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Story Grid Writing Podcast

Beat Breakdown: Analyzing Writing Line-by-Line - Part 2

Story Grid Writing Podcast

Shawn Coyne

Books, Language Learning, Authors, Education, Story, Publishing, Arts, Creativity, Writing, Fiction Writing

4.8767 Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2022

⏱️ 61 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode, Danielle continues walking Tim through every single line of Ed McBain's EYE WITNESS to help him identify the beats and what they are doing. This is a perfect episode for the story nerds!

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello and welcome to the Storygrid podcast. My name is Tim Graal. I'm your host and I am a struggling

0:06.0

writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He's the

0:13.1

creator and founder of StoryGrid. And along with him is our editor-in-chief of StoryGrid

0:18.8

publishing, Leslie Watts, along with the chief academic

0:21.8

officer of Story Grid University, Danielle Kiyoski. In this episode, we continue breaking down

0:27.7

the short story eyewitness by Ed McBain, beat by beat. So we're literally going line by line

0:34.2

through this short story, separating it into beats and looking at each individual beat

0:39.5

and analyzing it. So we started this last week. We're continuing it this week. And for those of you

0:45.7

that are wondering why this is worth all of the hassle, I really recommend you just stick with it.

0:52.8

One of the amazing things about looking at a masterwork line by

0:57.4

line is you really get to understand what the author was doing at each part of the process.

1:04.0

And it really helps you understand how to put these things into practice in your own writing

1:08.1

as well. So this is a really, really good process. I hope you stick

1:12.6

with it. Again, if you are listening to just the audio version of this podcast, I highly recommend

1:18.3

you go to our YouTube channel Storygrid, check out the video recording of this episode because

1:24.0

then you can actually follow along with the writing as well. But either way,

1:29.3

I hope you enjoy the episode and we're going to go ahead and jump in and get started.

1:34.5

All right. So let's pick back up with where we left off last week. We are in the middle of the

1:39.6

beat that starts out with the input, Magruder shrugged. He'd been on the force for a long time now,

1:45.3

and he was used to just about every type of taxpayer. I looked over to where the thin man sat on

1:50.1

the bench against the wall, and then it has the output, well, I said, let me see what I can get out of

1:55.8

him. So we're going to pick back up there talking about the input and the output.

...

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