Episode 8: Jeff Lyons, Writing Teacher
Writing teachers Jeff Lyons and Mary Kole in conversation about craft, from the big picture to the nitty gritty.
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Transcript of Podcast episoDe 8: Interview with Jeff Lyons, Writing Teacher
Mary: Hello, this is Mary Kole and the "Good Story Podcast", helping writers craft a good story. With me, you will hear from thought leaders related to writing and sometimes about topics important to writers of all categories and ability levels. Here is to telling a good story.
Thank you so much for joining us for the Good Story Podcast. My name is Mary Kole and, with me, I have Jeff Lyons, a writing teacher. So, it will be writing teacher to writing teacher talking about craft, big and small picture today. Jeff, why don't you introduce yourself to the fine people and let us know who you are and where you're coming from?
Jeff: My pleasure. Thank you so, so much for having me. I really enjoyed doing these kinds of podcasts. It's a lot of fun. Any time I get to talk story, I grab it. I am a traditionally published author. I'm working on my third book right now with my publisher Focal Press on story and subplots and how to develop subplots because that's a topic that's very hard to find out there.
Mary: I will ask you some questions about that.
Jeff: Yeah, it's a very gnarly topic and there's really not a whole lot out there, but I have two other books with them, "Anatomy of a Premise Line", which was my first book, which is a basic story development book, and another one which is very unusual called the "Rapid Story Development: How to Use the Enneagram-Story Connection to Become a Master Storyteller" that came out last October. That is a very, very big topic about how to use this thing called the enneagram with story development. Maybe we'll have some time to touch on that.
I come out of the screenwriting world. I'm mostly in TV and film. I've worked in the entertainment industry for many, many years, consulting with producers and writers, production companies helping them with scripts and development processes on the script side. In the last 15 years or so, I've moved much more solidly into the publishing world because a writing career now for a writer has to be in multiple places. I have just found that the publishing world is a lot more civil and a lot healthier in a lot of ways.
Mary: We have our quirks but all I've heard about you, Hollywood animals, is that it's like Mad Max out there.
Jeff: It's the dog eat dog eating the dog. In publishing, it's not exactly pussyfooting around, but movie and TV world is pretty nasty. It's my first form. It's the form I think I write best, but I'm getting more and more into my own fiction writing now as well. I've got several fiction projects. I've got some novelas that I've self-published through my own imprint, Storygeeks Press.
And I teach. I've been teaching since 2006 and I teach story development. I don't teach writing. I'm not a creative writing teacher because, for me, and I think we're going to get into this, the story function and the writing function are two completely different things. They literally have nothing to do with one another. The story function, the story craft is one that is not taught really. MFA programs, master's programs, writing schools, most writing gurus, they don't really talk about that. That's the niche I have found for myself because I fought getting into this space for years because I didn't want to be another damn story guru. You throw a stone, you're going to hit somebody.
Mary: Ow! You hit me just now.
Jeff: I wasn't pointing fingers. You know what I'm saying. I didn't want to have to do the same old, same old, talk about the same old stuff. We all talk about the same ideas because they're endemic to that creative process and so we're all going to talk about story structure. We're all going to talk about the same basic ideas but no one really, on the story side, ever tells you how to actually do it.
I finally found that niche for myself and said, "I have some original ideas here," and I can package that in this form of doing premise work and this thing called the premise line which over the last 8 years or so I found to be an unbelievably powerful tool for helping writers learn how to develop first before they start writing pages. It literally cuts your development time in half, saves you a lot of writing pain, and it responds to what I call the biggest myth in creative writing. The number one myth is, "Just do it. Just write because writers write, right? Just don't edit. Don't think about it." NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, which I hate with the heat of a nova.
Mary: He was a guest on this podcast, my friend. Great vibe.
Jeff: Very nice guy but exactly right. As a strategy for most writers, it is disastrous because all you end up is with 50,000 words of word salad and then you've got to go back and figure out, "Okay. Well, what's my story?" Well, why don't you figure it out first, save yourself all that, because there's this built-in prejudice. It's a bias. Well, the story is going to reveal itself in the writing. For some people, it does happen that way. I think it happens for everyone at some point in the creative writing process because this pantser/plotter thing is a completely divisive unnecessary debate. We do both of those. We do both. But my point being, for most people, they're good writers but they don't know how to tell a story. The story might be talking to them through the writing process but they don't have the skillset yet to hear it. They can't translate it and so they end up in the story woods and drowning in the story flood plain. That's what I'm trying to respond to with my work.
Mary: Well, this is why I'm so excited to have you on. Why? I like that you have the experience in film and screenwriting first because really the publishing's snobby understanding of the film world is that those people don't read. It's all about premise. It's all about the pitch. It's all about the actual concept of the story and so I completely agree with you. I think NaNoWriMo has a place. I think pantsing has a place. Some writers just need to do something because it can be a really big hurdle to actually getting started and I'm never going to kick a theory or an idea or practice out of bed, if you will, if it actually helps a writer move forward in some capacity.
But, at a certain point, I think you're exactly right. We have to find our own strategy moving forward and very few writers approach this whole enterprise from a story perspective first because I teach a revision class and I've actually been talking about this quite a bit. You want to know what your story is about before you start messing around with the words on the page, the actual writing. If you don't have a story premise in mind, if you don't know what story you're actually telling, if you don't have an outline, and many writers resent the outline or reject the outline without trying it because it seems daunting, I completely get that side of it but all the words on the page don't matter. If you're going to end up completely changing the story, then you have to get rid of all those words. Playing around, moving commas and beautiful turns of phrase, they're irrelevant until you nail down what I think is exactly what you're talking about.
So, I would love to just dive in what is your view...so, premise, pitch, logline. All of these words tend to intimidate creative writers because there's this idea of this is... Usually, by the time writers think about story, the manuscript already exists. The manuscript may or may not reflect the story that they're trying to tell, they may not know what story they're trying to tell, but I think a lot of the antagonistic viewpoint about pitching and creating a logline and figuring out your premise exists because writers are trying to reverse engineer it. They have a manuscript. They're trying to figure out what it's about. I think the more strategic approach is to think about premise and story first, but the reality is a lot of writers didn't do that and we can't go back in time.
So, if I am a writer with a manuscript already, how should I think about pitch? What is this big distinction that you bring to the table? How can you help me try to make sense of maybe this half-baked thing that I've written?
Jeff: Okay. It just so happens that...are you familiar with reedsy.com?
Mary: Yes, sir. I am on reedsy.com.
Jeff: Oh, okay. Oh, excellent. I'm doing a free webinar for them for Reedsy live on July 1st on the logline.
Mary: Fantastic. They have great educational resources. I'm actually writing something for them as well, so I'll see you on Reedsy, everyone.
Jeff: I just did one that's up on YouTube on how to avoid the mushy middle.
Mary: Awesome. I will post all of your links, by the way. To anybody curious about Jeff, what he does, his social media channels, I'm going to collect all of that for you so you can get your Jeff fix.
Jeff: Thank you, thank you. That's very nice. I'm just not pitching it. If somebody really wants to get into loglines, I'm going to be going over it and I'm going to be doing a lot, working with people one-on-one to build out their... Because I was at the Dallas Fort Worth Writers Conference last year and I presented. At the end of the conference, and this is relevant to your question, they had this thing called the Gong show. They have six or seven editors from publishing companies up on the stage and they've all got a gong in front of them. People from the audience...it was like 500 people. It's a really big conference. They present their query pitches. If you get three gongs, you're out. These editors were brutal. Almost everyone got three gongs almost right out of the shoot. It was because their pitches were so terrible. The editors talked about what it was. It was like, "I don't have all day. Cut to the chase. You've got to tell me the story. You've got to do it."
There is an art to this but there's all this confusion. The term logline, screenwriters are very familiar with it. It's part of the pitching process. Writers not so much. Novelists not so much. Premise line for sure is not something most novelists are familiar with. The logline is the essence of your story without telling your story.
Mary: That's clear. Yes, I get it. I think this is exactly going to the heart of why so many creative writers are intimidated by the whole process. I think the Gong game could be fun if done in a good spirit.
Jeff: It was great fun.
Mary: It seemed high-stakes, right? It seems like this is my make or break. Am I going to get the gong? I have to get to the point. I have to tell my story without telling my story. I have a headache just putting myself in the shoes of a writer trying to put this together.
Jeff: I'm going to read you an example of what I'm talking about. The logline is that basic idea of the essence of your story without telling the actual beats of the story, which is much more what a premise line is. The premise line is the entire structure of your story in two sentences. The logline has four basic components: the world protagonist, the moral flaw that they have, or whatever problem they're dealing with internally, the goal, challenge, and opponent—that's all one thing—the choice, decision, or action.
You actually write it out in those basic...in the logline, you have them in that order pretty much. If you hit all of those things... Here are some loglines for some TV shows and movie. This is for the pilot for "Jessica Jones", which is a very wonderful show. "In a world where superheroes hide in the shadows," there's the world, "a woman with super-strength," there's the protagonist, "and anger issues," because she does, she's just really pissed off at the world all the time, "discovers that a supervillain who once forced her to kill against her will is still alive and resolves to find and kill him before he can enslave her again." Boom!
Mary: I see us hitting all the points.
Jeff: All those points. The main thing that was at the end, you don't just say, "And then a really cool thing happens." You give a sense of what are they facing, the protagonist, and what are they going to do. There's some motion, some action. Okay, here's "Transparent", which is the TV show that got canceled. "A divorced father with a painful secret..." Okay, now a little out of order. That's the protagonist. "...negotiating a broken and dysfunctional family," which is the world, "weighs staying closeted or being open," is the choice/decision, "and decides to come out as trans to his family." It doesn't tell you the story but you know exactly what this is about.
Mary: That one seems to reveal a little bit more about what the choice ends up yielding. Is that still okay or are we leaving it kind of hanging?
Jeff: Absolutely. You don't always want to leave it hanging. You want to give the editor a sense of what happens at the end of the story, but don't tease them because that really pisses them off. Tell them the nugget. If you're going to catch them, catch them with something concrete.
Mary: I really couldn't agree with you more. In a query letter which the writers write above their pitch, it drives me crazy when somebody says, "Will he make the decision to be who he is?"
Jeff: Exactly.
Mary: I was an agent for five years and it's like, "No, I don't want to guess your story. I want you to tell me what you actually wrote because this is a choice you made," and I want to see do they make the character have the more interesting experience, the more difficult choice. How good is their plotting at that point? I don't want to have to guess at it.
Jeff: Exactly. That's a logline. That's what you use for query letters. That's what you use when you've got somebody in an elevator and you've got two floors and they say, "Oh, you're a writer? What are you writing?" It's really quick.
The premise line is very different. The premise line is your canary in the coal mine. It is a tool that you can use as a writer to...I won't say quickly because it takes...I mean I literally wrote a book on this. It takes me eight weeks sometimes to get a premise line right. It's the literary equivalent of waterboarding. It is so hard to do. But when you do it and it works, it saves you months and months and months of writing.
Mary: In a perfect world, you would like a writer to sit down and hammer out a premise line before they even go to the page.
Jeff: My motto is developed first; write, second. Unless you're one of these people that just has to write, then write but also do the development process because it will inform you. So, here's an example. A logline, like I said, it's a very long, one or two sentences. I use a lot of semicolons so grammatically it's nice, but you'll see what I'm talking about. The idea is the premise line sentences are made of clauses. There are four clauses. It's very mechanical in this sense but it turns out not to be. There's four clauses: the protagonist clause, the team goal clause, the opposition clause, and the doom moment clause.
The protagonist clause establishes the protagonist and what the inciting incident is. The team clause gives you a sense of what tangible goal or desire the hero has, what everyone has, and who are they going to team with to get it done. Who are the core relationships that are going to be driving the middle of your book?
The opposition clause raises the specter of the opposition. Who's going to fight and to stop them? How are they going to do it? Basically you want three beats of what are the big beats going to be in the middle of the story. I don't talk about acts because I don't think acts are very useful, but I speak in terms of story structure milestones.
The third clause is all about establishing the opposition and then ending that on a sense of what the midpoint is going to be, what that midpoint complication, what's that midpoint turn going to be.
And then going into the last clause, you have the doom moment. Starting it off, all is lost. The hero/heroine is at their lowest point, farthest away from getting their goal. Now, they're on their way back up trying to figure out how are they going to get what they really want toward the battle and then the end of the story, the resolution.
Those are the four clauses. That's the basic story structure ideas of any story regardless of genre, and what you're doing is you're mapping this thing I call invisible structure to this template. The invisible structure is basically the seven components of any story. I don't want to get too theoretical in terms of the story focus stuff, but a story is a thing. It's not about a thing. They really have their own existence and all stories have structure. The idea is every story has those same basic things. You have a sense of character. You have a sense of constriction or that inciting incident. The character wants. There's this human desire. There's a sense of core relationship. There's resistance, which is the opposition. There's a sense of overall adventure. And there's some change at the end. Stories are about emotional change. You map those to these four clauses in a very mechanical way and this magical thing happens where over time if you think structurally about what your story is and who your protagonist is, and we have to talk about this thing called the moral component next because that's the key, that's the narrative engine for any story especially the middle of a book.
But let me read you a premise line from "The Godfather".
Mary: Yes, please.
Jeff: Okay. "The innocent youngest son of a mafia Godfather discovers his beloved father has been shot..." That's your first clause. We know who the protagonist is. We know what the constriction is, what the inciting incident is.
"...in a turf war and agrees to join with older brother Sonny and step-brother Tom to exact revenge..." There's a team and there's the goal.
"...to re-establish the family's honor and his own place within the family; when his ruthless need to keep his family safe emerges, causing Sonny and Tom to question his methods, distrust from his wife, and escalating an already out-of-control war with the other mafia families; leading to Sonny's death, his wife's increased fear about what kind of man she's married, a bloody and final end to the war, and his own dark metamorphosis into the new Godfather."
Mary: There it is.
Jeff: There it is.
Mary: Spoiler alert, also. No, I'm just kidding.
Jeff: That's the whole story beat for beat. This is the big challenge is, whenever people write premise lines, you've got to know the backstory. You've got to know what they're feeling. You have to know what they're thinking. No, there's no feelings, no thinking, no nothing going on here about what the internal angst is. What happens, ma'am, just dealing the facts, ma'am. That's it. Now, you can move forward.
What I have people do is, from here, I have them map this long, convoluted thing into a three to six-page short synopsis where they start working in subplots and things like that. And then they can take that and work it into a longer synopsis, which is an actual deliverable in the publishing world. Editors and agents, they actually want you to have a longer synopsis like 20 to 30 pages sometimes. This process of going from premise line to short synopsis to long synopsis, by the time you get that long synopsis done, and this could take you a couple of months easy, but you're going to be able to start writing pages and be so confident your story's not going to go off the rails. If you go off and create a tangent and do other things and they work, well, then you go back and you rework these other documents and you get them in line. These are living documents. They inform one another. They help you in the writing process. That's what I mean by your canary in the coal mine. If you start going off on tangents and it's not working but you really love the ideas but they're not consistent with what you know is working in your premise, you've got to kill your darlings because all you're going to do is...you're just going to derail yourself.
Mary: This dovetails perfectly with what I teach for revision. I'm talking to people who already have the manuscript.
Jeff: Thank you. This is the other thing that happens. I call it backing into the story. This is what almost everybody does, including me, is you get those 200 to 300 pages of a novel and it's like, "Okay, the wheels came off the cart. How do I know where that happened?" Everybody does the same thing. You follow the breadcrumbs. You always go back. You go back. Where did the wheels come off? Everybody ends up in the exact same place—the premise. Because if a story is going to go off the rails, that's where it's going to happen first. The very level of the idea itself. If you start with that first, you're not going to have this problem. You're not going to have 200 pages of word salad. You've got to figure out, "Okay, now, what's my story?" It seems so basic and logical, but that's not how people work. This process saves you so much pain and the big objection is always, "Oh, my creative process is so special, you see, because I can't possibly be constrained by these rules and regulations." Just the opposite happens.
The writing process is a reductive process. It is about restricting your options, not expanding them. You cannot have an infinite number of possibilities while you're writing. You will never get anything done. The trick is to figure out what to keep and what not to keep. That's what these so-called rules are all about—structure and all that. There are no rules. There are no rules. Nobody's made new rules, but there are best practices. We've been doing this novel writing thing for a couple hundred years. We figured some things out that worked and things that don't work. Follow best practices until you can break those best practices in really creative ways, but like Picasso says, "Follow the rules like a pro until you can break them like an artist."
That's the idea. That's what the premise line is all about. That's what I help people do. They call me and they say, "I've got 300 pages. What the hell am I going to do now?" I say, "Scrap it. Don't scrap it because there are some gems there and you're going to want them, but right now we can't be in the woods. We can't be caught up in the woods. We have to start over." I just start them right back into the premise process. Immediately, we discover what's wrong because it's the same thing. Their protagonist's moral component is not working. If there's any one thing I want people to walk away with, even from my books, it's this idea of having a strong moral component. Let me explain what that is real quick.
Mary: Yes, let's dig into that. Before we do one thing, as we sell people on this idea of doing a premise, doing a short outline, doing a longer outline, I think the wisdom here, especially for those writers who may be reluctant to try this approach is that the thinking is already done. You don't have to think as you write. You have a strong roadmap from which to operate. If you've done your logline work, if you've done your premise work, if you've done your outline work, by the time you sit down to write, you're not, like you say, wandering around in the woods.
Jeff: Now you can be creative. Now you've got the structure. Now you can let it talk to you and take you in different directions. This is what I mean by it's the opposite of the fear that people have their creative process is constrained. Just the opposite. It opens up your creativity. That's always what happens.
Mary: It could derail a lot of writers when you're just sort of, "What am I going to write today? Well, if only there was a way to know." Well, you can come up with it ahead of time.
Jeff: Yeah, it's called craft. This is a talent but it's also a craft skill. If it's a skill, anybody could learn it.
Mary: The moral center at the heart of every story, this is the secret sauce. This is what you advocate putting a lot of thought into, as you develop character, as you develop story, walk us through it.
Jeff: Everybody talks about it. You've got to have a flawed protagonist. You've got to have a broken person. You've got to have something struggling with blah, blah, blah, right? Nobody tells you how to get it though.
Mary: That's a fair point.
Jeff: What they normally settle on is they write out a central casting. The drunk who's kicking his dog when he comes home at night. The guilty cop who's crying into his beer every night because he's done something terrible. They don't go any deeper. They never ask the next question. Why is he crying in his beer? What is that about? When you ask that one question, you open up this whole possibility for what's driving the middle of the story for your protagonist. What's their motivation? Actors always say, "What's my motivation? What's my motivation?" That has to do with your protagonist in the novel, too, because if you don't have them clearly motivated in a "negative way", then you end up with episodic writing. They just go from problem to problem to problem and there's no dramatic connection between what they're dealing with necessarily.
This is the fundamental difference between what they call a situation in the story. Situations are problems, puzzles, mysteries, whatever it is, and the adventure is, "How do you solve the problem?" Nobody's changing. A classic example is, "Twenty-something kids caught in the cabin in the woods and the monsters outside are going to kill them." The only questions are: who's going to get out alive? How bloody is it going to get? That's it.
Mary: It's not a character story.
Jeff: No one's going to have a sudden revelation. "Oh, my gosh, I've spent my youth." No, they're not going to...no. Get out alive and be creative in how you do that and entertaining. There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that, but you have to know that that's what you've got because, if you start layering in all the subtext of personal angst, it's going to feel phony. That's the difference between a story and a situation. A story has that moral problem.
Did you ever see "The Verdict" with Paul Newman?
Mary: I have not actually.
Jeff: Okay, it's great. You don't have to see it. It's an ambulance-chasing lawyer, former wunderkind fallen from grace, Boston lawyer, Brahmin guy, and he's a drunk. He's standing outside of a funeral home, taking a swig, just about to go in and starts handing out his card. "Sorry for your loss. Sorry for your loss." It's an ambulance. Right from the beginning, you see that he's got a problem. Most people would say, "Oh, yay, he's an alcoholic. He's feeling guilty," and that's it. They won't go any deeper than that. No.
He's acting badly in the world. He's taking and he's preying on people's pain, preying on them to get value out of them. You have to ask the question, and you do this for your protagonist. If they're acting badly in the world, they're hurting other people, how are they doing it? What would they have to think about other human beings in order to justify that behavior to themselves?
Mary: Oh, interesting, so world-view question.
Jeff: Frank has to think people don't have any value other than what I can get out of them. They don't have dignity. They don't matter. I'm going to prey on them. They're just targets. Then, you ask the next question. What would someone have to think about themselves in order to justify having that kind of world-view? Frank thinks people don't have any value. Guess what. Frank's people, too.
Mary: Very true.
Jeff: His nasty little secret is, "I don't matter. I don't have any value. Don't look at me." But he is not aware of it. He's blind to it. It's his moral blind spot, I call it. The moral component of his story is made up of three things: the blind spot, the immoral effect, and the dynamic moral tension. When you have those three things in unity, you have an engine for the middle of your story that doesn't quit.
Frank thinks he doesn't have any value. He's not aware of that belief. It's his blind spot; blind spot behaviors that we have that we don't see but everybody else around us sees in our behavior because we act it out.
Mary: Do you recommend going into backstory for what's the wound that's caused this eventually? Does it come to light?
Jeff: You eventually figure what that is. Yeah, absolutely. You've got to come up with a wound. How did they get here? But sometimes you don't have to. It's just that they've had that fall from grace, and now they're going to figure out why they fell. In Frank's case, you don't ever really get to the core wound. It's just that we know he fell from grace. He's no longer the wunderkind. He's trying to get it back on top. That's really what he wants to do, and he thinks he has to do it. The way he's hurting people is by stepping on them. He's drinking. That's numbing the real pain, which is, "I'm a failure. I don't matter." That's the whole point of the story is he takes on a case of a woman who was in a coma in a hospital who has no value, who has no dignity, mirroring his exact problem.
Over the course of the story, he discovers his value and his worth and all of that and takes on the big bad law firm who's defending the hospital who put the woman into a coma. Then it's your David and Goliath legal story. But you see what's driving him and how it is his Achilles' heel and how it's taken advantage of by the opposition to create more conflict because here's the engine. It's called the active protagonist loop. I have this blind spot. It motivates me. It colors everything I do in the world and, because I'm acting badly in the world, that bad behavior creates a problem. That is proactive because it's sourcing from the protagonist. It is not the world squeezing them and making them act, which is passive. They're internally creating their own trouble. That's the building of stakes all coming from inside them.
They're not a leaf on the wind coming up against problem, problem, problem, which is a situation. Again, nothing wrong with that. It's fun. It's a fun ride. But, in a story, you've got somebody who's motivated internally with this core blind spot making them act badly in the world and then the story—this is the dynamic moral tension—constantly gives the protagonist the option. "Okay, Frank, you're being a real jerk here. You want to change now?" "No, no, no, no. I can't possibly do that. I have a...no, no, no, no." "Okay." He carries on, makes a new mistake, a new problem, new stakes, new relationships get in trouble, stakes are rising, stakes are rising, stakes are rising. He's getting in darker, darker, darker, deeper, deeper, deeper. The story comes back. "Okay, Frank, you're really getting into it now. You want to make up?" "No, no, no. I can't possibly do it." You want at least three big moments where you clearly see the protagonist could make a new choice here but they can't because they're not out of their blind spot.
Then they hit the doom moment, which is a classic story structure step. Every story's got it where all is lost. The bad guy is going to win but they're isolated and they've lost a lover, they've lost a boyfriend, they've lost whatever, and they realize, "I can't keep going on the way I'm going because, if I do, I will lose everything but I don't know what to do. I don't know what change has to happen yet," but they know they've got to do something. Now, this is what I call that pattern of elevation. They've been on a pattern of decline for the whole middle of the story, and it builds, and builds, and builds because of that moral component engine. Then, the blind spot happens. They realize I've got to change, and they reconnect with the people who they've alienated. They come back into the story but in a new way with a new agenda, leading them to the final battle, and then everything changes, and they change, blah, blah, blah. That's the classic pattern.
All is driven by having a character who's acting badly but has a very core fundamental idea about who they are as a human being that is fundamentally wrong but one that they've come to that you may know or may not know. It all depends on your story. But that is the reason why they're the way they are in the world. When you have that, then you have the basis for every relationship. You have the basis for every conflict. You have the basis for every crisis. It's all about them.
Mary: I really like this way of thinking about it and, to bring back... Our previous podcast guest was Jessica Brody who spun off Blake Snyder's "Save the Cat!" into "Save the Cat! Writes a Novel". She characterizes it as trying to solve the problem the wrong way for the first two-thirds of the story, and then once this moral awakening that you're talking about happens, you actually try to solve the problem the right way with the right tools.
Jeff: It's the exact same idea I think, but what I'm doing I think is I'm getting people to get down into the mud of the person themselves. The problem is a core emotional belief that they've got to change about... The character is going to learn something at the end of the story. What are they going to learn? They're going to learn what it is they've been doing and how they have to change. That's that blind spot. It's, "Oh, that's what's got to change." This is another really cool thing. Once you know what your character is going to learn, now you know how they have to be at the beginning of the story. They can't be a whole person at the end of the story. They've got to be pretty much 180-degree opposite of what they are at the end of the story. It gives you that character arc. There really aren't character arcs. They don't arc. They're more like heart attacks. But you know what I'm saying; that trajectory that they're on dramatically.
That moral component piece is so critically important. That is at the core of this whole idea of the premise line. First thing that I do with people is let's get your moral component figured out. And then we're going to start structuring out the story because then that tells you how they're acting. It tells you what sort of scenes you're going to have to create. It tells you what sort of conflicts you're going to have and what's going to be wrong in the relationships. If you've got a love story, well, love stories are always about what's broken in the relationship. That always sources from that blind spot of one of the protagonists.
Mary: Let me put a question to you that I'm sure you've been asked before. There are those writers who... I love the Picasso quote about learning the rules and then breaking them like an artist, but we all have met writers who say, "Well, I'm doing something a little bit different." Whether that's an asset or a liability has yet to be seen. One of the questions that I really struggle to answer in a good way and I'm hoping to put it to you is: what if I'm writing a story where the character doesn't change? Usually, this is some kind of critique on a nihilistic type of story where it reflects a pessimistic view of human nature. There's no redemption arc because there's no redemption in real life, that sort of thing. Do all characters in your view have to have this change of heart, this self-awareness, this movement out of their blind spot in order for it to be an effective story?
Jeff: No. Well, yes and no. In a situation, they're not going to change. That's one of the key features of a situation is the emotional space of the story at the end is pretty much the same as it was at the beginning. Nobody's going to learn anything. This isn't a moral lesson. It's a puzzle piece. It's a mystery that you're solving. And those are fun. It's a fun adventure. That's it. That's all it has to be.
But, if you've got a story, let's take "The Godfather". He doesn't turn into a nice guy. He turns into a monster.
Mary: That's actually very true.
Jeff: The horror of it is that he doesn't see it. He thinks he's turned into a great person. He's brought his family together. He's healed the wounds of the past. He's done it in a pool of blood but he doesn't see it. He's turned into the devil. You don't have to have the character change in a positive direction. What you can't have is someone who's just treading water because even the choice not to change is a choice. They have made a choice. It's a proactive decision; I will not change.
"My Dinner with Andre". Perfect example of this. Two guys sitting in a restaurant, talking. You can't get more boring than that, but it's riveting. I love this movie and the story is... I have it in my book. I use it as an example. It hits all these beats. The Wally character at the end...it's just two guys in a restaurant talking about life, but one is getting pushed, pushed, pushed with these judgments about the kind of life he's living by the other who's very flamboyant and doing these crazy acting things in Central Europe with crazy...he's just off living this crazy bohemian life and the other guy wants to read his "New York Times" and have breakfast with his girlfriend. That's all he wants to do, and he's being pushed. He's being pushed. His buttons are being pushed very subtly. It's brilliant writing.
At the end, the Wally character, the one who's getting pissed off more and more and more comes to this amazing revelation that, because of his dinner with Andre, he does see the world differently now. He understands. So many people are going through the world as robots, not making choices, just doing autonomous thing, and that he was that kind of guy. But now, because of this dinner, he appreciates in a different way. There's a change, but the choice he makes is, "I want to go home and I want to just tell Debbie about my dinner with Andre." He's not going to go off to Eastern Europe and do the craziest stuff. No. He's going to be reading his "New York Times" in the morning over breakfast with Debbie, so there's no fundamental shift or change other than his view changes but he's not going to change his life.
A character cannot go through one of these crucibles that you're putting them through and then ending up in the same miserable place they were at the beginning. What's the point? Unless your point is just you're nihilist and that's okay. Nothing bad or wrong about that, but you really don't have anything more to say about that honestly? That's a question you have to ask yourself is...if that's your point, that's your point. Like I said, there's no rules. There's no right or wrong about it, but stories are about making statements about what it means to be human. If your statement is just that we're pieces of crap and human fodder and worms, okay, thank you very much. Next. In this pandemic age, I really don't need to hear what a horrible thing I am.
Mary: I was listening to something the other day, and I think that we actually will be moving away from stories that are more nihilistic and dystopian and grim in nature. Already on the publishing side, I'm hearing how sick people are of virus stories and the sky is falling stories. I think people want a little bit of hope, just a little bit of something because of our lived experience.
Jeff: Yeah, that happened after The Great Depression. There was a whole spate of more uplifting kind of writing that was happening. It's cyclical that way. We're very predictable animals in that respect.
Mary: I was going to ask if you think that there's any kind of genre, any kind of category that doesn't respond so well to this treatment or if you found that it's applicable no matter what kind of story somebody's writing.
Jeff: A story is a story. It doesn't matter whether it's a three-second commercial or a memoir or create a piece of creative nonfiction story. Genre is not a story. Genre is our story conventions that have developed over time. We, as readers, are the ones who create genre.
Mary: I think that's a great point.
Jeff: Writers respond to that because, when you write a story and people say, "Great, I love your writing. Do it again," they don't want you to literally do it again. What they want is they want the same stuff in it but in a different way.
Mary: The same experience.
Jeff: Agatha Christie wrote the same mystery over and over and over again, but she did it in new ways all the time that kept people engaged. Science fiction, horror, they've all got certain story beat conventions that everybody wants to see that becomes the genre. Genres go in and out of fashion. Young adult was really big and then, a few years ago, new adult was developed. Mixed people started saying...I mean a new genre was born and genres come and go like that. But the people who create them are readers and consumers. It's not some editor in some lofty publishing house, "Well, time to create a new genre." Consumers create genres.
Mary: I think new adult was all the grown women who were reading YA who wanted characters just slightly older who could drive and stay out past their curfew.
Jeff: That's exactly right. I think you're exactly right. Don't get caught up in genre. That's like "Save the Cat!" All these what I call beat systems, that's what I snuck in under the radar here with this premise structure stuff because what I'm doing is what you want to do first before you do a "Save the Cat!" or before you do a 21 building blocks or before you do the hero's journey and all that kind of stuff. You want to have that all figured out. When you figure out what beat system really resonates with your style, then you're really going to be able to leverage those systems. These are all great thinkers. They're all great contributors. They're very creative people. I love all of them. I love John Truby. I think he's fantastic. I know Chris Vogler. Years ago, I knew him anyway. Hero's journey is fantastic if you're writing a myth story.
But before you do those systems, figure this stuff out first and you're going to go in and really be able to leverage the power of what those other folks did. Same thing with "Story Grid" with what's his name, which is very, very popular. [inaudible 00:49:52].
Mary: Yeah.
Jeff: Yeah, Coyne. He did a really brilliant thing with "Story Grid" but I think you would benefit greatly from having this process figured out before you start using "Story Grid" because it was really meant to be a tool for editing. I don't know if going on a tangent here. I don't know if...
Mary: No, I think the point is that every writer is different. Every story is different. Sometimes you write differently. You edit and revise differently from story to story. It is a living thing and people have their preferences to apply, but your contribution here is these are your universal things that we can do that speak to the greater whole of what you're trying to accomplish with your project.
Jeff: Maybe this is a nice way to sum up. I have tried diligently in my approach to this because I hate the guru world with a passion. I have tried to keep this high-level enough that it's productive and useful and gets you where you need to go without being so restrictive that it's Jeff Lyons' seven steps and you've got to jump through Jeff Lyons' hoops. I care less whether you do what I'm talking about. You want to make it two steps? Fine. Whatever you want to do. I am not about controlling anybody's process. Not interested.
I've really tried to keep this to make it really accessible, to find this real balance between being overly controlling with mechanical steps like cookie cutters but not so wishy-washy that there's nothing there that you can really wrap your arms around. I think I've found my sweet spot where it's agreeable.
Mary: I think with anything it's take the wisdom, leave the rest. One of the things that I hear about some of these systems is, "Oh, they're so formulaic." If every single story hits these seven beats or whatever the numbers are, everybody has their own framework that they use, doesn't that make everything the same? I think the bigger picture and why I love interviewing different writing teachers, we just had "Save the Cat!", is writers need to know that they have agency and that, once they start getting to know their own process and going through the rigmarole of creating a manuscript a couple of times, you'll figure out what works for you and it may not necessarily be the same thing each time or the same thinker, but I think that there are many gems that you've given us from your approach. Again, I think that the sanest thing is to think through the story ahead of time because you're going to save yourself so much grief on the revision end of things if you take this kind of more measured approach. But people get excited to start writing. They get excited to just get their daily words.
Jeff: It is. It's an impulse. Do it. Go ahead and go for it but don't do it at the expense of this. Do both.
Mary: I think that people look for a system to follow at first, especially as they're getting their legs under them, but why not do both? You can write and be more strategic. The world is literally your oyster. [inaudible 00:53:39] terrible cliché. That's why I love talking about writing, teaching writing. For a lot of people, it's going to be a lifelong process and this is something I see as a real productivity strategy tool. The older I get, the more I kick around the publishing industry, the more I'm like, "Let's all work smarter, not harder."
Jeff: That's a really important point because—I'll just speak for myself—we're not getting any younger. The clock is ticking. How much time do you really have? If you're an older writer, you've got to really be strategic about where you put your time.
Mary: Although writing is one profession where you could well keel over at your keyboard if you wanted to. I hear from a lot of older writers who are saying, "Am I too late? Did I miss the boat? Do agents and publishers just want the hot, young thing?" but I see a lot of writers coming to this as a second or third career, coming to it in retirement. Who knows how many sharp years we have left? It's not like a professional athlete. Their career has an expiration date unless they want to go into commenting or commentary or whatever they're called.
Jeff: You're absolutely right. The age isn't a problem. It's a real problem in the movie and TV world for sure. I mean I'm certainly experiencing that now myself but, in the prose world, no. You could start writing very late in life and find great success.
Mary: And bring a lot of insight and experience to this whole juicy moral issue at the center of a story, and some of that stuff only comes from life experience.
Jeff: You've got it.
Mary: This has been great. We touched on some expected and unexpected things, and I really think that people will get a lot out of your approach and your view of things. I'm hearing people can find you on July 1st—those listening currently—with a Reedsy webinar. Is there anything else that you're super excited about right now?
Jeff: I've got a premise development workshop starting a five-week workshop starting on Writers.com.
Mary: Very cool.
Jeff: That starts June 24th. That class is open right now. In 5 weeks, we're going to walk through the premise development process of a story idea and take you up through at least a short synopsis. You can learn the process. I do a lot of one-on-one. I work a lot with one-on-one with people.
Mary: Very cool. So, if you want some hands-on help with getting your premise rolling, getting a short synopsis and really mapping out your next steps, whether they're writing something new or revising, right?
Jeff: Correct. The idea is that, when I teach this stuff, I'm trying to teach something...it's like the old phrase, "Give a man a fish, he eats for a night; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime." It's teaching people a process that they over time can use without me, because my other favorite motto that I came up with that I want to chip out in the sidewalk all the time is listen to everyone. Try everything. Follow no one. You're your own guru. You've got to figure out your own process. If it ends up being a Swiss Army knife of five different techniques from different systems, nothing wrong with that.
Mary: Yeah. I say that I want to become irrelevant in people's lives, especially as a freelance editor working one-on-one. I don't want to stick around. I want you to be able to get your own skills, get your own confidence, and move forward and use what you learned absolutely, but it's a process.
Jeff: Right. I totally agree with you.
Mary: No, Jeff. Thank you so much for coming on the "Good Story Podcast". Jeff's links and online presence will be available for clicking, and I welcome everybody to check out his work, his books. I know I certainly will take a deeper read because there is obviously a lot of very good, very useful actionable writing teaching and writing thought here. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on.
Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure. I really enjoyed it.
Mary: Absolutely. You all listening out there, here's to a good story.
Thank you so much for joining us for the "Good Story Podcast". My name is Mary Kole. The "Good Story Podcast" is made possible by my team, Abby Pickus, Amy Holland, Amy Wilson, Jen Petro-Roy, Jenna Van Rooy, Kristen Overman, Paige Polzin, and audio and video wizardry from Steve Reiss. You can find us online at goodstorycompany.com, goodstorypodcast.com. I'm at marykole.com. And also, find your writing partner at critcollective.com. And here is to a good story.
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