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'm the struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works.

On the show with me is Sean Coyne, the creator of the Story Grid, the author of the book, the story grid, and an editor with 25 plus years

experience, he's taking all of my questions and all of my just floundering around trying to

figure out how to do this writing thing, and he's helping put me on the right path, and hopefully

along the way put you on the right path as well. In this episode, we talk about the units of story. We're talking

about the beat, the scene, the sequence, the act, subplot, all the different units of the story

and how they all work together to make sure that you write a story that works. This is one of the

more complicated parts of the story grid for me, and I get a little confused, but Sean does a good job

walking me through how each of these things work and which things I need to pay attention to

before the writing and which things I need to pay attention to once I'm in editor mode in the

manuscript's done. I think you're going to learn a lot in this episode, so we're going to

jump right in and get started. So, Sean, I want to start this episode and go into, it's a new part

of the book. So we just came through the Five Commandments of Storytelling. And now it's the

units of the story. So talk a little bit about what the different units are first,

and then I have a plethora of questions. Okay. Well, this goes, the units of story is sort of a way

that I, as an editor, try and figure out sort of the global tracking of a story.

So the units are pretty simple.

There's the beat.

Now, what the beat is, if anybody's ever taking an acting class,

a beat is sort of a moment in a scene

where something happens, an event happens, that makes one of the characters change their

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