Speaker 1: There's a simple trick you can use in your writing to immediately engage your reader and get them to empathize with your protagonist. And I'm going to teach you that trick in this video. But to get there, we got to dive back into the five commandments of storytelling and continue my series on this all-important topic. Stories are about change. You're not telling a story if something's not changing. And how we track that change in story is the five commandments of storytelling. Now I've done a video on each of the five commandments and those are down in the description. But I'm going to do a quick review so we're all on the same page. The inciting incident is a ball of chaos that spins into the story and knocks the protagonist's life out of balance. This is what creates the want of the protagonist that the protagonist pursues for the rest of the story or the scene or whatever part of the story that we're telling. This can be a good or a bad thing. A lot of times it's a bad thing like a cancer diagnosis or a threat of a nuclear bomb. But it can also be a good thing like a job offer or a potential love interest. But the basic idea is your protagonist is going along with their life assuming they know what's going to happen next and something comes in and knocks their life off balance. The next commandment is progressive complications that build to a turning point. So as your protagonist pursues the want that came from the inciting incident things are going to keep getting in the way. People are going to get in the way. Things are going to happen. And each time they're going to try something new to get to their want. Now these progressive complications reach a turning point. And the turning point is when the protagonist realizes she may not get what she wants. And if she does it's going to cost her a lot more than she thought she was going to have to pay. Commandment number three is the crisis. The turning point pushes us to a decision point where the protagonist has to choose between two incompatible choices. They have to pick A or they have to pick B. And there has to be meaningful stakes with this decision. Which leads us to commandment number four, the climax. And this is when the protagonist chooses either A or B. Which leads us to the resolution, commandment number five. Which is what happens in the world around the protagonist as a result of the choice that they made. Now my name is Tim Graw, I'm the CEO of StoryGrid where we help you build the skills, write a book, and leave your legacy. My partner Sean Coyne is the creator and founder of StoryGrid and he's a writer and editor with over 30 years of experience. The thing to understand about the five commandments of storytelling is they work at every level of your story. From the manuscript, through the act, through the scene, all the way down to the beat by beat level of your story. The five commandments have to be in each of those levels because at each of those levels something has to be changing. So the videos I did walking through each of the five commandments was looking at them from the global level. So today I'm going to shoot all the way down to the beat level and we're going to look at how the five commandments show up in your line by line writing. If you get this right with your line by line writing, this is how you keep readers engaged because something is changing in every sentence, every interaction on the page. This is how you keep the reader reading, compelled to read, and empathizing with your protagonist. First, let's talk about what a beat is. So whenever I've seen this in writing manuals or books, it's kind of random and some people refer to it as paragraphs. Some people talk about, well, it's whenever your protagonist does something, but we have a very specific idea of what a beat is here at StoryGrid. So this is how you identify a beat in your writing. First of all, it's when the five commandments of storytelling show up in your line by line writing and we're going to get into that in just a second. It's whenever something small has changed. This can be a single sentence or it can be multiple paragraphs, but it's usually somewhere around three to five sentences. How does this work in your writing? Let's back up and look at two of the commandments again. Remember that the inciting incident is something that happens to your protagonist. Your protagonist can't consciously cause the inciting incident themselves. Otherwise, it's not knocking their life off balance. It has to be something that comes in from somebody else or from the world around them and knocks their life off balance. So the inciting incident is something that happens to your protagonist. The climax is the decision they make as a result of the inciting incident. So the inciting incident knocks their life off balance and the climax is the decision they're forced to make as a result of their life being knocked off balance. So why am I spending so much time talking about this? Well, another way to think about this is a stimulus and a response. So there's a stimulus and then the protagonist responds. We can also think about this as input and output. There's an input from the world or the characters in the world and there's an output from the protagonist. So in your line-by-line writing, your protagonist is the one that is responding to the stimulus. They can't be causing the stimulus. This is a mistake we see a lot of writers make is they put their protagonist in the stimulus role and the other characters in the world as the responders. This is going to cause one of two problems for your reader. The first is they're not going to be able to tell who they should be following and who they should be empathizing with. Your reader automatically wants to empathize with the person whose life is knocked off balance and track what kind of decision they're going to make. So if you put your protagonist in the input or role or in the stimulus role, they're not going to be able to tell who to map on to or number two, they might map on to the wrong person. And the last thing you want is for your reader to be mapping on and caring more about your antagonist than your protagonist. So let's take a look at a few examples. This is an excerpt from the book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There's a link to it down in the description. I recommend before continuing with this video, you jump down and give it a quick read. It's pretty short. So the lead into this scene is when Armanski calls Lisbeth into his office and he's planning on firing her. But then what she says here is what knocks his life off balance. She says, you know, if you just want an office, sir, if you can get one from a temp agency, I can handle anything and anyone you want. And if you don't have any better use for me than sorting posts, then you're an idiot. So this is the inciting incident of this scene. But it's also the inciting incident of this beat, because then he has to respond. And instead of responding, he just sits there stunned and angry. So this is like a freeze response when you just don't know how to respond. But think about this. This is what incited him. And this is the climax. This is how he chose to respond. And then the resolution is what she says next, which is also the inciting incident of the next beat. So she says, you have a man here who spent three weeks writing a completely useless report about that yuppie they're thinking of recruiting for that dot com company. I copied the piece of crap for him last night, and I see it's lying on your desk now. So that's the inciting incident. And then our Mansky has to respond, which is the climax. Armansky's eyes went to the report. And for a change, he raised his voice. You're not supposed to read confidential reports. And we see it go back and forth, back and forth where there is an inciting incident here. And then there is a climax and then an inciting incident and a climax. And what makes this good writing is that in each of these beats, something changes. Now, it's small, which is why it's a beat. But it keeps the story progressing and keeps going towards the turning point in the scene. And so this is what I want you to see about this is the protagonist. Armansky is in the responder role. They are the one making the decision. They are the one at the climax making the decision. And then the antagonist of the scene is Lisbeth, who is giving the inciting incident in each of these beats. OK, let's look at another scene. This is from the book The Princess Bride. So, again, this link is down in the description. And you can see where I've marked off the five commandments for the full scene. But you can see again where Vassini welcomes him. This is the input. And this is the output. He stops and surveys the situation. And then again, the inciting incident. And then the climax. And then the inciting incident. And then the climax. And on and on we go. So this is what it means to make sure that your protagonist, the man in black in this scene, is the protagonist. And he is the one responding to the constant inciting incidents from the antagonist of the scene. So in every scene, the protagonist needs to be the one, beat by beat, whose life is being knocked off balance by an inciting incident. And then we see them respond. While there may be a handful of beats where your protagonist isn't the one responding, they may be the one inputting. Or two other characters start inputting and outputting to each other. For the full scene to work, and for your reader to be able to track what's going on, the vast majority of your scene needs to be the protagonist in the climatic role. They're the one responding to the stimulus of the inciting incident on a beat by beat level. So this is how you can see the five commandments working at the scene level, and then all the way down to an individual beat level. Now hear me on this. This doesn't mean your protagonist isn't doing anything. A lot of times when I teach this stuff, people think, oh, is my protagonist supposed to just sit there quietly until an inciting incident hits them, and only then can they respond? No, no, no, no. Your protagonist is pursuing their want. They're going about their life, trying to get what they want. And in each individual beat, something gets in their way, and they have to respond. So at the beginning of this video, I said I would show you a trick, and this is the trick. Make sure your protagonist is in the responder role for the vast majority of your scene. This is how you ensure that your reader empathizes with your protagonist. The protagonist of your beats naturally builds to who is the protagonist of your scene. This will make your scenes engaging and compelling for your readers because they want to keep seeing how your protagonist overcomes the barrage of inciting incidents that are happening beat by beat by beat. When you show your scenes to people, if you're getting feedback that your readers don't really care about your protagonist, or they care more about your antagonist, or they can't really keep track of who's important in the scene, it's because of this. It's because your protagonist is not in the responder role for the vast majority of the beats in your scene. The five commandments of storytelling is the go-to tool we use when evaluating somebody's writing, from the manuscript all the way down to the beat by beat level. So getting really clear understanding of how this affects your writing is so important, which is why I'm going to continue to do this series on this channel. So make sure you like this video, leave a comment, subscribe to the channel, hit that bell to make sure you get all future videos from StoryGrid. Also, to get the most out of StoryGrid, make sure you go to StoryGrid.com, sign up for the newsletter, and check out all the resources we have available there. But as always, thanks for being a writer, thanks for being a part of our community here at StoryGrid, and I'll see you next time.