Action Adventure/Man Against Nature Stories: These are stories that use
the natural world or a specific setting as the villain/force of conflict. They
can be further delineated by four kinds of plot devices:

• The Labyrinth Plot: The object of desire is to save victim(s) and get out
of a maze-like edifice. (Die Hard)

• The Monster Plot: The villain is an animal. (Jaws)

• The Environment Plot: The villain is the actual global setting. (Gravity)

• The Doomsday Plot: The victim is the environment. The hero must
save the environment from disaster. (Independence Day)

2. Action Epic/Man Against the State Stories: These are stories where the
hero must confront societal institutions or tyrants.

• Rebellion Plot: The hero is pitted against a visible tyrant like a Darth
Vader from Star Wars.
 89

• Conspiracy Plot: The hero is up against an invisible tyrant. (Enemy of

EXTERNAL CONTENT GENRES

the State, The Bourne Identity)

• Vigilante Plot: The hero is up against a criminal organization. (Above

the Law)

• Savior Plot: The hero is up against someone who wants to destroy

society. (The Dark Knight)

3. Action Duel/Man Against Man Stories:

• Revenge Plot: Hero chases the villain.

• Hunted Plot: Villain chases the hero.

• Machiavellian Plot: Hero sets two villains against each other. (A Fistful
of Dollars)

• Collision Plot: Villain sets two heroes against each other. (Troy)

4. Action Clock/Man Against Time

• Ransom Plot: A deadline imposed by the villain.

• Countdown Plot: A deadline superimposed by circumstance.

(Andromeda Strain)

• Holdout Plot: Hero has to holdout until others can rally. (The 300)

• Fate Plot: Time is the villain. (Back to the Future)

The Horror Genre

The core value in horror, like action, is also life/death, but here it is taken to the
very end of the line…the fate worse than death. When dying would be a mercy.
The core emotion is fear and the core event is “the victim at the mercy of the
monster” scene. The element to remember about horror, like action, is that the
forces of antagonism (the monsters) are key.

Generically, horror stories concern survival, those that go to the limits of human
experience. They are by definition unrealistic and live inside the Fantasy Reality
Genre leaf. An Inciting Incident featuring an attack by a monster of some kind
throws a single non-heroic protagonist out of stasis in such a way that he must
actively pursue a conscious object of desire, saving his own life.
90

One very important convention within the horror Genre is that the antagonist(s)
THE STORY GRID

are possessed by “evil.” The antagonists cannot be reasoned with. They have no
interest in anything other than annihilation. There are three Subgenres of horror
and they divide along the lines of explaining the monster. Again, I must pay a
debt to Robert McKee for these definitions. And remember that the action plot
devices can be used for each of these Subgenres.

1. Uncanny: These are stories where the force of evil is explainable—a man-
made monster, aliens, or a possessed maniac like Jason in the Friday the
13th movies. There is no way to convince these monsters to do anything
but slaughter.

2. Supernatural: The monster in these stories isn’t “real.” That is, the force
of antagonism is from the spirit realm and cannot be explained like a
man-made monster, alien beings from outer space, or an axe-wielding
freak. Rather they are of the zombies, vampires, Freddie Kruger variety.
The Amityville Horror is a good example, as the father from the family
becomes “possessed” by spirits in his home, which push him to slaughter
his family.

3. Ambiguous: In these stories, the reader/viewer is kept in the dark about

the source of evil. The sanity of the protagonist/victim comes into doubt.
The Shining is a great example, one of my all-time favorite novels. Just a
brilliant and beautifully written Story that mixes alcoholism, egotism, and
despair into one hellish stew.

The Crime Genre

The core value in crime is justice/injustice, and the core event is the exposure of
the criminal.

An unjust Inciting Incident (the compelling “What if?” event) throws a single
protagonist out of stasis in such that he must actively pursue a conscious object
of desire (a criminal) to restore justice. The type of protagonist and his point of
view are what create the many Subgenres in crime.

1. Murder Mystery: The murder mystery is the most obvious Subgenre of

crime. The Inciting Incident is the discovery of a dead body. For the most
part, the end of the Story is the revelation of the murderer. Conventions
of the Murder Mystery include false clues (red herrings), a crafty killer
who has constructed the perfect crime, lots of interviews, lots of secrets,
and an intrepid investigator, usually underestimated, who proves more
 91

capable than the villain. There are numerous Sub-subgenres of the murder

EXTERNAL CONTENT GENRES

mystery and they divide along the point of view of the protagonist, as well
as the category of investigator. Each Sub-subgenre has its own additional
conventions and obligatory scenes.

• Master Detective: Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Columbo… The

core event is also the climax of the Story where the master detective lays
out how the murder occurred and who perpetrated it. The murderer
usually tries to escape but is thwarted by the intrepid investigator to
resolution. Justice is restored by Story’s end.

• Cozy: Miss Marple, Jessica Fletcher, Diane Mott Davidson’s Goldy

Schulz etc. These stories are told from the point of view of the amateur
sleuth, who usually has some expertise that others lack that enables
them to figure out the mystery. Readers love cozies because they
learn quite a bit about an alien discipline while enjoying the standard
investigation. Mysteries with recipes are quite popular. And of course
there is that Sub-sub-subgenre that will never go away, the cat mystery
where a cat is instrumental in solving the crime.

• Historical: These either feature historical figures as amateur sleuths,

Eleanor Roosevelt, or they feature interesting professionals from earlier
times like the monk investigator in The Name of the Rose. And like
the cozy, the reader learns a whole lot about a particular time period
while getting the honey of a perfectly crafted mystery.

• Noir/Hard-Boiled: These are a very specific mash up from a very

specific time. The lead character is usually a good guy detective or
lawyer or someone with skills that can be used for evil deeds. He gets
seduced by a very specific character called a femme fatale, a woman
who uses all of her feminine wiles to get the man to do as she pleases.
She’s a sort of modern day succubus. The innocent man decides to
do the woman’s bidding, commits a crime of some sort (most often
murder) and then she sets him up to take the fall for it, escaping with
some kind of treasure that only the innocent man can help her attain.
The convention is that the Story is told from the schmuck’s point of
view, often in flashback. Double Indemnity by James M. Cain is a
textbook example. The movie Body Heat is a nice update to it.
92

• Paranormal: These mysteries combine elements of the supernatural

THE STORY GRID

with the classic murder mystery plot. Charlaine Harris’ Sookie

Stackhouse mysteries/horror novels that began with Dead until Dark
are a great example. HBO adapted the books into the series True
Blood.

• Police Procedural: These are the classic cop point of view books. Law
and Order kind of stuff, but just the first half of the show. There is a
long list of these. Ed McBain/Evan Hunter’s 87th Precinct series of
books epitomize the form. Another one of my personal favorites was a
book I worked on years ago called Eleven Days by Donald Harstad. It
was a terrific mash up of Police Procedural and Paranormal.

2. Organized Crime: is a crime (not necessarily murder) from the criminal

point of view. The reader roots for the criminal to get away with it. The
Godfather is an example of a crime novel combined with a political
society drama. There is an amateur variety too where the good guy goes
bad for good reason. Breaking Bad is the perfect example. The main thrust
of the narrative is Will he get caught?

3. Caper: This is an offshoot of the organized crime Subgenre that has been
done enough to earn its own distinction. This is a Story from the master
criminal’s point of view, movies like Rififi and Sexy Beast are two great
examples.

4. Courtroom: These are crime stories from the point of view of a lawyer.
One of my favorites is The Verdict, which meshes an internal redemption
Story with the external crime Genre.

5. Newsroom: These feature reporters as protagonists. Ron Howard’s movie

The Paper and the nonfiction All the President’s Men are prime examples.

6. Espionage: A spy is the lead character. These often walk the razor’s edge
between crime and thriller, depending on the presence of a hero at the
mercy of the villain scene. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy come to mind.

7. Prison: These are from the point of view of a prisoner. Will they solve the
riddle of how they were set up.
 93

The Western Genre

EXTERNAL CONTENT GENRES

The core values in the western concern the individual inside and outside of
society, good/evil, strong/weak, and wilderness/civilization. The core event is the
showdown between the hero and the villain. I recommend Will Wright’s book
Sixguns and Society if you really want the grand tour of this Genre, which had a
very long run of popularity in the twentieth century.

1. Classical: A stranger comes into a small town, reveals that he has a special
talent and is then tasked with saving the town from the influence of villains.
By the end, the hero is welcomed into the fold. Even though he does not
stay amongst the people at the end of the Story, Shane is the prototype.
From the classical come three Subgenres.

2. Vengeance: The stranger is intent on righting a wrong. He’s outside of

society at the beginning, inside society at the end. Marlon Brando’s One-
Eyed Jacks is a perfect example.

3. Transition: The hero is inside society at the start, outside of society by the
end. (High Noon)

4. Professional: The heroes are not out to save society. They’re just doing a
job, making a living outside of the law. (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid)

The Thriller Genre

What would happen if you mashed up the action, horror and crime Genres?
You’d get the modern thriller. Thrillers take the core values of action and horror
(life and death) and adapt them to a very realistic human extreme. The life/death
value escalates to what Robert McKee calls the Fate Worse than Death. Not just
the external Fate Worse than Death that is present in horror, but all the way
to include the internal Fate Worse than Death…Damnation. The core emotion
escalates from the intrigue inherent in crime stories to the excitement level of
action and then to horror’s fear and ultimately terror. The force of conflict, the
antagonist, is far worse than the single dimensional action villain, but just a shade
less than the inexplicable horror monster.

The thriller explores the horrors of real life, real monsters who prey in our everyday
world.
94

What distinguishes thrillers from action, crime and horror is that they require
THE STORY GRID

a supporting Internal Content Genre to drive the protagonist’s “B” Story. The
external threats and how the protagonist deals with them have a deep impact on
his/her inner conflicts. James Bond doesn’t think twice after he’s killed a bad guy.
The thriller protagonist, no matter his outward bravado, does. But more on that
when we go over The Story Grid for The Silence of the Lambs.

The thriller is very malleable. It can be used as a sort of honey to attract readers
and then be circumvented by its underlying Internal Content Genre to become a
much more symbolic treatise on contemporary life than one would expect on a
first read. As such, it is embraced by both the commercial and literary publishing
cultures. You’ll often find books positioned and sold as “literary thrillers,”
promising such a deep experience. I’m going to examine the thriller at greater
length later on when I go through The Story Grid column by column for The
Silence of the Lambs. For now, let’s examine the Genre broadly.

The thriller features a heroic protagonist (someone willing to sacrifice his own life
for others) facing personal conflict just a hair’s breadth short of the omnipotent
horror antagonist. These are realistic threats of the highest order, crime antagonists
at the peak of their strength. With outstanding action set pieces filled with derring-
do to thwart the plans of the villain, the thriller must make the antagonism
personal. That is, the protagonist of the Story must be revealed, usually by the
middle of the novel or the end of the second act, as the victim. The victim in
horror is the everyman protagonist. But in the thriller, he’s a hero.

A sociopath has singled out the hero for the most extreme of the life/death values,
the end of the line, what Robert McKee calls the Negation of the Negation,
the fate worse than death…damnation. While horror stories also take the lead
character to the fate worse than death, the thriller does so in a terrifyingly realistic
way. Plus, the lead character has a deep inner life, filled with all three levels of
individual conflict—inner, personal and extra-personal.

When done well, thrillers push all of our buttons. They entertain us in a way
that action/adventure, horror and crime stories do, but in addition, they add on
a deep layer of internal struggle that protagonists in literary Mini-plots contend
with as their greatest challenge.

As you can use one or more of the sixteen plot devices in horror that you do in
action, so can you use the same sixteen for the thriller. As most thrillers adhere to
realism Genre within the REALITY leaf of our Five-Leaf Genre Clover, the variety
of thriller is often determined by the setting. The setting is often referred to in
 95

Hollywood as the “world.” The point of view of the hero/victim protagonist is

EXTERNAL CONTENT GENRES

also a determining factor.

1. Serial Killer: Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, (police/FBI/PI as hero/victim)

2. Legal: Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow, (lawyer/judge as hero/victim)

3. Medical: Coma by Robin Cook, (doctor/nurse/researcher as hero/victim)

4. Military: Seven Days In May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey,

(soldier as hero/victim)

5. Political: Marathon Man by William Goldman, (everyman/politician/

gangster as hero/victim)

6. Journalism: The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly, (journalist as hero/victim)

7. Psychological: Primal Fear by William Diehl, (the core question “is he/she
crazy?” drives the Story)

8. Financial: Numbered Account by Christopher Reich, (setting is financial

world and how it works)

9. Espionage: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre, The
Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum, (spy as hero/victim)

10. Woman in Jeopardy: Sleeping with the Enemy by Nancy Price, (woman as
hero/victim)

11. Child in Jeopardy: The Client by John Grisham, (child as hero/victim)

12. Hitchcock: A Coffin For Dimitrios by Eric Ambler, (wrong man as hero/
victim)

The War Genre

The core value of the war Story is victory/defeat for straightforward pro or anti-
war propaganda Stories. These epics usually use Factualism as their REALITY
Genre. The Longest Day and The Battle of the Bulge are prime examples. Another
Subgenre of the war Story is what I call the brotherhood variation, which has a
core value of honor/disgrace and would include Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield
and Oliver Stone’s Platoon. The core emotion can be anything from excitement to
fear to intrigue. And of course the core event is the big battle.
96

Love stories are often subplots within war stories, Atonement by Ian McEwan is a
THE STORY GRID

wonderful example of the use of love to ground the war Story.

The Society Genre

These are stories that are most driven by big ideas. That is they are often used to
present a particular point of view/argument for political purposes. There are a
number of varieties that hinge on the core values inherent in their choice of setting
or character. They are often referred to as social dramas, but as we’ve defined
drama as a particular category of the Style leaf of Genre, I prefer to reference
these as just the society Genre. As society has many different strata, these stories
usually have multiple protagonists. The core values at stake are dependent upon
the Subgenre and the core events are also Subgenre specific.

1. Domestic: concerns the family dynamic and the core value is the health
of the individual versus the bond of the family. The core event is what I
call the “showdown” between the central force of control (father, mother,
etc.) and the rebellious member(s) of the family. Long Day’s Journey into
Night is the masterwork of the form. All members of the family are both
perpetrators of repression and victims of repression stuck in inescapable
torment. But they are in it together.

2. Woman’s: concerns the struggle of the independent woman versus an

overbearing patriarch. The value is feminism/patriarchy and/or similar
to the political, power/impotence. The core event is the rebellion and/or
submission of the protagonist. Anna Karenina is a prime example.

3. Political: is the struggle for power. Its core value is power/impotence and
the core event is the revolution where power is either lost or gained. The
Godfather, while squarely in the crime Genre, is also a political drama
too. We root for the gangster Michael Corleone to take down the five
families and regain the power lost with the death of his father Vito.

4. Biographical: The value at stake in the biographical Story is dependent

upon the figure as is the core event. Often biography takes on the dynamic
of the performance Genre and/or one of the other External Content Genres
to ground the narrative of a particular life Story.
 97

5. Historical: The value at stake in the historical is also dependent upon the

EXTERNAL CONTENT GENRES

time period chosen as is the core event. What’s important to remember is
that when choosing the historical period to explore, it should be applicable
to the present day dynamic. That is, the controlling idea of the Story should
be applicable to contemporary life. Using historical details enables the
writer to comment on a particular taboo or highly charged moment in
contemporary life through the prism of the past. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
has multiple protagonists as do the big epic novels of Edward Rutherfurd
and Ken Follett.

The Love Genre

There are three Subgenres of the love Story: Stories of Courtship, Stories of
Marriage, and Stories of Obsession. The core value of course is love/hate and the
core event is the proof of love of one character for another.

1. Courtship: These stories concern the process of two people meeting and
committing or not committing to each other. Beyond the core value of love/
hate, they often concern dependence/independence, communication/
misunderstanding, morality/immorality, social approval/disapproval, and
togetherness/loneliness.

2. Marriage: These are stories about committed relationships going deeper

into true intimacy or breaking apart. Beyond the global value of love/hate,
they deal with notions of loyalty/betrayal, truth/lie, fidelity/infidelity, and
self/other.

3. Obsession: These are stories about desire and passion, most often sexual.
The core value beyond love/hate can often take a turn to survival/death.
The core emotion can begin at romance/arousal and move to fear pretty
quickly.

There are numerous popular Sub-sub-subgenres of love stories, including erotic,

gothic, historical, paranormal, regency, romantic suspense, western and a very
popular form in crime, thriller and horror…Buddy Salvation. Love stories are
extremely effective as subplots in the other popular External Content Genres.
98

The Performance Genre

THE STORY GRID

These stories are very popular because they concern the core value dynamic of
respect versus shame. Will the big fight, performance, or presentation go well
or will it result in dishonor? The core event, of course, is the big game or big
performance.

1. Sports: The Natural by Bernard Malamud

2. Music: The Commitments by Roddy Doyle

3. Business: Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet

4. Art: The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone

1
25
W hy do I make a distinction between External and
Internal Content Genres?

The reason why is that today’s Storytellers, especially long

FOR
INTERNAL form television writers and series novelists, must have both
components of Genre content to make their work compelling
CONTENT and sustainable over six or seven years of series television or
GENRES ten to fifteen series novels. There are exceptions of course,
but if you wish to create a Story that has the potential to play
out over a long period of time, you need to think deeply
about having both external and internal components in your
work.

Years ago when I was at Doubleday Publishing, I worked

with crime novelist Robert Crais. At the time, he’d written
seven novels featuring a wise cracking and brilliant private
investigator in Los Angeles named Elvis Cole and his dark
compatriot Joe Pike. While the series was a commercial
powerhouse, Bob wanted to go deeper. He wanted to stretch
himself and I jumped at the opportunity to help him. I’ll not
get into the nitty-gritty of how Crais masterfully upped his
game in his bestselling breakout novel L.A. Requiem, but it
had everything to do with the internal wars within his two
lead characters. Crais layered in multiple strands of Internal
Genre to pitch perfect effect. So much so that today, most
readers of Crais go to him for the internal battles he explores
as much for his external plot machinations.

Remember that the External Genres concern outside forces

aligned against the protagonist...nature, another person or
society in general. These are represented by extra-personal
and personal conflicts. They keep the protagonist from
achieving his conscious desire…saving a victim, marrying
his beloved, throwing down on the basketball court etc.

The Internal Genres concern forces inside the individual

aligned against the protagonist’s pursuit of a subconscious
object of desire. The subconscious object of desire is the

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ultimate need within a protagonist whereas the conscious object of desire is

THE STORY GRID

the want, his immediate, on-the-surface identifiable goal. So in a thriller, a

protagonist’s external conscious object of desire will be to save a victim. But at
a deeper level, he may need to sacrifice himself for another person in order to
redeem himself from a past moral failing. Or he may need to finally learn the
truth of who he is and why he does the things he does.

In the redemption plot, the lead character is conscious of wanting to save the
victim. Beneath that consciousness, though, if the lead character were to sit
down with a friend or a therapist and be asked why it was so important for him
or her to save this victim beyond “doing their job,” he’d eventually come to
understand that his desire is a need to recover from a trauma/moral failing in his
past. That buried-beneath-the surface need is the hero’s internal object of desire.
The redemption plot is just one of a number of possible internal content plot
devices. More of those below.

So where did I come up with these classifications?

In 1955, Norman Friedman published the seminal Internal Genre differentiation

“Forms of the Plot” in the Journal of General Education.3 These Internal Genres
are varieties of the hero’s journey that reflect the quality of internal change at the
beginning versus the end of the protagonist’s mission.

Like choosing the global External Content Genre, choosing the Internal Content
Genre is crucial to your Story. A poor combination of external and internal will
result in an unsatisfying Story experience. A perfect combination will be a work
of art. I’ll take a hard look at one of the masterworks of the last fifty years, The
Silence of the Lambs, and show you a pitch perfect combination of external and
Internal Content Genres down the road.

From Friedman’s work, I’ve adapted three internal Subgenres:

1. Worldview: connotes a change of seeing the world one way and by Story’s
end, seeing it differently.

2. Morality: connotes a change in the moral or ethical character of the

protagonist.

3. Status: connotes a change in social position of the protagonist.

3 (Volume 8, pages 241-253)

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The choice of global Internal Genre is driven by your lead character’s subconscious

INTERNAL CONTENT GENRES

object of desire, your character’s unknown (to them at the beginning) inner quest.
Remember that the quest is most often a two front journey. There is the external
quest for a conscious object of desire like justice or survival or companionship
or a prize of some sort like the rave review or victory. Then there is the internal
quest, the one the lead character doesn’t know he is in need of until a critical
moment in the telling. The interplay of these two quests for objects of desire is
what provides narrative drive on the one hand (the external) and insight into the
human condition on the other (the internal).

Each of the three can be broken down further into recognizable Subgenres.

1. Worldview: A Change in Perception of Life Experience

• Education: a shift in view of life from meaninglessness to meaning

(Tender Mercies)

• Maturation: a shift from naiveté to worldliness (Saturday Night Fever)

• Revelation: ignorance to knowing (Oedipus Rex)

• Disillusionment: belief to disillusionment (The Great Gatsby)

2. Morality: A Change in a Character’s Inner Moral Compass

• Punitive: good guy goes bad and is punished (Wall Street)

• Redemption: bad guy reforms (Drugstore Cowboy)

• Testing: willpower versus temptation (Cool Hand Luke)

3. Status: A Change in Social Position

• Pathetic: weak protagonist tries to rise and fails (Little Miss Sunshine)

• Sentimental: weak succeeds against all odds (Rocky)

• Tragic: striver makes mistake that dooms him to failure (American

Tragedy)

• Admiration: principled person rises without compromise (Gladiator)

The Internal Content Genres are crucial to execute for novels or stories in the
“Literary” Style, often referred to as those of “character.” Literary novels most
often use the Mini-plot structure and, for the most part, Mini-plot requires that the
Internal Genre drive the global Story. That is, it is the change in the inner world of
the character that compels interest in the reader/viewer much more so than the
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External Genre’s global value at stake. We read Crime and Punishment not for the
THE STORY GRID

external crime but for the internal punishment.

These Mini-plot stories are the stuff of the “literary” culture.

So a novel like To Kill a Mockingbird, while it has a wonderful external crime

Genre within (the courtroom drama with Atticus Finch leading the defense of
Tom Robinson), is a maturation plot first and foremost…the preeminent coming
of age novel of the twentieth century.

Stories driven by the big set piece extra-personal antagonisms of horror and action,
however, are far less dependent on the Internal Content Genres to work. In fact if
you add too much internal hemming and hawing and “character development” in
the pure action Story or horror Story, you may completely alienate your audience.

The master Stephen King is that rare novelist who can do both. But it’s interesting
to note how he pulls off this trick in his novels like The Shining and Misery. He
does it by creating horror elements that can serve as symbols for inner turmoil. In
The Shining, alcoholism’s inner abuser takes form as supernatural spirits egging
on the protagonist to kill his family. And in Misery, King has recently revealed
that he created Annie Wilkes as a stand-in of sorts for his personal struggles
with cocaine. Cocaine was his #1 fan…pushing and egging him on to furiously
complete his pages.

Stephen King knows better than anyone how unchecked internal wars can morph
into external horrors.
1
26
S creenwriters often speak of these choices as Storyline A
and Storyline B.

This is just another way of looking at their External and

FOR “A” STORY
THE Internal Genre choices. If the Storyteller is telling a
conventional murder mystery, the “A” Story would be the
AND THE “B” actual investigation…finding the killer and bringing him
STORY to justice. The External Genre, the crime Story, dictates
the global object of desire. And the quest for justice that
the lead character undertakes drives the global telling. The
protagonist wants justice. He’ll get it or he won’t.

The “B” Story in a crime Story is usually determined by the

choice of Internal Genre that the Storyteller makes. The
“B” Story drives the theme or controlling idea. It’s what the
whole thing is really about. Under the surface of the external
crime Genre, there is often another subconscious quest that
the lead character/investigator/criminal undergoes. Keep in
mind that this second quest is a deliberate choice by the
writer. There are plenty of fun crime novels or films that
do not have deep Internal Genres. Agatha Christie’s master
detectives aren’t going on any internal quest in her stories.
They are simply there to solve the crime.

In Robert Towne’s screenplay Chinatown, though, the lead

character does have an internal quest, a “B” Story. Jake
Gittes is out to “find the girl,” but underneath it all, he is out
to prove to himself that he is capable of righting the wrongs
of his past. He is out to beat the myriad of forces in the
world that are out to keep him from living a righteous life
protecting the people he loves.

Gittes wins the “find the girl” external object of desire, but
he does not win the internal “redemption” Story. The bad
guys win that one in the end. In fact, they’ve used Gittes
to do their dirty work without his knowing and there’s not

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a thing he can do about it in the end. Not only have they killed the woman he
THE STORY GRID

loves, they will take the innocence of a child.

Because Chinatown is a crime Story, the investigation drives the Story on the
surface. Only with multiple viewings of the film do you discover that Gittes is
haunted by a case in his past…back when he was on the LAPD and covered the
eponymous Chinatown. He’s asked at some point in the film about why he left
the force and his reply is that he tried to protect someone and he failed. Back
when he was a cop in Chinatown, his job was to do “as little as possible” but
he refused. His meddling caused someone he cared about a great deal of pain
if not her life. Towne wisely leaves the circumstances of that past trauma to the
imagination of the viewer.

Jake Gittes doesn’t know why he’s decided to put his life on the line to help
Evelyn Mulwray and her sister escape the clutches of Noah Cross, but he does
it anyway. What’s remarkable is that we, as the viewers of the movie, never
question why he makes that choice. Because Robert Towne did such a masterful
job revealing Gittes’ deep character while he toils away toward his conscious
object of desire—his wanting to find the girl—the audience is able to intuit his
need. It’s a need we all have.

Subconsciously, Gittes wants to redeem himself. To prove that his choice to help
people is not in vain, that his deeds result in “truth” coming into the world. He
exposes infidelities for a fee, what he calls “an honest living.” This is why he gets
so deeply invested in the Evelyn Mulwray case. He wants to prove to himself
that he has the power to bring truth to the world and punish those who trade in
deception, to redeem himself from his past failure in Chinatown.

Gittes may not know why he put his life on the line, but we do. Gittes needs to
uncover the truth so that he can bring justice to the world. Like the Cerberus
hellhounds who guard the Underworld, the authentic Jake Gittes (the self-
actualized Jake Gittes) is a sentry for justice. He does what we know our better
selves would do in the same circumstances. He fights for what’s right. Even when
Gittes fails, we never question his decision to try. He didn’t get what he wanted
(to save the world), but he got what he needed (a better understanding of the
world).

That “B” Story is so deeply embedded inside of the “A” Story that it is almost
invisible, as subconscious to the viewer as it is to Gittes. A first viewing of the
movie leaves the viewer with a sense of deep sorrow for Gittes and the corrupt
world he lives in. That feeling of empathy is the result of Towne not hitting the
viewer over the head with the “B” Story. Instead he expertly drops hints in
dialogue and description that make the catharsis palpable at the end. He never
 105

comments on the internal quest. But after multiple viewings, you can see and

THE “A” STORY AND THE “B” STORY

hear exactly where the screenwriter, Robert Towne, placed the critical mechanics
of the “B” Story.

The perfect modulation of the “A” and “B” Stories reveals the ultimate theme/
controlling idea of the global Story. Chinatown’s controlling idea is very much in
keeping with the director of the movie, Roman Polanski’s view of the world. Evil
reigns, to fight it is folly.
PART THREE

THE FOOLSCAP
GLOBAL
STORY GRID
27
It took my friend and business partner Steven Pressfield
thirty years before he published his first novel. If he had
to boil down the thick slurry of reasons why it took so long,
he’d tell you that it took that long to figure out how to write
THE FOOLSCAP a single foolscap page.
METHOD Years ago Steve was a struggling writer in New York, with
a slew of unfinished manuscripts in his closet. He had no
clue about why, but he knew deep in his heart that all of his
efforts just didn’t have “it” to convince a publishing house
to give him a shot. He just knew there was something wrong
with his novels but didn’t know what.

One morning Steve was, yet again, whining to his friend

Norm Stahl about this dark feeling when Stahl had finally had
enough. He told Steve to meet him for lunch at Joe Allen’s
on West 46th Street in the Theater District of Manhattan that
very day. His treat. [Joe Allen’s is famous for its “Flop Wall,”
featuring posters of failed Broadway plays.]

So after Steve ordered his cheeseburger and fries and got his
tall glass of ice tea, Stahl laid it on him. He reached into his
briefcase and pulled out a legal sized yellow pad, known in
the paper trade as foolscap.

“Steve, the good Lord wisely made one sheet of foolscap

paper just long enough to outline an entire novel. The reason
why your work is letting you down is that you may have a
clear destination in mind when you start, but you have no
map. How will you know if you made the best choices for
getting to ‘THE END’ if you don’t have a game plan before
you set out? THIS IS YOUR MAP!” he pointed to the yellow
lined paper.

Steve’s friend wasn’t just some civilian with no experience

creating narrative Story. Norm Stahl is a highly respected
and incredibly nimble and productive filmmaker with over
three hundred feature-length documentaries to his credit.

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And if you have no sense of Story when making a documentary, you are in deep
THE STORY GRID

trouble. Over the years, Stahl had learned not to be so precious with his material,
but to be brutal and decisive about what he wanted to say and how he wanted
to say it.

Stahl then pulled out a thick-felted Sharpie and drew two lines across the page,
cutting the one sheet into thirds.

“The top third of the page is your first act, Steve. The second third is your second
act and the third is your third act... You can only use the space allotted.”

Steve sat transfixed.

“In the simplest way possible, write down your ‘What if?’ Inciting incident at the
top of act 1. Say it’s a murder mystery. Your Inciting Incident will be the discovery
of a body. If it’s a romance, it’s the lovers meet scene. If it’s a horror novel, it’s
the scene where the monster attacks. Now at the very bottom of the page, write
down the climax of the entire novel. If it’s a murder mystery, it could be the core
event identifying the murderer…bringing him to justice or him getting away. If it’s
a romance, it could be the lovers reunite after falling out in the second act scene.
If it’s a horror novel, it could be the vulnerable victim overcoming the monster.
Whatever. After you have the global Inciting Incident and the global climax of
your Story, then all you have to do is fill in the rest!”

Steve was speechless.

The concept was so easy to get and understand that he had a hard time believing
it was that simple. Like anyone else would, Steve resisted the notion.

“That’s nice, Norm, but I’m trying to write something with real gravitas. My stuff
can’t be broken down like that.”

Stahl smiled and said, “Oh yeah? Is your stuff better than Moby Dick? How
about The Great Gatsby?” Steve shook his head. “Well both of those break down
perfectly using the Foolscap Method. Try it!”

Eventually, in one of those all is lost moments we all reach when we’re forced to
change, Steve did try it. He decided to map out a novel that had been scratching
inside his head for years. He just had no idea how to execute it. He only had a
notion.

Steve put Norm Stahl’s Foolscap Method to the test when he wrote his first
published novel, which not only put his work into bookstores, but also onto big
screens. The Legend of Bagger Vance adaptation was directed by Robert Redford
and starred Matt Damon, Will Smith and Charlize Theron. Steve writes about the
 111

entire experience in The Authentic Swing, which lays out just how he practically

THE FOOLSCAP METHOD

applied Norm Stahl’s advice. (Full disclosure: Steve and I published The Authentic
Swing together under the same publishing house that this book is being released,
Black Irish Books.)

Norm Stahl’s Foolscap Method is remarkably similar to what took me a good

twenty years to figure out myself as a struggling book editor. I have a similar, but
a bit more obsessive method that involves an extra black line that divides the
foolscap into four sections instead of three. It evolved as an editor’s diagnostic
tool rather than a “create from whole cloth” Story creator’s point of view. But it’s
absolutely a similar concept.

In honor of my friend Steven Pressfield and his mentor Norm Stahl, I call it
The Foolscap Global Story Grid.
28
A n editor handed a pile of manuscript pages must answer
a whole bunch of questions before he can even begin
to diagnose the effectiveness of the Storytelling. While he’ll
know after one read whether the book “works,” in order
AN EDITOR’S to take the book to the next level, he’ll have to figure out
SIX CORE exactly how it is working. He has to put the whole book
onto one page.
QUESTIONS
To refresh your memory, here are the six questions he must
answer:

1. What’s the Genre?

2. What are the conventions and obligatory scenes for

that Genre?

3. What’s the Point of View?

4. What are the objects of desire?

5. What’s the controlling idea/theme?

6. What is the Beginning Hook, the Middle Build, and

Ending Payoff?

The Foolscap Global Story Grid is that one page document.

Once he’s read the book [just one time] if the book is well
conceived he should be able to fill in the blanks of The
Foolscap Global Story Grid without having any serious head
scratches.

When you boil down an entire Story to one page, there is

no place for a writer or an editor to bullshit himself. It’s an
indispensable tool to check your work.

But don’t forget that it is a diagnostic tool and not a recipe.

You could have a brilliantly laid out Foolscap Global Story
Grid before you begin writing and the Story itself could
fizzle completely. Or you may have what seems to be a
 113

rather generic Foolscap Global Story Grid that results in a timeless work of art.

AN EDITOR’S SIX CORE QUESTIONS

Execution is everything.

If you cannot execute the plan, The Foolscap Global Story Grid will not result in
a great Story. You could have the best architectural plans, but if you are a lousy
carpenter or plumber or electrician, the house is going to have flaws. But those
kinds of flaws are fixable through perseverance and hard work and dedication
to craft. But an ill-conceived Foolscap Global Story Grid is fatal. The Story won’t
work.

But again, The Foolscap Global Story Grid is not an end to itself. It’s not even
something to show anyone else unless he is your editor or a fellow scribe in need
of a helping hand. To go back to our metaphor, it’s an architectural layout for a
building, not a building.

Don’t torture yourself over it unless you really have to.

What The Foolscap Global Story Grid can do for you if your Story isn’t working
is immeasurably helpful. It will show you where you went wrong. Where you
jumped off track, got lazy, fell in love with a scene instead of making sure the
scene served your Story, etc. It will show you where your problems are, where
there’s a leak in your plumbing, a short in your wiring etc. and thus it will take
away quite a bit of that inner self-loathing and destructive behavior we all face
when we have a very, very rough first draft. You as the writer are not the problem,
the problem is the problem. The Foolscap Global Story Grid will tell you where
your problems are.

It will take away a lot of emotional sturm and drang and keep you working. You’ll
use it to make discernible progress. It will keep you from desperately seeking
“notes” from friends or acquaintances who know nothing about Story structure. It
will make you a much better Storyteller and as you use it more and more, you’ll
become a far better writer.

Eventually you’ll do the work of The Foolscap Global Story Grid intuitively. But
you’ll always be able to fill it in at the first sign of trouble.

Now, let’s move down The Foolscap Global Story Grid from top to bottom and
explain exactly what we need to fill in.
114 THE STORY GRID
 115

The first line we need to fill out is the External Genre, which is one of the nine

AN EDITOR’S SIX CORE QUESTIONS

External Content Genres I detailed earlier along with its Sub and/or Sub-subgenre
classification. So for The Silence of the Lambs, the External Content Genre would
be THRILLER, along with its Subgenre classification SERIAL KILLER.

External Genre: Serial Killer Thriller

The External Value at Stake in a thriller is a convention. It is Life. To remind myself

of the progression of the value, I’ll move it from its positive value to its most
negative. Again, I’ll go into more depth regarding the external value in part 7.

External Value at Stake: Life to Unconsciousness to Death to Fate Worse than

Death (Damnation)

One of the Internal Genres that I discussed earlier is also a very major component
of The Silence of the Lambs. I’ll do a much more in-depth analysis of why I’ve
designated it the way that I have later on when I walk you through the entire Story
Grid for The Silence of the Lambs.

Internal Genre: Worldview Disillusionment

The Internal Value at Stake in a Worldview Internal Story is what you’d expect—
the way in which the protagonist views the world. It will arc from negative to
positive or positive to negative depending upon your Subgenre. In the case of
The Silence of the Lambs, it arcs from what I see as a “false positive view” to a
proven negative and it does so through the prism of Clarice Starling’s professional
ambition.

Internal Value at Stake: Blind Belief to Justified Belief to Doubt to Disillusionment

I’ll lay out the obligatory scenes and conventions of the thriller and we can fill in
the next line on our Foolscap Global Story Grid, but before we do that it’s worth
the time to look at where the thriller Genre came from.
29
A l Zuckerman, a very experienced and successful
literary agent who founded and runs the esteemed
literary agency Writers House, wrote a book some years ago
(1994) that is still vital, Writing the Blockbuster Novel. In it,
THE UNIVERSAL Zuckerman recommends that if a potential novelist wants
APPEAL OF THE to succeed commercially, he should write a novel with
multiple points of view. This is sage advice from someone
THRILLER who represents the extremely successful writer Ken Follett.
In his book, Zuckerman actually walks the reader through
Follett’s multiple outlines for The Man from St. Petersburg.
I highly recommend reading it, as you’ll get a very clear
understanding of one writer’s analytical process before he
even contemplates writing his first draft.

Follett is a big believer in outlining. I worked for one of his

editors years ago at Delacorte Press, the wonderful Jackie
Farber, and had the pleasure of reading a number of his
outlines before he wrote word one. While innovations
in his Story came to him during the drafting that he
hadn’t anticipated before he dove in, his outline was
comprehensive. That is, he tackled the very difficult work
of creating a Beginning, Middle and End to his book before
he began writing. He didn’t depend upon the guiding light
of the Muse alone to steer him to shore, he mapped out his
journey before he set sail. And wouldn’t you know it, while
he worked fresh ideas that took his outline from a “B” Story
to an “A” Story emerged.

He made sure he knew where he was going before he set

out on the journey. Through his example (and many other
extremely gifted and hardworking writers including the
master Elmore Leonard), I began my quest to conceive and
develop The Story Grid. Twenty plus years later...here it
finally is!

Follett’s kind of sweeping novel that is as much about a

historical time and place as it is about its characters requires
 117

a very unique set of skills. Al Zuckerman is certainly right that when a novel of

THE UNIVERSAL APPEAL OF THE THRILLER

great scope hits the marketplace and touches a nerve, it can become a blockbuster
success.

However, it is my contention that while the broad, often multi-Genre historical

saga (Dr. Zhivago, Pillars of the Earth, the entire James Michener backlist etc.) can
result in very compelling Story, it does not have the commercial potential today
that it did only a few decades ago. That is, beyond Ken Follett, there are few
writers making hay with this approach today. Just take a look at today’s bestseller
lists and you’ll see that this kind of work is not as represented as it once was.

As time passes, things change. Like everything else, Story changes too. What was
once a dominant Genre just a few decades ago often recedes in popularity. Why
aren’t there novels like Rich Man, Poor Man or The Carpetbaggers or even Less
than Zero on bestseller lists anymore? Audiences grew weary of them and moved
elsewhere.

But then again if I were to give advice to a young writer looking for an angle…
I’d suggest writing a saga. When there is a hole in the marketplace, it doesn’t
necessarily mean that there is no market for that kind of book. It usually indicates
an opportunity. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch being a major bestseller and critical
sensation stands as direct proof. In fact, I can anticipate that within the next few
years, we’ll have more of these epic realistic sagas with deep Story reaching
larger and larger audiences. The good old-fashioned epic social drama is on the
ascent.

What determine the degree of popularity of any one particular Genre are the
vagaries of the time period in which it has been written. What were once the
popcorn Stories of a time, decades later prove to be dusty and unpopular. Westerns
were once the bread and butter of book publishing. Paperback houses survived
on churning out westerns, sometimes five of them a month. Now the western is
all but forgotten. Other than a few classics from the arena, Lonesome Dove and
the Louis L’Amour oeuvre perhaps, or post-modern takes that splice the western
into other Genres, you can’t give away westerns today. There was once a Genre
called the Pennydreadful that was hugely popular in the Victorian era. Not so
anymore. Although there is a television series just out working hard to revive it.

So what is the Story Genre of our time?

THE THRILLER.

The thriller is the Story form of our time because it concerns the individual coping
with omnipresent and often difficult to even comprehend antagonism. Thrillers
boil down our modern experience to a psychological core that every literate
118

person and even illiterate person on the planet can understand, sympathize and
THE STORY GRID

empathize.

Contemporary civilization is a dizzying mix of sensory input designed to elicit

individual compliance and subconscious behavioral action. We are inundated
with psychically damaging messages—we’re too fat, we’re ugly, we’re low class,
we’re not cool, we’re lazy, we’re never going to make it. On top of those assaults
are prescriptive solutions to overcoming our inadequacies—go on a diet, join
a health club, go to college, wear hip-hop clothes, take this seminar. They are
targeted to us every single day, hour, minute, and even second of our lives.

And these are no longer static images from the Mad Men era. They are loaded
in full High Definition motion on billboards, in cabs, on buses, on the Internet
and every single cable channel. While the commercial messaging is impossible
to ignore or avoid, it is modern life’s “control” messaging that really knocks us on
our asses. I’ll not get into the work of Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays
here, but he’s the ghost in all of these machines.

The granddaddy of all messages we receive is this: WE’RE NOT SAFE.

We are told that there are boogeymen at every corner. Al Qaeda, and now ISIS
and a slew of other terrorist organizations that we know little of, want to destroy
us. Pedophiles are stalking our children. Our government is failing us. The world
is getting so hot, it will soon melt down. Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis,
are imminent. Storm watches, breaking news, lone gunmen, sociopaths,
psychopaths, liars, cheaters, swindlers, gangs, feral youth, pirates, unstable
veterans, racists, sexists, drones, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Police, MI5, MI6,
the Stasi, KGB, DEA, IRS, drunk drivers, texting drivers, homeless people… The
fear factory is churning out product like no other time in history.

To make matters worse? We all live alone. We belong to no protective tribe. The
nuclear family is a couple or just one parent with a kid or two or three. Perhaps
all from different partners. Single parents pulled in a million directions. It’s just
mano a mano.

This is why the thriller is the form that holds the blockbuster baton these days.
[Let’s not forget that Ken Follett has written one of the best thrillers of all time, Eye
of the Needle as well as his epic sagas.]

I also think we are attracted to the thriller because of the chaotic and yet intricately
connected character of our age. Modern man is assaulted with data from the
moment he wakes to the moment he falls asleep. While we are all connected now
by the World Wide Web, we don’t see any real grand humanitarian design coming
to bear as a result. There are millions of people starving, being slaughtered, used
 119

as slaves, and our economies are in complete flux. Everything that modern man

THE UNIVERSAL APPEAL OF THE THRILLER

once held dear and believed (technology will solve all of our problems) is now
in doubt. There just doesn’t seem to be any way to navigate the world without
feeling in one way or another victimized by forces beyond our control.

In order to find our way in this chaos, we seek stories that give us hope and faith
that we can persevere.

While over the top action fantasy stories are certainly still viable and commercially
irresistible (hence the Batman, Superman, Avenger, comic book movie franchises),
long form stories in novel form that do not sugarcoat reality or simplify success
help satisfy our need for order. As we often feel like we have no impact on the
world whatsoever and are treated by the powerful as consumption machines
to be programmed by the latest algorithms, we deeply identify with thriller
protagonists.

The thriller is all about one individual negotiating a complex world, living it to the
limits of human existence, and usually triumphing over seemingly overwhelming
forces of antagonism. Isn’t this a description of what we often feel we are up
against every day of our lives? We love thrillers because they reassure us that
there is an order to the world and one person can make a difference, have an
impact. When we leave a great movie thriller or finish a great thriller novel, we
have a catharsis. The experience purges our gloom and gives us reinforcement to
stay the course.

If Clarice Starling can survive having Hannibal Lecter in her head, all the while
chasing a schizophrenic serial killer flaying women to make himself a woman
suit, we can certainly make it through another day at work.
30
S o just how do you take your Story to the end of the line…
to the limits of human experience?

The Storyteller needs a tool to not only understand this

THE POWER concept, but to evaluate whether or not they have successfully
OF NEGATIVE done so. And if you’re writing a big Story, you have to go to
the end of the line.
THINKING
The trick to figuring out how to do that is discovering what
Robert McKee calls the negation of the negation of your
global Story value. Once you understand the negation of the
negation of a global Story value, you will discover whether
your draft or your murky foolscap sketch for a Story has
legs. And in the process, if you do this work early and often,
you’ll be able to clearly understand the obligatory scenes
and promises that you are making to the reader by your
choice of Genre and/or mix of Genres.

Let’s take a step back and look at Story values.

What the hell am I talking about when I use the phrase

“Story value”?

A Story value has nothing to do with “family values”

or financial currency. A Story value is simply a human
experience (a judgment of reality) that can change from
positive to negative or negative to positive. It’s best to just list
a whole slew of them so that you’ll get the gist. Alive/dead,
truth/lie, love/hate, justice/injustice, hope/despair, good/
evil, right/wrong, happy/sad, naïve/experienced, young/
old, smart/dumb, rich/poor, freedom/slavery, honor/shame,
chosen/ignored, etc.

Where one goes off track is in forgetting that these Story

values aren’t just black and white polarities.
 121

There are progressive degrees of positivity or negativity for each.

THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING

For example, the opposite of love may be hate, but there is something in between
love and hate that is worse than love but less than hate. That in between is called
indifference. And there is also something worse than hate. That something is
what Robert McKee coined as the “negation of the negation.” And for the love/
hate spectrum, the negation of the negation is “hate masquerading as love” or
“self-hatred.”

Let’s look at a very popular External Content Genre, crime fiction, and examine
the core value at stake in four different ways.

The Story value at stake for crime fiction is JUSTICE.

A crime has been committed.

Will the crime be solved?

Will the perpetrator be brought to justice? That’s basically it.

By choosing the crime Genre, the first promise you are making to a reader is an
answer to these two fundamental questions.

But we’d all agree that there are varying degrees of crime, right?

Stealing a piece of candy from a drugstore is far less of a crime than the wholesale
slaughter of an entire village. There is a wide spectrum of mendacity. Because
there is such a wide band, the writer has a choice of how far to take his Story.
As every Story must progressively complicate, a crime Story needs to begin one
place, get more and more difficult to solve, and then end in a surprising but
inevitable final solution or conundrum. Just how far you take the crime (how
globally threatening it is) requires you to figure out exactly where the line ends in
terms of the JUSTICE value.

To do that, we need to look at the negative progression (or degradation) of the

value at stake.

So let’s begin with the POSITIVE end of the spectrum, which is JUSTICE, and
place that at the very left of our degradation line. And we know that the opposite
of JUSTICE is INJUSTICE, so let’s put that down the line on the right hand side,
further away from the epitome of positive.
122

JUSTICE INJUSTICE
THE STORY GRID

But we also all know there’s more to the negative world than injustice. There’s
crime with extenuating circumstances…like the thief who steals a loaf of bread to
feed his starving children. Did the man steal the bread and did the owner of the
store lose a valuable asset? Yes.

But is this an offense that threatens society?

No.

So somewhere between JUSTICE and INJUSTICE lies a nether region of unfairness.

It’s unfair to the owner of the store not to be compensated for his bread. But the
fact that the bread was used to feed starving children—a good outcome from
a bad act—lessens the act’s venality. So between justice and injustice, let’s put
UNFAIRNESS, which is something in between black and white.

JUSTICE UNFAIRNESS INJUSTICE

Now the question arises, is there something worse than an Injustice?

The bad mojo that off the charts sociopathic narcissists bring into the world is
something more than just unjust, isn’t it? The serial killer or warlord or fascist
genocidal perpetrator is emblematic of a world that is always unjust. In this kind
of world, there is no justice. By definition, it is run with complete unpredictability.
The rules are changed whenever it suits the whims or desires of a central body
or figure.

That kind of more negative than the opposite JUSTICE is the world of Tyranny.

So on a straight line spectrum from positive to negative, let’s put Tyranny even
further to the right of injustice.

JUSTICE UNFAIRNESS INJUSTICE TYRANNY

To recap, while there is a direct opposite of Justice (Injustice), the value has
far more nuance than purely positive or purely negative. There is the degree of
negativity less than the direct opposite, Unfairness, and the degree of negativity
far more abhorrent than the direct opposite, Tyranny.

It is the darkest of the dark that McKee has termed the Negation of the Negation.

Here’s the way I would chart the spectrum of positive to negative

 123

JUSTICE (+) UNFAIRNESS (+/-) INJUSTICE (-) TYRANNY (- -)

THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING

If we were asked to assign a power of ten number for each of these (the number
one being the most positive and number ten being the most negative), it would
look like this:

JUSTICE (1) UNFAIRNESS (3) INJUSTICE (7) TYRANNY (11)

If you’ve ever seen the movie Spinal Tap, I think you know where we should try
and reach by the end of our crime Story.

Using the power of ten system by assigning a numeric value to the degree of
negativity can help you track the progression of your Story.

The beginning section of your Story should progress from say a 1 to a 4, the
middle from 4 to an 8 and the end from an 8 to an 11. The resolution of the Story
would then bring the Story full circle, back to 1, or end on a more somber note,
ending on 8 or even 11.

If your crime Story is a straight action James Bond kind of thing like Thunderball
or Live and Let Die, your resolution will circle back to Justice, 1…all’s well again
in the world. James Bond has fixed it. Major positive ending.

But if your Story is Apocalypse Now or Chinatown, you’re going to end on an 11

on the negativity scale. The world is a mess and we’ve gone completely to the
dark side. It’s every man for himself.

What about those stories that have a positive ending for the global Story but have
an ironic twist?

Is there a way for a crime Story to somehow return the global Story value back
to Justice (or life back to life in the case of the thriller, action Story or horror
Story) but do it ironically? That is, bring a criminal to technical justice but lose
something in the process?

If your Story is Dirty Harry, you can accomplish this irony through your choice
of theme/controlling idea.

Dirty Harry ends on a positive/negative combo plate of irony. Our cop gets the
guy and justice is served, but he breaks the law doing it and leaves his job in
disgust (remember he throws away his badge at the very end). The world no
longer has a vicious killer in it, but the kind of man who can take him out has
124

been lost too. The only way to stop the killers is to empower fascists/”good”
THE STORY GRID

killers is one interpretation of the theme/controlling idea of Dirty Harry.

Another way to add irony to Story is to add an Internal Genre along with its
inherent value progression underneath the global External Genre. That is, the
protagonist undergoes an internal quest as well as an external quest in the Story.
The External Genre ends on the positive, while the Internal Genre ends on the
negative, thus producing irony.

An example of that scenario would be the movie The Social Network… The lead
character wins the business performance External Genre (Facebook is a huge hit)
but fails his internal morality test plot (he succumbs to the temptations of wealth
and power at the expense of real connection to fellow human beings).

Bottom line, should you wish to reach the pinnacle of your chosen Genre(s) (don’t
we all?) you must think deeply and clearly about the negation of the negation and
how best to express its arrival in your Story.
1
31
W e’ve been working our way down The Foolscap
Global Story Grid.

Let’s look at the spaces we’ll need to fill in for the conventions
FOR OBLIGATORY
THE and obligatory scenes of your chosen Genres. As our big
payoff down the road will be a complete creation and
SCENES AND analysis of The Story Grid for The Silence of the Lambs,
CONVENTIONS OF here is the breakdown of conventions and obligatory scenes
THE THRILLER for the External Content Genre, the thriller.

The thriller is its own Genre, but it came to be through a

mashing up of three primal Genres that came before it:
action, horror and crime.

Many place the thriller inside the action or crime Genres

because a large number of the obligatory scenes and
conventions of the thriller share elements with both action
and crime stories. Few (Robert McKee being the very large
exception) would associate thriller with horror, but the
horror element is what puts the cherry on top of the thriller’s
three-Genre mash up sundae.

Here are the other necessities (beyond a supporting value

of Justice at stake) in a thriller that derive from action and
crime and stories.

1. The first convention of a thriller is that there must be a

crime. And with a crime, you must have perpetrator(s)
and victim(s), either corpse(s), the assaulted or
hostage(s).

2. The crime must occur early on in the telling.

3. The crime must reveal a clue about the villain’s

MacGuffin.

A MacGuffin is the object of desire for the villain. If

the villain gets the MacGuffin, he will “win.” Some
familiar MacGuffins are a) the codes to the nuclear

125
126

warhead, b) one thousand kilos of heroin, c) microfilm, d) and in the case

THE STORY GRID

of The Silence of the Lambs, the final pieces of skin to make a woman-
suit. The MacGuffin must make sense to the reader. It doesn’t necessarily
have to be realistic, just believable. I think Alfred Hitchcock coined the
term when asked about the device in North by Northwest. MacGuffins are
essentially the antagonist’s literal objects of desire.

4. There must be a brilliant and/or incredibly powerful master criminal and

an equally brilliant and/or powerful investigator/detective/sleuth. But the
balance of power between the two is heavily in favor of the villain.

5. The villain must “make it personal” with regard to the protagonist. The
criminal may from the very beginning want to kill/humiliate/destroy/damn
the investigator; or he may come to this attitude during the telling. But the
crime must escalate and become personal. The protagonist must become
a victim.

6. There must be clues and red herrings in the Storytelling. The protagonist
investigates and follows leads in order to find and/or trap the criminal.
Some of these leads are dead ends and misdirect the protagonist and the
reader.

7. The value at stake in a crime Story can progress from justice to unfairness to
injustice to tyranny. Most crime stories end at Injustice...will the detective
get his man? He usually does. But in a thriller, the value is often driven to
the limit. If the detective/investigator/protagonist does not bring the villain
to justice, tyranny will be the result. The protagonist’s failure to get the
criminal takes on a universal quality. If our best investigators can’t stop the
worst villains, the villains have won. There is no justice. We live in tyranny.

So what does the thriller get from the horror Genre?

1. In the horror Genre, like the action Genre, the value at stake is life. But the
value is taken to the end of the line…the fate worse than death, damnation.
So while the thriller gets procedural elements from the crime Story, its
global value comes from horror.

2. The villain in horror is far more powerful/intelligent/ supernatural than the

protagonist. The balance of power is huge, so large that it’s unrealistic. In
the thriller, the balance of power is not as large as horror but far more than
in a crime Story. And the thriller is realistic...that is believable, possible to
occur in real life. The villain in a thriller is a human monster.
 127

3. In the horror Genre, there is a speech in praise of the villain and/or

THE OBLIGATORY SCENES AND CONVENTIONS OF THE THRILLER

awesomeness of the supernatural power. So too in the thriller. There is a
speech in praise of the villain that clearly states how awesome the forces
of antagonism are.

4. Also like the horror Genre, there is the hero at the mercy of the villain
scene. The protagonist must be put into a position where they are
seemingly incapable of overpowering the villain. That is, there is no way
the protagonist can free himself. But somehow, the protagonist either
outsmarts or overpowers the villain and escapes. This is the real nail biter
scene of a thriller, the big moment, and as such it is the most difficult to
innovate.

5. There is a false ending. Like those cheesy but wonderful Friday the 13th
movies, the end of a thriller isn’t really the end. Somehow the villain
reasserts himself one final time. Just when you think it’s safe to enjoy the
resolution of the Story, BAM!

Let’s put it all together. Here are the conventions and obligatory scenes for the
thriller.

1. An Inciting crime

2. A MacGuffin

3. Red herrings

4. A Speech in Praise of the Villain

5. The stakes must become personal for the hero. If he fails to stop the villain,
he will suffer severe consequences. The hero must become the victim.

6. There must be a hero at the mercy of the villain scene.

7. False ending. There must be two endings.

Lastly, many thrillers also have an additional convention that derives from the
action Genre, a clock. At a critical point in the Story, a time limit is placed on the
protagonist to get the villain. If the protagonist does not do so, the villain will get
what he wants by default. The clock is one way for the writer to clearly define the
end of the limit for the Story, the ultimate fate worse than death, damnation. If the
hero dilly-dallies like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, his indecisiveness will damn him.
128

It’s his fault that the villain won because he refused to accept his calling. Clocks
THE STORY GRID

are not required, but they sure help escalate the stakes. You’ll see how brilliantly
Harris uses a clock in the Middle Build of The Silence of the Lambs later on. The
Middle Build is the most challenging section of a Story, when a Story is most
likely to lose its grip on the reader.

If you’ve decided to write a thriller and you know that you have to deliver these
conventions and scenes, wouldn’t it be a good place to start your work by mapping
out some strategies to do so? That is, if you know you have to write the hero at
the mercy of the villain scene, wouldn’t it be a good idea to try to crack it before
you dive into fleshing out the rest of the novel? The hero at the mercy scene is the
big promise you’re making to a reader when you tell her that you have written a
thriller. Nailing it early on will help you immeasurably.

Obligatory scenes are a great way to give you a clear mission. You’ll be surprised
at how straightforward it can be to write the rest of the Story if you’ve created
innovative obligatory scenes.

So this is why it’s a good idea to remind yourself on your Foolscap Global Story
Grid about the conventions and obligatory scenes you’ll need to drop into your
Story. Put them at the very top and you’ll have them ever present in your mind.
From first through final draft.
32
N ext up on our Foolscap Global Story Grid is the space
to fill in point of view.

Point of view is the vantage point the writer chooses to tell

POINT OF VIEW the reader a Story. Your point of view choices will dictate the
tenor of each beat, each scene, each sequence, each act and
the entire work. They are crucial choices. (I’ll do a follow up
chapter to this on Free Indirect Style next for more on how
best to approach the literal telling.)

Let’s say that you have two characters in a scene. Two

brothers. The younger brother is the prodigal son. He’s left
town years ago and now has decided to come home to the
family farm. He’s coming back—not because he’s broke and
destitute and in need of help—rather because he’s wealthy
beyond whatever he expected out of life. But his material
possessions have brought him no happiness. He’s coming
home to rekindle his love for his dear brother who stayed
behind to take care of the family while he went out to make
his fortune.

The older brother is the workhorse farmer who has sacrificed

his own individual ambitions in order to care for the extended
family. The farm survives only by his efforts.

How will these two greet each other? What will they want
from one another? Will one get what he wants while the
other doesn’t? One of the best places to begin to answer
these questions (if you haven’t already) is by approaching
them through point of view.

You’ll have four point of view choices to describe this

“coming home” scene. Your choice of global Genre will
dictate which choice to make, hence why I’ve spent so much
time laying out the Genres. Knowing what point of view will
best serve your Genre is the key.

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You could:
THE STORY GRID

• Place the center of the narrative “inside the mind” of the rich younger
brother coming home, and share his thoughts as if there were a magical
parrot sitting on his shoulder capable of hearing and repeating the
character’s inner world to the reader. (See the Free Indirect Style chapter
coming up next.)

• You could put the parrot on the farmer brother’s shoulder.

• You could alternate between the two brothers’ points of view and their
respective magical parrots.

• You could place the narrative center above the world and describe the
scene as if you are the child at play with two dolls and a farm set. This
reportorial/neutral point of view is the strict third person omniscient voice
that does not tell the reader what is going on inside the heads of the
characters. Or if it does, it does so from a God-like perspective. (Again,
read the upcoming chapter Free Indirect Style for more on this.)

How do you decide?

If the younger brother is the protagonist of your Story—your novel could be a

modern society/redemption Story about the corrupting powers of ambition—I’d
suggest you follow everything that happens from his point of view.

If your Story is a western/testing Story about the difficult choice someone might
make to safeguard the lives of others at the expense of his own “self-actualization,”
I’d suggest you follow everything that happens from the farmer brother’s point of
view.

If your Story is a domestic drama/sentimental Story about the pressures of shifting

from one kind of family dynamic and back again, then perhaps using both points
of view would serve your purposes well. In this case, both brothers would serve
as protagonists and antagonists, depending upon the particular circumstances of
the global family saga Story’s arc. See Giant by Edna Ferber.

If your Story is not about either of these brothers, but is a historical drama/punitive
Story about a plague and the effects it has on regular people, you’ll probably want
to write it as strict third person omniscient with perhaps a smattering of indirect
speech to invest the reader emotionally with one or more characters.
 131

Here’s my advice to get you started. If you are writing a traditional Arch-plot

POINT OF VIEW
structured novel, write the first draft from the point of view of your protagonist.
Either in the first person or by using third person omniscient (all knowing/Godlike)
Free Indirect Style.

Quick reminder:

First Person means the Story is told by the narrator...I saw my brother in the
field.

Second Person means that the Story is told with the narrator referring to the
reader as you...You saw him in the field. Rarely do novelists use the Second
Person. Jay McInerney did a remarkable job with it in Bright Lights, Big City.

Third Person means the Story is told from a narrative distance—Jim Smith

saw his brother Luke in the field.

If you can sustain interest in the trials and tribulations of that one character and
use the inner life of that lead character to best effect, you’ll get the most out of the
Arch-plot form. But after you’ve finished the first draft, you may find places in the
Story that would benefit from a shift in point of view. That is, you may need to get
Story events onto the page that the protagonist is not privy to. Or you’ll want to
layer in another character’s thoughts to counterbalance those of your protagonist.

For example, in The Silence of the Lambs Thomas Harris makes use of nine points
of view. Primarily Clarice Starling (the protagonist), but he also gives at least two
chapters/scenes to Buffalo Bill/Jame Gumb (the antagonist), Jack Crawford (the
mentor) and Hannibal Lecter (the anti-mentor).

Starling is the dominant force of the novel. But if Harris did not stretch out and
use the POVs of the other three characters, the reader would have a very generic
sense of the forces aligned with her and those against her. Without seeing Buffalo
Bill/Jame Gumb prepare to harvest his victim, the novel would lose a great deal
of tension. Starling would not be privy to that preparation, so if Harris strictly
maintained her POV, we’d lose a very chilling scene.

You’ll notice though that Harris does not give us the antagonist’s POV until the
Middle Build portion of his novel, nor does he give us Hannibal Lecter’s until
even later on in the book. He does give us Jack Crawford’s POV in chapter
five. That choice allows the reader to attach to Crawford emotionally. Harris
understood that Crawford’s actions up to that point are very stoic and dictatorial,
if not Machiavellian. By giving us his world early, the reader can’t help but see
132

that his behavior is a mask. A mask to cover up the horrors of his personal life
THE STORY GRID

experience. And thus, the reader allows him his misanthropy. Empathizes with
him.

You’ll also notice Harris using minor characters’ points of view with Free Indirect
Style to ratchet tension in critical moments. He does this so seamlessly that the
reader does not mind the POV shifts.

Big caution: Too many POV shifts are irritating.

Especially in the Beginning Hook of a Story. You need the reader to get attached
to your protagonist before you can branch out. Finding the perfect mix is the
challenge. The simple rule to follow is…if the POV shift takes the reader out of
the global world and confuses them for even a millisecond…don’t do it.
1
33
H ow can you best tell a Story? Through the vantage point
of one character? Or multiple characters?

If you decide to write in first person, I went across the street

FOR INDIRECT
FREE to buy an ice cream cone, then you have taken on the
central limitation/strength of the novelist. Choosing to write
STYLE a novel gives you the best opportunity to explore the deep
inner conflicts of one or more characters. The intrapersonal
world (what is going inside someone’s head) is the novelist’s
domain. You must master it. No other Story medium (stage
or screen) allows for such exploration into the inner life of
a character like a novel. And the first person Storytelling
method is a Godsend to do that very thing. The Great
Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby Dick, The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn…these are among the great American
novels and they all use first person narration.

But what of the many (if not majority of) novels that are not
written in the first person? They are written in what is called
third person omniscient point of view, meaning from a
God-like stature above the action, He went across the street
to buy an ice cream cone. The advantages of third person
omniscient writing is that you can have a broad cast of
characters doing a whole slew of actions in multiple places,
even all at the same time. If you take that Godlike approach,
you are not limited to what one-character experiences, but
rather you can report on the actions of many. Of such scope
are epics made. War and Peace anyone?

Most commercial fiction in the primal External Genres

(novels written to be bought and enjoyed by strangers, not
just your extended family and the Ivory Tower) is in the third
person. So if the advantage of the novel is in being able to
get inside a character’s head, but first person narration only
allows you to write from the point of view of one character,
how do the third person omniscient stories work? In other
words, is there a way to get inside multiple characters’

133
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heads while also maintaining the proverbial Godlike/reportorial narrative of third

THE STORY GRID

person omniscient?

The answer is YES!

We have the Stephen Kings, Nora Roberts, and John Irvings of their time…Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert (and many of his fellow
French nineteenth-century realist novelists), to thank for the innovation. Madame
Bovary (Flaubert 1857) is generally recognized as the model for the technique.
These literary lions wrote in what is now called the “Free Indirect Style.”

Essentially, Free Indirect Style is a combo plate of first person and third person.
Meaning there are two distinct narrative beings present in Free Indirect Style.
There is the third person narrator (you, the writer) and there is a character or
multiple characters in the novel that also “narrate” through their thoughts.

For example, as I’ll be analyzing The Silence of the Lambs in part 7, let’s take
a look at how Thomas Harris makes brilliant use of Free Indirect Style. What’s
more, he transitions into it seamlessly, allowing the reader to attach to his lead
character as a virtual observer of her behavior before he lets us “hear” directly
from her. Harris begins the novel by reporting her thoughts as if he (the Godlike
narrator) were capable of tapping her consciousness. Later on, he’ll drop the
reporting element altogether and just give the reader her thoughts.

In chapter 1, Clarice Starling has been called into the big boss’ office, Jack
Crawford head of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit.

“Starling, Clarice M., good morning,” he said.

“Hello.” Her smile was only polite.
“Nothing’s wrong. I hope the call didn’t spook you.”
“No.” Not totally true, Starling thought.4

The last two sentences in this dialogue “No.” Not totally true, Starling thought.
are written with direct (“No.”) and indirect (Not totally true, Starling thought.)
speech. Direct speech (quoted) and indirect speech (reported) abide by the
traditional third person omniscient rules. The narrator quotes the action. Starling
says “No.” Indirect speech is the narrator retelling the character’s thoughts. “Not
totally true, Starling thought.” So technically, the first chapter is written in third
person omniscient.

What’s interesting is that Harris chose to italicize “Not totally true,” even though
he’s using the indirect approach and the phrase does not require it. I suspect

4 Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs (P. 2). Macmillan.

 135

Harris made this choice to signal to the reader, subconsciously, that he was going

FREE INDIRECT STYLE

to eventually use Free Indirect Style and get rid of the necessity of having to write
“she thought… she said to herself… she wondered” etc.

In the very next chapter of The Silence of the Lambs, when Starling meets with
Dr. Frederick Chilton, the head of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally
Insane, Harris makes the complete shift into Free Indirect Style. He’s already let
the reader get a global sense of who Starling is through his quoting and reporting
her speech and thoughts. Now he’s giving them the intimacy of being able to hear
her thoughts without his authorial reporting attached.

After Chilton tells Starling that he suspects Crawford is just using her to “turn-on”
the killer Hannibal Lecter, thus her being given the job to interview him, Harris
makes the transition to Free Indirect Style.

Well fuck off, Chilton. “I graduated from the University of Virginia with
honors, Doctor. It’s not a charm school.”5

This may all be a bit inside baseball for our purposes. The bottom line, though, is
that Free Indirect Style is a wonderful tool for the novelist. It gives you the best of
first person and third person narration. Going inside a character’s head and giving
the reader her thoughts without third person reportage emotionally bonds the
reader to a character. Jane Austen was one of its masters. She was so skilled that
a novel without some free indirect speech in it today feels sterile, devoid of heart.

Remember, though, that you must limit the number of brains that you open up to
the reader in a novel. The use of Free Indirect Style signals to the reader that this
character is our protagonist...this is the main person we will view this fictional
world through. Especially at the beginning. If you use the technique with more
than one character, you better have a very good reason. And you better think hard
about where in the novel to insert these kinds of shifts.

Thriller writers often use Free Indirect Style with their protagonists and with
their antagonists. Thomas Harris uses the Free Indirect Style for nine different
characters in The Silence of the Lambs. Every single time he did so was a critical
and productive choice. Make sure your choices are too.

5 Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs (P. 11). Macmillan.

34
T he most challenging line to fill in on our Foolscap Global
Story Grid is Controlling Idea/Theme.

The controlling idea is the takeaway message the writer wants

CONTROLLING the reader/viewer to discover from reading or watching his
Story. It’s the whole reason many of us want to be writers in
IDEA/THEME the first place. We have something to say about the way the
world is and we want others to come to see it in the same
way we do.

Wanting to say something and understanding exactly what

it is that you are trying to say is the most difficult thing to
crack. The truth of the matter is that there is a wide chasm
between our rational and deliberately reasoned and specific
inner philosophies and our creative energies. Oftentimes,
our subconscious creative comes up with a strikingly
good idea for a scene or description and we have no real
understanding of where it came from. The more you write,
the more you discover that those inspirations are clues to
figuring out the controlling idea/theme of your global Story.

Many writers don’t have a clue of what their theme is until far
into the writing process. Some even refuse to acknowledge
that they have any particular agenda or message to impart
beyond keeping the reader guessing what’s going to happen
next… One of my clients is David Mamet and he’ll pledge
on a stack of bibles that he does not have any agenda in his
work beyond keeping the audience transfixed. I absolutely
believe him, but to think that there are no controlling ideas
in Oleanna or Glengarry Glen Ross or Sexual Perversity
in Chicago is to ignore the very truths that emerge when
a writer is busting his hump to keep us guessing. I could
devote entire books to these three plays and pull out very
clear controlling ideas concerning tyranny, self-deception,
humiliation, and the nature of intimacy, which all three of
these plays explore. Mamet would deny that he had any
intention of loading these works with any of my takeaways.
 137

He would not be lying either. But his work is so damn specific and biting that

CONTROLLING IDEA/THEME
to deny the truths that lie within the drama (put there intentionally or not) is
ludicrous.

So it’s fine if you don’t want to overly concern yourself with the controlling idea/
theme. If you can write scenes and structure progressive complications, crises,
climaxes and resolutions like David Mamet, you certainly don’t need me to tell
you that your work isn’t vital because you won’t spell it out for me. But if you
haven’t been sitting at a desk for forty years like he has with a clear intention
to keep people guessing no matter what, then you may find that codifying your
controlling idea/theme can help direct your work.

This is the beauty of writing, the big payoff that keeps people staring at blank
screens for hours on end banging out scenes and chapters that they believe are
accomplishing one thing, while underneath the onstage action they are doing
something completely different. The creative energy and hard work necessary
to bring these bits to life truthfully will eventually coalesce and an “aha, that’s
what this is about!” moment will come. Perhaps not even to the writer, but to the
reader.

One of the most difficult skills to develop as a writer is patience. And figuring out
the controlling idea/theme requires it in abundance.

But once the controlling idea of the Story becomes concrete for the writer, and
this may take far longer than you can possibly imagine, the Story will come to
life. Problems will resolve themselves. Decisions will become much easier to
make and the work becomes far more pleasurable.

What exactly is a controlling idea?

I like the approach that Robert McKee takes because it is extremely clear and
specific.

1. A controlling idea must be boiled down to the fewest possible words and
cannot be longer than a one-sentence statement.

2. It must describe the climactic value charge of the entire Story, either
positively or negatively.

3. And it must be as specific as possible about the cause of the change in

value charge.
138

For example, the controlling idea of the popular crime novel and film adaptation,
THE STORY GRID

The Firm, would be justice prevails when an everyman victim is more clever
than the criminals.

That’s a solid controlling idea. Is it incredibly innovative or deep? No. But it is

perfect in keeping with the core value at stake in a crime Story—justice.

John Grisham told a wildly compelling Story using his deep understanding of
the life of a young lawyer. While the controlling idea of his book isn’t internally
driven or existentially spectacular, the execution of the important cultural value
that “Justice prevails” is very important. Justice is a value that we all want to
deeply believe in.

Reading a Story like The Firm, gives us an initial anxiety about how justice can
prevail if the stewards of the law are corrupt. But at climax when it does prevail
surprisingly but inevitably, we find relief. The fact that a single individual can
outsmart and defend an important societal value is a message we all need to hear.
That’s what the controlling idea/theme is all about. Taking a value that we all rely
on to live peacefully day to day, challenging its stolidity and then paying it off
with its confirmation or its vulnerability. So even though you may think the crime,
horror, action stories that have no underlying internal messages within are purely
entertainments…they serve society as certifiers of our values. When the bad guy
is caught, we’re relieved. Justice prevails, life is precious, love is sublime…we
need to get these messages from our stories or we despair.

Did John Grisham sit down and write out his controlling idea before he wrote
The Firm?

My guess is no. Instead, Grisham’s life experience and grasp of compelling

characters and scenes all flowed from an internal value that he perhaps never
consciously spelled out for himself. When a writer chooses to have his Story
driven by a broad External Genre, the controlling idea is often inherent in the
choice. This is perfectly acceptable and even laudable when well executed.
There is no requirement to pound your head on a table to come up with a brand
new controlling idea for your particular Story. Knowing what the controlling idea
is concretely, though, will help you stay on course.

Especially if you get stuck in the weeds on a particular draft.

But isn’t there a way to have a deep controlling idea within a broad External
Content Genre?
 139

The answer of course is yes. The way to pull this off is to drive the Internal Content

CONTROLLING IDEA/THEME
Genre as hard as you do your External. An example of a very deep controlling
idea that is also a straightforward horror Story is The Shining by Stephen King.

I took away the following controlling idea from his book: Narcissistic self-abuse
annihilates all forms of human love. The novel is one of King’s masterpieces,
written in the midst of his coming to terms with his own alcoholism and cocaine
addiction. This Story fired on all cylinders because it was deeply horrifying while
also being so intensely personal. It didn’t just nail the ambiguous horror Story.
It was a deeply moving punitive/cautionary tale for the overly ambitious/self-
loathing striver in all of us…the one who insists that if he were just given the right
circumstances to paint his masterpiece, he’d deliver…

Both Grisham and King wrote extraordinarily successful novels. And both men
had something very important to say. While Grisham’s was more of a deep
dive into the dangers of powerful legal partnerships in the United States and its
dominant global Genre was the crime thriller, King’s novel was ultimately driven
by its Internal Genre, the Punitive Plot. But he brilliantly wrapped it in the candy
of an external ambiguous horror Story.

King somehow wrote a literary Mini-plot novel masquerading as a horror Story.

That’s extraordinary.

You may have imagined the most charismatic protagonist, the most detailed and
inviting setting and the perfect foil, but without a clear understanding of what it
is you are trying to get across to the reader, you’ll never hear the magic words…
”your book changed my life.” And trust me. Every writer I’ve ever worked with
would die happy to hear someone tell him that. Even just once.

There is a reason why writing a novel, a screenplay, a play, a television pilot or

even launching a company is difficult. Practically impossible. You have to make
a lot of choices. You have to make value judgments. You have to ask yourself: If I
had to boil down all of the events in my Story to one sentence what would that
sentence be? That sentence is the controlling idea. Once you figure it out, and
again it will not come easily to you, you will gain immeasurable confidence.
35
A fter we’ve laid out the global elements of our Story at the
top of our Foolscap Global Story Grid, we need to nail
down the actual major movements. So you’ll see that the
final three quarters of our Foolscap is dedicated to mapping
BEGINNING out the Beginning, Middle and End of our Story.
HOOK, MIDDLE Boiling your pile of four hundred pages down to BEGINNING,
BUILD AND MIDDLE and END and setting aside all of the other pieces
ENDING PAYOFF in your Story is the single best advice I could give anyone.
Remember, Stories are conceptually simple things…

A Storyteller hooks us: Once upon a time, there were

three bad children…on their morning walk one day a wolf
captures them and takes them to his lair…

And then we get a Middle Build that raises the stakes: the
three children are tasked to help the wolf slaughter their
kingdom’s only source of food…while they “help” the wolf,
they make a dastardly plan that only wicked children could
devise.

Lastly, we get an Ending Payoff that is both surprising and

inevitable: after the children trick the wolf and lead him to
his death, his fur fades away, his snout shortens and he is
revealed as their long lost father the King. The King awakens
and tells them of the spell he’d been put under by an evil
housemaid and of how that spell could only be broken by
his children. With the return of their father, the children
are no longer bad and the family is restored.

It’s very useful to remember that the BEGINNING is all

about HOOKING your reader...getting them so deeply
curious and involved in the Story that there is no way they’ll
abandon it until they know how it turns out. The MIDDLE is
about BUILDING progressive complications that bring the
stress and pressure down so hard on your lead character(s)
that they are forced to take huge risks so that they can return
to “normal.” The ENDING is the big PAYOFF, when the
 141

promises you’ve made from your HOOK get satisfied in completely unique and

BEGINNING HOOK, MIDDLE BUILD AND ENDING PAYOFF

unexpected ways.

STORY distilled is...HOOK, BUILD, PAYOFF. That’s it.

The Beginning Hook of our little Story above would be the introduction of three
bad children (why are they bad?) who get approached by a wolf on their morning
walk. The appearance of the wolf is the Inciting Incident that leads to a crisis…
to refuse the wolf could end in death for the three children, to abide the wolf’s
request could result in worse for the whole community.

The Middle Build would be the wolf and children’s preparations for the slaughter
of the kingdom’s animals all the while having the children set up the betrayal of
the wolf.

The ending paying is the revelation that the wolf was their father under a terrible
spell. Once his evil persona has been destroyed through the efforts of his “bad/
disobedient” children, he is restored to his normal self. He’s now capable of
providing for his brood, knowing that his children are resourceful. The Ending
provides the answer to the Beginning Hook, Why are the children bad? They’ve
lost their father and without one, they do not fit in with polite society, which is a
very good thing when they meet up with a wolf. And it resolves their true selves.
They are not “bad” or they would have abided the wolf’s request, slaughtered the
kingdom’s food sources and then lived with the evil wolf. Once their father has
returned to his normal self at the end of the Story, the world is restored to order.

The more time you invest in your global hook, build and payoff, the better your
Story will be. You’ll see that I’ve listed five scenes in each section of our Foolscap
Global Story Grid. Now let’s take a look at those crucial constituent parts of the
Beginning Hook, Middle Build and Ending Payoff.
36
C reating a Foolscap Global Story Grid for a complete
work is all well and good, but then what?

How do you begin to actually map out the rest? How long
THE MATH will it take you to write the first draft? Is there a way to take
the “Beginning Hook, Middle Build, and Ending Payoff”
concepts even further to break down the work into more
“doable” parts?

This is where a little rudimentary math will help.

But before we dive into it, remember that you are not the
problem. The problem is the problem. And the problem
we’re facing now is figuring out how to map out a course
to get from idea to first draft or how to evaluate the first
draft we have in hand. At the beginning of the long form
Story process, the problems we face are innumerable. To
demystify exactly how a lump sum of words can be broken
down into component parts is extraordinarily helpful. If
we can cut our problems into bite size pieces that we can
contend with one by one, one day, one session at a time,
then we can beat Resistance into submission and finish our
first draft or edit our first draft.

I know. You hate math. That is why you became a writer/

Storyteller. But, math is a Godsend. And a very cursory look
at the math of a novel is definitely worth the time.

Why?

Math helps you break problems into little bits. It’s much
easier to figure out where to cut a piece of lumber than it is
framing a house. Your mind can’t really wrap itself around
framing a house. But if you break the work down into its
component parts, you’ll reach a very doable level of skill…a
skill that is relatively easy to master. Measuring the length
of a board, marking where to cut it, and then taking a saw
and ripping it at that mark is the primal skill for a carpenter.
 143

If you can do that one skill well (and you can screw it up very easily too) you are

THE MATH
well on your way to learning how to frame a house.

Same goes with writing or editing a long form Story.

So let’s look a novel in mathematical terms.

Here are some facts.

The average length of a commercial novel today is between eighty thousand

and one hundred thousand words. Are there exceptions? Sure, but this ballpark
range is where the novel has settled over the last twenty years or so. It’s the length
the average reader is expecting—not too much and not too little. So, it’s a safe
assumption to make that if you want to begin a path that will satisfy a particular
readership, your goal is to put together eighty thousand to one hundred thousand
words in a unique and compelling way.

Let’s break it down further using the Foolscap method.

To keep it simple, you’ll need a beginning, middle, and an end to your Story. No
matter how many acts you have (three to five to seven), you need a beginning to
your Story, a middle section to your Story and an ending to your Story. As an editor,
I don’t worry so much about figuring out exactly how many acts are in a book.
For me, the Beginning, Middle and End are all that matter. The beginning may
comprise two acts, the middle three acts and the end two acts, but I don’t really
care. Instead I concentrate on the five building materials for each of the three
sections. I think about the Inciting Incident scenes, Progressive Complications
scenes, the Crisis scenes, the Climax scenes and the Resolution scenes for the
beginning, middle and end of a book. (Don’t worry; I’ll go over these crucial
elements of Story form in much greater detail in part 4.)

As you’ll recall, the key building block for a long form narrative is the scene.
Beats are the actor’s domain. Scenes are the writer’s. (I’ll review the building
blocks of Story in part 5.)

So the first breakdown of the eighty-thousand to one-hundred-thousand-word

book are the scenes necessary to create the five building materials for your
beginning, middle and end of your Global Story. So there will be at least fifteen
scenes in your book:

1. You’ll need a scene that is the Inciting Incident of the beginning of your
Story.

2. You’ll need a scene that is the Inciting Incident of the middle of your Story.
144

3. You’ll need a scene that is the Inciting Incident of the end of your Story.
THE STORY GRID

4. You’ll need a scene that progressively complicates the beginning of your

Story.

5. You’ll need a scene that progressively complicates the middle of your

Story.

6. You’ll need a scene that progressively complicates the end of your Story.

7. You’ll need a scene that creates a crisis question at the beginning of your
Story.

8. You’ll need a scene that creates a crisis question in the middle of your
Story.

9. You’ll need a scene that creates a crisis question at the end of your Story.

10. You’ll need a scene that climaxes the beginning of your Story.

11. You’ll need a scene that climaxes the middle of your Story.

12. You’ll need a scene that climaxes the end of your Story.

13 You’ll need a scene that resolves the beginning of your Story.

14. You’ll need a scene that resolves the middle of your Story.

15. You’ll need a scene that resolves the end of your Story.

But how long should they be? How many words should each scene be? And then
how many words should be in the beginning? How many words should be in the
middle? How many words should be in the end?

Here is a piece of information that professional writers spend ten thousand hours
of their lives figuring out. After thousands of years of Storytelling, the beginning,
the middle and the end for a long form Arch-plot or Mini-plot Story breaks down
as follows:

The Beginning is about one quarter of the Story.

The Middle is about one half of the Story.

The End is the last quarter of the Story.

 145

Are there stories that do not break down 25/50/25? Absolutely. But if you were to

THE MATH
average every Story ever told, 25/50/25 would be the result. I have a theory about
why Stories break down like this. That’s up next.

So, if you are writing a one-hundred-thousand-word novel, the beginning will

generally be twenty-five thousand words, the middle will generally be fifty
thousand words and the end will be the last twenty-five thousand words. We’ve
already determined that we need at least fifteen scenes in the book, five in the
beginning, five in the middle, and five in the end.

What about the rest?

Nerds like me have noticed that typically, in contemporary commercial fiction,

scenes run between one thousand and five thousand words. Remember that a
scene creates a clear value change in the life of a character through conflict.
When I break down The Story Grid for The Silence of the Lambs, you’ll see
where Thomas Harris fell on the scene word count spectrum. My personal
recommendation is to take a page from the master and keep your scenes, like
Harris’, around two thousand words. I also recommend that you treat your scenes
like chapters. That is, each scene should be a chapter in your novel.

Why?

Two-thousand-word scenes/chapters are potato chip length.

That is, if you are about to go to bed and you’re reading a terrific novel and the
scenes/chapters come in around two-thousand-word bites, you’ll tell yourself
that you’ll read just one more chapter. But if the narrative is really moving after
you finish one of these bites, you won’t be able to help yourself reading another.
If the Story is extremely well told, you’ll just keep eating the potato chip scenes
all through the night.

Whereas, if you cram five scenes into a chapter that ends up being forty pages,
the bedside reader will have a much easier time just setting the book down before
beginning the long slog through seventy-five hundred words.

People like to stop reading when they’ve finished a chapter, not in the middle
of a chapter. This is probably the last thing they’ll tell you at the Iowa Writer’s
Workshop, but it’s a reality worth considering.

You can accomplish quite a bit in two thousand words, and if you successfully
leave out the stuff that the reader does not need explained to them, two thousand
words can often be way too much.
146

Anyway, let’s assume that all of the scenes/chapters in our novel are two thousand
THE STORY GRID

words long. So if we’re writing a one-hundred-thousand-word novel, we’ll have

about fifty scenes/chapters in our novel. From our earlier beginning, middle and
end discussion, we know that fifteen of those fifty scenes are already spoken for.
So we’ll need to write thirty-five more.

I know. You are an artist and this mathematical manipulation is probably rubbing
you the wrong way. I get it. But remember, the math is just a way to break down
an extremely intimidating task into doable units.

So we have thirty-five scenes left. Let’s set aside 25% of these for the BEGINNING,
50% of them for the MIDDLE and the other 25% for the END.

So we’ll need seven to eight scenes in addition to our five obligatory scenes for
our beginning (twelve to thirteen total).

We’ll have twenty additional scenes to play with in addition to our five obligatory
scenes in the middle (twenty-five total).

And we’ll have seven to eight scenes in addition to our five obligatory scenes for
our end (twelve to thirteen total).

Take a look at The Story Grid now based on this information. You can now see
the entire form of your novel without having written a single word. You’ve got
doable pieces of work that can be attacked one day, one session at a time.

But let me emphasize again that you may end up with six scenes for the beginning,
thirty for the middle and fourteen for the end or the other way around. There is no
“rule” about 12/25/13. We are merely trying to map out a course of work for us
to bang out a first draft. After we have a first draft, we can go back and analyze
exactly which scenes work and which scenes don’t work. But if we never write
a first draft because we get stuck after writing three scenes, we’re never going to
finish the novel. Better to have a map of the targets we need to hit in order to
make it to the end. Once we get there, then we can fix our blunders.
37
E lizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote the seminal book On Death
and Dying (1969) in which she laid out a psychological
model for the stages of extreme change…coping with
the death of a loved one. In the years after publication,
THE KUBLER- psychologists, sociologists and economists have applied
ROSS CHANGE Kubler-Ross’ work to the process of dealing with many
varieties of life change. Most notably, her stages of grief
CURVE FOR were applied to organizational change in an article entitled
STORY AND “Applying Grief Stages to Organizational Change” by P.
THE MATH Scire in Mark R. Brent’s book An Attributional Analysis of
Kubler-Ross’ Model of Dying6, an article that inspired me to
think of Story as “coping with change” narrative.

The bottom line with change (and change is the substance of

Story) is that it requires loss. Even when change is positive,
we lose something of ourselves coping with its effects.
Lottery winners are a great example of the monumental
effect of positive change.

I promised to explain why I think Stories break down to

25% Beginning Hook, 50% Middle Build, and 25% Ending
Payoff. So for our purposes, I’ve created a change curve that
best aligns with the Storyteller process.

6 Harvard University, 1981

147
148

Here it is:
THE STORY GRID

You’ll see that the vertical axis reflects the effects of change on the protagonist(s)
of your Story. The higher the position on the y-axis, the more comfortable and
competent the character is. The lower the position, the less comfortable and
competent. The horizontal axis represents Time. I’ve broken the Time into our
three parts—Beginning Hook, Middle Build and Ending Payoff.

Let’s begin at the beginning SHOCK.

Remember that when life throws us out of kilter, it takes us a certain amount of
time to even realize that we’re out of kilter. There is an initial shock about an
event in our life and then shortly thereafter, a denial that the event even occurred.
We just pretend that everything is as it ever was until we’re forced to face the
facts.

I think these two stages, SHOCK and DENIAL, comprise the BEGINNING HOOK
of a Story.

The Beginning Hook of a Story ends when the protagonist or multiple cast of the
Story can no longer deny the truth. The climax and resolution of the BEGINNING
HOOK pushes us into the MIDDLE BUILD of our Story and also the middle of
 149

the change curve.

THE KUBLER-ROSS CHANGE CURVE FOR STORY AND THE MATH

The middle forces us to react to the truth of the life event.

Once we can no longer bullshit ourselves about our circumstances, we get

ANGRY. We blame others or the gods for what has stricken us, lash out, usually
making our circumstances even worse. After we burn off our anger, we search
for the easiest way out of our situation. We work to BARGAIN our way out of
the problem. Perhaps we push the problem to someone else, who is sure to fail
solving it.

Or we decide that if we change our environment, we will be able to slough off

the problem. We move to another city. We change jobs. We find a new spouse.
We buy a better lifestyle. Of course, the bargaining proves fruitless. The monkey
on our back (coping with the shock necessitating a change in ourselves) gets even
heavier.

When we discover that there is no easy solution to our predicament and all of
our bargaining has left us broken and battered in worse circumstances than if
we had faced the problem head on at the beginning, we finally come to the
understanding that there is no way we can turn back.

Our lives will never be the same. We’ve lost. We bottom out in DEPRESSION.

This depression is dramatized in what screenwriters call the ALL IS LOST

MOMENT scene. We despair. There is no way in hell that we’re going to come
out of this event anywhere near how we were before it happened. It’s finally clear
to us that life will never be the same.

Once we can no longer live with our sad sack, life-is-no-fair selves, we take
a deep breath and get to work. We dig deep and confront our demon(s), stare
down our problems and resolve to beat them into submission. We come to THE
DELIBERATION stage. This is the moment we weigh the pros and cons about
what we can do to cope with the big change in our lives.

We finally see the crisis for what it really is—a single question that has no easy
answer. Whatever we do will require loss.

We must choose the best bad choice or an irreconcilable good, knowing that we
have to lose something in order to gain forward progress and reach a new level of
stability. We understand that we’ll never get back to “normal,” so we stop trying.
150

I think these four stages, ANGER, BARGAINING, DEPRESSION and

THE STORY GRID

DELIBERATION, thematically comprise the MIDDLE BUILD of a Story.

Now the beginning of the ENDING PAYOFF of a Story is how we choose to

answer our crisis dilemma. CHOICE is the climactic moment when we actively
do something that will finally metabolize the Inciting Incident event and change
our lives forever.

Once we choose, we barrel forward, damn the torpedoes and act.

Lastly, there is INTEGRATION, which I would call the very end of a Story.
INTEGRATION dramatizes resolution. We’ve found a new stability, one that is
vastly different than where we began. We’ve got a whole new outlook on life and
we’re not the same person we once were. At INTEGRATION, we have come full
circle and have recovered from the SHOCK of a big Inciting Incident in our life.
No matter what, by the end of the Story we will never go back to where or who
we were before.

This entire change process is eight stages.

In terms of telling a Story (a change process) the BEGINNING HOOK is two parts,
the MIDDLE BUILD is four parts and the ENDING PAYOFF is two parts.

What do you know?

In terms of percentage of the change cycle, 25% of the cycle comprises the
beginning, 50% for the middle, and 25% for the end. So the 25/50/25 rule mirrors
the process that psychologists have hypothesized is required for a global personal
point of view change. I don’t think this is a coincidence.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ theories can be helpful in other ways too. Especially if

you get stuck trying to understand how your protagonist will psychologically
proceed through your Story. Here’s how the building materials of Story break
down psychologically.

The Inciting Incident SHOCKS our protagonist...throws them off balance to the
point of DENIAL...hooking the reader’s curiosity about how the denial will come
back to haunt the protagonist.

This beginning to the Story transitions into the progressive complications in the
middle, when the protagonist can no longer deny his predicament. He rages about
his plight, bargains ineffectively to make it go away, realizes his life will never be
the same and despairs during his ALL IS LOST MOMENT, until he regroups and
deliberates about his crisis.
 151

He makes a choice, often called THE POINT OF NO RETURN, and the Story

THE KUBLER-ROSS CHANGE CURVE FOR STORY AND THE MATH

moves toward the Ending Payoff. He makes that CHOICE active during the climax,
which results in the INTEGRATION of a new point of view, which is the Story’s
Resolution.

So, if you get stuck and you’re not sure where to take your character in any one
place during your Story, think about these eight stages. Are you dramatizing the
psychological turmoil of your lead character(s)?
38
L ater on, I’ll go through it line by line, but it’s worth looking
at a complete page right now. Here’s The Foolscap Global
Story Grid for The Silence of the Lambs…The entire outline
of the novel on one page.
FLASH
FORWARD:
THE FOOLSCAP
GLOBAL STORY
GRID IN ACTION
153

FLASH FORWARD: THE FOOLSCAP GLOBAL STORY GRID IN ACTION

PART FOUR

STORY FORM
39
It’s now time to review the timeless principles that we rely
upon to create and evaluate the building blocks of a long
form Story—scenes. Scenes build into sequences, which
build into acts, which create our Beginning Hooks, Middle
THE FIVE Builds and Ending Payoffs.
COMMANDMENTS The five elements that build Story are the Inciting Incident
OF STORYTELLING (either causal or coincidental), progressive complications
expressed through active or revelatory turning points, a
crisis question that requires a choice between at least two
negative alternatives or at least two irreconcilable goods,
the climax choice and the resolution.

Here they are in outline form:

1. Inciting Incident

a. Causal

b. Coincidence

2. Progressive Complication

a. Active Turning Point

b. Revelatory Turning Point

3. Crisis

a. The Best Bad choice

b. Irreconcilable goods

4. Climax

5. Resolution

These five elements must be clearly defined and executed

for each unit of Story. I’ll go into further detail about all of
the units of Story later on, but for now it’s important to note:

157
158

1. Every beat has an Inciting Incident, progressive complication(s), a crisis, a

THE STORY GRID

climax and a resolution.

2. A well-designed series of beats builds to the next unit of Story, the scene,
which also has an Inciting Incident, progressive complications, a crisis, a
climax and a resolution.

3. Scenes build into sequences, which also have Inciting Incidents, progressive
complications, crises, climaxes and resolutions.

4. In turn sequences build into acts, which have their own Inciting Incidents,
progressive complications, crises, climaxes and resolutions.

5. Subplots also have Inciting Incidents, progressive complications, crises,

climaxes and resolutions, and can be tracked in exactly the same way
as the global Story. They act more like add-on extensions or outbuildings
to the property that make the global Story a deeper and more satisfying
experience.

6. And lastly, the global Story itself has its own Inciting Incident, progressive
complications, crisis, climax and resolution.

Like an organic structure, a Story has a base set of internal materials that integrally
combine to form self-contained units of mini-Story, which in turn combine to form
even more complex systems. Ultimately, all of the systems combine to create a
work of intellectual property.

Just as cells form tissues, which interact to form organs that work with other
organs to form systems (skeletal, nervous, circulatory etc.) with ultimately
fourteen systems making up the anatomy of a human being, so do beats combine
to form scenes which combine to form sequences which combine to form acts
and subplots and ultimately the Beginning Hook, Middle Build and Ending Payoff
of a global Story.

But without the engines of creation (the Inciting Incident, progressive

complications, crisis, climax and resolution) beats, scenes, sequences, acts,
subplots and the global Story will have no life. It is never a bad idea to revisit
these crucial Story elements before we begin a new project or just after we’ve
banged out our first draft of a project...just before we put on the editor’s hat.

Knowing them and trusting their efficacy are mandatory. A writer who does not
pound these concepts into her head will never come close to reaching her artistic
 159

potential. There is no escaping them. And anyone who tells you differently is

THE FIVE COMMANDMENTS OF STORYTELLING

either ignorant or a charlatan. Seriously.

So my advice is to surrender to them. Bow down to them. Hold them closely to

your heart. They will save you from yourself. They will outwit and out duel any
bullshit you or anyone else will come up with to get you to ignore them so that
you can write “freely.” Sure go nuts on your first draft and riff all you want. But
when you dive into your edit, you’ve got to make sure that these five elements are
present in every beat, scene, sequence, act, subplot and global Story.

When Moses’ cousin, Morrie the writer, went up the mountain seeking a cure
for his writer’s block, God didn’t have time to give him all of the answers. And
wouldn’t you know it, Morrie climbed up unprepared. He only had a crumpled
coffee shop napkin and a leaky pen in his shirt pocket. So God did Morrie a solid
and boiled Story down to just five commandments.
40
T hou must have an Inciting Incident.

The Inciting Incident is the big event scene that kicks off
your Story.
COMMANDMENT It is also an equal or somewhat lesser event scene that opens
NUMBER ONE your Middle Build or Ending Payoff.

It is an even smaller event scene that kicks off a sequence.

It is also a minor event that destabilizes a supporting scene

within a sequence.

And lastly, the smallest Inciting Incident is an action in a

beat that unsettles the relationship between two characters.

No matter the unit of Story (beat, scene, sequence, act, or

global Story) what the Inciting Incident must do is upset the
life balance of your lead protagonist(s). It must make them
uncomfortably out of sync…for good or for ill.

An Inciting Incident can occur in one of two ways:

1. Cause

2. Coincidence

A causal Inciting Incident is the result of an active choice—a

wife leaves her husband, a man enlists in the Marines, a
dentist molests a patient he’s put under anesthesia.

A coincidental Inciting Incident is when something

unexpected or random or accidental happens—a simple
man wins the lottery, a woman takes the wrong suitcase at
an airport, a piano falls out of a window and kills a man’s
dog.

What your choice of Inciting Incidents in every unit of Story

(beat, scene, sequence, act, and global Story) must do is
arouse a reaction by your protagonist. For the examples
 161

above: perhaps, the man resolves to get his wife back, the recruit decides to fight

COMMANDMENT NUMBER ONE

against his Parris Island instructor, the patient hires a detective to investigate the
dentist, the lottery winner decides to give away all the money, the woman with
the wrong suitcase decides to keep it, the man who barely escapes the piano
quits his job.

Obviously, the most crucial Inciting Incident you must choose is the event for the
Beginning Hook. If you have a weak hook, no matter the Genre (even the most
mini of mini-plots requires a compelling hook), there is little that can be done
editorially to make your Story work. Unless you start over.

Remember also that how your character acts—and refusing to do anything is an

action too, especially in mini-plot stories…it’s actively hiding—must be in tune
with your choice of External and Internal Genres.

That is, the Inciting Incident of a global Story must make a promise to the reader…
the ending. The ending must be a perfectly reasonable and inevitable result of the
Inciting Incident. But it must also be surprising. If it is not surprising, it will not
drive anyone to recommend it to his friend to read. Don’t promise something and
then not deliver it. That is the telltale mark of a writer writing a book that will not
work, no matter how great bits and pieces are within.

Many Genres have conventional Inciting Incidents that set up obligatory climaxes.
If you’re writing a murder mystery, the Inciting Incident must be the discovery
of a dead body. The climax of the mystery will be the solving of the crime. If
you’re writing a love Story, the Inciting Incident will be when the lovers meet. The
climax of the love Story will be the answer to whether the couple stays together.
If you’re writing a horror novel, the Inciting Incident will be an attack by the
monster, which sets up the obligatory climax, which is the ultimate confrontation
between your lead character victim and the seemingly indestructible monster
from your Inciting Incident.

Without Inciting Incidents, a writer has nothing…just a collection of riffs that

don’t add up in any coherent way…character sketches or meticulous Proustian
descriptions of inanimate objects that have zero emotional payoff. That kind of
writing is what most people think of when they think of what a writer with a
capital “W” is and does. But being able to put words together in unique and
poetic ways without anything happening that requires an action or reaction on
the part of your cast of characters is not Storytelling. It is showing off your way
with words, gold plating inertia. As Truman Capote said so well, “That’s not
writing, that’s typing.”
162

Without an Inciting Incident, nothing meaningful can happen. And when nothing
THE STORY GRID

meaningful happens, it’s not a Story.

To put it in Hollywood terms, the Inciting Incident is the High Concept for every
unit of your Story, the golden “What if?” It’s the intriguing lure to get people to
care not only about what you are going to tell them right now, but also what you
are going to tell them later. If you are writing a novel and your Inciting Incidents
are ho-hum, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of pain. You’ll twist and turn inside
trying to use language as a crutch to inflate the importance of trivial events.

Instead why not take the time before you write anything—be it a beat, a scene,
a sequence, an act, a subplot or the global Story—and make sure your Inciting
Incident is compelling and appropriate for the unit of Story you are about to tell.
Remember that every unit of Story has an Inciting Incident. So every scene you put
in your Story has to have one, no matter its position on the work’s progressively
complicated hierarchy.

Years ago I had the surreal experience of working with Bill Murray on a book
project. One day we were having a cup of coffee. I’d just returned from doing a
lot of talking at a sales conference and my voice was shot. Bill laughed and told
me I sounded like Mike Ovitz back when he worked with him.

“He spoke very softly so you’d really have to concentrate to make out what he
was saying.”

I asked what happened to that relationship. Bill no longer works with an agent,
he just sort of lets people find him and offer him stuff to work on. If he likes the
idea of it, the “What if?” he’ll do it. If he doesn’t, he won’t.

Bill explained to me that Ovitz called him one day and told him that he’d met
with a studio and pitched an idea to them that they loved. They were willing to
write Bill a big check if he signed on to the project. Bill asked Ovitz what the idea
was and he simply said, “Bill Murray and an elephant.”

While not even close to half-baked, that five-word phrase inspired an Inciting
Incident that Bill found attractive. All they needed now was for someone to bang
on a word processor for a few months and they’d be ready to go. Roy Blount Jr., a
wonderful writer and author of my favorite sports nonfiction About Three Bricks
Shy of a Load was given that impossible task.

Blount took that single phrase and spun it into the far more fleshed out conceit
“a down-on-his-luck motivational speaker finds out that his father has left him a
huge inheritance…the twist is that his father was a circus promoter and the son’s
inheritance is an elephant…”
 163

They did make that movie. It was called Larger than Life and unfortunately, it

COMMANDMENT NUMBER ONE

bombed.

Soon after that experience, Bill decided he could make those kinds of mistakes
himself. He didn’t need an agent to do it for him. From that point forward, Bill
decided to only talk to the creators of material directly. If he gets a good feeling
about the writer/director and their commitment to the Story (and of course what
they’ve put down on actual paper), not just the Inciting Incident but the whole
Story, he’ll do it. If he doesn’t, he won’t.

But getting Bill to talk to you is a whole other Story. I left a message for him about
five years ago and I’m still waiting for him to return the call. So Bill, if you’re
reading this, could you mail me back that laptop I lent you before you left for
Tokyo?

Again, global Inciting Incidents are most often determined by the Genre the writer
chooses. But what about the great American novels? What were their Inciting
Incidents?

The Great Gatsby—the cousin of a man’s long lost love moves next door to him.

Moby Dick—a young man gets a job on a monomaniac’s whale ship.

Catch-22—fighter pilot can’t get grounded for being crazy because he says he’s
crazy and crazy people don’t know they’re crazy.

These are examples of global Inciting Incidents. Like the peanut butter that lures
a mouse into a mousetrap, the global Inciting Incident must be irresistible to
the writer’s intended audience. And yes, even the big literary writers have an
intended audience.

But alas, a fantastic global Inciting Incident does not make for a slam-dunk
commercial success. You must load every beat, scene, sequence, and act with
tantalizing Inciting Incidents to keep the reader turning pages or to keep the
viewer in their seat. Creating these kinds of Inciting Incidents is all about zigging
when the reader expects a zag. They require singular imagination. Ideally, the
writer fulfills the conventions of a particular Genre’s obligatory Inciting Incidents
in a completely unique way. A way that the reader never sees coming.

Here’s some advice…

Mix up your Inciting Incidents. Don’t make them all causal or all coincidental.
When the reader is expecting a causal event, swap in a coincidence and vice
versa.
41
H ow does one know when a Story isn’t working?

After more than ten thousand hours of publishing books,

reading submissions and being pitched both fiction and
COMMANDMENT nonfiction, here is just one of the criteria I use to separate
the wheat from the chaff.
NUMBER TWO
I simply track the Story’s progressive complications…the
escalating degrees of conflict that face the protagonist.

How do you do that?

Take this pitch as an example:

An ambitious actor/lawyer/chef/programmer graduates from

Julliard/Harvard/Culinary Institute of America/MIT and looks
for meaningful work. After months of rejections, the actor/
lawyer/chef/programmer decides to take a side job while
continuing to look for what will ultimately make him happy.

The Inciting Incident of the Story arrives (at long last) when
he gets a part time job as assistant to a casting director/
judge/Michelin star restaurateur/editor in chief of Wired
magazine. As he works for the casting director/judge/
Michelin star restaurateur/editor in chief of Wired magazine,
he is exposed to all of the best new projects in Hollywood/
Washington/New York/Silicon Valley and even gets to help
out by being a reader during auditions/doing paralegal
work/sous cheffing/writing code. The casting director/judge/
Michelin star restaurateur/editor in chief of Wired magazine
notices his talent and decides to promote him.

By dint of hard work the actor/lawyer/chef/programmer gets

the big job and the rewards that come with it—status and
money. But after a while, the actor/lawyer/chef/programmer
grows weary of the big Hollywood grind/legal profession/
food work/writing code and decides to go back to his first
love, the theater/pro bono work/artisanal cheese making/
new app innovation. He then auditions/takes up a cause/
 165

makes cheese/devises a new app that no one takes seriously let alone buys into.

COMMANDMENT NUMBER TWO

Until, at last, he gets a small time director/not for profit/cheese monger/software
company to take on his life’s work. The performance/cause/cheese debut/app
launches, but to little acclaim. The actor/lawyer/chef/programmer loses his shirt
on the project, but learns a lot about himself. He decides that his happiness is
dependent on his relationships and not the fantasies of finding meaning through
work. The End.

And yes, the above is indicative of the kind of material that floods literary agencies
and publishing houses. A very talented prose stylist could actually make the
above rather entertaining too. And he’d also be able to hide behind a pseudo-
Genre like “literary slice of life” to boot. But no matter the writerly artifice, this
Story doesn’t work. It may prove commercially viable depending upon the tenor
of the times, but it will never last as a work of art. Let’s assume the writer is not a
celebrity or the hottest young thing to come out of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
So extenuating commercial potentialities are not in play here. That is, the literary
agent can’t sell the Story based on just the identity of the writer. She has to sell it
on its Story.

Beyond the fact that there is no clear antagonist in the above, other than some
vague hinted sense that the lead character is having “inner turmoil.” Not to
mention the fact that the execution of the Inciting Incident—getting a job—is a
flaccid cliché. [There are a great many novels/screenplays that deal with Mini-
plot inner slice of life conflict with soft Inciting Incidents that do work. Madame
Bovary/Lost in Translation anyone?] The fatal flaw of the above Story is that the
difficulties and successes that the protagonist must contend with (the conflicts)
do not escalate. They remain boringly similar from derivative scene to derivative
scene and from derivative act to derivative act.

If you had to assign a number from 1 to 10 for each complication in this and its
anxiety/conflict level, and tracked the numbers from beginning to end, the result
would look something like this…and I’m being generous:

(2) Graduation

(3) Quest to find meaningful work

(4) Not finding meaningful work

(3) Finding a part time job instead

(2) Having success at part time job

(3) Getting promoted at part time job

166

(3) Finding more success at job

THE STORY GRID

(4) Leaving job to get back to quest for meaning

(5) Failing

(6) Getting the big break

(7) Failing

(3) Resigning oneself to meaningless work, for the sake of meaningful

relationships

You’ll see just by following the numbers (2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 3) that the

Story just kind of slogs along. It goes back over the same old complications too.
The stakes are boring as hell. The lead character faces rejection when looking for
work until he decides to lower his standards and accept a lesser status job. While
at the menial job, he gets the break of a lifetime and successfully takes advantage
of it. Then he becomes disillusioned by his success and decides to shuck the
entire career and start afresh. Then he goes back to trying to get work in his old
career and faces yet more rejection. At last he gets a big break that turns out to be
disappointing and then goes back to settle for something in between his dream
and punching the clock.

It’s not surprising that the above “Story” sounds like the banal professional choices
we all make at one or more times in our lives. But just regurgitating dull universal
experience does not make for cathartic reading or viewing.

And inevitably if an editor were to tactfully point out that the Story seems a bit
undercooked and that the writer should think about committing to a Genre or
mixing two or more Genres to ground some finer focused idea/theme…well you
probably know how that usually ends. The editor would get a terse reply back.
Thanks for reading, but that’s not the way I work…I don’t believe in formulaic
Genre hackwork.

But every now and then, an editor will find a pro, someone open enough (or
desperate enough) to get back to basics. A writer interested in creating an Inciting
Incident at level 10 with conflict/complications that progress from 11 to 100 by
Story’s end.

Progressive complications move stories forward, never backward. They do so

by making life more and more difficult (in positive as well as negative ways) for
your lead character. In other words, you cannot have your protagonist stare down
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the same dilemma in act 3 or act 2 that the character already faced in act 1. You

COMMANDMENT NUMBER TWO

must progressively move from one dilemma to a more trying dilemma to a bigger
problem to an even bigger problem etc.

The payoff is when the lead character is faced with the limits of human experience—
life and death. Cool Hand Luke, Sophie’s Choice, Network, Unforgiven, Gates of
Fire…walk us to the precipice of human experience and allow us to peer into the
abyss. And we don’t have to leave our comfortable seats to do it, either. That’s
called art.

So how can you be sure that your Story does the same?

Ask yourself the simple question…how difficult would it be for my character to

reverse his decision? Could he go back to his old life without any repercussions?
A few repercussions? Or is there no turning back?

You’ve hit the Point of No Return when no matter what decision the character
makes, he will be irrevocably changed by the experience. If he does one thing,
he’ll put himself in great danger (either physically or psychologically) and if he
doesn’t, he’ll be tormented by his inaction, incapable of functioning the way he
used to.

The trick to remember when evaluating the reversibility factor is how difficult
will it be for the character to go back in time if they make a certain decision. That
is, can they make a decision and not have it affect their worldview? Can they go
back to the way things used to be and not suffer any discontent or trauma?

If you re-read the example of the generic submission above, you’ll see that no
decision that the character makes will change them irrevocably. They can head
back in time any time they’d like and not have their worldview changed in any
way.

How do you know if you are falling into this same trap? That is, how do you know
if you are progressively complicating the life of your character?

I suggest going back to the grading concept above and use the power of ten.
Evaluate the difficulty for the character to reverse their decision in each and every
scene that you write. With 10 being absolutely irreversible to 1 being an easy
switch back. By the way, if your character isn’t making any decision in a scene,
it’s not a scene. It’s goofing around. Cut it or revise.
42
T he turning point in a beat, scene, sequence, act, subplot
or Story is the moment when new information comes to
the fore and a character can’t help but react. This is where
the rubber meets the road in a Story. Without clearly defined
THE LITTLE and surprising turning points, the reader/audience will lose
BUDDY OF interest. Quickly.
COMMANDMENT I’m writing an entire chapter on turning point and putting
NUMBER TWO it just after Progressive Complications for a reason. Turning
points are sort of the little buddies of complication. They are
the little choices that a writer makes that drive progressive
complications, the nails that put the progressively larger
complication building blocks in place in a Story.

There are only two ways you can create a turning point in
an event.

The event can turn with:

1. Character Action

2. Revelation

One of the best ways to tell if your scenes are working is to

pinpoint the exact place (the exact beat(s) and the precise
place in those beats) when the Story turns. It will be the
place when something unexpected happens.

To give you a very obvious example, there is a scene in the

screenplay Zero Dark Thirty where the female protagonist
(Jessica Chastain) has a friendly meeting/dinner date with
a colleague (Jennifer Ehle). These are the highest-ranking
women in the Islamabad CIA station and it’s their infrequent
chance to blow off some steam. Our hero is a workaholic
and through great effort, she finally pulls herself away from
her desk and arrives late for the dinner. There is an awkward
moment between the two like the one we all feel when we
are reintroduced to a person we don’t know well. You can’t
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yell at the acquaintance for being late, but you don’t want them to think they can

THE LITTLE BUDDY OF COMMANDMENT NUMBER TWO

treat you as a second-class citizen either. That sub-textual tension is palpable in
the scene as it plays out in the film.

At last the two relax and as they drink a glass of wine together the audience
settles in for what they expect will be the typical “girl talk” scene. The audience
is expecting these two to commiserate about how shitty it is that they are the only
women in the station and how the men treat them poorly and they get no support
and blah blah blah. We all like this kind of scene when it’s done well, especially
after the mini-drama of the protagonist even making it to the dinner itself. As
they pick up their wine, we, the audience, are looking forward to a relaxation
of physical action in the Storyline and the opportunity to eavesdrop on a juicy
conversation.

And we get some of that…but just before the scene goes on too long, while the
Jennifer Ehle character is tipping back her second glass of wine, there is a massive
explosion. The entire room completely disintegrates. The lights go out, fires erupt
etc.

Obviously the scene has completely turned from the action of two people getting
to know each other over light dinner conversation to the action of urgency for
survival. The two agents have to get the hell out of there before another bomb goes
off. The audience is grabbed by the throat and surprised by the revolutionary shift
in the scene. The turning point shakes the audience up as they breathlessly go on
the ride with the two women as they sort themselves out and find a passageway
to safety.

This is an example of a Character Action turning point scene. In an act of terrorism,

the major antagonists in the Story, Al Qaeda, have bombed a hotel. This is extra-
personal conflict antagonism at a very high level. This kind of turn on big action
is one often used for an act climax. It’s shocking and changes the entire specter
of the Story.

What is an example of a smaller turning point that is not a “big moment” Story
event but still emblematic of a character action turning point? There is a wonderful
moment in the movie The Way We Were that turns the scene with a very subtle
action.

Again, the setting is a restaurant/bar. Barbra Streisand plays the lead character
Katie Morosky. She’s a nice, hardworking Jewish girl from Brooklyn who has
entered a blue blood university in New England. She works at the local diner to
pay her way through school. She is infatuated with an All American blond blue-
eyed young man in her class, Robert Redford’s Hubble Gardiner.
170

In the Story, both Streisand and Redford are studying to be writers. She’s the
THE STORY GRID

grinder type who busts her ass with every word, sentence and paragraph…
relentlessly editing her work intellectually. He’s a natural. He doesn’t sweat. He
seemingly sits down, the gods descend, and he bangs out brilliant short stories.

She hates him for it but also can’t help but be attracted to him. Why has God
given such gifts to someone so privileged by birth?

So one night…it’s late…Streisand has just finished her nightly shift and she’s
walking back to her campus dorm room. Up ahead, she sees Redford, sitting
alone outside a restaurant with a pitcher of beer. He’s too much of a temptation.
She needs to keep focused. And she’s embarrassed too for being such a grind
and loser poor girl from the neighborhood. So she crosses the street so that she
doesn’t have to walk by him.

As she clicks her heels on the opposite sidewalk, Redford calls out to her.

The problem with some people is they work too hard.

He gets her to cross the street. You can tell he thinks she’s the greatest thing on
earth and he’s just drunk enough to let her know that. But he’s as insecure and
pathetic as she is. He sees himself as a huge fraud, someone given so much for
doing far too little. His gifts have not been earned like Streisand’s. He’s just one of
the lucky ones and he finds his life and the life of his friends rather absurd. She’s
the real deal.

To gain her admiration he tells her that he’s just sold a short Story. He knows that
she’s the only one who would be impressed by such a thing and he gets her to
share a beer with him in celebration.

After some flirty chitchat, Streisand begs off. She’s gotta get back and do her
homework. But before she can get away, Redford tells her to stop. The audience
thinks maybe he’s going to kiss her and declare his love for her. But instead he
takes another action that tells the audience everything they need to know about
him.

He sticks out his leg and tells her, Put your foot here. She does. He ties her
shoelace very tightly and says:

Go get ‘em, Katie.

This is also a scene that turns on character action. The big action of the scene is
Redford’s character tying the shoe of Streisand’s character instead of telling her
how he feels about her. He sends her on her way content that there is someone
wonderful in the world to take on the big battles that he is too cowardly to
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fight himself. He’s fine resting on his freely given gifts, getting drunk and feeling

THE LITTLE BUDDY OF COMMANDMENT NUMBER TWO

superior to everyone else because he “sees through” the bullshit. He will never
take up the sword like this woman will and he accepts that about himself.

This scene occurs in the first fifteen minutes of the movie and it pays off in a huge
way by the end. It leads to an end that is both surprising and inevitable.

Okay, so if those are two examples of scenes that turn on action, what are
examples of scenes that turn on revelation?

There is a wonderful small scene in Chinatown that is a perfect example of

revelation.

Jack Nicholson plays Jake Gittes. He’s caught up in the investigation of the
murder of a wealthy man in Los Angeles. He’s at the home of the victim, waiting
to interview his widow. As he waits in the backyard garden, there is a Chinese
gardener tending a lush natural pool of water. He’s pulling out sod that surrounds
the pool and notices Gittes looking at him perplexed.

Gittes has actually spotted something in the water and is focusing his attention
on whatever it is, but the gardener thinks he’s questioning him about why he’s
pulling up the sod.

Bad for the glass. the gardener says in rough English.

Huh? says Gittes.

Salt water, bad for the glass.

Yeah, bad for the glass. Gittes repeats.

Gittes then asks the gardener to fish out what he’s sighted in the pool. The gardener
does so, handing him a broken set of spectacles.

The beat ends as the widow (Faye Dunaway) enters, greeting Gittes in dressage
gear.

This small scene turns on two seemingly irrelevant revelations that will later have
a huge impact on the Story. Gittes doesn’t know at the time how the victim was
killed (he drowned). And again, this scene, like the one in The Way We Were
comes very early in the movie and seems sort of off-handed. But the revelations
in this exchange between two people who work for the powerful (a private
investigator and a gardener) are the key to the entire murder mystery.

The turning point revelations are that the pool in the backyard garden is saltwater
and that there was a pair of the murdered man’s glasses at the bottom of the pool.
172

Gittes eventually pulls those two pieces of information together and solves the
THE STORY GRID

case.

One last example of revelation turning a scene comes from The Great Gatsby.

One day, Gatsby invites his neighbor Nick Carraway for lunch in the city. Carraway
arrives and finds Gatsby sitting with an elderly gentleman. He joins the two men.
Carraway notices that the man has a set of cuff links made of human molar
teeth and that there’s something quite peculiar about the relationship between
the Oxford educated Gatsby and this rather common figure. At last the man rises
to take his leave and Caraway asks Gatsby who the man was.

Why, that’s the man who fixed the 1908 World Series…

This revelation that Gatsby is closely associated with an organized crime figure
turns the scene and the overall Story. We don’t need to know anything more
about how Gatsby has found his fortune. He openly consorts with gangsters.

Character action and revelation are the only ways to turn scenes.

When you edit your work, put each of your scenes under a microscope and see
where you’ve turned your scenes and by what method you’ve done so. If they
turn on action, action, action, action and you infrequently use revelation, guess
what? The reader/audience will get frustrated. Your book or screenplay will seem
“overly plotted, making it hard to suspend disbelief.”

Similarly if you turn all of your scenes with revelation, revelation, revelation,
your Story will seem, and most likely will be, melodramatic. It will feel like a
telenovela/soap opera because there is no let up on new information. Either way,
if you do not regulate your turning points, your work will lack narrative drive…
that magic stuff that keeps people turning pages.

The key is to find a compelling mix between how your beats, scenes, sequences
and acts turn. If your act 1 crisis scene turns on revelation, you might want to
consider turning your act 1 climax scene on action and vice versa. If you hear
comments from others like “something just doesn’t feel right” about your Story, it
could be a turning point problem.

Taking an analytical approach to your work when you put on your editor hat is
very important. It will help you find out what the problems are in your Story so
that you can fix them. It’s like a weird noise in your car. You need to find out what
the problem is before you can fix it. This is what the analytical/editor mind is all
about.
43
T hou must have a crisis.

The crisis in a beat, a scene, a sequence, an act, a subplot

and the global Genre boils down to a question.
COMMANDMENT In all of the units of Story…after the Inciting Incident…the
NUMBER THREE protagonist faces complication(s)…the Story turning points
then lead to definable dilemmas. These dilemmas must
coalesce into a question that offers a choice between two
options.

Confronted with another character’s direct action (or extra-

personal action like the bomb in Zero Dark Thirty) or by the
revelation of new information, will the protagonist do this?
Or will the protagonist do that?

The crisis is the time when your protagonist must make

a decision. And the choice that he makes will determine
whether he’ll get closer to or further away from his objects
of desire (both external and internal). Often a particular
choice will move a character closer to one object of desire
while moving him further away from the other…

If the writer is choosing an ironic ending to his Story, it stands

to reason that if the protagonist gets closer to his external
object of desire, the likelihood is that he’ll move further
away from his internal object of desire. And vice versa.

Crises are questions that arise just after a scene turns.

That is, once the turn occurs in a unit of Story through an

action or a revelation, that change in circumstance raises a
question. That question is the crisis.

For example:

• A man walking down the street falls into a manhole.

(A coincidental Inciting Incident)

• When he regains his senses, he discovers that he’s

waist deep in water. (A complication)

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174

• The water begins to rush around him and he struggles to hold his ground.
THE STORY GRID

(A second complication)

• He loses his footing and he’s moved along in the underground current. (A
third complication that escalates the reversibility factor…he won’t be able
to go back through the same manhole that he fell through…he’s quickly
reached the point of no return.)

• As he funnels through the pipe, gulping as much air as he can, he

discovers that the pipe is getting narrower and that it will eventually reach
a circumference that he will not be able to pass through. He’ll eventually
plug the hole (a turning point on revelation) and then the water will
overwhelm him and he will drown (escalation of complication to the limits
of human experience).

• He feels along the surface of the pipe to try and find a hold of some sort
to stop his forward progress. He finds a crossbar and successfully grabs it.
This grabbing of the crossbar is an active turning point that changes the
direction of the value in the scene, in this case moving it from imminent
death to life. The character has actively turned his world around.

• But the water keeps rushing over him, pulling him away from his hold.
He understands that there is a limited amount of time that he can stay in
this position. As he catches his breath his eyes now adjust to the darkness.
He sees that there is a beam of light that shines about twenty feet away
from him downstream. He suspects this beam of light comes from another
manhole, like the one he fell through. This revelation is a second turning
point in the scene that increases his chance for survival.

• These two beat turning points (grabbing the cross bar and seeing the light)
lead to the scene’s crisis.

• Should he let go of the crossbar and ride the water twenty feet to the next
manhole to take the chance that he’ll be able to grab hold of its exit ladder
to the street? Or should he stay put, wait for the rush of water to slow and
then carefully make his way to the next manhole? He remembers that it
was a very busy walkway he fell through and undoubtedly someone saw
him fall into the hole. Are the chances that someone did see him fall and
went to find help to fish him out better than him taking the risk to ride the
water to the next manhole exit?
 175

This question is the crisis point of the scene.

COMMANDMENT NUMBER THREE

The way the protagonist answers this question will show the reader/viewer
what kind of person he is. The character’s actions, not his words, define him.
Compelling crisis questions and the way they are answered are the way to reveal
character.

If you remember the old Batman TV shows or other kids’ programs from the 50s
60s and 70s, you’ll recognize the crisis point rather easily. This was the point
in the show just before a commercial or just before the episode ended. Writing
those kinds of crises is a technique called the cliffhanger. It leaves the audience
with a question that they will desperately want answered. And used with great
skill, cliffhangers increase the narrative velocity of your Story. But trundled out
too often, cliffhangers become irritating and cliché.

The crisis is that point when the protagonist must do something.

And remember choosing to do nothing is doing something too.

If the man in the hole decides to stay put and wait for help … that choice says a
lot about him.

• He believes in the basic goodness of humanity…that anyone who sees a

person fall into a hole would immediately drop what they were doing and
run for help.

• He’s confident in his strength to hold on to the crossbar for as long as it

takes for someone to arrive. Every bit of energy he expels to stay on the
crossbar will drain him of energy to reach up to the next manhole and pull
him up.

If on the other hand he decides to let go and make a grab for the next manhole
that says a lot about him too.

• This character is self-reliant to the point that he’ll risk his own life depending
upon himself instead of believing in other powers coming to his aid.

• He knows that for every second he spends waiting for help, it will drain
him of energy to help himself. And he’d rather bet on himself than someone
else to save his own life.
176

As you can see, both of these options are “bad” choices. They could both result in
THE STORY GRID

his death. The character acting on the option that is the least bad choice is what
will define him to the reader.

So the two turns of the scene, the action to grab the crossbar and the revelation that
there is a manhole twenty feel away, lead to the two pronged crisis questions—
Should I stay? Or should I go?

If there is an easy way out or an obvious path for your lead character at a crisis,
you are making a major mistake. You will lose your reader or your viewer right
then and there.

Why?

We live day-to-day, month-to-month and year-to-year, making small, medium

and large choices in our lives. The simple choices we make automatically. They
are not interesting. We do not want to revisit them in our precious downtime in
a Story. Unless she’s a diabetic who has already lost her left leg to the disease,
having your lead character decide whether or not she puts sugar in her coffee is
not a choice any of us wants to read about.

We want to see the hard choices and we want to see where they lead for your
characters. None of us can go back in time and change difficult decisions we’ve
made in our lives. So we go to Story to evaluate whether or not we made the
right choice. We either find comfort from stories that show us that we’ve done
the right thing. Or on the other side, when we make a mistake, in a Story we get
to experience the path of a different course. Risk Free! A new map to help us find
our courage.

We go to Story to experience life at the edge, where we’ve been shaken in our
boots in our own lives.

This is what stories are for…to reassure us that we’ve made the right decision in
our own lives or to help us recognize our mistakes, learn from them and find the
courage to change.

So the crisis choices in your Story cannot be easy, or we’ll fall asleep.

What defines humanity is our ability to think and choose. A muskrat doesn’t face
existential dilemmas. He doesn’t worry about whether or not he should kill a rat
and eat it. He just does that automatically. But human beings are blessed and
cursed with the ability to choose, to discern complex moral issues and to define
their place on the earth by the choices they make. Life is an ever-escalating
process of making choices.
 177

All crises, of course, are not created equal. You need to build to the end of the

COMMANDMENT NUMBER THREE

line. They all are not life and death, but they all must be the best bad choice
variety or of the irreconcilably good variety. It is the escalation of crises in your
Story from reversible to irreversible that “raises the stakes” and not only gives
your Story narrative momentum, but deep meaning.

So when you are stuck looking at any of your units of the Story form (beat,
scene, sequence, act, subplot, global Story) get out your magnifying glass and
analyze the effectiveness of your crises. Are they building from meaningful but
not irreversible to life changing and irreversible?

Track them.

If your crises are banal and pointless, so will your Story be banal and pointless.

Before I dive into climax, which is the moment when a character acts on his crisis
choice, it’s worth taking a closer look at the two types of Story crises, the best bad
choice and the choice between irreconcilable goods.
44
W e face two critical crisis kinds of decisions in our lives.

These decisions define who we are as human beings.

We do not live in an evil/good, joy/misery, sated/starving
THE BEST BAD kind of world. Never have. Never will. Because we don’t—
we always fall on a spectrum within the confines of each of
CHOICE CRISIS these values—we rely on stories to help us figure out how
to choose between two bad choices or two irreconcilably
good choices.

These two qualities of dilemma that define us flesh and

blood human beings also define characters.

When you are considering how best to create the appropriate

crisis question for your character, think in terms of the best
bad choice or a choice between irreconcilable goods.

What do I mean by “The Best Bad Choice?” Here are two

examples, one from the made up world and one from real
life.

You’ve seen the movie Rocky? If you haven’t it’s a very simple
setup. The lead character of the movie is a Philadelphia
mook named Rocky Balboa, a boxer with a lot of heart
but a rapidly fading twinkle of talent. At the beginning of
Sylvester Stallone’s screenplay, Rocky’s at that place we can
all appreciate. He’s accepted his station in life. He makes
enough scratch from the local black hand as an enforcer
to live the way he sees himself deserving to live… in a flop
house with a sweat and bloodstained mattress propped on
cinderblocks with two cans left of a six pack of beer and half
eaten slab of processed meat in the fridge.

Rocky still gets in the ring and even sometimes wins, but
he’s really just … as my father used to say “getting Monday
into Tuesday … Tuesday into Wednesday … and so on.”
Stallone lets us soak up this sad life for a good chunk of
pages before he gives us all what we know is coming. The
Inciting Incident of the performance Genre in every boxing
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novel/movie/short Story is the opportunity for THE BIG FIGHT. Rocky gets picked

THE BEST BAD CHOICE CRISIS

to fight the heavyweight champion of the world.

Not because he earned it, but because of his silly pugilistic moniker… The Italian
Stallion. This is an example of a coincidental Inciting Incident, like winning the
lottery.

The chance to fight the big fight is what we all say we want, isn’t it?

If Random House just took my novel on as a lark… they wouldn’t even have
to give me an advance… I’d bust my butt, promote it like hell and make it a
success… I’d show them how wrong they are to dismiss my work…

We say to ourselves that given a lock, an opportunity, we’d be our best selves and
kick some serious ass.

Would we though?

Stallone knew that giving his fictional character the chance that we all want
would seriously invest us in Rocky’s life. Even a ballet dancer or billionaire would
relate to this guy.

So where does the Best Bad Choice come in here? Rocky has no bad choice
right? The Gods have intervened and given him something he always dreamed
of… what could be bad about that?

Stallone has Rocky explain his situation to the arthritic, pockmarked old Irish gym
rat played by Burgess Meredith, a man who has come to see Rocky to ask for the
shot to train him. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with archetypes/stereotypes
if you do them well (specificity please)… and who doesn’t love the old battle-
scarred sensei? Even though Meredith’s “Mick” shamed Rocky by taking away
his locker at the gym, Rocky knows that he did it because Mick always expected
more of him. Mick thought Rocky had “moxie” before he became a bum.

When Mick comes to Rocky’s dump to offer his services, Rocky takes a long look
at his situation. Rocky’s no Einstein (are any of us?), but he’s not stupid either. He
has two bad choices.

The first choice is to fight the champ and get the crap kicked out of him. The
champ is the greatest fighter of all time and could very likely kill him with one
precise blow to his head. At the very least Rocky will be humiliated. He’ll become
a barroom joke… not just in Philadelphia but all over the world. That’s his first
choice—humiliation.
180

The second choice is seemingly not so bad. He could beg off, tell the champ he
THE STORY GRID

appreciates the shot, but he’s just not at his level. There would be no shame in
turning down an unwinnable fight would there? Rocky would be able to keep
threatening welshers for his mafia boss and he could stay in his flop for the rest of
his life. And he’d have a great Story to tell people about how he turned down the
greatest fighter of all time… No one would blame him for choosing to run away.

Really, only one person—two actually—would find that choice cowardly.

The first choice, fighting, could lead to literal death. But Rocky also knows that
running away, the second bad choice, would be spiritual death. He’d end up
hating himself even more than he already does. Shame is at stake versus honor.
(Shame/honor is the core global value at stake for the performance Genre.)

What’s even better is that Stallone makes Rocky face himself thirty years in the
future, in the form of Mick. Rocky knows that Mick knows the balance sheet of
both choices here. Because even though Stallone never literally states it in the
screenplay, the reader/viewer knows that Mick made the choice to quit decades
before. This is why Rocky and Mick are the perfect match to take on a power as
great as the champ.

They’re both in it for redemption. And trust me, there is not a fighter in the world
who wants to step into a ring with someone looking for redemption. [The External
Performance Genre’s shame/honor welded to the Internal Morality Genre/
Redemption Plot is irresistible.]

The best bad choice for Rocky is to fight.

He can take a physical beating, but he won’t be able to live with himself with a
psychological one. He’ll always be a bum, but at least he’ll be an honorable one.
Mick knows Rocky’s situation too. It’s why he dragged his ass to Rocky’s dump in
the first place. This best bad choice crisis comes at the end of the Beginning Hook
of the screenplay, and it sets up the rest of the movie perfectly.

What’s an example of the best bad choice for nonfiction?

A while back, two men in powerful positions in the U.S., one a member of Congress
and one a Governor were faced with the same Best Bad Choice situation. Both
men, as men seem to do over and over again, lost themselves in their intoxicating
positions of being highly respected members of government.

A great number of people relied on these men, sacrificed for these men and
believed in them. But if you had to boil down to the single other human being on
the planet who believed in them the most, you’d have to say their life partners—
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their wives—sacrificed the most for them. I’m sure their wives were not and still

THE BEST BAD CHOICE CRISIS

aren’t saints and that the relationships had all of the deeply serious challenges that
any committed one does. But the fact is that there’s just one rule in a committed
relationship that is unassailable.

You must remain faithful. You cannot cheat.

Both men cheated, one with a prostitute and one online. They both made a
terrible decision, one that they most likely continued to make over and over again
until they got caught. (I’m no psychologist, but it’s pretty obvious that everyday
people, not sociopaths, do stupid things more out of self-sabotage than animus.)

One chose to call a press conference, admitted that he’d been with a prostitute
and eventually resigned as the Governor, probably destroying his political career
for the rest of his life in the process. The other said his computer had been hacked
and denied that he did anything inappropriate. Eventually after overwhelming
evidence that the man claiming victimhood was lying, he finally admitted that he
not only did what he said he didn’t do, but that he lied about it…twice…once to
his wife and then to the world.

Both men had to face a real life Best Bad Choice… admit a character defect and
take the consequences or lie and maybe get away with it. One man’s bad choice
was truly better than the other’s, wasn’t it? The guy who came clean right off the
bat? You have more sympathy for that guy, don’t you? You’re more likely to give
that guy a break than the other one, aren’t you?

This is the stuff of humanity and by association art. You must understand the
concept of the best bad choice and artfully place your characters in these kinds
of situations and have them choose. The choices they make will tell the reader/
viewer/listener what kind of character they are.

What your characters say they are is not who they are… What they do is the key.
45
N ow the Yang to the Best Bad Choice Yin is choosing
between Irreconcilable Goods.

Making a choice between two “good” things sounds pretty

THE great right? No matter what you pick, a positive will come
to the world. But don’t Stories require conflict? How can
IRRECONCILABLE a choice between two good things, not just drive a Story
GOODS CRISIS forward but actually create a catharsis?

The key word, of course, is “irreconcilable.” Choosing one

good precludes the other. What’s good for someone else is
a different kind of good for you and what’s good for you is a
different kind of good for someone else.

But any good is just as good as another good, right?

No, it isn’t.

One of my favorite movies, Kramer vs. Kramer, starts with

a double “best bad choice” scenario but then is all about
irreconcilable goods.

Wife Kramer (an impossible part played brilliantly by Meryl

Streep) is at a crisis point with Husband Kramer (played by
Dustin Hoffman). Only problem is that they have a four-
year-old little boy.

Is staying with her husband—a narcissist of the highest order

who cares little for her and barely registers the existence of
their son—until her boy is grown worse than denying her
inner self? Wife Kramer thinks staying is worse. She’s gotta
go. That’s best bad choice number one.

Now should she take the little boy with her? She’s an
emotional wreck and has no idea of what she’s going to do
with her life or how. So wouldn’t it be better to leave the boy
with the father until she gets squared away? Wife Kramer
thinks leaving the boy is the best bad choice. That’s best bad
choice number two.
 183

This movie is so brilliantly written that everything I’ve just described happens in

THE IRRECONCILABLE GOODS CRISIS

the first sixty seconds…

Now left to care for the little guy after his hysterical wife flies the coop, Hoffman’s
character has to make a series of irreconcilably good choices.

He can hire a full-time nanny and stay on his career track as an up and coming
advertising exec. Or he can take the kid to school, pick him up, make his dinner,
clean up after him, discipline him, read him stories, and answer endless ridiculous
and often impossible questions from his maddening four-year-old point of view.

Hiring a third-party caregiver would be good for Kramer personally and it would
be good for his kid too. All of his hard work making something of himself will
most likely lead to professional recognition, more money, etc. And because of
the money etc. his son will have privileges and opportunities in life that the older
Kramer didn’t have when he was a boy.

He’ll be a great role model for his son…hard work pays off, stay focused!

But does his son really need that kind of role model when he’s four years old?

Doesn’t he just want his mom and dad there when he bangs his head on the
coffee table?

So the other good choice would be to put the brakes on his career, take a lesser
paying job, and make it to every school play. He’ll teach his son how to draw just
like his old man does for a living. He’ll get angry at his son for bullying the next
door neighbor and then he’ll stand behind his boy when he knocks on the door
to apologize…

That would be a good choice too, right?

His son would learn that money and titles aren’t really that important if it means
that a man can’t eat dinner with his family. Having someone to cry with about
losing his mommy (or wife) trumps a key to the executive washroom.

Of this stuff are “irreconcilable goods” conflicts made. I saw this movie before
I became a man, as I’m sure a lot of men of my generation did. Go to any
playground today. Guess what you’ll see. A bunch of dads with their kids. Stories
change people.
46
Y ou must have a climax in every unit of your Story.
Because the climax is the truth of character.

It is the precise moment in your beat, scene, sequence, act,

COMMANDMENT subplot and global Story when your character acts on his/
her crisis choice. And as we all know, choices and actions
NUMBER FOUR tell the truth about our character(s). We may make a choice
to do one thing, but when the moment actually comes, we
often act differently.

Seriously, this kind of stuff happens every single day to us.

Our friend may tell us that she’ll back us up and stand with
us at a meeting to discuss what to do about our school’s
lunch program…but when the meeting commences, our
friend often (sadly most often) remains silent.

Our friend’s crisis choice that she so passionately told us

about before the meeting (she was going to stand up with us
to change something that would require a lot of work and
risk the majority group’s disapproval) is all well and good,
but it is not a reflection of her character.

Only her actions reflect her character. Her silence at the

meeting tells us who she really is (fearful and cowardly
when in a group). That moment of truth is the climax of the
scene and it changes the way we view her character from
that point forward.

A climax is the active answer to the question raised by a

crisis.

It’s the choice the character makes between the best bad
one or between irreconcilable goods. This is the big reveal
of character. Not who he says he is, but who he really is.

Also it’s important to remember that when the protagonist

makes a choice and acts on that choice, that climax must
be on stage. That is, it has to happen on the page or on the
screen, not in some previous scene or moment that another
 185

character reports. To rob the reader or viewer of the crucial moment of truth

COMMANDMENT NUMBER FOUR

for a protagonist will devastate them. It will make them so angry that they will
probably never read anything you write ever again. You’ve promised them page
after page that you are going to give them a great scene where the protagonist
faces an impossible choice. You’ve got to deliver it. Seriously.

With that said, secondary characters can choose and act off stage and then the
results of those choices and actions can be reported as revelations later on.
Protagonists, though, must make their choices and actions ON STAGE!

As with crises, climaxes move from minor to medium to large to life changing.
In a Story with both External and Internal Genre dimensions, if faced with the
similar crisis in the Beginning Hook and the Ending Payoff, what your protagonist
chooses at the beginning of your Story and what your character chooses at the
end of your Story should be opposite choices.

What I mean is this: Do you think Rick in Casablanca would choose to give
up his long-lost love at the beginning of the Story? No way. At the beginning of
Casablanca, Rick is a self-obsessed sad sack who won’t stick his neck out for
anybody. By the end, he’s a hero, a character willing to sacrifice himself for the
greater good of humanity. What happens between the beginning and the end is a
progressive escalation of crises and climaxes in Rick’s life that make him change
his worldview. This is what’s known as the internal arc of the character and is
determined by your choice of Internal Genre.

It is true that some of the External Genres don’t require an internal arc…like a
master detective murder mystery or a James Bond action adventure, but they still
require external crises and climaxes aplenty.

You’ve probably heard a million times that a character must “arc.” What that
means (again some Genres do not require an internal character arc) is that the
lead character in a Story cannot remain the same person he/she was at the end of
the novel/movie as they were at the beginning.

The Internal Content Genres are those that move a character and his status or
worldview or morality from one place to another by Story’s end. And the global
Story’s climax delivers the catharsis inherent in such a journey.

Many commercial writers find this “protagonists must arc” rule silly. And extremely
talented action writers disregard it all of the time. Don’t people face threats in
their lives, overcome them, and then return to stasis? Didn’t Donald Trump build
a fortune, lose most of it, and then regain it? Isn’t he the same person he was in
2014 as he was in 1980? Probably he is.
186

But I would posit that Donald Trump (the public Donald Trump, who knows, he
THE STORY GRID

may be a philosopher king in private) is not a three dimensional character. He

could be the basis of an action hero, or amateur detective murder mystery (lead
characters in long form Storytelling that do not arc) like a John Connor or a Lara
Croft or a Miss Marple or Sherlock Holmes or Columbo. But as a fully fleshed
out lead character in a literary novel or a thriller or any of the other Genres that
require a compelling subconscious as well as conscious object of desire? Not so
much.

What the character arc is crucial for is to achieve a cathartic global Story climax.
When I say catharsis, I mean an overwhelming emotional reaction from the
audience...tears, indescribable joy…the kind of experience that keeps us coming
back to the movies, to books, to plays. If you’re a writer and you tell me you have
no interest in bringing the audience to catharsis, you’re lying.

This is not to thumb the nose at the action Genre or the murder mystery or
any of the other External Content Genres. Because these Genres have been
so thoroughly mined over the centuries, creating a surprising action Story or
inscrutable murder mystery Story is practically impossible. It takes a tremendous
skill and imagination to breathe new life into these classic Genres. They are as
difficult to successfully execute as writing a book that wins the Booker prize. For
my money, they are harder to write.

But back to climax:

What do I mean by progressively complicated climaxes?

Let’s look at the protagonist in The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling, and
track some of the climax moments she must face in the novel. By the way, the
film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs is dead solid perfect. You know why?
Because Ted Tally, the screenwriter, and Jonathan Demme basically “shot the
book.” They recognized how perfectly constructed the novel was, so they didn’t
ruin it with “interpretation.” You can watch the movie and get the same effect as
reading the book. Doing both is one of the rare pleasures in life…especially for
Story addicts like myself.

All right, let’s track some scenes:

The crisis in the very first scene of the book (chapter 1) is a best bad choice
situation.

Clarice Starling is given the opportunity to interview the madman Hannibal

Lecter. Just being in a room with the guy will open her up to serious darkness.
It’s no small decision. Her choices are that she can decline the opportunity and
 187

protect herself and stay on course to become a garden-variety FBI agent. Or she

COMMANDMENT NUMBER FOUR

can take the job and earn brownie points with the man she’s trying to impress,
the head of Behavioral Science Jack Crawford.

The climax of this first scene is that she decides to take the job.

It’s an exciting active choice that shows Starling is no coward, but it is in no way
a decision that will change Starling’s worldview. Is it a huge climax? No. It’s a big
choice though and one that has just enough oomph to keep the reader turning
pages wondering what is going to happen next…

Now the crisis in the third scene of the novel’s Middle Build (chapter 13) is
another best bad decision, but the stakes here are much higher than in the first
scene.

Starling must decide whether she should confront Jack Crawford about his
behavior toward her at the crime scene in Potter, West Virginia. When the two
were there to fingerprint a victim of serial killer Buffalo Bill, Crawford asked to
speak with the sheriff privately…out of her hearing range…as if she were too
delicate for “manly talk.”

Crawford left Starling to stand with a gaggle of low-level cops as if she were a
little girl and he, her father, was going in to speak to the principal. The disrespect
stings and it hurts her ability to get the townspeople to take her seriously as an
FBI agent. She suspects that Crawford is using her.

As she is doing the job of an FBI agent, even though she’s an FBI trainee, Starling
wants to be treated as such. But if she confronts Crawford about his behavior,
she may lose him as her mentor. He may not want to have the kind of honest
personal relationship with her that she needs and he could dump her from the
investigation. On the other hand, if she doesn’t confront him about the disrespect,
he will probably continue to treat her as a trained dog instead of a colleague with
something to contribute.

So the crisis is confront and risk banishment or let it go and guarantee servitude.

The climax of the scene is that Starling chooses to confront Crawford.

Here is a perfect example of “showing, not telling.” Harris never describes Starling
as “courageous.” Instead he has her act courageously.

And then Harris has Crawford react to her courage too. He apologizes, in his
way, by saying “duly noted, Starling.” Just enough for her to get satisfaction, but
not enough to lower his position.
188

This moment may seem small, but it is a climax of one of the novel’s subplots
THE STORY GRID

as well as the climax of the third scene of the Middle Build. The subplot in this
case is an Internal Genre Status Admiration plot. This moment not only moves
the serial killer thriller and disillusionment plots forward (Harris’ External and
Internal global Genre choices), it represents a large change in Starling’s status. Her
ultimate goal (external object of desire) is to work with Crawford permanently as
a certified FBI agent. This moment shows that she’s progressed to a place where
her superior has acknowledged that she is worthy of respect.

Just to track the progression of climaxes here. In chapter 1 of The Silence of the
Lambs, we have a climax that propels the entire action of the novel…Starling
decides to take the job. By the Middle Build, we have a climax that shows Starling
has not only done the job well, but is now respected as someone capable of
doing the job the rest of her life.

Harris’ climax progression is natural and organic…seamless.

For fun, let’s examine where Harris escalates the crisis and climax even more to
what is often called The Point of No Return. The Point of No Return is the critical
moment of irreversibility for the protagonist…that place where she’ll never be the
same, no matter what choice she makes in the crisis.

At the beginning of the novel, Starling decides to expose herself to a brilliant

manipulator. She does this rather subconsciously. That is, she doesn’t really think
too much about the fact that she’s serving her own mind up on a plate to the
cannibal Hannibal Lecter.

She’s jacked up with ambition to join the venerable FBI, so she acts with blind
belief in the institution and its stewards, without deeply thinking about the
consequences of her decisions. (Sound familiar?) That sentence could describe a
freshman in College or a new CEO coming into IBM or us joining a fancy country
club.

At the height of the Middle Build, Starling faces a crisis that will make her come
out of her fog and confront the reality of just what she’s gotten herself into. She’s
progressed from life as normal to life as extraordinary to living without much self-
knowledge subconsciously to consciously facing the truth about herself. She’s
coping with the prospect of her actions or inactions leading to end of the line of
human experience…DEATH.

Here’s the situation:

Buffalo Bill has abducted another woman and is planning to skin her to create
the final piece for his “woman suit.” Induced by Crawford, Starling goes to talk
 189

to Lecter to convince him to help them stop Buffalo Bill. But Lecter won’t speak

COMMANDMENT NUMBER FOUR

to Starling unless he gets a quid pro quo. He won’t help her, unless she opens
herself up to Lecter’s own special brand of psychoanalysis.

He wants to get inside her mind.

I’m going to analyze this crisis as an irreconcilable goods situation. Starling can
either reject the quid pro quo and save her inner most thoughts and self and
subconscious desires from being toyed with. Good for her. Or she can accept
Lecter’s terms and perhaps save a woman from certain death. Good for the
woman and the rest of society. If she decides to agree, though, she’ll essentially
be letting the devil into her mind.

This is a major moment of truth and will tell us whether Starling has the stuff of
the hero.

At the beginning of the novel, if Starling had faced this same dilemma, chances
are she would have chosen to keep her mind to herself. But because she’s
progressed so far in her quest to become an FBI agent by the time of this critical
meeting, she’s vulnerable to this ultimatum. There is no turning back once Lecter
gets inside her mind.

She’ll never be able to get him out.

As you’ll see if you take a look at The Story Grid for The Silence of the Lambs,
Harris gives us the point of no return in the middle of his Story. The promise he’s
making the reader by doing so with half of the telling left, is that he’s going to take
his Story to the end of the line of human experience.

In terms of the Story’s values, Starling has moved from positive life at the beginning
of the Story to the negative of unconsciousness at the end of the Inciting Incident
of the global Story to now comprehending that she’s in a life or death situation. If
she does not act, someone will die. Now the Story value is clearly in the negative
death arena. But with this big scene coming so early, Harris is promising that the
value will go more negative still. He is going to drive it down to the fate even
worse than death, the place of damnation.

Harris is making a promise in the Middle Build of the Story that is so attractive,
the reader won’t be able to stop reading. What’s even better is that he delivers on
that promise so assuredly by the novel’s Ending Payoff.
47
T he fifth and final element of Story form is the least
respected and often forgotten. But it’s indispensable.

The resolution of a beat, scene, sequence, act, subplot

COMMANDMENT or global Story is crucial for the reader or viewer to fully
metabolize the Story. Many writers dash these moments off
NUMBER FIVE in epilogues or one or two sentence updates at the end of a
climactic scene.

One exception, of course, is the innovative ending of Animal

House, which was perfect for that movie because the viewer
just needed some time to enjoy the outrageous climax and
the wonderful music. Having a scene where the Deltas all
met at a diner later that evening to talk about what they were
going to do in the future would have been ridiculous. Instead
the director John Landis created stills with biographical
updates for each of the characters one by one, resolving
their stories with a little bit of fallout action from the panic
at the Homecoming parade and then a cutaway to a photo
and bio. Just like they do in college “class notes” magazines
years and decades after.

The ending of Animal House was a perfect resolution (easy,

funny, smart and with just enough tag moments to bring the
viewer down from the hilarious climax). But like all things
that have been done over and over again, the photo-montage
movie resolution has lost its effectiveness with each new
repetition. The most recent I can remember was the movie
Argo. The trick, as is the trick in not creating cliché moments
in the other four Story commandments, is to not settle for
the first idea that comes into your head.

Dig deep inside yourself and create something new,

something fresh that we have not read or seen before. That
takes a lot of time, but it’s worth the effort.
 191

So how does a resolution scene work? That is, how does it move from one pole

COMMANDMENT NUMBER FIVE

of a value to the other? Isn’t it really just a summing up of what has already taken
place?

One way to approach a resolution is to create a fable or a metaphor to reinforce

the way in which the climax changed the character or characters in the Story.
Some of the best fables come from old war stories.

Here’s an example of a perfect resolution scene from a longer chapter from Steven
Pressfield’s book The Warrior Ethos:

A Roman general was leading his legions toward the enemy in a swampy
country. He knew that the next day’s battle would be fought on a certain
plain because it was the only dry, flat place for miles. He pushed his army
all night, marching them through a frightening and formidable swamp, so
that they reached the battle site before the fore and could claim the high
ground. In the aftermath of victory, the general called his troops together
and asked them, “Brothers, when did we win the battle?”

One captain replied, “Sir, when the infantry attacked.”

Another said, “Sir, we won when the cavalry broke through.”

“No,” said the general. “We won the battle the night before—when our men
marched through that swamp and took the high ground.”

This is a perfect example of a compelling resolution. In this hundred odd word little
Story, the reader walks with an army of thousands, trudges through a harrowing
swamp only to be faced with a bloody battle with no sleep. The values at stake
are life/death, victory/defeat, honor/dishonor etc. They are all in the negative at
the beginning.

But despite the army’s exhaustion, they win the battle and end the scene on a
positive.

So the Story turns here from what the reader believes could be annihilation (How
can one expect to fight hand to hand with no rest the night before?) to victory.
The values move from negative to positive. That’s the surface external war Genre
Storyline for the scene. And it climaxes in victory.

The internal revelation Storyline though is not resolved by the external climax.
And yes there is an internal struggle in this Story…the struggle to keep one’s shit
together before battle and how best to do that. So the resolution of this little Story
must “tag” and resolve the Internal Genre.
192

The reader/listener would be left wanting if the internal lesson wasn’t resolved.
THE STORY GRID

Without the general calling his victorious drunken mates together and having a
little Socratic dialogue at the end in the resolution scene, the internal “revelation
plot” and its value shift from negative to positive (ignorance to knowledge)
would be lost on the reader. The takeaway is—the way to keep one’s head is to
think clearly about strategy and tactics. That little lesson makes the chaos of war
digestible. It reveals that science and reason can save lives...especially in the
preparations for combat.

What’s really great about this tiny Story is that the resolution seems obvious once
it’s stated.

The general reminds his men of the work they put in before the fight. Of course
they won the battle because they seized the high ground before the enemy could.
Everyone knows it’s far easier to win a battle from a higher position. Running
downhill is far easier than it is fighting while charging uphill. But because the
value at stake in the external Storyline is so dire (being killed in a nasty battle)
and the reader’s anticipation of the climax of the external Storyline is so great,
the reader forgets, if only momentarily, the internal conflict within the characters.

Fighting the internal enemy and winning that battle is the key to defeating the
external enemy is the payoff resolution of the Story. Doing the inner work of war
is the way to hold off the terror of its commencement.

Thus the resolution of this Story…”we won the battle the night before…” really
tags the entire scene, reinforcing the substance of the Inciting Incident (a battle
must be fought), the progressive complications (swamps and fatigue), the crisis
(do we burn energy for a tactical advantage or rest and fight uphill?), and the
climax (they take the tactical advantage).

But didn’t Pressfield just repeat some ancient mini-tale? He didn’t invent this
Story, did he?

Here’s a little secret. I’ve read a LOT of ancient war stories and histories. I can’t
recall reading this mini-Story in any of the classics. It doesn’t mean it’s not there,
of course. Pressfield has read far more in this arena than I have. But it may not be
any one place.

What I think Pressfield did here was what Homer and Thucydides did way back
in the pre-digital age. Pressfield opened his mind to all of the reading and work
he’d done in his forty plus years of studying writing and ancient history and came
up with that Roman general anecdote. Pressfield the writer took all that he read
before and created something unique and fresh and true. In less than a hundred
words.
 193

Pressfield came up with that resolution. And he came up with the rest of it too.

COMMANDMENT NUMBER FIVE

Somehow a guy in Los Angeles in 2011 was able to create a mini-Story using
the fable form (a form that was not prevalent in ancient times by the way) that
rings true for ancient warriors and of U.S. Special Forces today. And he did it so
effectively that The Warrior Ethos is now mandatory reading for the U.S. Marine
Corps and for first year midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Resolutions and turning them masterfully so that they are unexpected, yet on
reflection obvious, is what takes a very good Story from entertaining to memorable.

So, don’t dash off resolution scenes. Don’t settle for “summing up” what happened
previously in the climax. The reader already knows what happened. What the
resolution moment does is tells the reader exactly what the climax of the Story
MEANS. How the worldview has shifted.

Another trick to keep in mind is if your global Story rests on a massive internal
shift in your lead character, the resolution scene should resolve the external
changes in that character. If your maturation plot is the global Story climax, the
resolution scene should revolve around a subplot External Genre. Likewise, like
the Pressfield example above, if your global Story rests on a massive external shift
like WAR, then the resolution scene should resolve the internal changes in your
character.

In The Silence of the Lambs, the external climax scene of the global Story is
Clarice Starling killing Buffalo Bill. So for his resolution scene(s), Harris does not
dwell on the external Storyline. There isn’t a big recap of the action from Starling’s
FBI colleagues…we already know what happened. The external climax is firmly
established—Buffalo Bill is dead and Starling killed him. Instead Harris focuses
on the internal change to Starling after she attains her conscious object of desire.

The resolution scenes do not go over her being patted on the back etc. reviewing
exactly how she figured out everything and found Buffalo Bill’s lair.

It ends with Starling accepting the fact that she did not get her subconscious object
of desire (safety and protection and rewards from an esteemed social institution).
We watch her settle into a new worldview shift. She’s moved from blind belief
in the righteousness in strict hierarchical law and the order of institutions (FBI)
to disillusionment. Even though the External Genre has moved from negative to
positive (the killer is dead), Starling’s view of the world has gone from naively
positive to justified negative.
PART FIVE

THE UNITS
OF STORY
48
T he beat is the smallest unit of Story.

And as the smallest, it is often given short shrift by

prose writers. In many cases, beats are ignored and left to
THE BEAT the exigencies of the subconscious. What I mean by that is
that beats are so small (atomic in some instances) that we
often leave them unexamined in our quest to finely tune the
mechanics of scenes, sequences, acts, secondary plot lines
and global stories. And that’s okay for the novelist.

Dwelling on the beat in the first drafts of your novel is a

mistake. You will most certainly lose the forest for the trees if
you obsess about each and every beat. If a scene works, then
by association so do the beats that make up the scene. If the
scene doesn’t work, then having wonderful beats within it
will not save it. I recommend that tinkering with beats be
best left to the final finish work just prior to publication or
production.

But with that said, looking hard at every beat in a Story,

while taxing, creates rich subtext. Slight tweaks of beats can
highlight image systems and hammer home your controlling
idea/theme. Should you spend hours deliberating the use of
one word? It depends on the beat within the scene and the
importance of that scene to the overarching Story of course.
Obviously, you are going to spend a lot of time on every
beat in your Story’s global climax scene.

Carefully weighing and pruning your language is exactly

what you do when you examine beats. My answer is to
not even think about parsing beats until you have a very
accomplished draft in place. Robert McKee is soon to release
a book purely dedicated to DIALOGUE, which I’ve had the
privilege to edit. I suggest you take a look at that book for
further delineation about beat craft. It’s comprehensive.

In the performing arts, much more so than in prose writing,

beats are the central focus. Beats are the actors’ medium.

197
198

It is within the moment-to-moment beats that actors make specific choices to

THE STORY GRID

portray their idea of their characters. Acting is a very difficult skill as it requires the
delivery of memorized text in a simulated and at the same time “real” situation—
one actor speaking to another is real, even if the text is pre-programmed.

So what is a beat?

A beat is an identifiable moment of change. And like all units of Story, the writer
must have the raw materials to create a stable beat. There is an Inciting Incident,
a complication, a crisis, a climax and a resolution inside each and every beat.

1. The Inciting Incident is when two characters, each with their own agendas,
take the stage or come onto the page.

2. The complication is a clear understanding that their agendas are in conflict.

That is, one wants something from the other one that the other does not
want to give.

3. The crisis is a question that arises within each character. Do I do this? Or

do I do that?

4. The climax of the beat is the active choice that the two characters
individually make in response to the crisis.

5. The resolution is the fallout from the choices as evidenced in the reactions
of the characters.

I think you can see how this can get mind-trippy.

The beat is the moment when one character realizes that the active choice he/
she is making is not working on the other character. He’s not successful getting
the other person to do what he wants, so he changes the action to try and get
it another way. Perhaps scolding doesn’t work, so the character changes his
approach and tries to woo the other one instead.

For example, in the movie Tootsie, there are pitch perfect beats galore.

I saw Tootsie decades ago, but there was one moment that was so perfectly
executed and so in character that I still use it as the best example of a beat…a
definable moment with an Inciting Incident, a complication, a crisis, a climax
and a resolution that changes everything.

In the movie, Bill Murray plays playwright, Jeff. He’s thrown together a birthday
party for his actor friend and roommate Michael Dorsey played by Dustin
 199

Hoffman. Up until this moment, the viewer has only heard about “Jeff” from

THE BEAT
dialogue between Dorsey and his agent, played by the wonderful Sidney Pollack
who also directed the movie. Dorsey has told his agent that he needs a job so that
he can raise enough money to put on his friend Jeff’s play at a regional summer
stock theater. The name of the play is Return to Love Canal. For those of you who
don’t remember, Love Canal was a place in New York that had been built on top
of toxic waste. The people who moved into Love Canal got terribly ill (this is all
true) and many contracted cancer because of the exposure. It was a big Story in
the 1970s and a real tragedy.

So Dorsey’s friend Jeff has decided that he will write a play about people who
were exposed to horribly toxic substances, who then make the ridiculous decision
that they should move back in.

The very title of the play sounds like the work of a very self-important person.

At first exposure, Murray as Jeff seems like a really thoughtful, good friend to
Michael. He’s put together the party and we watch as Dorsey makes his way
around the crowd. It seems that Jeff is just a good egg…no more no less.

Then later on, the camera moves to Murray/Jeff holding court at the kitchen table.
He’s got a crowd of five people gathered around him and he’s telling them his
philosophy of theater. He tells them that he wants to have a theater that’s only
open when it’s raining. And then Sidney Pollack cuts the action. That’s one beat.

Pollack picks up the action again and now there are only three people listening
to Murray/Jeff. Murray/Jeff goes on to further explain that he doesn’t want people
to tell him how great his work is, he wants them to come out of his plays and say
to him.

“I saw your play…what happened?”

Pollack cuts the scene again. That’s another beat.

Pollack picks up the action again and now it’s just Murray/Jeff and his girlfriend
rubbing his shoulders.

Let’s walk through the next beat, which is my aforementioned favorite.

1. The Inciting Incident is the party.

2. After Murray/Jeff’s speech, he’s lost his audience. A complication.

Jeff’s agenda is to enthrall the guests of his friend’s birthday party enough
that they will eventually support him either financially or just show up
for one of his plays. His bullshit has been working but now it’s worn off,
which raises the crisis question…
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3. The crisis question is what can I do to get the attention back on me?
THE STORY GRID

But remember, the people at the party have their own agenda. They are
at this birthday party to see Dorsey and are most likely Dorsey’s primary
friends, not Jeff’s. They find Jeff kind of fascinating at first and he’s one of
those people you meet at a party who holds your attention and makes
you forget the fact that you are at a party. Guys like Jeff relieve the people
around them from having to be “on.” They don’t want to be “on.” This guy
is “on” so their wants are being met. At first.

Then Murray/Jeff begins to repeat himself and is starting to bore them. So

from the point of view of the partygoers, the Inciting Incident is the party,
the complication is that the conversation is getting boring, the crisis is
what they should they do about it? Should they leave the circle and have
to be “on” somewhere else? Or stay the course and be bored? They leave.

4. Murray/Jeff realizes this has happened. So, he needs to change to get back
his audience. That moment of change is the moment the beat changes.

5. The climax of the beat is not verbal in this instance. I doubt it was even
written into the script. Rather it’s a physical motion that the actor Bill
Murray uses to keep the scene moving forward.

Just as he senses that he’s lost his audience, Jeff/Murray violently swats at
an invisible fly. This action is a desperate attempt to get focus back to him.

The aggressive move changes the dynamic of the moment and the Story
value from Friendly to Dangerous. Murray/Jeff doesn’t get what he wants
(no one is coming back to listen to him), so he strikes out.

And thus another beat begins. That’s acting.

This is the example of a very clean and discernible beat. Before the fly-swatting
incident, the environment is one way…after the fly swatting incident, things are
another way. The beat change was driven by conflict. Murray/Jeff was not getting
what he wanted and so he changed his action to get what he wanted. This choice
says everything we really need to know about Jeff/Murray. This is a selfish guy
who needs constant stroking and support to create his “art.” If he doesn’t get it,
then he will strike out.

The beat is so well done that it brings a very large laugh. The laugh comes from
the audience understanding intuitively the dynamic at play and Murray’s violent
action breaks that artifice. We recognize this kind of thing from our own lives.
This moment, entirely invented by Murray, is what is meant by an actor making
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a specific choice. An active choice (not in the screenplay) that is universally

THE BEAT
understood by the audience propels the beat and the scene forward.

But you can’t put actor moments like that in a novel, right?

Actually you can. Here’s a sentence from The Great Gatsby that comprises an
entire beat.

The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re
descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line
was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute
to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father
carries on today.7

The Inciting Incident of this beat is the intention of the first person narrator to
tell the reader about himself. The narrator begins by telling us about the world
he lives in. “The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition
that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch…” Having Nick Carraway,
his narrator, state that his family is like a “clan” connotes deep Scottish roots
and allows Fitzgerald to establish what kind of people will inhabit the Story. The
bloodline is so deep that it extends back to Dukes in Scotland… These are “some
high class people” is the narrator’s intended message.

But the use of the phrase “something of a clan” raises a complication.

The narrator intuitively knows that he may lose his audience if he comes off as
too insular or snobby, so he hedges his statement with the word “something,”
which tells the reader that he’s detached from this family attitude. Which raises
the crisis question of what to do about disabusing the reader of the notion that
the narrator is not “like them.”

The narrator’s object of desire is to get the reader on his side—be willing to listen
to him and his Story for quite some time—which results in a climactic decision
to play down his lineage.

He states that he is from blue blood, but then sensing that this revelation may turn
off the average reader, he changes his approach and his action by then confessing
that “the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came
here in ‘51 (meaning 1851…not exactly a founding father of the revolution),
sent a substitute to the Civil War (used money to get out of his Patriotic duty…
perhaps this is a line of cowards?) and started the wholesale hardware business
(not pedigreed money, money that had to be earned) that my father carries on
today.”

7 Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby (p. 3). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
202

The resolution of the beat is the narrator’s confession that he’s basically the son of
THE STORY GRID

a guy who runs a hardware store. This confession pulls the reader into Carraway’s
Story. The message to the reader is “I live in a high class world, but I’m not
really like those kind of people…Being of salt of the earth lineage, I’m capable
of seeing through it…”

So the turning point is the shift from hoity toity “you should listen to what I
have to say because I’m a high class guy” to “I may seem to be high class, but
the reality of my life is much more in keeping with the average hardworking
American Joe…” Fitzgerald accomplishes this shift by having his narrator use an
action, to confess.

Do you see how brilliantly Fitzgerald created a beat with this one sentence?
The first person Storyteller’s Inciting Incident is the need for them to tell you
something, followed by the complication that perhaps he’ll turn off readers who
cannot relate to the setting of the Story, giving rise to the crisis of how to get the
reader back, leading to the climactic action of confession, and the resolution of
getting the broadest possible audience back to hear more of the Story.

What’s more, the word choices Fitzgerald makes just could not be any better.
49
T he scene is the basic building block of a Story.

While the beat is the actor’s medium, and as such can

be “saved” by a skilled actor, even Meryl Streep can’t save
THE SCENE a poorly written scene. There is just no hiding for a writer
when it comes to a scene. It either works or it doesn’t. There
is either a very clear shift in value from the beginning to
the end—a change—or there isn’t. If there is no change, no
value at stake, no movement, the scene doesn’t work. And
if a writer’s scenes don’t work, no matter how well he can
craft a sentence, his Story won’t work.

I promise you this. If you put aside everything else that you
read in this book, hold on to this one kernel of truth. Scenes
are the place to focus.

Spend your time dreaming up scenes, writing them down,

working them until you are blue in the face. Invest Malcolm
Gladwell’s golden ten-thousand-hour labor law in learning
how to write a scene and you’ll always be able to put food
on the table. You will be a writer.

You can learn the other stuff easily—in fact it will probably
come very naturally—if you can bang out a compelling scene
with confidence. You’ll get work as a script doctor or an
editor or an advertising copywriter or a how-to ghostwriter
if you can write a scene that grabs a reader by the throat and
surprises them. And the more efficiently you can do so, the
better.

While it can be broken down into its component beats, the

scene is the most obvious mini-Story. They are the things
that stay ever present when we talk about a great movie or
great novel. Remember what happened after character A
saw character B with another woman?

The structure of a scene is straightforward. A scene must

move from one value state to another. From a positive
expression of a value like “love” to a negative expression

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of a that value “hate.” Or from a negative expression of a value “injustice” to a

THE STORY GRID

positive expression of a value “justice.” Page upon page of prose without a turn
from one value state to another is not a scene.

Just having two characters meet and talk does not make a scene. It’s just talk.

The driving force of the scene is conflict. One character is in pursuit of one thing
and one or more other characters are in pursuit of another. Only one desire can
be fulfilled. So the two forces conflict. One will win and one will lose. Scenes are
battles built on conflict. Stories are wars that take values to the end of the line or,
at the very least, approach the end of the line.

Scenes can turn on very black and white terms—good/bad, life/death, truth/lie
etc.

While long form stories can never deliver much entertainment or emotional
impact by just flip-flopping between a positive Story value and its negative
opposite, a scene can. In fact, it must. These black and white value shifts are
usually the obligatory scenes for the External Content Genres. You’ll find these
straightforward, easy to understand scenes the most difficult to innovate.

Pure action scenes, for example, move between the simple value of life versus
death. The character either lives or dies. These are the James Bond “Hero at the
Mercy of the Villain” scenes that we all adore:

BOND: “Do you expect me to talk?”

GOLDFINGER: stops on the steps and looks down, both hands in his
pockets.

GOLDFINGER: “No, Mister Bond. I expect you to die!”

Life/death is the only value at stake in many big action scenes and because it is so
simple and understandable, these scenes are some of the most difficult to write.
How can you innovative a scene that has been written millions of times?

Can you outdo the action scenes in The Iliad or The Odyssey or Beowulf or The
Terminator or North by Northwest? Maybe not, but think about what fun it would
be to try. What is very important to recognize is the size of the mountain you are
trying to climb for every scene you write. Besting Homer or James Cameron is a
very steep task. Better bring extra oxygen and know that this ain’t gonna be done
in an afternoon.
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You cannot just throw off the first thing that comes to your mind when you are

THE SCENE
creating an action scene, or any other scene for that matter. Well, you can, but it
will be derivative and cliché. I guarantee it.

The reason why you can’t settle for the first thing that comes to mind, though, is
that the first thing that comes to anyone’s mind is all the stuff that’s been pumped
into your brain since seeing your first cartoon.

This is not to say that you should drive yourself crazy on your first draft and not
use these first cliché scenes as mile markers for your Story. It is to say that you can
and should use them to give you a sense of the kind of scene you need to drop
in, but you cannot be satisfied with the first thing that comes into your mind. The
first thing that comes into your mind has been written before.

It’s called a memory.

For example, if I’m going to write a thriller, I’ll definitely need a scene where the
hero/protagonist of the Story is at the mercy of the villain. This is the obligatory
scene that all thrillers must have. If the reader/viewer doesn’t get this scene, they
won’t like your book/movie. Simple as that.

My first attempt to craft this scene would go something like this:

Our hero is tied to a wall at the four points of his body. The villain begins to
crank the rope until our hero is stretched to his limit. One additional crank
and our hero’s tendons and muscles in his shoulders and hips will pop.

But our hero has figured out that if he can just break his own thumb, he’ll
be able to slip out of the restraint on his most powerful arm.

VILLAIN: “Your wife called…I told her you were tied up…”

HERO: “That’s very funny…Why don’t you come over here and say that to
my face.”

Villain walks over to hero. Hero breaks his thumb and gets villain in a
headlock with his one strong arm. He chokes villain to death and then
unties himself and escapes.

On just a cursory look at this construction, you’ll see that it’s basically a mash up
of every action movie scene from Die Hard to Taken to Goldfinger.

That’s okay for your first draft.

Let the cliché sit on the page while you move forward. You’ll definitely come
back to it later on when you have your critical editor cap on your head. But for
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your first draft, write cliché after cliché. It’s okay. No one is going to see this draft
THE STORY GRID

but you. What you need in a first draft are the types of scenes you’ll need and the
general order in which they’ll fall.

Just don’t write scenes that don’t go anywhere. They all must have Inciting
Incidents (hero caught by villain), progressive complications (tied to a wall…
rope pulled to breaking point), crisis (do I try and buy some time or do I break
my thumb and try and free myself? Best Bad Choice), climax (breaks thumb),
resolution (hero tricks villain, kills him and escapes). The scene moves from death
to life. It works.

It’s far from great, but it works.

The most important thing to remember about writing a scene is that it has to
TURN. It has to move from one state of being to another. It can be a subtle turn,
but it must turn in a meaningful way.

When you get stuck, think about the overall state of your protagonist’s quest for
his objects of desire (both external and internal). Has his quest moved closer
to success or failure from the beginning to the end of the scene? It must move
from positive to negative or negative to positive or positive to double positive or
negative to double negative etc.

If your scene does not move, it has to be reworked so that it does. If you find that
you are pulling your hair out trying to turn the scene and it just won’t turn, there’s
a good reason why it won’t. You don’t need it in your Story. It’s undoubtedly a
Shoe Leather/Stage Business scene that just moves your character physically from
one space to another.

Cut that stuff. You don’t need it and it’s boring.

What’s great about finding these bits in your first draft is that you can just highlight
and delete knowing that the reader or viewer will fill in that stage business inside
their own minds. They don’t want to read the part when your lead character goes
to dinner with a friend who tells him all about what’s been going on back home
for two thousand words.

They want to see the friend pick up a steak knife and try and kill your protagonist.
Or they want the friend to brilliantly undermine your protagonist’s confidence. A
scene must have conflict. And someone must win or lose.

Later on, when we lay out The Story Grid Spreadsheet (the micro editorial view),
I’ll show you how to track the turns in your scenes so that you’ll be easily able to
pinpoint the duds and fix them.
50
S equences give the reader a sense of “critical moments in
life.” That is, they, like all the other units of Story, have
beginnings, middles and ends.

THE SEQUENCE To look at it another way, sequences are large stages in the
global Story journey.

Like the beat and the scene and ultimately the act, the
subplot and the global Story, the sequence must have the five
form elements (Inciting Incident, progressive complications,
crisis, climax, and resolution) but it does not have the “major
shift” reversals of the Story’s core value like the act or global
plot. More on these major shifts later on.

Sequence events can be summed up with phrases like

“GETTING THE JOB” or “WINNING THE RACE” or
“COURTING THE PRINCESS” or “FIRST KISS” or “BUYING
THE HOUSE.”

More specifically, a sequence is a collection of scenes (or

even one) that adds up to more than the sum of their parts
but less the major reversal of a Story’s core value that occurs
in the act. That means that the change that occurs in the
sequence is greater in scale than any preceding single scene
but not as great as the change that occurs in an act.

For example in the novel and film Misery, there are some
very definable sequences. I’ll work from William Goldman’s
amazing screenplay adaptation of one of Stephen King’s
best works. Here are the first seven scenes of the screenplay.

1. The first scene of the movie lasts one minute twenty

seconds. James Caan (playing protagonist Paul
Sheldon) finishes writing a novel and partakes in his
ritual single cigarette and bottle of champagne.

2. The second scene is two minutes forty-five seconds

long. Paul leaves his hotel to head home and deliver
the novel to his agent but crashes his car in a blizzard.

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3. The third scene is a flashback to Paul deciding that he’s going to forego the
THE STORY GRID

commercial route that has made him so successful and write a real novel.
This scene lasts one minute five seconds.

4. The fourth scene finds Paul unconscious. A large figure pulls him out of his
wrecked car, throws him over its shoulder and trudges into the woods. This
scene is one minute twenty seconds.

5. The fifth scene finds Paul awake in bed. He’s being taken care of by Annie
Wilkes, played by Kathy Bates. The scene is one minute five seconds.

6. In the sixth scene Annie tells Paul why she did not take him to a hospital.
They are snowed in. This scene is one minute five seconds.

7. In the seventh scene Annie explains to Paul just how badly he is hurt. This
scene lasts one minute fifteen seconds.

(I’ve given you the screen time to illustrate just how economic Goldman is with
his Storytelling. These scenes are practically the same length, a technique that
builds a visual rhythm.)

These first seven scenes comprise three distinct sequences.

The first sequence (scenes 1 and 2) could be called SUCCESSFUL WRITER

CRASHES HIS CAR. We know he’s successful by the tony ski lodge environment
he’s in and his choice of champagne to celebrate the completion of his work.

• The Inciting Incident of sequence one is the completion of the novel.

• Progressive complications of sequence one are the weather conditions he

faces upon departure.

• The crisis of sequence one is whether he should disregard the storm and
press forward homeward bound? Or should he stay put and risk getting
stuck in the mountains with nothing to do? This is the crisis’ best bad
choice question.

• The climax of sequence one is his decision to go.

• The resolution of sequence one is his wrecking the car and being completely
incapacitated.
 209

What’s so wonderful about this sequence, beyond its economy, is that it results in

THE SEQUENCE
an irreversible change. The lead character cannot undo the fact that he recklessly
drove into the heart of a snowstorm. If the sequence were expanded and the
writer decided to wait out the storm until morning and then drive home and then
the rest of the events of the Story played out…not only would it alter the tenor of
the Storytelling, it would drastically influence the viewer/reader’s understanding
of the character.

Paul Sheldon takes big chances. He’s not a guy who’s going to vacillate.

The second sequence is just one scene (and yes a skilled writer can pull off a
sequence with one scene). It is the third scene flashback when the viewer/reader
is informed of the Sheldon’s decision to change his career path. It could be called
WRITER STOPS PLAYING TO THE CROWD.

The third sequence is the WRITER GETS RESCUED BY RECLUSE sequence, made
up of scenes 4 through 7.

• The Inciting Incident of this sequence is the Annie character played by

Kathy Bates pulling Paul Sheldon out of the car.

• The progressive complications are Paul’s discovery that 1) while he’s safe,
he’s not in a hospital, 2) his injuries are such that he’s at the mercy of a rather
strange and powerfully built woman, and 3) the woman has loaded him
up with narcotics that keep the pain at bay but are dangerously addictive.

• The crisis question Paul must answer is another best bad choice. Should
he use his star power and demand that this woman get him immediate
evacuation? Or should he humor her and hope that she comes to her
senses?

• The climax is in his ultimate decision to humor her.

• The resolution is that she pushes him deeper and deeper into relying on
the pain medication.

Sequences are crucial building blocks of Story, but I recommend that writers
focus on scenes in their first draft. Looking at and defining sequences is a great
idea, once you have something in hand and you are evaluating how successfully
you brought the Story to life. To obsess about them before you have a rough
draft is very often a mistake. Sequence analysis is an editorial craft, and as such,
should be saved for editing, not initial creation.
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If you get stuck and you have no idea where your Story went off tracks, chances are
THE STORY GRID

you are either missing or over delivering sequences in the Story. Over delivering
on a sequence means that you have too many supporting scenes. One or two can
be eliminated entirely without losing any narrative consistency.

Remember that readers and viewers are very discerning and sophisticated (just
think about how much Story the average person consumes each day from the
newspaper to websites, emails, television shows, books, heart to heart talks
with their friends etc.). That old chestnut LESS IS MORE absolutely applies in
Storytelling. You want to give the reader just enough to follow the through-line of
your Story without overloading them with scenes they’ve already anticipated in
their own minds.

For example, Stephen King and William Goldman knew that a sequence such as
ANNIE LEAVES HER HOME FOR A WALK AND DISCOVERS A CAR WRECKED
ON THE HIGHWAY is not necessary for MISERY. When Annie appears, the reader
intuitively knows that that sequence has happened off stage. If you have that kind
of “shoe leather” in your book or screenplay, you will lose the attention of your
reader/viewer. And once you lose their attention, it’s almost impossible to get it
back.

The time to really look hard at sequences is in the third or fourth draft, after you’re
convinced that your scene by scene, your act by act, your subplot by subplot and
your global plot is sound. After you have those marks checked off, it is a very
good idea to go back yet again and define the sequences of your scenes. You’ll
undoubtedly find places to hone and cut.
51
T here is a song by the 1980s new wave band The
Godfathers that I always remember when someone asks
me how best to describe an act. It is simply titled, Birth,
School, Work, Death.
THE ACT
The act is a major life stage in a Story.

The act could be a self-sustaining Story in and of itself. There

is no shortage of one-act plays. But in long form Storytelling,
acts are the major events that change the Story irrevocably.
Again, what that means is that the protagonist’s life is
changed permanently. Like the beat, scene and sequence,
the act must have a clear Inciting Incident, progressive
complications, crisis, climax and resolution. And if you
were to home in on these particular moments in an act, you
would be able to identify the specific sequence, scene and
beat that comprises the act’s component parts. Beats build
scenes, scenes build sequences and sequences build acts.

The act brings explosive change.

As such, acts are often very satisfying in that they bring a

very strong Story rush to the reader/audience. But in the long
form Story, they must leave the reader/audience wanting
more. Even in the final act’s resolution (which serves as the
resolution for the global Story too) a well-turned Story leaves
the reader/audience wanting to hear another Story about the
same characters. Hence the sequel, prequel phenomenon
we inhabit today.

Long form episodic television series like Breaking Bad or

Mad Men are divided essentially into acts. Each episode
is a critical moment/developmental stage in the life of the
protagonist, Walter White or Donald Draper, or one of the
major secondary characters. We keep coming back to the
shows because we want to know how a fundamental change
that occurred in one episode will play out in the next.

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Acts completely change the global Story, either positively or negatively. Again,
THE STORY GRID

the climactic action in an act must be irreversible. That is there is no turning

back. Someone dies. Someone gets pregnant. An alien lands on the earth… these
are the climactic moments in acts.

The characters and by extension the audience, must be surprised by the action or
revelation from the act climax. The values at stake in an act also move the Story’s
global values. That is, if the Story is a serial killer thriller, its act climaxes must
shift on life or death circumstances. The protagonist is either close to bringing the
antagonist to justice or the antagonist has the hero on the ropes in a seemingly
inescapable situation.

Act climaxes escalate—move closer and closer to the limits of human experience—
the further along you move into the global Story. They must progressively
complicate, moving from “big” to “huge” to “shocking.”

For example, if the first act climax of Chinatown was the revelation that Evelyn
Mulwray was raped by her father, the viewer would not really be prepared for
that level of shock. The viewer has yet to fully attach to the character, so the
information that she was raped would not resonate. The writer, Robert Towne,
knew that a revelation of that size had to be saved for the ending of the Story. And
he puts it exactly where it needs to be...at the penultimate act climax.

Instead Towne ended the first act with the scene when the real Mrs. Mulwray
arrives at Jake Gittes’ offices.

A mysterious imposter played by Diane Ladd had hired Gittes in an early scene
to track the movements of Hollis Mulwray. The real Mrs. Mulwray played by
Faye Dunaway arrives at Gittes’ offices to tell him that she never hired him to tail
her husband, and that the work he’s been doing is going to cost him his entire
business. She is going to sue him and destroy his livelihood.

This is a perfect end to the Beginning Hook of the Story, a great reversal that turns
on both revelation (I’m not the woman who hired you) and action (my lawyer is
going to destroy you).

This act 1 climax is irreversible.

Gittes can’t go back to the life he had before the real Mrs. Mulwray came into
his life. His business is now at risk. His future is in danger and he’s not the sort
of person who stands idly by when he is threatened. Towne knew that the perfect
way of getting his character Gittes to react was by threatening him. Gittes fights
back.
 213

How Gittes reacts to the threat defines him, as it does for all of us. His ire propels

THE ACT
us into the next act…wondering how the hell is this going to sort itself out?

Plus, at the end of this first act, Towne has made the Story personal to Gittes, a
major obligatory element in a crime thriller. Gittes is now the “victim” in his own
eyes. And Jake Gittes is not anyone’s Patsy. He’s going to press forward no matter
what.

This characteristic is exactly why the central evil/antagonist in Chinatown, Noah

Cross, sets Gittes up in the first place. We discover later on that Noah Cross,
Evelyn Mulwray’s father, essentially owns the Los Angeles Police Department.
And we’re told that Gittes used to be a cop before he became a private eye. While
we never do learn why Gittes left the force, he does confess that his butting in to
someone else’s business and the tragic end of that interference had something to
do with his leaving the LAPD.

Here’s the scene just after Gittes gets his nose sliced open:

EVELYN: “(working on him So why does it bother you to talk about it...
Chinatown...”

GITTES: “Bothers everybody who works there — but to me — It was —

Gittes shrugs.”

EVELYN: “Hold still — why?”

GITTES: “You can’t always tell what’s going on there —”

EVELYN: “... No — why was it”

GITTES: “I thought I was keeping someone from being hurt and actually I
ended up making sure they were hurt.”

The antagonist of the Story, Noah Cross, played with relish by John Huston, will
not be denied. So when his former partner Hollis Mulwray (his daughter Evelyn’s
husband) tries to safeguard a young girl from him, Cross undoubtedly asked his
cronies in the LAPD which Private Detective he should hire to find the girl.

They recommended Gittes because he is a monomaniac. The cops explain to

Cross that Gittes threw away his police career in Chinatown just to take a case
to the end of the line. Cross, being a brilliant epitome of evil, understands that
if he makes the mission to find the girl personal for Gittes, there is little chance
214

he’ll fail in finding her. Cross makes it personal for Gittes by using his own
THE STORY GRID

daughter to unwittingly bait him. Cross hired the imposter to get Gittes to take
the case knowing full well that his real daughter would confront Gittes after she
discovered his investigation. [What is so incredible about the above information
is that Towne never puts it on the page…it’s information that the audience fills in
themselves long after they’ve seen the actual movie.]

The theme/controlling idea of Chinatown is simply “evil reigns.” No matter who

we are and no matter how smart or tough we are, we cannot outsmart or out
muscle evil. We are fated to either give in to evil figures like Noah Cross or we
are fated to fight against tyranny pointlessly and ineffectively for the rest of our
lives. Humanity is repugnant and dirty. Evil has won, always has won and always
will win. Principled people with good intentions not only fail to bring justice to
the world, by their very naiveté they empower tyrants.

Chinatown’s Director Roman Polanski barely survived the Holocaust. Battling

demons of his own, he unleashed them all in this effort.

While Towne’s screenplay is a masterpiece, the controlling idea/theme of the

movie is pure Polanski. What is so striking about Chinatown, a commercial
Story with one of the most disturbing down endings of all time, is that Polanski’s
vision was so perfectly put onto the screen, in such a compelling way, that the
dark message made sense. It satisfied the viewer. Polanski’s art was so perfectly
expressed; it made the average Joe willingly submit himself to confronting the
very dark underbelly of humanity. That is remarkable.

Chinatown, like The Silence of the Lambs, is that very rare commercial Story
with a deeply resonant and meaningful controlling idea/theme that is so perfectly
crafted, it makes us confront the darkest realities of our being.
52
S ubplot is the next level up from act in the long form Story.

Subplots are the added attractions for a Story and are best
used to amplify the theme/controlling idea more aggressively
THE SUBPLOT or to counterbalance the global Story with irony.

A quick example would be the love Story in The Sound of

Music between Liesl and her Austrian messenger boy Rolfe
who ends up joining the Nazi Party. While the introduction
of the young love is wonderfully engaging in the form of the
song “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” in the Beginning Hook
of the Story, by the end of the film that delightful innocence
has been corrupted by the Nazis. This subplot would be an
example of amplifying the theme…Only a family that sticks
together can defeat tyranny.

Deciding when and where you need to employ a particular

subplot is dependent upon the global Story you are trying
to tell. Love Story subplots aid just about all of the External
Content Genres (war, crime, thriller, performance, etc.).

And an action subplot in a global maturation/coming of age

Story (like Saturday Night Fever’s gang fight subplot) can
raise the temperature of a Global Internal Content Genre. If
Tony Manero (played by John Travolta) was never physically
threatened by his neighborhood, only spiritually threatened,
I doubt his departure to Manhattan in the final scene would
have much resonance.

Subplots have all of the same things that all units of Story have
(Inciting Incidents, progressive complications, crisis, climax
and resolution). But unlike the Global Story requirement
that all of the big moments be on stage—witnessed by the
reader/viewer—subplot’s critical scenes (crisis, climax and
resolution) often, by necessity, occur off stage. They can
be announced or implied as having occurred off stage in
dialogue to dynamically turn scenes. The details of these
reported offstage events are often left mysterious, to be filled
in by the reader/viewer’s mind.
215
216

In the Chinatown example from the previous chapter on the act, the scenes from
THE STORY GRID

the Noah Cross subplot of his orchestrating the hiring of Jake Gittes to find his
“granddaughter” are not on the page at all. The reader/viewer only discovers this
subplot with the revelation close to the very end of the movie that the woman who
was hired to portray Evelyn Mulwray (the Diane Ladd character) at the beginning
of the movie has been murdered. Whoever the bad guy is must have hired her
and then when Gittes tracked her down, had her murdered.

For another example, let’s go back to William Goldman’s screenplay adaptation of

Stephen King’s Misery. You’ll recall that there is a crime Story subplot in addition
to the abduction thriller global Story.

In the movie, Richard Farnsworth plays Buster, the local Sheriff of the Colorado
town where writer Paul Sheldon crashes his car. Throughout the film, we see small
snippets of Buster gathering information about the disappearance of Sheldon but
we don’t see all of the crime Story business on stage.

Goldman trusts that the viewer will piece together all of what Buster is up to.
He understands that showing all of the investigation steps would not only slog
down the pace of the global Story, it would disrespect the audience’s intelligence.
The audience already knows how a crime investigation ensues from having read
and/or watched thousands of hours of crime fiction. So Goldman wisely lets the
viewer do that work for him.

Instead he uses the climactic moment of his subplot crime Story…the discovery
of the identity of the criminal…as a way to progressively complicate the climactic
act of his global thriller Story.

Obviously the climax of his subplot (being it crime and external and active) is the
perfect choice to put on stage. It moves his last act of the global thriller Story to
the ultimate high. Just when we think someone is going to help Paul Sheldon...
Buster shows up at Annie Wilke’s house just about certain that she’s up to no
good...the viewer’s hopes are dashed.

When Annie Wilkes kills Buster, all hope the viewer has that a third party will
save Paul Sheldon is lost. The final confrontation between the antagonist (Annie)
and the victim (Paul) is now one on one. The only person who can save Paul….is
Paul. And his chances of doing so physically are impossible. The only way he’ll
be able to do it is by using his mind.

Misery has one of the best “hero at the mercy of the villain” scenes ever written.
The way Sheldon gets out of the jam is by using Annie’s cheesy love of romance
against her.
 217

Let’s go back to the love Story, as it is the most often used Genre for subplots. The

THE SUBPLOT
reason it is used so often is that it’s ideal to soften a particularly violent or horrific
global Story (war, horror, thriller).

For example, all love stories must have the obligatory “Lovers Kiss” scene which
is the critical moment of electricity that tells the characters their lives will be
meaningless in the absence of the other. After the kiss, there is no going back to
the life they enjoyed or endured before meeting.

Now if your global plot is a love Story, this obligatory scene (of course that does
not mean that the way you write this scene is conventional or derivative) must
be ON STAGE. That is, it must be an active scene in which the viewers/readers
“watch” the two lovers kiss. [The novel Atonement by Ian McEwan and its film
adaptation by Christopher Hampton both had the lovers kiss directly on stage. In
this case, the war Story serves as subplot to the global love Story.]

But, if you are using love Story as a subplot to another global Genre, like a thriller,
you may or may not have to put the “Lovers Kiss” obligatory scene on stage. For
example, in Die Hard we know that John McClain, the lead character played by
Bruce Willis, and his wife have already had their Lovers Kiss scene before the
movie even began. The love Story subplot supports the action…the only reason
McClain is in the building in the first place is to win back the love of his life.
We know that these two people are meant to be together and that Willis will do
anything to get Bonnie Bedelia to invite him back to their house for Christmas. If
it means having to stop a group of terrorist/criminals to prove his love to her, so
be it.

We don’t need the backstory Lovers Kiss scene in the movie because the very
circumstances of the thriller’s setup have already done that work. This is an
example of a subplot that picks up a Story in the middle of things. And that is
absolutely fine to do for a subplot…and global plot too. Preferable even.

Whether or not to put obligatory/conventional scenes on stage for subplots is

a very difficult decision. Putting them in just to show that you know they are
required isn’t a big enough reason to do so.

Often, writers use an obligatory scene from a subplot as a way to pay off a major
global Story change. That is, they present what the reader will initially believe
is a scene they’ve seen a million times before and turn it such that the climax
actually reveals a huge change in the global Story. The payoff of the crime subplot
in Misery is a prime example of that. We expect the criminal to be brought to
justice in a conventional crime Story. Not only does that not happen, but the lead
investigator is suddenly killed.
218

I suggest that the writer put all of his energy into crafting the global plot first before
THE STORY GRID

making decisions about where and when to pay off the subplots. Oftentimes, the
writer subconsciously drops in subplot while concentrating on the global Story.
Pay attention to these ideas as they are usually spot on!

It’s been my experience that subplots are usually the work of the writer’s
subconscious. They somehow find themselves woven perfectly into a global Story
without the writer even realizing they’ve done so. You can really drive yourself
crazy over thinking the choices you’ve made with your subplots. I suggest you
don’t go overboard with subplot analysis unless you really have to.

Also, you need to remember that by Global Story climax, you need to have paid
off all of the plots—the global and the subplots. To do so, obviously is not easy.
But when it’s done well, like in Misery, the payoffs are far more than the sum of
their parts.

If you are having difficulty after you’ve gone through your first draft and have
found that the climax of the global Story is just not mind-blowing…take a deep
breath. Before you dump the whole global baby out with the bathwater, go back
and look at your subplots. You may have omitted a key scene (left it off stage) in
one of the subplots and failed to pay it off. That could be the big problem at the
end of your Story. The solution to that problem is to figure out a way to combine
the subplot climax and resolution with the climax and resolution of your global
Story.

In The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris uses multiple love stories as subplots
in his global thriller—the Crawford/Bella love Story, the buddy friendship love
Story between Starling and Ardelia Mapp, the father/daughter dynamic between
Crawford/Starling, the budding romance between Starling and the scientist Pilcher
at the Smithsonian, and of course the strange sadomasochistic May/December
thing between Starling/Lecter.

Harris did not load in so much love Story by accident. He knew that to create
killers like Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter and put their gruesome actions on
stage, he needed to counterbalance the Story with the opposite of their contempt
for humanity…love for it.

 
1
53
A s per our Foolscap Global Story Grid, Global Story has
the same five elements as each of its component parts—
an Inciting Incident, progressive complications, crisis,
climax and resolution. Ideally, you “the editor” should be
FOR GLOBAL
THE able to pinpoint exactly what beats, scenes, sequences,
STORY acts, and subplots in your Story combine to satisfy these
requirements.

For example, your global Inciting Incident could be a positive

shift in your External Content Genre that occurs in the third
beat of the second scene in the first sequence of the first act
of your global plot and a negative shift in the Internal Genre
that occurs in the third beat of the second scene in the first
sequence of the first act of the secondary subplot of your
global plot.

But should you plan this stuff out before you begin writing
your first draft?

Absolutely not! Don’t do it. Seriously, you’ll drive yourself

crazy.

If you do, you will get an acute case of Paralysis by Analysis.

Trust me, I battle P by A on every single thing I do. It’s just
the way my brain works when I face a particular problem.
Maybe yours does too.

The trick is to combine just enough analysis to get you started

(the Foolscap Global Story Grid), something to push you
through to a first draft. Then and only then, when you have a
pound of rough pages, should you dive into the hypercritical
editorial pool. And once in that water, it should be your goal
to stay in it for the least amount of time necessary to solve
your Story problems. Use the macro analysis of the Foolscap
Global Story Grid and the micro analysis of The Story Grid
Spreadsheet (that’s up next) to find out what problems you
have. And then go about fixing them.

And you should refrain from ever speaking in the Story

lexicon (Inciting Incident, progressive complications, blah

219
220

blah blah) to anyone who has any interest in reading your Story. You will bore
THE STORY GRID

them to tears and you will come off as quite mad. The exception of course is with
fellow Story Grid nerds. Then you can go to town.

Remember that the first rule when editing a book is to DO NO HARM. Most of
the books I’ve edited in my career never required the depths of detailed analysis
that you could potentially mine from The Story Grid.

Could I have put the full Story Grid to bear on each and every one of them? Sure.
But that is not the editor’s job. The editor’s job is to help the writer find peace with
their work while also doing what’s necessary to make the Story “work” as well as
it possibly can.

Without driving the writer crazy!

If you are the writer and the editor (and you should be both) do your best to
balance both forces within yourself. Allow the writer in you to have freedom.
When you’re writing don’t think about all of this Story Grid editorial stuff. After
you’ve set yourself a writing task (the lovers meet scene, for example) just write
down whatever comes out. And then move on to the next assignment without
editing the thing you just banged out.

Only after you have a full draft of something do you want to turn over the reins
to your editor self.

Just as you gave your writer self freedom without harsh criticism while he was
working, so you should allow your analytical/somewhat nutty inside baseball
editor to do what he does without criticism too. Balancing the two sides of
yourself is the goal.

When you feel like you’re being too loosey goosey when you’re editing, you
probably are. And likewise, if you feel like you’re being too tight and analytical
when you are writing, you probably are. Listen to that stuff and clamp down or
pull back as necessary.

But lastly, when you’re noodling a new project, don’t complicate for the sake
of theory. Don’t map out all sixty-four of your scenes in detail before you write
them. Give yourself just enough guidance to keep your pen moving. No more,
no less.

But when you have a draft, it’s time to figure out what’s working and what’s not
working. Then improve what’s working and fix what’s not.

The tool that will show you exactly where you need to focus is up next. I call it
The Story Grid Spreadsheet.
PART SIX

THE STORY GRID

SPREADSHEET
54
N ow that we’ve reviewed the five fundamentals of Story
form (Inciting Incident, Progressive Complications,
Crisis, Climax and Resolution) and the six units of Story
(Beat, Scene, Sequence, Act, Subplot and Global Story), let’s
WHERE EDITORS take a step back to the very beginning.
BEGIN What does an editor do the minute a manuscript that he’s
commissioned lands on his desk?

Let’s assume he’s already read it.

The Story isn’t working quite yet.

It’s close, but it’s vaguely disappointing.

There is no easy fix that comes into his mind. He knows

that he’ll have to do a comprehensive analysis of the work
before he’ll be able to give the right diagnosis and provide
suggestions capable of helping the writer fix the problems.

The first editorial stage is to pull up a fresh Story Grid

Spreadsheet and fill it in. This is no small task, but it is crucial
to take a book that doesn’t work to one that does.

As we are leading up to The Story Grid for The Silence of

the Lambs, let’s create The Story Grid Spreadsheet for it too.
So in the next few chapters, we’ll walk through the data
points on The Story Grid Spreadsheet column-by-column
and row-by-row. These data points, when combined with
The Foolscap Global Story Grid, will ultimately generate
that very strange-looking infographic I shared with you at
the very beginning of the book.

By the time we’re through, you’ll be able to walk through

The Story Grid from left to right, from top to bottom and
everywhere in between and intuit exactly how Thomas
Harris created such an amazing Story.

We’ll get there, I promise. It’s the Ending Payoff of this book.

I have to confess at this very moment my blood is pumping.

I’m excited. For a Story nerd, there is nothing more appealing
than figuring out how a master writer put together his
masterpiece.
223
 Scene, Word Count, Story Event
55 O nce you have a first draft, you’ll need to inspect each
of the units of your Story and make sure you’ve used
TRACKING THE the right materials. Just like a building, you’ll want to make
sure that your Story will stand up to the test of time. This is
GLOBAL STORY what The Story Grid is all about. It’s an editorial tool above
all else.

What is also appealing about creating The Story Grid for

your Story is that it requires you to use a completely different
part of your brain. You can give your creative side a rest and
dive completely into the analytics. For each and every scene
you’ve written in your book, you’ll now take inventory of
what exactly you have in hand by writing down critical
information in each column of The Story Grid Spreadsheet.

It’s crucial to be very meticulous about the notations because

the spreadsheet will be invaluable in pinpointing places
where you went off course, missed a crucial scene or beat,
and/or made minor continuity mistakes.

Spend the time making your notes in The Story Grid

Spreadsheet succinct. But err on the side of being
comprehensive in your first round. Trust me, you’ll go
through this spreadsheet so many times that, by the end of
the process, you’ll be able to boil down each scene in your
book to a phrase.

And if you can’t, you’ll know the scene is too obtuse…not

clear…in need of an overhaul.

Here’s another major word of advice.

Don’t stop and fix an obvious problem until you’ve

completed the entire spreadsheet!

It is just about impossible to toggle between your creative

side (writing the Story) and your analytical side (editing your
 225

Story) simultaneously. You need to separate Church and State. The Writer and the

TRACKING THE GLOBAL STORY

Editor. When the Writer is doing his work, the Editor has to be on vacation…and
when the Editor is doing his work, the Writer has to be on vacation.

You, the Editor, need to see the work as a whole, every single piece, before you’ll
be able to tackle revisions. If you revise before you’ve done a complete analysis,
you’ll find that your first instinct solutions will not work when viewed globally.
That is, you may come up with a great idea to fix chapter 3, but if you actually do
that revision, you may up fouling up the foundation for your best work in chapter
1 and your best work in chapter 18.

So don’t do it, no matter how easy a fix you think it is, or how dreadfully terrible
the scene is.

Not writing while you are editing is going to be as hard as it is to not revise your
work while you’re writing. But you can’t give the Writer a working plan to fix all
of the novel’s problems as the Editor until you’ve digested the entire Story Grid
Spreadsheet, put it together with the Foolscap Global Story Grid and mapped out
the final Story Grid. After you’ve done all of that work, the problems AND THE
SOLUTIONS TO THOSE PROBLEMS will be evident.

You must resist the temptation to revise before you have all of this work done.
Seriously. If you don’t, you’ll add months if not years to your workload or you’ll
abandon it completely because you’ll come to the conclusion that your work is
unsalvageable. It’s not!

THE EDITOR
STAGE ONE
If you have a pile of pages completed and you are putting your editor hat on for
the first time, the very first thing to do is to write out your list of fifty-odd scenes/
chapters. In order to figure out what’s going on in the Story, you need to know
where everything is.

So when I take on a new editing job, I’ll first sit down with the manuscript and
a stapler. I’ll go page by page and separate the entire book into its component
scenes. There are usually between fifty and seventy scenes in a novel. So I’ll have
a pile of fifty to seventy packets.

I’ll then turn on my computer and pull up a fresh Excel spreadsheet. As I will be
analyzing The Silence of the Lambs, I’ll label the file “The Story Grid Spreadsheet
226

for The Silence of the Lambs.” I’ve gone through The Silence of the Lambs and
THE STORY GRID

determined that Harris’ sixty-one chapters break down to sixty-four scenes. Harris
wisely chose to make each of his chapters a scene, with the exception of three
chapters, which comprise two scenes stitched together.

Now on my spreadsheet, in the very first column, at the top I’ll type SCENE and
underneath, I’ll write from 1 to 64 row to row.

Next to the SCENE column, I’ll create another column called WORD COUNT.
For this column, I’ll simply add up the number of words for every single scene.
For example, the first scene is the first chapter in The Silence of the Lambs and
it runs for 1,690 words, so I’ll type 1,690 in the corresponding cell for scene 1.

It’s a grind to do this for every scene, but keeping track of the word count is
invaluable. It will allow you as the editor to compare and contrast how you, the
writer emphasized or deemphasized a particular scene just by its very length, and
where you should trim and/or revise to best effect. It’s not a lot of fun to run your
cursor over a big patch of text just to get the word count number, but when you
have the entire word count on a single spreadsheet, scene by scene, you’ve got
some vital information.

When you the editor first finished reading the draft, you may have had a suspicion
that a very minor scene went on far too long, while a critical scene was too short.
Saying that you have a suspicion to a writer is one thing. Telling them exactly
what scenes you are referring to and their respective word counts is far more
helpful.

Actually showing the writer that, for example, his “getting a haircut” scene took
six thousand words, while his “contemplating suicide” scene took less than one
thousand is far more persuasive to get him to cut the haircut and pump up the
suicide. There is no arguing when you have pinpointed information.

It should take you a full workday, perhaps two or three when you are just getting
started, to complete these first two columns. I’d suggest that you assign yourself
this task on Day One of Editing and no matter how long the process takes you,
knock off for the day when you complete the work.

Editing requires very concentrated attention. When you get tired, you screw up.
Just like writing. So until you’re in the Editing groove, give yourself ample time to
complete The Story Grid tasks.
 227

THE EDITOR

TRACKING THE GLOBAL STORY

STAGE TWO
After you’ve filled in your scene numbers and word counts, it’s time to fill in
the next column on The Story Grid Spreadsheet, the STORY EVENT column. I
recommend you read A Practical Handbook for the Actor, which was written by a
group of actors from the Atlantic Theater Company to help you nail Story Events.
I keep the book handy at all times.

The trick to filling out the STORY EVENT column is to reduce each scene to its
essence, either a single sentence or a phrase that will tell you the gist of what
has occurred in the scene. It’s a great way to build a shorthand language with the
writer too. You can refer to The killer prepares scene and know exactly where in
the novel it takes place.

I also suggest that once you’ve completed this column you go out and buy a
stack of 3 x 5 index cards and write down each scene on one card, along with its
corresponding sequential number and word count. This is a technique I used back
in college when I struggled through organic chemistry. On one side of the card,
I’d draw you the structural diagram for a particular compound like Benzene, and
on the other, I’d write the word Benzene. I’d walk around with a stack of these in
my backpack at all times. So on my way to odd jobs or to the canteen for dinner,
I’d be able to quiz myself and keep everything straight.

You can make notes about each of these scenes in your downtime and you’ll be
surprised at the kind of subconscious work your mind will be doing just lugging
the cards around. Try it.

When you are first running through the book scene by scene, and coming up
with the Story events for each, it could take anywhere from a day to a week or
more of work. Don’t kill yourself over getting the perfect description for every
Story event. You’ll end up tweaking just about all of them by the time you’re
through generating the full Story Grid.

Don’t grind too hard now. Write down just enough so that you’ll remember the
scene as a unit. So later on, when you’re thinking about the sequence of your Story,
you’ll think in terms of “The break-up scene” or “The battle for Constantinople
scene” instead of the myriads of beats and details that will go into each.

Here’s how I did it:

The first scene/chapter in The Silence of the Lambs can be summed up as “FBI
Section Chief Jack Crawford summons FBI trainee Clarice Starling and recruits
her for ‘an interesting errand.’” And here is how the beginning of your Story Grid
Spreadsheet will look:
228
THE STORY GRID

WORD
SCENE STORY EVENT
COUNT

1 1,690 FBI Section Chief Jack Crawford summons FBI trainee

Clarice Starling to recruit her for an ‘interesting errand.’

Now it is simply a matter of going through the entire manuscript and generating
a list of all of the scenes in their particular order with their word counts and their
particular Story events.

If you discover (and you will) that one or more of your scenes do not have events,
you’ll find that these are the sorts of expositional passages that can be cut in
your next draft. But for now, simply write down the core of activity. That is, “John
walks to town” or “Susan thinks about ice cream” can be written in the Story
Event column as placeholders. They aren’t really events. They’re stage business/
exposition. You’ll fix them later.

Don’t freak out if your scenes don’t seem all that exciting yet. Even those shoe
leather scenes that aren’t really scenes are important to keep in that first draft.
They are important because there is probably critical exposition in these passages
that must be woven into the Story.

There will be plenty of time to evaluate the effectiveness of each scene’s event
later on. You didn’t nail it perfectly on the first draft (who does?) but don’t throw
these “not working” scenes away or try and fix them yet. You need to see the full
picture as an editor to make specific decisions later on.

Let’s move forward.

So after a full workweek, we’ve got the first three columns together for our Story
Grid Spreadsheet.

When I finished my spreadsheet’s first three columns, I knew that The Silence of
the Lambs is sixty-four scenes comprised of 96,299 words. I now knew its core
component parts. That is a huge step forward.

Now it’s time to break these sixty-four scenes down further to see just how and
where Thomas Harris not only delivered the five commandments of Story form for
each, but how he solved the knotty problem of abiding by all of the conventions
and obligatory scenes of his chosen Genres.
 Value Shift, Polarity Shift, Turning Point
56 T he next three columns on The Story Grid Spreadsheet
pinpoint the mechanics of each scene.
TRACKING Essentially, the VALUE SHIFT, POLARITY SHIFT and
THE SCENE TURNING POINT columns will tell you how each scene
has moved the Story forward. You’ll identify what value is
at stake at the beginning of the scene and the value by the
end of the scene. Then you’ll determine whether that value
has shifted from positive to negative or negative to positive.
Lastly, you’ll determine the precise moment in the scene
when that shift occurred, the Turning Point.

These three columns will give you the perspective necessary

to track the success of your Story form. That is whether
your Inciting Incidents, progressive complications, crises,
climaxes and resolutions in each scene are clearly defined.
If you have to struggle to determine what value is at stake
in your scene or if there was no discernable moment in the
scene when it shifted from positive to negative or negative
to positive, you’ll know that you have more work to do on
that scene.

Before I lay out these three columns for the sixty-four scenes
in The Silence of the Lambs, some definitions and refreshers
of fundamental Story principles are in order:

Story Value: These are human experiences that can shift

in quality from positive to negative or negative to positive
from moment to moment. For example happy/sad, wisdom/
stupidity, love/hate, freedom/slavery, innocence/experience,
etc. Every scene must turn a Story value or it is not a scene. It
must start someplace (happy) and end somewhere else (sad)
or there is no movement, no change and the Story stops
dead in its tracks.

Polarity Shift: The polarity shift is simply shorthand for the

value valence change from +/- or -/+. Remember that change

229
230

can occur in a scene that moves from good to great or bad to worse too. +/++
THE STORY GRID

and -/-- are perfectly valid polarity shifts and are essential to building the thriller’s
progressive complications. Choosing when to escalate the complications in your
overall Story can make or break it from one that “works” to “doesn’t work.”

Turning Point: the precise beat when the value in the scene shifts from positive
to negative or negative to positive etc. Turning points can either happen through
action (a bomb blows up) or revelation. (“I’m you’re father, Luke.”)

You can see the Value Shift, Polarity Shift and Turning Point columns for The
Silence of the Lambs in the long spreadsheet at the end of this part of the book.
You’ll notice that I’ve categorized the turning points as either turning on “action”
or “revelation.”

Tracking the quality of the turning points is important, as it will give you a sense
of flow and continuity of your Story. If you are turning your scenes the same way
over and over again, it would be good to know that, right?

Repetitious turns will turn off a reader or viewer subconsciously. They won’t know
exactly why they’re losing the ability to suspend their disbelief in your Story, but
they will.

No matter how great the scene is, if it is the tenth straight scene that turns on
revelation, you will bore your audience. You’ve got to mix it up and surprise
the reader at every opportunity. So if they are expecting some big revelation to
happen, it’s best to throw down some action. And vice versa.

THE EDITOR
STAGE THREE
Now it’s time for you to go through all of your scenes and evaluate your value
shifts, polarity shifts and turning points. Take your time doing so and be brutally
honest with yourself. This process could take as long as two weeks to complete.
Set yourself a reasonable goal each day. Today I will evaluate ten scenes.

Remember that we all have a tendency to protect ourselves from criticism by

writing down “what we intended to do” as opposed to “what we really did” on
the page. And we become more and more susceptible to that temptation when
we’ve been slaving in the analytical mines all day. So take your time and do this
piecemeal. And again, don’t rewrite now. Wait until you’ve finished your Story
Grid before you set yourself to that task.
 231

It’s okay if you want to write down what you intended to do as well as what you

TRACKING THE SCENE

actually did if that will allow you to be truthful. What you don’t want to do is
write down what is not on the page. Remember that no one in the universe will
look at your Story Grid Spreadsheet. Nor would they really understand what
it means anyway. The last thing you want to do is lie to yourself about what is
actually on the page. You need to remind yourself that you are going to fix the
problems in due course. This is the time to find the problems, not to sweep them
under the rug.

So if you find that your first ten scenes do not turn or there is no clear value at
stake, but a whole slew of values, or that you’ve used the same polarity shift over
and over again, don’t sweat it. Just barrel through and write down the truth of
every scene in your first draft and leave the “solution” stage for another time.

FINDING THE PROBLEMS IS THE EDITOR’S #1 JOB

This first draft spreadsheet round is all about finding the problems.

It’s not about solving the problems.

The only way to solve all of the problems in your draft is to have them all clearly
listed in front of you. So you must force yourself to keep the Writer on vacation
and also don’t overwork the Editor. Pace yourself. You may not think that you
are getting anywhere, but you are. When you finish The Story Grid Spreadsheet,
you’ll be able to go through it over and over again and mine seriously valuable
insight. But if your spreadsheet is not complete or there are intentions and not
actualities listed in it, it will do you little good. It will be more of an excuse list
than a helpful tool.

Think of The Story Grid Spreadsheet like a knife. You must hone it and keep it
razor sharp so that when you need to cut or re-envision a scene, you’ll know
exactly where to do it and more importantly WHY to do it. The How of doing it
will also come to you over time. Not now, but when you least expect it. Let the
writer deal with the How later. You’ll be amazed by how smart that guy is.
 Point of View, Period/Time, Duration, Location
57 Onstage Characters, Offstage Characters

TRACKING T he last six columns in The Story Grid Spreadsheet

concern Story continuity.
CONTINUITY These are important to track so that you keep all of the
setting, time, and character entrances and exits in sync. On
the screen, continuity glitches can take the viewer right out
of the experience. We’ve all seen movies where a character
is smoking a long cigarette in one scene. And then the shot
cuts to another character and then back to the cigarette
smoker who is now holding a drink with no cigarette in
sight. Those continuity glitches aren’t just distracting; they
ruin the viewer’s ability to suspend their disbelief. The same
thing can happen in a novel or play.

The Story Grid Spreadsheet is the place to keep track of all

of the little details that can sabotage the finest of stories.

Again, this is pure analytical labor. It takes serious

concentration. So, I’d suggest doing only a limited amount
of this work per day. Set a goal to do ten scenes and then
shut it down and walk the dog. You can get seriously hinky if
you try and knock off these details in a day. Take your time.
The more accurate the spreadsheet is, the more helpful it
will be.

Here are the column headings with brief descriptions:

Point of View is the vantage point from which the reader/

viewer sees the fictional world. You’ll see that Thomas
Harris uses nine different points of view in The Silence of
the Lambs.

Here is a chart of all nine along with the number of scenes

each has in the novel.
233

TRACKING CONTINUITY
234

Where Harris chose to switch points of view were critical decisions. The way you
THE STORY GRID

choose to approach point of view is no less crucial. Track them and you’ll be able
to experiment. If you don’t track them, you won’t know how you handled this
crucial Storytelling device from scene to scene. And that is just silly not to know.

Period/Time is simply the time of day, hour, weekday, month or year that the
scene is taking place. For example, late afternoon, Thursday February 6 is a very
specific period and time designation. The more specific you are with the period
and time in each of your scenes, the better. If you are unable to pinpoint exactly
when the scene you’ve written has taken place, you need to figure that out. If you
don’t know, the reader certainly won’t either.

Why would you ever want to lose a reader because they are confused about the
time in a scene? Thomas Harris embedded all of the information necessary to
map out the exact time and day of his Story. I figured it out. You have to be able
to do it too.

Duration describes the approximate length of time the scene took to occur. If
it’s a meeting, chances are it won’t last longer than fifteen minutes. If it’s a long
chase action scene, the duration could be much longer. You need to choose how
long your scene will play out. Again, specificity and variety are keys to holding
a reader’s interest. One meeting scene after another will bore them to tears. And
action scene, action scene, action scene will suck the life out of them.

Location is literally where the scene is taking place. Again be as specific as

possible.

Onstage Characters column is a literal list of all of the characters present in

the scene. It’s important to have a keen understanding of who is on stage in
every single scene. If someone never appears on stage and is just referred to, that
choice will have a very big impact on how the reader imagines them. I also track
the total number of players on stage and place the number next to the list in a
separate column. Again we don’t want the same characters over and over again
in the same combinations. We want variety.

Offstage Characters are the people who are not in the scene but are referred to
by the people on stage. This is especially important when tracking “speeches in
praise of villains” in thrillers and in establishing relationships between characters.
If your onstage characters never refer to any offstage characters, the scene will
not feel authentic. The first thing we all do in a conversation is refer to other
people. If your characters don’t do that in your Story, they will not come off as
“real.” I also track the total number of players mentioned off stage in the scene
and place the number next to the list.
58
THE STORY GRID
SPREADSHEET FOR
THE SILENCE OF
THE LAMBS

235
236 THE STORY GRID
237

THE STORY GRID SPREADSHEET FOR THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

238 THE STORY GRID
239

THE STORY GRID SPREADSHEET FOR THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

240 THE STORY GRID
241

THE STORY GRID SPREADSHEET FOR THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

242 THE STORY GRID
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THE STORY GRID SPREADSHEET FOR THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

244 THE STORY GRID
245

THE STORY GRID SPREADSHEET FOR THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

246 THE STORY GRID
247

THE STORY GRID SPREADSHEET FOR THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

248 THE STORY GRID
249

THE STORY GRID SPREADSHEET FOR THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

250 THE STORY GRID
251

THE STORY GRID SPREADSHEET FOR THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

252 THE STORY GRID
253

THE STORY GRID SPREADSHEET FOR THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

1
59
W ith sixty-four rows corresponding to sixty-four scenes
in the novel The Silence of the Lambs and fourteen
columns detailing the step-by-step progression of the global
Story along with the key values for each scene labeled and
FOR MICRO
FROM all elements of continuity detailed, we’ve got the micro
TO MACRO progression of scenes fully fleshed out. Now is the time to
use The Story Grid Spreadsheet to help us analyze the novel
from the thirty-thousand-foot view, the macro distillation of
the Foolscap Global Story Grid.

We’ve now reached:

THE EDITOR
STAGE FOUR
Deconstructing the big movements of how Thomas Harris
created that rarest of novels—the outrageously successful
commercial thriller that stands as one of the pre-eminent
novels of the twentieth century will be a lot of fun. Seriously.
Somehow Harris wrote a book that was impossible to put
down but deeply resonates with the reader long after he’s
finished reading. I’ve gone through the book at least fifty
times line by line and I always discover something new.
While I do not profess to have any insight into the working
mind of Thomas Harris or of how he crafts his stories, what
I can do is analyze the structure of his work within the
traditions and conventions of his chosen Genres.

We’re going to do this by going back to our Foolscap Global

Story Grid. This is the Norm Stahl/Steven Pressfield one
piece of paper that outlines an entire novel. So let’s now go
macro and fill in the foolscap page for The Silence of the
Lambs.
PART SEVEN

BUILDING
THE FOOLSCAP
GLOBAL STORY
GRID
60
If you’re like me, right now your head is swimming.

You’ve just spent three or four weeks using a microscope

to lay out the elements of a novel, all of its scenes and
BACK TO GENRE continuity details, turning points, values etc. Moving from
minutiae to the view from thirty thousand feet is a very
difficult transition. No matter how many books I’ve worked
on, the moment I’ve completed The Story Grid Spreadsheet
brings great joy and soon thereafter great sorrow. Because
inevitably, I’ll have this really cool document and not really
know what to do with it.

Don’t panic.

It is in these times that Genre will save you. Remember that

Genres manage audience expectations. So if we head back
to looking at the big picture by detailing the Genres inherent
in our Story, we’ll be able to make sure we hit all of our
marks. That is, we can make sure that we abided by the
conventions and obligatory scenes of our chosen Genres.
And once we’ve made sure we’ve done that, we can then
hone them so that they are extraordinary. But if we don’t
have a checklist of things to make sure we’ve done, we’ll just
get lost in the details of our micro Story Grid Spreadsheet.

The Foolscap Global Story Grid is that checklist. So let’s fill

it out and see how Thomas Harris solved all of his Genres
requirements.

Let’s go back to those very important half dozen questions

that the editor must ask himself of every project that crosses
his desk. These are the make or break questions that will give
him the definitive answer to that crucial question—Works,
Doesn’t Work?

257
258 THE STORY GRID
259

BACK TO GENRE
260

Here they are again:

THE STORY GRID

1. What’s the Genre?

2. What are the conventions and obligatory scenes for that Genre?

3. What’s the Point of View?

4. What are the protagonist’s objects of desire?

5. What’s the controlling idea/theme?

6. What is the Beginning Hook, the Middle Build, and Ending Payoff?

After we’ve answered these six big questions, we’ll be able to build our Foolscap
Global Story Grid one page—the single page document that gives us our Big
Picture. So let’s take a deep breath and just start out with answering Genre.

After just one read, an experienced Editor would have no problem (with the
exception perhaps of the Internal Content Genre) categorizing The Silence of the
Lambs’ Genres.

Let’s run ‘em down:

1. TIME: Obviously, the novel is long form Storytelling.

2. REALITY: From the first page, with its reportorial sensibility and the
specificity of its references to a real life law and order institution (FBI) and
settings, it’s clear we’re dealing with the realities of contemporary life. So
Realism is the Reality Genre.

3. STYLE: As we are dealing with concrete emotional terrain, the Style Genre
is Drama.

4. STRUCTURE: Structure is classic Arch-plot with a protagonist on a personal

quest (Ambitious newbie trying to become FBI agent) and then given an
external mission too (interview the craziest killer ever).

5. CONTENT:

A. EXTERNAL: The External Content Genre has all of the markings of the
thriller (see the earlier chapters, THE UNIVERSAL APPEAL OF THE
THRILLER and THE OBLIGATORY SCENES AND CONVENTIONS OF
THE THRILLER) and as it concerns the hunt for a serial killer, the flavor
of thriller is serial killer.
 261

B. INTERNAL: I’ll get into the Internal Content Genre and why I categorize

BACK TO GENRE
it as “disillusionment” later on.

Okay, so we know the Genres. We can now fill in our Foolscap.

61
F or fun, let’s look at the world through Thomas Harris’ eyes
and let’s pretend that he uses The Story Grid to help him
organize his thoughts. It’s 1982 and he has to make some
choices. Again I have no idea how Thomas Harris works nor
FILLING IN would I presume to tell him how to work. I’m just looking
THE FOOLSCAP at the end result and reengineering it through my Story Grid
methodology.

He’s already written a great serial killer thriller called Red

Dragon, which introduced the piece de resistance of serial
killers, Hannibal Lecter.

What’s he going to do next?

Harris is a working pro. That is, he makes his living writing.

Red Dragon was successful enough that his agent and
his editor probably plead with him to write a sequel. The
publisher backs up the notion with a hefty advance. So
Harris is tasked with outdoing Red Dragon, the novel that
defined the serial killer novel.

What a nightmare!

Congratulations…you’ve done something very few writers

have ever done before…now do it one better!

Harris doesn’t panic. He gets out a legal pad of foolscap

paper and writes down what he needs to decide. It will look
like this:
263

FILLING IN THE FOOLSCAP

264

The first question to answer is easy:

THE STORY GRID

The second question is easy too, as we know the thriller Genre backwards and
forwards. The global value at stake in a thriller is a convention—life/death.

Now, why did I write down Life to Unconsciousness to Death to Damnation? I

did so to remind myself of the progression of negativity of the LIFE value. It moves
from LIFE to UNCONSCIOUSNESS to DEATH. But of course, it goes even further.
To the end of the line of human experience.

What is that?

It is the fate worse than death…DAMNATION.

The most compelling thrillers take us to the end of the line...the limit of human
experience. Thomas Harris knows that his protagonist for his sequel must move
through these stages to reach a fresh and personal hell (just like his protagonist Will
Graham did in Red Dragon). His protagonist must face damnation. [Review the
chapter THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING in part 3 for further explanation
on value progressions.]

We are just two answers into filling out our Foolscap page and already we know
just about everything we’ll need to know about the global structure of the new
novel. Just by clearly deciding the global Genre and using the value at stake for
that Genre as our North Star.

Here’s why.

We have to write a BEGINNING HOOK for the novel, then a MIDDLE BUILD,
and finally an ENDING PAYOFF. But we can’t just willy-nilly shift our global
Story Genre in mid-stream from serial killer thriller to love Story and throw out
our global life value and substitute it with a global love value.
 265

That would be a recipe for disaster.

FILLING IN THE FOOLSCAP

The reason why we can’t do this is because the major turning points in a Story
require turns on the global value of the chosen global Genre. That is, the climax
of the Beginning Hook, the climax of the Middle Build and the climax of the
Ending Payoff must turn on the Life value for a thriller. For a love Story they must
turn on the love value.

Now smaller scenes in the thriller novel (those we fully detailed in our spreadsheet)
can certainly turn on other values. But the big moments have to turn on the
global value.

Because we know straight off the bat that we’re writing a sequel to a serial killer
thriller, we know that we have to abide by the serial killer Genre’s conventions
for the major turning points of the Story.

Harris knows that those conventions insist that he move the lead protagonist
from a stable LIFE at the beginning of the Story to a state of cluelessness,
UNCONSCIOUSNESS, at the end of the Beginning Hook of his Story.

And then Harris knows that he has to take the protagonist from
UNCONSCIOUSNESS at the end of his hook to the threat of DEATH in his
Middle Build.

And finally he must take his protagonist from the threat of DEATH at the climax
of his Middle Build to the threat of DAMNATION to pay off the entire Story.

This is his goal…to take his protagonist to the limits of external human experience.
Some thrillers, most in fact, don’t go this far and that’s okay. But they have to at
least have the threat of damnation if not put it in play. Or they’ve gone to the
limits of human experience in the Story’s supporting Internal Genre. Or they
simply work without going to the end of the line. They work, but they’d don’t
push the envelope of the Genre. If you want to transcend the run of the mill stuff
in your chosen Genre, you must take the Story to the end of the line.

Harris went for broke with The Silence of the Lambs. He chose to take his Story
as far as it could go.

Because he knows he’s going for broke, Harris moves to the last three quarters of
his foolscap page and writes the following in the three blocks designated for his
Beginning Hook, Middle Build and Ending Payoff. These notes will remind him
of how his scenes must progress.
266
THE STORY GRID

On his foolscap, he’s reminding himself that the BEGINNING HOOK of his book
will move his protagonist from LIFE to UNCONSCIOUSNESS. Then the MIDDLE
BUILD must take the character from UNCONSCIOUSNESS to threat of DEATH.
And lastly, the ENDING PAYOFF must deliver the limit of human experience
moving from the threat of DEATH to the threat of DAMNATION.

So if and when he gets stuck at any place in his novel, Harris will have a concrete
reminder of the most important progressions. He’ll have something to use to
evaluate his scenes. No matter how great a scene, if it gets in the way of moving
his lead character from one life value to the next, it has to go.
 267

What is so impressive about Harris is that instead of banging out just another

FILLING IN THE FOOLSCAP

book that mirrored the progressions of Red Dragon, he challenged himself to
write something completely different. The foolscap he has in hand now is the
same as it would have been for Red Dragon at the same stage of construction.

But, what Harris chose to do with The Silence of the Lambs is to do Red Dragon
one better. He added a remarkably satisfying Internal Content Genre for his
protagonist. Reading Red Dragon and then The Silence of the Lambs back to
back is the equivalent of listening to Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations recorded
in 1955 and then listening to the same pieces recorded in 1981. They are both
astounding works, but for my money Harris in 1988 and Gould in 1981 are
examples of creators moving from exuberant geniuses to seasoned artists.
62
H uman beings live in two worlds, the external and the
internal, on the public stage and inside ourselves. We
pursue external objects of desire like a new job or a spouse
or if we’re in law enforcement, we seek to bring criminals
THE INTERNAL to justice. But we also have internal objects of desire, like
CONTENT respect or redemption or belonging to something bigger
than ourselves. But the deepest internal object of desire, the
GENRE OF one we admire most in our fellow human beings and in
THE SILENCE OF ourselves, is to seek truth.
THE LAMBS And truth is defined as a search for those unknowable
answers to two questions:

Who am I?

Why am I here?

It is within the Internal Content Genres that we find the

pursuit of answers to these ultimately unknowable questions.

The best stories, the ones that we fall head over heels in love
with, are those that contend with finding deep internal truth.

Thomas Harris decided, whether consciously or

subconsciously matters little, that the way to outdo Red
Dragon was to put as much emphasis on his Internal Content
Genre in The Silence of the Lambs as he does his External
Content Genre.

Remember that the external Story of life is on the surface.

And two kinds of outside forces drive external events. Harris

knew that he had the personal outside forces of the serial
killer Buffalo Bill and the extra-personal outside forces of
the FBI Behavioral Science Unit to drive his external Story
for The Silence of the Lambs. His lead protagonist’s external
Story would move backward or forward according to her
moment-to-moment success pursuing her conscious object
of desire, her “want.”
 269

What’s wonderful about Harris’ choice of protagonist (beyond the fact that he

THE INTERNAL CONTENT GENRE OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

wisely chose to feature a woman trying to make it in a man’s world) is that he
does not give her the obvious “want” of most serial killer stories. We don’t meet
a seasoned/hardened detective faced with a seemingly impossible task. Well, we
do, but he’s the secondary character Jack Crawford.

Instead of making the charismatic Crawford his lead, Harris introduces us to a

version of ourselves, a newbie trainee with a lot of ambition and “on the surface”
qualities that seem to be easy to exploit. She’s smart, but more importantly, she
has the physical qualities that will attract the attentions of Hannibal Lecter. Clarice
Starling’s “want” at the beginning of the Story is a reflection of her internal need
to find the truth. Just as every one of our deep-seated wants is to find truth.

At the beginning of the novel, Clarice Starling just wants to become an FBI Agent
under Behavioral Science head Jack Crawford.

But when she discovers the errand that Crawford sends her on could help solve
the Buffalo Bill case, her want then escalates to contribute to cracking the case
itself. She now wants to play a big role in catching the serial killer du jour.

That change in want, driven by events arising from conflict, moves the external
Story forward. She’s now “wanting” something else and we as readers are pulled
with her as she chases it. We want it for her too. What this “on the surface” drive
sets up is an internal journey too. We the readers might not know the specific
internal reasons why it is so important for her to be an FBI agent, but Harris does.

And Harris masterfully takes us deeper and deeper into Starling as a human being.
She doesn’t know it (and we don’t know it either really), but her want to become
an FBI Agent has turned into a need to find truth...about the world she inhabits
and the truth about herself.

She wants to find the surface truth of the identity of Buffalo Bill, but she also
needs to learn the truth of the institution that is tasked with finding him (the
FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit) in order to be ultimately successful in her career.
Crawford is retiring soon. What will it take for her to get his job someday? Learning
the truth about the institution brings up yet another need…to find out the truth of
why she needs to be a part of it so badly.

Remember that we look to Story to instruct us how to navigate the world. While
we the readers get sucked into the External Genre, Thomas Harris is also telling an
underlying Internal Content Genre Story. The “A” Story is the serial killer thriller
and the “B” Story is the internal content Story all about Starling, an empathetic
stand-in for the reader.

We don’t live in one world. We live in two.

270

The external world (how we live among our fellow man pursuing what we want)
THE STORY GRID

and the internal world (how we find peace within ourselves by getting what we
need) are the hemispheres of human experience.

Let’s get back to Thomas Harris’ foolscap and look at how he answered the crucial
Internal Content Genre and the value at stake progression:

Again, Harris knew that he was going to write a sequel to Red Dragon and
that it would be a serial killer thriller that had life as its central global value at
stake. I also suspect that he knew that he wanted his lead character to “win” the
external challenge—to find the killer. That is, he wanted his protagonist to smite
the dragon, to get what she wants externally. He may have toyed with the idea
of Buffalo Bill getting away or even killing Clarice Starling and using a part of
her body to perfect his woman suit, but I doubt that notion got very far. Having
a schizophrenic flayer of women come out on top just doesn’t jibe with even the
most cynical views of contemporary society. The world is a mess, but it’s not so
chaotic that you can’t walk down the street without the threat of death. At least
that’s true within the confines of western society’s reading public...those people
who would actually engage and buy Harris’ book.

So if the External Genre ends up as a “win,” a positive success, the killer is

brought to justice and the protagonist survives, what “B” Story could Harris tell
that doesn’t end with roses and sunshine?

Remember that one of the reasons we find Story so compelling is that it provides
both sides of life in the telling...the positive and the negative. So if the External
Genre ends in positive, the Internal Genre should end in the negative. The
combination plate of win/lose produces irony. If the writer invests in a deep
Internal Content Genre as his “B” Story and chooses to have it succeed or fail in
the same way as his External Content Genre, the Story won’t work. It will ring
untrue. Readers will come away disappointed, even though they don’t know
exactly why.

The thriller often uses a secondary tragic love Story to counterbalance the positive
of getting the criminal. That is, the protagonist falls in love, but then loses the love
after the killer discovers the attachment. The villain then kills the protagonist’s love
interest or his buddy salvation partner etc. The lead character wins by bringing
the antagonist to justice, but loses by losing her love.

We’ve seen this twist a million times. It’s not that you can’t use love Story to
accomplish this goal if you set out to write a thriller, but you’re going to have a
 271

hell of a time making it fresh and surprising. We’re so used to this subplot that

THE INTERNAL CONTENT GENRE OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

most readers will be so far ahead of the Storytelling that they’ll abandon the book
very early on in the read. They know it’s only a matter of time before the bad guy
kills the hero’s lover/partner/friend.

Harris uses love Story as subplot in The Silence of the Lambs, but he uses it
as tertiary comic relief more than dramatic revelation—i.e. the nerd at the
Smithsonian’s flirtation with Clarice Starling. Harris also uses the father/daughter
mentor/apprentice love relationship masterfully too, but serious romantic love is
not a driving force in the book.

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel with Starling falling in love as his “B” Story,
Harris decided to use his journalist’s training to comment on a social institution.
He has Starling learn the hard way about the realities of the FBI, bureaucracy,
politics, sexism etc. The way he chose to dramatize this education, while also
adding deep layers of characterization to his lead character, is to choose the
Disillusionment Plot as his Internal Content Genre.

Remember that the disillusionment plot is a movement from a positive belief in

the order of the universe, basic fairness etc. (positive) to a darker point of view,
one that recognizes the murkiness of life, the real injustice and mendacity that
plagues us all. To have no illusions is to understand that a person must have
powerful political connections to move up in a large organization. Working one’s
fingers to the bone is all well and good, but getting to “the top” requires alliances
and careful manipulations.

The disillusioned come to the conclusion that there is no treasure at the end of
the hard-work rainbow, because there really isn’t any rainbow to begin with.
What we think we want and how we think we can get there is never what it really
turns out to be. To become a pivotal high-ranking FBI agent has as much to do
with who your friends are as it does with how hard you work or how talented an
agent you are. Harris chose to have Starling learn this needed dark lesson while
she pursues her external wants—finding Buffalo Bill.

The value at stake in the Disillusionment plot is the lead character’s worldview.
What Germans call Weltanschauung. I love the German word because, for me,
it sounds visceral, in the guts. Generally, the progression of negativity of the
Weltanschauung value moves from ILLUSION to CONFUSION to DISILLUSION
to the negation of the negation DYSTHYMIA (a chronic state of negative/
depression).

But for The Silence of the Lambs, I define the progression as a movement from
the negative state of naïve positivity of BLIND BELIEF (assuming something
without empirical proof) to the positive state of JUSTIFIED BELIEF (coming to
trust based on evidence) back to the negative with the rise of DOUBT (counter
272

evidence arising disproving previous data) and culminating in deep negative of

THE STORY GRID

DISILLUSION.

For Clarice Starling, her disillusionment plot manifests itself through her illusions
about the meritocracy of the FBI. She begins the Story from a positive yet dangerous
state of BLIND BELIEF in the power figures and the FBI institution as a whole. At
the beginning, she’s being played by Jack Crawford to do his dirty work (using her
as bait for Hannibal Lecter to help Crawford crack a case) but because she is so
blinded by her ambition and ego, she doesn’t question Crawford’s motives. She
wants to believe that Crawford sees something in her, some quality above and
beyond her test scores and beauty that leads her to this great opportunity.

After he pulls her in, Crawford then actively manipulates Starling into seeing the
FBI as a righteous institution. He rewards her with more authority and respect as
she proves herself capable. He confuses her and her confusion/unconsciousness
leads her to JUSTIFIED BELIEF that the FBI really is a meritocracy. Harris has
Starling transition from BLIND BELIEF to JUSTIFIED BELIEF just as he moves the
external value from LIFE to UNCONSCIOUSNESS at the end of the Beginning
Hook of the novel.

Later when the FBI and Crawford come under extreme stress after the kidnapping
of a senator’s daughter though, the real truth about the institution begins to reveal
itself to Starling. Her illusions about her place in the world begin to shatter. By
the novel’s end, she is forced to directly oppose the FBI in order to get what she
wants (Buffalo Bill) which also saves her from spiritual damnation.

After all of the machinations within and outside the FBI, at the end of the novel
Starling is DISILLUSIONED.

She has a negative worldview. She understands that there are no rules at the FBI
beyond self-preservation. She is not at the end of the line in terms of the disillusion
value (catatonic depression or Dysthymia), but her worldview has dramatically
changed from the beginning of the novel to the end.

While the external content value ends at positive, the life value has been restored
(although it is not at the level that it was at the beginning of the novel), the internal
value ends at negative. I’ll do a much deeper dive into this dual progression and
how the two values arc in relation to one another chapter by chapter later on
when we build our final Story Grid.

So here is how we’ll fill in our Foolscap for the Internal Genre:
 273

And let’s add in the Internal Value Progression alongside the external value

THE INTERNAL CONTENT GENRE OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

progression on the rest of our page:
63
S o Thomas Harris has his marching orders in terms of his
External and Internal Content Genres. What he’ll do now
is write down the obligatory scenes and conventions of the
serial killer thriller in shorthand to remind himself of his
THE OBLIGATORY “must haves.”
SCENES AND
CONVENTIONS OF
THE SILENCE OF
THE LAMBS Looking at this list of seven, Harris understands that each of
these elements should be literally “on stage, on the page” so
that the reader is clearly satisfied that they’ve been delivered.
They can’t be off stage and reported by a third party.

So, we’ll need at least seven scenes to deliver what is

expected in a thriller:

• A scene/chapter that establishes the central crime and

its inherent MacGuffin (the big “want” of the villain)

• A scene/chapter that establishes that the villain has

made his crimes personal in relation to the investigator

• A scene/chapter that establishes at least one false

lead/red herring

• A possible scene/chapter that clearly establishes a

clock

• A scene/chapter that establishes the gravitas/praises

the intelligence and/or power of the villain

• A scene/chapter that puts the hero at the mercy of the

villain

• A scene/chapter that is a false ending

 275

These seven scenes are extremely concrete assignments. They break down an

THE OBLIGATORY SCENES AND CONVENTIONS OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

extremely intimidating task into clear, doable bits. While you may end up writing
twenty versions of each of these scenes before you find the perfect fit for your
Story, understanding what these scenes are and why they need to be in your
thriller leapfrogs you into action.

Write them down on your one page foolscap so that you never forget their
importance. And then make damn sure that you have them in your final
manuscript. I’ll show you how to do this when you map out the final Story Grid.
I’ll pinpoint exactly where Harris satisfied these conventions…the exact scenes
themselves.
1
64
M oving down the top of the foolscap, Harris now has
to make global decisions about the point of view and
generally what his controlling idea/theme will be for the
entire novel.
FOR OF
POINT
Let’s start with Point of View.
VIEW AND
CONTROLLING This choice is relatively simple for a thriller. I’d suggest either
one of two.
IDEA IN
THE SILENCE OF You can write a thriller in first person from the lead character’s
THE LAMBS point of view. The effect is literally having your lead character
tell the Story to the reader. I went to see Hannibal Lecter…
for example.

The advantages of first person are the immediate

establishment of a tight bond between the reader and a
character. Gillian Flynn does this extraordinarily well in
Gone Girl for both her female and male lead characters.

The limitations of first person, though, are the inability to

narrate a scene where your lead character is not present.
Some writers get around this limitation by having multiple
first person Storylines, like Gillian Flynn does. Others find
that a singular and direct approach aids them in creating
tension. First person is a perfectly valid, and when done
well, an extremely compelling choice. Years ago I worked
on a police procedural novel called Eleven Days by Donald
Harstad, which used first person to perfection.

The alternative to pure first person is to use the wonderful

old standby “cheat” called Free Indirect Style. Free Indirect
Style evolved in the nineteenth century in France and other
places where writers were working out “realism.” Gustave
Flaubert is often credited with the first very immersive Free
Indirect Style in Madame Bovary. Essentially, Free Indirect
Style is a way of writing in third person, while also allowing
 277

the writer to crawl inside the brain of a character and tell the reader her thoughts.

POINT OF VIEW AND CONTROLLING IDEA IN THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

For more on it, re-read the FREE INDIRECT STYLE chapter in part 3.

Harris chose to use Free Indirect Style throughout the novel.

Just to make the Free Indirect Style more clear, I’ll refer to this technique in The
Story Grid Spreadsheet and in the text from this point forward as Omniscient
Intracranial, which is sort of a wide-angle “mind-reading” vision from a single
character’s point of view.

Next Harris had to choose whether he should add additional points of view
other than his lead character, Clarice Starling. I’m sure he debated these choices
innumerable times in his mind, but for my money, I think he came up with a
perfect mix when he gave dedicated chapters to Jack Crawford, Jame Gumb,
Hannibal Lecter, Catherine Martin, Senator Martin, Ardelia Mapp, and Select
Police/FBI/Paramedics. Harris also used straight up third person omniscient a
number of times (the journalist’s default choice to tell a Story) in order to convey
an authoritarian sensibility for exposition. The effect was to drop in essential
exposition in the guise of an official report or a journalist’s notes. He does this
with his journalistic detailing the preparations of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team
for example.

A list of all of the points of view and the number of scenes each point of view
has in the Beginning Hook (BH), Middle Build (MB) and Ending Payoff (EP) of the
entire novel follows.

Last but certainly not least, Harris may have begun writing The Silence of the
Lambs with some sort of controlling idea in mind. I don’t think it tormented him
to the degree that his first Lecter-themed novel, Red Dragon did. But remember
that I have no idea whatsoever about his writing process. All of my analysis of
his work is through the lens of The Story Grid and not in any way a nonfiction
account of how Mr. Harris writes.

Let’s review again exactly what a controlling idea is.

The controlling idea is the takeaway for the reader. It’s what the entire Story is all
about. And it should be easily expressed in one sentence, describing how and
why a change has occurred from the state at the beginning of the Story to the
state at the end of the Story. As Harris has decided to counterbalance his external
thriller plot with an internal disillusionment plot, he’s setting out to leave the
reader with a sense of irony.
278
THE STORY GRID

If he had decided just to focus on the External Plot, his controlling idea would
be something like “Justice triumphs when the protagonist empathizes with the
victims.” Remember that Starling doesn’t crack and break the Buffalo Bill case
until she looks at the world through Fredrica Bimmel’s eyes, the first victim of
Jame Gumb in Belvedere, Ohio.

But Harris set out to do more than just convey the message that we should
pay as much, if not more attention to the victims of violent crime as we do the
perpetrators. As a former journalist for the Associated Press and reporter on the
police beat in Waco, Texas, Harris was well aware of the human infatuation with
evil and of how that curiosity is exploited by tabloid journalism.

That theme was a very big element in Red Dragon.

How he chose to create deeper meaning with The Silence of the Lambs is by
placing as much emphasis on Starling’s self-delusion and naiveté as he does on
 279

the thriller plot. How she changes from the beginning of the novel and how she

POINT OF VIEW AND CONTROLLING IDEA IN THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

comes to a deeper understanding of herself and her place in the world by the end
is the heart and soul of the work. It’s not just the emphasis on the disillusionment
plot that takes the novel into a higher realm; it’s the mechanism Harris chose to
enlighten Starling that provides an even deeper irony.

At the end of the novel, Starling has saved the life of another person and saved
herself from personal damnation. But she did so not by being supported by a
righteous human institution, the FBI, but through the help of evil incarnate,
Hannibal Lecter. The FBI portrays itself as a force of good, but in the novel, it is
in fact the opposite.

The psychopath who literally eats human beings he finds contemptible for
seemingly no other reason than sport is in fact the most consistent and forthright
character in the entire novel. While he certainly withholds information from her,
Lecter does not lie to Starling.

He mentors her far more than Jack Crawford.

And it is through Lecter’s help that Starling is not only able to help humanity, but
to find the truth about herself. The trick she learns by the end of the novel is not
to silence the screams of the lambs within her, but to listen to them.

So what is the overarching controlling idea of The Silence of the Lambs? The clue
for me is in Harris’ choice of title.

Starling has to accept that the shrieks of the lambs within her psyche will never go
away. She can live in fear of them and do everything in her power to escape them
or she can use them as fuel to compel her in her life’s work—seeking justice. On
a global thematic scale, I think you can see the lambs as Jesus Christ metaphors.
That is, we continually slaughter the truth, the word of Christ, the lamb of God.

We deny the truth of ourselves. We silence innocence.

Lecter, the dark prince, understands that Starling’s anger (a dark force) and her
deep sense of injustice from her childhood are the very things that will enable
her to unearth the truth about Buffalo Bill. Lecter literally asks Starling a number
of times in the novel, “What do you do with your anger, Clarice?”

She never verbally answers the question. But she does with her actions.
280

She uses her anger to drive herself into the abyss…to raise the courage to battle
THE STORY GRID

the dragon in his own dark lair. She succeeds on one level, slaying Buffalo Bill,
but loses on another.

Her pas de deux with Lecter ultimately ensures the cannibal’s escape. Perhaps
the controlling idea is this: Justice prevails when the protagonist engages her
inner darkness as passionately as she does her “positive” side.

Alternatively, We silence the word of God because the Devil’s diction is far more
entertaining.

Or, Evil silences truth.

I suspect Thomas Harris understands the irony of a serial killer thriller as

“entertainment” far better than we.
 To complete the bottom three quarters we need to go back to
our Story Grid Spreadsheet. Our goal is to pick out the five
1
65 scenes from the novel that comprise the five cornerstones
of Story Form—the Inciting Incident, a progressive
FINISHING THE
FOR complication, the crisis, the climax and the resolution—for
FOOLSCAP FOR the Beginning Hook of the novel. Then, we’ll do the same
thing for the Middle Build of the book and lastly the Ending
THE SILENCE OF Payoff.
THE LAMBS
Where to begin?
Let’s go back and pretend that we’re Thomas Harris using
The Story Grid to lay out his novel before he actually wrote
the first draft. How would he approach filling in this section
of the Foolscap Global Story Grid?

Well, he’ll know a few things right off the bat about
Beginning Hooks, Middle Builds, and Ending Payoffs. He’ll
know the values at stake and the kind of transitional scenes
he’ll need to write to move from the Beginning Hook (BH)
to the Middle Build (MB) and from the MB to the Ending
Payoff (EP).

1. He’ll need a scene at the end of the Beginning Hook

that shifts the global value of his External Genre in a
major way, while it also shifts the global value of his
Internal Genre in a major way, such that there is a
clear demarcation in the reader’s mind. This doesn’t
mean that he just slaps a divider in his book and calls
it PART TWO. It means that the reader subconsciously
understands that “now things are getting serious.”

2. He’ll need a scene at the end of the Middle Build

that shifts the global value of his External Genre in
an even bigger way than the transition scene from
BH to MB. This scene must also shift the global value
of his Internal Genre in an even bigger way than the
transition scene from BH to MB.

281
282

There must really be an even clearer demarcation in the reader’s mind at

THE STORY GRID

the end of this scene. Like a spectator at a Fourth of July Fireworks show,
the reader now must subconsciously understand that the grand finale of
the novel is on the way. The reader will put the book down at this point,
go to the bathroom, refill their glass of preferred beverage and let every
person know around him/her to leave him/her alone until they’ve finished
the book.

So let’s figure out how Harris solved these two scenes…that is, what chapters
from our Story Grid Spreadsheet represent these two critical scenes?

From my point of view, scene 12 (which corresponds to chapter 10) is the

transitional scene that ends the Beginning Hook and moves to the Middle Build.
Let’s look at whether or not this scene does what it’s supposed to do.

Does it shift the global value of the External Genre (the serial killer thriller value
is life) in a major way?

Remember that Harris made a note to himself a while back that reminded him
that he had to shift the value from Life to Unconsciousness by the end of the
Beginning hook. Does he do that with this scene? The answer is that he actually
takes the value a little further than unconsciousness…he takes it to what I call
“off stage death.”

If he were to have just taken it to unconsciousness, the end of the Beginning

Hook would be the discovery that there was some killer out there that no one
had any clue was active. Everything that the FBI had thought about the Buffalo
Bill case would be completely turned on its ear. I think that moment (life to
unconsciousness) comes earlier in the telling and is not a major turning point in
the novel. It was the revelation that Hannibal Lecter knew about the head in the
jar in the storage unit and that he mostly likely knows the real identity of Buffalo
Bill.

So what do I mean by “off-stage death”? This is when the novelist reports of

death. He doesn’t put it on the page. Harris has Crawford tell Starling about
Miggs’ death in scene 7 (also chapter 7), which is the first death of the novel.
Now in scene 12, we learn that another victim of Buffalo Bill has surfaced. Can
you make the argument that this revelation can also be interpreted as information
that informs the FBI that what they thought was true isn’t? Sure.

The reason why scene 12 is the moment when the value drastically shifts in terms
of the life value is that it requires a very large reaction on the part of the central
 283

figures in the novel. The Miggs death doesn’t, nor does the head in the jar. The

FINISHING THE FOOLSCAP FOR THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

Miggs death matters little to the FBI. And the head in the jar seemingly means
little too. But the discovery of a body in a river is cause for the private plane to
be brought out and to immediately fly to West Virginia to check for fresh clues.

Does it shift the global value of the Internal Genre (the disillusionment Genre’s
value is worldview) in a major way?

Prior to scene 12, Starling is operating under “blind belief” of the meritocracy
inherent in the FBI. She thinks the way the FBI works is that if you do exceptional
work, you’ll move up. You’ll be rewarded with more responsibility. It’s the same
“blind belief” that we all begin with when we get out of college or start a new
job or join the tennis team. We believe that all we have to do is work hard
and do great work and we’ll be rewarded. Oftentimes, at the beginning of our
honeymoon with a particular institution, this blind belief is rewarded. That is, if
we do bust our chops, we do get recognized and we do get a pat on the back.
It is this pat on the back that moves our attitude from “blind belief” to “justified
belief.” Our idea that hard work pays off with recognition is proven correct, so
we place more trust in the institution. When what we think is true turns out to be
true, we trust our rational faculties all the more.

So, Starling sets off at the beginning of the novel with “blind belief” in the FBI. She
gets an interesting errand from big shot section head Jack Crawford, interviews
Lecter, writes up a stellar report and does a great job. Crawford tells her as much
and rewards her with another job, following up the lead that Lecter gave her
about the “valentines.”

Remember that Crawford didn’t agree to let Starling follow up on that clue
initially. It was only after her report came in that he agreed. That small detail…
denial of unproven skill and then rewarding of proven skill strengthens Starling’s
belief in the meritocracy of the FBI. Not in a major way, but a very important
building block kind of way. If Harris had Crawford give Starling the go-ahead to
track down the clue without her first proving herself with her report, the reader
would have found that odd…unbelievable even.

So by scene 12, Starling has proven herself twice. She did the great report on
Lecter, which got her the chance to follow up the clue. The clue turned out to
be the head in the jar at the storage facility in Baltimore, which was another star
in her cap. Remember also that she initially failed in her attempt to track down
the clue. Crawford lectured her about the failure in his “assume” speech and
then he gave her the advice that led to her success. More incremental proof of
meritocracy.
284

So now when the global external value shifts and there is the discovery of a dead
THE STORY GRID

body in West Virginia, Starling gets the big call to go with Crawford to fingerprint
the dead body.

This is a major shift in the Internal Genre for Starling. Her “blind belief” now
moves to “justified belief.” She did great work and now she’s being brought up
to the big leagues. She’s going to work with Jack Crawford as his right hand. The
progressive build of this promotion to junior FBI agent in training from plebe at
the academy is a major shift. And it happens in the transitional scene 12 (chapter
10) when the external value shifts too. This is not a coincidence. It is indispensable
Story craft.

So in my estimation, scene 12 is the resolution scene of the Beginning Hook of

the novel as well as the Inciting Incident of the Middle Build of the novel. Great
how that works out right? Very efficient Storytelling.

Now let’s move on to the transitional scene between the Middle Build and the
Ending Payoff.

It is scene 50 (chapter 48) when Starling meets Crawford at the funeral home to
ask him for his blessing for her to go to Belvedere, Ohio.

Does it shift the global value of the External Genre (the serial killer thriller value
is life) in a major way?

Thomas Harris knows that he has to move the global value from life to death to the
fate worse than death (damnation) in order to pay off the promise of his chosen
global External Genre. It is in scene 50 that this escalation of stakes becomes very
clear. The mere fact that it takes place in front of a funeral home after the death
of Jack Crawford’s wife lets the reader know that there are fates worse than death.
Outliving your loved one is certainly one.

From chapter 3, Bella has been slowly withering away, sapping Crawford of life
force. While he’s a stoic and tight-lipped professional, the reader can sense that
he’s not going to be of much use once his beloved kicks the bucket. And he’s not.

Starling too has been beaten down, pushing her to quit her pursuit of Buffalo Bill.

Political machinations have forced her back to the academy. She’s been warned
that if she goes near the Buffalo Bill case again, she’ll be washed out of the
program. And it’s also clear that even if she makes it through and gets her badge
as a full-fledged FBI agent, chances are that she’ll end up in a satellite office in
Podunk U.S.A. She’s not liked.
 285

But what Starling can’t abide is the fact that a woman is not only going to be

FINISHING THE FOOLSCAP FOR THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

killed, but her body will be desecrated, flayed and used to make a vest with “tits
on it.” Deep down she knows that if she does not do everything in her power to
try and save the woman, she’ll never forgive herself. Forget about the lambs she
didn’t try and save when she was a girl, how in the hell is she going to live with
herself knowing that she did nothing to save another human being?

This is the place where the External Genre moves from death to damnation for
this very reason.

If Starling quits and does nothing, a woman will die and she will suffer a fate
worse than death. So will Starling. She’ll have to live with unimaginable self-
hate. Damnation indeed.

So in scene 50 (chapter 48), Starling goes to Crawford and asks him to send her to
Ohio to figure out how Buffalo Bill hunts. Crawford, on the verge of an emotional
breakdown and also at the end of his career, agrees. Starling is the last best hope.

Does it shift the global value of the Internal Genre (the disillusionment Genre’s
value is worldview) in a major way?

I think it’s obvious by scene 50 (chapter 48) that Starling is no longer a believer
in the meritocracy of the FBI. Just to recap, she’s been used to titillate a cannibal
serial killer. That killer, Hannibal Lecter, turned the tables and used the FBI’s
stupidity against itself in a way that ensured his escape. He’s now at large after
slaughtering a number of innocent people. And God knows whether he has
designs on visiting Starling in person in the near future. Not only that, but the FBI
blames Starling for his escape and only through the intervention of the man who
got her into the mess in the first place (Crawford) is she still a viable candidate to
get her badge. Barely.

She’s moved from “blind belief” in the Beginning Hook, to “justified belief” and
“doubt” in the Middle Build, and now she’s on a steep dive into “disillusionment”
for the Ending Payoff.

What’s really great here is that she now knows the truth.

The FBI is bullshit. But, the job is not.

Her mission in life is still to bring justice to the world, to save as many lambs as
she can. Now that she no longer confuses the artifice of her mission (the badge)
with the actual mission, she’s a force to be reckoned with.
286

She’s literally no longer operating under any illusions. She doesn’t think she’s
THE STORY GRID

going to get anything out of her mission to Ohio. In fact, she’s pretty certain she’ll
get recycled for going in the first place. But she does it anyway.

She’s now a hero. She sacrifices herself for the sake of others.

You’ll notice that both of Harris’ transitional scenes that create major Story value
shifts are not big action scenes. There is no gunplay or blood.

He trusted his Story to deliver…not spectacle. And boy does it.

Now that we have our two critical Major shifts figured out, all we need to do is
walk back through the other scenes that make up the Inciting Incidents, progressive
complications, crises, climaxes and resolutions for our Beginning Hook, Middle
Build and Ending Payoff and track the polarity shifts in each of these scenes in
terms of the two global values at stake, life and worldview.

So now we have a completed Story Grid Spreadsheet and a completed Foolscap

Global Story Grid. Let’s put them together to generate the entire Story Grid for
The Silence of the Lambs.
287

FINISHING THE FOOLSCAP FOR THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

PART EIGHT

THE STORY GRID

66
A t long last, now it’s time to combine the Macro with the
Micro and create The Story Grid.

The first thing we need to do is to get out a big piece of

PUTTING IT ALL graph paper.

TOGETHER I use eleven-inch by seventeen-inch paper that is divided

into .25 inch boxes, which will give you sixty-eight boxes
from left to right and forty-four boxes from bottom to top.
You can also use a spreadsheet program like Excel. Just set
it up so that the row and column settings are both at .25
inches.

I turn it so that it is in the horizontal configuration and then

count up twenty-two boxes from the bottom which will be
just about the middle of the page and draw a thick black
line across. This will be the horizontal, or x-axis of our Story
Grid for The Silence of the Lambs.

On the horizontal x-axis we will use one box to designate

a scene from The Silence of the Lambs. From our Story Grid
Spreadsheet, we know that there are sixty-four total scenes
in the book, so I label from one to sixty-four across the black
line from left to right.

Under and above each of the scene numbers, I’ll boil

down each scene event that I’ve written on my Story Grid
Spreadsheet to the shortest possible phrase or sentence that
tells me what’s happened. I’ll then write down the event
above or below the horizontal line to designate the value
shift of that particular scene.

So if the scene moves from a positive to a negative value

charge, I will put the label for that scene beneath the x-axis
to indicate that it ends negative. If the scene moves from
a negative to a positive charge, I will put the label for that
scene above the x-axis to indicate that it ends positive.

291
292

What do I glean from the Foolscap Global Story Grid? The Beginning Hook,
THE STORY GRID

Middle Build and Ending Payoff of the Global Story. So I’ll move to scene 12 on
my sheet and draw a vertical line straight down from top to bottom and I’ll do
the same at scene 50. Now I have the whole novel broken down into the three
component parts.
1
67 S o, after I’ve combined the Spreadsheet info with the
Foolscap for the Beginning Hook of the novel, which
comprises the first twelve scenes, the horizontal axis should
look like the diagram on the next page.
FOR BEGINNING
THE
HOOK OF You’ll notice a couple of things.

THE SILENCE 1. Ten of these first twelve scenes are written from
OF THE LAMBS Clarice Starling’s point of view (again, I’ve used
the information we wrote down in The Story Grid
Spreadsheet), while two are from the point of view of
Jack Crawford. Thomas Harris wisely made sure that
the reader will not get too distracted in the Beginning
Hook. The reader needs to bond immediately with
the protagonist Starling, or the rest of the novel
won’t work. But Harris also knew that thematically
he needed to establish “impending death” early on
so that the reader wouldn’t shudder and abandon
the book when things got bloody. He does this by
using Crawford’s ailing and comatose wife Bella as
the device to signal to the reader that the Story is
going to go to the limits of human experience. Bella’s
unconsciousness lurks over the entire novel until
scene 50 when she finally dies and Starling now has
her full faculties available to deal with Buffalo Bill.
Plus the dying wife element really softens Crawford
as Starling’s manipulative mentor. Without Bella,
Crawford would come off as a real asshole.

2. Scenes 3 and 11 have italicized type describing the

events. I’ve put italic type here to designate the times
when Starling and Lecter meet one on one. The Lecter
interview scenes are brilliant. But the reader still
“sees” the scene through Starling’s point of view. To
be able to immediately go back and see when they
occur and how they evolve shows just how carefully
Harris constructed the Story.

293
294

3. The Story events in scenes 5 and 8 are shaded boxes. The shaded boxes
THE STORY GRID

indicate when Thomas Harris has shifted the point of view to Jack Crawford.
So all scenes in the novel that are from the point of view of Jack Crawford
will be in shaded boxes.
 295

Harris will use eight other points of view. Here is that box again that shows you

THE BEGINNING HOOK OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

the others as well as the number of scenes each POV has in the Beginning Hook
(BH), Middle Build (MB) and Ending Payoff (EP) of the book.

Next up, the vertical line/y-axis

Not only can we track the progression of Story events and shifts in values scene
by scene in The Story Grid, we can also track the progression of the global
Genre values. We do this by moving from scene to scene on our Story Grid and
evaluating the state of the global value at stake in each scene. Is it positive or
negative in relation to the scene that came before it? We’ll put a dot on the grid
on the vertical y-axis, corresponding to the scene based on the movement of the
global value at the end of that scene.
296

Remember that the serial killer life value in The Silence of the Lambs moves from
THE STORY GRID

Life to Unconsciousness to Death to the fate worse than death (Damnation) and
the disillusionment internal worldview value moves from blind belief to justified
belief to doubt to disillusionment. We’ll mark those levels of positive and negative
on our Story Grid alongside the y-axis so we don’t forget.

We can use the vertical axis of our graph paper to track how these global values
are moving.

So to begin, let’s define the area above the horizontal line as Positive in global
value and below the horizontal line as Negative in global value. Let’s designate
the Life value with a solid line and the Worldview value with a dashed line. With
these definitions in mind, let’s walk through the progression of global values in
the Beginning Hook.

The EXTERNAL GENRE VALUE “LIFE” starts at the most positive for Clarice
Starling at the very beginning of the novel. She’s got her shit together. As an FBI
trainee, she’s on her way to reaching her goal of becoming an FBI agent. Then she
gets the call to see Jack Crawford.

In scene 1 (chapter 1) Crawford offers her the Inciting Incident “errand” to go

and interview the most dangerous serial killer on earth. Now her “LIFE” value is
threatened in the negative. She’s going to be putting her life in danger, and she
has no idea how much danger, so the curve of her Life value descends. She’s
acting without knowing just exactly what she’s gotten herself into, approaching
unconsciousness.

Now let’s look at the Worldview value.

As Starling’s LIFE value in the EXTERNAL PLOT descends toward

UNCONSCIOUSNESS, the INTERNAL GENRE VALUE “WORLDVIEW” ascends.

At the beginning of the novel, Starling’s worldview is filled with “illusion.”

She’s ignorant of the ways of the professional world and thus vulnerable for
manipulation. While some would argue that illusion is a positive outlook on
life in that the individual is immersed in the powers of positive thinking, for our
purposes, and for Harris’, this lack of knowledge is in fact a false positive.

And a false positive is in fact, negative.

I’m defining it as “Blind Belief.” And I’m giving it a negative charge.

Justified belief as I’m defining it will be evidence in the righteousness of a blind

belief. In this case a particular institution, the FBI. Doubt however will have a
negative charge as will ultimately disillusionment.
 297

Let’s track the internal value for the Beginning Hook.

THE BEGINNING HOOK OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

At the onset of the Story, Starling is clueless about the ways of the world...as
represented by the FBI. She thinks that as long as she does what she’s told and
does it well, she will move up in the FBI hierarchy. To pinpoint her illusion/naiveté
more precisely, I think the notion of “blind belief” is most accurate. She goes
on faith that the FBI’s fundamental concern is with maintaining law and order.
And order means rules, appropriate conduct that must be adhered to in order to
become part of the institution. And once inside the institution, Starling believes
that there are clear steps that an agent takes in order to rise in the organization.

As the BEGINNING HOOK of the novel progresses, Starling becomes less and
less naive just as her life faces more and more threats. Her external moves down
the graph, while her internal moves up. She doesn’t know that Crawford is using
her to get to Lecter until the smarmy Dr. Chilton assaults her with that possibility.

That revelation makes Starling even more confused about exactly what her errand
is really about. Her blind belief is now in question. Meanwhile, she’s getting a
serious lesson in the lack of gravitas her position as an FBI agent in training
means. She’s losing her illusions and gaining understanding of her place in the
world.

At the climax of the BEGINNING HOOK of the novel, you’ll see that the two values
intersect. The climax comes in scene 12, chapter 10 when Starling is “rewarded”
for her intrepid investigation of a clue proffered by Lecter. By following Lecter’s
lead, she’s discovered a severed head of an unknown victim in the storage unit
held by one of Lecter’s victims.

She’s also shown to be a capable agent when faced with media interference.
So Crawford pulls her out of the Academy to accompany him on a trip to West
Virginia. The fact that Starling is also from West Virginia is certainly not far from
his mind either.

Another victim of Buffalo Bill has been found, which moves the life value across
the dead zone.

On the worldview dashed line side of things though, Starling, just a newbie
trainee, has moved up the ladder. She’s now joined the hunt for Buffalo Bill and
Harris has completely hooked the reader. Her worldview has now shifted from
blind belief to justified belief.

Obviously Crawford’s pulling her into a serial killer investigation when she is only
a trainee is a huge deal. Even Starling isn’t sure why he’s is bringing her, but instead
of deeply questioning his motives, she puts her head down and resolves to do the
best job possible. She’s crossed the line from “blind belief” to “justified belief.”
298 THE STORY GRID
 299

She’s done what she’s been told and she’s done it well. So, as she expected

THE BEGINNING HOOK OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

previously based on blind assumption (Harris even makes a joke about the word
“assume”), she’s being elevated in the FBI hierarchy based on what she perceives
as merit.

Her worldview is now more informed and she’s now a believer in the way the
FBI works.

Let’s take a short time out here and check in on THE MATH of the book. By my
calculation, The Silence of the Lambs is 96,299 words. The end of the BEGINNING
HOOK comes after TEN CHAPTERS/TWELVE SCENES and takes up 18,152 words,
or 19% of the entire novel. Not exactly the 25% we use to estimate the length of
a novel’s beginning in our 25/50/25 principle, but definitely in the general arena
that we’ve been using as our yardstick for long form Story.
1
68
N ext comes the MIDDLE BUILD of the novel, the longest
and most challenging section to keep the reader in
suspense. You’ll not find a finer execution of a Middle Build
than The Silence of the Lambs.
FOR MIDDLE
THE
Using our Foolscap Global Story Grid and our Story Grid
BUILD OF Spreadsheet, I’ll do the exact same thing we did for the
THE SILENCE OF Beginning Hook of the book for the Middle Build. I’ll boil
THE LAMBS down each scene event that I’ve written on my Story Grid
Spreadsheet to the shortest possible phrase or sentence that
tells us what’s happened. I’ll then write down the event
above or below the horizontal line to designate the value
shift of that particular scene. So if the scene moves from
a positive to a negative value charge, I will put the label
for that scene beneath the x-axis. If the scene moves from
a negative to a positive charge, I will put the label for that
scene above the x-axis.

We’ll track the movement of the “Life” and “Worldview”

values in the y-axis too.

The “Life” value (straight line) will grow ever more negative
until the “all is lost” moment when the FBI and by association
Starling is the furthest away from identifying and capturing
Buffalo Bill. You’ll notice that the “all is lost” moment
comes just about at midpoint of the entire novel. That is no
coincidence!

As for the “Worldview” value (in dashed line), it will rise

to its greatest height in scene 27 (chapter 25) when Starling
with complete faith in the meritocracy and righteousness of
the FBI makes the Faustian bargain with Hannibal Lecter.
She’ll open up her inner world to him in exchange for his
help finding Buffalo Bill. She soon finds out that this decision
will haunt her the rest of her life.

The MIDDLE BUILD diagram is on pages 306 and 307.

 301

The Inciting Incident for the MIDDLE BUILD is the discovery of the “floater” in

THE MIDDLE BUILD OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

West Virginia. This is the third dead body introduced in the novel. The first you’ll
remember is the suicide of Miggs and then the floating head at the storage unit.
Harris is raising the stakes in the Story with the increase in body count. Having
the Buffalo Bill bodies (Miggs was a result of Lecter’s work) submerged in fluid
is also an apt metaphor for the haziness with which Starling and the FBI see the
world. The life value is definitely in the death arena.

In the early stages of the Middle Build, her internal “justified belief” value is
gaining in positivity. She’s doing great work and being rewarded. Cause and
effect are seemingly in sync.

But what’s with that dip in scene 14 (chapter 12)?

That dip is Harris creating the perfect progressive complication to get Starling
(AND THE READER) to believe in the righteousness of Crawford and the FBI to
an almost unassailable level. Harris needs this dip in order to make Starling’s later
decision to sacrifice her inner peace for the good of the FBI (and for what she
thinks her rewards will be for doing so) believable.

She’s not an idiot for agreeing to allow Lecter inside her brain. Crawford is
manipulating her to do so. She’s been victimized by her mentor (Crawford) and
the institution that he represents to her, thus making the reader empathetic to her
plight.

But if Harris doesn’t fortify the “fairness” of Crawford at this point, the reader may
not completely empathize with Starling at the crucial moment in the novel for the
protagonist (the stand-in for the reader)…the point of no return.

Here is that dip moment again.

When Starling and Crawford are in West Virginia, Crawford disrespects her in
front of the local police by barring her from a confidential meeting about the
dead girl. Starling takes offense and momentarily questions whether this is a
Standard Operating Procedure in the FBI. Do the higher ups use the agents below
them in order to amplify their power?

This dip is the representation of her momentary questioning of the core

righteousness of the FBI. It’s sort of a “wait a minute, am I being played?” inner
doubt in Starling. And it’s simply brilliant.

When they return from West Virginia after Starling has discovered another
crucial bit of evidence (the moth cocoon in the throat of the victim), Starling is
emboldened. She confronts Crawford about the disrespect. Crawford cops to it
302

and then gives her a very reasonable and clear explanation about why he dissed
THE STORY GRID

her. This moment in the novel jacks up the internal value toward the positive even
more for Starling. Her “justified belief” in the meritocracy and order of the FBI is
not only restored but is much higher than it had been before.

Harris ends the chapter with these two sentences. “She would have killed for him
then. That was one of Crawford’s great talents.” There is no doubt that Crawford has
done this sort of manipulation before…it’s one of his best plays in his playbook.

You’ll also notice that in scene 13 (chapter 11), Harris satisfies the “speech in
praise of the villain” thriller convention in the form of having Starling read and
review Buffalo Bill’s case file. This killer is brilliant...seemingly impossible to
catch...he leaves no clues. We’ll make a note of this on our Story Grid and check
off the requirement on our Foolscap Global Story Grid.

Let’s move forward.

Just as Starling is getting traction with Crawford, in scene 17 (chapter 15), Harris
raises the stakes again. He moves the life value at stake from investigation of old
death to the real threat of future death with the abduction of a senator’s daughter,
Catherine Martin. In addition, Harris has now thrown in a clock plot to his Story,
another popular feature of the thriller. If the FBI doesn’t get some breaks, a woman
will die. Harris literally establishes the clock at the end of scene 18 (chapter 16)
with an exchange between the FBI director and Crawford, “What have we got at
best—six or seven days, Jack?”

Why does Harris use a senator’s daughter as the victim?

He’s setting up Starling’s disillusionment plot. It has to make sense. So Harris has
set up a dramatic difference between Buffalo Bill’s victims. A senator’s daughter
is going to get a full court press. But what about victims like Fredrica Bimmel?
Girls/women from the coal mines just like Starling? They get dehumanized, just
bodies in a timeline. They don’t matter.

With a senator’s daughter at stake, the FBI will be put under serious duress and
will be politically vulnerable. And when institutions come under duress, their true
characters reveal themselves. Stress threatens the institutions’ order and hierarchy.
Because institutions are just collectives of human beings with no real soul of their
own (unless they are benevolent tyrannies that is), when bad things happen to
them, most people run to protect themselves. And they look for sacrificial lambs
to offer up if the shit really hits the fan. Fall guys to blame. Harris uses the serious
threat of political reprisal as a way to reveal the truth about the FBI. Is it really the
roses and sunshine meritocracy filled with stern but benevolent mentors like Jack
 303

Crawford that Starling believes? Or is that myth just a convenient mask that men

THE MIDDLE BUILD OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

like Crawford use to cover up the realities of the institution?

If Harris did not use the daughter of a powerful figure as the victim, the motivations
of the people within the FBI and the ancillary antagonists like Dr. Chilton would
not be as clearly delineated. The “importance” of the victim increases the urgency.

Harris is also using Catherine Martin to show (not tell) how there is a very real
difference in value of her life versus the previous victims. The other women who
were killed and flayed are referred to more as evidence than they are as human
beings. They’re pejoratively “the Bimmel Girl,” “the Kittridge girl from Pittsburgh,”
“the next one he grabbed,” “the one after,” and “the Varner woman.”

The subtext here is that what was once a plodding, clinical investigation into the
murders of run of the mill every-woman is now the number one priority of the
FBI. And it’s all because of the serious value of Buffalo Bill’s next target. If he’d
grabbed a waitress instead of the daughter of a senator, he’d get away with it.

I’ll get into this a bit more later on, but what makes Starling so effective as an
investigator is her ability to identify with the unnamed, “lesser” victims. And how
she comes to that realization that she should look at the world through their eyes
instead of trying to “be the killer” (the investigative innovation in Red Dragon and
the FBI Behavioral Science Unit itself) is what breaks the case. It is in these details
that you see how Harris outdid himself with this novel. He turned the whole
investigative MacGuffin of Red Dragon (Will Graham sees the world through the
killer’s eyes) around in The Silence of the Lambs (Starling sees the world through
the victims’ eyes).

The force that makes Starling come to a true understanding of herself is also
extraordinary. Which character forces her to accept herself for who she really is,
“not one generation out of the mines,” and drives her to this realization?

It’s none other than the incarnation of evil…Hannibal Lecter. This is one of the
reasons why the reader can’t help but love Lecter. So much so that the reader even
overlooks the fact that he’s a cannibal. The reason why is that he’s the only one
who actually cares about Starling, wants her to find truth and live with it. Instead
of living in lies and being a toady to a corrupt institution. Lecter may have not
said this, but it’s absolutely something he would agree with…a quote from John
Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
304 THE STORY GRID
305

THE MIDDLE BUILD OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

306

Harris has Lecter see through the bullshit around him and to not sit idly by. He
THE STORY GRID

acts and punishes the venal poseurs in life. And he’s a real sucker for a regular
Joe who has the courage to be comfortable in his own skin. Isn’t that the kind
of person we’d like to be too? Not only someone who can separate the noble
from the political, but someone who has the nerve to take up arms against the
wicked and help the naïve defend themselves? Without the whole cold-blooded
murder and cannibalism element of course, to abide by the Lecter code would
be admirable, no?

Another way Harris sets up Starling’s disillusionment is in scene 20 (chapter 17).

After the news that Buffalo Bill has kidnapped Catherine Martin becomes public,
Starling assumes that Crawford will pull her out of class again and have her join
the investigation.

But he doesn’t.

You’ll see on the graph that there is another dip to represent this disappointment,
which again only makes the reader more empathetic to Starling.

She’s gone to great lengths to be ready to join Crawford when she hears about
Martin. She even jumps in the shower with another trainee to speed up her
preparedness. But instead of being Crawford’s first call, she is forgotten, ignored.

Crawford does not share her expectation that she’s become indispensable to the
investigation. Crawford needed a nice looking woman to goose Lecter into giving
up some information and he needed someone familiar with the provincial nature
of West Virginia who could also do fingerprinting. Starling happened to fit the
bill for both of those errands, so he pulled her out of class. But now, she’s an
afterthought. For Crawford, she’s done what he needed of her (getting Lecter to
give information), so now she’s disposable.

Harris is using Starling’s disappointment as a way to reinforce the fact that all
is not what it seems at the FBI. Jack Crawford is not the benevolent mentor that
he seems to be. But Harris is not quite ready to make Starling give up on the
institution. Instead he’s raising the stakes again. Crawford disappointed her once
and he made up for it. He’s definitely disappointing her again when he ignores
her.

How many more times will Starling need to be disappointed before she sees the
truth?
 307

As an aside, it’s interesting to note how Harris is playing out this relationship.

THE MIDDLE BUILD OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

It’s sort of like a high school romance. The girl lets a boy know she’s interested
in him, he responds, she then pushes him away, he’s devastated until she comes
back again and he’s even more in love with her. Not unlike a dysfunctional parent/
child relationship either. This is a purposeful choice on Harris’ part. No question.

Harris does have Crawford call for Starling at the very end of the scene 20
(chapter 17) to rejoin him in the investigation. But the reason Crawford does so
is not because he feels he should, but because he needs to use Starling again.
It’s because the head that Starling found in the storage unit, through Lecter’s
intercession, also has a moth cocoon inserted into its throat. Just like the one she
found in the body in West Virginia.

That information necessitates that whoever killed the man whose head was stuck
in the storage unit probably killed the floater in West Virginia, the other body
with a cocoon in its mouth. And both are probably the work of Buffalo Bill.
So Starling, the only one to unearth the head in the jar and the only one to see
the cocoon in the West Virginia body, has connected Buffalo Bill with Lecter.
So Crawford pulls her back into the investigation based on merit, yes, but also
because she’s the catnip that will get Lecter to play along and give up more
information. The complicated and political nature of the FBI is now coming into
focus. For the reader. But not necessarily for Starling. She’s too focused on her
object of desire (to become a valued and celebrated agent in the FBI) to step back
from her tenacious striving to see the real truth.

When Starling hears that Crawford’s decision to bring her in was based on the
discovery of the cocoon, her justified belief in the FBI is restored and is now
almost sacrosanct to her. You can almost read her thoughts.

It is a meritocracy! Whew!

So when Crawford tells Starling that she has to go back and talk to Lecter again,
she doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t stop to think that Crawford’s using her… Again!
She thinks now, wholeheartedly, that she should do what she’s told. And if she
does that, and does it well, she’ll get what she wants. Crawford will give it to her
because she’s earned it…

Meanwhile, while Starling’s worldview grows ever positive, the Story’s external
life value, life/death, gets more negative. Onstage death (as opposed to the
discovery of dead bodies) is becoming more and more inevitable. With the earlier
308

establishment of the clock ticking after Buffalo Bill’s abduction of the senator’s
THE STORY GRID

daughter, it’s clear that the FBI has no real clue who Buffalo Bill is or why he’s
doing what he’s doing. It’s so clueless, it’s relying on a trainee to do the hard
legwork in the case.

Harris makes this FBI cluelessness clear by giving Buffalo Bill (Jame Gumb) his
own chapter (20, scene 23). This is Gumb’s first appearance on stage and it’s very
strange and frightening, but what’s remarkable is its specificity. This guy is off the
reservation and no one has any idea who he is, let along where he is.

Back to Starling.

So, emboldened by her success finding the cocoon in West Virginia and getting
the lead to the head in the jar from Lecter and her justified belief in the FBI,
Starling goes back to see Lecter in scene 25 (chapter 22). She finds him about
twenty steps ahead in what’s going on.

Lecter schools Starling and warns her about how she’s being played by Crawford
and company. And he even tells her how she’ll save her own life at the very end
of the book (it has to do with the smell of goat). But Lecter won’t tell Starling
WHY Buffalo Bill is doing what he is doing until she agrees to confide in him.

Remember that the WHY? for the antagonist is a convention of the thriller. It’s
called the MacGuffin. What’s so smart about Harris is that he understood, before
anyone else, that the real life FBI Behavioral Science Unit itself was an effort to
search for MacGuffins. The thinking is that if we know WHY killers kill, what they
get out of it, we’ll be better equipped to stop them. Obviously the pathology goes
much deeper than the above the surface object of desire for a serial killer, but it’s
the first stage to getting into his internal object of the desire. Discovering the ways
in which the killer acts out those desires leads to his comeuppance.

Back to the Story.

In order to get her external object of desire (to become a respected FBI agent),
Starling must allow the most brilliant killer in the world into her mind. What’s
great about this demand beyond the fact that it is a masterstroke in “Best Bad
Choice” crisis questions, is that Lecter spells out the quid pro quo directly. He
doesn’t manipulate Starling. He tells her what it’s going to cost her right up front.
Crawford and company, on the other hand, deceive her.
 309

Because Starling has just experienced the rush of fulfilled ambition from what

THE MIDDLE BUILD OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

she sees as her own merit, she agrees. She tells Lecter her worst memory of
childhood. The quid pro quo, a Faustian bargain that will become more explicit
and meaningful in a later chapter. Lecter also knows that Starling’s monomaniacal
ambition (as well as the ambitions of the creepy head of the hospital, Frederick
Chilton), will deliver him from captivity.

He’s made plans from the very first meeting with Starling based on knowing what
everyone will do before they actually do it.

Scene 25 (chapter 22) culminates with Lecter explaining the MacGuffin.

He tells Starling that Buffalo Bill wants a vest with “tits on it.” Buffalo Bill believes
he’s a woman and is making his own woman suit out of the body parts of his
victims. I love the way Harris has Lecter use profanity here. The subtext is that the
killer sees women as objects with interchangeable body parts—just like the FBI
views victims who aren’t senators’ daughters.

Lecter then sends Starling away to get him a deal, knowing full well that Dr.
Chilton is monitoring everything he’s saying. Lecter is setting up his own escape
by admitting that he knows who Buffalo Bill is. But it is important to remember
that Lecter never lies to Starling or plays her like Crawford does. He’s giving her
just enough of what she’ll need to catch the killer if she has the courage to see
through the bullshit. But not one bit more.

Harris breaks away from the investigation after the MacGuffin is revealed to give
us the point of view of the human being who will provide Buffalo Bill’s vest,
Catherine Martin. We see what she’s going through and it’s horrifying. Every
second the FBI wastes…death gets closer. Add the fact that she’ll be flayed and
her chest will be sewn into a suit worn and paraded around by some mad man is
definitely in fate worse than death territory. And we’re only midway through the
novel!

This is masterful construction of Progressive Complications. Now you know why

the MIDDLE is called BUILD. And the view from the pit humanizes a prurient
detail. It’s as if Harris is telling us not to forget that the vest with tits is a human
being. And for all of our rooting for Starling and her ambitions to make the grade,
there is a person about to be slaughtered for every second she and her fellow FBI
agents waste.
310

To repeat, the peak of Starling’s justified belief arrives in scene 28 (chapter 25).
THE STORY GRID

She throws herself all on the line and agrees to give Lecter what he wants, entree
inside her mind to her deepest thoughts—a sexual metaphor if there ever was one.
She does this because she believes unequivocally that the FBI and the senator are
telling the truth. They’re backing her up and they’ll live up to their promises. She
believes they will protect her from Hannibal the Cannibal.

But Lecter knows that the FBI and Crawford are lying to Starling and he will use
that knowledge to escape, but he also can’t help himself from falling for Starling.
This is why he’s decided to help her find the truth about herself. In exchange for
his penetration into her mind, he’ll help Starling find Buffalo Bill all by herself
too. If she’s as smart as she thinks she is. What she does when she finds Buffalo
Bill, though, is up to her.

Lecter also decides to give her a critical piece of information…the information

that will save her from Buffalo Bill. All she has to remember is that schizophrenics
smell like goats. Remember this scene? Scene 25, chapter 22? Lecter explains to
Starling why Sammie, his new cellmate after Miggs killed himself, smells like a
goat. It is this explanation that will clue Starling in to the fact that Sammie and
Buffalo Bill share the same affliction. So in the climax of the entire novel, she’ll
remember that little tidbit and save herself. If you also have any doubt that Lecter
knew who Buffalo Bill was and in fact where Jame Gumb lives…just go to the
very first meeting between Lecter and Starling and you’ll notice that he’s made
a drawing of the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo in Florence, Italy. He makes a
special point of letting Starling know that he’s drawn the scene as it would look
from the point of view of the Belvedere.

Buffalo Bill/Gumb lives in Belvedere, Ohio. Talk about setting up a clue and
paying it off!

He’s mocking the FBI with his artwork at the very beginning of the novel (and at
the end too) and they don’t even know it. The only one who comes to understand
how important his artwork is? Starling.

Also in scene 25 (chapter 22) Lecter tells Starling that Buffalo Bill is all about
“change.” Buffalo Bill wants to change himself, but he’s wrong about the course
he’s taking to do it. Lecter knows that this yearning for change mirrors Starling’s.
Starling wants to shed her West Virginia, white trash, coal country past and
become an important person, a crack FBI agent. If she can do that, she’ll also
 311

avenge her father’s death, the murdered night watchman who died when she was

THE MIDDLE BUILD OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

just a little girl.

Jame Gumb, the man behind the Buffalo Bill robe, wants to don new skin too.
But he wants to do it…literally.

Lecter knows that by giving Starling the clues to understand why the killer is
doing what he’s doing, she may come to understand that she is metaphorically
doing the same thing. The irony Lecter is trying to convey to Starling is that the
only way she will be able to catch the killer is by being true to who she is...
especially the nobody West Virginia girl part.

Of course, Thomas Harris never spells this subtext out. It reveals itself to the
reader upon reflection. And even if it doesn’t, the specificity of the telling is
enough to sit with the reader for years.

Back to the clues. In scene 28 (chapter 25), Lecter tells Starling to look for men
who have applied for sex changes but who have been turned down for the
operation. To look for one person who has been turned down at every clinic
in the country. The work required to do this, Lecter knows, will take the FBI
far longer than it will for Gumb to kill the senator’s daughter. But it’s righteous
information nevertheless.

Lecter’s counting on the delay in getting the sensitive sex change information to
enable him to escape.

Scene 28 (chapter 25) represents the peak of the positive worldview for Starling.
She believes in her role in the FBI so intently that she opens up her subconscious
self to Lecter. From this point forward, Starling is going to get a deep lesson in the
realities of the institution she’s sacrificed for.

Back to the external value shift.

After the big break that Lecter gives Starling in scene 28 (chapter 25), Harris
triples down on the forces of antagonism.

He takes us into Lecter’s brain in scenes 29, 30 and 32 (chapters 26, 27 and 29)
letting us know that he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s going to use the
ambition and venality of Dr. Chilton to get him out of Baltimore. Chilton is so
stupid that he thinks he’s going to pressure Lecter into giving up Buffalo Bill all
312

on his own. And then in scene 31 (chapter 28), Crawford goes to Johns Hopkins
THE STORY GRID

to follow up on the clue that Lecter has given Starling, only to find that the doctor
responsible for the list of sex change operation patients is refusing to give up any
information. It’s going to take far more than “please” to get the info they need
to track down Buffalo Bill. In these scenes, Harris presents Lecter, Chilton, and
the doctor at Johns Hopkins as additional forces of antagonism undermining the
efforts to stop Buffalo Bill, the primary force of antagonism.

Which brings us to the midpoint of the entire novel, scene 33 (chapter 30), the
“Point of No Return Moment.”

In scene 33 (chapter 30), Crawford informs Starling of all the obstacles now in
their path.

Her reaction is rage, something that Crawford can completely understand. He’s
been swallowing his rage for thirty years. It is in this moment (when getting Buffalo
Bill seems impossible) that Crawford finally sees Starling as a human being. He
relates to her because of her anger. He sees himself, at last, in her. She’s just not
some cute broad he needed to dangle in front of Lecter anymore.

She’s a pro, just like him.

Crawford gives Starling some advice...”Freeze your anger.”

He thinks this is good advice because it allowed him to navigate the difficult
political landscape within the FBI and rise to the head of Behavioral Science.
What he does not know is that Starling has already let Lecter into her mind.
She’s all in. If they do not get Buffalo Bill, she will have submitted to a lifetime of
Lecter’s voice inside her head...perpetual internal torment...for nothing. Starling
has already passed the point of no return internally, now she faces it externally.

In scene 33 (chapter 30), Crawford finally starts to tell her the truth. He confides
to her about the FBI’s bureaucracy, tells her that if she stays on the case, she’ll
most likely be recycled at the Academy. She’ll have to start all over again and he
won’t be able to do anything to help her.

In addition to it being the Point of No Return, the entire case is now completely
personal to Starling. Yet another convention of the thriller Genre ticked off by
Harris in a completely innovative way. Many writers abide this convention to
“make it personal” in a thriller by concocting some beef the killer has with the
investigator. But Buffalo Bill couldn’t care less about Clarice Starling.
 313

The way Harris makes the case personal to Starling, of course, is through Lecter

THE MIDDLE BUILD OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

and the FBI.

While Lecter’s goosing Starling’s subconscious mind to push her into understanding
her psychological condition and how it must change in order for her to succeed,
the FBI is goosing her externally through the direct possibility that everything
she’s worked for up until this point will be taken away from her if she stays on the
case. Talk about a crisis! Starling has reached the point of no return internally and
externally. She either keeps going or quits now. There is no turning back.

Harris has taken a rather tired convention “make it personal,” turned it on its
ear, and made it a seamless and inevitable progressive complication, incredibly
powerful and compelling. This is how you innovate conventions and obligatory
scenes. You look at them in a different way than just a checklist of things you have
to cram into your Story. You look at them as opportunities to elevate your Story.

And then Harris makes things even worse for Starling.

Crawford sends Starling to Memphis to hang around in case Lecter wants someone
to talk to. In scene 37 (chapter 34), she goes to Catherine Martin’s apartment to
do a personal reconnaissance, just to see life from the point of view of the victim.
(For those of you who have read Red Dragon, you’ll see that this trip is akin to
the trips Will Graham makes to see the crime from the point of view of the killer.)

And then the senator, Catherine Martin’s mother, arrives and accuses Starling of
stealing...the worst possible accusation to someone from Starling’s background.
She’s made to feel like a commoner, not worthy of touching the material goods
of one higher on the social ladder. This episode is even more negative movement
of the internal worldview value. Here Starling is putting her entire life on the
line to help find this woman’s daughter and the mother treats her like a common
criminal. And then Starling’s quickly dismissed, told to go back to Quantico by
one of the senator’s flunkies, someone capable of ruining her career. Someone
with far more power than Jack Crawford.

But Starling decides to disobey the higher ups. She transitions into a hero in this
critical moment.

Starling goes to see Lecter one last time before going back to the Academy. It’s a
Hail Mary act. A great crisis (you’re fired!) matched with a compelling climax (I’m
going to keep working anyway) sets up a doozy of a resolution scene.
314

Scene 38 (chapter 35) is the last meeting between Lecter and Starling and it’s a
THE STORY GRID

stunner.

“People will say we’re in love,” is one of Lecter’s opening remarks.

Starling suspects that the Chilton-derived help Lecter has been giving the FBI, his
whole “Billy Rubin” business is a deception, a red herring (another convention
of the thriller Harris has made interesting). She nudges Lecter into talking more
about the imago metaphor (the last stage an insect reaches before metamorphosis)
that he’d spoken of in their last meeting.

Lecter’s game to talk. He plays with Starling by asking her direct questions that
reveal Buffalo Bill’s occupation “Do you sew at all? Did you make that costume?”

Lecter also lectures (interesting choice of name Harris made for Lecter...lecturn,
lecture…) Starling about one of stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius’ first principles,
simplicity. What is the causal nature of Buffalo Bill? He Covets. He wants what
he sees everyday. This of course is the clue that will send Starling to Belvedere,
Ohio. The end of the argument Lecter is making without directly saying it is that
Buffalo Bill began killing because he saw the victim (the Bimmel girl) every day.
After he killed her he branched outside of his home quarters…to be safe. But the
first one was the beginning of his last stage before his metamorphosis.

And what of Starling’s first principles? What is her causal nature? Lecter goes
deep and probes her about her darkest memory. Quid pro quo.

“What happened to you and the horse and what you do with your anger?”

Lecter always comes back to “anger” with Starling. While her actions are not
those one would perceive as those of an angry person, Lecter knows something
that the reader does not. He’s put together Starling’s psychological profile and
he’s probing her past to see if his theory is accurate.

Lecter knows that Starling’s abandonment in childhood is a recipe for acute anger
and self-loathing. It’s psychology 101. Her father’s death led to her mother’s
overwork and eventually to the young Starling being sent away to her mother’s
cousin in Montana. This is a multi-ton weight of injustice and abandonment for
a child to comprehend.

A child is incapable of making the cognitive leaps necessary to metabolize such

tragic circumstances. Their brains just aren’t developed enough at that point in
 315

time. So their minds immediately move to express anger (along with fear and

THE MIDDLE BUILD OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

primal sexual urge, baseline emotional fallback positions for humans under
threat) with the only being available to them. Themselves. They are alone and
have no one to “act out” on.

The anger is internalized and the child begins to attack herself. If I weren’t so
difficult my mother would have been able to take care of me. Such internalized
anger creates pervasive self-loathing in a child that either expresses itself through
a serious personality disorder (Jame Gumb) or it wedges itself deep inside the
psyche and is repressed (Starling).

Those high achievers that we all know are often driven by this deeply wedged
self-loathing. They work relentlessly to prove themselves worthy. Short of
metamorphosis into another person entirely (Jame Gumb), though, their efforts
will come up short. Again and again and again. What’s also remarkable about
the effect of abandonment is an acute sense of injustice within the abandoned.
Perceived or real injustice is that thing that the abandoned child as an adult has
difficulty understanding.

Or accepting as an inescapable part of life.

Rage and uncompromising/impossible personal standards within the adult are

the result.

Lecter knows that Starling is driven by deeply repressed anger and self-loathing.
As he’s an emotional cannibal as well as a literal one, he feeds on this knowledge.
Hence his appetite for Starling’s deep psychological wounds.

This scene is brilliantly realized because Harris has delivered Starling to Lecter
just after she’d been the victim of, to her, a serious injustice. She’s been accused
of stealing by a powerful senator and her anger/rage is boiling by the time she
comes in to see Lecter. Lecter, the psychological GPS device par excellence,
senses this vulnerability and thus is successful in getting her to spill the beans
about her longing for The Silence of the Lambs. She tells Lecter her recurring
nightmare about the slaughtering of lambs from her past. How she cannot stop
their screams echoing in her subconscious.

It is this unveiling of deeply seated childhood trauma that allows Starling to change
her investigative methods and release her true genius. Knowing the truth about
yourself, even if there is no magic pill to solve your dilemma, is empowering.
316

Starling’s confessions to Lecter actually enable her to get rid of her own self-
THE STORY GRID

infatuation (her anger and her obsession with injustice and self-improvement/
elevation). She is now capable of empathy, capable of recognizing the emotions
others experience. It is this release that gives her the tools necessary to solve
the case. She’ll be able to see the world in the way that the “victims” saw it (the
opposite of Will Graham in Red Dragon).

Like all great thrillers, the protagonist and the antagonist are polar expressions
of a single archetype. What separates Buffalo Bill and Clarice Starling, both
abandoned children with deep-seated anger, is the ability to confront their inner
demons. Buffalo Bill is incapable of doing so. Instead he decides he must literally
change himself. But Starling is capable of confronting her inner demons and she
does so with Lecter (the epitome of darkness) as her guide.

The first ten times I read The Silence of the Lambs, I did not pick up the significance
of Lecter’s infatuation with Starling’s anger. It wasn’t until I did a deep dive into
the psychological literature about how deeply rooted anger presents itself, that
I came to the understanding that Starling is a classic borderline personality case
study. Highly functioning of course. One of those people who are incredibly
accomplished and seemingly steady and centered with a secret.

What’s also fascinating about the chronically angry is that they are great magical
thinkers. That is, their inner torment is so overwhelming that they internally
reason with themselves. If I can just get my Ph.D. then I won’t feel so bad about
myself... Without knowing why they harbor such anger and how that anger is
trumping their adult cognition, these magical thinkers keep pressing forward...
with great ambition...to move up the old social hierarchy in the hopes that if the
whole world sees them as valuable and worthy, then perhaps they will too. They
believe that third party validation will envelop them and silence the inner voice
that degrades and abuses them as unlovable and worthless.

But, of course, it never will.

“Do you think if you caught Buffalo Bill yourself and if you made Catherine
all right, you could make the lambs stop screaming, do you think they’d be
all right too and you wouldn’t wake up again in the dark and hear the lambs
screaming? Clarice?”

“Yes. I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Thank you, Clarice.” Dr. Lecter seemed oddly at peace.

 317

Lecter is at peace because he has solved the crossword puzzle of Clarice

THE MIDDLE BUILD OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

Starling. His diagnosis is spot on. Starling is a classic highly functional borderline
personality. Her deeply seated anger is her causal nature…what drives her
ambition. Her belief that if she catches Buffalo Bill, she’ll be able to quiet the
voices inside her mind (the sound of sheep being slaughtered is the metaphor for
her inner torment) is magical thinking par excellence.

Lecter, the emotional and literal cannibal, then hands Starling the case file and
points her in the right direction to find Buffalo Bill…to Belvedere, Ohio. For fun,
go to scene 3 (chapter 3) and read about the painting Lecter has on his wall in
the very first meeting with Starling. After you’ve re-read it, you’ll have little doubt
that Lecter has orchestrated the plot of The Silence of the Lambs.

Why does Lecter have such an affinity for Starling?

I think it’s because Lecter and Starling share the same malady. Lecter figured out
his problem a long time ago and chose the life of an Uberman, a Nietzsche figure
parsing out his own sense of justice, while tormenting the simpletons around him
for sport. Lecter is chronically angry too. We never do learn what drives Lecter’s
behavior. Thankfully. Not knowing is so much better.

But Lecter has dispensed with magical thinking. He understands that his inner
voices are unrelenting and therefore he considers himself “of them” as opposed to
“apart from them.” He’s identified himself with the darkness inside and expresses
that identity with aplomb.

Starling is his counterbalance. She believes that her inner light is stronger than
her dark voices and that if her actions are “good” then those actions will compile
into a record of “goodness” that will beat down her darker impulses. Lecter will
leave Starling alone after his escape because it brings him great satisfaction to
see someone else playing this game at the deepest psychological level. She’s his
protégé of sorts and he’ll enjoy following her life and career from afar.

I think Lecter empathizes with Starling. And he teaches her how to empathize
too with his coup de grace of psychological probing. The only way she’ll find
Buffalo Bill is to embrace the skin she wishes to shed, the West Virginia girl. If she
understands what motivates that kind of girl and puts herself in that girl’s shoes, it
will lead her to the dark force that covets victims like “the Bimmel girl.”

So scene 38 (chapter 35) represents her literal point of no return. Driven by deep-
seated anger triggered by the senator’s accusing her of theft, Starling has spilled
318

her guts to Lecter. She’s supposed to have gone back to Quantico, but instead
THE STORY GRID

disobeyed orders. Whatever happens now, she won’t be able to turn back the
clock. She’s put herself on the shit list of high political powers, a tier she will
never rise to, for the rest of her life.

She will never be treated “justly.”

The stakes for Starling continue to rise in the next sequence of scenes.

Lecter escapes just after his heart to heart talk with her. It’s as if Starling has given
him the nourishment and the motive to do so.

In scene 38 (chapter 35) Harris also has Lecter grill Starling about the time clock
her father had to use when he was a night patrolman for his small West Virginia
town. This is the second clock introduced in the Story and I believe it is a metaphor
for the imminent necessity for Starling to see the real truth behind the FBI. They
are using her just as her childhood town used her father. Her father died serving
a bunch of assholes that used him like a human watchdog. If Starling doesn’t wise
up about the people using her, her clock will run out too. You’ll see that Starling’s
worldview takes precipitous dive in this scene 38 (chapter 35). Doubting the
institution in which she’s placed her faith in is now overwhelming.

In scene 50 (chapter 47), after we’ve had the escape chapters, Catherine Martin’s
attempt to kidnap Jame Gumb’s dog Precious, and Jame Gumb’s preparations
for the slaughter, we’re back to Starling in Quantico. She’s running her list of
grievances in her mind after she awakes from her perpetual “screaming lambs”
nightmare. She’s pleased to be full of anger and not fear. Starling now recognizes
that anger is a great motivator and, like Lecter, embraces it…unlike Crawford
who eats his.

Starling goes to the laundry room, the sounds subconsciously reminding her of
the last time she was safe...in her mother’s womb. She goes through the Buffalo
Bill file that Lecter handed her on her way out of his holding cell. In the file,
Lecter gives her the clue to go to the area where the first victim was found.

Clarice, doesn’t this random scattering of sites seem overdone to you?

...Does it suggest to you the elaborations of a bad liar?

I love how Harris has Lecter use the word “liar.” Starling has been lied to the
entire book. By the FBI and by herself. The only one who never lied to her was
Lecter.
 319

At the end of scene 50 (chapter 47), we reach the crisis question of the Middle

THE MIDDLE BUILD OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

Build. Should Starling keep going on the hunt for Buffalo Bill and lose her place
at the FBI? Or should she stay at Quantico and finish out her FBI training and
lament the death of Catherine Martin? It’s a best bad choice dilemma.

She goes to Crawford to tell him her decision. The climax of the Middle Build
is scene 51 (chapter 48). This scene arrives just after Crawford’s wife Bella dies.
Starling gets Crawford’s blessing and his pocket money just outside of the funeral
home. The resolution is that Crawford sees Starling as the hero he never quite
became. It’s a very moving scene, perfectly executed. And Harris shows it from
Crawford’s point of view, a great way of showing how Starling has become his
equal.

Let’s look at the external value.

Remember that the end of the line for the life value progresses from Life to
Unconsciousness to Death to the fate worse than Death…Damnation.

The last major shift in the Life value came in scene 17 (chapter 15), when Buffalo
Bill abducts Catherine Martin. Now, the intellectual exercise of trying to clarify
who the killer is from the clues left from dead bodies becomes a race to stop not
just death…but the fate worse than death…having a woman’s body defiled and
used as a suit.

From scene 17 though scene 42 (chapter 15 to chapter 39), no one dies. But by
scene 51 (chapter 48), death is prevalent. Lecter has viciously killed two guards
and Bella is dead. Three bodies by the end of scene 51 (chapter 48).

It’s now evident that no one is going to stop death.

How does Harris escalate the stakes from death to damnation for Starling for the
final chapters of the novel? He’s already established that damnation has arrived
with the escape of Lecter for the entire FBI. How does he put damnation in play
for Starling specifically?

It is the crisis of the Middle Build for her that takes the value to the limits of
human experience, damnation. If Starling does not act, if she does not put her
ass on the line and sacrifice her global object of desire of becoming a big shot
FBI agent, Catherine Martin will die. She won’t just die either. Her body will be
desecrated.
320

So if Starling doesn’t act, Catherine Martin will haunt her in a way that makes
THE STORY GRID

those little lambs screaming in her nightmares child’s play. Martin’s death on
Starling’s conscience, especially when she knows that Lecter has absolutely given
her the key to finding Buffalo Bill, would damn her to a fate worse than death…a
living hell. Imagine the internal torment for Starling. Not only would she be self-
hating for not have the courage to do something but that very lack of courage
causes the death of another human being. To die is one thing, to cause death or
standing idly by when someone else is facing death is damning.

So to save herself from damnation, Starling must save Martin.

What about the Internal Value?

Remember that Harris chose the Disillusionment plot for his internal content
worldview plot. And disillusion moves from Illusion (Blind Belief), to Confirmation
(Justified Belief) to Confusion (Doubt), to Disillusion to Dysthymia. Harris does
not go to the end of the line with the disillusionment plot here because he’s
working in the thriller Genre. If he were working on a Mini-plot literary novel,
perhaps he would. But to go to the end of the line with the internal content
value as well as the external content value would be too much for the reader. So
instead he moves Starling one level before chronic depression, disillusionment.

The climax of the Middle Build is also the transition point of Starling into
disillusion.

She’s now completely going against orders from on high (far higher than Crawford)
and she’s going solo, without any backup beyond Crawford’s personal support.
She’s carrying a gun but technically she is no longer allowed to present herself as
an authorized FBI agent. She understands at this point too that what she’s doing
will destroy her naïve “want” of becoming an agent and rising in the bureau.
She’s learned that the institution is not just inept, it’s corrupt and not in any real
way devoted to justice or safeguarding the public.

As someone born into an unjust world, it makes perfect sense for Starling to shit
can her career to fight for what is right. It’s why she wanted to be an FBI agent in
the first place. Whether she knows it or not, it was Lecter who probed her deepest
childhood horrors that enabled her to come to this conclusion subconsciously.
She knows the truth about herself…because of the horrors of her childhood she’s
a vigilante for justice. That is what she does and will continue to do with her
anger. Fight for justice.
 321

Just for fun, before we dive into the Ending Payoff of The Silence of the Lambs,

THE MIDDLE BUILD OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

let’s look at the math of the novel.

The Middle Build comprises 38 chapters and 55,238 words (57% of the book).
Along with the Beginning Hook, we’ve traversed 76% of the novel. So the Ending
Payoff will be 24%. A 19/57/24 distribution of Beginning Hook, Middle Build and
Ending Payoff. This is absolutely in the realm of standard novel form.

I can promise you that this composition is not a coincidence. The 25/50/25
guideline is an extremely helpful piece of information that will save you a ton of
heartache.
69
A t long last, we come to the Ending Payoff of the novel.

Whether or not the book “works” will all come down to

the Ending Payoff. Just about any gaffe (with the exception of
the Inciting Incident) in the Beginning Hook or Middle Build
THE ENDING can be made up in the Ending Payoff. And obviously, no
PAYOFF OF matter how great your Beginning Hook or Middle Build is,
THE SILENCE if the ending fizzles, you will not have a Story that compels
readers to tell one another about it.
OF THE LAMBS
Using our Foolscap Global Story Grid and our Story Grid
Spreadsheet, I’ll do the exact same thing we did for the
Beginning Hook and Middle Build of the book for the Ending
Payoff. I’ll boil down each scene event that I’ve written on
my Story Grid Spreadsheet to the shortest possible phrase or
sentence that tells us what’s happened. I’ll then write down
the event above or below the horizontal line to designate
the value shift of that particular scene. So if the scene moves
from a positive to a negative value charge, I will put the
label for that scene beneath the x-axis. If the scene moves
from a negative to a positive charge, I will put the label for
that scene above the x-axis.

I’ll track the movement of the “Life” and “Worldview”

values in the y-axis too. The “Life” value will grow ever more
positive as the FBI, and by association Starling, gets closer to
identifying and capturing Buffalo Bill. There will be a big dip
in the penultimate end to reflect the false ending in the book
and then it will end in the positive and linger at the very,
very end in the negative. Let’s not forget that an even worse
killer than Buffalo Bill, Hannibal Lecter, is at large now.

As for the “Worldview” value, it will fall into disillusion

from the very start of the Ending Payoff. Starling no longer
has confidence in the FBI and by necessity has chosen to go
it alone. At the end of the novel, in the resolution chapters
after the death of Buffalo Bill, Starling’s worldview settles in
to rest in the negative.
323

THE ENDING PAYOFF OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

324

Scene 52 (chapter 49) is the Inciting Incident of the Ending Payoff. Jame Gumb
THE STORY GRID

(Buffalo Bill) moves forward with his plans to harvest the hide of Catherine Martin.
Harris writes it from Gumb’s point of view. Scene 52 (chapter 49) is all about
establishing Gumb’s state of mind and how he actually does what it is he does…
the technical aspects of creating a woman suit. As it is so clinical, the impact on
the reader is chilling. This guy has not one reservation about killing a woman and
cutting off her skin. She may as well be a tree he’d like to strip of bark.

Following up on Lecter’s clue from the case file that Buffalo Bill’s pattern of
abduction is desperately random and that his causal being is to covet what he
sees, scene 53 (chapter 50) shows us Starling’s investigation into the life of Buffalo
Bill’s very first victim, Frederica Bimmel. She goes to Bimmel’s room to suss out
any clues about what men she may have known before her death. Her theory,
based on Lecter’s suggestion, is that whoever killed Bimmel was around her for
some time…so much so that he coveted her skin.

Scene 54 (chapter 51) sets up the required False Ending convention of the thriller.

Crawford finally hears from the doctors at Johns Hopkins about the man who was
turned down for a sex change operation. They give Crawford Buffalo Bill’s real
name, Jame Gumb. The reader knows that Crawford now has the right guy, but
Starling does not. Giving the reader more information than the protagonist is a
great way of ratcheting up narrative drive. Harris is a master at this.

Back to Starling in scene 55 (chapter 52). She’s figured out that Buffalo Bill is
a tailor. Obviously, if he is making a “woman suit,” he knows how to sew. She
recalls Lecter asking her if she knew how to sew too, which only confirms her
conclusions.

In scene 56 (chapter 53), Starling tells the FBI’s switchboard operator about her
findings. But he’s not all that interested. The operator tells Starling that they’ve
tracked down Buffalo Bill and that the Hostage Rescue Team is on the way to
break down his door and catch him red-handed. This information raises the
irreconcilable goods crisis of the Ending Payoff.

Should Starling abort the rest of her investigation in Belvedere, Ohio? Or should
she carry on? What’s the point really? She’s not going to be the big hero and
obviously she’s been misled. If she heads back to Quantico now, she may even
save her spot in the trainee program. That would be good for her. But if she
continues it could be good for the case.

But Lecter’s influence keeps her on course. Starling considers the fact that if they
get Buffalo Bill in handcuffs, they will need a ton of evidence to convict him.
And besides, she’s moved beyond her own inner trauma after her head-shrinking
session with Lecter back before he escaped. She no longer operates under
 325

illusions. So she reminds herself of what she’s supposed to do, what her gifts are

THE ENDING PAYOFF OF THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

as a human being and how she can use them to help others—Jame Gumb will
be arrested. The FBI will have to make the case that he’s the killer of Bimmel. Her
investigation will help. So the Bimmel father would at least know what happened
to his daughter and who was responsible.

“Her job, her duty, was to think about Fredrica and how Gumb might have
gotten her. A criminal prosecution of Buffalo Bill would require all the facts.
Think about Fredrica, stuck here all her young life. Where would she look
for the exit? Did her longings resonate with Buffalo Bill’s? Did that draw
them together? Awful thought, that he might have understood her out of
his own experience, empathized even, and still helped himself to her skin.8

In scene 57 (chapter 54) Starling chooses to continue her investigation and talks
with a friend of Frederica’s who works at a bank. She gives Starling the information
that will lead her to Gumb’s house.

In scene 58 (chapter 55) the Hostage Rescue team breaks down the wrong guy’s
door. Here is our obligatory false ending scene. Simply brilliant and totally
believable knowing what we know about the FBI now.

In scene 59 (chapter 56), Gumb resolves to kill Martin even if it threatens his dog
Precious. He puts on his robe to begin the process. He’s going to use infrared
goggles and take a headshot in the dark to kill Martin so that he doesn’t accidently
ruin her torso skin. But then Starling arrives at his back door and we’ve now
reached the climax of the entire novel.

The hero at the mercy of the villain scene is the most important scene in a
thriller and Harris delivers his in a HUGE way.

After much toing and froing, Gumb has turned off the lights in the basement
and is moving around with his night vision goggles. He’s enjoying watching
Starling struggle to find her way. But just as he’s about to shoot her, Starling smells
something.

Heavy in her nostrils the smell of the goat.9

The smell is the same one that Lecter told her schizophrenics emit…Buffalo Bill
is a schizophrenic. Starling then hears the snick of his gun. She turns to the noise,
fires and expertly kills him.

Great climax! Over the moon great. The set up for it probably took a ridiculous
amount of thinking and work, but what a payoff!

8 Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs (p. 325). Macmillan. Kindle Edition.
9 Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs (p. 346). Macmillan. Kindle Edition.
326

Starling remembered the goat smell that Lecter had warned her about back in
THE STORY GRID

Baltimore, which told her that Gumb was in the room even though she couldn’t
see him.

She was blind until Lecter taught her to “see” with her nose!

Not just her nose, but her ears too!

Starling was prepared for him to shoot her so she was attuned to the noise of the
cocking of a gun. She knows that noise because she’s an expert shooter herself.
See the great stuff at the very beginning of the novel when we see Starling as ace
of her shooting class! Harris set up her expertise long ago in the Beginning Hook
of the book.

She trusts her instincts and senses and kills Gumb before he can kill her.

This scene also mirrors the death of her father who was murdered in darkness
when he confronted a criminal. Thematically, she’s won back the family honor
by facing down the same circumstance as her father and triumphing. Justice has
been restored.

Starling’s life is now at equilibrium. She’s seriously changed, though.

Her object of desire (being an FBI agent) is no longer the magical trophy that will
bring her inner peace. But she also understands that defending the weak is her
destiny…it’s what she needs to do to dissipate her anger.

The remaining scenes resolve the novel. They bring down the fever of the reader
in a very believable and compelling way.

Starling even gets a little love from the FBI.

They haven’t washed her out of Academy. Instead she’s given a couple of extra
days to pass her exams and her friend Ardelia Mapp as tutor. She passes. And she
resolves her romance with the nerdy scientist at the Smithsonian too. She goes
away for the weekend with him.

While Starling’s found a modicum of peace, leaving the reader satisfied, Harris
also leaves the ending open. Hannibal Lecter is still on the loose. One killer may
be dead, but an ever more dangerous one is now loose.

Irony anyone?
1
70
S o, we’ve tracked the entire scene-to-scene movement
of The Silence of the Lambs in terms of its external and
internal values. And we’ve identified quite a number of
places within its scenes where Thomas Harris has abided by
FOR FINAL
THE the conventions and obligatory scenes of his chosen global
TWEAKS Story—the serial killer thriller. We’ve also tracked the exact
places where the Beginning Hook has transitioned into the
Middle Build and where the Middle Build has transitioned
into the Ending Payoff.

Let’s now load all of that information into The Story Grid
so that at a glance, we’ll be able to remind ourselves where
Harris did what. The real value of The Story Grid is in its
immediate gratification. That is, in the years prior to creating
The Story Grid infographic, every time I had a question like
“When did Thomas Harris drop in his clock?” I had to go
look at a pile of notes.

And I’d have to dig through it until I found the answer. I

don’t know about you, but once I found that answer I’d often
forget the original question I was trying to answer!

But now with The Story Grid, all I have to do is look for the
clock moment on the grid. Then I’ll know it was in scene
19 (chapter 17), six scenes into the Middle Build. Similarly,
when you map out your own Story Grid for your work in
progress, you may see that you’ve jammed a whole bunch
of stuff into one series of scenes, or your values are not
dynamically moving in the way that they should. Seeing it
visually as opposed to trying to piece it together in your
brain intellectually will be extremely useful.

So our final Story Grid for The Silence of the Lambs with all
of the crucial conventions and obligatory scenes marked as
well as the BH, MB, and EP demarcations follows.

327
328 THE STORY GRID
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THE FINAL TWEAKS

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But The Story Grid on the cover of the book and on the poster of The Silence of
THE STORY GRID

the Lambs Story Grid doesn’t have all this information. What’s up with that?

We stripped down the exhaustive information of the writer’s version of The Story
Grid to its essence for the infographic version for a simple reason. There’s just too
much INSIDE BASEBALL in the crazy detailed one. Whittling down the details,
we came to the conclusion that the most important visual takeaway for The Story
Grid is the movement of the external (the red line on the cover) and internal (the
blue line of the cover) content values. To view our pretty infographic in richer
detail and full color, just go to www.storygrid.com and check out the resources
section of the website.
1
EPILOGUE
O ne last big thing to remind you.

I think I’ve stated numerous times that The Story Grid

is a tool. It is not a formula.
FOR
A TOOL, NOT A You cannot just plug a bunch of stuff into The Foolscap
FORMULA! Global Story Grid or The Story Grid Spreadsheet and then
diagram it out in the final Story Grid and voila have a terrific
book come out at the end. If that were the case, I’d do it
myself. The Story Grid is a tool, a method to check your
work or to inspire a work. Nothing more.

I want to leave you with a few other thoughts.

It took me twenty-two years to figure out that The Story

Grid was not something that any other book editor I knew
used. After innumerable lunch and drink dates, I found out
that they didn’t create their own method to evaluate work
by studying Story structure. And they thought I was kind of
a nerd for doing that myself. Acquire it, tweak it, get it to
market were their mantras. And sometimes that was mine
too. Remember that editors don’t work for writers. They
work for publishers.

Now that I’m a grizzled vet and I understand the realities

of the book publishing Business versus the desires of Art,
I see The Story Grid as a tool to bridge the gap between
commercial necessity and literary ambition.

First things first…commercial necessity. Rest assured, using

The Story Grid will absolutely do no harm to your Story.
It will not turn a book that works into a book that doesn’t
work. It will not botch up your best scene or convince you
to cut your best secondary character.

Instead The Story Grid can make you learn a great deal
about why you’ve written your Story in the first place. And
that knowledge will be indispensable to making your work
better. Not just a little bit, but to such an extent that you will

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332

find yourself re-energized to laser focus on what exactly your Story is and how
THE STORY GRID

you can make it the best it can possibly be.

The Story Grid is all about getting from “Doesn’t Work” to “Works” to “Holy
Moly This is Incredible!”

Remember, like a joke, if your Story has three major movements—a Beginning
Hook, a Middle Build, and an Ending Payoff—for a simple, compelling premise,
it works. But that doesn’t mean a publisher will offer you a contract or that one
million or even one person will buy it.

Now having something work is nice.

But we all know that some jokes are good and make us chuckle and some make
us spit out our food. Same with Stories. Some are okay. Some change our lives.

If you want your Story to be great, you’ve got to hone it and edit it yourself.
Even if you get a Big Five publisher to take it on…especially if you get a Big
Five publisher to take it on. The publisher has bought your Story because they
are confident that it will sell to a critical mass of readers “as is.” That’s their job.
Whatever editorial commentary they provide after they’ve bought it will be first
and foremost all about getting their investment back! So they’re not going to ask
you to take another look at your Lovers Kiss scene and make it less cheesy. A lot
of people like cheesy…probably more than those who don’t. Only you will care
enough to really push yourself to take it from cheesy to heart wrenching.

Now, you may wish to have a greater impact in the world than just selling to ten
thousand people (hitting that number is a huge success regardless). If that is the
case, you need to know how to analyze and improve the work you’ve already
done without killing the good stuff. This is what The Story Grid is for. It’s for fixing
flaws and bettering strengths.

If you write a better Lovers Kiss scene than the solid cheesy one you’ve written
before, readers will recognize it. They want that better scene. They really do. And
if you give it to them, they’ll come back for more of your work in the future.

If you use The Story Grid tool rigorously and do not give in to the “good enoughs,”
it will definitely prove the difference between “nice work here, but it’s not quite
right for us” to “we’re getting our numbers together to make you an offer.”

It’s my contention that most writers don’t fear the work. They want to do the work.
No one, though, has clearly laid out in practical terms exactly what that work is.
I built The Story Grid methodology to do that.
 333

Most amateur writers understand the general concepts of Story: that they need

A TOOL, NOT A FORMULA!

a compelling Inciting Incident and that they have to satisfy the expectations of
their audience for the particular Genre they’ve chosen to write. But they have
no idea where to begin and no idea of how to analyze their work after they’ve
done some of it to make sure it can withstand the critical winds and turbulent
external forces of nature. The problem that bedevils most novice writers (and
even some seasoned pros) is that they fall in love with the glamorous aspects of
the literary trade—the romance of “the creative process,” the thrill of dashing off
chapter after chapter in a white heat of inspiration, etc.—and they undervalue
the blue-collar aspects of Story construction and inspection—understanding and
mastering Genre, Story form, character, Story cast, and so forth.

They fail to learn how to edit.

The inescapable fact is that you need an editor who cares about making your
book not just “work” but for it to transcend its Genre…to break new ground in
such a way that it changes the way people see the world. And there is only one
editor alive with that kind of commitment.

You.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE STORY GRID

What started out as a hubris-laden declaration, I’ll just toss off some thoughts
and we’ll bang out a paperback, for Steven Pressfield and my little publishing
company soon turned into a monster.

Over the three years it took to write, The Story Grid became nothing less than the
sum total of my life’s professional work. To get that kind of stuff out of your frontal
lobe requires a lot of help.

Without Steven Pressfield, I’d still be sulking in front of a computer screen with
miles to go before I slept.

Steve and I have worked together for almost twenty years. On this project, we
reversed roles. Steve took on the editor role and I took on the writer assignment.
It could have been a disaster. But Steve was the nicest noodge ever. He never
pressured me and I have no doubt he would not have damned me even if I’d
never gotten this book onto paper. And that was a real possibility. His editorial
notes were incisive and kind. They made a meandering mess of stuff cohere.

We’ve won some and we’ve lost some. But it’s always been fun. Even in our
darkest publishing hours, we’ve always found something to laugh about. Thanks,
Pard!

My wife Bibb and my kids Bleecker, Waverly and Crosby had to hear hour after
hour of blather about this book for far too long. They never made me feel bad
about it. Instead they listened and helped me immeasurably to simplify things
that could easily have ended up obtuse and didactic.

Callie Oettinger, the brains behind Black Irish Books, coordinates all of the
production, sales and publicity for our titles. And she does it with a commitment
and purpose that inspires.

Jeffrey Simon is our dear friend who makes video production, design and
technology something that two old dogs can actually understand.

Derick Tsai at Magnus Rex is an absolute pleasure to work with. A designer par
excellence with the tact of Norman Vincent Peale, Derick created all of the art for
The Story Grid and got me through a major meltdown at the finish line.

Our copyeditor Amanda Brown is a Godsend.

Seth Godin gave me the subtitle. Thanks, Seth!

All of the subscribers to www.stevenpressfield.com and www.storygrid.com

engage and care in a way that keeps us honest and focused on what we care
most about.