Hello and welcome to the Storygrid podcast. My name is Tim Graal. I'm the CEO of Storygrid, and I'm a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works.

Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He's the creator and founder of Storygrid, and he's a writer and editor with over 30 years of experience.

Along with him is Leslie Watts, the editor-in-chief of StoryGrid Publishing,

and Daniel Kiyoski, the chief academic officer of StoryGrid University.

So in this episode, I actually make some progress.

So I'm going to spoil the episode a little bit and just let you know up front.

They actually liked my writing this week.

And it was as surprising to me as it will be for you at this point and what always surprises me about this is

every project i've done whether it's writing or business or anything else that's really pushing

me to learn something new really pushing me outside of my

comfort zone, to the edge of what my understanding is, whatever metaphor you want to use, is that

I always reach this moment, this moment where I'm like, this is not going to work, where I just kind

of lose the will to live, I feel like I'm just banging my head against the wall, nothing's ever

going to work.

And that always is the moment before something starts to fall into place.

And what's crazy about it, even though I've been doing stuff like this long enough to know it's coming, it never makes it easier.

And so I went back and looked, the draft that I turned in this week was just the first two tropes of eyewitness by Ed McBain, rewritten in my own words, right? Just the first two

tropes. This was my 10th draft that as long as I, as far as I can remember from recording the

episode, they literally only wanted me

to change one word. And so it was really great to hear and hopefully you feel some relief as well

because sometimes we worry about you, the listener too, of like, man, they're just watching Tim's

struggle, getting all of this feedback and then making the same mistakes again.

...