How to Plan a Short Story Based on a Masterwork

Story Grid Writing Podcast

Shawn Coyne

Books, Language Learning, Authors, Education, Story, Publishing, Arts, Creativity, Writing, Fiction Writing

4.8 • 767 Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2022

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do we use all of this masterwork analysis to actually iterate our own short story? In this week's episode, we look at the 624, Beat, and Trope analysis for the short story EYE WITNESS by Ed McBain (https://amzn.to/3Q2UpqV) and start discussing what kind of short story I might write based on all of the analysis. This is where things start to go off the rails. As you'll see, Shawn and Tim aren't always on the same page and struggle to communicate with each other. We decided to leave this episode in so you can see what it looks like when an editor and author don's see eye-to-eye. For the transcript and downloads for this episode, visit https://storygrid.com/265 — Get a free copy of our book Story Grid 101: The First Five Principles of the Story Grid Methodology: https://storygrid101.com This is Episode 265 of the Story Grid Podcast: https://storygrid.com/podcast

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Storygrid podcast. My name is Tim Graal. I'm your host and I'm a struggling
0:06.0	writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He's
0:12.0	the creator and founder of StoryGrid and an editor with over 30 years of experience. Along with
0:18.1	him is Leslie Watts, our editor-in-chief of StoryGrid Publishing, and Daniel Kiyoski, the chief academic officer at Storygrid University.
0:26.6	So this episode is a little strange. So we've been doing the whole analysis and in-depth look at Ed McBain's short story eyewitness. And now we're ready to
0:39.7	transition into me writing my scene, my short story, based on that masterwork. So in this episode,
0:47.5	we begin talking about that. And as you see, it starts to go off the rails. And so we thought
0:53.7	about, you know, is this really an episode?
0:55.8	We should keep in here? Should we edit it in some way? And we decide to just go ahead and leave it in.
1:01.4	You know, we've been running this Storygood podcast for over 260 episodes. And one of the things
1:06.0	we try to do here is show what it's really like for an editor and a writer to work together.
1:12.1	And for a long time, we've had a rule that we don't talk about my writing outside of this
1:17.3	podcast. We don't want to have anything behind the scenes. We want to show you what goes on.
1:22.0	And so this is what it looks like when an editor and a writer can't seem to get on the same
1:26.6	page and they're not understanding
1:27.9	each other and they're both kind of getting frustrated. And along with that, what we realized
1:33.1	is like we made a couple of fundamental mistakes. One of the mistakes is a mistake that drives us
1:38.7	crazy. We hate when writers take these vague ideas of writing. They haven't put anything we've taught
1:46.2	into practice. And they kind of think about like these vague kind of hypothetical questions and
1:51.2	they just start throwing them out without actually going and doing the writing. And so we realized
1:56.1	like that's what we did here is instead of me actually trying to write a scene and then having
2:00.7	something to get feedback on, I started asking instead of me actually trying to write a scene and then having something
	...

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