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 Graal and I am a struggling novelist trying to figure out how to tell a story that works.

Joining me soon is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of Story Grid, the author of the book Story Grid, and an editor with over 25 years experience,

and he's helping me figure all of this writing stuff out. With my role as host of this show,

I'm constantly trying to straddle the line between being the host and making sure the show

is something that is relevant and useful to all of you that are listening.

But then also I'm a writer and he's helping me with my own book.

And so I'm trying to get all of the information I need to write a book of my own.

And I'm constantly kind of bouncing back and forth between those.

So this episode ended up being quite the epic length. We spent the normal hour just talking

through different things about my book. And again, I'm trying to keep it more focused on you,

the listener, as well as me, the writer. And then after we cut for this episode, we kept talking

and we just kept the tape rolling and we talked specifically

about my book and my writing style and things I have to work on to get better. And so I took

that whole extra chunk and I put it at the end of this episode after the outro, so you can listen

to it almost like an epilogue. So this is a very long episode. I think

you'll enjoy the entire thing. But the first part is kind of a normal episode and the last part

is me and Sean just kind of riffing on specific things I need to work on. So I hope you really

enjoy the show. I think you'll get a lot out of hearing me struggle through some of these things.

So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, I did my homework this week where I went through

a bunch of action books and movies and came up with my hero, my villain, and my victim. And then I also did a lot of thinking, I was thinking about

my victim and how that was going to get set up. But right at the end of the episode that we

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