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 is Sean Coyne.

He is the creator of Story Grid, the author of the book Story Grid and an editor with over 25 years experience. When it comes to this

podcast, I have a few rules that I've imposed on both me and Sean and myself. One of them is that

I'm not allowed to get any feedback on my writing from Sean that's not being recorded for the

podcast. So anytime like I send him a scene and he gives me feedback, that's the first I've heard

of it. We don't do anything outside of the podcast so that you're always getting kind of an

unfiltered raw version. The other thing personally is I try to always ask the questions

that I'm afraid to ask, directly address things that I'm trying to avoid. And this episode

is all about that. I've been kind of freaking out about the novel. This week I had like a plan

of what we're going to talk about,

a certain topic, and we're going to try to get that into that in a different episode

because I realized that I was avoiding something and talking to Sean about it. And I realize,

you know, that would be breaking that rule of always being transparent and always going headfirst

into the thing that I'm

afraid of. So this episode is all about me freaking out about my novel and hopefully you hear

kind of the rawness of where I'm at with it. So hopefully it's helpful to you. And so let's

jump in and get started. So, Sean, I had originally emailed you

with a topic for this week that didn't have anything to do with my book because I really

didn't want to talk about my book. And this morning I was working on it some more. And I've been

...