Episode 018 - The Importance of Masterworks with Anne Hawley
March 17, 2020
Story Grid-certified editor Anne Hawley discusses what we can learn from masterworks and the importance of meeting a reader's genre-specific expectations. Anne Hawley is the author of Restraint, a love story set in 19th Century London. A third-generation native Oregonian and a Story Grid Certified Editor, when she’s not writing stories, she’s editing them, reading them, researching them, or podcasting about them on The Editor Roundtable Podcast. She can often be seen riding her Dutch bike Eleanor around Portland
Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Anne Hawley. Anne, how are you doing?
Anne: I'm great. Thank you for having me. It's nice to see you, Matty.
Matty: Oh, it's my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Anne Hawley is the author of Restraint, a love story set in 19th-century London. A third generation native Oregonian and a Story Grid certified editor, when she's not writing stories, she's editing them, reading them, researching them, or podcasting about them on the Editor Roundtable Podcast, and she can often be seen riding her Dutch bike, Eleanor, around Portland. I had to look up Dutch bike because I wasn't familiar with that, but it's like the canonical bike.
Anne: It is. It's a great big heavy city bike.
Matty: Yeah, it looks great. It looks like the kind of thing I would like to ride up and down the flat streets at the Jersey shore on.
Anne: Flat would be the key word.
Matty: As anyone knows who has talked to me for more than about five minutes at a writers' group meeting or a conference, I'm a huge fan of the Story Grid. And I've been following the various podcasts that have been spun up around the Story Grid for several years now.
Obviously if a topic merits discussion over several years of podcasts, we're not going to be able to cover it in one episode, so we've decided to focus on one specific aspect of the Story Grid, and that is the importance of studying masterworks, which Anne is the expert in discussing, and you'll learn why as we talk.
Before we dive into the masterwork topic, can you just give a little bit of context for our listeners about what the Story Grid is, if they're not familiar with it yet?
Anne: The Story Grid is basically an editing method. It began with a series of blog posts by Shawn Coyne, which he eventually turned into this great big fat book called The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know--that subtitle is important. And it has since become a whole <industry>. They are publishing house now. They put on courses. They certify other editors. I'm one of them. The idea of the Story Grid is that it is a method for writers to use to structurally edit and develop their own stories, but it's also a very valid method for professional editors to help writers develop and fix and work on creating a good solid story that works.
Matty: The thing that really attracted me to the Story Grid was the idea that if you're an editor or if you're the recipient of editing services, you don't have to get editing input that sounds like, "Well, I got to the middle and it was just sort of, I don't know. I can't really say, but I just kind of felt that ..."--you know that kind of advice from an editor, which is really not helpful.
And the Story Grid really gives some very specific advice about, for example, obligatory scenes depending on your genre, which I think is great because you can use that as a test if you feel like your story is not working or you're editing for someone else and their story isn't working, it gives you an idea of why.
Anne: And it's actionable. I mean, it is not that "I just sort of feel like this doesn't work" or "I don't really believe this character would do that here," and it's certainly far above the level of, "Use a different word," "You forgot to close your quotes here." It's not line editing. It's not copyediting.
Matty: Describe a little bit what you did in terms of the masterwork with Shawn in The Masterwork Podcast, because that was fascinating.
Anne: That was fun. Shawn invited me to come on the podcast for this 10 episode arc because he wanted to test out a theory that he had about using what he calls masterworks, any good work in any area that you're interested in writing in, to create a set of, he called them writing prompts, but basically you could say, "Okay, here's how you steal from this."
He had read my novel Restraint, which has the tagline "Pride and Prejudice meets Brokeback Mountain" because it's a gay love story set in the Regency. He said, " Why don't you come on the show and we'll analyze Brokeback Mountain," which is a 10,000 word sort of long short story by Annie Proulx, which was turned into a movie that is in fact very faithful to the short story, so if you've seen the movie, that's a starting point. And we're going to break it down into what he called beats, and then you're going to take those beats and repurpose them, set them in Regency England instead of 1960s Wyoming. But basically reconstruct the general idea of the story using the pieces that Annie Proulx put into Brokeback Mountain.
The beat, it's not clearly defined, but it's basically a unit of change in the story. My job was to find those, and I came up with like 83 of them in a 10,000-word short story. Shawn came up with a lot fewer. I was really granular about it. But a beat when you strip it down is something like, in Brokeback Mountain, the first beat is a man in difficult circumstances starts his day. It's stripped down and kind of abstracted. It's not a cowboy in Wyoming starts his day in a trailer on a windy autumn day or whatever. I can make it then a servant in a manor house in Hampshire starts his day and transpose the abstract structure to a different time and place, set of circumstances. It could be a woman. But to Shawn, the underlying meaning of Brokeback Mountain had to do with the fact that both of these men were poor, and therefore that sets up stakes that they can't avoid if they're gay and they're poor, they can't afford to lose their job over being caught out being gay, that type of thing. So those were important sort of considerations of meaning.
We went through Brokeback Mountain over 10 episodes, broke it down into little tiny pieces. Then I started constructing my story using those pieces, and at the end of 10 episodes, I did not have a story. I don't write that fast. It took me 10 weeks just to get the idea, and we ended it on the promise that I would turn a story in, it would be novella length. I had a little leeway on the length. He said, you don't have to stick to 10,000 words. Historical generally requires a little bit more words to construct a world. But when you get it done, send it in and we'll aim to publish it.
Matty: It was really surprising to me that that story was only 10,000 words long. She packs a lot of punch in 10,000 words.
Anne: And it's a great piece to study for line writing at that level too, although that's not what I was there for. But to study how she packs so much into so few words. That's line writing.
Matty: The fact that it was 10,000 words made your job of identifying the 83 beats a little bit easier than if you had been contending with an 80- or 90- or 100,000-word novel.
Anne: I would never break a novel down at that level. It would drive you crazy. You break down a scene at that level, or a chapter or two, but I wouldn't see a lot of point in doing that for a whole novel except as an intellectual exercise.
Matty: I was surprised when I was listening to that podcast that if I understood correctly, the initial goal was if Annie Proulx had 83 beats, you were going to have 83 beats. Was that your understanding when you went into that experiment? Did that come up later? What did you think about that?
Anne: My understanding when I went into the experiment was that I could read Brokeback Mountain and do whatever I wanted with it. And as the podcasts wore on, it became clear that Shawn as my editor was expecting me to be much more precise.
However, it also became clear that I was being excessive by finding 83 beats. I couldn't possibly replicate them all. Then I would just be rewriting her story. And also that I could rearrange them in sequence and some things like that. What I have done since then-- I'm still working on the story--I have cut out a whole bunch of them. They were ridiculously excessive and I'm down to like 23 now.
Matty: You mean excessive in your analysis as opposed to excessive in the story itself, I take it.
Anne: No, I mean my ridiculously granular view of the story was excessive.
Matty: What led you to go through the exercise of identifying things at that level of detail?
Anne: To be honest, Shawn is in some ways my boss, and that's what he's telling me to do. I wanted to do it really, really well, and I just kind of think that way. I'm very detailed thinker. I work at that level more easily than at the high level.
Matty: The example of taking Brokeback Mountain and then creating a story with it, it's a really good example of a way to address a concern that I hear from a lot of people about, "Oh, the Story Grid is just a formula. If you're writing a thriller, then you have to have these eight obligatory scenes or whatever it is. You're just making a checklist." And my response is always that any approach that covers both Pride and Prejudice and Silence of the Lambs, which are two stories that come up a lot in the podcast discussions, can't be that formulaic.
Is that something that you've heard, especially because you went through this experiment of taking something and assessing it really granularly, even if you didn't end up with 83 when you were done, and having an attempt to match those beats. What is your response to that?
Anne: It's a very common complaint. I hear it all the time. I understand where people are coming from. My story is that I felt the same way when I first read The Story Grid book several years ago now. And the book came my way because I was working on editing my novel Restraint.
It was 230,000 words. That's not a publishable length. I needed to cut a lot and I didn't know how to make cuts. When The Story Grid book said, this will help you find non-working parts of your story and so forth, I thought, "Oh good. This is just what I need." And it was, and it worked. I cut 100,000 words without changing the fundamental story.
But while I was in that process, I was listening to the main podcast and there was one episode where Shawn defined and gave the exact what he considers the obligatory scenes or moments and conventions of a love story. And Restraint is a love story. I was skeptical about obligatory scenes and conventions, but when he outlined them, I realized that I already had met all of them in my story kind of automatically.
Because I have absorbed a lot of love stories and a lot of other kinds of stories, and of course your lovers have to meet, right? Of course, somewhere along the line they have to have conflict enough in the relationship that it splits them apart so that they can come back together. That's the arc of a love story.
If they just meet and say, "I love you." "I love you." "Let's get married." That's not a story, right? You need some people against the love affair and some people who are for it, who are driving them apart or pushing them together. Those are conventions of a love story. There's nothing formulaic about them.
My job as a writer was to innovate on them. I innovated on something like Pride and Prejudice by having it be two men and then having to examine the fact that their relationship is technically a capital crime in that time and place.
That's how you have to innovate those things. But still your lovers do have to meet. They do have to split up. They do have to reunite and wind up either with a commitment or a tragedy or whatever it is that arises out of those things. Every story type--a thriller, an action story-- has conventions like that that you have to meet because without them it's not that kind of story.
It's hard to sell to people unless you have time to sit down with them and go through a story of theirs and say, "This thing here doesn't fit in this type of story, this belongs in another type of story."
Matty: And if a reader picks up something with the expectation it's a love story based on the title or the description or the cover or other books that's filed with, and then they don't have the breakup scene and then the reuniting scene, their expectations will have been thwarted.
Anne: Exactly. And when you have like say an exciting action story, if the hero or the heroine--the protagonist--is never at the mercy of the villain, the antagonist, if there is no big power divide between the hero and the villain, it's not an action story. It's not a thriller. You need that power division. That's a convention of that type of story.
Matty: You took a 10,000-word story as a masterwork and then you cut your story down from, I think you said like 200,000 words to 100,000 words.
Anne: Let me clarify. I had already written and published Restraint. That's how Shawn read it, and that's where he got the idea, "Let's ask Anne to do this and look at Brokeback Mountain and set it in the Regency." That was just a tagline of mine. It's just to say this is two guys in the Regency: "Brokeback Mountain meets Pride and Prejudice." The masterwork experiment was for me to write a new story.
Speaking of conventions, Regency type stories, because of Jane Austen and then because of Georgette Heyer, tend to involve upper classes and wealthy people and manners in society, that type of thing. So to take Brokeback Mountain and set a story in that same period, but among lower class people, which was an important key to the meaning of Brokeback, now that was really my challenge. Take all the research that you've done about how people lived in that time, and then do some more about how servants lived and how farmers lived, so my story that I'm still working on involves a couple of servant class men.
And then the restrictions on them because they can't buy their way out of trouble. People who were hanged for sodomy, for example, tended to be lower class men and rich men, just like today, they just don't face those consequences. It's a whole new challenge for me in terms of research and just thinking through the period that I think I know so well, but I hadn't really thought quite as much about servant class people.
Matty: One thing I thought was interesting about translating, I had seen Brokeback Mountain a long time ago. Then I read it as I was following along with the podcast and then I went and watched it again and I realized that another interesting change, although the movie was, as you said, pretty faithful to the book, is that it was Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, who were these two young and really good looking men who were playing the main characters and if you read the book, they're not really young or really good-looking.
Anne: They are young. Neither of them was 20, but they are not particularly good-looking men.
Matty: I would imagine that for a Regency book, a convention of romance is usually that you have both physically and emotionally or psychologically attractive people as the couple that you want to come together.
Anne: Yeah. And that's certainly convention of romance, which is a marketing genre that is a subset of love stories, right? Because love stories can also be tragic or you know, end with obsession or something like that. But the romance has to have a happily ever after ending. That's like the fundamental rule of romance.
I do not write romances because I don't necessarily write happy endings, but, yeah, the conventions include usually quite good-looking people or people who the reader can fantasize, these are attractive, beautiful people. I don't think it's completely unknown to write less than attractive or less than physically perfect people in romance.
My story is going to involve somebody who was a foundling, an orphan in that time. He's undersized and not necessarily like great teeth, but you know, you have to put yourself in the historical period too and say people weren't quite as judgmental about perfect teeth in 1812 England as maybe they are today.
If my story were to become a film--wouldn't that be wonderful?--they would definitely have to cast better looking people just to sell the film.
Matty: Exactly. You had mentioned that a convention of the romances that are the love story, I guess I shouldn't be using those terms interchangeably, is the happy ending.
Anne: Romeo and Juliet is a love story. Just remember that.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Brokeback Mountain ends on what, on the surface is a very unhappy ending. But as I recall in your conversation with Shawn, there was some debate about is there an underlying more positive message or is it just doom and gloom.
Anne: Right. After going through those episodes and recording them with Shawn, I ended up consulting with some of my gay friends about the idea of whether it's still like a worthwhile thing to bury your gays is the expression. Where you introduce a gay character only to kill them off.
That's still, unfortunately, kind of common in television and movies. It's getting better. And I questioned whether--I mean Brokeback Mountain was published in the 90s and gay marriage was not available and things were very different then--do we still need to be telling that same kind of cautionary story about here's the terrible things that can happen to you if you're gay and you're out and you live in a restrictive society.
And my feeling was and remains, I don't think that's the story I want to tell anymore. And there's no one gay person who can give you all the answers any more than any other group. But the consensus was, I think, preferring not to kill a character at the end, having him die of a hate crime, which is what happens in Brokeback Mountain. And I have since decided that I'm going to leverage the literary device of a metaphorical death and give them a happy end.
Matty: Very interesting. I'm going to be continuing to watch that with interest.
I think another way that the Story Grid approach can be used in a sort of reverse engineering way is that for people who are working on a book and they've gotten quite far through it, but they still don't quite know what the genre is.
It's also an interesting test to be able to go through and say, "I'm going to look at all the obligatory scenes of each of the genres I think it might be and I'm going to see where it lands most frequently." You know, in which genre am I satisfying the most number of reader expectations.
Anne: Yeah, that's actually a good technique. I take clients all the time whose main question is what genre am I writing, because they come to me as a result of my being a Story Grid certified editor, and I think you can go through and look at all of the conventions and try and match up. But the key question that I always ask my clients is, "How do you want me to feel when I've turned over the last page?"
That's getting at the Story Grid idea of the core emotion, which is going to be associated with one genre or another. What's the climactic scene of the whole story? What's your global climax? What's your big culminating scene? What do you picture? That's going to identify what kind of story it's in your heart to tell.
And after that we can go through and figure out, well, do you meet all these criteria? Does your character want these kinds of things? Are they motivated by certain kinds of things? What I mean by that is, for example, if you're writing an action story--and action story is the basic hero's journey arc story-- your protagonist has to want to save lives.
It has to turn on values of life and death. And if the culminating scene, the core scene that you're imagining, isn't basically the hero at the mercy of the villain, figuring out how to, you know, kill defeat, thwart, confuse, whatever, outwit the villain, then you're probably not writing an action story.
So we start with, "How do you want me to feel at the end, the core emotion that you want to convey in this story or the message that you want to convey and the climactic scene?" And then we worked down from there. That's pretty typical way to go about finding your genre.
Matty: I found that identifying these things for one's own work is orders of magnitude more difficult than identifying it for other people and even after several years of listening to the podcast and reading the book and being a very faithful Story Grid editor, I can follow along and you guys say things and I said, "Oh yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense." And then when I try to apply it to my own work, it's tougher, which I think is a plug for finding other people, as you have, who are familiar with that approach and talking through those things.
But I think it would be especially hard in terms of identifying a masterwork. What advice do you have for people if they like this idea of a masterwork? How do they find what it is for their own work?
Anne: That's a really good question. I don't know that I have like specific steps on that, but you start with the genre, I mean the Story Grid genre, that you think you might be writing in. So, for example, if you're writing a worldview story, a YA story, where the character's internal arc is maturation with their coming of age type of becoming wiser type of story , you can find a range of anything-- from stories to books to movies--that have to do with a young person wising up. And you can use any one of those as a masterwork for hitting the marks of that arc, right? That character arc from naiveté to sophistication basically is the value change there. But at the same time, if you really want to study how, like I want to write my novel in first person, present tense, then you go pick a novel that's popular, that's doing well now, that's written in first person present tense, and you look at how that author did it.
So there's a range of story principles that you can go and look at different masterworks to find out how that was done. Fantasy settings, future settings. You can look at masterworks for those things while also looking at To Kill a Mockingbird for your maturation arc, for example.
Matty: Is there a resource like that, associated with the Story Grid where you can look up who did a really good job of first-person point of view, or who did a really good job of fantasy world building?
Anne: Not yet. We have a quite a dictionary now of stories that are in certain genres, the internal arc of the characters genre and the external, whether it's action or thriller or crime or something like that.
There's spreadsheets and stuff around that you can find, I can give you some links to some of those things. Those lower levels of story, just different story principles. This is the message of Story Grid that I don't think can be repeated too often. You as a writer have to do more reading.
I mean, we would like to be able to just give you this list, but it's constantly changing. There's new stuff being published all the time, and I'm just absolutely astonished at how many people who want to be writers who don't read. It's amazing to me. You have to read more and you have to read in your area, in your genre, in your bookshelf genre. You've got to know what's the latest thing in dystopian YA future, if that's what you write. You better know what was written last week in that that's doing well on Amazon. Otherwise you're just going to be writing 10-year-old stuff that your audience has already read it.
You need to keep up with that, but you also need to read and examine. You can examine television shows and movies too, they're valid for studying story structure. You've got to go outside your genre for things like an unusual narrative device-- that first person present tense, how the story is told--or for different kinds of settings or for different approaches, like combination of internal and external genre, like what kind of character's going through what kind of internal change against a backdrop of what kind of external world? Is it a hurricane or is it a labor strike or is it a pandemic?
You have to read broadly across genres and deeply within the genre where you're trying to write.
Matty: A scary part about that is--and I'm glad you brought up the idea of the movies because I know you guys are doing a lot of assessment of movies more recently on the Editor Roundtable podcast--that even the ones that are quite successful, you guys often have some really legitimate reasons why it's not always hitting the mark.
You know, a particular movie or particular short story doesn't really hit the mark. I guess it just has to be every writer's final personal decision that says, "Oh, I really love the way they presented this first-person fantasy world " or something like that and make your own decision. Don't necessarily rely on what's the bestselling book or is the one that gets read in high school or college courses.
Anne: Yeah, right. On the Roundtable podcast, we do disagree sometimes on whether a story works. Typically, we agree that it works or doesn't work, but we will disagree on either why, or that I liked it, even though it didn't work.
We did Blade Runner, for example, not long ago. It's a movie that I've loved for 40 years, 37 years. And I could see very clearly that it doesn't work as a story. There's lots of flaws in it. That doesn't change the fact that it was so innovative and so WowWee at the time that people still love it and include in lists of a hundred great movies or whatever.
And that's valid. You know, if you're that writer, Ridley Scott, and that director, you know, take a swing and be prepared to miss. I really encourage writers to take that swing if they really want to tell this difficult, complex story. The more difficult, more complex the story, the more likely you are not to succeed at writing it, especially if you're not a super experienced writer, but swing anyway-- swing for the outfield. But Story Grid gives you the tools to simplify it down. If that big idea doesn't work, Story Grid will give you the tools to come out with something that's functional and satisfying and will reach a readership that wants that kind of story.
Matty: Blade Runner is an interesting example because as you guys were summarizing the plot, I thought, I remember nothing really about the plot. I didn't remember what the driving force was. I didn't remember what the robot people were trying for, but I think it was just that that movie was so gorgeous to look at--
Anne: Visually it's very strong.
Matty: Very stunning. And I can remember in a lot of detail, a lot of visuals without being able to remember what the story behind it was. So from a writer's point of view, it might be a good test to say, you may love a book, and then as you assess it based on something like the Story Grid, you realize you'd love it because the language is just gorgeous. And it's letting you overlook what would otherwise be structural problems.
Anne: Right. And readers will forgive a great deal if they're satisfied with the outcome, or the basic path that the story followed. You can forgive plot holes if you're engaged. We all know that, there's no such thing as a perfect novel.
But yeah, absolutely. You have a better chance of getting closer to a perfect novel if you kind of know what beats you need to hit, right? What points your path needs to hit before you get to the end. And also, if you have good pacing, which is basically do the events happen in the right place, in the right sequence, at the expected time in the story, that's pacing. And if you can hit that, you're going to satisfy a lot of readers and they will forgive little problems. And every writer who has finished and published a novel knows that there are problems in that novel that you just kind of hope nobody asks about.
Matty: You hope you dazzled them with something else.
Anne: Exactly, exactly.
Matty: Well, Anne, this is great, and I feel certain that you have intrigued people who may not already know about the Story Grid. So if people wanted to dip their toe in it, what resources would you point them to to start out?
Anne: I would first point everybody to storygrid.com, just the main Story Grid website, where the first thing you're going to see is a menu for resources.
Go to Resources, and that's where you can hook up with all three podcasts. And also just millions of words of what we call Fundamental Fridays posts, where different Story Grid certified editors have gone into depth on a particular story principle.
So those are all really, really good resources for people who are interested in Story Grid.
Matty: And I really like sending people back to the very, very first episodes of the podcast with Shawn and Tim Grahl.
Anne: Yes, Tim has come to Sean and said, "I've never written a novel before yet. He helped me start from scratch." Yeah, and that novel finally just came out a couple of weeks ago.
Matty: That's so exciting. Yeah, and I think perhaps a less overwhelming introduction than diving right into the Editors Roundtable, for example, which I think assumes a certain understanding of the concepts and the language that's used and so on.
Anne: Yeah, absolutely. We aim the Editor Roundtable Podcast at Story Grid people. Definitely.
Matty: And where can people go online to find out more about you and your work?
Anne: They can reach me at annehawley.net.
Matty: Great. Well, thank you so much. This has been such a thrill to have you on the podcast.
Anne: It was a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Anne: I'm great. Thank you for having me. It's nice to see you, Matty.
Matty: Oh, it's my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Anne Hawley is the author of Restraint, a love story set in 19th-century London. A third generation native Oregonian and a Story Grid certified editor, when she's not writing stories, she's editing them, reading them, researching them, or podcasting about them on the Editor Roundtable Podcast, and she can often be seen riding her Dutch bike, Eleanor, around Portland. I had to look up Dutch bike because I wasn't familiar with that, but it's like the canonical bike.
Anne: It is. It's a great big heavy city bike.
Matty: Yeah, it looks great. It looks like the kind of thing I would like to ride up and down the flat streets at the Jersey shore on.
Anne: Flat would be the key word.
Matty: As anyone knows who has talked to me for more than about five minutes at a writers' group meeting or a conference, I'm a huge fan of the Story Grid. And I've been following the various podcasts that have been spun up around the Story Grid for several years now.
Obviously if a topic merits discussion over several years of podcasts, we're not going to be able to cover it in one episode, so we've decided to focus on one specific aspect of the Story Grid, and that is the importance of studying masterworks, which Anne is the expert in discussing, and you'll learn why as we talk.
Before we dive into the masterwork topic, can you just give a little bit of context for our listeners about what the Story Grid is, if they're not familiar with it yet?
Anne: The Story Grid is basically an editing method. It began with a series of blog posts by Shawn Coyne, which he eventually turned into this great big fat book called The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know--that subtitle is important. And it has since become a whole <industry>. They are publishing house now. They put on courses. They certify other editors. I'm one of them. The idea of the Story Grid is that it is a method for writers to use to structurally edit and develop their own stories, but it's also a very valid method for professional editors to help writers develop and fix and work on creating a good solid story that works.
Matty: The thing that really attracted me to the Story Grid was the idea that if you're an editor or if you're the recipient of editing services, you don't have to get editing input that sounds like, "Well, I got to the middle and it was just sort of, I don't know. I can't really say, but I just kind of felt that ..."--you know that kind of advice from an editor, which is really not helpful.
And the Story Grid really gives some very specific advice about, for example, obligatory scenes depending on your genre, which I think is great because you can use that as a test if you feel like your story is not working or you're editing for someone else and their story isn't working, it gives you an idea of why.
Anne: And it's actionable. I mean, it is not that "I just sort of feel like this doesn't work" or "I don't really believe this character would do that here," and it's certainly far above the level of, "Use a different word," "You forgot to close your quotes here." It's not line editing. It's not copyediting.
Matty: Describe a little bit what you did in terms of the masterwork with Shawn in The Masterwork Podcast, because that was fascinating.
Anne: That was fun. Shawn invited me to come on the podcast for this 10 episode arc because he wanted to test out a theory that he had about using what he calls masterworks, any good work in any area that you're interested in writing in, to create a set of, he called them writing prompts, but basically you could say, "Okay, here's how you steal from this."
He had read my novel Restraint, which has the tagline "Pride and Prejudice meets Brokeback Mountain" because it's a gay love story set in the Regency. He said, " Why don't you come on the show and we'll analyze Brokeback Mountain," which is a 10,000 word sort of long short story by Annie Proulx, which was turned into a movie that is in fact very faithful to the short story, so if you've seen the movie, that's a starting point. And we're going to break it down into what he called beats, and then you're going to take those beats and repurpose them, set them in Regency England instead of 1960s Wyoming. But basically reconstruct the general idea of the story using the pieces that Annie Proulx put into Brokeback Mountain.
The beat, it's not clearly defined, but it's basically a unit of change in the story. My job was to find those, and I came up with like 83 of them in a 10,000-word short story. Shawn came up with a lot fewer. I was really granular about it. But a beat when you strip it down is something like, in Brokeback Mountain, the first beat is a man in difficult circumstances starts his day. It's stripped down and kind of abstracted. It's not a cowboy in Wyoming starts his day in a trailer on a windy autumn day or whatever. I can make it then a servant in a manor house in Hampshire starts his day and transpose the abstract structure to a different time and place, set of circumstances. It could be a woman. But to Shawn, the underlying meaning of Brokeback Mountain had to do with the fact that both of these men were poor, and therefore that sets up stakes that they can't avoid if they're gay and they're poor, they can't afford to lose their job over being caught out being gay, that type of thing. So those were important sort of considerations of meaning.
We went through Brokeback Mountain over 10 episodes, broke it down into little tiny pieces. Then I started constructing my story using those pieces, and at the end of 10 episodes, I did not have a story. I don't write that fast. It took me 10 weeks just to get the idea, and we ended it on the promise that I would turn a story in, it would be novella length. I had a little leeway on the length. He said, you don't have to stick to 10,000 words. Historical generally requires a little bit more words to construct a world. But when you get it done, send it in and we'll aim to publish it.
Matty: It was really surprising to me that that story was only 10,000 words long. She packs a lot of punch in 10,000 words.
Anne: And it's a great piece to study for line writing at that level too, although that's not what I was there for. But to study how she packs so much into so few words. That's line writing.
Matty: The fact that it was 10,000 words made your job of identifying the 83 beats a little bit easier than if you had been contending with an 80- or 90- or 100,000-word novel.
Anne: I would never break a novel down at that level. It would drive you crazy. You break down a scene at that level, or a chapter or two, but I wouldn't see a lot of point in doing that for a whole novel except as an intellectual exercise.
Matty: I was surprised when I was listening to that podcast that if I understood correctly, the initial goal was if Annie Proulx had 83 beats, you were going to have 83 beats. Was that your understanding when you went into that experiment? Did that come up later? What did you think about that?
Anne: My understanding when I went into the experiment was that I could read Brokeback Mountain and do whatever I wanted with it. And as the podcasts wore on, it became clear that Shawn as my editor was expecting me to be much more precise.
However, it also became clear that I was being excessive by finding 83 beats. I couldn't possibly replicate them all. Then I would just be rewriting her story. And also that I could rearrange them in sequence and some things like that. What I have done since then-- I'm still working on the story--I have cut out a whole bunch of them. They were ridiculously excessive and I'm down to like 23 now.
Matty: You mean excessive in your analysis as opposed to excessive in the story itself, I take it.
Anne: No, I mean my ridiculously granular view of the story was excessive.
Matty: What led you to go through the exercise of identifying things at that level of detail?
Anne: To be honest, Shawn is in some ways my boss, and that's what he's telling me to do. I wanted to do it really, really well, and I just kind of think that way. I'm very detailed thinker. I work at that level more easily than at the high level.
Matty: The example of taking Brokeback Mountain and then creating a story with it, it's a really good example of a way to address a concern that I hear from a lot of people about, "Oh, the Story Grid is just a formula. If you're writing a thriller, then you have to have these eight obligatory scenes or whatever it is. You're just making a checklist." And my response is always that any approach that covers both Pride and Prejudice and Silence of the Lambs, which are two stories that come up a lot in the podcast discussions, can't be that formulaic.
Is that something that you've heard, especially because you went through this experiment of taking something and assessing it really granularly, even if you didn't end up with 83 when you were done, and having an attempt to match those beats. What is your response to that?
Anne: It's a very common complaint. I hear it all the time. I understand where people are coming from. My story is that I felt the same way when I first read The Story Grid book several years ago now. And the book came my way because I was working on editing my novel Restraint.
It was 230,000 words. That's not a publishable length. I needed to cut a lot and I didn't know how to make cuts. When The Story Grid book said, this will help you find non-working parts of your story and so forth, I thought, "Oh good. This is just what I need." And it was, and it worked. I cut 100,000 words without changing the fundamental story.
But while I was in that process, I was listening to the main podcast and there was one episode where Shawn defined and gave the exact what he considers the obligatory scenes or moments and conventions of a love story. And Restraint is a love story. I was skeptical about obligatory scenes and conventions, but when he outlined them, I realized that I already had met all of them in my story kind of automatically.
Because I have absorbed a lot of love stories and a lot of other kinds of stories, and of course your lovers have to meet, right? Of course, somewhere along the line they have to have conflict enough in the relationship that it splits them apart so that they can come back together. That's the arc of a love story.
If they just meet and say, "I love you." "I love you." "Let's get married." That's not a story, right? You need some people against the love affair and some people who are for it, who are driving them apart or pushing them together. Those are conventions of a love story. There's nothing formulaic about them.
My job as a writer was to innovate on them. I innovated on something like Pride and Prejudice by having it be two men and then having to examine the fact that their relationship is technically a capital crime in that time and place.
That's how you have to innovate those things. But still your lovers do have to meet. They do have to split up. They do have to reunite and wind up either with a commitment or a tragedy or whatever it is that arises out of those things. Every story type--a thriller, an action story-- has conventions like that that you have to meet because without them it's not that kind of story.
It's hard to sell to people unless you have time to sit down with them and go through a story of theirs and say, "This thing here doesn't fit in this type of story, this belongs in another type of story."
Matty: And if a reader picks up something with the expectation it's a love story based on the title or the description or the cover or other books that's filed with, and then they don't have the breakup scene and then the reuniting scene, their expectations will have been thwarted.
Anne: Exactly. And when you have like say an exciting action story, if the hero or the heroine--the protagonist--is never at the mercy of the villain, the antagonist, if there is no big power divide between the hero and the villain, it's not an action story. It's not a thriller. You need that power division. That's a convention of that type of story.
Matty: You took a 10,000-word story as a masterwork and then you cut your story down from, I think you said like 200,000 words to 100,000 words.
Anne: Let me clarify. I had already written and published Restraint. That's how Shawn read it, and that's where he got the idea, "Let's ask Anne to do this and look at Brokeback Mountain and set it in the Regency." That was just a tagline of mine. It's just to say this is two guys in the Regency: "Brokeback Mountain meets Pride and Prejudice." The masterwork experiment was for me to write a new story.
Speaking of conventions, Regency type stories, because of Jane Austen and then because of Georgette Heyer, tend to involve upper classes and wealthy people and manners in society, that type of thing. So to take Brokeback Mountain and set a story in that same period, but among lower class people, which was an important key to the meaning of Brokeback, now that was really my challenge. Take all the research that you've done about how people lived in that time, and then do some more about how servants lived and how farmers lived, so my story that I'm still working on involves a couple of servant class men.
And then the restrictions on them because they can't buy their way out of trouble. People who were hanged for sodomy, for example, tended to be lower class men and rich men, just like today, they just don't face those consequences. It's a whole new challenge for me in terms of research and just thinking through the period that I think I know so well, but I hadn't really thought quite as much about servant class people.
Matty: One thing I thought was interesting about translating, I had seen Brokeback Mountain a long time ago. Then I read it as I was following along with the podcast and then I went and watched it again and I realized that another interesting change, although the movie was, as you said, pretty faithful to the book, is that it was Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, who were these two young and really good looking men who were playing the main characters and if you read the book, they're not really young or really good-looking.
Anne: They are young. Neither of them was 20, but they are not particularly good-looking men.
Matty: I would imagine that for a Regency book, a convention of romance is usually that you have both physically and emotionally or psychologically attractive people as the couple that you want to come together.
Anne: Yeah. And that's certainly convention of romance, which is a marketing genre that is a subset of love stories, right? Because love stories can also be tragic or you know, end with obsession or something like that. But the romance has to have a happily ever after ending. That's like the fundamental rule of romance.
I do not write romances because I don't necessarily write happy endings, but, yeah, the conventions include usually quite good-looking people or people who the reader can fantasize, these are attractive, beautiful people. I don't think it's completely unknown to write less than attractive or less than physically perfect people in romance.
My story is going to involve somebody who was a foundling, an orphan in that time. He's undersized and not necessarily like great teeth, but you know, you have to put yourself in the historical period too and say people weren't quite as judgmental about perfect teeth in 1812 England as maybe they are today.
If my story were to become a film--wouldn't that be wonderful?--they would definitely have to cast better looking people just to sell the film.
Matty: Exactly. You had mentioned that a convention of the romances that are the love story, I guess I shouldn't be using those terms interchangeably, is the happy ending.
Anne: Romeo and Juliet is a love story. Just remember that.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Brokeback Mountain ends on what, on the surface is a very unhappy ending. But as I recall in your conversation with Shawn, there was some debate about is there an underlying more positive message or is it just doom and gloom.
Anne: Right. After going through those episodes and recording them with Shawn, I ended up consulting with some of my gay friends about the idea of whether it's still like a worthwhile thing to bury your gays is the expression. Where you introduce a gay character only to kill them off.
That's still, unfortunately, kind of common in television and movies. It's getting better. And I questioned whether--I mean Brokeback Mountain was published in the 90s and gay marriage was not available and things were very different then--do we still need to be telling that same kind of cautionary story about here's the terrible things that can happen to you if you're gay and you're out and you live in a restrictive society.
And my feeling was and remains, I don't think that's the story I want to tell anymore. And there's no one gay person who can give you all the answers any more than any other group. But the consensus was, I think, preferring not to kill a character at the end, having him die of a hate crime, which is what happens in Brokeback Mountain. And I have since decided that I'm going to leverage the literary device of a metaphorical death and give them a happy end.
Matty: Very interesting. I'm going to be continuing to watch that with interest.
I think another way that the Story Grid approach can be used in a sort of reverse engineering way is that for people who are working on a book and they've gotten quite far through it, but they still don't quite know what the genre is.
It's also an interesting test to be able to go through and say, "I'm going to look at all the obligatory scenes of each of the genres I think it might be and I'm going to see where it lands most frequently." You know, in which genre am I satisfying the most number of reader expectations.
Anne: Yeah, that's actually a good technique. I take clients all the time whose main question is what genre am I writing, because they come to me as a result of my being a Story Grid certified editor, and I think you can go through and look at all of the conventions and try and match up. But the key question that I always ask my clients is, "How do you want me to feel when I've turned over the last page?"
That's getting at the Story Grid idea of the core emotion, which is going to be associated with one genre or another. What's the climactic scene of the whole story? What's your global climax? What's your big culminating scene? What do you picture? That's going to identify what kind of story it's in your heart to tell.
And after that we can go through and figure out, well, do you meet all these criteria? Does your character want these kinds of things? Are they motivated by certain kinds of things? What I mean by that is, for example, if you're writing an action story--and action story is the basic hero's journey arc story-- your protagonist has to want to save lives.
It has to turn on values of life and death. And if the culminating scene, the core scene that you're imagining, isn't basically the hero at the mercy of the villain, figuring out how to, you know, kill defeat, thwart, confuse, whatever, outwit the villain, then you're probably not writing an action story.
So we start with, "How do you want me to feel at the end, the core emotion that you want to convey in this story or the message that you want to convey and the climactic scene?" And then we worked down from there. That's pretty typical way to go about finding your genre.
Matty: I found that identifying these things for one's own work is orders of magnitude more difficult than identifying it for other people and even after several years of listening to the podcast and reading the book and being a very faithful Story Grid editor, I can follow along and you guys say things and I said, "Oh yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense." And then when I try to apply it to my own work, it's tougher, which I think is a plug for finding other people, as you have, who are familiar with that approach and talking through those things.
But I think it would be especially hard in terms of identifying a masterwork. What advice do you have for people if they like this idea of a masterwork? How do they find what it is for their own work?
Anne: That's a really good question. I don't know that I have like specific steps on that, but you start with the genre, I mean the Story Grid genre, that you think you might be writing in. So, for example, if you're writing a worldview story, a YA story, where the character's internal arc is maturation with their coming of age type of becoming wiser type of story , you can find a range of anything-- from stories to books to movies--that have to do with a young person wising up. And you can use any one of those as a masterwork for hitting the marks of that arc, right? That character arc from naiveté to sophistication basically is the value change there. But at the same time, if you really want to study how, like I want to write my novel in first person, present tense, then you go pick a novel that's popular, that's doing well now, that's written in first person present tense, and you look at how that author did it.
So there's a range of story principles that you can go and look at different masterworks to find out how that was done. Fantasy settings, future settings. You can look at masterworks for those things while also looking at To Kill a Mockingbird for your maturation arc, for example.
Matty: Is there a resource like that, associated with the Story Grid where you can look up who did a really good job of first-person point of view, or who did a really good job of fantasy world building?
Anne: Not yet. We have a quite a dictionary now of stories that are in certain genres, the internal arc of the characters genre and the external, whether it's action or thriller or crime or something like that.
There's spreadsheets and stuff around that you can find, I can give you some links to some of those things. Those lower levels of story, just different story principles. This is the message of Story Grid that I don't think can be repeated too often. You as a writer have to do more reading.
I mean, we would like to be able to just give you this list, but it's constantly changing. There's new stuff being published all the time, and I'm just absolutely astonished at how many people who want to be writers who don't read. It's amazing to me. You have to read more and you have to read in your area, in your genre, in your bookshelf genre. You've got to know what's the latest thing in dystopian YA future, if that's what you write. You better know what was written last week in that that's doing well on Amazon. Otherwise you're just going to be writing 10-year-old stuff that your audience has already read it.
You need to keep up with that, but you also need to read and examine. You can examine television shows and movies too, they're valid for studying story structure. You've got to go outside your genre for things like an unusual narrative device-- that first person present tense, how the story is told--or for different kinds of settings or for different approaches, like combination of internal and external genre, like what kind of character's going through what kind of internal change against a backdrop of what kind of external world? Is it a hurricane or is it a labor strike or is it a pandemic?
You have to read broadly across genres and deeply within the genre where you're trying to write.
Matty: A scary part about that is--and I'm glad you brought up the idea of the movies because I know you guys are doing a lot of assessment of movies more recently on the Editor Roundtable podcast--that even the ones that are quite successful, you guys often have some really legitimate reasons why it's not always hitting the mark.
You know, a particular movie or particular short story doesn't really hit the mark. I guess it just has to be every writer's final personal decision that says, "Oh, I really love the way they presented this first-person fantasy world " or something like that and make your own decision. Don't necessarily rely on what's the bestselling book or is the one that gets read in high school or college courses.
Anne: Yeah, right. On the Roundtable podcast, we do disagree sometimes on whether a story works. Typically, we agree that it works or doesn't work, but we will disagree on either why, or that I liked it, even though it didn't work.
We did Blade Runner, for example, not long ago. It's a movie that I've loved for 40 years, 37 years. And I could see very clearly that it doesn't work as a story. There's lots of flaws in it. That doesn't change the fact that it was so innovative and so WowWee at the time that people still love it and include in lists of a hundred great movies or whatever.
And that's valid. You know, if you're that writer, Ridley Scott, and that director, you know, take a swing and be prepared to miss. I really encourage writers to take that swing if they really want to tell this difficult, complex story. The more difficult, more complex the story, the more likely you are not to succeed at writing it, especially if you're not a super experienced writer, but swing anyway-- swing for the outfield. But Story Grid gives you the tools to simplify it down. If that big idea doesn't work, Story Grid will give you the tools to come out with something that's functional and satisfying and will reach a readership that wants that kind of story.
Matty: Blade Runner is an interesting example because as you guys were summarizing the plot, I thought, I remember nothing really about the plot. I didn't remember what the driving force was. I didn't remember what the robot people were trying for, but I think it was just that that movie was so gorgeous to look at--
Anne: Visually it's very strong.
Matty: Very stunning. And I can remember in a lot of detail, a lot of visuals without being able to remember what the story behind it was. So from a writer's point of view, it might be a good test to say, you may love a book, and then as you assess it based on something like the Story Grid, you realize you'd love it because the language is just gorgeous. And it's letting you overlook what would otherwise be structural problems.
Anne: Right. And readers will forgive a great deal if they're satisfied with the outcome, or the basic path that the story followed. You can forgive plot holes if you're engaged. We all know that, there's no such thing as a perfect novel.
But yeah, absolutely. You have a better chance of getting closer to a perfect novel if you kind of know what beats you need to hit, right? What points your path needs to hit before you get to the end. And also, if you have good pacing, which is basically do the events happen in the right place, in the right sequence, at the expected time in the story, that's pacing. And if you can hit that, you're going to satisfy a lot of readers and they will forgive little problems. And every writer who has finished and published a novel knows that there are problems in that novel that you just kind of hope nobody asks about.
Matty: You hope you dazzled them with something else.
Anne: Exactly, exactly.
Matty: Well, Anne, this is great, and I feel certain that you have intrigued people who may not already know about the Story Grid. So if people wanted to dip their toe in it, what resources would you point them to to start out?
Anne: I would first point everybody to storygrid.com, just the main Story Grid website, where the first thing you're going to see is a menu for resources.
Go to Resources, and that's where you can hook up with all three podcasts. And also just millions of words of what we call Fundamental Fridays posts, where different Story Grid certified editors have gone into depth on a particular story principle.
So those are all really, really good resources for people who are interested in Story Grid.
Matty: And I really like sending people back to the very, very first episodes of the podcast with Shawn and Tim Grahl.
Anne: Yes, Tim has come to Sean and said, "I've never written a novel before yet. He helped me start from scratch." Yeah, and that novel finally just came out a couple of weeks ago.
Matty: That's so exciting. Yeah, and I think perhaps a less overwhelming introduction than diving right into the Editors Roundtable, for example, which I think assumes a certain understanding of the concepts and the language that's used and so on.
Anne: Yeah, absolutely. We aim the Editor Roundtable Podcast at Story Grid people. Definitely.
Matty: And where can people go online to find out more about you and your work?
Anne: They can reach me at annehawley.net.
Matty: Great. Well, thank you so much. This has been such a thrill to have you on the podcast.
Anne: It was a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Links
From Anne:
Here's a working spreadsheet of scene types that your audience can view.
And here's a working listing of well known stories by genre and sub-genre.
The Masterwork Experiment episodes of the main podcast start here.
Here's a working spreadsheet of scene types that your audience can view.
And here's a working listing of well known stories by genre and sub-genre.
The Masterwork Experiment episodes of the main podcast start here.
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