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 the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book StoryGrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we

continue the conversation from last week about writing a contender guide. I was able to get some

scenes done and send them over to Sean and then he sent back his thoughts on them. And as with so

many things around storytelling and story grid, everything seems

a little bit easier in theory than when you actually put it into practice. So Sean walks me through

how to evaluate the scenes in the way that we're looking for and hopefully you'll learn something

about evaluating your own scenes along the way. So let's jump in and get started.

So Sean, I've been working through the contender guide for the threshing,

and I sent you the first dozen or so chapters evaluation that I've done.

I feel like this exercise is like so many things where in theory it seemed

really kind of straightforward. I'm like, okay, yeah, this should be easy. But then once I get into it,

it's really hard to find the middle ground between driving myself and saying, trying to come up

with the right answers, and then just kind of quickly moving through it and not

really evaluating it. And so you sent me back a bunch of notes and we'll include these in the show

notes just so everybody can see what we're talking about. But could you just walk me through a little

bit how you're evaluating this?

I just have been surprised at how hard it's been to come up with it.

And then reading your notes on it kind of made me think, I don't know, I'm just struggling

with it.

So could you talk through a little bit what you're looking for when you're looking through

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