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Story Grid Writing Podcast

Writing Emotional Pain: How to Care About Your Protagonist

Story Grid Writing Podcast

Shawn Coyne

Books, Language Learning, Authors, Education, Story, Publishing, Arts, Creativity, Writing, Fiction Writing

4.8767 Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2022

⏱️ 68 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What happens when you can't connect to your protagonist? This week Tim makes some progress on his scene, but it's still missing something. The soul in the writing isn't there. Shawn, Leslie, and Danielle talk through how to use emotional pain to connect into the story.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast.

0:03.0

My name is Tim Graal. I am the CEO of StoryGrid and I'm also a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works.

0:12.0

Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He's the creator and founder of StoryGrid and he's an editor and writer with over 30 years of experience.

0:21.3

Along with him is Daniel Kiyoski, the chief academic officer of Story Grid University,

0:26.6

and Leslie Watts, the editor-in-chief of Story Grid Publishing.

0:30.7

This week's episode was kind of rough on me.

0:35.3

Basically, we keep running into this thing where like I'm trying to check

0:40.7

off all the boxes with my writing to make sure it works without actually kind of connecting to the

0:48.0

protagonist and connecting to like the soul of the story. And it's one of those things that's just hard to force,

0:55.6

or I guess I would say it's impossible to force.

1:00.0

And we have some really good discussions around like how important that part is

1:05.0

and then how all of the structure around story applies to it once you're able to connect to it.

1:13.1

And this actually brought up for me this thought of like how many times.

1:17.5

So several times I've been asked in person or people send me emails and they're like, hey,

1:22.3

you know, does story grid work for this or destroy grid work for this genre genre or you know can you you know does it ever

1:29.0

actually turn into a book or something like that and i just think it's so interesting and i i understand

1:33.8

what they're saying right there's a lot of these kind of like formulas out there for writing a book right

1:40.0

of like you know just do these three acts and do it in this way and all of these kind of things.

1:44.6

And they're formulaic.

1:45.9

And so I get why people would take story grid and assume that we're kind of talking about it as if it's this formulaic thing.

1:55.5

But I hear, this is what drives me crazy, is when people ask me questions like that i hear you asking me if like e

2:02.0

equals mc squared works and i'm like um yeah because it like describes reality right you know it's uh

...

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