← The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
The EDAN Writing Framework: Explanation, Narration, Action, Description
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I want to introduce you to what I like to call the Eden Framework. So this is the easiest way that I have come up with to understand what writing is. Because if you ask someone, what is writing? Or oftentimes you hear people say, I want to be a successful writer, the problem with the word writing is that it's a bundled term. There are a zillion different types of writing, right? There are so many different types of writers that you can be like, I wrote this whole book. Writer career paths. There's tons of different career paths that you can take as a writer, and each of them lead to different types of success, right? So when we say, what is writing? It's very easy to just come to the conclusion, oh, well, writing is just writing words, you know, and if you put push it a little further. Good writing is clear writing or specific writing. It's not that any of these things are wrong. It's that they are unclear. They are not that helpful, right? If someone says to you, you just need to communicate better, you don't actually know what to do. And over the years, you know, I studied fiction writing in college. I've been studying literature for a long time. My favorite type of thing to read is literature. I have a special affinity for Russian literature and Russian short stories. And over the years, as I read and as I study writing, I'm always asking myself the question, how could I reduce the thing that I am looking at to its simplest form? So I'm not just looking at a great book, or I'm not just looking at a great chapter, or I'm not even just looking at a great paragraph or a great sentence. What I'm doing is I'm asking myself, what is happening here in this sentence, in this word choice, in this paragraph, in this chapter? And more importantly, how is it being assembled? And I think that this is a really important question. And so today, what I want to walk you through is the simplest framework I've come up with for understanding what's actually happening on the page, okay? And I call it the Eden Framework. Eden stands for explanation, description, action and narration. Now, over the years, every time I sit down to read, and this is, I think, more true for fiction, but it is just as applicable to nonfiction. There's just little nuances. Whenever I sit down to read, I notice, and I have noticed over the past decade, that almost everything I'm reading in any given sentence or paragraph can be reverse engineered into one of these four buckets. You are either reading the writer explaining something to you. So explanation, you're reading a description of something, you are reading an action, or you are getting some form of narration. And I'm going to explain the nuances of what each of these mean. But once this clicked for me, it really changed the way that I approached reading. And so, for example, like, here's a picture of a book that I'm reading right now. It's called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. And as I'm reading, this is actually something that I do. And I've started doing this ever since this framework clicked for me, which is I will read each sentence and then all the sentences in a paragraph, and then I will go back and ask myself, okay, which one of those sentences was explanation? Which one of those sentences was action? Which one was description? Which one was narration? And this is especially a cool exercise, by the way, if you pair this with different colors. So if you do this with different color pens or with highlighters, because what happens is you start to see the writing as more than just a bunch of words on the page. You're able to see them as Lego blocks, like different blocks that get stacked on top of each other. And to use an extreme example, like, visually, how would you interpret if you saw an entire paragraph that was all one color, meaning the entire paragraph was action versus another paragraph that is, you know, one color, one sentence is action, and then you get two sentences of explanation, and then you get a sentence of description, and then you get a sentence of narration. When you. When you start associating colors with different. With these four different types of writing and what's actually happening, you start to go beyond just the words on the page. You're able to see it, see the way that it's structured. You're able to look at. Okay, so in order to elicit a paragraph like this, what I'm really doing is stacking these different things on top of each other in this order, which I find to be really helpful. If you haven't noticed, I created this framework mostly as a way of making sense of what's happening for myself. And that's why I think it's so helpful, which is why I wanna pass it along. The other thing about this framework and reading in this way is you start to realize why certain pieces of writing elicit the feelings that they do in you. And this is where, you know, writing is such an infinite game. Metaphorically, I really like, or I guess I should say analogy. In an analogy, writing is very similar to me, to chess. And what I mean by that is with chess, for A beginner, all you have to do is learn what each piece does, right? Like, I got to know what a pawn does. I got to know what a queen does. I got to know how the bishop moves. I got to know how the rook moves, right? That's really the foundation of playing chess. I just got to know how the pieces work. But then there are infinite ways to play chess, right? There are infinite combinations of moves that you can make on the chessboard. And this was sort of the aha. That I had, which is, if you think of writing, and I'm sure, like, if we wanted to, we could probably break this down even more specifically or into even smaller parts. But I think that this is the simplest without overcomplicating it, which is why I like it. But if you think about this Eden framework as explanation, description, action, and narration, if you think of them as different chess pieces, the first step of writing is understanding what are the pieces on the board. And I think now that this has clicked for me, I think it's so ironic. I even went to school for writing. I studied writing. I think it's so ironic the way that writing gets taught. Because writing, writing and the way that it typically gets taught doesn't start here. It starts from a place of write what you feel. Write what you love. Be honest on the page. The problem with all of those instructions is they are bundled instructions. It requires a lot of subjective interpretation of what that means. This I find to be a lot more helpful, because what you're doing is you're starting from a place of truth. There are four pieces. Here are what the four pieces do, and each of the four pieces serves a different function. And so in order to learn how to play chess, you can't just put someone down in front of a chessboard and go, hey, just play how you feel. It's impossible because you don't know what the pieces do yet, right? You have to first learn what the pieces do, and then you can play with them, and then you can start chaining them together in more and more unique or advanced ways, right? That's why in chess, like, I bought a bunch of chess books just to solidify this analogy in my head. But that's why you can buy a chess book that's the size of a dictionary that is nothing but openers. It's like, here are a thousand different combinations for opening a chess game, right? And the same is actually true with writing. Once you understand how these pieces work, it's not just, oh, I do a paragraph of explanation, and then I do a paragraph of description and then I do a paragraph of action and then a paragraph of narration. That is an extremely beginner way of thinking about it. But as you become more proficient, you start to realize, okay, not only can I mix and match these, but I can stack them in different ways. No different than a chess opener where you open with the pawn and then you bring the rook out, and then you move the bishop into position. And it's not until five or ten moves later that then you've established a position or you've achieved something on the board. Right. I think of writing the exact same way, which is as you stack these things together, you're going to elicit different feelings in the reader. So let's go through each one because there's some nuance. And I think it's important to understand how I'm defining these in my brain. And I also want to preface. I have. Once this framework clicked, I have tried to break it. So I have really tried to read things and go, is there any, Is there ever something that makes this framework no longer hold true? And I'm letting you know, I haven't broken it yet. So that's why I like it so much. And I've waited until I really stress tested it and really thought it out before I decided to share it here. So the first is explanation. In its simplest form, explanation is just context. Okay. So when you're reading a story, it's not just that a character's action matters, right? An action in and of itself is neither important or unimportant. An action only has importance once it has context around it. Okay. And so what I mean by that is like, let's say you have a character. Let's say you have a situation where one character yells at another character. Well, the yelling is the action, right? But yelling in and of itself isn't necessarily bad or good. What makes that action have meaning is the context that we surround it with. And so, for example, if it's like a kid who has an abusive alcoholic father and the kid finally musters up the courage to yell at the alcoholic father, right? That is a moment of growth. That is a moment of redemption. We might view that as a very positive moment. Oh, the character is finally standing up for themselves. Themselves, Right. And we only know that we only interpret that action that way when we have the context of the character and the backstory. And so when you are assembling sentences or paragraphs or chapters or stories of any kind, you have to ask yourself, how much explanation do I actually need to give in order to make the ultimate action or the description have meaning. And so this is what I mean by first you have to understand what the pieces do, and then you, you can think of different ways where you can stack these together. Like, for example, sometimes writers will start with the explanation, so you, they, they give the context and then they go into the action. Other times they start with the action and then they give the explanation thereafter. Or, or even further, sometimes they give an action and then they don't explain it until three chapters later. You think about this with TV shows too. With movies, like, different pieces of information get revealed at different times. Going back to our chess analogy, it is no different than moving a bishop into place and that bishop not actually activating its position for 10 moves into the future. Right. Just because you moved it into place doesn't mean that its job is done. You moved it into place for a reason. And you go, okay, I'm putting this here because I know that I want to eventually use it to create an advantage 10 moves later. That is, you should think of writing and these pieces in the same way. What are you explaining now? That either gives context that is important now, or maybe gives context for something that will be important later. Okay, description then. And this is really interesting. Description is implied meaning. Okay. This is one of the reasons why I love Russian literature so much. Because if you've ever read Nikolai Gogol or Anton Chekhov or like any of the great Russian literary writers, a big part of their style is they don't explain anything. Like, explanation almost doesn't exist. And instead what they do is they just give you a ton of very specific description, in which case you have to extract the meaning. The meaning is in some way implied. It's almost that this quality is closer to poetry, almost. And so, for example, like, I could explain a conflict, or I could just describe a very uncomfortable situation. I could describe objects on a table. I could describe the way that two characters are sitting next to each other. I don't need to explain necessarily what's going on between them, but if I describe the way that they're sitting next to each other in the right way and that meaning is implied, and the reader has to sort of figure that out on their own. And so, just as an example of how these different pieces get used by different writers and different genres of writers, I tend to notice that the more advanced, obviously there's outliers and nuances, but the more advanced a piece of literature, the more it uses description, AKA the more that it Relies on implied meaning. I would say the closer you get to the other side of the spectrum, which is maybe more genre fiction, maybe more accessible fiction, or more accessible stories in general. Nonfiction too, tends to lean more on explanation. And the reason, you know, and I've noticed this even as a writer, as I write different things, the reason is because explanation is always easier than description. It goes back to the whole show, don't tell. Like that is an adage in the world of creative writing. Well, what are they really saying when someone says show, don't tell. What they're really saying is description over explanation, right? Telling is explanation. Showing is description. The challenge is that description is hard. It's way easier to just explain, oh, these two characters don't like each other, right? Rather than sit there and really imagine and go, okay, what is a moment that I could describe where the reader would imply that meaning or that meaning is implied on its own? I don't have to say it so overtly. So this is where Description, I think, is a very powerful piece. It is a more advanced piece, I think, where description goes wrong. We've all read books and stories like this is where the writer is describing things for the sake of describing them, right? Like there's two pages describing a doorknob. Like, that's where description tends to go awry. Because really the purpose of description is that it should in some way replace. It is the more advanced version of explanation. The third piece is Action. And I would say of the four, Action is actually the simplest piece you could think of. Action. Almost as. I don't know if I would want to go so reductive. But you could almost think of action as the pawn, the pawn on the chessboard. The reason is because action is very. I think it is as easy, if not easier than explanation. Because action is just something happening, right? He smiled, she threw the lamp, they walked across the park. He spent a bunch of money on a watch. Like, these are. These are actions. Actions are verbs, right? Things that are happening. And so I like to think of action as movement. And so in some way, the purpose of action is to move the story forward. Now, there are, and this is true for all of these pieces, but there are weak versions of this piece and there are stronger versions of this piece. A weak action is something that happens, but it doesn't have any long term meaning. It doesn't actually move the story forward. For example, imagine you open a book and the character just goes, I took a step forward and then I took another step, and then I took a Third step. And then I took a fourth step. Just because actions are happening don't mean that every action is consequential. And so because action is such an easy piece to use, you don't you want to push yourself and not just go, okay, well, let me just have something happen for the sake of happening. Right. Stronger actions are where something happens and it is in some way consequential. It moves the plot forward, moves the story forward. It reveals something about the character, reveals their intentions. It reveals a weakness that they have or a strength that they have. Right. I think nothing exemplifies this better than if you think about different genres of film, action films tend to be the most. There's just a bunch of cool shit happening on the screen. You know, it's not necessarily that it's the most advanced story or the most heart wrenching story or the most meaningful story. It's just a bunch of explosions on the screen. And that's fine. You know, there is value of that in some way and there's obviously a large audience of people who enjoy that. But if you think of action on a spectrum, it's like on one side of the spectrum you just have, there's a bunch of explosions happening and lots of people doing high action things, Mission Impossible, you know, and then on the other side of the spectrum, you have maybe much more subtle actions. You know, like the action itself is not this big grand event. It's something much smaller. It's something much more subtle. And the action might be small, but the meaning based on the context around it. Right. The explanation around that action or the description around that action gives that action so much more weight. That's how, you know, you could have two films and it's like, all right, Transformers, one robot explodes in front of the other one, this giant action. But that might have a lot less meaning than something that's like an Academy Award winning film where this character does one very subtle thing. And because of all the other explanation and description and context that has preceded that action, you're like, you walk out of the theater, you finish the movie, and you're just like, oh my gosh, that was so. That was so agonizing, you know, so it's not necessarily the size of the action, it's the way that all the pieces get stacked up around the action that gives it meaning. And then the fourth piece, and this one took me a while to land on because I wasn't really sure of the best way to, to categorize it, but where I ended up landing Is narration. Now, narration. Narration is the narrator, right? But the narrator's voice serves multiple purposes. And so what I mean by narration is the narrator could be explaining something. The narrator could be describing something. The narrator could be taking an action. But I classify sentences or phrases or pieces as narration when the author or the narrator is really peeking out from behind the curtain and making their own personal point of view known. Now, this is a more subtle and harder thing to recognize. I had to really sit here for a while and kind of figure out how to recognize when this was happening in the text. So I'll give you a little example here. This is an example that I'm using throughout. But in this passage, I wrote this passage, and I did this as an example. So in this passage, the narrator says, we hadn't talked all summer, not since his mom died and my parents got divorced. And that's the thing about divorce, is it's selfish because it hurts the people around you more than it hurts the people getting divorced. Now, what's interesting about this phrase that I've highlighted here is that this is narration. The sentences that precede it are explanation. We hadn't talked all summer. That's backstory. We hadn't done this thing. That's context. You need to know. Not since his mom died and my parents got divorced. That's backstory. That's context. That is explanation. But then we extend the sentence, and we go into narration and the narration. You know that it's narration because all of a sudden, it's voicing an opinion or a belief. So. And that's the thing about divorce, is it's selfish because it hurts the people around you more than it hurts the people getting divorced. That's not necessarily a character. That's not dialogue. That's not an action. That's not explanation or backstory. That's not description. That is narration. That is where you can hear. It's. It's either, but it's almost always both. It's either the narrator in the story and. Or the author speaking through the narrative voice, voicing some sort of opinion. Or really, I like thinking about it as a point of view on the world. This is a point of view. Not everyone necessarily believes this, but this narrator and. Or author believes this. Okay. And narration, I actually like to think, you know, if we go back to our chess analogy, I like to think of narration as maybe the king or queen on the chessboard, because those pieces don't typically get used that much in a game. Right. Like you want. You want to use more of the pawns, you want to use the rooks and the knights and the bishops. The king and queen are really the last resort, you know, but that's not to say they don't have value. They actually are the two most valuable pieces in the game. And that's how I like thinking about narration, is it's not that this piece doesn't have value, it's that it actually has so much value that you want to protect it. You know, you're not going to move your king out in the first three moves of the game and be like, I'm going to start playing aggressive with my king. You know, I don't know. Maybe you will. The point of narration is this is where themes in stories really come to life. Because it's not just that a story is based on an idea or that there's a theme present in the story. It's that you also want to know what does the narrator and. Or what does the author think about this theme? What is their point of view on this theme? Or what is their point of view on this specific thing that's happening. And so the more that I read, I tend to notice, if we think in hierarchy, I tend to notice that explanation and action are the two pieces that get used the most. Let me explain why this is important. Character takes an action. The next most advanced piece is description. It's harder. It's harder to do well, but it's obviously important. And then the most advanced piece is narration. And that's where you start to get a sense of what is, what's actually the point of view that's driving this story. That little tangent. In literature, especially literature that's competing for the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Prize, literature in that category, one of the defining characteristics is the narration. Because literature that tends to win awards, for example, it's not just that it's a great story or that it's a beautiful story or that it's told really well. It's the fact that it's all of those things that plus it's all of those things, plus these moments of narration where you get a sense of a unique way of seeing the world, a unique point of view, that narration ends up being that extra special quality that usually makes a story or a piece of literature stand out. Narration, by the way, is one that I continue to have to practice actively to be able to recognize it. Because sometimes it's so subtle that it sneaks right past you and you don't realize it. And sometimes it's buried inside of a Sentence of explanation. Or sometimes it's buried between two sentences of explanation and action. So I guess the. The thing I want to leave you with about the Eden Framework is one of the most helpful things that you can do. And I'm reading this other book, actually, I have it on my desk here. I'll share it with you. I'm reading this other book called Peak, and this is all about high and peak performance, obviously, and what it is that high performers do differently than everyone else. And something that I'm taking away from this book and that I've been thinking about a lot is this idea of how to improve at something. And I think for many years I operated from a place, especially through the lens of writing, of thinking. The way I get better at writing is just by writing. And in the beginning, that is true. When you are a beginner, that is true. Because doing anything is better than doing nothing. If you go from I'm not writing to I'm writing, of course you're going to improve because you went from zero to one, right? The problem, and this is one of those, like, what got you here won't get you there. The problem with that approach, as time goes on, is that you will inevitably plateau. Like, once you are actively doing the thing, doing it more doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get better at it. And this is kind of the big takeaway from this book that I find so interesting, because it's verbalizing something that I think I've understood intuitively, but now it's making me much more conscious of it. A great example is like, we all have that friend who plays golf recreationally, for example, and they play golf once a month or twice a month, and they've been doing it for years, but they've. So they're consistent. They're doing the thing. But have they actually gotten better at golf over the past five years? No, they're probably like incrementally better, but roughly the same. Right. So why is that? And the big takeaway and the big point of this book is that when you start to plateau in any given thing, what allows you to jump from where you are to where you want to go? Or the next level of proficiency is by upgrading your mental model. And not just like understanding it, because upgrading a mental model means understanding how to do something differently, but then isolating that thing with that new mental model and practicing it over and over and over again. So are you going to become a better golfer by just playing golf? No. Eventually you will plateau. Are you going to become a better chess player by just playing games of chess. No. Eventually you're going to plateau. The way that you improve then is by isolating parts of the game, parts of the decisions that you're making. You know, if you think of a chess game or a golf game as one big bundled thing, you have to unbundle it. Golf is a great example. You have the piece of I'm driving off the tee. You have, I'm playing on the fairway, or maybe I hit it into the bushes. You have the short game. Maybe I'm right in front of the green. I got to chip it onto the green, or I got to get it out of the sand pit. And then you've got putting, right? You can sort of break golf up into four different pieces. Chess, in many ways is similar. You have openers, you have mid game, you have near endgame, and you have endgame, right? So the way that you improve then is by isolating one of those and then finding someone who has an upgraded mental model to you and going, let me adopt a new and different mental model. Maybe the way that you've been chipping onto the green is not the most effective way. Right. Maybe you need to upgrade your mental model and go, oh, I've actually been aiming at the wrong thing. Or I have my hand placement totally off. I need to completely rework my hand placement. Right. Chess, I'm always trying to play in this direction, but really I need to change the way I'm thinking about that and play in a different direction. So you upgrade your mental model and then the important piece, and it's the most important because it's the thing that no one wants to do, which is then you practice or you create mechanisms to practice just that individual piece over and over and over and over and over again. And that is how then you get really good at that one specific skill, which inherently makes your whole game better, and then you do it again for a different skill, and then you do it again for a different skill, and then you do it again for a different skill. Right? But it's the isolating of the skill that is how you ultimately improve. And so the reason that I'm sharing that as context explanation is more and more especially because I've been writing for a very long time. I've been writing on the Internet for 15 years now, and I've written thousands and thousands and thousands of things. And at a certain point, I've had to acknowledge in myself, wait a second. I don't know that I'm actually Getting that much better. I think that I have plateaued in different things. And so that's why I've been reading books like Peak. You know, it's like trying to understand, okay, so how do I move beyond this plateau? And this is like, now, with this framework, this Eden framework in mind, this is something that I'm pretty fixated on right now, which is, okay, am I going to get better at telling stories, or am I going to get better at writing novels, or am I going to get better at whatever type of thing I'm trying to improve at just by doing it more? Maybe incrementally, maybe, But I think a much more helpful and productive approach, and this is what I've started doing with this framework in mind, is to take the Eden framework and go, okay, all I'm going to do is I'm going to practice explanation, and I'm going to practice explanation in different ways, different styles, and I'm going to read only focusing on how other writers approach explanation. And I'm just going to hammer that piece home for, like, weeks in a row. And then I'm going to do the same thing with description, and then I'm going to do the same thing with action. And then I'm going to do the same thing with narration, and then I'm going to start slowly combining them. So then I will practice explanation and description woven together, and then I'll practice description and action woven together, and then I'll practice action and narration woven together. And then from there I'll. I'll create even more advanced combinations. I will practice explanation and description and action. How can those three things be woven together? And how can I weave them together in different ways? This is why I am so obsessed with this analogy of writing is like chess, because this is how, if you wanted to be a chess grandmaster, this is how you would approach the game. And I'm kind of like kicking myself for not realizing this sooner. I should have realized this, like, five or ten years ago. But if you wanted to become a grandmaster in chess, you would isolate each individual part of the game, and then you would memorize a bunch of different combinations. This is why chess grandmasters, they all can recite games back to you. They can all tell you 30 moves into the game, this is where all the chess pieces were assembled. There's a reason why they can do that. It's because that is a reflection of how they study. And so this is what I'm starting to think a lot more about in my own writing, is how can I isolate These different pieces, how can I upgrade my mental models for each individual piece? How can I repeatedly practice that individual piece? And then how can I start to combine them in more and more and more and more and more ways? And so one of the things, because I'm such a big believer in using writing as a vehicle for crystallizing your learning, which is a bit of a meta concept, as I go along and do this and as I find each new combination, I also have a separate doc where I articulate that combination to myself. So I'm like, okay, if I want to elicit this thing in the story or this feeling in the reader, I am combining this piece with this piece in this order. That's an opener. That's opener number one. But if I combine them in this different opener, here's opener number two. Then if I combine them in an even more different combination, here's opener number three. And I can see how if I continue to do this over the next five or 10 years, I will get to a point where I will have thousands of different individual combinations memorized so that at any point as I'm writing, I will be able to just retrieve and go, okay, I want to create this feeling. I want, you know, this amount of tension, or I want this specific implied meaning, or I know that 10 moves from now, I want this to happen in the story. What are the different combinations that allow me to get there? And it's no different than chess. It's no different than golf. It's no different than music. It's all of these different artistic pursuits or. And athletics too. They all follow the same fundamental rules. That's why I'm, like, so obsessed with this book right now. I think it's this. This is one of the best books I've ever read on high performance, by the way, so highly recommend it. So anyway, that's the Eden framework. It's something I've been thinking about a lot. I've been reading more literature lately and really trying to stress test this framework and just wanted to share it with you. I thought it would be helpful. Let me know your thoughts. Let me know if you have any questions. But this is a big part of how I've been studying writing lately, and I'm excited to keep pushing it and seeing how far I can take it.