← The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
Fiction Color Mapping Exercise (Storytelling Structure Secrets!)
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All right, fiction writers, today I want to introduce you to my new favorite creative writing exercise. I call this color mapping. So, as you can see here, I've been doing this with different movies and different books that I've been reading, almost all in the sci fi or fantasy genre. And here I'm actually putting together a color map for Star Wars Episode 9. I just picked it. I was watching it randomly one day. I thought, let's, let's do the color map exercise. Okay, so what is a color map? A color map is essentially associating themes and individual characters with each thing that's happening in the story or each scene in the movie, or each meaningful section in a book. Now, why is this such an effective exercise? Well, side note, I've been reading this book recently called Peak. And the subtitle something like the New Science of Expertise. And basically the entire point of the book is that volume in and of itself doesn't necessarily mean skill acquisition. I think oftentimes, and I've fallen victim to this as well over the years, oftentimes we think, well, as long as I'm just doing the thing, that inherently means that I'm improving. And what this book is about is essentially it says, no, that's not the case. And a very simple way of proving it is if. If you look at people who have been in the same career for 30, 40, 50 years, a surgeon or a lawyer who has 50 years of experience isn't necessarily better than someone who has 10 years of experience, because normally what happens is as you get comfortable with a certain level of proficiency, you just sort of. You stop naturally improving or pushing yourself. And so instead, if you're not actively growing, some of your skills deteriorate, and they deteriorate in ways where you default to what's most comfortable. And so anyways, the point of me sharing this is what they stress in the book is that if you want to improve a certain skill, you have to first isolate the skill, and then you have to come up with an exercise or some tangible, objective way of measuring the improvement of that skill. And then you have to deploy a lot of volume within that exercise to improve that particular skill. So two examples that I come back to often when I'm thinking through this is golf and chess. You know, golf is. You don't just. If you want to become a better golfer, what a beginner would do is think, oh, I just need to keep playing 18 holes over and over and over again. A beginner chess player would say, oh, I just need to play chess games. Over and over and over again. But intermediate and advanced and expert level golf players or chess masters, you know, that's not what they do. What they do is they isolate parts of their game. So in golf it would be, I'm going to practice putting and then I'm going to practice chipping. I'm going to practice chipping out of the weeds, I'm going to practice chipping out of the sand. Right? Chess. I'm going to practice just openers. I'm going to practice mid game, I'm going to practice end game. They're breaking it apart into pieces, smaller and smaller pieces, and then they are practicing just that individual piece. And so you should think of skill acquisition as a whole as you isolating different pieces. And then as you isolate and practice individual pieces, then the entire skill improves over time. It's a very simple idea. But the reason why, why I've been particularly obsessed with it recently is because in the world of writing, especially creative writing and fiction writing, I find that this is a huge deficit. It's a deficit for writers, it's a deficit for people who are trying to learn, and it's also a deficit for people who are very proficient at their craft. So this is how we'll pull the iPad out for this. Okay? Most writers, myself included, for many years, most writers think about stories like this. You have a beginning, you have an end, and then you have a story arc, right? And this is really the only way that we can conceptualize. Let me rephrase that. This is the most common way that creative writers conceptualize stories. They think of them as one big thing. And so a lot of conventional wisdom, especially in the world of creative writing, is, well, if you want to tell better stories, you should just tell more stories, right? If you want to become a novelist, you should just write more novels. And to some degree that's true. But think like, go back to the beginner golf player or beginner chess player. That's like thinking, oh, if I just play more rounds of golf, I will become a better golfer. If I just play more rounds of chess, I will become a better chess player. And that is true for a very short amount of time in the beginning, right? Because in the beginning it's like any skill acquisition is good because you're just acquiring skills. The problem is that plateaus very quickly. And so if you're a writer and you're just churning out novels, but you're not isolating any individual skill, then you are no different than the person who plays 18 holes of golf every other weekend, and you get better at first, and then eventually you plateau and you're like, I have no idea why I'm not improving. Even if you go on to play 18 holes every other week for 30 years in a row, right? And so this doesn't really exist in the world of creative writing and fiction writing. I know because I have a degree in fiction writing. I think back to when all of my teachers would explain story structure to me. It was always talked about in this very overarching way. It's like, you start here and we got to end up here, and then all this stuff happens in the middle and there's so much ambiguity there, right? Like, how do we actually break that apart? Well, if you go down the rabbit hole. Because like, I have over the years, I've read so many books on story structure and, you know, how do you make sense of this, the next level, and the way that most people break apart, apart stories is they break it apart into. Maybe you've heard of, you know, the three act structure, or on occasion, maybe even the five act structure, right? And so you basically have like, this is the setup, you know, and this is the midpoint. And this is, you know, the, the climax is usually somewhere around here, you know, and maybe you have like the descending action down here. This is the climax up here. These pieces you've probably heard of before. And is this more helpful than just the beginning and the end and one big arc? Yes, this is more helpful, but this still isn't breaking it apart enough because it's like, okay, yeah, but there's all these things that need to happen in the setup. And then how do we keep the person's attention at the midpoint? And then how do we effectively build up to the climax? And then how do we effectively execute the descending action? Right? And so imagine going back to golf and chess for a second. It's like imagine you going to your, your golf instructor and being like, you know, this midpoint, my, my mid game, I really want to work on going from a fairway wood right in the middle to getting to the green. I don't want to work on the initial drive. I don't want to work on chipping, I don't want to work on putting. I just want to improve going from the midpoint to getting on the green, right? And imagine if your golf instructor said, okay, so here's the advice I can give you when you go and the next time you hit the ball, you just gotta really, like, do what you feel, you know, you just gotta Trust yourself. If you were playing golf, you would get upset by that. You would think that that is ridiculous. If you're playing chess and your chess instructor explained how to execute the midpoint of a chess game and just say, you just gotta trust how you feel, right? You would be very frustrate. And yet, this is how storytelling and creative writing and fiction writing gets taught everywhere. I recently bought another. I'm always buying courses and educational materials because I want to see what I can learn from other people. I recently bought this fiction writing course from a really successful fiction writer. I won't share who because it honestly doesn't matter. This is the same problem I run into over and over and over again. And I buy this course and I open it up and I'm like, if I even learn just one actionable thing, that's great. That'll be worth the money that I spent. It was like 100 bucks. And the most actionable thing that was shared was just a different version of trust. How you feel. You know, to make really great characters, you gotta. If you want them to be believable, you just gotta ask yourself, do you believe them? Right. That is not helpful. It's not helpful because it's not actionable, it's not objective. There's not something that we can isolate and practice. Right? It is very subjective. It's open to interpretation. And so for me, as someone who wants to continue learning and building these skills, I have found it very frustrating. Because if I wanted to learn chess, the most entry level thing I could do is go buy a book of 1000 different chess moves that I should just go memorize. And I would immediately become a fairly proficient chess player because I can isolate each of the individual moves and I can practice them. That doesn't tend to exist in the world of fiction writing and storytelling. Instead, a lot of the advice is write how you feel. Right? If you want characters to be believable, ask yourself if you believe them. That stuff is not actionable or objective. So what is the purpose of doing a color mapping exercise? Well, the color mapping is really a way of training your brain to think about these different pieces. So if we go back to our color map for a second, I'm gonna walk you through how I've set this up and what each piece is doing. But really the goal, if we go back to our iPad here, the goal is to take a little drawing like this and to break it down even further, I want to get down to the individual scene level. Okay, so here's what this should look like your color map is basically an exercise to understand, okay, if I have a beginning and I have an end, and I have a story arc that I have to get through right from here all the way to here. And then if we go down to the second level, we have, you know, maybe Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, Act 4, Act 5, right? We have our setup, we have our midpoint. All the things that I walk through. What a color map does is you associate different colors with different characters or different character archetypes. So in sci fi and fantasy, there's really only seven or so character archetypes that are in that you're going to follow throughout the story. Now, sometimes are there different ones? Of course, but like, in general, these are the archetypes. Archetypes. And I'll just walk through those here first. So typically you have, especially in this genre, you have what I'm naming as the enemy. Now, the enemy here, that word represents the largest enemy force. Okay, so in Star wars, right? That is like the bad side. That is Chancellor Palpatine. You know, in Lord of the Rings, that is the bad side. That is like the broader enemy. That's Saurman and Salomon. Or I always mix up their two names, right? Sauron and Solomon. I think I'm close. So enemy just is the largest enemy force. Okay. Sometimes this manifests as a character. Sometimes this manifests as like, just a broad. Like evil gods, right? Broad enemy force. Below enemy, you have what I am naming as the rival. The rival is almost always the counterpoint to the hero. The rival is also the one who is the apprentice to the broader enemy or the one who is executing the enemy's deeds. So in Star wars, especially in this specific episode, the enemy would be Chancellor Palpatine. The dark side, the rival would be Kylo Ren. And so he's on the enemy side, but he's a distinct character archetype. Below that, you have what I am naming as the broader army. The army, especially in sci fi and fiction on the evil side is almost always mindless. Mindless in the sense of they are just committed to evil. They're not questioning their actions. In Star wars, these are the stormtroopers. In Lord of the Rings, these are the orcs. And just like the army that they've put together, right? That's sort of the hierarchy of the bad side. On the good side, you have the mentor. And mentor is. Is sort of an interchangeable thing because the mentor could be the counterpoint to the enemy. The mentor could just be the good side. Broader, you know, gods. In Star wars, it's just like Jedis in general or a specific Jedi Master. Right. So I'm using mentor sort of as, like, a high level there. It can show up in different ways. Below the mentor, you have the story's hero. The hero is the counterpoint to the rival. The mentor is the counterpoint to the enemy. Right. And then the same way that the dark side has army, the light side has allies. And almost always the allies are the scrappy, clever. They're the underdogs. Right? So you have the mindless, super powerful, like, strong in numbers, evil army. And then you have the scrappy, clever, underdog battalion that is the allies. And then you have these two sort of flow. Oh, and then one more is you have the secondary characters that support the hero, which I am naming the comedic comrades. So these are the friends that the hero makes along the way. And these comrades help the hero fulfill their story arc. And then second is they fill in the hero's gaps. They almost always, like, come in and save the hero, whether it's through, like, a character trait or it's a specific item or a specific skill. That's something that the hero needs, you know, at a particular moment in time. Those are typically the primary archetypes, and you can see how they sort of match up with each other. Right. And then you have these two floating archetypes that I'm calling either the unexpected rogue, which would be the, like, someone on the evil side, or unexpected ally, which would be someone on the good side. An unexpected, unexpected rogue. In Star wars, for example, this would be like a bounty hunter. You know, they're not necessarily, like, fully committed to the enemy's plan, but they are for hire or they are available as needed as long as they're getting something out of it. And they just lean toward the dark side. Right. The unexpected ally is sort of the same thing on the light side, which is someone who maybe is like an old friend who comes back out of nowhere to help the cause. They didn't want to be part of it, but because they see that the allies need some help, they jump back in for a second, and then they're left after that scene. Or maybe they're an old foe, they're an old enemy, and then they have some sort of need or desire with the good guys, the light side, and they're willing to sort of put their differences aside to help them in order to get something else that they want. Right? So you have these floating archetypes of unexpected rogue and unexpected ally. When you understand that most sci fi and fantasy stories are really just following that cast of characters, yes, there can be other ones thrown in there, et cetera. But like this is 80, 90% of the cast of most sci fi or fantasy stories. When you understand that these are the archetypes you're following and you really want to break down, how does a story get assembled? One of the best things that you can do is associate different colors to these different character archetypes. Why? Because when you look at a story like this, what's actually happening, and this is what took me a long time to figure out what's actually happening, is that each one of these character archetypes has their own individual storyline. Right. But we don't experience their storyline necessarily linear in the sense that it's not back to back to back to back to back. Right. How we experience it is sort of scattered throughout the story. That's why when you're watching movies, you're all, you know, one scene you're following the good guys, and then the next scene you're following the bad guys. Right. If we were to list the good scenes, you know, the good guy scenes and the bad guy scenes, then they would all be one after another. But that's not how we experience the story. They're changed around. Right? So. So really what a story looks like is something like this. It's like we have a bad guy scene here and then we have another one here, and then we follow one here, and then we come back here and we got one here, we come back here, and then we got two here, and then those are all the bad guy scenes, right? And then we have the good guy scenes. The good guy scenes are like, well, we got one here, one here, we got another one here, another one here, here, here. Then we got here, and already, even if we just went high level, you know, bad guy, good guy. This helps us better understand the cadence of the story because we're like, oh, okay, so first we follow the good guys, then we transition over, I'll do this in a different color. Then we transition over, and then we follow the bad guys, and then we come back to the good guys. Then we go back to the bad guys, and then the bad guys, we continue from the last scene and then we go back to the good guys. And so that is what's actually happening. Now we can take this a step further when we actually put together a whole color map. Because what is a color map? A color map is where you have this story and you have the story Arc, and then you have your primary sections, and then you associate colors with each individual character archetype. So it's not just like, here are the bad guy scenes, and here are the good guy scenes. We can get even more specific. We have the bad guy, the enemy scenes. We see the enemy here, and then we don't actually see the enemy again until here, and then we see the enemy once here, and then we see the enemy ones here, and then we have the enemy ones here. Right? And then maybe below that. Let's see, we got the rival, right? And so then we see the rival come in here, and maybe we got two there, and then we got a rival there. We got a rival here, we got one more here, another one here, and then, oh, we follow the hero, and then the hero comes in here, and then we got a couple of the hero here. Right? Maybe we have more hero here at the end, but. And then we have the comedic comrades. Comedic comrades come in and help here. We're on a quest. We come in, we do this. So hopefully, as you see me doing this, every color I add, you should be able to see how the story gets assembled a little bit more. Right? That is ultimately the goal. And once you isolate these down into colors, a bunch of things happen. Okay, so one, it actually becomes really actionable for you to sit there and figure out and go, okay, so how do I assemble a story like this? It's not one big story. What it is is just a collection of individual scenes, and each individual scene is accomplishing something different for a different character. The reason why I think that the color mapping exercise is so valuable and for context. I've been doing this for about a year now. I've done this for a handful of different movies. I've done this for a handful of different books. Each one of these color maps takes me probably somewhere in the ballpark of 70 to 100 hours. Okay. It takes a long time. And when you're doing it, your brain hurts because you're really having to sit there and go, wait a second. I just watched two scenes in a row. What happened? What are the interactions between each character? What did we accomplish? What is the purpose of this specific scene or this collection of scenes in the story? And then forcing yourself to articulate it. The other reason why this is so effective as an exercise is in the book peak that I'm reading. One of the things that they stress about high performers is that high performers, what they do over time is they build visual models in their brain. Visual models allow you to Pull information very quickly, and they also make it easier for you to organize information in your brain very quickly. So some examples are memory champions. Memory champions. The technique that most of them end up using is what's called a memory palace. And a memory palace is where you have this imaginary space in your brain. So think of a 90 bedroom house, and you have this physical space in your brain that you build. And every time you're trying to remember something, you attach it to a different object inside of your memory palace. So in order to remember a string of 100 random digits, for example, you would associate each digit or grouping of digits with a different object inside of a different space inside of your memory palace. So that all you have to do is walk through your memory palace. And as you're walking through it, you're passing the different objects or different spaces, and you remember each of the digits. Okay, I'm not making this up. This is like how memory champions do their shit. The same thing is true with something like chess. There's a reason why chess players can recall individual moves within chess games. You know, if you ask a chess master, hey, remember that match you played 20 years ago and remember what happened at the mid game? A lot of them can say, I remember the game, I remember the mid game. I can tell you all of the pieces that were on the chessboard at the time. I could tell you all the moves that are available to me at that time. That is because part of becoming a chess master or grandmaster is building these visual models inside of your head. I believe you can do the same thing with writing. I didn't really realize it until I did this exercise and until I started reading this book. But a lot of the decisions that I've made along my own writing career over the past decade, I've been doing stuff like this intuitively. So especially with nonfiction, I have written so many articles in the nonfiction world, so many thought leadership articles, ghostwriting articles for other people, newsletters, it's all the same structure. I didn't really realize that I had basically just built a repository of visual templates in my brain and so I could just be given information and immediately cycle through all these visual templates in my brain. And that's what has allowed my output to increase so much over the years. When I started doing these color mapping exercises, I realized that the true benefit of doing this is you end up building these visual maps inside of your brain. Where you can take this a step further is let's bring the iPad back out. For this is when you have A map like this, what inevitably happens, like, let's say we're at a specific place in the story. Come on, what are we doing here? We're at a specific place in the story, and we're in just the setup. So let's pretend this is just the setup. Right? Now you start to learn patterns. So maybe one pattern is where, like, we follow the enemy first, and then we transition over to the hero, and then we transition over to the comedic comrades, and then the comedic comrades and the hero interact so they share a scene. Right? And then we see them go to war with the enemy. All of them. Okay, so you would see all three of these stack up, Right. Once you start to break it apart, you begin to realize that this is just a pattern. And when you start isolating stories into patterns, then what happens is, as you're telling a story or as you're working on writing one out or writing a novel, when you get confronted with. You're like, okay, so I just had two enemy scenes back to back. This got established. Where do I go from here? You hear people say that in writing all the time, right? Where do I go from here? So much of the existing advice is, well, you just follow the story. You just let the characters do their thing. You just follow the characters on the page, right? That is not helpful. What is significantly more helpful is to ask the question, well, let's put it in a different context. What would a chess player do? What a chess player would do is they would look for different patterns, and then they would know, oh, we used these two moves first. Okay. What comes after that is a double hero followed by a comedic comrade followed by a comedic comrade and a hero followed by a big battle scene. That is just a pattern. And so when you start to break things apart into these color maps, what happens is you're able to start seeing patterns. So let me point out a couple that I noticed building this for Star Wars. First of all, the first three scenes of the movie, all we're doing is we're setting up the Rival's Desire. So first we follow Kylo Ren in the forest somewhere. You know, he. And we're trying to figure out, okay, well, what. What is he doing? He's trying to find where Chancellor Palpatine is. Darth Sidious, right? So he's fighting, fighting out into the forest. He finds the wayfinder. He finds this object, the object tells him where to go. He grabs that object, he goes, and he meets up with Darth Sidious. And then we see Darth Sidious, the Enemy and rival Kylo Ren interact. And we have established this is. This is the game plan. This is how they're going to take over the world. We know what Chancellor Palpatine wants. We know what the rival Kylo Ren wants. That's been established. We've done that in three scenes. And then we move into setting up the next storyline, which is we set up the comedic comrades. Right. And then after that, three more scenes, we do the same thing with the hero. As you start to realize these patterns, well, if you sit down and write a story immediately, the first thing is you should think of all three of these as three different openers. I have a rival desire opener. I have a comedic comrades starting the first quest opener, and I have the hero training. You know, they're in training, they're trying to build some special skill. Right. I have the hero training opener. Okay, so think about how much easier it is when you sit down to write and you go, all right, instead of me sitting here and going, let me trust my intuition, how should I begin this story? That's not the most effective way of doing it. The most effective way would be for you to be able to cycle through in your head and go, all right, I've memorized 20 different openers. Do I want the rival desire opener? Do I want the hero in training opener? Do I want the comedic comrades quest opener? And then when you have that framework, writing becomes very easy because then you go, oh, well, I pick this opener arbitrarily, and then I go execute it. Right Now, I want to end with one thing, because I know I'm throwing a lot in here. This is something I've been percolating on for a while. So if you can't tell, I'm very excited about it. Where this gets really interesting is, first of all, this as an exercise will make you so much more proficient as a storyteller because it helps you understand how stories actually get assembled. And when you understand how something gets assembled down to the unit level, then you're able to play with it more. You're able to improve individual pieces, which, going back to golf and chess and all of the examples that I used, that is the best way to improve. Okay. Second is this allows you to build a visual model. When you have a visual model in your head, you're able to retrieve information significantly faster and more effectively. Same examples that I used. Right. But where this gets super interesting is third, the use case for combining this level of detail and thinking with AI. I think that part of the reason why AI up until this point has not been super great or super well received in the world of storytelling and fiction writing is because a lot of the prompting that is happening with AI is happening. We'll go back to our little iPad here. The prompting is really still getting used to my new. My new iPad here. So bear with me. The prompting is really just someone trying to vocalize and verbalize to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever. They're basically saying, here's what my story is about. Write me the story. That's why it doesn't work, because you're making all of this middle so ambiguous for AI now, someone who's moderately proficient might go, and this is what I tried to do for a while. They might go, all right, here's my whole story. Let's break it down into five acts, you know, now write it better, but still not great. Where I think this gets to the point where AI writing and human writing, whether you like it or you don't, becomes indistinguishable, is when you are able to build your own IP down to this level of clarity. Because if you can isolate individual scenes, and I think you can take this even further, and that's what I plan to do. If you can isolate individual scenes and then frameworks within each scene. So again, pretend here for a second that we're talking about just one scene. Okay? We just have one scene here. And then within just one scene. So I'm talking about, like, just this block right here, right? Then within just one scene, you're like, I know that I'm going to have. I'm going to have the character do this first, and then this needs to happen, and then this conflict appears, and then here's the resolution, and then here's the beginning of the next quest, and then here's the transition. What is that? That's just another pattern. So if you can do this for each individual, if you can do this for the whole story and then all the acts, and then all the individual scenes and then all of the pieces within each individual scene, and you can create rules for each individual piece. You're like, here's how I want you to execute this big conflict in the middle. Here's how I want you to execute the beginning of the next quest. AI is going to be able to write this as good, probably better than the vast majority of humans. But it's not because you're deferring all the thinking to AI. It's because you're giving it so much specific, objective, tangible direction. And I Think this is where all of storytelling is headed. I think becoming a storyteller in the digital AI first age is going to be completely dependent upon your ability to create your own ip, your own frameworks, your own ability to articulate how stories get assembled. So if you're a writer who just sort of sits down and trusts their own intuition is like whatever comes out of my fingers, that's what's going on the page. Yeah, you might be able to write novels, but you are not going to be able to unlock the same level of leverage as other people. So anyway, thanks for coming to my TED Talk. I'm really excited about this. As an idea, I wanted to share this color mapping exercise because it's been very effective for me. It has taught me a lot. Let me know in the comments if this is something that you would be interested in. I've actually been thinking about bundling a bunch of these color maps together and sharing them. So if, if that's something that you would be interested in, drop me a comment or if you have any questions, let me know. And otherwise I would just encourage you to give this a try. You know, like use this as inspiration. Turn on your favorite sci fi or fantasy movie. You can do this for any genre. I just do it for sci fi and fantasy. And every time a scene changes, pause. So watch. Usually every scene is about a minute. Let the scene play, pause, create a new cell, Write inside of the cell what happened from an archetype perspective. Right. You know, not necessarily like the movie. If you see here, like in this first cell, I have rival in search of enemy rages war on planet to find fantasy device, giving him the location. So there I'm trying to articulate it through an archetypal lens because that helps me just understand like stories in general as opposed to getting too hyper focused on. No, this is how it works in Star wars or this is how it works in Lord of the Rings. It's like, yes, that's what's happening. But the real takeaway is we want to understand how this works just for stories in general. Okay. So I hope this was helpful. I hope you enjoyed this little breakdown and if you give this color mapping exercise a try, let me know because it's been really, really effective for me.