Hello and welcome to the Storygrid 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 is Sean Coyne. He is a creator of Story Grid, the author of the book Story Grid, and an editor with over 25 years experience.

In this episode, I kind of chuckled when I said I'm trying to figure out how to tell a

story that works because that is definitely what last week's episode and this week's episode

has been all about, is me trying to figure out what's going on in my story. Why am I dreading, writing the

middle build, you know, not knowing what's happening with the villain and my genre and all that

kind of stuff. And so I did a lot of work over the last week, thought through a lot of stuff,

and came to some really good places.

So Sean and I talked through this and this is a particularly, I think this is a particularly

important episode because this is something that every writer is going to deal with where

they're deep in their story and they're stuck and what do you do when you're

stuck? Where do you go? What are the kind of questions you start asking? And so that's what we

talk about in this episode. So let's jump in and get started. So Sean, last week I felt like

the call started really nice because you're telling me how good my writing was.

And then when we got into the discussion about what is the villain want, it started unraveling

pretty quickly for me. And I think this is good because I was struggling, you know, I kept having this dread over me as I

entered into the middle build that something was wrong. And so as we talked about that, I felt like

we got a clear picture that something was legitimately wrong. So I spent a few days thinking about this and I was just making

lots of notes trying to get what was churning in my head out. And I felt like, so I went

back and started thinking, okay, because we talked about The Matrix, we talked about

Hunger Games, we talked about other stories, and you will always say to just go back to the

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