all the story theory, concepts that we use to craft stories. Are not made up out of a void. They're not rules that some gatekeepers somewhere decided that we all have to follow or no one can be on the best seller lists. No. Stories reflect real life. Stories are about change because life is about change. We need change in stories. Because we experienced change every single day in our regular lives. Welcome to your next draft.
If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you're probably familiar with my constant refrain. I love editing. Wait. No wrong one. Stories are about change. I love editing is a great one though. Someday I'm going to get that unmerge and then I will be the only person who ever wears the t-shirt, but I will wear it everywhere and everywhere I go, writers will give me funny. Looks. Anyway. Not the point. Stories are about change. In fact change is one of the fundamental things.
Maybe the fundamental thing that makes stories useful. Interesting and fun. We tell stories to communicate with each other. We use stories to illustrate. I was there. And now I'm here. And this is how I got here. Or I encountered this problem. And then I overcame it and here's how. All of that has changed. Things were one way at the beginning. And another way in the end and stories, show us how that change happened. Without change. You have no story. With change.
And more specifically with the right change, you can craft an incredible story. And that is what this episode is all about. I'm going to share with you the way that I think about change in every book that I edited. I will share tons of examples of change, including breaking down the movie, how to train your dragon. I'll share not one, not two but three exercises that you can do today. To develop your awareness of change in stories.
And your ability to spot the changes or lack of change in your own stories. And I'll share a resource I've created that. I think you're going to love. It's the value shift word bank. And in it. I'm sharing an enormous list of all the values that change in the books that I've edited recently. I'll tell you more about it later in the episode. But if you want to go ahead and grab it, you can get it. Our subtler. dot com slash value. And that link is also in the show notes.
Ready to see how change really works in stories. Let's dive in. The first thing I want to do is define terms. I keep using the word change because it's straightforward. We all understand it instantly. But the phrase I use when I'm editing the phrase I use with my clients. It's actually the value shifts. What is the value shift? In this context, I like to think of value as kind of like a state of being. And the value shift. Means that it changes.
So for instance, if I'm sad and someone plays a song that I like, and it cheers me up. I go from sad to happy. That's a value shift. Or if it's raining outside and I walk out the door of my house and I get soaked, I go from dry to wet. That's the value shift. In other words, when I say value shifts, I'm specifying what change has occurred. Now. A few best practices about value shifts. First I aim to describe each value in one word. A single word, starting value. And the single word ending value.
This isn't a long-winded description of all the nuances of how something changed. This is a statement. At the beginning, things were one way. And at the end they were a different way. Sad to happy. Dry to wet. And second. The beginning and the ending values are related to each other. Think about walking into the rain. I didn't say that at the beginning I was dry. And at the end I was happy. Dry and happy are not on the same scale. Let's look at dry for a moment.
You can think of dry as a spectrum from dry to wet. Here are some words on that spectrum. Dry. Damn. Wet. Soaked. And then let's look at happy. Here's how that spectrum might go. Depressed sad, cheerful, happy, ecstatic. When you're identifying a value shift, you want to pick two values that are on the same scale. So I could say that the value shifts from dry to wet when I walk outside and maybe it shifts again from wet damp. When I come back in and I take off my wet jacket.
But I wouldn't say that I went from dry to happy. Those values aren't on the same scale. They're not related. Now when I go outside and I get drenched. I might also have an emotional reaction to that experience, which brings me to the third best practice. Multiple value shifts can happen at the same time. Maybe I was really looking forward to a walk in the sunshine. I'm excited. I'm also inside and I'm dry. I walk outside without looking and I get soaked by the rain.
And that moment, a few things have changed. I was dry. And now I'm wet. I was excited and now I'm disappointed. I was inside and now I'm outside. I could even say a fourth thing has changed. I was unaware that it was raining and now I'm aware. Dry to wet. Excited to disappointed. Inside to outside. Unaware to aware. Four values that have shifted all at once. And that brings me to one more important note about value shifts. Values shift on two levels. Internal and external.
External value shifts happen in the outside world. Outside of your characters. And this example of me walking into the rain. The external value shifts are dry to wet and inside to outside. Those are experiences that I'm having in the world around me. Internal value shifts happen inside your characters. There are shifts in the things that your characters think shifts in their emotions, shifts in the ways that they make decisions. In this case, I noted two internal value shifts.
Excited to disappointed and unaware to aware. Excited to disappointed is an emotional shift. My emotions have changed. I felt one thing and now I feel another. Unaware to aware is a shift in thoughts and knowledge. At first, I didn't have knowledge about something and now I do. You can have multiple internal value shifts and multiple external value shifts at the same time in the same moment. And both are really important to your story.
The external shifts are important to your plot and the internal shifts are important to your character development. So when I'm looking for value shifts, I like to look for both. I start with looking for external changes. And then I look for how those external events impact the characters. What internal changes have they experienced as well? So that's your introduction to value shifts. You see the concept. Uh, state of being has changed and we can identify the before state and the after state.
In one word each. Now, let me show you an example of how this works in a story. I'm going to examine my absolute favorite movie. How to train your dragon. This movie instantly became my favorite movie. When I first watched them theaters 13 years ago. And nothing has knocked it out of that top spot since. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. You are in for a treat. That said I am about to spoil the whole entire thing for you. It is 13 years old and you have been warned.
I'll start off with a quick synopsis of the movie. Hiccup is a teenage Viking who lives with his biking community on the island of Burke. Burke has a pest problem. Dragons attack all the time and steal their sheep. So the Vikings being tough, strong warriors. Fight them off. But hiccup isn't tough or strong he's scrawny and he has never been able to help fight off the dragons. One day during a dragon attack. He shoots a dragon down.
But when he goes to kill it, he finds that he can't bring himself to do it. So instead he befriends this dragon, he bonds with him. He learns to ride him. And he discovers that everything has community knows about dragons is wrong. Meanwhile hiccup is awarded the honor of killing a dragon in front of his entire village. But instead of killing the dragon. He uses the opportunity to try to show everyone that dragons can be befriended. That all goes terribly wrong.
And his dad captures toothless hiccups, dragon, and sails away to the islands where all the dragons live with the goal of killing them all and being done with dragons forever. So hiccup in his friends gather the few dragons left behind and they fly off to the island after the Vikings. There hiccup, freeze, toothless and hiccup and toothless fight. This enormous monstrous dragon that threatens both dragons and Vikings alike. And by the end of the movie. Hiccup and toothless defeat the dragon.
The Vikings and the dragons are all safe. And best of all the two communities art piece. The dragons go from being the pests, putting the Viking lives at risk to pets that they love to co-exist with. So there you go. That's the movie. Now. Let's look at some values that shift over the course of the movie. I'll start with external value shifts. At the beginning of the movie, dragons are pests that the Vikings need to exterminate at the end. They're pets that the Vikings care for. Pests to pets.
At the beginning of the movie. Vikings are regularly fighting off attacks from dragons in this ongoing war between them. At the end there at peace war to peace. At the beginning of the movie. Vikings are in constant danger. Always living with the threat of another dragon attack at the end there safe. Danger. To safety. At the beginning of the movie. HCA has a secret he's befriended a dragon. At the end of the movie, that's no longer a secret. Everyone knows. Hidden to revealed. At the beginning.
Hiccups community looks down on him as an incompetent disappointment who can never live up to what Vikings are supposed to be. At the end, they welcome honor and celebrate him as not just one of them, but as one of the best Vikings. Rejected to accepted. And also shamed to honored. Oh, and here's a really simple, straightforward, external value shift, but also really important one. At the beginning of the movie.
The enormous monstrous dragon that lives on the dragon islands and controls all the smaller dragons is alive. At the end of the movie. Hiccup and toothless kill it alive. Two dead. So those are all external shifts that happen in the movie. Here they are again. Pests to pets. Say that five times fast. War to peace. Danger to safety. Hidden to revealed. Rejected. To accept it. Shamed. Two honored. Alive to dead. Now let's look at some internal value shifts. At the beginning of the movie.
Hiccup believes he needs to change who he is and become like the other Vikings in order to fit in and be respected in his community. At the end, he's fully embraced the things about himself that make him different from the other Vikings. Self-rejection to self-acceptance. At the beginning. Hiccup feels like a failure as a Viking for not being able to live up to the Viking ideal. At the end, he's proud of his unique strengths. Ashamed to proud. At the beginning.
Hiccup is awkward, shy, not very good at Viking skills. And generally lacking confidence around his peers. At the end of the movie, he's confident in his strengths. Unconfident to confident. So those were all internal shifts that happened within hiccup. Here they are again. Self-rejection to self-acceptance. Embarrassed to proud. Unconfident to confidence. Now. All the shifts that I've just described, both the external and the internal shifts happened on the scale of the movie as a whole.
But value shifts happen everywhere at all. Levels of story. They happen in the story as a whole. They happen with an ax and they happen within scenes. So let's zoom in for a moment and look at the opening scene of how to train your dragon. I'm not going to give you a synopsis of this opening scene. But I've linked to it in the show notes, so you can go watch it. And I highly recommend that you do, because even just this opening scene is a real masterclass in storytelling.
Here are a few value shifts in the opening scene. At the beginning of the scene. Dragons are attacking Burke at the end. The attack is over and the dragons have left attacking to not attacking. At the beginning. Hiccup has a clever plan to use a machine that he's built to shoot down a dragon and contribute to the fight. At the end, he has not succeeded in helping fight off the dragons, but has actually made things much worse success to failure. Or even helping to harming.
At the beginning, hiccups, dad is annoyed with him for coming outside to join in the fight. At the end, his dad is full on angry that he's interfered with the battle with disastrous consequences. Annoyed too angry. There are loads more shifts even in just that one scene. Watch it. And I'm sure you'll be able to spot many things that change. But hopefully even just those three examples, help to illustrate how these value shifts are present at every level of story.
I hope you're tracking with me as I go through this. I'm spending a lot of time here and really breaking this down with a ton of examples because this whole concept, the concept of value shifts. Is absolutely foundational. It is at the core of all the editing that I do. It's the tool that I use to edit everything from the whole plot arc of a seven book series to a single sentence tucked away in the middle of a scene. I am always, always asking. What's the value shift. What changes.
Now. There is no comprehensive list of all the possible value shifts that you could have in a story. And honestly, you don't need one. You don't need to reference the correct list of value shifts. What you need to do is develop an awareness of change in stories. You need to develop the skill of being able to identify what changes in your story. And to identify when the answer is that nothing is changing yet. So you'll need to incorporate a change.
But I know that what you need and what you want are not always the same things. And I'm going to give you both things. So first. I have a resource you're going to love. I mentioned it before. It's called the value shift word bank. I have looked back through the last few books that I've edited and I've pulled every single value shift that I marked throughout those books. Because, yes, this is something that I literally mark and write down as I go through editing a book.
I've put them all in a spreadsheet and I'm sharing that sheet with you so that you can reference it and get inspiration for value shifts in your stories. Again, This is not a comprehensive list of every possible value shift. But it has a really long list with over a hundred value shifts. It won't cover every scene that you write. But it will give you a lot of ideas for possible value shifts. You'll get tons of examples of one word changes.
And you might even get some ideas for the kinds of things that could change in your story. You can get the value shift word bank by going to Alice Dot com slash value. And of course that link is also in the show notes. Go to that link into your email and I'll send you the link to access the word bank. That's Alice dot com slash value. And in addition to the value shift word bank. I have a whole slew of exercises for you to help you practice finding and applying value shifts in your stories.
Because remember the real skill here is not reading a list of value shifts. But developing your awareness of change in stories. Here's your first exercise. I want you to go watch the opening scene of how to train your dragon. Like I said, you can find that link in the show notes. And as you watch. I want you to pull out a piece of paper. And write down every value shift that you see in the scene. Every time, something changes. Make note of it.
Look, especially for things that are one way at the beginning of the scene. And another way at the end of the scene, for instance, I'll give you another one. At the beginning, the village is perfectly fine. And at the end, half of the village is on fire. Not on fire. Two on fire. That is a very clear visual change in the scene. And be sure to watch for both internal and external changes. Remember, both kinds of change can happen at the same time. And both are really important for your story.
So that's exercise number one. Here's the second exercise. I want you to observe the value changes in your daily life. For the next 24 hours. Keep a pen and paper on hand, or have the notes app open on your phone. Throughout your day, watch for moments when things change. These could be really straightforward. You're hungry. You eat dinner and then you're full. Hungry to full. It's raining and then the sun comes out and the sky clears up rainy to sunny.
Or they could be a little more tricky to observe. Maybe you have a sort of low grade anxiety about a big work project all morning. And then you have a conversation with a coworker. You get a helpful piece of information. And your anxiety goes down. Anxious to relaxed. Or maybe anxious to less anxious. Whenever you notice a value shifting throughout your day. Write it down. Right down the starting value and the ending value. That is the value at the beginning and the value at the end.
See, if you can describe both sides of that value in one word, each. I fudged it a little bit on the, not on fire too on fire, but you get the idea. We're aiming for pithy here. I think this exercise is really powerful because it's such a great reminder. That all the story theory, concepts that we use to craft stories. Are not made up out of a void. They're not rules that some gatekeepers somewhere decided that we all have to follow or no one can be on the best seller lists.
No. Stories reflect real life. Stories are about change because life is about change. We need change in stories. Because we experienced change every single day in our regular lives. So that's your second exercise. Look for the value shifts happening all around you every single day. And here's the third exercise, the one where the rubber meets the road. Pull out a scene of your novel. Read it. And then write down every value shift that you can find. What changes externally in your scene?
Look for any external changes you can find. And write them down. And what changes internally inside of your character? How has your character different at the end than they were at the beginning? Right. Those values down. If you can find value shifts. That's fantastic. And it's a sign that you're seeing is working. If you can't find a value shift. Ask yourself. What is the purpose of this scene? What needs to change in the scene in order to move the story as a whole forward.
And then brainstorm ways that you can incorporate that value shift into the scene. And there you go. Three exercises to help you practice identifying value shifts and the stories that you read. And the stories that you write and in your own life every day, This episode was a whole, whole lot. And like I said, this is foundational stuff, a really powerful tool for your editing process. So I'd recommend that you save this episode as one that you'll come back to, to study and reference again.
Before I wrap up though, I want to give you a quick recap. The value shifts are changes in a state of being. When you're identifying value shifts, Keep in mind for best practices. One do your best to describe each value in one word, the starting value and the ending value. One word each. Too. Make sure that those two values are related to each other. Dry to happy. Isn't a good value shift, but dry to wet is. Three. Remember that multiple value shifts can happen at the same time.
For. I look for value shifts on two levels, the external and the internal. What changes in the external world around your character? And what changes inside your character in the ways that they feel and think. And if you'd like a handy reference to help you spot some value shifts, be sure to get the value shift word bank. You can get access to the word bank by going to Alice sedlak.com/value. Alright there you have it. Your crash course, introduction to value shifts.
Now I invite you to go out into the rest of your day and keep a sharp eye out for the values that are shifting all around. You. I'll give you a hint at one coming up in just a moment. Me talking to me, not talking. Until the next episode, happy editing.