The Protagonist As Outputter

Story Grid training has some helpful guidelines concerning beats, which are on-the-surface moments that involve an input followed by an output.

For instance, if you are writing an inciting incident scene, something from outside the protagonist will hurtle into their life and cause a problem. That's the input. The protagonist must respond. That's the output. The input and output might be dialog, but not necessarily. At the end of this post, I'll include a link to a short Story Grid video on YouTube wherein Tim Grahl and Shawn Coyne discuss this very thing.

I'm bringing this up today because I’m sharing another preview of The Write Fix process. Last week, I shared my very first draft from when our group first began experimenting with this weekly writing exercise--long before we had the glimmer of a podcast in our eyes. This week I’m sharing my second draft. This was still in the early days when we were only writing for five minutes and didn't brainstorm before we commenced writing.

The exercise featured in today’s recording took place around the same time that we were just starting to study this concept of beats as an input and an output, and the idea that the protagonist of the scene should be the outputter. This draft was my earliest attempt at putting this into practice.

The setup is that the protagonist is on the phone with someone. We only hear her end of the conversation, which is a response (output) to the imagined inputs on the other end of the line. There are also two brief inputs voiced by a third character, but everything else is an output.

If you want to give this exercise a try, play the recording. When you hear the music, set your timer for five minutes. And feel free to share your draft in the comments if you like.

(Rated PG for language.)

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Helpful Resources

For Tim and Shawn discussing the protagonist as the outputter, click here.

For more from Shawn on beats, click here.

Voice Over

Andrea Margaret Higgins, SAG AFTRA