The Story Grid

What Good Editors Know

By: Shawn Coyne

Narrated by: Dan Portnoy

What is the Story Grid?

The Story Grid is a tool developed by editor Shawn Coyne to analyze stories and provide helpful editorial comments. It's like a CT Scan that takes a photo of the global story and tells the editor or writer what is working, what is not, and what must be done to make what works better and fix what's not.

The Story Grid breaks down the component parts of stories to identify the problems. And finding the problems in a story is almost as difficult as the writing of the story itself (maybe even more difficult).

The Story Grid is a tool with many applications:

• It will tell a writer if a story "works" or "doesn't work".
• It pinpoints story problems but does not emotionally abuse the writer, revealing exactly where a story (not the person creating the story) has failed.
• It will tell the writer the specific work necessary to fix that story's problems.
• It is a tool to re-envision and resuscitate a seemingly irredeemable pile of paper stuck in an attic drawer.
• It is a tool that can inspire an original creation.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2015 Black Irish Entertainment (P)2019 Black Irish Entertainment

great

Great boost for writers. I understand my story better now. Shares a lot of experience.

Fantastic information with poor narration.

Coyne does a great job explaining his system in general, but the organization of the book is a little fractured. Far too many chapters could have been compressed and there’s a fair amount of repeated concepts. There’s also a bit too much “we’ll cover that later” in the beginning. The first half of the book sounds like it’s still trying to sell you the book. Then there is the shoddy narration. Often it repeats lines and many times the voice changes to a much lower quality, as if it were corrected and the narrator phoned it in. Overall, it gets the point across, but I feel like the physical book would be better. Some of the images on the attached PDF are low quality as well.

Excellent starting point for a struggling writer

I really needed this. I’ve known for years that writing fiction is what I want to do with my life. I have about 35 notebooks on my bookshelf, filled with stories that fizzled out and went nowhere. I had acquired some talent for turning a phrase. I had some talent in world-building, character creation/development, and plotting a decent inciting incident, crisis, and conclusion. But it wasn’t enough.

I got lost. Every single time. I would constantly rewrite my first draft as I wrote it. My pacing was atrocious. Worst of all, I would put in the titanic effort to execute my plan to the best of my abilities, only to find that it didn’t work at all.

This book really helped me understand what I subconsciously love as a reader when I’m tearing through an exciting book. I think I wanted to believe that if you had the correct ingredients, the dish would come out perfect. Execution is as important as the underlying creative output.

I’m still lost. But now I have a map!

(My only complaint is that I can’t read it because the pdf is not a high enough resolution to view on my phone...but I can view it on the website).

Most important of all, I’m enjoying writing again! With any luck (and a titanic effort), I will actually complete my first novel using this method. And I’d you’re anything like me, maybe you can too!

Oh the irony that this book was not edited.

This book is masterful at helping the writer learn the grid of a story and how to make it work. It is ironic that the audio version was not edited and often repeated itself or skipped. The narrator was good, but was ruined by the producers not double checking and editing out bad spots. Kind of crazy.

Buy the Print, reader is not great.

It's ironic that the reader of a book about editing would fail to edit his recording. Multiple times in the recording he reads the same thing over and over again, stumbling over his words, failing to get it right. Most audiobook readers would, afterwards, go back and edit the places they marked as spots where they stumbled. This reader does not.

Aside from that, he reads extremely fast, and this book is all about exacting details of form and function of the anatomy of books and stories.

Save yourself a credit and buy the Print book instead.

Terrible narrator

Dan, I hope this was your first book as narrator, and that you have improved your skills since recording this. There are so many technical and quality issues with the narration, that it completely distracts from Shawn’s writing. Sudden changes in volume, missing words (including verbs!), spliced-in sentences using a suddenly more/less hoarse voice, double readings and stumbling over sentences, incorrect reading of words (“causal” not “casual”), irritating and inconsistent use of the word “slash”, etc. I’d recommend redoing this narration to give listeners a better experience. It was hard to finish.

Shawn, this is an awesome tool that you have laid out for story writers. Thank you. Your final chapter is key to understanding the philosophy of how to best use this tool. I look forward to applying this tool to my own work.

a godsend

The book answered so many questions I had. I'm glad I picked it up. The book is actually intended for editors, well, for writers that have to edit their own book.

Great info!

Loved all of it. Will definitely be going over it again and again as a tool and reference. The audio was obviously recorded over a few times (intermediate change in voice/audio quality, and saying the same thing twice). It was a little distracting at times. But I would still highly recommend this title.

The info & Study I have been looking for!

The information and depth of practical application is invaluable to me. The thorough way that Shaun goes through the details of writing and editing a work is challenging to me and his use of well known literature to illustrate his points were so well done that I did not find it necessary to have read them all.

A must have for writers, enthusiasts and every-day hobbyists!

A great manual for any writer!

This book will give new perspective to authors and help aspiring novelists look at the task of writing a novel in a new way.