Hello and welcome to the Storygrid Masterwork Experiment. My name is Anne Hawley, and I'm an experienced

novelist trying to ground my craft more solidly in Storygrid methodology. So I've agreed to be

the lab rat in the Masterwork experiment, which Sean Coyne is conducting as a test of his latest

writing and editing methods.

Sean is the creator of the Story Grid method, the author of the book, The Story Grid,

What Good Editors Know, and an editor with many years' experience in the big New York publishing

houses. In the Masterwork experiment, Sean and I analyzed the brilliant short novella Brokeback Mountain by Annie Prue with an eye to understanding what it's made of, right down to the beat level.

Then my job will be to write a novella of my own using exactly the same beats and structures, but with a different setting, style, and voice. To be specific, the setting

will be Regency England. Last week, we reviewed the editor's six-core questions and used the

answers to them to fill in the Global Foolscap worksheet, which is a one-page analysis of the

whole story. In today's episode, I talk about the protagonists I have in mind

for my own story, who will somehow have to be Regency England analogs of the two Wyoming cowboy lovers

in Brokeback Mountain. Our discussion takes us into some political territory about representation,

and I fight pretty hard against the requirement to match Annie Prue's

tragic ending. That conversation probably isn't over yet. So put on your white coat and safety

goggles and step into the laboratory for episode three of the masterwork experiment.

Good morning, Sean. Good morning, Ann. Here we are on episode three of our masterwork

experiment. And I spent the last several days working on a scene-by-scene breakdown of Brokeback

Mountain. So how would you like to proceed today? Yeah, I started doing that too. And then just before we got on the call here, I was thinking

about what the best approach would be to make sure as best we can that this experiment is as successful

as we'd like it to be. So I was thinking about just the process by which writers can sort of help themselves through

moments that they know are going to happen.

...