Why Story Grid Is Different

Hello, and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. My name is Valerie Francis. I'm one of the certified Storygrid editors, and I'll be filling in for Tim today while he continues to work on editing his debut novel, the Threshing. Those of you who regularly follow the show will know that in February 2019, we're holding another certification training session. If you're thinking of applying, or if you're still wondering why you should bother putting in the effort to learn StoryGrid. And trust me, it does require effort. This episode is for you. I've been following Sean Coyne and studying his method since January 2015. For the past year, I've been working with authors, teaching them about the fundamentals of storytelling and helping them become better writers. Of course, as an author myself, I've also been applying Shawn's method to my own work, and that has really improved my writing. But one of the things I've struggled with is explaining what exactly the Storygrid method is and how it differs from other structural or developmental editing approaches. So I finally managed to get Shawn to sit down with me and talk about it. Now, we cover a pretty wide canvas, from the origins of Storygrid and the time Sean sent Steven Pressfield back for a page one rewrite to the moment during my editor training when I thought Sean was wrong, only to find out months later that, of course, he'd been right on the money. Okay, so now, as Tim says, let's jump in and get started. Hello, Sean.

Hi, Valerie. Wow, it's great to hear a different voice.

This is really exciting.

Okay, so today we're going to talk about what it is to be a story grid editor and what it means for a writer to have a story grid edit done to their work. But even before we get into that, I think we have to take a little step backwards, because, I mean, I've been doing this for a year, and one of the most common questions that I get from writers, even before they tell me about their work in progress, is exactly what is a story grid edit? Because they don't know that there are different types of editing. Especially if, you know, if someone is brand new to this industry, they just think an editor is an editor, but there are actually five different types of editors. So before we get into exactly what a story grid edit is, I wonder if you could just take a minute to explain what the different types of editors are and then which one fits into StoryGrid.

I'm just like, my Mind is a little bit scrambling because I'm like, wow, there are five different kinds of editors. I guess there are. Okay, so let me just tell a little bit of a story to illustrate that this is not an easily answerable or digestible problem. And okay, so when I got into book publishing, I assumed, and I think everybody who isn't in book publishing assumes I assumed that there was a structured sort of curriculum that would walk a person through moving from being an assistant to an editor to actually becoming their own full fledged editor. And I thought that there was a real craft sort of process to learn the craft of editing. And unfortunately there isn't. What there is instead is an apprenticeship, you know, sort of program where you sit underneath a brilliant, you know, experienced editor from a particular publishing house. I'm talking about traditional New York, big corporation publishing, Random House, St. Martin's Press, Grand Central Books, Harper Collins, the big names that we all know and associate with book publishing from all the way back. So that is not true. It is absolutely not true. And it makes sense why it's not true. Because the business of book publishing is about. Just as the business of General Electric or Hollywood or Google, the business is about profit. And there's nothing wrong with profit. I'm a great believer in profit. I think of all the systems, capitalism is very flawed. But I think it's the thing that really motivates people in the best way. So book publishing is about profit. So what an editor's job is at a book publishing company is really about finding the hits. It's about looking at a mass of material and being able to train their eye in such a way that they can pick out a hit. Now, a hit is something that the largest group of mass audience will enjoy. So that is sort of how they kind of train you as an editor in the major publishing house is to read a lot of. So you read a good seven to 10 manuscripts a week, plus probably dip into another 12 to 15. So you're reading all the time. And what that does is it gets you a sense of what the flatline story universe is really all about. And through that apprenticeship, you get pretty good at identifying particular stories that are working versus not working. Now, the problem that comes in is that there's no methodology that you learn to sort of figure that out. So it's as if we're in the early years of the medical profession when people would go to a quote, unquote doctor and the doctor would say, well, your humors are out of balance, so you don't have Enough fire and your water is a little low. And you know, traditionally, like now, today, we think that's crazy. But at the time, it was really sort of like the cutting edge of medical profession. So over time, we got much better medicine. And the problem with book publishing and book editing is that the thing works. So the big editors at Random House, they're still doing their job, and they're doing it very well. They're picking out hits. They're picking out enough hits to justify their salary and to bring, you know, a positive cash flow to their corporation. So from their point of view, nothing's wrong. But for me, when I was in there, I thought, wow, wouldn't it be great if there was actually a curriculum that you could use to teach people to identify what works and what doesn't work faster than hope for the best, read a lot, and God bless you. So that's where the storygrid methodology came from. It was an effort for me to take things that didn't quite work, make them work, and hopefully make them work to such a degree that a mass audience would be even more, you know, enjoy the work even more. So the story grid came out of an effort for me to systematize the process by which an executive editor at Random House has, you know, trained their eye to the point, 35 years into the game that they can. I mean, they're amazing at being able to read a single page and say, that's not going to work. Not for me, isn't. Right, no, thank you. And so when you're, when you're a literary agent and you send manuscripts to those really good, well trained eyes, they'll tell you within an hour, you know, they'll be like, nope, that's not going to work for me. So the question becomes, how did they do that? How did they get to that place where they know that. That the story isn't going to work and it's not worth the investment of the corporation in the work. So it's not black magic that they've learned. It's actually an intuitive craft that they have honed, but they haven't externalized onto a piece of paper for other people to learn that craft. And you kind of have to think, well, it makes sense that they're not telling people how to do the job that they do so well, because, you know, they might not get a job after that. But my point was that wouldn't it be better if people knew the craft? Then the chances of people being able to get better would be great. So that's where the story grid came. So what? The traditional sort of story editor at a major publishing house. And these are the people who become freelance editors after they leave the corporate fold. And a lot of them are massively intelligent. They're so extremely experienced. They know a great story from a terrible story. What they can do for you is basically tell you your book doesn't work, though. And they will point out every specific problem that they can figure out from reading your book multiple times. So the way the traditional editor works is they will read your manuscript and. And alongside they will have a clipboard with, you know, a legal pad of yellow paper, a fool's cap page, you know, pad next to them, and they will write down notes. Page one. Don't believe this character would do this. A little cheesy, bad cliche here. I'm not really pulled in yet. And they will do that from page one until page 527. So then they'll transfer those notes into what is called an editorial letter. And the editorial letter is. And I wrote, you know, hundreds of these when I was in the publishing house, before I started using storygrid terminology, I had to abide by the standards and conventions of the standard editorial letter for, you know, 20 years. And the standard editorial letter goes like this. Dear Valerie, thank you so much for sending me your manuscript. I think we have some work to do. However, what I loved about the book was the following. And then there's, you know, six paragraphs about all the things that they were excited about when they initially wanted to acquire a novel. Now we're in the stage where your book generally works, but they're trying to fix it into making it even better. And so after the praise to sort of, you know, heat up the warm bath for you before they throw the scalding water on your face, then they'll say, what follows are my page by page notes from the work. I hope you can glean some information here that will help you in your next draft. And then it literally begins page one. I didn't like this. This sentence here is a cliche. Page two, and it goes all the way. And these letters can be 35 to 40 page, single spaced. This is the letter that Steve Pressfield talks about when he talks about the letter he got when I read Tides of Wool when he almost jumped off a cliff.

So let me just go back to that story because I think that's pretty illustrative of the process for the traditional editor writer relationship. So this is around 1990. I acquired Gates of Fire and Steve And I started working together in 1996. I think he recently wrote it was 1998, but I think he wanted to avoid the two years of pain. And his mind has sort of erased that fact.

I understand that completely.

He skipped the entire, like, painful editorial process for two years before we actually published anything together. So he sent me Tides of War. I read it, I went page by page and I sent him a 40 page single spaced letter that identified every single problem in the book. Now when I say every single problem, I'm talking about macro story problems, meaning you didn't have an inciting incident for your middle build. I didn't think it was believable all the way to. Using that phrase is a cliche. You should change it. So it went. It ranged from 30,000 foot view criticism to micro sentence by sentence criticism in one single letter. And if you had to abstractly pull out what that letter was, it was literally a point by point description of everything that was wrong with the book. Okay, so that's what an editor does, right? And so, you know, at the end of that 40 page, single space letter, I wrote to him, I said to myself, I've done a tremendous job. I have just identified every single problem for this writer. Now, all the writer has to do now is go through every single thing that I've pointed out and fix it. So simple, right? So now it's like I've now taken the basketball and I've thrown it back to the writer. So now the writer has to take that basketball and fix everything in that problem. And then he gets to send the basketball back to me with a new draft that has solved all of those problems.

And how did Steve take that?

I'll get to that in a second. Okay? And if he can't solve all those problems, I have a contract that says, I will give you the chance to solve all the problems that I've indicated. If you can't solve the problems to my satisfaction, then you get to give me all of the money back that I've already paid you or my corporation has paid you. So it's a very, very contentious, excruciatingly difficult relationship to navigate between the editor and the writer in traditional publishing. Because the writer wants the editor to like them. Because if they liked them, they'd be less inclined to cancel their contract and force them to pay back the money.

Okay?

So the writer finds themselves in this terrible place where they might not agree with 70% of the editorial comments that the editor has given them, and they might not think that they're a problem. And they might have really good explanations of why what they think are problems aren't really problems. And in fact, they were intentional choices. But if they start to get into a negotiation, squabbling negotiation about the editorial comments, then that can, you know, really screw up the relationship. And then the editor is like, I don't want to work with this pain in the ass. Let's cancel the contract. So let's. Let me get back to the question of what Steve did when he got the 40 page letter. What Steve did was what a professional would do. And this was, oh, geez, over 20 years ago. So he wasn't the professional he is now, but he still was smart enough to do this thing. And what he did is he called me after he got the letter and he said, oh my gosh, the work that you put into this thing is remarkable. And I can't thank you enough. I've never seen the quality of, you know, analytical, you know, looking at my work in this way. And I'm just, I gotta, I gotta confess, I'm awash in terror because I don't really quite know what to do with it yet. Would it be possible for you to come and spend some time with me so that we can go over this together and figure out some answers to these problems? So he didn't call me and say, how dare you? He said, I acknowledge that you've created a document that pinpoints innumerable problems with my manuscript. And, and I accept that those problems are probably true. However, would you be so kind as to tell me or to help me fix them? So what he basically was saying is, I need another level of work from you, Sean. I'm not going to be able to digest this and give you back what you want. Could we jump into it together? And so I did. I flew out there and it was not easy convincing my Boss, hey, spend $2,000 for me to go to Los Angeles to the Beverly Hills Hilton so that I can go edit this guy who hasn't really brought in any money to the corporation yet, but I had a reputation at that point where they were like, yeah, I guess it's a pretty good investment. Don't drink too much and don't spend too much money, but go ahead. So I spent a week with Steve and we literally went through my 40 page letter, you know, note by note. And he would say, okay, here's the problem that you state here. You're saying that my genre is not particularly clear. What do you mean by that, Sean? And so what I Had to do is go, well, the way I look at genre is this way. And I laid out my global genre theory to Steve, and he looked at me in amazement and he said, oh, my God. Yeah, that's the way I look at things when I write screenplays with my. My friend Ron Chessett. So, yeah, I'm totally locked in. I get it. So what you're saying is it's not clear that this is an ancient historical war novel about the Peloponnesian War yet. Yes, that's right. So that's what we did. And what we did was we sussed out what level of analysis I was criticizing in each note. So instead of him just going note by note and trying to fix everything, what we did is we came up with a hierarchy of problems, right? So what's the point in fixing a cliche phrase on page 512 if you don't know what your genre is yet? It's kind of stupid, right? Why would you fix something when the engine isn't even turning over yet? You wouldn't fix the air conditioning in your car if you can't even get the engine to turn over. So what we did is we filtered out levels of problems, and then we said, okay, if we had to break down these levels of problems, what's the first level that we should fix? And what we did is we came up with the macro. And he said, you know, one of the things that I do is I like to use a single sheet of foolscap paper to kind of outline what I'm talking about. Oh, really? I do the same thing, Steve. I call it like my global grid. And he's like, well, I call mine the foolscap page. And so the two of us sat down and go, yeah, I can work that way. Yeah, I can work that way, too. So then we mapped out the beginning, the middle, and the end of his book. And we said, you know, we got problems in the transition between the beginning and the middle, and we really need a better inciting incident here. And, yeah, he's like, yeah, I know what an inciting incident is. I took Robert McKee's course. I understand the global story structure. So it turned out that Steve and I shared a vocabulary. We shared the shop talk together. We were able to compare and contrast the way we looked at story. And what we discovered is that we both understood exactly what the other person was saying. And so that is sort of the beginnings of story grid methodology was in Steve's apartment in Los Angeles in, you know, 1996 or 97. And throughout the, you know, the 20 years of us working together, we. We would book by book by book, we would hone it, right? And I would use it with other writers. And guess what? The other writers books started selling better than their previous books. I worked on Robert Crace's series and I worked on a book called La Requiem. And it was sort of the book that took Robert from a really solid, good presentation, but just not hitting the bestseller list to the bestseller list. And it happened. And it didn't happen all the time. But what I discovered is that the writers that I used it with, they would really appreciate it because it would level up their craft. They would get better and better and better. So what the traditional. Let me circle back to the original question. What's the difference between, you know, a traditional editor and a story grid editor? Is that the traditional editor is a brilliant problem detector. They will tell you your problems. Now the story grid editor is going to tell you the problems, but the other thing that they're going to tell you is they're going to help you solve the problems, and they're going to help you solve the problems in the least painful way possible. So you can either, you know, go with a traditional editor and they will tell you everything that's wrong with your book. And then you can try and do what Steve and I did and sort all of those things into categories that you can understand and say, you know, it'd probably be better if I fixed my plot before I started going into my line editing. Let me work on the plot first. So what are all the comments about the trajectory of my plot? Okay, I've sorted those over here and blah, blah, blah. So all that stuff that the writer used to have to always do by themselves and really not have the confidence that they were doing it in a way that was the best possible method. Now, Storygrid provides them with a method that they can either do themselves or, or they can hire a third party expert in the methodology who will do it for them, and then they can have a conversation with their story grid editor. Like Steve and I had a conversation back in 1996. So what. What Steve and I can say today is that was the beginning of our beautiful friendship. And that book that we worked on, Tides of War, if somebody put a gun to my head and maybe Steve, I would say that's my favorite book, is Steve's. Now, a lot of people think Gates of Fire is a better novel. I don't. I think Tides of War is a tremendous work of art that operates on many, many different levels than Gates of Fire does. Now, it's not as financially successful as Gates of Fire, but for me, it's a better novel, it's a better story. But I love Gates of Fire too. But Tides of War is, you know, for me, it's probably because of the intense work that he and I did that we shared that is, you know, contributing to that opinion. But. So let me try and figure out what these five different kinds of editors are. Okay, the first kind of editor is the copy editor. Now, a copy editor is somebody who goes in and fixes your grammar and your punctuation and make sure that you're abiding by the Chicago manual style and that your work is consistent with general, acceptable English grammatical structure that has been, you know, the standard for 200, 300 years. So that's what a copy editor does. They don't talk about your story. They're just fixing poor sentence structure and punctuation. So that's the first kind of editor. The second kind of editor, I believe, would be the. The acquiring editor. And what the acquiring editor does is what I described early on. They sort through piles and piles of manuscripts and pick winners. Now, once they pick the winner, quote unquote, they pass it along to a story editor. And the story editor is the one is supposed to identify the problems in the winter work that the acquiring editor has bought. Usually it's the acquiring editor at the highest level is the publisher. So when I was a publisher, I would often buy a project and throw it on my senior editor's desk and go fix this. And then I was done. And then if the book worked, I would take all the credit. And if it didn't work, I blame the senior editor. So that's the way it worked for me as the traditional publisher. Okay, so that's an acquiring editor. They just pick the winners. And then the story editor is the one that pinpoints all of the problems. So they're the ones who do the 40 page, single spaced letter like the one I just described that I gave Steve. Okay, now then there's the line by line editor. Now the line by line editor is the editor that will help you clean up your prose so that it doesn't sound like a third grader wrote it. So they're going to say you had a simple declarative sentence here. You might want to add some prepositional phrases so that you, you balance your literary style. They help a person develop, quote, unquote, their voice, and they just sort of iron out the choppy Stuff. So the line by line editor is the one who does the final pass on the manuscript. And that's the way I structure it. So, for example, Tim and I are working on the threshing. Tim is probably in the middle. He's in the final stages of the story fixing of his novel. Once the story fixing is finished and he has a draft that I would call the working draft, then that working draft would land on my desk as line by line editor. And I would go sentence by sentence there and go, I'm going to clean this up a little bit. This is a little choppy. And you know, it can be very extensive or less extensive based upon basically the success of the writer. So nobody's really doing line by line edits on Dan Brown because Dan Brown sells 10 million copies. So why would you or Danielle Steele, why would you mess with their voice, with their prose, with their choices when it works? You don't. Why would you. Nobody's really doing that to Stephen King or John Grisham or any of the major big brand name writers. James Patterson, because why?

They've got formulas that work. Yeah, yeah.

Why would you want James Patterson to sound like Jane Austen? It's. He just didn't. You don't do that. It's dumb. Okay, so. But in the early stages, you do want, I mean, that's the brilliance of a line editor is understanding the voice, not screwing up the voice, but sort of enhancing the voice so that it's even more unique. It's a real, real skill. And it's almost more art than full craft. Like you've got to know how to, you know, hit a 100 mile an hour fastball or throw a 95 mile an hour fastball. But you also need to know the situation of the game as a line editor. So I used a baseball analogy. But it's sort of like you've got to be at the top of your craft, know everything of story structure, no grammar and no copy editing. And then on top of that, then you sort of have to have an understanding of the art. And you go by your instincts when you're a line by line reader. And you go, you know what? In my mind, that doesn't sound so good. So I'm going to fix that. And you tweak it and it doesn't interfere with the. Like, I line edit Steve. Right. And Steve, Yeah, Steve will email me back now. I don't have to do a lot.

That's a very interesting point.

Right. But it's funny that occasionally I've had To write two or three paragraphs, and I'll shoot it back to him and go, steve, I rewrote this, that, and this, and I added this. And he'll accept 70%. And he'll go, you know, you write almost like, better than I write me. So it's working together after a while. You know, it's learning the cadences of the voice of the writer. And Steve is a really, really. I mean, specific. He does not. I would never presume to rewrite much. It's usually, here's a draft that I wrote in your voice. Fix it. And then he'll fix it, but he'll be like, 70% of this works, but this isn't working. So that's what a line editor does. Now, there's also. It's something that I've talked about for years, and these. It's sort of like a combination plate of a studio executive in Hollywood and like a story person. And that's the developmental editor. And the developmental editor is someone who works with a writer from the beginning, so they will sort of mentor a writer from concept to final manuscript. I've developmentally edited tin. So the threshing is the process of taking someone. I mean, I can't believe I agreed to do it.

Well, didn't you? You agreed to 10 episodes, didn't you?

I did.

I agreed to 10 episodes.

I'm like, I can't leave. I can't leave this poor guy handy to think like, he's nailed it now that he's got his 10 episodes. So the whole, like, the major process of story editing is if you. If you were crazy enough to listen from episode one to episode X, you would see the careful tending of someone's psyche as they're learning something brand new. And I think if you look at what Tim wrote at the very start of the podcast versus what he's writing now, you would say, holy crap, mackerel. How did that happen? And it's, you know, it's three years now that. Three years without a mentor, a developmental editor. I gotta say, I don't think Tim. It would take Tim 20 years.

Well, I am crazy enough to have listened to every single podcast.

And one of the reasons I asked this question is because many people know I'm a writer as well as an editor. So now I'm seeing the conversation from both sides. And one of the conversations, one of the questions that comes up a lot with writers, especially those who are still in the early stages of their career, how do I know what kind of editor I need Is a developmental edit worth it? And maybe all I need is just a proofreader, because there are a lot of in the indie world, which is really the only one I know, where there's a school of thought that says you need to write very quickly and develop a backlist very quickly. And I hear, you know, in the writing groups that I'm in, authors saying, well, I wrote my draft, I sent it to beta readers who also proofread and fixed typos. And now I'm going to publish. And then there's people like me on the way, on the other side of the spectrum, who is investing in this type of training for myself, professional development for myself, and diving deep into story. So for writers who are listening, probably working on their first or one of their first novels, how do they know if they need a developmental editor or a story editor? How can you determine that for yourself? Is it just a subjective thing? Is there some litmus test? Because when I was starting, I didn't even have the language of works doesn't work. I was writing on instinct. And what my first novel gave me the opportunity to do was develop a list of questions. So at least I knew what I didn't know, Right? So then when I found Storygrid, you had answers to those questions, which is why I kept following Story Grid. It was wonderful. So for people who were like me and are just writing on instinct, how do you figure out what kind of editing you need? And how do you decide to make that investment in yourself and your development as an artist?

Okay, well, I think it goes to. To your fundamental nature. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Okay, that's one element of the equation. But the super macro element of the equation is you must, must ask yourself an extremely difficult question. And that question is, why? Why am I doing it? And there are a couple of answers to that there. You know, if you had to sort of split it into a four, one way or the other. 50, 50. The first answer to the why? Question would be, I want to be commercially successful. Meaning I want to make my writing my living. I want to be a major New York Times bestseller, and if not a major New York Times bestseller, I want to live comfortably off of my writing creativity. So that's one answer. So it's the commercial answer. I want, for lack of a better word, money. Money equals success. Okay. The second answer is, I'm not sure I want money, but I'm compelled. I'm compelled by something that I don't really understand at all. And I'M very curious about this compulsion within me that I'd like to pursue it with a very serious focus. Doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to quit my job and run away from the circus and, you know, all that. But it means my why is about there's something inside of me that's pointing me in this direction, and I want to really take it seriously because I just have a feeling that it's something I should be doing. So you've got the why of money and the why of internal compulsion, or I don't even know if that's the right word. So the fundamental question is, why am I doing this? And the two answers that are easy to come up with are money or internal need. So it doesn't mean that if you're in pursuit of money, you don't have an internal need, or if you have internal need, you don't have pursuit of money. But I always say you need to identify the line, and the line is given a final choice. Which choice do you make? It's the best bad choice or the irreconcilable good choice.

Right, Right.

It's the crisis. The crisis of your life. My crisis is I want to write for money or for myself. Okay, so if you have to choose one of those, you have to choose. Choose one. Just. It's okay. Just choose one. Okay, so let's say you choose money. Perfectly valid choice. Absolutely, perfectly valid. And I'm not saying that you can't become a great artist if you choose money as your primary choice at the beginning. So let's just go down that road. You choose money. So like any really intelligent person, you would say to yourself, if I want to make money as a writer, how would I do it? What are the first principles of making money as a writer? And there are plenty of people in the Internet and in marketing programs and at writers conferences that will say to you, I will tell you the first principles of making money as a writer. And the answers to those questions are volume of work, series characters, and manipulation of Internet algorithms. So they're not talking about the creation of the art, they're talking about. It's sort of like that Steve Martin joke, you know, I can teach you how to make a million dollars and not pay taxes. First, make a million dollars. Second, say, I forgot. And he doesn't really get into how to make the million dollars part. So they don't get into how to actually write the book. They say, write series characters, write 5,000 words a day. Don't be precious. Get your Crap done. And there's a really good message in that. But it also can go off the rails, especially when the algorithms keep getting more and more refined. And it's going to become more and more difficult to get people to give your book a try.

It's also totally outside our control.

Well, it's almost like at the beginning of a new technology, at the beginning of a new business, a new thing, what you find is that there are arbitrage moments. So, for example, everything starts out, a new technology starts out as a bell curve, right? And that's what the long tail was about, which was written about 10 years ago or 15 years ago, maybe it's not that long. But it's Internet time, which seems like that. Okay, so at the beginning of a new technology, the Bell curve rules. And what the bell curve is is that the barriers to entry are wide open and anybody can get in there. And even if you, like, have zero expertise, you can make a little bit of money because it's a very wide curve. Now, over time, what happens is the bell curve starts to shrink and it becomes a Pareto curve. And the Pareto curve is 80% of all volume goes to 20%. So this is why we have Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, just one more. Can't think of it. And the reason why those major corporations dominate now is because the bell curve of the Internet became the Pareto principle. So if you look at this in terms of books, the ebook revolution in 2007 opened up a gigantic bell curve. So all those people who never had access to the marketplace now did. So guess what happens? There was a insatiable appetite for news stories that just was never being satisfied because the major publishers, you know, they. They only eked out a certain number of books per year. And people who didn't read didn't even pay attention to what the big publishers were doing because they never published anything they were interested in. So guess what happens is that Big Internet 2007 ebook Rush opens by Amazon. They open up the gates. There were no algorithms, no restraints. So what you found were these people who couldn't be published traditionally by the major publishers decided, I'm going to get in on this gold rush. They were the first ones to California. They were able to bang out book after book after book in a series character that, you know, did wildly successful business, while the stories themselves weren't all that well told, but they were something fresh and new. So a lot of these people became, you know, pretty known commodities after a while, and eventually they would either be picked up by the major publishers, or they would retire with a lot of money and be happy about it. So as the Internet and ebooks have gotten older and older and older, what you're finding is that bell curve is starting to squeeze. And so it becomes more and more difficult to squeeze out dollars from the ebook world. And that's why people go to writers conferences to hear from experts who tell them how to manipulate their publishing schedules, their covers, their offers. They're, you know, give this one for 99 cents and then, bang, 48 hours, do a 299 release on. You know, there are all these formulas that these people are obsessively plugging through, and guess what? They work for about a month, and then they got to come up with a new gimmick because the Amazon algorithm or the Google or whatever algorithm, guess what? They start to figure out what the other people. It's an arbitrage game, right? So that's what the money side of being a writer can lead to. You end up like. I recently spoke at a writer's conference, and they asked me to speak for five years in a row, and I kept saying no, because I don't really enjoy doing that. But eventually I said, you know what? I gotta open up my world a little bit. Let me do it. So I go, and there's, I guess a thousand published writers who are all making a living writing. And my boring presentation was like, how to level up your craft, you know, like how to bust your ass to make your story a little bit better. And guess what? I had the smallest room.

And next door to me was someone who was an algorithm expert. And I had 25 people in my, you know, thing, and there were 500 people next door. And I said to myself, that's okay, because these 25 people have a better probability of success over time, like if you looked at it as a. As a graph, than the 500 people next door who are just trying to, you know, make their nut that month. You know, they're trying to manipulate the algorithm and get out another nine books this year so that because two years ago they could publish six books and make enough money, now they have to publish nine. And you get where I'm saying yes, completely. So those people aren't going to hire any editors other than copy editors, proofreaders, and that's totally fine with me. And I think sometimes the act of constantly writing, you can't help but get better. It's sort of like if you are constantly practicing running a sprint for 90ft over and over again. But you don't know anything about running mechanics or the kinetic chain or anything like that. The chances are you're probably going to hit a plateau, and you're never going to get faster. But sometimes, occasionally, a person, their body sort of realigns, and they do get faster. Now, if you compare that person who's with someone else who's really analyzed the first principles of running mechanics and has, you know, really analyzed how Usain Bolt, you know, goes so fast, and they figure out, oh, my gosh, it's really about force per step and number. If I can increase my numbers of steps and push off more, I'll go faster. And if I can manipulate my blonde, it's. If they level up their craft in terms of running a sprint, they're going to go faster than the person who's just running over and over again without really knowing what they're doing. But occasionally, that person who's running over and over again really starts to learn things. And what happens, Valerie, is that that person who's so dedicated to just doing it for money, they discover the money's not enough for them anymore. They're not getting what they want. They have all the money that they thought that they would possibly need, and it's still not making them happy, but they still want to write. And then they say to themselves, what if I can get a little bit better in this writing thing? Maybe this writing, there's more to it than just making my $100,000 a year. Yeah, yeah, I seemingly can make it now. Now I'm kind of. This is boring. What am I going to do next? You know what? I still love to write. Maybe if I tried a different genre, maybe if I tried something else. And those are the people who start to sort of move further, and they start to cross that border into the compulsion of internal, you know, desire to become a. A serious writer. One who's. And when I say serious writer, it doesn't mean you're writing the great American novel. It means someone who's really diving into their particular genre and saying, how can I write a better book? Is it possible to write a better book than Pride and Prejudice? I wonder if I can write a love story better than that. Or I wonder if I can get close to it. I wonder if I can write a horror novel better than Frankenstein. Those are the people who are like, oh, storygrid. Let me check that out. Because that's what they're about. They're about masterworks, looking at the masterworks, using those as inspiration to innovate. The genre even better. And to get a little bit better each time I write a book. So if I'm, you know, I'm writing 5,000 words a day, maybe I can turn down the volume and concentrate on maybe a thousand, maybe one scene a day, and then maybe I could spend a day or two analyzing the scene and then on the fourth day, do a rewrite and see if I can even notch it up a little bit better. That is what we're about, and that's what developmental editing is about. It's sort of ratcheting up the level of craft incrementally so that you're not. It's like lifting weights. Right. You don't go from, you know, 0 pounds to 150 pound bench press in three months. It's like an incremental. And then you also hit plateaus. Right. I know that you exercise. You know what I'm talking?

Yes, absolutely.

So progress is not a linear path. It's a lot of bumps and, you know, falls. So your original question is, how do I know that I'm ready to hire an editor? It's really ask yourself that one question and say to yourself, am I in this for the money? Okay, yeah, I'm in it for the money. Can I write 5,000 words a day? Yeah, I can do that. Can I do nine books a year? Yeah, I can do that. Well, what I say to you is, God bless. Go with God. Go do it. Go do it. And you know what? You're gonna probably become a better writer just through repetition and hard work. Blue collar work is never going to be bad for you.

And a lot of writing is blue collar work. You know, 90% of it, maybe 95. When people come to editors, the instinctually, they know that the story that came out on the page is not the one that was in their head. So they know that there's work to do. But receiving feedback can be really difficult, especially if we've spent years of our life toiling on the story. We become very attached to our writing. So sometimes writers go to editors looking for feedback, but really just wanting validation that what they've written is really good. And you said something. I don't know if it was during our training or maybe it was on one of the podcast episodes. I don't remember. You said, the writer is not the problem. The problem is the problem. And that was a light bulb moment for me because it separates the person from the art. So what advice would you have for a writer who's listening to this, who knows that they need to level up. They know that the work that they've produced is not the story that was in their head, and they're trying to figure out how to make that happen. Yet they take the feedback very personally, and they may not even be aware that that's what's happening. But the reaction is, this is my art. You can't change. I'm not changing my art. And of course, story grid is all about diving deep into the story and saying, well, you don't have an inciting incident. The inciting incident of the middle build needs work. So for a writer who is feeling defensive about receiving feedback, what advice would you have for that person?

Well, I think you already answered the question in that you have to dissociate from the work in a way that is. Steve always says something like when, you know, this happened recently where I told him he had to basically go back to a page one rewrite. And he said, the first three days, he was ready to jump on a plane and come kill me. And he just didn't want to hear it. And he recognized that, and he said, look, I'm emotionally incapable of dealing with this right now. I'm too pissed off. So my feelings are hurt. I busted my ass, and all this guy does is criticize me. I don't want to deal with this. So instead of acting on that impulse, he decided to let his body metabolize it. And what that meant was he probably went and worked on something else, or he went to the gym, or he went for a walk, or he went on a vacation. You know, he did something that allowed him to just get it out of his mind, and then he went back to it later. And then what the next step is that he said to himself, look, I have to acknowledge that, Steve, number one, you're a really great guy. You really brought this first draft to a completion. God bless you. You're fired. And then he says to himself, steve, number two, you're hired. Now, Steve number two, come in here and fix all this shit.

Steve number one.

And it's exactly the Hollywood mentality, right? Like the screenplay comes in, it's no good. They hire somebody else to come fix it. So Steve is like his own Hollywood boss. And so if you can play those. Those little games with yourself, they really work. Because you can say, you know what? You're a really nice guy, Sean, and you did the best that you could, and you should be proud of yourself. Now I'm giving you the freedom to not deal with this anymore. So goodbye. And then you go, sean, Number two, all right, you're the editor. You know what the hell you're doing. Now go in there and fix this piece of shit. And that will allow you to start to separate yourself from your work. Then eventually you will go, hey, Sean, nice first draft. You know what? I'm gonna have to call in an editor to see how well you did, but, you know, I really want to thank you for doing that. And then you. You bring in a story grid editor, and then they come in, they give you the truth, and they say, here are all your problems. They're not saying you're an idiot, you can't write. They're saying, hey, here are the problems with your book. Let's work through them one by one. And instead of me working in the wrong end of the problem, we're going to start at the top, and, you know, we're going to have some difficult conversations. And you know what happened on that page One rewrite with Steve is that I said to him, steve, hey, buddy, you didn't choose the genre. And you know what he did? He said, holy shit, you're right. I was lazy. I thought I was a pro. I thought I didn't have to literally choose a genre. I mean, isn't that like amateur hour choosing your genre? Oh, I'm gonna write a mystery novel. And you know what he said? That was the major problem. So he went back to first principles of story and said, what kind of story do you want to want to write? And he decided he wanted to write a horror story. Okay, what are the masterworks that are in the arena that I admire, that I would say I would be incredibly happy to have my book compared to? They would be Rosemary's Baby and the Exorcist. Okay, so what are the qualities of those two masterworks that are so compelling that brought people to the. To the theater, to the book? And then he walked himself through, through story grid first principles. He talked himself off of the ledge. And guess what the side effect was? He got pretty excited again about his work because he could say, oh, that scene over there might work over here. Oh, you know what? I might not have to throw that out. I can tweak that a little bit. And that's what an editor author relationship can be within your own psyche. So the more. More you can do that for yourself. And I'm an introvert, right? So when I created the story grid methodology, no, I did not call up Robert McKee and ask him to have coffee. I didn't. I did not call up David Mammon. I did not do those things. What I did is I went and I went. Who knows the most about Stuart? Robert McKee? All right, I'm going to read that book, okay? I read the book. I'm going to go to his conference. I'm going to go to his conference. I took my notes, okay? Here are the principles that I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree with. He makes perfect sense. Here's everything. Now, how do I make that prescriptive for me, huh? I'm not really sure. Let me explore. What about Aristotle? What about Robert Friedman? So an introvert is an autodidact, right? They are for. For better or for worse, they don't like to show that they don't know everything. So they go out and they plumb the depths of literature and they start to piece together their own world view. So if you're a writer and you're not like, really that excited about hearing somebody criticize your work with a methodology that you fully don't understand yet, what I suggest is, you know what? You become your editor. You read the story grid, you read Robert McKee. You put all those principles to task in something that you love. Say, you know, you love the English Patient as your novel. Well, go on story grid the English Patient. Learn your craft. Learn the editor's craft. And then maybe you'll look at your novel in a different way. You probably will. And then eventually you're going to say, you know what? I'd like to just sort of bat this around with somebody who knows the same shit that I know. Oh, who, who knows? Oh, story grid editors. So if I have a conversation about, you know, progressive complications, they're going to be like, well, yeah, here's an example from X Masterwork in the thing that you like, right? They're gonna. They have the same language, the same methodology. They're one of. They're one of the people you know. So that's what I'm sure. Let me ask you this question, Valerie, since I've been answering so many.

Okay.

All right. So what's the major thing that I told you was going to happen when I did the certification course about editing for you that you thought I was lying about that you didn't think was true, and did you find it to be true or. Or false? Do you know what I mean?

There was one point in particular. Now, most of. With the exception of this one point, everything else that you tell me, I just accept as true because you have 30 years experience and I have one. So I'm just going to go with It. And as we do stories on the Roundtable podcast, this happens to me, and I know it happens to the others as well because we talk about it as we study a story every week, we'll discover an element that we think, oh, oh, look, this is what Sean was talking about. None of us really knew it. We couldn't come up with an example of it. We just accepted it as true. Or we put it in our list of things we want to investigate further. Oh, this is why you want to show don't tell that kind of stuff. There was one point that during our training that I thought, well, I don't. I don't know, Shawn. Okay. But I don't know if I agree with that point. And it's. When you said that for first time novelists, the first novel is a memoir of some degree. Sometimes it's explicitly a memoir, other times it's inspired by an event in the author's life. I thought, well, you know, I was thinking back to my first novel, and I thought, well, I didn't do that. So I'm not sure. Yeah, this is my maturation plot as an author.

Okay.

So many lessons to learn.

Well, that's okay. I mean, I mean, we talked about this on our, Our weekly call the other day. Is that what drives us to write is that we want to figure out what our story's about. Our own story. Right. Yeah. So we may use protagonists and other things to sort of start picking at our own story. And so those who are compelled to write that, first thing that they write is it could be, you know, about, you know, anthropomorphic animals or aliens or something, but deep down, it's dealing with a very, very unsolved issue in your own story. Right. So that is what I think is so wonderful about writing, is that you're your own analyst without really even knowing it. So the very intuitive, sort of strange part of your brain, which is the right hemisphere, is constantly cycling through your experiences and the collective unconscious of experiences of everything that you've ever read, watched, listened to. So all the stories, the sum total of the stories that you have consumed in your life mixes with your own sort of unsettled, weird, kind of not really sure why the hell I'm doing that thing. And then that process is this. It's almost like this little nudge. It's a little poke internally in you as a writer that says, you should write, you should write, you should write, you should write. And then you sit down and you're like, I don't know what to Write. And then you start with, like, he was a poor boy in a foreign land.

You know, that's right.

And then you're like, oh, my God, this is great. And then, you know, you put it in the drawer because you lose steam. At some point, you're like, that's not going to work. And then accidentally, you'll pull it out in five years, and you go, oh, my gosh, this is so on the nose about the fact that I was applying for that loan for my new house. And so that's what's. I mean, what you'll find is that the professional writer, at some point, they cross this line. They go, oh, man, now I know what it's all about. I'm writing to figure out my own shit. And I'm using story structure and the collective unconscious as a means to figure out my own shit. And so any dollar that comes into my bank account by me sitting here and constructing these wild fantasies to figure out my own shit is magic.

There's one question that I keep getting, and that is, why do you need five Commandments? Why do you have to do all this stuff? And the reason all these story principles are story princip is because these things happen in life. And this is exactly what you're saying. Stories are our way of dealing with situations in life and working through them and figuring out how do we behave, how do we not behave? And in order for the story to resonate with the audience, the reader, the viewer, it's got to have these elements. If we look at any interaction we have with people in our lives, the five commandments unfold in every scene. And once we start to see them, we can't unsee them. My daughter is 15, and she also likes to write. She texted me from a party she went to the other day. A friend of hers had a crush on the popular boy, thought she didn't have a chance. And then at the party, the boy looked at her friend in a certain way, and Avery texted me and said, mom, I just saw a turning point.

So they are everywhere, right? My daughter is suitably brainwashed now.

Well, you know, I told you a while back, I was working on a project, and it was a neuroscience project, so I had to do a lot of deep research about the way neurotransmitters work and the way we actually behave neurochemically. And, you know, it was no great lack of thrill when I discovered that the five commandments are basically the neurochemical chain that occurs when something that we don't know was going to happen happens. So basically solving the problem of what do you do when you don't know what to do? And our brains, the way we handle those kinds of situations are, are structured like a story. So like your daughter was saying, you know, her friend, the inciting incident was she was attracted to a guy at school. And the progressive complication was he didn't even look at her twice. So it was a real downer. But then she probably put herself, you know, in his arena more and more. So eventually he started recognizing her. And then your daughter went to the party with her friend. And I don't know what happens at your daughter's parties, but he probably had a beer and he probably saw her and his limbic system was like, that girl, there's that girl you always see. And he was thinking, wow, I never. Yeah, that is somebody I'd be interested in. And so the crisis then at that point for him and for her was, what are we gonna do about this? You know, are we going, you know, and then we got a whole story here. I mean, this is like Twilight.

That's right, that's right.

You know, the reason why it's so. I mean, just hearing your daughter's story was compelling to me because I want to know what happens. I want to know what happens with those two. Because part of me is like, oh, she should never ever, you know, approach that guy because he's just going to take advantage of her. And then another part of me was like, that boy shouldn't, you know, get close to her because she doesn't really know who he is. And so all of these things start to come into our minds as third party observers just hearing the story that it does so, so much work for the writer that if you just abide the neurochemical stages of storytelling and you really, really focus on them and make them crystal clear, the subjective reader or the subjective viewer will fill in so much of the stuff that you don't have to really do much work at all. If you really focus on this happens, then that happens, then this happens and that happens and that, and then that leads to this and this and this and this. And if you just construct it using these really great tools, then it's remarkable what other people bring to your story that you would never, ever even consider. And then you get to become this genius storyteller when you're really just minding your P's and Q's and being very, very specific about what you want to accomplish, what the point of your story is, and how you're going to get from A to B and B to C. And these are the principles that story grid are all about. It's about teaching people this way of looking at stories so that we can tell better stories and that, you know, your daughter could write that story short scene, and it would probably floor everybody in her English class, and she could just use, like, kangaroos, you know, so that's what a writer does. And obviously your daughter's a writer because she wouldn't have even consciously observed that happening if she wasn't sort of clued into the structure of how the world works. Well, that's great to hear.

This is the type of thing that StoryGrid does for writers. It opens up a story in a whole new way. It gives you a whole new lens to view your craft and the story itself. I mean, look, I drank the Kool Aid long ago, so, you know, I'm all in. It's fine. Basically, the. The thing that I want to let people know if they get frustrated with storygrid because it's. It's heavy. There's. You got to work to understand this stuff. It's not going to just come without effort. You've got to study. But if you're willing to put in the work and you're willing to study, then it's like having the secret decoder ring to figure out how the heck you go from I just want to write stories to the end of a story, a book or a short story or a novella that works, that pleases the artist and that the artist can have pride in. But that also is entertaining and that resonates with the audience, with whoever reads it. If that's you, if you're listening to this podcast and that sounds like you, you're someone who wants to level up your craft. You're really interested in becoming a better writer, then you're in the right place. Storygrid is for you.

Wow. I couldn't said it better myself. Thanks, Valerie.

And on that note, I better go do my writing for the day.

Thank you so much, Sean.

Oh, thank you, Valerie.

Bye.

Bye. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the StoryGrid podcast. If you're interested in attending the certification training that's coming up in February, go to storygrid.com cert that's C E R T, and fill out an application. I'll be there along with at least six other editors from the first session we did in 2017. We're all coming back for the opportunity to study directly with Sean Coyne so that we can continue to level up our craft. He's been teasing us that he's got all kinds of new material in this session, so I cannot wait to find out what this is. For everything StoryGrid related, check out storygrid.com make sure you pick up a copy of the book and sign up to the newsletter so you don't miss anything happening in the StoryGrid universe, including the fundamental Friday's posts. Just saying. If you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any past episode, all of that can be found@storygrid.com podcast if you'd like to reach out to us, you can find us on Twitter torygrid. As always, if you'd like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcasts and leaving a rating and review. Thanks so much for subscribing and being part of our work here at Story Grid. We'll see you next time.