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 as 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, we finish off talking about the hero's journey archetypes. I submitted some scenes to Sean and we go through

those. And then we start talking through some bigger ideas about tying the story together

and then some very concrete steps to finish up this race to the end

of the novel. So it's exciting for me. I feel like I'm getting much closer now. And so I think

it's a fun episode. You'll get a lot out of it. So let's jump in and get started. So Sean, I

worked on the other archetypes that we talked about because the last couple weeks

we've been looking at the second draft of the threshing through the lens of the hero's journey

archetypes. We got through about half of them the first week. And really, the only big homework

I had was working on turning Ernst into the trickster. So setting up a

scenario where he double crossed Jesse and the team. And so I went through, at first, I didn't

push back because it was one of these situations where I knew you were right, but I really like Ernst and I didn't push back because it was one of these situations where I knew you were right,

but I really like Ernst and I don't want them to be a bad guy, which I always hear when I

run into those things in the audiobook of on writing, Stephen King says, you know, always kill your

darlings, you know. So I got to let that stuff go. So I started thinking through

it and it was, on one hand, it was kind of easy the way, because I thought, so what I decided

was he was going to be an agent for another faction. And the whole idea was he was in there as a mole to undermine

winning the threshing. So that gave him a really good reason why he should be helping Jesse

for most of the book because he wants her

to get to the threshing because that's his biggest chance to undermine the success.

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