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

My name is Tim Graal. I am a first-time novelist trying to figure out how to write a story that works.

Joining me soon is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of StoryGrid. He is the guy that wrote the book StoryGrid, and he's an editor with over 25 years of experience

and he's helping me to write my first book.

In this episode, we talk about theme.

I've finally gotten past the outline of my story and started writing and of course I'm

running into all kinds of roadblocks.

So we talk about theme.

We talk about how it applies to your story, how to

figure out what it is, and how it can help you write your story. We also talk about specificity

and some other things that you may run into the first time you sit down and start writing your next

book. So I hope it's helpful for you. Let's jump in and get started. So in the last week, I finally started

writing. So I finished up my outline as best I could. Actually, I want to start there because

I got stuck about two-thirds of the way through my middle build and didn't know what to do next.

And so then I just, I knew what I was going to do to get to my ending payoff and then through

the end of the book.

So I outlined that.

But I'm still like five to ten scenes short.

Is that okay to go ahead and start writing if I don't really know what's going to

happen in the middle of the book? Absolutely. Okay. Again, I mean, I've gotten a bunch of

emails over the last couple of days from people asking about, you know, they're basically very

worried that they're getting paralyzed by analysis. And I think that's a very

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