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's the creator of Story Grid, the author of the

book Story Grid, and an editor with over 25 years experience.

In this episode, I have some questions about genre, what genre I'm writing in, and how that

will affect my overall story. So, Sean and I dive into this, and if you've been listening

to this show for a while, you know Sean believes genre is extremely important. It gives you the conventions and obligatory scenes that your story needs to hit. And I was just getting a little confused about what that meant for my story, as I'm sure you have felt about your story from time to time. So I think it's a great episode. I hope you enjoy it. Let's jump in and get started.

So Sean, a few weeks ago, a month ago, something, I was talking with a buddy mine, and I was

kind of bragging.

You know, I'm like, you know, I'm to the point where Sean, he doesn't just let me

write one scene.

He'll let me write a whole sequence before he'll look at it and give me feedback. And literally, like the next day we recorded and you

made me stop writing. Entirely. Right. As we like figured out how to do a middle build. So it's been

nice to have this plan in place and I'm moving. I've got four scenes done since we taught. My first sequence actually expanded

out to four scenes because I found this great opportunity as I was writing to stop and explain

the world through the eyes of one of the characters, which was kind of neat. Yeah, so I've been

writing on that. I'm going to try to get the first two sequences done, so, you know, roughly

seven scenes done before you look at it. So I'm going to get that to you probably next week.

But I've been thinking, I want to step back since I'm not ready to go over the writing yet.

And just, I had some questions around genre. And this is kind of based on some of the emails,

you and I have been passing around from one of our listeners about the lit RPG genre.

And I'm struggling a little bit with how to think about like, because we keep saying, okay,

...