Episode 053 - What Authors Can Learn from TV and Movies with Tiffany Yates Martin
November 17, 2020
Editor Tiffany Yates Martin and I geek out about THE PRINCESS BRIDE and all the lessons it can teach writers about story structure, character development, and those little bits that make a story extra engaging. She shares tips for how authors can gain some distance from our own work in order to bring an editor’s eye to it, and we talk about how Old Spice’s The Man Your Man Can Smell Like played with traditional knight in shining armor tropes.
Tiffany Yates Martin has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling, award-winning authors as well as indie and newer writers. She is the author of the Amazon bestseller INTUITIVE EDITING: A CREATIVE AND PRACTICAL GUIDE TO REVISING YOUR WRITING. She's led workshops and seminars for conferences and writers' groups across the country and is a frequent contributor to writers' sites and publications. Under the pen name Phoebe Fox, she's the author of the Breakup Doctor series and her most recent release, A LITTLE BIT OF GRACE.
"When you see a movie or television show, what's the first thing you do if you really love it or really hate it? You want to tell somebody about it. So from almost an instinctive young age, we start talking about these stories that we loved and what we loved about them. And I think when we start writing, we then can learn how to apply that specifically to what we're writing." --Tiffany Yates Martin
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Tiffany Yates Martin. Hey, Tiffany, how are you doing?
[00:00:07] Tiffany: Hi, Matty. How are you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background …
Tiffany Yates Martin has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling, award-winning authors as well as indie and newer writers. She is the author of the Amazon bestseller Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing. She's led workshops and seminars for conferences and writers' groups across the country and is a frequent contributor to writers' sites and publications. Under the pen name Phoebe Fox, she's the author of the Breakup Doctor series and her most recent release, A Little Bit of Grace.
[00:00:49] I met Tiffany when she did a webinar for Sisters in Crime on backstory, and in that webinar, she mentioned a topic that I wanted to delve into in a little more detail. And that's going to be the topic of today's episode, which is what authors can learn from TV and movies. And in discussing this topic, we quickly found that we shared a favorite movie, THE PRINCESS BRIDE. Who would not have THE PRINCESS BRIDE as a favorite movie? So we're going to be using that as a basis for some of our discussion but feeling free to range into other movies and TV shows and even commercials as the topic takes us.
[00:01:21] Although I have to admit, I haven't watched anything other than movies and streaming TV series for years, so I'm probably not going to be able to help with the commercials examples.
[00:01:32] But before we dive into the details of that, Tiffany, do you remember what the first movie or TV show was that you very explicitly took a reference or took a lesson for your writing from? ...
[00:00:07] Tiffany: Hi, Matty. How are you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background …
Tiffany Yates Martin has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling, award-winning authors as well as indie and newer writers. She is the author of the Amazon bestseller Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing. She's led workshops and seminars for conferences and writers' groups across the country and is a frequent contributor to writers' sites and publications. Under the pen name Phoebe Fox, she's the author of the Breakup Doctor series and her most recent release, A Little Bit of Grace.
[00:00:49] I met Tiffany when she did a webinar for Sisters in Crime on backstory, and in that webinar, she mentioned a topic that I wanted to delve into in a little more detail. And that's going to be the topic of today's episode, which is what authors can learn from TV and movies. And in discussing this topic, we quickly found that we shared a favorite movie, THE PRINCESS BRIDE. Who would not have THE PRINCESS BRIDE as a favorite movie? So we're going to be using that as a basis for some of our discussion but feeling free to range into other movies and TV shows and even commercials as the topic takes us.
[00:01:21] Although I have to admit, I haven't watched anything other than movies and streaming TV series for years, so I'm probably not going to be able to help with the commercials examples.
[00:01:32] But before we dive into the details of that, Tiffany, do you remember what the first movie or TV show was that you very explicitly took a reference or took a lesson for your writing from? ...
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[00:01:46] Tiffany: Oh, that's a good question. It's funny. I think I do it all the time subconsciously. I'm an analytical person anyway, and I was an English major, soI had sort of a circuitous route to publishing, but I think I knew from a very early age that that was what I loved. Writing papers was one of my favorite things to do because I got to analyze this thing that we read.
[00:02:07] So I've always done it. It drives my husband nuts. I'm one of those people after I watch something I want to pick it apart and that ruins it for him. So I don't think it was until probably I began writing in earnest professionally that I began doing it consciously, which is sort of the system that I've devised that we're going to talk about today a little bit.
[00:02:28] But here's the thing. I think we all do it. When you see a movie or television show, what's the first thing you do if you really love it or really hate it? You want to tell somebody about it. So from almost an instinctive young age, we start talking about these stories that we loved and what we loved about them.
[00:02:47] And I think when we start writing, we then can learn how to apply that specifically to what we're writing. If you're going to pin me down on what, I probably have to say PRINCESS BRIDE, just because I'm old enough to have seen it when it was in the theaters and I literally went to see it, I think, six times in the theater. And I was a teenager at the time, so this was a lot of money for me to spend. This thing blew my mind and I've come to appreciate it more and more the longer I've been editing because the more I pick it apart, the more I see how perfectly structured it is, it's so tight.
[00:03:22] Matty: What is an example from THE PRINCESS BRIDE that you find yourself referencing for your own work or for your clients the most, just to lead us into this topic of what we can learn from movies?
[00:03:33] Tiffany: That's sort of a backward way from what I approach. I don't usually take movie examples and deliberately quote them. But I do find that when I'm trying to convey something to an author in an edit, like an idea, you know, can you introduce backstory here while you're still moving the story forward? For example, in PRINCESS BRIDE, when Westley and Buttercup are walking through the fire swamp and Westley takes that opportunity as they are doing things to get through the fire swamp and pursue their goal, he also fills in the backstory on what happened when he was captured by the Dread Pirate Roberts. So I don't so much say, It's like this, as I use it as ways to illustrate points.
[00:04:15] And what I love about using movies and television shows, and I also teach this for what we're reading, because you know, writers are taught to read, but we're not really shown how to do that in a way that's useful for our writing, which is analytically. So I do that really deliberately. But with movies and TV shows, I use them a lot in presentations because, one, they're fairly universal. I mean, you can count on a room full of people, most of whom having seen either THE PRINCESS BRIDE or THE AVENGERS or whatever big blockbuster you want to quote.
[00:04:43] And it's also condensed. It's really hard to get your mind around a 300- or 400-page story, if you're going to analyze the concepts in it, but it's a lot easier to do that when you take little bite sized chunks. You know, I used sitcoms. So even a 22-minute sitcom or an hour-long television show or a two hour movie, it's just easier to get your mind around the whole of it.
[00:05:06] Matty: Diverging to sitcoms for a moment, what's an example of a sitcom that's doing it really well, whatever the it is.
[00:05:15] Tiffany: Here's the thing. This is what I really love about this. This is entirely subjective, right? Everything in this pursuit that we have chosen, it is entirely subjective. It's why JK Rowling can get 30-odd rejections and then get an acceptance and have the biggest selling book in the history of books. Because this is an entirely subjective business.
[00:05:37] So what I think is really effective may not be what somebody else does, but the trick is to notice how you react to it and then analyze what is making you particularly react, because you're going to find your voice and your story and the kinds of messages you want to convey and that's going to be what resonates with you on what you're watching too. So learn to analyze that.
[00:05:58] I was doing a presentation last night for Passionate, Inc., which is the erotica chapter of RWA, and I was giving an example of suspense intention using two silly shows -- COMMUNITY and THE BIG BANG THEORY. COMMUNITY is almost farcical, it's just popcorn, and yet it still illustrates this concept I was talking about, building suspense intention at chapter ends or the ends of sections, and saying, you can use that in what you're reading and watching by noticing what makes you need to come back after the commercial, in the olden days, or now more likely binge the next episode. What is it at the end of it that makes you do that?
[00:06:40] And so there was a two-part episode of COMMUNITY, two of the main characters of the show, Troy and Abed, have this kind of like really deep bromance relationship, and it's a little bit the heart of the story. And so in this two-part episode, they have a breach in their friendship. And the first episode ends where they are bitter enemies. And it created in me and my husband this really visceral sense of unrest. We needed this thing resolved, which is the key of suspense intention. You create this uncertainty that you then create the desperation in the reader to resolve, which is how you propel them through the story. And that's what this silly little show did by showing me discord between two characters I was invested in having be together.
[00:07:25] So it's just silly little things like that, where you almost train your brain to watch and take in story -- other people's stories -- because it's so much easier to analyze a story that is not your own. Because for starters, you have objectivity that you don't have with your own, but also with our own stories, they're so real in our heads that as we're trying to assess them, we're filling in the blanks in our heads. And it's really hard to see what's actually on the page versus what's in our minds, what's in our imagination. But when you're looking at someone else's story, you have the distance to do that.
[00:07:59] And this is why I teach it in three different ways, three different levels, because not everybody really wants to analyze the living crap out of something, which I love doing, which makes sense, right? I'm an editor, that's what I like to do. But even if you only want to do what I call passive watching, you can still learn so much about story just from observing your personal reactions to what the storyteller is creating in you, and then following them backward and asking yourself why or why not?
[00:08:29] Why do I feel that way? What's causing that? That can reveal so much about storytelling that you almost osmose as a writer. So that when you're writing, I don't advocate writing in your left brain where you've got all these craft "rules" that you're trying to impose on your writing. I think it shuts us down. But if you make a habit of watching this way, then it really just becomes a part of you and you almost intuitively -- like my book INTUITIVE EDITING -- you almost intuitively start putting those into your own stories, those techniques into your own stories.
[00:09:04] Matty: I had gotten deeply into THE PRINCESS BRIDE because I was thinking of putting together a webinar based on a technique I use for my own books. So my books are suspense and mystery and thriller, and so who knows what when and where they are at different points is always very important. And so because I think everything is better in Excel, I have put together a spreadsheet that I don't start out with, but at some point, I feed the information I've put into my draft into. It that has all the chapters down one axis and all the characters across the other axis. And then in every cell I put, what does the character know, think, and believe at that point and where are they? And so it keeps me from acting like a character doesn't know something that they do or having disconnects like that in the story. And I didn't want to use my own book and I wanted to use one that I thought people would be familiar with. So I said, Oh, I'll just do it with THE PRINCESS BRIDE.
[00:10:03] And it wasn't until I started going through it, that I realized that is all about who knows what when and where they are. And not that the writer is going to make the mistake in the final version, if they're careful, these things would be caught in the edit, but let's just say, okay, spoiler alert for the remainder of the episode, Humperdinck is the one who has set up Buttercup to be captured and killed. And of course he's not letting on, the viewer doesn't know that until later on, but it would be easy, I think, for a writer to go down the path of writing a scene and sort of forgetting for a moment that that's part of what they're trying to set up. And so I think you can save yourself a lot of time and pain if you do that.
[00:10:47] But as I started doing that, plugging in all the actions in THE PRINCESS BRIDE into my spreadsheet, it was really clear how well constructed and carefully constructed that story was. And that's sort of popcorny. It's not like the popcorn stuff you can be careless about and WAR AND PEACE you have to be careful about. It's that regardless of the genre or the tone that careful construction in this case, the case of this example, is important to make sure your story works.
[00:11:14] Tiffany: Well, there's a reason it's a classic, right? First of all, it's classic hero's journey. So it's got this very classic structure in it. William Goldman is almost sending up how stringently he's following a lot of storytelling conventions. He's got the lovers that are separated. He's got the call to action and the hero rejects it. He's got every trope in there. And if you read the book especially, it's written on a meta level where I think he's a character himself actually, where he's talking about having discovered this ancient manuscript of these true events and he is retelling it in THE PRINCESS BRIDE. So it's this meta structure of story and he kind of is poking fun at it as he's writing it.
[00:11:59] Actually, he does this a lot, but there's one part where he'll break from the action of THE PRINCESS BRIDE, almost like the structure of the movie itself, where the grandfather is reading to the kid, and he'll break from it and he'll observe what he's writing. And he'll say things like. At this point in the original manuscript, there were 17 pages of the princess packing all of her gowns that I felt that we should leave out this book, like commenting on story structure within the story itself. And it adds a whole other level to it.
[00:12:28] Matty: I've never read the book. I got the film script for this analysis I was doing, but I'm going to have to read the book too.
[00:12:35] Tiffany: Actually. It's funny you say this because I have an online course about plotting, how to create an airtight plot. And the movie that I use as the basis for it is PRINCESS BRIDE, because once I started to see how tightly plotted and structured it was, I realized there's not an ounce of fat in it, but what makes it, as you said, I think, so accessible is that it's not WAR AND PEACE. It's this really fun yarn and a lot of the memorable lines we quote, think about the sword fight with Inigo and Westley or Miracle Max -- a nice mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich -- we quote these lines that feel like fluff, but they're not fluff if you analyze the movie and you pick apart why they're in there, all of them are doing one of the things that make a scene essential, which is building character, raising stakes, or furthering the plot.
[00:13:27] Matty: One of the things that I found was interesting about THE PRINCESS BRIDE analysis I did is that once I filled out my spreadsheet, I could look through all the axes and see how it all worked out. But the one thing that if this were intended to be a more realistic story than it is, the call out that I would have had is that it's odd that when the Man in Black finally catches up with Vizzini and the Princess Bride and Vizzini holding her at knife point and they're seated at a banquet table, I was like, Yeah, they weren't really traveling with a banquet table.
[00:14:01] Tiffany: I never noticed that.
[00:14:02] Matty: Why did he happen to stop and lay out a banquet? You know, he made it easy for the Man in Black to catch up with them. It's THE PRINCESS BRIDE and he can be having a banquet if he wants to.
[00:14:12] Tiffany: I could never understand why she doesn't know that's Westley. We all knew that was Westley.
[00:14:17] Matty: Well, that was another interesting thing, that analyzing the book and analyzing the movie would be two entirely different things because of course as soon as the Man in Black shows up, the movie viewer, unless you're pretty dimwitted, knows that that's Westley behind the mask, whereas in a book, you could set it up so that even the reader didn't know until Buttercup knew, so that was an interesting difference in how that would be handled.
[00:14:48] Tiffany: Yeah, that's actually one of the exercises -- I hate to say something like that because it sounds very serious, because to me, this is fun, you know, analyze the stories you love -- but one of the things I suggest to authors is that if you do have a book that you love or movie that you love, compare them, compare the book in the movie version, like BIG LITTLE LIES or LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, PRINCESS BRIDE. REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is another really good one -- Richard Yates -- I also read the book of that because the movie was really powerful. It's useful to see how they excerpt out, how they abridge it for the more truncated version of a movie. And also what's deemed essential. What translates, what's different in the interpretation of an actor or director. It's just useful to analyze. It's useful to analyze all of this. And the beauty is there's no wrong answer.
[00:15:40] And the other thing I think is interesting about books versus movies and television shows is that with things that we're watching, often it is a little bit more passive. We're taking the story in and it's kind of fully formed for us. There's not much work we have to do. But I always think of books as collaborative. The author creates the story that they have in their head, but then the reader brings more to it. We bring our imaginations to it. We animate these people, and we fill in the blanks in our heads however it feels right to us, which may or may not match the author's vision. And it makes it this symbiotic art form that I think is unique. As much as I love movies and TV, they are more of a unidirectional art form where you just sit on the sofa and take in the artist's vision.
[00:16:29] Matty: You were talking about the Miracle Max lines from PRINCESS BRIDE and assuming that character was in the book, I think I understand that Billy Crystal ad libbed a lot of those lines. And so you have sort of two layers of storytelling. You have the William Goldman PRINCESS BRIDE storytelling, and then you have Billy Crystal's mini within the movie storytelling -- character building, really, more than storytelling -- which doesn't seem disconnected when you're watching the movie, but if you step back and think about it, you can see that it's not the same almost exaggerated hero's journey kind of dialogue that you get for the rest of it. As you had mentioned before that Goldman is sending up the concept a little bit.
[00:17:17] Tiffany: Interestingly, as you're saying that, I realized that movies and television are a collaborative medium, just not necessarily with the viewer, but with the author, the writer, and the director and the actors, and everybody brings their interpretation to it that adds something unique, just like Billy Crystal did with Miracle Max. But you're right, yeah, it is collaborative. It's just not necessarily collaborative for us as the final audience for it.
[00:17:42] Matty: Did you want to talk more about this difference between passive and active watching and some examples of how that plays out, how that's played out for you and your viewing?
[00:17:53] Tiffany: Yeah, actually I do because sometimes when I talk about this and the analyzing -- not everybody is really into the analyzing, like I said, my husband hates it, it ruins the movie for him --- so that's one of the reasons that I break it down into three different types of analyzing so in the part where I talked about passive watching, I picture Fat Thor from THE AVENGERS, because I'm like, sometimes you just want to sit on the couch and binge eat and binge-watch, and you don't really want to think that hard. And that's cool. But even when you're doing that, you can process the story in a way that's a little bit more writerly than just sitting there completely letting it wash over you.
[00:18:33] And it's the equivalent of what I do as an editor. When I get a new manuscript, the first thing I do is cold read it like it's a novel. And it's basically the equivalent of sitting on the sofa with my popcorn, because I'm not making notes. I'm not really trying that hard to analyze it. I joke that I call it feeling the story, but it really is what I'm doing. I'm just experiencing it because before I can start being analytical toward it, I have to orient myself to the whole story. I have to understand it. I have to let it wash over me and more important, or as important, I guess, I need to observe my reactions to it because that's my job as an editor. I'm holding up the mirror and trying to almost predict how readers will perceive the author's intentions based on what's on the page. And that's what passive watching actually is. You're not analyzing the story; you're just paying attention to your reaction to the story and then trying to figure out why you feel that way.
[00:19:35] So first you're just watching it. You're just letting it wash over you, not worrying about it, not analyzing it. And then after you've watched it, and we talked a minute ago about how you'll go and recommend something you liked or trash talk something you hated to a friend, it's basically the equivalent of that. You'll analyze just the big stuff that struck you.
[00:19:55] So after you watch let's use PRINCESS BRIDE, because we're there. What did you love about it? First of all, did it affect you when you saw it? Obviously, I saw it six times in the theater, so I did love it. Why did I love it? Well, it transported me to another world where there were demarcations between good and evil and the good guys triumph, and it was funny, and it was adventurous and it was suspenseful and it made me laugh. So also all these things are my reaction to it.
[00:20:25] So now, why did I feel that way? Why did I feel that it was suspenseful, and then I start to look at where I might've felt that. And let's say the first one would be, when they're on the ship. If you haven't seen PRINCESS BRIDE, you're listening to this episode going, Oh my God, can we talk about something I know?
[00:20:44] Matty: That's their assignment, though. If they haven't, they have to go watch it and then come back.
[00:20:47] Tiffany: I always thought it was one of those movies that was absolutely universal that everybody had seen. And then when I recently did a presentation on using it for a group, there were like three people who had never seen it before. It blew my mind.
[00:21:01] But anyway, let's say, and then they went and watched it and they're like, Oh my God, that is such a good movie and it's weathered so well. That's the other thing about it being the classic, but when they've kidnapped Buttercup And they're on the ship and suddenly they see another ship behind them -- He's right on top of us! -- and then they try to go to the Cliffs of Insanity. Well, from that moment, that's a really strong story. I mean all the way through, but there's a really strong string of suspense there from the minute they see the ship and then Buttercup sees the possibility of rescue and she jumps.
[00:21:31] So that's the first time she's taking action for her own salvation. Maybe the only time in the movie, actually that she does -- my one complaint is it's not a really feminist movie -- that she takes action, and she jumps overboard, and she tries to save herself and then they pull her back and the ship is getting closer and they're scrambling against this constant threat behind them. They get to the Cliffs of Insanity. And at this point we don't even know what we're rooting for, because she's with kidnappers, but for all we know it's worse news behind her.
[00:22:00] So then they get up the Cliffs of Insanity and the Man in Black -- and by this time I think we maybe realize he's Westley, I can't remember if we've seen him at that point -- but so at this point now we can root for him. And he gets to the top, but there's a swordsman waiting -- the best swordsman in the world waiting to kill him. And then he defeats that guy, but then there's the strongest man in the world waiting to kill him. But then he defeats that guy. And then there's the "smartest man in the world" to outsmart and kill him. And he's got to defeat that guy.
[00:22:30] And so from that moment, there's this relentless suspense driving us all the way through it. So without analyzing too hard, I can just sort of passively notice where I felt that uncertainty inside me about what was going to happen, that investment in rooting for Buttercup to escape, Westley to catch her and for her to figure out who he was and for them to be together and have their happy ending. Noticing my reactions to that lets me pay attention to where in the story these elements are present.
[00:23:07] And then if I decide to more actively analyze, I already know where the spots are to put my finger so I can start digging backward, forensically. And again, this is really similar to what I do as an editor. So after I finished a first draft, I will put the story down and I'll just sit there and let it wash over me and I'll ask myself very broad questions.
[00:23:27] First of all, did I like it and not in a subjective way, but did it engage me, which is subjective, obviously, but not just was this my kind of story? Just did this draw me in to their world of the story. At any point, did I feel that I disengaged from the world of the story? At any point did I get bored and did I like the characters? Did I feel invested in what they wanted? Did I know what they wanted? Was I rooting for it? Did I know what was at stake if they didn't get it? Were there any places in the story that made me emotional? Were there any places in the story where I felt indifferent?
[00:24:06] Just really broad questions where I'm starting to circle in on where in the story the author might strengthen it. And if you get in the habit of just sitting on the sofa and after you finish a show or movie asking yourself those big, broad questions like that, even if that's all you do is notice and pay attention to the reactions that it's eliciting, that's really a lot. You're really serving your writing very well.
[00:24:34] And you're learning to start not only noticing the effect on you but asking yourself why you felt that. Not how necessarily yet, because that gets a little more active, but let's use Buttercup. Did I like Buttercup? Was I invested in her? Yes, I was invested in her. I did like her, but I also wasn't as invested in her as any of the other characters. So now I can start asking myself why. Why was that? Partly it's because as I said, she does not act on her own behalf. And for me, I like a protagonist, particularly a female protagonist, to take a hand in her own destiny.
[00:25:09] And I remember in the fire swamp scene where the ROUS is attacking Westley, even as a kid, I remember thinking, Girl hit him with the stick, hit the ROUS with the stick! She just sits there, kind of poking at it. So it's useful for me to notice that. It's helpful for my writing to understand why I did not connect with that character as deeply as I did some of the others.
[00:25:32] Why do I connect more with Inigo Montoya? Nobody ever killed my father, and I didn't want to kill them and I didn't spend my life perfecting the skill that would allow me to do that. But I can certainly relate to that kind of passion. I can certainly relate to the feeling of that massive injustice done, where you feel you must even the scales and the dedication you might give to whatever it takes to do that. Mine doesn't look like a Inigo's, but I can relate to that. I can't really relate to somebody who is like, Yeah, this thing is killing the man I love. And I'm just going to keep it from biting me.
[00:26:08] So that's useful for me to know as an author so that I can bring that to my own writing. And all that takes is just sitting and letting the story wash over you. It's not really that left-brained.
[00:26:19] Matty: One thing that I noticed in the analysis I did in addition to the why does he happen to have a banquet table with him, which I was totally willing to let go, is that I think it's Westley who proposes the battle of wits. And I think I would have been better if it had been Vizzini who proposed the battle of wits, because the only reason he would be sitting there waiting for the Man in Black to catch up with him is if he thought he could best him. And the only way he's going to think he could best him was a battle of wits.
[00:26:52] And so I thought it would be more logical if Vizzini was the one who had proposed the battle of wits. And then Westley could have said, Well, okay. Just as he said, I recognize that you, Indigo, are the best swordsman, and you, Fezzik, are the strongest man, it would have been more suspenseful. Because as soon as Westley proposes a battle of wits, you're like, Oh, I wonder if what he has up his sleeve. You're not really worried about him.
[00:27:34] Tiffany: You know, here's what's interesting as you're saying that, because I will never get tired of analyzing things. I've seen that movie -- I just got a new nuance from it thanks to what you said. So if you think about the fact that when he battles Inigo and Fezzik, who he recognizes, as you pointed out, he will recognize both of them as masters at what they do -- he recognizes Inigo is a brilliant swordsman. He recognizes that Fezzik is an incredibly strong man.
[00:28:00] But notice when he first approaches Vizzini, he's sarcastic. He does not recognize that Vizzini is the smart man. And he leaves Inigo and Fezzik alive, but he has no such compunctions about Vizzini. Vizzini is an actual bad guy. Inigo and Fezzik are simply men in a situation that has pitted them against Westley, but they have honor, they have their own internal system of honor. Whereas Vizzini does not as is evidenced by the fact that he cheats in his battle of wits.
[00:28:30] Matty: It's also interesting that, Humperdinck doesn't get killed.
[00:28:36] Tiffany: But he goes to the pain, to the pain.
[00:28:38] Matty: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
[00:28:39] Tiffany: But Humperdinck gets what is worse for him than death, which is humiliation. Actually one of my favorite little bits in that movie, this is totally apropos of nothing, but it's one of the examples of little bitty moments. I talk in the third way of dissecting story is that moment by moment, tiny, tiny beats, that adds so much to a story.
[00:29:00] One of the really subtle ones is when Westley has gone to the castle, he's found Buttercup. He's kept her from killing herself. Humperdinck catches them. Westley stands up. Drop your sword. And then just as we cut away to the hallway, I think, where we see Inigo, we hear them -- it's just a voiceover -- you hear in the room Westley says to her, Tie him up, make it as tight as you like, and you hear, Oww! So that's like the last little omph for Humperdinck as he is being tied up so tight that it hurts by a girl, and he's going to be left that way to be humiliated. So I think that he gets his revenge.
[00:29:37] The only two people that get killed are the truly, truly evil. I mean, you could argue Humperdinck is pretty evil, but Vizzini and Rugen. There's no redemption for them. I don't think there's redemption for Humperdinck either.
[00:29:50] Matty: But the fact that they're each getting the thing that they want the least I think is key there.
[00:29:57] Tiffany: Yeah. And if you think about again, observing your reactions, reader expectations is what I always talk about at that point, call us horrible, we want to see Rugen die. He's been awful. And again, he cheated, and he stopped and he throws a knife at Inigo Montoya.
[00:30:14] We don't want dishonorable people to prevail. And so with both Vizzini and Rugen, who have done terrible, dishonorable things, we want to see those guys bite it. That's a matter of giving the reader the most satisfying resolution.
[00:30:29] Whereas Humperdinck is kind of pathetic, you know. As awful as he is, he shows himself to be such a coward that it's almost like kicking him, it's like punching down. Have you heard that? A friend just taught me that, which I thought was brilliant. Like it's okay to punch up higher than your level. You can attack. But if you punch down, if you attack somebody who's lower than you in some way, who's already at a disadvantage, that's not noble in and of itself.
[00:30:57] So if we see Westley and Buttercup do that to Humperdinck after he's already brought so low and humiliated and is such a coward, it's almost like shooting someone in the back. Look, the more we analyze this thing, the more perfect it becomes.
[00:31:13] Matty: It's really true. The fact that people can watch it over and over again, I think is a testament to that.
[00:31:18] Tiffany: Yeah. Think about that. Like your favorite stuff you can watch or read over and over again. Why? Because you get something new out of it every single time.
[00:31:26] Matty: What do you think the technique is that is making the characters that are sort of doing bad things like Inigo and Fezzik and the Dread Pirate Roberts, what are the techniques that are being used to make them people you're really rooting for that could be repurposed for writers in their own books?
[00:31:49] Tiffany: That is such a good question because I'm not of the school that characters have to be likable. They just have to be relatable. Now it happens I think Fezzik and Inigo are extremely likable, and that's part of it, but also there are several sort of tropey things that you can pretty much rely on to make people invest in a character.
[00:32:09] One is humor. We love people who are funny. WEDDING CRASHERS opens with two seemingly irredeemable men who crash weddings to sleep with women under false pretenses. We should hate them, but they're funny. And so we already have some liking for them, and then they're doing a decent thing. In WEDDING CRASHERS, we see that they're trying to help couples have an amiable divorce. They're trying to help smooth the waters of the rancor between these two exes. That's a decent pursuit.
[00:32:41] So same with Inigo Montoya. Yeah. He's a hired sword. So he's a mercenary in a lot of ways. And yet he is motivated by a very understandable, relatable, even you might argue honorable goal, which is to avenge the wrongful slaying of his father. And so of course we can invest in him.
[00:33:03] And then he's so kind with Fezzik. He plays the rhyming game. So if you can show a goodness or a softness, you know, a bad guy that has a puppy that he treats like gold, to use the total easy cliche that shows us a softness and a character that lets us invest in them.
[00:33:20] It might be that they're incredibly dedicated. Why did we like Hannibal Lecter? As bad a guy as there was, that dude was dedicated. And in his own way, he was operating by a code. Now it was a code that we may not understand, but he had one and he stayed aligned with that. And although he was doing it for his own reasons, he also helped Clarice to catch another bad guy.
[00:33:49] It's like Dexter, look, I'm all over the map. But Dexter was fascinating to me because he is horrible. He's a repulsive, emotionless serial killer. And yet he is killing people who do bad things. So there's this interesting moral gray area where we have to examine our own killing is wrong. Black and white. Well, but is it? And so now we have to question that premise and in some ways, you can relate to someone who says What I'm doing is stopping you from doing something even worse. So, is it bad? I don't know. So if you can make the reader question their premises, that's another way of making a character relatable.
[00:34:31] Matty: I'm trying to think back to having read SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, which has been a while, and compare how Hannibal Lecter was presented in the book versus the Anthony Hopkins portrayal in the movie and figuring out to what extent was Hannibal Lecter attractive because it was Anthony Hopkins. I just don't remember. Do you have a sense of that?
[00:34:57] Tiffany: I didn't read the book, but you're right, I think actors bring so much. I mean, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are likable guys, so there's already that built in advantage. Whereas, and this is nothing against him personally, but someone like Christian Bale, could he have pulled that roll off in that way as instantly likable? I don't know. Paul Rudd can sell us anything because there is no more likable human being on the planet. You know, we'd sympathize with him a little bit no matter what we saw him doing because he's Paul Rudd, because he has this affability and relate-ability just baked into who he is as a human being.
[00:35:36] So you're right. You're right. The character has a lot to do with it. The charisma the actor brings.
[00:35:42] Matty: It would be interesting to watch Anthony Hopkins or Mandy Patinkin, who is Indigo Montoya, or actors who are playing a very likable character in one movie and a very unlikeable character in another movie and see what they do to elicit that response from the viewer.
[00:36:01] Tiffany: Well, look at Tom Hanks in ROAD TO PERDITION, I think it's called, where he plays a hitman. Because again, Tom Hanks is like Paul Rudd.
[00:36:12] Matty: Yeah. Tom Hanks is pretty much the poster child for likability.
[00:36:16] Tiffany: He is, but why? That's useful to analyze too? Why is he such a likable person? Again, all of this is subjective, so your answer might be different. That's what makes it useful for your writing. Because we're not all writing the same thing. So even if you go I can't stay on Tom Hanks, great. Why? Put that in your story.
[00:36:34] But why I think he is so universally likable, first of all, he's kind of every man. You know, he's not too handsome. He's not too anything. He just seems like everybody's father. There's an inherent sort of kindness in his affect. But I think what he really brings to stories is a complexity where we see that he is a man who is pulled in different directions, but generally motivated by trying to do what he believes is the right thing.
[00:37:05] If you look at almost any one of his characters, including in ROAD TO PERDITION in which I think his son is killed, but something that lets us understand what is driving him. BRIDGE OF SPIES, same thing, even CASTAWAY, the Wilson movie. This is a man who is always deeply invested, but also nuanced in the way that he's vulnerable. I think that's that vulnerability in him, that nakedness in his emotional spectrum, that lets us really relate to him in a way that, I don't know, he's like the universal unguent.
[00:37:44] Matty: Coincidentally, I just saw a very interesting example of this, where he was on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. And this must've been shortly after the movie SULLY came out. And there was a skit where Sully Sullenberger has gone back to fly commercial airplanes. And he goes into the cockpit and he's doing all the things that the pilot in command of the commercial airliner does. And then the other pilot comes in, it's Alec Baldwin, and he says, I think there must be some mistake. I'm the pilot command for this flight and you're the copilot. And Sully says, Oh, no, I'm Sully. And so they call up the tower and they say, Yeah, Captain Sullenberger, you've been out of circulation for a little while. To comply with regulations, you're going to have to fly as the copilot.
[00:38:32] And then for the whole rest of the time, he's doing all these little things to undermine Alec Baldwin as the primary pilot. And after a while you're going, geez, what a jerk. But it's very interesting because it's Tom Hanks, it's Sully Sullenberger, and yet, by the end of this, get you're like, Whoa, that guy's really a jerk.
[00:38:50] Tiffany: Which is why that case is so useful to analyze. Why is that funny? Because it turned the expectation, turned the readers' assumptions on their ear and made us laugh at them. So that skit we can analyze and see what makes it effective. We joked about commercials and you were saying you don't watch them anymore. I don't really watch a lot of streaming too, like everybody, but do you remember the Old Spice commercial with Isaiah Mustafa? The man your man could smell like. Remember that guy? He was a phenomenon of commercials. I don't even know how long ago, six, seven years. And the Old Spice guy was this hot, hot dude with a towel wrapped around him and he said things like, Look, I have a handful of diamonds ... I'm riding a horse ... I'm on a boat ... I am the man your man could smell like.
[00:39:40] It was a phenomenon of a commercial, even a thing like that you can analyze and go, Why was that a phenomenon? Well, for starters, because Isaiah Mustafa is hot as fire, but also it was sending up this trope of what women want. We want a knight in shining armor to give us everything and we can't have that, so our dude could smell like that dude.
[00:40:07] Matty: And so that's brilliant
[00:40:09] Tiffany: Yes, it is brilliant, but analyzing why it's brilliant, why it affects you, that's so instructional for our writing and you can be doing it on autopilot all the time.
[00:40:19] I do it with Taylor Swift songs. Why is it so catchy? Why is this song so broadly appealing? Well, it's because she's tapping into universal feelings based on the very specific perspective of, when she was younger, a teenage girl about love. Was I that at the time? No, but she's tapping into these universals and that's valuable for my writing, to understand how the more specific we are in our writing, the more universally relatable we are.
[00:40:48] Matty: I think that the reason that the Sully skit was both funny and also you ended up being annoyed is that he was acting completely opposite to everything that you think you know about Sully Sullenberger, that, you know, this man i, a super talented pilot, selfless, understated about his own accomplishments. And then here he is dropping the names of the famous people that he's gotten to meet and being real petty about who's in command. And it's that countering what your expectations are of the person you think, you know that is attention getting in that scenario.
[00:41:24] Tiffany: Yeah. there's nothing you can't analyze. It's a ball, frankly, once you start to do it, it's so much fun because, again, you're not left brain analyzing and giving it all this brainpower. You're just going, Oh, what am I feeling? Why am I feeling that? So you're really just getting to know you better, but in the course of doing that, you are learning story and you're learning who you are as a storyteller and how to achieve those kinds of reactions in your intended audience.
[00:41:52] Matty: Do you have any tips for if an author is reading their own work, draft work, is there a mindset they can bring so that they can experience that? Just letting it wash over them?
[00:42:03] Tiffany: Yeah. That's another reason I love doing this. I used to call this presentation "How to Train Your Editor Brain," because that's really what it does when you're watching, you're in that analytical mode, that objective assessing mode that you need to bring to editing your own work, which is so challenging for that very reason, because it's so hard to get the objectivity.
[00:42:22] I have little tricks that most of us have heard. But the more distance you can give yourself from the story initially, after you finish it, the better. A lot of writers will finish drafting and then dive right in and start editing it. And I advocate, first of all, the cooling off period, just where you get away from it, even if it's just for a few days, do something else. Go for hikes, go on vacation, read something else, write something else, but give yourself some mental space from it.
[00:42:50] And then I've got a bunch of other little tricks, silly things, but honestly, they can work. Changing the font that you wrote it in can give you a little bit of distance. Reading it in a different place from where you wrote it. Hearing it differently, like if you wrote it on a computer, print it out or have it read to you or read it aloud yourself or put it on a text to speech program.
[00:43:11] But then when you go to it, as I said, a lot of authors will finish writing and then immediately start editing, dive right in. I think you're doing yourself a disservice on a couple of levels by that. Because first of all, you're not giving yourself your best and probably only chance to take in your story like a reader will take it in. So I always advocate after the cooling off period, do that cold read, just like I do it when I'm editing. Resist the temptation to do anything. Don't start fixing, don't even analyze too hard. That's one thing I'll tell authors, when you do that, when you just read it like a novel. Another trick is put it on your Kindle or your reading device, because seeing it in that different formats just flips a switch in your brain where suddenly it's not yours anymore. And you get a little mental distance.
[00:43:58] So do that cold read. And then if things are jumping out at you, as you're reading it, make little tiny brief notes. And I mean brief, like, Page 34 character feels fuzzy. Just that brief. Don't start fixing it. And for God's sake, don't start fixing the prose itself.
[00:44:17] I think a lot of authors start at the end and that's the last thing you do. That would be like staging a house while it's still under construction. It's amazing, the funnest part of editing is that window dressing stuff, you know, go in there and massage your sentences and make it say the perfect thing. But it's the last thing that you should do because there's so much structural stuff. First, you've got to get the foundation poured. Make sure it's solid. You've got to get the studs up. You've got to put in the dry wall. I love using the house analogy just because it makes so much sense that you wouldn't try to hang curtains before you've installed the windows.
[00:44:52] So make sure that your key story elements are in place. And the best way to do that is by taking in your whole story as close to the experience of a reader as possible. Because no matter how well you think, you know it while you're writing it, the reading of it is a different animal. The taking it in as a whole will show you a lot of what you actually have.
[00:45:16] And I also advocate trying to do that in as few sittings as possible. If you're a really fast reader, you can do it in one sitting. If you're not, try to do it in two, three, four sittings, but as close together as you can, because the trick is that we want to get this whole sense of what the story is in its entirety before we start assessing what areas might need to be strengthened.
[00:45:41] And then do this passive watching thing where you're not so much analyzing yet, but you're just going, Okay, were there parts where it felt slow to me? Were there parts where I left a loose thread? Were there parts where I didn't understand how I got the character from one place to another? The end wasn't as satisfying as I thought it would be? My characters aren't coming across as vividly as I felt they were?
[00:46:03] So it's just big stuff. And then when I teach the course on active reading and watching, this is when you go in and then you get super analytical. And that's what I do after I finished the first cold read. Then I go back to the very beginning and I go through with a little tiny microscope and I may make quite literally hundreds of embedded notes, in addition to probably an editorial letter, that will be a minimum of 5,000 words and often up to 10,000 words. So it is a lot of feedback and observation, and it's not, here's what you should do or here's what's not right. It's holding up the mirror to what you have so that you as an author can go, yes, that's my intention or no, that's not my intention. Where do I need to make my intention clearer? Where do I need to develop what I wanted to say more deeply? After you've done that first read, that's when you go through, and you start doing that nitty gritty.
[00:46:59] Okay, here's another sort of radical suggestion. I also don't recommend doing that beginning-to-end chronologically, which is how most authors will edit. After you finish your first read, you're going to have a pretty good idea where the holes in the dam are. And usually it's going to be something big. If your story needs serious attention, it's probably going to be in the areas of character, plot, stakes, sometimes suspense intention, momentum. Those are the main areas they tend to fall in. This is why the asking yourself what I'm feeling is good.
[00:47:33] If you have lost interest in a certain place, your momentum is lagging there. Why is your momentum lagging there? Maybe stakes are too low. Maybe we're not invested in the characters. Maybe we don't clearly see what the character wants. Maybe the character is not actively pursuing what they want -- you know, Buttercup and the ROUS and the stick. So then you can start to answer those questions and you go in and you plug the holes in the dam. If you've got major character issues that you need to address first, it's not going to do you any good to start at the beginning and start reading through. Go to the places where you notice that and fix that.
[00:48:05] And then get the pleasure of stepping back again and reading it again, if you need to, and then you can start going through and doing those little-by-little incremental shoring up throughout, beginning to end, but I think authors try to do too much when they finish and then start at the beginning and immediately start trying to edit.
[00:48:26] Matty: That's a great tip. I've never heard it posed quite that way, but it makes so much sense.
[00:48:32] Tiffany: I borrowed parts of it. Actually, I adapted a lot of it from my system, but I borrowed a lot of the premise from Saul Stein, who's one of my favorite craft writers. He calls it triage, which is a great, it's a great image because if you think about like a field hospital, you take the bleeders first because they're going to die. You would never go to the guy who has a cut arm or a bullet lodged in the meat of his thigh and be like, Oh, we better get you in there. It's counterproductive. The bleeders are going to bleed out if you do that. So when you're editing, start with the bleeders.
[00:49:06] Matty: Yup. Well, this has been so great. I think I could just spend the rest of the day chatting with you about movies, TV, and commercials. I know you have a ton of resources that if people are intrigued by this, they can go to, so describe where people can go for more information about all this.
[00:49:23] Tiffany: The best clearing house for everything is probably my website, which is really, really full of resources. I try to make it content rich for authors, and that's foxprinteditorial.com. And on there, you'll find there's a whole page of resources for authors with a lot of my favorite craft books, podcasts, blogs, great posts from authors on craft technique. My online classes are there, and I do have one on this topic that we've been talking about today: How to Train Yourself to Read and Watch Analytically. I have one on how to create an airtight plot. I've got five more in the works that'll be out. All my socials media is on there.
[00:49:58] My book INTUITIVE EDITING. The subtitle is "Creative and Practical Ways to Revise Your Writing." And it really is to me what we were just talking about, the approach to editing. I don't think it's all left brain analytical. I really do think it's creative and intuitive and it's based on some of these ideas you and I have been talking about, where you learn to ask yourself questions, learn to assess what's on the page of your own writing and ask yourself the questions to circle in on what needs to be shored up maybe, and then how to do that too. It's a really practical, useful approach.
[00:50:35] You can find where I'm going to be appearing. I've got a blog on there. That's probably the best place to go. We're so at the point now my web designer said we cannot add more things to your website unless we get another subscription on whatever the hosting facility is.
[00:50:51] Matty: Well, that's great that there's so much there because I know people will have been intrigued by this conversation. And of course, if you haven't watched THE PRINCESS BRIDE, that's the other homework assignment. Everyone should go watch THE PRINCESS BRIDE.
[00:51:01] Tiffany: It's the greatest homework in the world. You will thank us.
[00:51:03] Matty: Yes. Well, thank you so much, Tiffany. This has been so helpful.
[00:51:06] Tiffany: Thank you. You so much, Matty. This has just been really a fun conversation. I loved it.
[00:02:07] So I've always done it. It drives my husband nuts. I'm one of those people after I watch something I want to pick it apart and that ruins it for him. So I don't think it was until probably I began writing in earnest professionally that I began doing it consciously, which is sort of the system that I've devised that we're going to talk about today a little bit.
[00:02:28] But here's the thing. I think we all do it. When you see a movie or television show, what's the first thing you do if you really love it or really hate it? You want to tell somebody about it. So from almost an instinctive young age, we start talking about these stories that we loved and what we loved about them.
[00:02:47] And I think when we start writing, we then can learn how to apply that specifically to what we're writing. If you're going to pin me down on what, I probably have to say PRINCESS BRIDE, just because I'm old enough to have seen it when it was in the theaters and I literally went to see it, I think, six times in the theater. And I was a teenager at the time, so this was a lot of money for me to spend. This thing blew my mind and I've come to appreciate it more and more the longer I've been editing because the more I pick it apart, the more I see how perfectly structured it is, it's so tight.
[00:03:22] Matty: What is an example from THE PRINCESS BRIDE that you find yourself referencing for your own work or for your clients the most, just to lead us into this topic of what we can learn from movies?
[00:03:33] Tiffany: That's sort of a backward way from what I approach. I don't usually take movie examples and deliberately quote them. But I do find that when I'm trying to convey something to an author in an edit, like an idea, you know, can you introduce backstory here while you're still moving the story forward? For example, in PRINCESS BRIDE, when Westley and Buttercup are walking through the fire swamp and Westley takes that opportunity as they are doing things to get through the fire swamp and pursue their goal, he also fills in the backstory on what happened when he was captured by the Dread Pirate Roberts. So I don't so much say, It's like this, as I use it as ways to illustrate points.
[00:04:15] And what I love about using movies and television shows, and I also teach this for what we're reading, because you know, writers are taught to read, but we're not really shown how to do that in a way that's useful for our writing, which is analytically. So I do that really deliberately. But with movies and TV shows, I use them a lot in presentations because, one, they're fairly universal. I mean, you can count on a room full of people, most of whom having seen either THE PRINCESS BRIDE or THE AVENGERS or whatever big blockbuster you want to quote.
[00:04:43] And it's also condensed. It's really hard to get your mind around a 300- or 400-page story, if you're going to analyze the concepts in it, but it's a lot easier to do that when you take little bite sized chunks. You know, I used sitcoms. So even a 22-minute sitcom or an hour-long television show or a two hour movie, it's just easier to get your mind around the whole of it.
[00:05:06] Matty: Diverging to sitcoms for a moment, what's an example of a sitcom that's doing it really well, whatever the it is.
[00:05:15] Tiffany: Here's the thing. This is what I really love about this. This is entirely subjective, right? Everything in this pursuit that we have chosen, it is entirely subjective. It's why JK Rowling can get 30-odd rejections and then get an acceptance and have the biggest selling book in the history of books. Because this is an entirely subjective business.
[00:05:37] So what I think is really effective may not be what somebody else does, but the trick is to notice how you react to it and then analyze what is making you particularly react, because you're going to find your voice and your story and the kinds of messages you want to convey and that's going to be what resonates with you on what you're watching too. So learn to analyze that.
[00:05:58] I was doing a presentation last night for Passionate, Inc., which is the erotica chapter of RWA, and I was giving an example of suspense intention using two silly shows -- COMMUNITY and THE BIG BANG THEORY. COMMUNITY is almost farcical, it's just popcorn, and yet it still illustrates this concept I was talking about, building suspense intention at chapter ends or the ends of sections, and saying, you can use that in what you're reading and watching by noticing what makes you need to come back after the commercial, in the olden days, or now more likely binge the next episode. What is it at the end of it that makes you do that?
[00:06:40] And so there was a two-part episode of COMMUNITY, two of the main characters of the show, Troy and Abed, have this kind of like really deep bromance relationship, and it's a little bit the heart of the story. And so in this two-part episode, they have a breach in their friendship. And the first episode ends where they are bitter enemies. And it created in me and my husband this really visceral sense of unrest. We needed this thing resolved, which is the key of suspense intention. You create this uncertainty that you then create the desperation in the reader to resolve, which is how you propel them through the story. And that's what this silly little show did by showing me discord between two characters I was invested in having be together.
[00:07:25] So it's just silly little things like that, where you almost train your brain to watch and take in story -- other people's stories -- because it's so much easier to analyze a story that is not your own. Because for starters, you have objectivity that you don't have with your own, but also with our own stories, they're so real in our heads that as we're trying to assess them, we're filling in the blanks in our heads. And it's really hard to see what's actually on the page versus what's in our minds, what's in our imagination. But when you're looking at someone else's story, you have the distance to do that.
[00:07:59] And this is why I teach it in three different ways, three different levels, because not everybody really wants to analyze the living crap out of something, which I love doing, which makes sense, right? I'm an editor, that's what I like to do. But even if you only want to do what I call passive watching, you can still learn so much about story just from observing your personal reactions to what the storyteller is creating in you, and then following them backward and asking yourself why or why not?
[00:08:29] Why do I feel that way? What's causing that? That can reveal so much about storytelling that you almost osmose as a writer. So that when you're writing, I don't advocate writing in your left brain where you've got all these craft "rules" that you're trying to impose on your writing. I think it shuts us down. But if you make a habit of watching this way, then it really just becomes a part of you and you almost intuitively -- like my book INTUITIVE EDITING -- you almost intuitively start putting those into your own stories, those techniques into your own stories.
[00:09:04] Matty: I had gotten deeply into THE PRINCESS BRIDE because I was thinking of putting together a webinar based on a technique I use for my own books. So my books are suspense and mystery and thriller, and so who knows what when and where they are at different points is always very important. And so because I think everything is better in Excel, I have put together a spreadsheet that I don't start out with, but at some point, I feed the information I've put into my draft into. It that has all the chapters down one axis and all the characters across the other axis. And then in every cell I put, what does the character know, think, and believe at that point and where are they? And so it keeps me from acting like a character doesn't know something that they do or having disconnects like that in the story. And I didn't want to use my own book and I wanted to use one that I thought people would be familiar with. So I said, Oh, I'll just do it with THE PRINCESS BRIDE.
[00:10:03] And it wasn't until I started going through it, that I realized that is all about who knows what when and where they are. And not that the writer is going to make the mistake in the final version, if they're careful, these things would be caught in the edit, but let's just say, okay, spoiler alert for the remainder of the episode, Humperdinck is the one who has set up Buttercup to be captured and killed. And of course he's not letting on, the viewer doesn't know that until later on, but it would be easy, I think, for a writer to go down the path of writing a scene and sort of forgetting for a moment that that's part of what they're trying to set up. And so I think you can save yourself a lot of time and pain if you do that.
[00:10:47] But as I started doing that, plugging in all the actions in THE PRINCESS BRIDE into my spreadsheet, it was really clear how well constructed and carefully constructed that story was. And that's sort of popcorny. It's not like the popcorn stuff you can be careless about and WAR AND PEACE you have to be careful about. It's that regardless of the genre or the tone that careful construction in this case, the case of this example, is important to make sure your story works.
[00:11:14] Tiffany: Well, there's a reason it's a classic, right? First of all, it's classic hero's journey. So it's got this very classic structure in it. William Goldman is almost sending up how stringently he's following a lot of storytelling conventions. He's got the lovers that are separated. He's got the call to action and the hero rejects it. He's got every trope in there. And if you read the book especially, it's written on a meta level where I think he's a character himself actually, where he's talking about having discovered this ancient manuscript of these true events and he is retelling it in THE PRINCESS BRIDE. So it's this meta structure of story and he kind of is poking fun at it as he's writing it.
[00:11:59] Actually, he does this a lot, but there's one part where he'll break from the action of THE PRINCESS BRIDE, almost like the structure of the movie itself, where the grandfather is reading to the kid, and he'll break from it and he'll observe what he's writing. And he'll say things like. At this point in the original manuscript, there were 17 pages of the princess packing all of her gowns that I felt that we should leave out this book, like commenting on story structure within the story itself. And it adds a whole other level to it.
[00:12:28] Matty: I've never read the book. I got the film script for this analysis I was doing, but I'm going to have to read the book too.
[00:12:35] Tiffany: Actually. It's funny you say this because I have an online course about plotting, how to create an airtight plot. And the movie that I use as the basis for it is PRINCESS BRIDE, because once I started to see how tightly plotted and structured it was, I realized there's not an ounce of fat in it, but what makes it, as you said, I think, so accessible is that it's not WAR AND PEACE. It's this really fun yarn and a lot of the memorable lines we quote, think about the sword fight with Inigo and Westley or Miracle Max -- a nice mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich -- we quote these lines that feel like fluff, but they're not fluff if you analyze the movie and you pick apart why they're in there, all of them are doing one of the things that make a scene essential, which is building character, raising stakes, or furthering the plot.
[00:13:27] Matty: One of the things that I found was interesting about THE PRINCESS BRIDE analysis I did is that once I filled out my spreadsheet, I could look through all the axes and see how it all worked out. But the one thing that if this were intended to be a more realistic story than it is, the call out that I would have had is that it's odd that when the Man in Black finally catches up with Vizzini and the Princess Bride and Vizzini holding her at knife point and they're seated at a banquet table, I was like, Yeah, they weren't really traveling with a banquet table.
[00:14:01] Tiffany: I never noticed that.
[00:14:02] Matty: Why did he happen to stop and lay out a banquet? You know, he made it easy for the Man in Black to catch up with them. It's THE PRINCESS BRIDE and he can be having a banquet if he wants to.
[00:14:12] Tiffany: I could never understand why she doesn't know that's Westley. We all knew that was Westley.
[00:14:17] Matty: Well, that was another interesting thing, that analyzing the book and analyzing the movie would be two entirely different things because of course as soon as the Man in Black shows up, the movie viewer, unless you're pretty dimwitted, knows that that's Westley behind the mask, whereas in a book, you could set it up so that even the reader didn't know until Buttercup knew, so that was an interesting difference in how that would be handled.
[00:14:48] Tiffany: Yeah, that's actually one of the exercises -- I hate to say something like that because it sounds very serious, because to me, this is fun, you know, analyze the stories you love -- but one of the things I suggest to authors is that if you do have a book that you love or movie that you love, compare them, compare the book in the movie version, like BIG LITTLE LIES or LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, PRINCESS BRIDE. REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is another really good one -- Richard Yates -- I also read the book of that because the movie was really powerful. It's useful to see how they excerpt out, how they abridge it for the more truncated version of a movie. And also what's deemed essential. What translates, what's different in the interpretation of an actor or director. It's just useful to analyze. It's useful to analyze all of this. And the beauty is there's no wrong answer.
[00:15:40] And the other thing I think is interesting about books versus movies and television shows is that with things that we're watching, often it is a little bit more passive. We're taking the story in and it's kind of fully formed for us. There's not much work we have to do. But I always think of books as collaborative. The author creates the story that they have in their head, but then the reader brings more to it. We bring our imaginations to it. We animate these people, and we fill in the blanks in our heads however it feels right to us, which may or may not match the author's vision. And it makes it this symbiotic art form that I think is unique. As much as I love movies and TV, they are more of a unidirectional art form where you just sit on the sofa and take in the artist's vision.
[00:16:29] Matty: You were talking about the Miracle Max lines from PRINCESS BRIDE and assuming that character was in the book, I think I understand that Billy Crystal ad libbed a lot of those lines. And so you have sort of two layers of storytelling. You have the William Goldman PRINCESS BRIDE storytelling, and then you have Billy Crystal's mini within the movie storytelling -- character building, really, more than storytelling -- which doesn't seem disconnected when you're watching the movie, but if you step back and think about it, you can see that it's not the same almost exaggerated hero's journey kind of dialogue that you get for the rest of it. As you had mentioned before that Goldman is sending up the concept a little bit.
[00:17:17] Tiffany: Interestingly, as you're saying that, I realized that movies and television are a collaborative medium, just not necessarily with the viewer, but with the author, the writer, and the director and the actors, and everybody brings their interpretation to it that adds something unique, just like Billy Crystal did with Miracle Max. But you're right, yeah, it is collaborative. It's just not necessarily collaborative for us as the final audience for it.
[00:17:42] Matty: Did you want to talk more about this difference between passive and active watching and some examples of how that plays out, how that's played out for you and your viewing?
[00:17:53] Tiffany: Yeah, actually I do because sometimes when I talk about this and the analyzing -- not everybody is really into the analyzing, like I said, my husband hates it, it ruins the movie for him --- so that's one of the reasons that I break it down into three different types of analyzing so in the part where I talked about passive watching, I picture Fat Thor from THE AVENGERS, because I'm like, sometimes you just want to sit on the couch and binge eat and binge-watch, and you don't really want to think that hard. And that's cool. But even when you're doing that, you can process the story in a way that's a little bit more writerly than just sitting there completely letting it wash over you.
[00:18:33] And it's the equivalent of what I do as an editor. When I get a new manuscript, the first thing I do is cold read it like it's a novel. And it's basically the equivalent of sitting on the sofa with my popcorn, because I'm not making notes. I'm not really trying that hard to analyze it. I joke that I call it feeling the story, but it really is what I'm doing. I'm just experiencing it because before I can start being analytical toward it, I have to orient myself to the whole story. I have to understand it. I have to let it wash over me and more important, or as important, I guess, I need to observe my reactions to it because that's my job as an editor. I'm holding up the mirror and trying to almost predict how readers will perceive the author's intentions based on what's on the page. And that's what passive watching actually is. You're not analyzing the story; you're just paying attention to your reaction to the story and then trying to figure out why you feel that way.
[00:19:35] So first you're just watching it. You're just letting it wash over you, not worrying about it, not analyzing it. And then after you've watched it, and we talked a minute ago about how you'll go and recommend something you liked or trash talk something you hated to a friend, it's basically the equivalent of that. You'll analyze just the big stuff that struck you.
[00:19:55] So after you watch let's use PRINCESS BRIDE, because we're there. What did you love about it? First of all, did it affect you when you saw it? Obviously, I saw it six times in the theater, so I did love it. Why did I love it? Well, it transported me to another world where there were demarcations between good and evil and the good guys triumph, and it was funny, and it was adventurous and it was suspenseful and it made me laugh. So also all these things are my reaction to it.
[00:20:25] So now, why did I feel that way? Why did I feel that it was suspenseful, and then I start to look at where I might've felt that. And let's say the first one would be, when they're on the ship. If you haven't seen PRINCESS BRIDE, you're listening to this episode going, Oh my God, can we talk about something I know?
[00:20:44] Matty: That's their assignment, though. If they haven't, they have to go watch it and then come back.
[00:20:47] Tiffany: I always thought it was one of those movies that was absolutely universal that everybody had seen. And then when I recently did a presentation on using it for a group, there were like three people who had never seen it before. It blew my mind.
[00:21:01] But anyway, let's say, and then they went and watched it and they're like, Oh my God, that is such a good movie and it's weathered so well. That's the other thing about it being the classic, but when they've kidnapped Buttercup And they're on the ship and suddenly they see another ship behind them -- He's right on top of us! -- and then they try to go to the Cliffs of Insanity. Well, from that moment, that's a really strong story. I mean all the way through, but there's a really strong string of suspense there from the minute they see the ship and then Buttercup sees the possibility of rescue and she jumps.
[00:21:31] So that's the first time she's taking action for her own salvation. Maybe the only time in the movie, actually that she does -- my one complaint is it's not a really feminist movie -- that she takes action, and she jumps overboard, and she tries to save herself and then they pull her back and the ship is getting closer and they're scrambling against this constant threat behind them. They get to the Cliffs of Insanity. And at this point we don't even know what we're rooting for, because she's with kidnappers, but for all we know it's worse news behind her.
[00:22:00] So then they get up the Cliffs of Insanity and the Man in Black -- and by this time I think we maybe realize he's Westley, I can't remember if we've seen him at that point -- but so at this point now we can root for him. And he gets to the top, but there's a swordsman waiting -- the best swordsman in the world waiting to kill him. And then he defeats that guy, but then there's the strongest man in the world waiting to kill him. But then he defeats that guy. And then there's the "smartest man in the world" to outsmart and kill him. And he's got to defeat that guy.
[00:22:30] And so from that moment, there's this relentless suspense driving us all the way through it. So without analyzing too hard, I can just sort of passively notice where I felt that uncertainty inside me about what was going to happen, that investment in rooting for Buttercup to escape, Westley to catch her and for her to figure out who he was and for them to be together and have their happy ending. Noticing my reactions to that lets me pay attention to where in the story these elements are present.
[00:23:07] And then if I decide to more actively analyze, I already know where the spots are to put my finger so I can start digging backward, forensically. And again, this is really similar to what I do as an editor. So after I finished a first draft, I will put the story down and I'll just sit there and let it wash over me and I'll ask myself very broad questions.
[00:23:27] First of all, did I like it and not in a subjective way, but did it engage me, which is subjective, obviously, but not just was this my kind of story? Just did this draw me in to their world of the story. At any point, did I feel that I disengaged from the world of the story? At any point did I get bored and did I like the characters? Did I feel invested in what they wanted? Did I know what they wanted? Was I rooting for it? Did I know what was at stake if they didn't get it? Were there any places in the story that made me emotional? Were there any places in the story where I felt indifferent?
[00:24:06] Just really broad questions where I'm starting to circle in on where in the story the author might strengthen it. And if you get in the habit of just sitting on the sofa and after you finish a show or movie asking yourself those big, broad questions like that, even if that's all you do is notice and pay attention to the reactions that it's eliciting, that's really a lot. You're really serving your writing very well.
[00:24:34] And you're learning to start not only noticing the effect on you but asking yourself why you felt that. Not how necessarily yet, because that gets a little more active, but let's use Buttercup. Did I like Buttercup? Was I invested in her? Yes, I was invested in her. I did like her, but I also wasn't as invested in her as any of the other characters. So now I can start asking myself why. Why was that? Partly it's because as I said, she does not act on her own behalf. And for me, I like a protagonist, particularly a female protagonist, to take a hand in her own destiny.
[00:25:09] And I remember in the fire swamp scene where the ROUS is attacking Westley, even as a kid, I remember thinking, Girl hit him with the stick, hit the ROUS with the stick! She just sits there, kind of poking at it. So it's useful for me to notice that. It's helpful for my writing to understand why I did not connect with that character as deeply as I did some of the others.
[00:25:32] Why do I connect more with Inigo Montoya? Nobody ever killed my father, and I didn't want to kill them and I didn't spend my life perfecting the skill that would allow me to do that. But I can certainly relate to that kind of passion. I can certainly relate to the feeling of that massive injustice done, where you feel you must even the scales and the dedication you might give to whatever it takes to do that. Mine doesn't look like a Inigo's, but I can relate to that. I can't really relate to somebody who is like, Yeah, this thing is killing the man I love. And I'm just going to keep it from biting me.
[00:26:08] So that's useful for me to know as an author so that I can bring that to my own writing. And all that takes is just sitting and letting the story wash over you. It's not really that left-brained.
[00:26:19] Matty: One thing that I noticed in the analysis I did in addition to the why does he happen to have a banquet table with him, which I was totally willing to let go, is that I think it's Westley who proposes the battle of wits. And I think I would have been better if it had been Vizzini who proposed the battle of wits, because the only reason he would be sitting there waiting for the Man in Black to catch up with him is if he thought he could best him. And the only way he's going to think he could best him was a battle of wits.
[00:26:52] And so I thought it would be more logical if Vizzini was the one who had proposed the battle of wits. And then Westley could have said, Well, okay. Just as he said, I recognize that you, Indigo, are the best swordsman, and you, Fezzik, are the strongest man, it would have been more suspenseful. Because as soon as Westley proposes a battle of wits, you're like, Oh, I wonder if what he has up his sleeve. You're not really worried about him.
[00:27:34] Tiffany: You know, here's what's interesting as you're saying that, because I will never get tired of analyzing things. I've seen that movie -- I just got a new nuance from it thanks to what you said. So if you think about the fact that when he battles Inigo and Fezzik, who he recognizes, as you pointed out, he will recognize both of them as masters at what they do -- he recognizes Inigo is a brilliant swordsman. He recognizes that Fezzik is an incredibly strong man.
[00:28:00] But notice when he first approaches Vizzini, he's sarcastic. He does not recognize that Vizzini is the smart man. And he leaves Inigo and Fezzik alive, but he has no such compunctions about Vizzini. Vizzini is an actual bad guy. Inigo and Fezzik are simply men in a situation that has pitted them against Westley, but they have honor, they have their own internal system of honor. Whereas Vizzini does not as is evidenced by the fact that he cheats in his battle of wits.
[00:28:30] Matty: It's also interesting that, Humperdinck doesn't get killed.
[00:28:36] Tiffany: But he goes to the pain, to the pain.
[00:28:38] Matty: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
[00:28:39] Tiffany: But Humperdinck gets what is worse for him than death, which is humiliation. Actually one of my favorite little bits in that movie, this is totally apropos of nothing, but it's one of the examples of little bitty moments. I talk in the third way of dissecting story is that moment by moment, tiny, tiny beats, that adds so much to a story.
[00:29:00] One of the really subtle ones is when Westley has gone to the castle, he's found Buttercup. He's kept her from killing herself. Humperdinck catches them. Westley stands up. Drop your sword. And then just as we cut away to the hallway, I think, where we see Inigo, we hear them -- it's just a voiceover -- you hear in the room Westley says to her, Tie him up, make it as tight as you like, and you hear, Oww! So that's like the last little omph for Humperdinck as he is being tied up so tight that it hurts by a girl, and he's going to be left that way to be humiliated. So I think that he gets his revenge.
[00:29:37] The only two people that get killed are the truly, truly evil. I mean, you could argue Humperdinck is pretty evil, but Vizzini and Rugen. There's no redemption for them. I don't think there's redemption for Humperdinck either.
[00:29:50] Matty: But the fact that they're each getting the thing that they want the least I think is key there.
[00:29:57] Tiffany: Yeah. And if you think about again, observing your reactions, reader expectations is what I always talk about at that point, call us horrible, we want to see Rugen die. He's been awful. And again, he cheated, and he stopped and he throws a knife at Inigo Montoya.
[00:30:14] We don't want dishonorable people to prevail. And so with both Vizzini and Rugen, who have done terrible, dishonorable things, we want to see those guys bite it. That's a matter of giving the reader the most satisfying resolution.
[00:30:29] Whereas Humperdinck is kind of pathetic, you know. As awful as he is, he shows himself to be such a coward that it's almost like kicking him, it's like punching down. Have you heard that? A friend just taught me that, which I thought was brilliant. Like it's okay to punch up higher than your level. You can attack. But if you punch down, if you attack somebody who's lower than you in some way, who's already at a disadvantage, that's not noble in and of itself.
[00:30:57] So if we see Westley and Buttercup do that to Humperdinck after he's already brought so low and humiliated and is such a coward, it's almost like shooting someone in the back. Look, the more we analyze this thing, the more perfect it becomes.
[00:31:13] Matty: It's really true. The fact that people can watch it over and over again, I think is a testament to that.
[00:31:18] Tiffany: Yeah. Think about that. Like your favorite stuff you can watch or read over and over again. Why? Because you get something new out of it every single time.
[00:31:26] Matty: What do you think the technique is that is making the characters that are sort of doing bad things like Inigo and Fezzik and the Dread Pirate Roberts, what are the techniques that are being used to make them people you're really rooting for that could be repurposed for writers in their own books?
[00:31:49] Tiffany: That is such a good question because I'm not of the school that characters have to be likable. They just have to be relatable. Now it happens I think Fezzik and Inigo are extremely likable, and that's part of it, but also there are several sort of tropey things that you can pretty much rely on to make people invest in a character.
[00:32:09] One is humor. We love people who are funny. WEDDING CRASHERS opens with two seemingly irredeemable men who crash weddings to sleep with women under false pretenses. We should hate them, but they're funny. And so we already have some liking for them, and then they're doing a decent thing. In WEDDING CRASHERS, we see that they're trying to help couples have an amiable divorce. They're trying to help smooth the waters of the rancor between these two exes. That's a decent pursuit.
[00:32:41] So same with Inigo Montoya. Yeah. He's a hired sword. So he's a mercenary in a lot of ways. And yet he is motivated by a very understandable, relatable, even you might argue honorable goal, which is to avenge the wrongful slaying of his father. And so of course we can invest in him.
[00:33:03] And then he's so kind with Fezzik. He plays the rhyming game. So if you can show a goodness or a softness, you know, a bad guy that has a puppy that he treats like gold, to use the total easy cliche that shows us a softness and a character that lets us invest in them.
[00:33:20] It might be that they're incredibly dedicated. Why did we like Hannibal Lecter? As bad a guy as there was, that dude was dedicated. And in his own way, he was operating by a code. Now it was a code that we may not understand, but he had one and he stayed aligned with that. And although he was doing it for his own reasons, he also helped Clarice to catch another bad guy.
[00:33:49] It's like Dexter, look, I'm all over the map. But Dexter was fascinating to me because he is horrible. He's a repulsive, emotionless serial killer. And yet he is killing people who do bad things. So there's this interesting moral gray area where we have to examine our own killing is wrong. Black and white. Well, but is it? And so now we have to question that premise and in some ways, you can relate to someone who says What I'm doing is stopping you from doing something even worse. So, is it bad? I don't know. So if you can make the reader question their premises, that's another way of making a character relatable.
[00:34:31] Matty: I'm trying to think back to having read SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, which has been a while, and compare how Hannibal Lecter was presented in the book versus the Anthony Hopkins portrayal in the movie and figuring out to what extent was Hannibal Lecter attractive because it was Anthony Hopkins. I just don't remember. Do you have a sense of that?
[00:34:57] Tiffany: I didn't read the book, but you're right, I think actors bring so much. I mean, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are likable guys, so there's already that built in advantage. Whereas, and this is nothing against him personally, but someone like Christian Bale, could he have pulled that roll off in that way as instantly likable? I don't know. Paul Rudd can sell us anything because there is no more likable human being on the planet. You know, we'd sympathize with him a little bit no matter what we saw him doing because he's Paul Rudd, because he has this affability and relate-ability just baked into who he is as a human being.
[00:35:36] So you're right. You're right. The character has a lot to do with it. The charisma the actor brings.
[00:35:42] Matty: It would be interesting to watch Anthony Hopkins or Mandy Patinkin, who is Indigo Montoya, or actors who are playing a very likable character in one movie and a very unlikeable character in another movie and see what they do to elicit that response from the viewer.
[00:36:01] Tiffany: Well, look at Tom Hanks in ROAD TO PERDITION, I think it's called, where he plays a hitman. Because again, Tom Hanks is like Paul Rudd.
[00:36:12] Matty: Yeah. Tom Hanks is pretty much the poster child for likability.
[00:36:16] Tiffany: He is, but why? That's useful to analyze too? Why is he such a likable person? Again, all of this is subjective, so your answer might be different. That's what makes it useful for your writing. Because we're not all writing the same thing. So even if you go I can't stay on Tom Hanks, great. Why? Put that in your story.
[00:36:34] But why I think he is so universally likable, first of all, he's kind of every man. You know, he's not too handsome. He's not too anything. He just seems like everybody's father. There's an inherent sort of kindness in his affect. But I think what he really brings to stories is a complexity where we see that he is a man who is pulled in different directions, but generally motivated by trying to do what he believes is the right thing.
[00:37:05] If you look at almost any one of his characters, including in ROAD TO PERDITION in which I think his son is killed, but something that lets us understand what is driving him. BRIDGE OF SPIES, same thing, even CASTAWAY, the Wilson movie. This is a man who is always deeply invested, but also nuanced in the way that he's vulnerable. I think that's that vulnerability in him, that nakedness in his emotional spectrum, that lets us really relate to him in a way that, I don't know, he's like the universal unguent.
[00:37:44] Matty: Coincidentally, I just saw a very interesting example of this, where he was on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. And this must've been shortly after the movie SULLY came out. And there was a skit where Sully Sullenberger has gone back to fly commercial airplanes. And he goes into the cockpit and he's doing all the things that the pilot in command of the commercial airliner does. And then the other pilot comes in, it's Alec Baldwin, and he says, I think there must be some mistake. I'm the pilot command for this flight and you're the copilot. And Sully says, Oh, no, I'm Sully. And so they call up the tower and they say, Yeah, Captain Sullenberger, you've been out of circulation for a little while. To comply with regulations, you're going to have to fly as the copilot.
[00:38:32] And then for the whole rest of the time, he's doing all these little things to undermine Alec Baldwin as the primary pilot. And after a while you're going, geez, what a jerk. But it's very interesting because it's Tom Hanks, it's Sully Sullenberger, and yet, by the end of this, get you're like, Whoa, that guy's really a jerk.
[00:38:50] Tiffany: Which is why that case is so useful to analyze. Why is that funny? Because it turned the expectation, turned the readers' assumptions on their ear and made us laugh at them. So that skit we can analyze and see what makes it effective. We joked about commercials and you were saying you don't watch them anymore. I don't really watch a lot of streaming too, like everybody, but do you remember the Old Spice commercial with Isaiah Mustafa? The man your man could smell like. Remember that guy? He was a phenomenon of commercials. I don't even know how long ago, six, seven years. And the Old Spice guy was this hot, hot dude with a towel wrapped around him and he said things like, Look, I have a handful of diamonds ... I'm riding a horse ... I'm on a boat ... I am the man your man could smell like.
[00:39:40] It was a phenomenon of a commercial, even a thing like that you can analyze and go, Why was that a phenomenon? Well, for starters, because Isaiah Mustafa is hot as fire, but also it was sending up this trope of what women want. We want a knight in shining armor to give us everything and we can't have that, so our dude could smell like that dude.
[00:40:07] Matty: And so that's brilliant
[00:40:09] Tiffany: Yes, it is brilliant, but analyzing why it's brilliant, why it affects you, that's so instructional for our writing and you can be doing it on autopilot all the time.
[00:40:19] I do it with Taylor Swift songs. Why is it so catchy? Why is this song so broadly appealing? Well, it's because she's tapping into universal feelings based on the very specific perspective of, when she was younger, a teenage girl about love. Was I that at the time? No, but she's tapping into these universals and that's valuable for my writing, to understand how the more specific we are in our writing, the more universally relatable we are.
[00:40:48] Matty: I think that the reason that the Sully skit was both funny and also you ended up being annoyed is that he was acting completely opposite to everything that you think you know about Sully Sullenberger, that, you know, this man i, a super talented pilot, selfless, understated about his own accomplishments. And then here he is dropping the names of the famous people that he's gotten to meet and being real petty about who's in command. And it's that countering what your expectations are of the person you think, you know that is attention getting in that scenario.
[00:41:24] Tiffany: Yeah. there's nothing you can't analyze. It's a ball, frankly, once you start to do it, it's so much fun because, again, you're not left brain analyzing and giving it all this brainpower. You're just going, Oh, what am I feeling? Why am I feeling that? So you're really just getting to know you better, but in the course of doing that, you are learning story and you're learning who you are as a storyteller and how to achieve those kinds of reactions in your intended audience.
[00:41:52] Matty: Do you have any tips for if an author is reading their own work, draft work, is there a mindset they can bring so that they can experience that? Just letting it wash over them?
[00:42:03] Tiffany: Yeah. That's another reason I love doing this. I used to call this presentation "How to Train Your Editor Brain," because that's really what it does when you're watching, you're in that analytical mode, that objective assessing mode that you need to bring to editing your own work, which is so challenging for that very reason, because it's so hard to get the objectivity.
[00:42:22] I have little tricks that most of us have heard. But the more distance you can give yourself from the story initially, after you finish it, the better. A lot of writers will finish drafting and then dive right in and start editing it. And I advocate, first of all, the cooling off period, just where you get away from it, even if it's just for a few days, do something else. Go for hikes, go on vacation, read something else, write something else, but give yourself some mental space from it.
[00:42:50] And then I've got a bunch of other little tricks, silly things, but honestly, they can work. Changing the font that you wrote it in can give you a little bit of distance. Reading it in a different place from where you wrote it. Hearing it differently, like if you wrote it on a computer, print it out or have it read to you or read it aloud yourself or put it on a text to speech program.
[00:43:11] But then when you go to it, as I said, a lot of authors will finish writing and then immediately start editing, dive right in. I think you're doing yourself a disservice on a couple of levels by that. Because first of all, you're not giving yourself your best and probably only chance to take in your story like a reader will take it in. So I always advocate after the cooling off period, do that cold read, just like I do it when I'm editing. Resist the temptation to do anything. Don't start fixing, don't even analyze too hard. That's one thing I'll tell authors, when you do that, when you just read it like a novel. Another trick is put it on your Kindle or your reading device, because seeing it in that different formats just flips a switch in your brain where suddenly it's not yours anymore. And you get a little mental distance.
[00:43:58] So do that cold read. And then if things are jumping out at you, as you're reading it, make little tiny brief notes. And I mean brief, like, Page 34 character feels fuzzy. Just that brief. Don't start fixing it. And for God's sake, don't start fixing the prose itself.
[00:44:17] I think a lot of authors start at the end and that's the last thing you do. That would be like staging a house while it's still under construction. It's amazing, the funnest part of editing is that window dressing stuff, you know, go in there and massage your sentences and make it say the perfect thing. But it's the last thing that you should do because there's so much structural stuff. First, you've got to get the foundation poured. Make sure it's solid. You've got to get the studs up. You've got to put in the dry wall. I love using the house analogy just because it makes so much sense that you wouldn't try to hang curtains before you've installed the windows.
[00:44:52] So make sure that your key story elements are in place. And the best way to do that is by taking in your whole story as close to the experience of a reader as possible. Because no matter how well you think, you know it while you're writing it, the reading of it is a different animal. The taking it in as a whole will show you a lot of what you actually have.
[00:45:16] And I also advocate trying to do that in as few sittings as possible. If you're a really fast reader, you can do it in one sitting. If you're not, try to do it in two, three, four sittings, but as close together as you can, because the trick is that we want to get this whole sense of what the story is in its entirety before we start assessing what areas might need to be strengthened.
[00:45:41] And then do this passive watching thing where you're not so much analyzing yet, but you're just going, Okay, were there parts where it felt slow to me? Were there parts where I left a loose thread? Were there parts where I didn't understand how I got the character from one place to another? The end wasn't as satisfying as I thought it would be? My characters aren't coming across as vividly as I felt they were?
[00:46:03] So it's just big stuff. And then when I teach the course on active reading and watching, this is when you go in and then you get super analytical. And that's what I do after I finished the first cold read. Then I go back to the very beginning and I go through with a little tiny microscope and I may make quite literally hundreds of embedded notes, in addition to probably an editorial letter, that will be a minimum of 5,000 words and often up to 10,000 words. So it is a lot of feedback and observation, and it's not, here's what you should do or here's what's not right. It's holding up the mirror to what you have so that you as an author can go, yes, that's my intention or no, that's not my intention. Where do I need to make my intention clearer? Where do I need to develop what I wanted to say more deeply? After you've done that first read, that's when you go through, and you start doing that nitty gritty.
[00:46:59] Okay, here's another sort of radical suggestion. I also don't recommend doing that beginning-to-end chronologically, which is how most authors will edit. After you finish your first read, you're going to have a pretty good idea where the holes in the dam are. And usually it's going to be something big. If your story needs serious attention, it's probably going to be in the areas of character, plot, stakes, sometimes suspense intention, momentum. Those are the main areas they tend to fall in. This is why the asking yourself what I'm feeling is good.
[00:47:33] If you have lost interest in a certain place, your momentum is lagging there. Why is your momentum lagging there? Maybe stakes are too low. Maybe we're not invested in the characters. Maybe we don't clearly see what the character wants. Maybe the character is not actively pursuing what they want -- you know, Buttercup and the ROUS and the stick. So then you can start to answer those questions and you go in and you plug the holes in the dam. If you've got major character issues that you need to address first, it's not going to do you any good to start at the beginning and start reading through. Go to the places where you notice that and fix that.
[00:48:05] And then get the pleasure of stepping back again and reading it again, if you need to, and then you can start going through and doing those little-by-little incremental shoring up throughout, beginning to end, but I think authors try to do too much when they finish and then start at the beginning and immediately start trying to edit.
[00:48:26] Matty: That's a great tip. I've never heard it posed quite that way, but it makes so much sense.
[00:48:32] Tiffany: I borrowed parts of it. Actually, I adapted a lot of it from my system, but I borrowed a lot of the premise from Saul Stein, who's one of my favorite craft writers. He calls it triage, which is a great, it's a great image because if you think about like a field hospital, you take the bleeders first because they're going to die. You would never go to the guy who has a cut arm or a bullet lodged in the meat of his thigh and be like, Oh, we better get you in there. It's counterproductive. The bleeders are going to bleed out if you do that. So when you're editing, start with the bleeders.
[00:49:06] Matty: Yup. Well, this has been so great. I think I could just spend the rest of the day chatting with you about movies, TV, and commercials. I know you have a ton of resources that if people are intrigued by this, they can go to, so describe where people can go for more information about all this.
[00:49:23] Tiffany: The best clearing house for everything is probably my website, which is really, really full of resources. I try to make it content rich for authors, and that's foxprinteditorial.com. And on there, you'll find there's a whole page of resources for authors with a lot of my favorite craft books, podcasts, blogs, great posts from authors on craft technique. My online classes are there, and I do have one on this topic that we've been talking about today: How to Train Yourself to Read and Watch Analytically. I have one on how to create an airtight plot. I've got five more in the works that'll be out. All my socials media is on there.
[00:49:58] My book INTUITIVE EDITING. The subtitle is "Creative and Practical Ways to Revise Your Writing." And it really is to me what we were just talking about, the approach to editing. I don't think it's all left brain analytical. I really do think it's creative and intuitive and it's based on some of these ideas you and I have been talking about, where you learn to ask yourself questions, learn to assess what's on the page of your own writing and ask yourself the questions to circle in on what needs to be shored up maybe, and then how to do that too. It's a really practical, useful approach.
[00:50:35] You can find where I'm going to be appearing. I've got a blog on there. That's probably the best place to go. We're so at the point now my web designer said we cannot add more things to your website unless we get another subscription on whatever the hosting facility is.
[00:50:51] Matty: Well, that's great that there's so much there because I know people will have been intrigued by this conversation. And of course, if you haven't watched THE PRINCESS BRIDE, that's the other homework assignment. Everyone should go watch THE PRINCESS BRIDE.
[00:51:01] Tiffany: It's the greatest homework in the world. You will thank us.
[00:51:03] Matty: Yes. Well, thank you so much, Tiffany. This has been so helpful.
[00:51:06] Tiffany: Thank you. You so much, Matty. This has just been really a fun conversation. I loved it.
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