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, who is the creator of Story Grid, the author of the book Story Grid, and an editor with over 25

years experience. And he is walking me through how to write my first novel, a novel that

will actually work. In this episode, we start out by looking at scene two of my story that I

sent Sean, and I was pretty surprised by his feedback. And then we dive into

the six different basic story types and some really cool new research that has come out

about these six basic types of stories. It's kind of heady stuff, but it's really good to look at these things and see

that these basic stories have been told over and over and over, and it is a beginning place that

we can start with our own stories. So I think you're really going to enjoy it. Let's jump in and get

started. So, Sean, I took all of what we talked about last week and I kind of

rolled that in to a new scene, which was hard. I wrote about half of it and got stuck and had

like backup and write like a whole beginning because I, you know, I had this thing where like I start writing a scene and it gets, it's over in like 500 words, so I got to figure out something.

So anyway, I sent that to you.

What did your feedback on where I went with it?

Well, I can only tell you what I only read at one time.

And what editors, the first test of a story is whether or not you want to read the next thing.

And that's just to pure anybody, any, you know, a five-year-old kid, if you tell them a story,

if they have wrapped attention, then you know the story's working.

And I'll tell you, after I finished reading

the second scene, I wanted to know what was going to happen next. So the very first thing is that

you're keeping the momentum of the storytelling moving forward. So with that inciting incident scene, you establish, you know, your hero is

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