Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is the podcast dedicated to helping you become a better writer.

My name is Tim Graal. I'm your host and I am a struggling writer trying to get my first book done and learn how to write a good book, a book that actually works.

And Sean Coyne is the expert 25 plus years editing experience

in New York publishing, and he is sharing his expertise with me along the way. The goal of the show

is to let you listen in to our conversation, so hopefully we both can learn something at the same time.

Now, I've really enjoyed going through this process. It's been really interesting to

share my scenes with you and to have your feedback along with Sean's. And so if you haven't seen

those, if you've listened to the previous episodes, you can go and download the actual scenes that I wrote and then that Sean fixed.

And you can see all of his comments as well.

Those are in previous show notes at storygrid.com slash podcast.

Now as we go through this, I'm hoping that you learn alongside me.

I know one of the things that I've learned the most is how to trust the audience and not

put too much in the scene and actually learn to draw things out.

I always kind of rush things and try to cram too much into every scene instead of letting

things draw out and play out.

So we talk about that a good bit in this episode as we go over my rewrite of a

scene. And then we dive into the math. And one of the things that I love about the story grid and why I

initially reached out to Sean to do this podcast after reading his book is that I feel like it helps writers

that are just getting started like myself and even season writers put some constraints around

their work, allow them to have a box that they can work inside of. So there's not too many options.

There's not too many decisions to make early on. And this discussion on math

is really central to this idea. It helps you make decisions early on, helps you know what scenes

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