Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is the show dedicated to helping you become a better writer.

In the show, we walk through the book The Story Grid by Sean Coyne, who will join me in a second.

And we are walking through all of the ideas in the book and discussing them and going deep on them so that we all can become a better

writer. The way that we're going about that is I, Tim Grohl, am the host, and I am a fledgling

fiction writer trying to figure out how to do this thing called writing. And Sean Coyne is the

seasoned expert helping me walk along the path. And hopefully as we do this, you can become a

better writer alongside of me. In this episode, we talk about how to get started with your story.

One of my questions was, I don't want to write 100,000 words before I find out that my story is

no good. So how do we make sure that we start on a good path and start off

right with our story? We also talk about the movie and the book The Martian and how the

story grid applies to that. And we dive into the external and internal genres as well. So it's a

really great episode. I hope you enjoy it and we'll get started right now.

So, Sean, I want to talk about, and I've just been thinking a lot lately about how to get started.

Because it's great to have a bunch of tools that let me know if my story is horrible, but that will only help me

after I've written 100,000 words or whatever.

Right.

So what would you say if I'm just, you know, I got my story in mind, like, and I want to do

everything I can before I write the actual book to make sure that it's good and I waste as few words written as possible.

Like, what's that process for getting started on your story?

Well, I'm really, I'm really excited that you brought this up because I've, um, I've actually been writing something for, uh, Steve Pressfield's site about this very thing.

And here's what I suggest.

And I think this is really good advice.

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