Story Mastermind: Novel Mini-Mastermind

Story Mastermind is a five-month small group workshop intensive. The deliverable, and this is what we are so excited about, is a fully workshopped novel draft and submission materials.

I do want to talk about this program and then give you a taste of how we discuss story in Novel Mastermind: from the premise, the elevator pitch, the logline; to theme, character objective, and stakes; and even touch on different novel categories. Then Kristen and I will delve into a live Pitch Workshop.

In just six months, you could have a complete, polished draft of your novel—and a plan to submit and launch it. Ready to take your writing to the next level?

Transcript

Mary: All right, all right. Hello, my name is Mary Kole. With me, I have my wonderful co-facilitator Kristen Overman. And today we are going to do a little demo for you of this "Story Mastermind Novel and Outline Mini-Workshops." So, this is a little taste of what we do with Story Mastermind, we want you to get a lot of value out of it. I am going to talk about the program but I'm just putting that out there, it is not sort of a heavy-handed sales pitch. But I do want to talk about this program and then give you a taste of how we discuss story in Novel Mastermind. So, what is that? You're an aspiring novelist and you start with an outline or an existing draft for when you are ready to complete your novel project.

Story Mastermind the novel version is a five-month small group workshop intensive with a very small cohort, three or four other writers. The program runs twice a year, January to May and July to December. We have Zoom meetings every other week with special guests from the publishing editor, agent, or author worlds. The deliverable, and this is what we are so excited about, is a fully workshopped novel draft and submission materials. You may not be 100% ready to submit, you may be doing additional revision. But if you want that structure, that accountability for getting your novel draft finished across that initial finish line with a lot of great feedback along the road, this is the way to do it in five months, which is really, really exciting.

We also offer an Outline Mastermind for your novel, it's a six-week small group intensive, focusing exclusively on your outline. And that is a lot of the material that we will be covering today. It runs twice a year, January to February and also June to July with Zoom meetings every week and your deliverable is a fully workshopped novel outline that you can then write from. That is really, really exciting, especially for people who may not be natural outliners who may not be excited about working from an outline, this is a really great opportunity to get into that practice as a writer. You have access to the Story Mastermind Discord community, which is a community of like-minded writers who have all been through the program that you can discuss various craft elements with.

You all have the same tools in your toolboxes as well as a summer pitch festival for all Story Mastermind alums that we organized. So, there's a lot of great structure to the workshop program, a lot of wonderful insights about your work specifically that you receive. And this is going to be a taste of how we talk about story, how we talk about the premise, how we talk about the nugget of the story. So, what is that nugget? This is what every novel starts with. It is the spark. The picture you see in your head when you think of the story that you want to write, could be a character, a setting, a situation, anything that gets you excited and sort of dreaming along a certain line.

You can take this nugget, expand it into a scene, who is the character? What are they doing? Is something happening to them? Are they making something happen? Are there any other characters involved? Are they trying to do something or get somewhere? Most importantly, the nugget of the story can tell you what the character wants and what stands in their way from realizing that desire and these are all elements that we will unpack now. So, your premise, this is a word that scares a lot of people because they think of pitching, they think of query letters.

But it's very, very important to do this big picture groundwork before you start turning it into a 300-400 page novel because it's a lot easier to workshop a premise than it is an entire manuscript. If you have an entire manuscript, that's totally fine. But ideally, we are starting with the premise from the ground up. So, your most important groundwork is to establish your objective, your theme, and your inciting incident. At least that's how we see it, that's how we want to come at it today. All of this combines into the premise of the story, otherwise known as the answer to the question, "What is your story about?" You might have also heard it called the elevator pitch or your logline.

In its shortest form, it's that one sentence hook that you include in your query letter, and it generally gives a hint about the characters, the central story, or the climax to the story. So, run your novel idea through this exercise. The premise for our purposes can also be in the form of a what-if question, and then we have a couple of examples for you. So, some hooks and loglines that I would feel very comfortable using for "Romeo and Juliet," what would happen if two teens from rival families met at a party and fell in love? So, you get the conflict right away. They meet, they fall in love, but they are from rival families, you get the characters.

And then from "Shadow and Bone," what if a girl discovered she had a one-of-a-kind power to summon lights, which could put an end to the darkness that plagues her world and unifies her country if she is able to sort of wrangle that power? So, we get the fantasy world-building, we get a sense that it's about these powers, we get a sense of the world, the world is currently broken, darkness, plagues, all of that. We learn who the character is, what they want, what stands in their way, and how the external factors of their world bear down upon them. And conflict over...sorry, conflicts often comes from how the character's internal desires are thwarted by their external circumstances, at least at first. Kristen, is there anything that you want to add about kind of this big premise statement?

Kristen: I jump in with where you have your character and your objective, that's where your theme comes from. So, I know in our list, we have theme at second, really, theme comes third. So, typically, people have ideas for themes without having an idea for a premise. So, we want you to reverse that and come up with your premise, come up with your objective, see how your character and their objectives come together to form the plot, and from there, your theme will be born. So, the more you can...

Mary: Your theme will be born.

Kristen: Your theme will be born. We are birthing themes.

Mary: Yes. You know, not to put a very uterus slant on it, but we have been called the midwives, the doulas of story.

Kristen: Yeah, we are.

Mary: Also the coven because we are witchy and kind of mean and but also very effective in our ways. It's like a funny mean.

Kristen: It's a nice mean.

Mary: Let's go, it's a nice mean.

Kristen: It's a learning experience mean.

Mary: That's right. So, that theme that you sort of identified as sparking into life is what I want to talk about. So, that is the emotional core of the story. What is the character learn? How is the character transformed? How does the plot push the character to change? And what universal idea about being alive does your story play with? There is a very important caveat on this slide. So, consider the character's emotional state at the beginning, the midpoint, and the end, how this changes, and how the actions and obstacles affect the character, those are all part of the theme as well.

Your job is to create the theme in the reader's mind so that when they finish the story, they instinctively know what the bigger picture is about. But it's important to know that you will not explicitly discuss your theme in the manuscript. Very, very important. So, here, what we're saying is you need to know what your project is about in this bigger sense, but how can we write a story that doesn't obviously point to the theme, that doesn't state the theme, that doesn't go on a monologue about the theme, that doesn't have kind of philosophizing about the theme? But it is something that you need to know, I think, before you can fully move forward with executing a novel. Kristen, do you have any more thoughts on theme?

Kristen: Just let the theme play in the back of your mind. Your theme can actually be your aha moment as you're developing your character and your story. Don't get hung up on, "What my theme is?" when you have your nugget. So, if you have your nugget of an idea and you're playing with it in your head and you're closing your eyes and figuring out what your character is doing and where their setting is and what's happening to them, the theme will come from that. So, it's like the Field of Dreams line, "If you build it, they will come." If you build your story, the theme will come.

Mary: Yes. And some of those building blocks that are crucial are character objective and need. So, character objective, we like to talk about that as being what the character wants in the opening pages before the inciting incident sort of rocks their world. This is a conscious desire that your character comes to the page with. But underneath the conscious desire is your character need, and that is often unclear to the reader at the opening but becomes apparent as the story unfolds.

It could be the opposite of what the character wants actually, and it ties to the theme as the character needs to grow and change in order to realize what they need. This is generally an unconscious desire tied to the wound until the character has some kind of a revelation. So, character objective and need are not the same thing and they usually don't come together until later in the story, but they are both things that I would strongly recommend that you're developing kind of along parallel lines. Kristen?

Kristen: Definitely, you want to know what the need is because that's what you're building your story towards. So, typically, I personally always have issues with I start off with great beginnings and they never go anywhere. You need to be able to have a sense of what your endpoint will be and that's your need. So, your beginning is the want, your endpoint is the need, around the midpoint of your story is where the shift starts to happen. So, the first part, you're going to be building, building, building a lot, working towards the one, and then subtle things happen and nuance plays in and by the time you hit the climax, it's clear what the character needs, the character realizes what they need, and then you land on your satisfying ending.

Mary: Yes, and it is important to note that a lot of writers, they have kind of the opening. Like you were saying, "I have this amazing opening, I know exactly how I'm going to just dive in." And then they might have a sense of the resolution because, ideally, the two kind of mirror one another, they come full circle. What happens in the middle, though, this is where outlining and really thinking and planning through your story will be very useful to you as a novelist because that muddy middle is one of the kind of major, major issues that we work with in any novel or any outline draft is kind of what happens to get us from Point A to Point B.

It shouldn't be Point A to Point B, it should be point A to point Z with a lot of points in between that subtly play on these issues of objective and need, the want and the need. Now, how do we do that? How do we start building what that plot might be and building it out? Stakes are something so crucial to consider and I want to give Kristen the floor here because I know this was one of your major kind of discussion points.

Kristen: Absolutely, the stakes of a story are something I'm thinking about all the time with everyone we're working with. And the internal stakes are generally what the person wants, the external stakes are what's happening to the person. A story without stakes is just a series of events. So, you know, you wake up in the morning, you go through your day, it's a series of events. Unless something happens that impacts your world and pushes you in a different direction, then you have stakes. And you can think about, like, what...an exercise you can do is think about what's at stake in your day-to-day life, if anything, and what would add pressure to your life? And then do the same thing with your characters because without stakes, there is nothing.

Mary: There is nothing.

Kristen: And you can write beautifully about characters and about settings and things happening in those settings, but we need to know what the character wants, what's driving your character at the beginning, and what's standing in their way. And each thing that stands in their way is one of the points that they have to move on. And when you have...the external steaks are things that happen in the world. So, typically, your inciting incident is going to be an external stake coming in changing things, pushing the character into a trajectory, where they leave their opening setting behind and go on this journey to find what they need.

Mary: And everything that happens to them is reflected in the internal stakes. And basically, another way to talk about stakes is why does this matter? Why does this matter in the larger world, the external stakes? Why does it matter in your own inner world and kind of your own trajectory? That's the internal stakes. And that combination creates the plot and the character intersection, why is this hero on this journey? Why this character for this story? And the stakes show us what the story is about. For this particular character, why it's this character in this story, not their best friend, not their neighbor down the street?

And in an adventure or fantasy story, the external stakes could be conditions of the world that are bearing down on the people in your story and the internal stakes are how those conditions affect...how the events of the story, the conditions of the world affect the protagonist directly. But it's basically like you don't want to put your character through a big story with a lot of plot or a lot of action. You know, the opposite problem of the person that has no middle, if you put your character through a fabulous plot but it doesn't affect them, they don't grow or change or despair or triumph as a result of those events? That's an opposite but equally problematic issue with stakes.

So, it all comes back to the stakes idea. Why do they matter? Readers need to know what's at stake from page one. Then the higher the stakes go as the story unfolds, the more tension will be created. Stakes also imply consequences. So, consider what your character wants, what happens if they don't get it? For example, saying a character wants a pony is super low stakes because if they don't get the pony, nothing about their life really changes except for they have to shovel less poop. But it's important that stakes relate to the character's objective and need.

So, pony, low stakes, but if the pony is a ticket for them to get out of their village because they're actually a very accomplished horse trainer or pony trainer, then that pony could be high stakes because then a lot is hanging in the balance for the character whether they get their hands on a pony or not. Now, you're creating kind of this interconnected story where the plot and character will revolve around one another. This ties into emotion. Emotion from the beginning to end. Nobody's perfect, which means that well-developed characters are flawed and that's something that we see all the time where the character is just an exemplary young person, for a middle-grade novel, that's a little bit boring.

If you have somebody that is just sort of the pinnacle, they've already had their development, they already know everything that they're supposed to know, I think the characters need a little bit more layering. So, they can be oversensitive or disgruntled or selfish or any number of things at the beginning, as long as they recognize the plot and they conscientiously work to overcome it. And the flaw should tie in with the plot. So, for example, in "The Hunger Games," you can say that Katniss's flaw is that she's headstrong and she feels defiant and she's obviously in a society where defiance does not please, you know, anybody in the Capitol.

This compels her to volunteer in Prim's place at the inciting incident. Thus, it propels the story forward. In that "Romeo and Juliet" example, Romeo enters as this kind of lovesick character thinking that no one will ever surpass Roseline, which propels the story as Tybalt is determined to fix him up with someone new. So, we do have characters that are a little prickly, they have some flaws. And in both cases, this opening emotion drives the plot and comes into play throughout. So, the characters learn how to handle themselves differently and in the end, they have a different perspective on themselves as well. Do you have anything to say about emotion?

Kristen: Emotion is something we need to see intertwine with the plot, so every time something happens, we need to see how the character reacts. So, it's action and reaction, and the reaction is where you get a lot of your emotion from too. It's not so much that you have to have a character wearing their heart in their sleeves or emoting all the time necessarily, but we need to see how they're handling the things that are thrown at them and how that changes their thought process and the lens that they're looking through.

Mary: And their sense of self, like, their sense of self is an extremely pliable thing throughout and if the plot isn't affecting what they believe about themselves or what they believe about the world, there's an opportunity for more connection there, I think, rather than less. So, let's talk about the why. Key questions that we asked here, especially about your beginning, why does the specific moment of your beginning matter in the character's life? Why is it so significant now that you have to tell people it's part of this imaginary world that you've created? Figuring out where to begin a story, particularly when you've worked out the backstories of the character and the world, is often a tough decision.

Generally, we believe that the story should open right before the inciting incident and give the reader a taste of the character's life and the world in its normal state, not for too long. It's important to get into the character's head and get a sense of what drives them before things change. But one of the questions we're always asking and we do spend quite a bit of time on the beginning in Story Mastermind is, "Why does your story start today?" Of all days, why today? So, let's move to the inciting incident and the life-changing decision. These are other huge building blocks of the beginning. These reflect the internal and the external stakes.

The inciting incident is typically external, but the decision it pushes onto the character is high stakes for them and internal, very emotional. So, for maximum tension and impact, we recommend that you get to know the character well enough in the first few pages to understand how the inciting incident is so impactful in their world and to appreciate how it affects their external and their internal stakes. So, how it drives the plot, whatever the inciting incident is, how it reflects back on the character or how it makes the character think about themselves and their lives, then the character makes a life-changing decision to go through a one-way door and engage with the story.

So, the inciting incident is almost like a presentation of a quest and what we're asking is, "Are you going to go on the quest, Character?" And the character might have feelings about it, they might be, you know, risk-averse, they might not want to, but something in themselves pushes them through that one-way door and that is the official beginning of the story. It happens in another place, there are examples of when the beginning doesn't necessarily follow these guidelines, but these are kind of best practices that we've come up with.

Kristen: And it's important that the character makes the decision. It's something that happens to them but they have to consciously say, "This is what I'm doing about it," and it can't be just a character along for the ride. So, we always...a lot of the time we fall back on the Harry Potter example just because it's well known. You need your character to be Harry and not Ron or not Hermione. And it's not the sidekick story, it's your protagonist's story, so they need to be the ones driving a lot of what happens.

Mary: Because Harry has the stakes. He has the backstory of his parents being killed, which has sort of...like, he was a baby when it happened, he didn't have a choice there, but he has a choice of how to be in the wizarding world, he has a choice of whether to engage with Voldemort. And he makes that decision and he rises to that challenge even if he's like, "I'm not from this world, I don't know anything about being a wizard, but I hear this call to adventure," and those stakes are unique to him because of his backstory. Plot and character intersection. We obviously can't cover how all of the strategies that are available to novelists in the middle of their stories, so we will do sort of a light kiss here.

But that intersection of plot and character is really what we play with in the middle. So, how does the premise tie into what the character wants and needs? This may seem like an obvious question if you're writing a character-driven novel, but sometimes we see plots that are driven by action and populated by characters who, as Kristen was saying, are merely along for the ride. Even if your character is one who has greatness thrust upon them, they still need to be a hero worthy of the journey. And that means the plot should impact what they want at the beginning and the action of the plot should push the character to discover what they really need.

So, the plot and the character really move in concert, and the character should contribute to the forward momentum of the plot in turn proactively rather than reactively. That is one of the biggest notes in Story Mastermind and in our editorial practice that we find ourselves giving over and over again, which is really that the character is sort of strapped into the backseat rather than finding ways to sort of drive the story forward and be that proactive protagonist. It's right there in the word in terms of what we want to see as readers from somebody who is involved in an interesting plot. Kristen, do you have any other thoughts on the slide?

Kristen: No, just the hero has to...it has to be the story about your character and how they're doing it. We repeat it often because we see it kind of often where you just need to make sure you're telling your character story, you're in the protagonist's head, you're showing us their thoughts, and [crosstalk 00:23:35] handle things.

Mary: Their reaction beats.

Kristen: Their reaction beats, they always have a choice.

Mary: Oh, you are getting all of Kristen's Greatest Hits. One of the things that we really try to rally around is this idea of, "And she had no choice, she stepped forward into the arena," or whatever. The character always has a choice and those moments of character turning point where the character makes a choice, it may not be the best choice or it may be a very hard choice to engage further with the story, those are the moments where your...that define your character, where your character is sort of created and cemented in your reader's head. Those are opportunities rather than just like, "She had no choice," you know, that is so much less interesting than seeing how that choice is made.

Kristen: Exactly. And that makes your character so much stronger too. Saying a character has no choice makes for a weak character because you're taking all responsibility away from them. And that distances your reader because the reader is kind of like, "Well, if the character is just not going to even try, I don't want to put my energy into reading it either." So, it's a risky run.

Mary: Yeah. Story Mastermind is pretty rigorous, not only in terms of getting through an entire draft in five months, but we push our writers, not in any direction that they don't want to go necessarily, but we push them to make bigger choices and harder choices and riskier choices that make for a more interesting character and plot and more interesting readers because we're thinking of how the reader is going to interpret the story too, which is why I wanted to get into some categories specific. So, we work with a lot of children's book authors for middle grade to YA on their novels and these are just some considerations as you passed around for what category your work might fit into.

For middle grade, your target readers are ages 9 to 12 or 13, with your ideal characters aged either 10 on the younger end or 12 or 13 on the older end. Your manuscripts are between 35,000 and 60,000 words depending on genre. Fantasy does get up there and can be even longer than 60,000 words but this is sort of a range of normal. Fantasy, adventure, and contemporary or coming of age are really appealing story types and themes for a lot of people in the market today. For young adult, your target readers are kind of 14-plus or 16-plus, your ideal characters are age 16 and older. Logistically, that removes a lot of obstacles of like, you know, if you need to go somewhere, you can just take a car. So, there are a lot of practical considerations there.

Manuscripts, 50,000-90,000 words, depending on category again. I tend to be pretty skeptical about manuscripts 100,000 words and over and this does seem to sometimes get people removed from consideration from agents and publishers. The longer your manuscript is, the more you sort of get a skeptical glance in the slush pile. Questions of identity and belonging, they play into character choices and sort of character experiences. Romance is usually an element, it's not required, but very, very appealing in the market. The stakes are higher, the mood is a little bit darker. We get into some serious things in young adult that any teenager might experience or there's also that element of curiosity about the darker elements in life, the more serious high stakes elements in life. So, they tend to be a component of those plots as well. Kristen, anything on category here?

Kristen: I think that about sums it up. The key with writing for kids is to make sure you're writing from a kid's perspective. A lot of times what we see with all of these categories are people jumping in with adult messaging in some way, shape, or form. And you need to bear in mind both who your character is and who your audience is and what they relate to and what their worldview is.

Mary: And one of the things that's really interesting is it's very easy to tell when it's an adult who is just aged 12 but they have adult insights, they bring kind of adult experience to the page, that's something we really want to get away from because the character needs to react as if they are 12, as if they're not making any decisions more than 24 hours in advance. They're not thinking about the consequences of their actions necessarily. Just something from...we try to sort of bring wisdom and insight into any novel from a theme perspective but our characters don't always possess. This is kind of the interesting push and pull of writing a young character is that character doesn't have access to that wisdom, to that insight that an adult does, simply because they haven't had a lot of life experience to draw from just yet.

So, it's a really interesting space to be in if you have that voice, if you have that desire. Over-teaching and preaching are not going to serve you very well in these categories. Let's talk about some other categories, especially for our adult readers now that we work with. New adults, this kind of fills in the blank after YA and before women's fiction with characters who are out of high school. Maybe they are in college or they're in their early careers or early relationships in their 20s and 30s. Romance, establishing oneself, making kind of messy choices, and figuring out who you are as an adult. Now that you've sort of been given the keys to adulthood, what are you doing with them? Those are some of the components that we see in new adult. It's a smaller category, but a lot of interest there because a big secret in the publishing industry and it's an open secret is that a lot of adults read YA.

They read YA because they're fun, the plots tend to move along very quickly, they tend to be a little less ponderous than some of these kind of midlife crisis women's fiction stories, and new adult sort of maneuvered into that space between YA and what an adult might be a little more interested in reading about. So, that basically is new adult. Then we do have women's fiction. Those stories focus a lot on relationships, whether romantic, a lot of friend stories, a lot of family stories. They feature characters in their late 20s and older as they engage with adulthood and its roles. Role changes are really big themes in women's fiction. For example, going from marriage...or from career to marriage to motherhood or trying to balance all of the above, extending to kind of later in life changes: divorce, intergenerational issues. These are all ripe topics for the women's fiction category.

We have literary fiction. That is a catch-all term that can feature characters in any age range. Generally targeted toward an adult readership, though, whereas middle-grade young adults are targeted more for that reader that is having those experiences in parallel even if the novel features a younger point of view character. And these categories tolerate a lot of different narrative choices, some storytelling risks, alternate timelines, interwoven narratives, different chronologies. Literary fiction is sort of a more risk-taking and explorative category where you can take some risks and make some choices that aren't necessarily just a linear chronological narrative. And then memoir. Memoir is nonfiction technically because the story that you're telling is your own, but you do have to shape it and structure it much in the way that a fiction writer would.

So, it's a slice of your life, but a very specific slice told with the aim of relating to readers who might be going through similar challenges or big turning points in their lives. A lot of the same storytelling and narrative tools apply as they do with novel and fiction. And the biggest challenge in memoir, I would say, from my work with editorial clients is selecting the material because you have so much material to choose from and you know it so well, but how do we select that material? How do we shape it into a narrative? And how do we contextualize it also? Memoirists have a lot in common with fantasy and historical writers in the fact that they have to do a lot of context, a lot of backstory. "How do we give somebody an entry point into our lives?" That's sort of a big craft consideration of memoir. Anything about category?

Kristen: Yeah, on memoir nowadays too, what we're seeing now in the market is you need to have much more of an emotional component in your memoir than you did even five years ago. So, just like with novel writing and connecting with the emotion that's happening throughout the plot, that has to happen in memoir. And it's hard for memoirists because a lot of the time, what memoirs they're writing about are difficult experiences that you've moved beyond. And to go back and relive it, you can't just relive the facts, you have to share with your audience how you felt going through it and how those feelings changed over the course of your memoir.

Mary: Yeah. Memoir writing is therapeutic in nature but you have to...if you're writing for the market, you have to at some point pivot like, "This is my story, I'm telling myself my story, I'm sort of, like, figuring out how do I relate to my own story," you have to pivot to including the reader as well. And that is where we get a lot of kind of these vulnerable authentic narratives, these voice-driven narratives. I mean, that is a question...this is not a memoir class, I can talk about this for hours. But that's a question that a lot of people have is kind of, "Do I have enough story for a memoir?" And kind of, "What is the persona that I'm putting forward?" So, a lot of really, really juicy questions and considerations I think in all of these categories, whether we're telling a fictional story or a story inspired by life or a combination of both as is the case in a lot of fiction as well.

And then genre-specific considerations, and then we'll move into our workshop section. So, science fiction and fantasy, a focus on world-building and logic, characters and plots that emerge from the world, how the world that you created really informs the story because the world is almost like another character in a lot of science fiction and fantasy. Otherwise, why would it be set in a different world? Why not just set in our world? So, that world really needs to bring something to the table. In mystery thriller suspense, we really focus on information, on reveals of information, when those reveals come, how those reveals happen. Is it a reveal for the reader or for the character or both? We focus on opening loops throughout the manuscript with built-in opportunities for twists, surprise, and misdirection.

What I mean by opening loops is, you know, Chekhov's gun, if we show Chekhov's gun, that opens a loop, readers will start wondering, "Well, is that gun ever going to come down off the wall? Is it going to go off?" And it's not until the gun does go off and how it goes off that that loop is closed. In mystery thriller suspense, we talk a lot about kind of what are the loops that you're opening? What are the mysteries that you are sort of opening and closing at various points in the story? There's a higher tolerance for widespread locations, multiple point-of-view characters, and omniscient perspective. I mean, Dan Brown, is, I think, sort of a trademark example of that, where the entire world is our playground, we hop in to different characters and different timelines, so those kinds of storytelling tools really come to the forefront.

In romance, it's a very trope-heavy category focusing on the reader expectations of the relationship outcomes, playing with those, subverting those, but also a lot of following those and it's just following them in an interesting or fresh way. That's what gives romance its real gas. And the feeling of longing drives the action. The ending is inevitable, but the story is all about how you get there. And then finally, in historical, there's also a focus on that world-building just like in the science fiction and fantasy, how this historical setting informs the character and plot? What do you get from the historical setting that you wouldn't be able to get in a contemporary realistic story?

And then the source material research is expected and usually, that's where a lot of historical writers really find their spark for the story, unless you move into a speculative direction. But usually, even if you write speculative or kind of like alternate history or another twist on the history, usually, there are a lot of those historical factual underpinnings going into the story. So, we love working with all of these different categories and categories not listed here, genres not listed here. I think it's understanding what your intentions are, what category or audience you're playing with and what the playing field is, how to bring all that together with a really sound story, structure, and understanding of the character. That's really what we do for every project that goes through the Story Mastermind workshop.

I think that brings us to Pitch Workshop. All right, so I'm going to do a little monkeying around with screen sharing, which is always really fun because it's always like my face and I'm, like, looking around. So, please feel free to go get a coffee or something in order to skip over the next, like, minute and a half. But I am going to open up a couple of submissions that people have so graciously shared with us for the purpose of workshop. And these are pitches, so this deals...this will be like a query critique, but we're really talking about the premise of various projects. So, I'm going to open one here and flip us over to that. Stop Sharing. Here I am.

And then we're going to start sharing but this time in Word. All right, and now I'm going to minimize our faces so that people can get...all right, so people can get the biggest experience of what I'm seeing on the page. "When King Midas's cursed daughter wakes up in 21st century New York City with her father's gift of the golden touch, she must find a way to break the curse before Ares, the bankrupt god of war, uses her to start a new world war." Wow. Is there a lot going on in this? So, this first part here is the logline. So, she was...so I'm not sure what the curse is and I have a couple of ideas here. Is it that she was frozen in time Sleeping Beauty-style and wakes up so much out of her time because you call the golden touch the gift, so I'm unsure what the curse is. Kristen, do you have any clarity on that from this pitch?

Kristen: No, but I want to know what the curse is, and again, like, how long has she been asleep? I'm really compelled by the idea that, you know, Ares is after her because he wants her golden touch. So, that part is fine, the first part I want more specificity.

Mary: Absolutely. I love this idea, like, Ares is bankrupt, she can turn things into gold, it's made in plot and stakes. Heaven. That being said...oh, and I love the additional theme of like, you know, "Down with capitalism and, you know, we're gonna really confront some of these capitalistic urges here in New York City." But, yeah, what is the curse? And so, it's like, "Find a way to break the curse," I want to resonate with that for a second. So, if the curse is that she went forward in time and, like, left everything that she knows and loves behind, that's already happened. And if the curse is the golden touch, well, that's already happened too. So, what can she change about her outcome if both of these things have just happened to her? Are you picking up what I'm saying, Kristen?

Kristen: Yeah, I think it's one of those, like, is the golden touch a gift or a curse? I like the idea that it's both but I don't think I like it both in the logline because it brings disambiguation.

Mary: This could be very much a logline issue or a pitch issue rather than a story issue. So, I'm excited to read it out loud just based on this. So, what is the curse that can be prevented? Okay. So, "12-year-old Rae, the spirited daughter of King Midas and the magical goddess Cybele," I believe? I'm not good at, like, reading names and place names. "Has lived a life of luxury in the rich [vocalization] kingdom." I'm not even gonna try to read that. "When her father receives the magical gift of the golden touch." Oh, interesting. So, I haven't boned up on my Midas in a while, I had no idea that this was something that, like, came, but it wasn't something [inaudible 00:41:27].

Kristen: Yeah, Midas was gifted because wasn't it something...like, Midas wished for it and it was granted and then [crosstalk 00:41:35] because I think he touched his daughter and turned her to gold. I think that's how the myth goes.

Mary: Is this the daughter?

Kristen: That's what I'm wondering.

Mary: Interesting. Okay, so I'm now wondering...rather than, "Okay, we should have gone on Wikipedia to look up the Midas myth." Other than that, I'm wondering when the story takes place. Because here, we have, "When King Midas's cursed daughter wakes up in 21st century," that seems like the inciting incident but here we're getting a lot of backstory and I'm wondering if we're going to see that in the narrative. "Are we going..." So is it like, "Hey, we're opening on the kingdom," and, "Hey, Dad," you know? Is it her normal life or is it when she wakes up that the story starts? "Get the backstory in the narrative itself." So, I have questions about narrative structure. Okay, "It turns into a horrible curse and Rae makes a terrible mistake that places the kingdom in terrible peril." Okay, that's high stakes language but it doesn't mean anything. For a pitch and this is specifically about the query, I'd be much more specific about the stakes themselves.

Kristen: Especially with that kind of backstory, I would say what the terrible mistake is because are we starting where she wakes up in New York, or are we starting back on what got her there?

Mary: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, "King Midas must do the unthinkable to save Rae's life, he turns her into gold." So, again, do we see this happening? I mean, it would be hard to write a point-of-view character who is a gold statue because they're not necessarily aware, they're like cryogenically frozen, right? "Do we see this happening or is it a flashback? Can she narrate while gold?" That's just kind of a storytelling consideration. "Cursed to remain a golden statue forever." Okay, so there we get curse again, so the curse must be that she was a gold statue. But here she wakes up and must find a way to break the curse, so I'm wondering what the second part of the curse is that she can still sort of have power over. "As a symbol of the curse of the golden touch, she ends up in present day New York."

Oh, she's at the Met. That is great. "This is a great setup." It's like just from a premise angle, I am loving this pitch. Oh, but wait, there's more. Now we get, "On a field trip to the museum, lonely Hunter touches the statue turning Rae back into a human but Rae's joy of being human is short-lived when she's in..." Sorry, "She discovers she's inherited her father's curse of the golden touch and her magical ability to understand and control nature doesn't seem to work." Okay, there's so much going on here. So, she's lost one...okay, so is this the thing she is looking to restore? Restore. Oops. Does she want to go home to her own time? Still looking for a little bit of clarity. I'm wondering will Hunter be POV? Is this dual point of view? I have a lot of storytelling questions. Now, dual point of view...

Kristen: That was my question I was gonna ask you.

Mary: Dual point of view can happen in middle grade, it's more common in young adult to have this kind of dual point of view. So, I'm wondering, you know, are we omniscient third? How are we handling these kinds of different kids and these different experiences? I was not expecting another point of view at all, so this sort of is a little bit of a curveball. I can't. Obviously, we're looking at the pitch the work sight unseen, so I can't tell you what works well and what doesn't, but I definitely had kind of like the question marks over my head when Hunter came to the party. Okay, so, "Meanwhile, Ares, the god of war, disguise as the cunning New York City mayor, is bankrupt and power-hungry." So, if Ares from that time is still around just in a different guise, does that mean her family is immortal and still there?

So, is her family is still around in present day? I'm unclear on what her objective is. This idea of breaking the curse has really just kind of, like, stuck with me in terms of I need a little bit more definition there. So, "Rae with her unlimited supply of gold is the answer, perfect. "Are Rae and Hunter brave enough to find a way to break the curse before Ares," so, again, what does this mean in practical terms? What does break the curse mean in practical terms? And also, I mean, I hate to be a little downer on Hunter, but what is his journey? He is super sidekick right now and I'm wondering if...like, we need a vehicle to awaken her but getting an entire other character in this, I kind of have some questions about that.

Kristen: I want to know what ability does Hunter have that he's the one who's able to awaken her? What's his magic game?

Mary: What about Hunter inherently awakened Rae? You know? So, we got like a rhetorical question in the pitch which I don't really love here because a pitch is you're telling me about your story, don't ask me to imagine what your story might be. Statements are always stronger but that's a pitch note, not a story note. "Before Ares uses her to start a new world war," "A magical quest, mythical creatures, and horrible monsters await in this thrilling." I love the pitch language but this is also pretty vague, it's just like a list. "This list doesn't give me a sense of plot."

So, you're just describing the stuff around the plot whereas I kind of want to know what the actual plot is. "Greek adventure that explores the power of hope and friendship to triumph over evil." Or is it capitalism? Still not sure. "The Girl with the Golden Touch" is a fast-paced middle-grade fantasy adventure that is standalone with series potential, unforgettable." Okay, so we're getting into some, like, adjectives, "I'd avoid adjectives in your pitch because, of course, you think it's awesome." I would kind of strip back from the query because it can come across as a little too awesome.

But, yeah, here we have another...so here you're listing your themes. "Another list of general themes." I would kind of keep that to a minimum. "Neil Gaiman, Kelly Barnhill, and Katherine Rundell," "The book is described as "Circe" meets "Percy Jackson."" I have some problems with these comp titles but this is not a query letter webinar, it's not a query workshop. So, we'll leave it at that for now but I think there's so much good working here. I just really need to understand what the crux of that curse is and how Hunter fits into this whole kettle of fish. Would you say that's fair?

Kristen: I agree. I think Hunter kind of throws me off on this one because it seems like it's Rae's story. I'd like a tighter pitch around Rae and how she comes into the present day. I agree with the questions about is her family also here? What are her resources in present day New York?

Mary: Yep.

Kristen: And on the end, I would either go with the three authors, which I like those examples of Neil Gaiman, Kelly Barnhill, and Katherine Rundell. It's a good spread. I'd probably cut the last sentence.

Mary: Okay, and thank you again for the people volunteering to have their work critiqued, this is so, so useful, I think, for everybody. So, what if? So, here's some like, "Thank you, thank you." This is the heart of it. "What if a girl, desperate to find a place to call home, must return to the house she abandoned as a child and brave unimaginable horrors to understand the mystery of her mother's death?" Okay, I'm gonna...I like you, Katie, for all your kind words, I am going to ignore that this was a rhetorical question. But I don't know what if, you tell me. You tell me, Katie, because this is the story that you've come up with. For logline, it is a... "For the most part in queries," I will allow it but it is sort of...

Kristen: Well, I think this goes back to what we were saying earlier about building your premise. Like, you can build your premises as a what-if statement when you're writing your pitch, you don't want it...you need to answer the question. So, for your purposes, yes, start with the what-if, develop your premise that way, figure it out for yourself. When you come to pitching, you need to make statements.

Mary: So, I like the mystery of her mother's death. I'm going to focus there, it's at the end of the what-if. "This is high stakes and compelling." It's that open loop, right? "The mystery of her mother's death." However, "Brave unimaginable horrors," sounds awesome...I mean, not awesome from, like, a human perspective. But you need to be more specific, even in a pitch. So, I don't know if it's...okay, so I don't know if it's her abusive family still lives there and she has to wade back into that environment. I don't know if there are literal monsters, right, that are waiting to jump out at her if she goes back into a haunted house, right? This could be anything, this could be contemporary realistic, this could be fantasy. At this point, I don't know. And by after the logline, I probably should know.

So, this is kind of like that car commercial language where it's like, "In a world," you know, and it sounds great but it doesn't give me clarity on what the story actually is. So, there, I would drill into more specifics. Now, "Kristen must return." This makes it sound like she has no choice but to return. So, I would put, "Maybe specify the circumstance," oops, some editor, my goodness, "Under which she has to make this choice." Because I think if we know what the circumstances are, if we know what she's facing, if we know those stakes, and we know that she makes the decision to return, that's a really juicy story element. So, is it that she really wants to solve the mystery of her mother's death?

Now, Kristen, if there's a dead body in the story already, that murder cannot be prevented, it has already happened, especially if it happened a long time ago. And so, the stakes aren't, "We're trying to prevent a murder," right? The stakes have to be then bound up in the character. Now, obviously, if it's like, "I've been framed with a murder," then the stakes are very obvious. It behooves you to solve that murder and sort of clear yourself of any blame. That doesn't sound like this story. So, we need to be very, very clear about what the character's stakes are, even though that murder has already happened and there is nothing she can do to sort of act upon the outcome of that murder. You need to be very careful in a situation like that.

Kristen: We also need to know, is the character in danger because the mother died...because of the way the mother died? So, are there present-day stakes involved that because of what happened, it could cause something else to happen now? And we also there get back to the question of, "Why now?"

Mary: Exactly, because I'm guessing that the mother has been dead for at least a little while. And so, what is the inciting incident that propels this character to go and start digging into this very painful past element? Okay, great. So, "Growing up in a near-constant state of starting over," I love that, and that loops into this really nice statement of her objective, which is, "Desperate to find a place to call home," so I like that. "Seventeen-year-old June longs to stay in one place for more than a few months." You are sort of repeating yourself here, so I would say, "Pick one statement of this fact."

"The only home she knows is her dad, the hum of the highway, and the anxiety she feels when sleeping somewhere new." Okay, the element of the somewhere new I think is well established. "When her dad insists returning to the house they abandoned 13 years ago will be their last move, June doesn't believe him." I would love a reason for this. You know, they abandon it once, I'm guessing that's where the murder happened. Why does dad think that it's such a good idea to return there?

Kristen: Or has something happened that makes it safe to go back? Or makes him think it's safe to go back?

Mary: Yes, "To go back."

Kristen: And is that the inciting incident?

Mary: Yes, "Is that the inciting incident?" "She doesn't believe him, but she takes opportunities to search for answers about why they fled." Okay, the thing that I'm still not seeing kids, why is this relevant? Now, they have a location change back to that location, which I still don't know why dad decides that's the way to go. But this 13 years ago, that's literally her entire lifetime minus 4 years. So, her entire life has passed since they've last been here, since Mom has died, I'm guessing. That's what made them leave in the first place. So, why is this...like, why is this inquiry acute now rather than something that she's been looking for the answers all her life, for example? So, she discovers the small Missouri town and surrounding forests hold more secrets and mysteries than she ever could have imagined.

I would give some examples. "Be specific here." Again, that car commercial voice doesn't really give me anything of substance. "She struggles to unravel the tangled Roots of lies that have kept growing in her absence." So, this is really interesting. How do you plan to give us a sense of that? "I worry that there's going to be a big dump of backstory here, or of other characters who haven't been big pieces of her life now filling in the blanks." So, I worry that there's going to be some static plotting there because this looks like we need a lot of information with which to move forward. "In the midst of this, she meets Phoebe, her kind of daring new neighbor who's determined to debunk the reported local paranormal activity." So, now I don't know if there are actual monsters.

Kristen: I think this might be a sentence that needs to go up near the beginning.

Mary: Yeah. "For the purposes of the pitch, make very clear right away if we're dealing with no fantasy or some paranormal or some magical realism." I would put that right upfront so that the pitch reader has some kind of framework for where your story might fit. Oh, I see some questions. I see some rhetorical questions. "Will June risk confiding in Phoebe about her own increasingly strange experiences?" Okay, we have not heard about the mom, we will in just a sentence, but are these tied to the mom or the house or both? And notice these things are happening to June, so how can we make her proactive even in a setting where things are happening to her? "Even if this means losing the only person she can trust?" That to me seems...I don't know. I mean, I guess...

Kristen: I'm guessing, you see, the way this is framed, I'm thinking the only person she can trust is Dad because Dad is home. So, do you mean Dad or do you mean Phoebe?

Mary: Because Phoebe is new, so losing a new friend, it's like, "Okay, bye, Felicia." I guess that she is looking for kind of any port in a storm to make that connection. So, that's a really good point.

Kristen: I'm also wondering if Phoebe's a ghost.

Mary: Ooh. So, Phoebe is implied here as the person to trust, but earlier it's implied Dad is home, so I'd clarify this. Is Phoebe dead? Did we just crack your story, Katie? I hope not. "How is her mother's death connected to any of this?" That is also a question that I am asking, just as an evaluator here. "I'd make this very clear as sort of the grounding..." Oops, the gourding. "You want to gourd your plot." "Element of the pitch, if they are connected." If they're not connected, I have different questions. "June must work through her shadows, or the truth of the past might kill her first." Okay, so I would start here.

Kristen: Yeah. Also, what shadows did she have at age four?

Mary: I don't know. When my kid was four, he was a pretty gnarly four-year-old.

Kristen: Yeah.

Mary: But yeah, I think if I...so, Katie, we're obviously not working on this story together. If it was me and I had my druthers and this was my story, I would do anything possible to close that 13-year gap because it's just so hard to make things that are so deep in the past relevant and I'm still wondering whether this is paranormal or not. Those are kind of like two big, big questions that I would love answered. All right, I'm going to stop sharing for a second and just go back to our little Chrome tab where I will reiterate kind of what the Story Mastermind program is. That was just a taste of how Kristen and I talked about story, our whole hilarious antics when it comes to story analysis.

But Story Mastermind is a program we've developed to really get you across that finish line with a sense of accountability and community of input from different sources, your fellow cohort members and us as facilitators. In five months, you could go to a fully workshopped draft, or in the case of Outline Mastermind, a fully workshopped outline in six weeks from which to write a novel confidently knowing that it has received tons of feedback. You get insight from various industry players during that process, and access to the entire Story Mastermind community of other writers who have sort of gotten the same tools, use the same tools, and work within that framework.

It's a program that we love. Kristen and I, we just think and talk and eat and sleep and breathe story, this is what we love to do. We would love to have you join us. If you're at all interested in learning more or applying, application is open twice a year in October and April, storymastermind.com is the place to go. But I hope you got something out of our conversation about story and our dissection of these two pitches. We would love to do the same for you if you ever join us and just thank you so much for your valuable time. And Kristen, thank you for joining me on this little mini-workshop.

Kristen: Okay, I'll add too that Story Mastermind is really...it's a unique program in that it's a lot of story coaching and community and the extra resources that Mary mentioned. It's not just a class and it's not a critique group, it's kind of a sweet spot for both, and I think people really enjoy it because of those reasons.

Mary: And that's why we moved into that space, honestly. It's not an MFA program. It's not that two-year of very, very, you know, high commitment structure of where you get a lot of kind of reading and a lot of classwork. This is very, very hyper-focused on your manuscript is the primary material with which we are working. And it's not a critique group and it's not a weekend conference either, it's much more involved than that.

And I will add that one of the pieces of feedback that we get over and over from Story Mastermind students is just that framework, that accountability, that structure, knowing that you have a submission every two weeks, knowing that you're going to get that feedback from the instructors as well as your cohort mates has been really one of the things that people have enjoyed. Because it can be tough to wander through a novel draft on any kind of schedule if you are not participating in something like this. So, that's one of the things that we love bringing to the experience and we hope you'll join us and thank you for joining us here. Here's to a good story, as I always say when I sign off. Thank you.

Kristen: Thank you.