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 writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works.

Joining me shortly as Sean Coyne, he is an editor with 25 plus years experience. He is the creator of Story Grid, the author of the book Story Grid,

and he is helping me as I flail around and figure out how to tell great stories. In this episode,

we're working on narrowing down to an outline that I can actually use to write my second draft,

which is ending up to be basically a second version of the first

draft, depending on how you look at it.

Anyway, through this discussion, even though we're talking specifically about my book,

I hope that you're learning the kinds of questions you should be asking of your book,

and you and your editor should be working through as well

about character development, their wants and needs inside of the book, talking through the

polarity shifts of positive and negative value shifts in scenes and in big swaths of your

book, and also just talking through overcoming cliches,

overcoming kind of basic normal things that every author deals with.

So as you go through this,

I hope that you're taking notes and that it's helping you get ready

to craft the perfect outline for your next book as well.

So let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, I want to talk and start first with an email I got from one of our listeners.

I don't want to read the entire thing, but I'm going to try to sum it up, which is basically

with all of our discussions around my stories and my story ideas

and you giving me feedback and changing them and molding them and even pointing me towards

...