Back when I was a grad student getting my MFA. I had a teacher, he used to say that novels are written scene by scene, by scene, by scene. She said, it didn't matter where you started. The important thing was to pay attention to the parts of the story that crackled with energy, the scenes that you felt excited to write, where you couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen now. She said at least in the beginning, don't worry too much about structure. If you keep writing, eventually the narrative arc will emerge from your subconscious.

This nonlinear approach to writing was one of the true gyms of my education. It was a relief to realize that I didn't need to have everything perfectly mapped out, that wandering around through scenes might in fact be a necessary part of finding my way. It gave me permission to let the creative process be messy and to not censor myself in those early first drafts.

But over the years, I've also come to appreciate the benefit of a more structured approach. My writer, friend, Carly Anne West had a gig for a while writing novels for the video game Hello Neighbor, o ne of which became a New York times bestseller. The terms of her contract were a little ridiculous. She'd be given a few key details that needed to be included in the story, a nd then the timeline to write the book was incredibly fast, often just a few weeks or months.

Watching Carly outline each novel according to the specifications the publisher had given her, and then crank those books out in a matter of weeks was nothing short of remarkable.

It was inspiring to realize that stories could come together that fast. I learned from Carly that having a formula doesn't have to mean being formulaic, that sometimes creative constraints can give us a structure that pushes us to work smarter. I still write novels scene by scene, by scene, by scene. But with podcasts episodes, I've come around to Carly's approach. Having an episode framework and a structure for the process to put it together, helps me to feel a little more grounded when I find myself in the messy.

So in this week's module, we're deconstructing that process and then putting the pieces back together so we can better understand how to give our episodes the great structure that we're aiming for.

The assigned episode for this week is one that I love, not just because it's a great story, but because it's the episode that crystallized for me the process of putting an episode together. You'll hear how I came to that process and the reflections conversation with Melissa Lent and then in the accompanying videos and slide deck, I'll walk you through an exercise that gave me a system for finding structure. Part of the work you'll do this week for your own podcast involves using that exercise for yourself.

But first let's take a closer look at what makes great structure in a good story. Going back to those basic elements of great story —conflict, character setting, and resolution. —it helps to put the conflict upfront along with some key details that brings setting and character to life. The narrative arc of your story will be a movement from conflict to resolution.

In his book STORY, Robert McKee writes , "All stories come back to the struggle to restore the balance of life."

One of the things we've included in this week's module is a diagram that McKee created to show the moment from conflict to resolution in a slightly more detailed manner.

Hopefully by now, you've gotten used to thinking about conflict anytime you write or edit audio or even conduct an interview. But McKee reminds us that conflict doesn't have to be negative or even dramatic. It just needs to be some inciting incident that throws the character's life out of balance.

Maybe the inciting incident is that they won the lottery or got accepted to grad school or got pregnant. That incident just needs to introduce some sort of conflict that will put the character on a path to try to restore balance. This quest is a journey toward the character's Object of Desire. , the thing that they think will restore balance, .

Whether the inciting incident is positive or negative, the character will have to take some action to move toward their goal and taking that action will force them to take some risks. Those risks could be physical, relational, societal, or internal. They're what bring tension into the story and make it interesting. They make us wonder how things will turn out. McKee says "a story is a series of dynamic events c ausally connected that change a person's life." He says that great stories. Ask the question. How should we live?

So let's look at these elements in this week's episode, "Finding the Fuego." Our character is Adriana, a Venezuelan-American photographer who loves to dance. As you'll see in the post-it note exercise, there are many different moments in Adriana's story that could serve as the inciting incident or even the main conflict, s o we have to pick one to focus on to kick off the episode.

This is made more difficult by the fact that people don't usually tell stories in a linear fashion. They tell them scene by scene, by scene, by scene. But once we can identify what those scenes are and where the tension and conflict are built into them, we can reorder them so that the narrative arc feels natural and the tension is both consistent and has ebbs and flows to give us some relief.

In Adriana's story, the inciting incident is learning to dance —and not being very good at it. The stakes don't seem very high at first but that incident throws her life out of balance and puts her on a path where she's having to take risks to move toward the thing that she ultimately wants—that object of desire: total acceptance of herself and her journey . To get there, she has to contend with tension on a number of levels, those risks that we talked about, i ncluding political unrest in Venezuela, her parents divorce. , her imposter syndrome as an artist. , her family wishing she'd come back home, her struggle to accept her body, her reluctance to settle down and become a mom, and finally her search for home as a bilingual Venezuelan- American, who has strong ties to both cultures. The resolution comes about when Adriana embraces dance at a time when life feels the most intense. She's a new mom, she's not realizing her potential as an artist, and she's just lost the job that was providing stability, but was making her miserable. She takes the less conventional path for something far more risky— but the payoff is that she finally reaches the object of her desire: feeling fulfilled creatively and vocationally, at home in the deepest sense of the word. My narration supports the narrative arc so that the listener feels led along the path that Adriana takes, but it's worth noting that the way I just outlined Adriana's story could be told with interview tape alone, it's all there just needing to be put in the right order so that the pieces fall into place.

As you'll see in the post-it note exercises for this week, there are also a number of key moments of tension and release to keep us moving through the story.

That leaves character and setting, which we can build in around the story at key moments to make our characters relatable and believable.

Sometimes setting plays a relatively small role. Maybe the whole story takes place in somebody's kitchen. But in stories like Adriana's, setting looms large. It's almost a character in and of itself. This story is ultimately about searching for home, both personally and metaphorically, and so it felt important to keep those elements of setting and even play them up s o that the moves from Venezuela to Florida to California were not only the backdrop for the story, but mirrored the transformation that Adriana was experiencing internally with each move.

So we've got our narrative arc moving from conflict to resolution, through other moments of tension that keep the story moving and interesting.

We've got the setting the sense of place that provides the context for what we're hearing. And we've got character, the details and word choices and speech habits that make this person unique.

"Finding the Fuego" is one of my favorite examples of how a character can come to life. When Adriana first heard the episode, she said to me, " I thought you'd take out all the Spanglish. I'm so glad you kept it in."

I certainly could have taken out those moments and pared down the story to just the essential facts, but the episode would have lost a lot of its heart. The way Adriana speaks is one of the things that I enjoy most about her. I wanted the listener to enjoy it too. She's enthusiastic and vibrant, and you can feel the influence of her multicultural upbringing. It's part of her fuego, her fire. I've mentioned before that when I edit interview tape, my goal is always to make that person sound like the best and most articulate version of themselves nd at the same time, exactly like themselves. For Adriana's tape I did take out a lot of filler words, not just the ums and UHS, but a lot of likes and you knows, but I didn't take them all out.

Whenever taking out those words would make her speech sounds stilted or choppy. I kept the. When her enthusiastic talking, got her too close to the mic or had her stumbling over her words. I cut those moments, but I made sure that whenever possible, I kept in the phrases or word choices that revealed something about her character and helped listeners feel like they knew her.

Hopefully by now you've got some interview tape of your own to work with. So in this week's module, We're asking you to share your own structure for your episode and in that process to identify your central conflict, your moments of tension, and also any details of character and setting that you want to include in your episode.

For those of you who feel ready to take that one step further, we're encouraging you to submit short audio clips that illustrate each of the four elements of character, the kinds of short audio clips that you heard in the post-it note exercise.

Give us clips that illustrate your conflict, your resolution, your character, and your setting. Remember that just like those post-it notes, you can move things around. This is just another creative experiment to help you get deeper into your story. .