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 Grawl 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 a creator of StoryGrid, the author of

the book Story Grid and an editor with over 25 years experience.

In this episode, I tell you, I'm excited about getting to start a new fiction project in this new book that we started talking about last week.

But at the same time, in this episode that we recorded, as I talked to Sean, I just started to feel that

overwhelming like, oh my gosh, this is bigger than anything I know how to do. This is why I've

gotten, when I've seen some of you at our events or I've gotten emails from you where you're

like, hey, why are you still call yourself with somebody that's trying to figure out how to tell a story that works? And this is why, because as soon as I step into

a new story, I feel like I get completely lost, completely unsure of where I'm supposed to be going.

So this was a really helpful episode for me as Sean kind of brought me back to the basics of what

to look at, how to go back to Masterworks, how to think about genre, and really, you know,

looking at it through this lens of victim, hero, and villains.

So it's a really great episode.

I think you'll get a lot out of it.

So let's jump in and get started. So Sean,

last week we started looking at the new novel I want to write and we looked through a lot of

the full scap stuff and figuring out what genre I'm writing in kind of the direction. And so I went

ahead and took a crack at writing the first few scenes and sent those over to you.

And, you know, I was trying to do something, the big thing I'm trying in this is a different kind of narrative device.

So I opened, the first scene is basically in a police interrogation

where they're getting this guy to tell what happened. And so then the book is him explaining

...