Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better

writer. I'm your host Tim Grawl and I'm a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a

story that works. Joining me shortly as Sean Coyne, he is the creator of Story Grid, the author of

the book Story Grid, and an editor with over 25 years experience.

In this episode, I take what is really my fourth crack at this sequence in trying to

dial it in and get something that actually works.

And when I started, and I talk about this a little bit, but I think what's important is coming back to

what does it mean when a scene or a sequence actually works? And what that means is it abides

by the five commandments of storytelling that are in story grid, that every scene, every sequence,

every piece of your story should have an inciting incident,

a progressive complication, a crisis, a climax, and a resolution.

And when you're missing those pieces, and that's what I'm learning, is when you're missing

those pieces is when it makes a scene not work.

And when you have them, you're much closer to having a scene that actually

works. So we go over some obvious problems in the sequence, but I definitely make some progress

over the last week. So anyway, I'll let Sean explain that better than I'm doing here. So let's

jump in and get started. So I was thinking about this sequence and I realized this is actually the fourth

rewrite I've done because when I first started the middle build, I tried to just dive into the

action and I wrote two versions of that before we stopped and redid a bunch of stuff. And then

I rewrote it and we went over that last week and now I

rewrote it again. So we've already done the sequence, the first sequence of the middle

build where she enters the new world and gets introduced to the new world and introduced

...