Hello and welcome to the Storygrid podcast. My name is Tim Graal. I'm your host and I'm a struggling

writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He's the

creator and founder of StoryGrid. Along with him is Danielle Kiyoski, the chief academic officer for StoryGrid

University and Leslie Watts, the editor-in-chief of Story Grid Publishing. In this episode, we dive

into the tropes for Ed McBain's story eyewitness. So we've been working through this short

story, looking at it from lots of different

angles. Last three weeks, we started looking at the beats, and now we're diving into the tropes.

And the tropes is this really helpful level of analysis that's kind of not too deep, but not

too macro. It's kind of at this perfect level that will start enabling me to actually write my own

scene.

So it's a really great episode.

We dive into what the first trope is, go through everything on that, and then we start

talking about next step.

So I think you're really going to enjoy it.

So let's jump in and get started.

Now that we've looked at beats and gone through all of the beats of eyewitness, broken them out

into input, output, and then the type of beat it is, and whether it's enlivening or depleting,

we're going to take a look at how to actually use this information to iterate our own version of this

masterwork pattern scene. So Tim's going to be doing that in the coming weeks. And to do that,

we want to take a step back from beats because while the beat information is extremely valuable,

it doesn't really give us a way to get words on the page. It's just too much to think about

for a writer who's trying to approach a blank page and turn that into a story of their own. So what we want

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