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.

The creator of Story Grid and the author of the book The Story Grid is Sean Coyne, who's an editor with over 25 years experience.

In this episode, Sean's not joining us because I

interviewed an author that I'm friends with that I really respect by the name of Ryan Holiday.

He's the author of many books. The most recent is Conspiracy, which I just absolutely love,

devoured it. But other books that I've loved of his is perennial seller, ego's

enemy, the obstacles the way, and he has a few others. So he's a really prolific writer.

He's released about a book a year since he started publishing books. And he's a really just

methodical and thoughtful writer.

He has written some extensive articles about how he does his writing,

and I'm going to put those in the show notes for this episode.

But I wanted to talk to him specifically about his editing process,

working with his editor, and what it looks like going from that first draft to a finished product. Because

so many times we hear advice from people talking about how to get your first draft done, which is

really important. But I wanted to talk about, well, okay, how do you go from that first draft to a published

work? And I really respect Ryan and how he brings himself to the page and to the

books that he writes. And so it's a really fun interview. I think he'll get a lot out of it. So let's

jump in and get started. So Ryan, when I started thinking through who I wanted to talk to about

editing a book, you know, you write the first draft and

there's all this advice out there about how to write the first draft. But what I found both for

myself and then as I talk to writers, and like you hear like Anne Lamont say like write a shitty

...