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 an experiment conducted by Sean Coyne. He's the creator of the story grid editing

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 structure, but with a different setting, style, and voice. Last week, we covered the broad

outlines of the experimental protocol. In today's episode,

Sean and I review the editor's six-core questions and use the answers to fill in the global

foolscap worksheet, which is a one-page analysis of the whole story. We argue a bit about the

love story convention requiring a so-called gender divide between the lovers.

We also conclude that it is hard to draw a precise conclusion about the story's internal

subgenre. So put on your white coat and safety goggles and step into the laboratory for episode

two of the masterwork experiment. Well, good morning, Sean. Good morning, Ann. How are you today? Are you

ready to launch into this again this week? I absolutely am, and I'm glad you mentioned that,

because Steve Presfield and I have this procedure that we use every week when we have our

weekly business call. And it seems to have served us well over the years. So I'll

share it with you and then maybe we can use it in the work that we do together. Okay. So the first thing that

Steve always asks me is, why are we on the phone call? Okay. Like what's the purpose of this meeting? And let's sort of figure that out before we

completely, you know, dive into details that may or may not help us. So let me just establish

...