Right here's How To Write Higher Tales By Realizing Your Story Grid Style
Why do some books work and some don't? Why do readers starve to consume one book while they drop another and forget about it altogether?
If you want to write books that readers love, find answers to these questions and apply those answers to your work. Fortunately, there is a resource available to you that offers an inside look at what readers want: The Story Grid!
New to Story Grid? Check out the book, podcast, and website.
In Part 1 of this Story Grid series, we looked at the six key questions you need to answer in order to know if your book is a good one. Now it's time to enlarge the first two questions:
- What is the genre?
- What are the conventions / mandatory moments?
If you want to write a great story with the potential to sell thousands of copies, the answers matter a lot to you.
Let's find out how knowing, fulfilling, and innovating your Story Grid genre can lead to avid readers who will trust you and get back to your work every time you post something new!
How to inspire your reader with the innovation of your genre
As you probably know, genre is essentially a way of cataloging types of stories. If you search Amazon, you will find many well-known genres such as romance, science fiction, war, horror, thriller, and mystery.
Writing in a familiar genre is critical to a writer's success.
The Story Grid genre is all about the reader's expectations. Readers are looking for specific stories with specific characteristics. If you don't live up to these expectations, you have a disappointed reader on your hands.
Here's what writer and editor Shawn Coyne writes in The Story Grid:
"When deciding which genre to live your story in, you will learn exactly what you need to do to meet the expectations of your potential audience. You need to know what your reader is expecting before you can possibly satisfy them."
Don't make the mistake of thinking that writing within a genre is hackwork or "sellout". Are coffee roaster hacks because within the coffee genres they sell dark, medium, whole beans, ground and so on?
The Story Grid genre is simply a way of categorizing stories. In order for people to take a leap in confidence and start reading your work, trust needs to be built. And you deserve that trust if you write in a well-known genre.
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Do you want to capture your readers and leave them satisfied and amazed? Study your genre, then work on its conventions and mandatory moments.
Meet the conventions of the genre
Every genre has conventions that must be met.
Coyne explains it this way:
"(Genre conventions) are elements in the story that have to be present, otherwise the reader will be confused, unsettled or so bored that, no matter how beautiful the sentences, they will stop reading."
In other words, every mystery has a detective. Every romance has two lovers. Required characters are a genre convention.
The genre can also have recruitment requirements. Science fiction stories usually take place in space or an alternate reality. Westerns take place. . . Well . . . You have the idea.
Coyne explains the importance of Story Grid genre conventions by comparing a story to a knock-knock joke. Without the words "knock-knock", followed by the answer "Who's there?" then you don't have a knock-knock joke You can't make a knock-knock joke with "So a guy goes to a bar …" It's an entirely different genre of joke identified by the opening line convention.
"As soon as we hear 'knock-knock' we expect the convention of the joke form … a fun pun that pays off. If we don't understand the pun convention, the listener won't laugh. The joke will die. It won't work."
In the same way, your story won't work if it doesn't include the genre conventions for the Story Grid. So make sure you know the common conventions of your chosen genre. This is the only way you can meet the expectations of your reader!
Meet the mandatory moments of the genre
While conventions are elements in a story that change a protagonist, the “mandatory moments are the indispensable elements in order to meet the increased expectations of these conventions”.
In other words, conventions are what ideal readers come into a genre for, like a corpse in a mystery / crime story (more on that in a second). But mandatory moments are the way these conventions are met – they are actual moments in history that make these conventions work.
For example, a mystery must have a "body scene discovery" followed by a "murderer confrontation". They just have to happen. Without it, the reader shakes his head in frustration.
Or in a dystopian science fiction story (all the rage in YA literature these days) there has to be a scene where the protagonist who sees things differently (a convention of this subgenre) makes a decision that goes against that System rebels. This scene is not negotiable. And the following scene, in which they have to suffer for this election, is also mandatory.
This may sound simple in theory, but it can be difficult to meet mandatory moments.
“Mandatory moments are the hardest for a writer to crack – discovering the dead body scene, the hero at the mercy of the villain scene, the first kissing scene, the attacking monster scene, etc. The reason for this is that these moments can easily turn into clichés. You were put to death. Inventing something fresh and surprising is an extremely difficult task. "
– Shawn Coyne
And this is where the amateur writer usually decides that writing within a story grid genre is not worthwhile. "I don't want to write a story full of clichés," you might think, and then decide to do it myself.
However, this is a fatal mistake and has rendered obsolescence many talented authors who could have published hugely successful books.
The trick is to meet your Story Grid genre and still be innovative. You're still telling a knock-knock joke. But you do it a lot, a lot different.
Innovations within these expectations
My four year old's favorite joke is as follows:
"Knock Knock!"
"Who's there?"
"Interrupt cow."
"Cow interrupt wh-"
"MOOOOOO !!!"
This is the first joke I've ever told her. It's also the only knock-knock joke I like because it innovates the genre. I find regular pun-based knock-knock jokes lame (orange, are you glad I didn't say "banana"?).
I also love stories that take on a familiar story grid genre and do wild, unexpected things with it.
At the heart of Coynes' analysis in The Story Grid is The Silence of the Lambs. The Silence of the Lambs is perhaps the greatest detective thriller ever made. It contains all the conventions and mandatory scenes of its Story Grid genre.
There's a detective. A serial killer. Bodies are discovered. A ticking clock increases the tension. In praise of the murderer, a speech is given that increases his threat. A false ending gives the viewer a false sense of peace. And then, in the end, there is the terrible confrontation between detective and villain.
However, the story is innovative in so many sources, most notably through the protagonist Clarice Starling and her slide Dr. Hannibal Lector. To learn more about how author Thomas Harris innovates so brilliantly, check out Coyne's analysis on The Story Grid.
Don't skip genre
Yes, The Silence of the Lambs is a fantastic novel. However, innovation is difficult. And with its considerable difficulty, there are two fatal temptations: to skip the requirements altogether or to plagiarize.
The first to drop the conventions and mandatory moments can never be an option. Your reader is too important. If you get her cheap, she'll never tell you a story again.
The second, copying the previous one, is similarly poisonous to your reader. As Coyne says:
“(Some) writers (some call them hacks) love the genre because they think they can just recycle old scenes from the genre's vault to fulfill those commitments. But if you rehash something that you saw in a Mannix episode from the 1970s, you will be sorely disappointed in your reader. "
But writing innovative stories is fun because it's difficult! Few things get me on my side more than the challenge and thrill of tackling something new. And the challenge is nowhere near as brutal as it may seem at first.
To illustrate this and to comfort his readers, Coyne offers a classic example of one of the greatest mystery writers of all time:
“Agatha Christie took a tried and true convention (her brilliant truth like Hercule Poirot) and refreshed it when she created the amateur truth Miss Marple. But you'll find that Christie didn't remove the central clue hunter from her story. It just changed the investigator's personality and background. It stuck to the convention, but innovated its implementation. "
See? You don't have to reinvent the wheel.
But you have to add spinners, lights, sparklers, spikes or something new and fresh. . . as long as it's still a wheel.
Strategies for writing the same but different
Have you ever heard of Brandon Sanderson's online science fiction and fantasy course at BYU? It's exceptional and I highly recommend spending a few hours trying it out on YouTube.
For a brief idea of how you can take your genre and write the same story, but different, I want to turn your attention to what Brandon Sanderson says that most people can agree that it happens in a story. Each story has:
And all of this is connected by:
You have to have conflicts in a story. This is what calls your characters to make decisions (and act) and move the story forward. But what will this conflict look like for your story?
How does your plot contain genre conventions and mandatory moments, but has another catch that drives that plot forward?
How are your characters different? What makes her the least unlikely hero for your story?
And where does your story take place?
Playing around with one or more of these story factors can give you some ideas on how to write within your genre conventions and mandatory moments, as well as writing your own story. There may not be "original" stories, but there can be new ideas for old ideas that we loved.
Your Story Grid genre is a tool for you
Choosing a story grid genre for your story can be overwhelming and intimidating. It's easy to give up early when you look at the huge mountain of accomplishments in a genre and wonder how the hell you will ever get there with the successful ones.
So here is what to do.
Whatever story you have on your mind, write it.
Keep writing – maybe up to 5,000 or 10,000 words – and then take a break. Take a step back and think about what characters, settings and scenes you have created so far and what you have planned for the future.
Then answer: What does a story look like? How does it sound How does it feel?
Find the genre that is closest to what you wrote. Study this genre until you are an expert on its conventions and mandatory moments.
Then come back to your story and shape it into that genre.
If you've started in the wrong place, it's easy to write a new beginning as it only contains a few thousand words. Choosing the wrong protagonist is a quick way to rewrite the early scenes from the right perspective.
And when you need to add / remove characters, settings, and scenes, you can do so without feeling like you've written an entire book only to realize it was wrong.
And that's one of Coyne's main points.
“Knowing the genre is the best way to avoid doing a lot of work in vain. If you don't know you're writing a horror novel and working on a character's past for four months to get an epic flashback, you're wasting your time. "
And nobody wants to waste time. Wasting time is wasted energy and passion. And you don't want that.
How do you write a book that works?
How do you write a book that readers can't put down?
You're writing in a Story Grid genre that is familiar and comfortable, but in a way that is innovative and surprising here and there. They meet a reader's expectations, but surprise them with small updates or additions that make the genre feel new and reborn.
Finally, consider this wisdom from Alice Sudlow, the certified Story Grid certified editor of The Write Practice:
“You can change the shape of your house's doors, or change the color, or whether it's wood or glass or a screen, or whether they're on hinges or in a pocket or on a track like a barn door. But your house needs to have doors . "
Start writing. Study what you wrote. Assign it to a genre. Then get creative.
How to write a story that readers love and that editors love to share with publishers.
This is how you can achieve success as a storyteller.
Are you writing with the genre in mind? Let us know in the comments.
WORK OUT
Think about your current work. What genre do you write in? What is a mandatory scene from this genre?
Now write this mandatory scene for free without worrying about how well it will fit into your current draft. Just write, take the elements of your story and place them in a familiar and well-read genre.
You have no work in progress? Try to write a mandatory scene from one of these genres:
Love: the lovers meet
Murder Secret: The Discovery of the Body
Action: The Hero at the Mercy of the Villain
Take fifteen minutes to write. Then share your letter in the comments below! Leave feedback to your co-writers as well. Can you imagine what genres they write?
