Writing | Tools
How The Story Grid Changed My Writing
It’s A Sorting Hat
When I was a young girl, I fell in love with stories. Our family were avid readers, and our favorite weekly outing was to the library, where we would spend hours browsing the stacks.
I loved reading, and then I discovered I also love writing.
Given my history with self-help books and libraries, it was interesting but inevitable that another book is becoming responsible for the books I am writing.
I’m always falling down rabbit holes on the internet. One day I discovered the Story Grid Podcast, and I was hooked.
The Story Grid is a tool that editor Shawn Coyne developed during his years as an editor. He has over twenty-five years of experience in New York publishing, working for the Big Five.
What is the Story Grid
It’s a book, a series of podcasts, an editor training program, and a framework for figuring out how your story works, among other things.
It’s a diagnostic tool developed to help editors and writers talk about stories using the same language. It helps you organize your writing into a story that works.
Shawn’s approach is generous and honest because he’s interested in helping writers become better writers. There’s a lot of free material on his website and many ways to learn.
First, I became hooked on the Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast, which inspired me to buy The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne. It’s a great book.
If you want to listen to some of the episodes, here’s a great link to the first season. Listen as the newly trained Story Grid Editors use specific examples of existing stories to illustrate the method.
For me, the Story Grid was a Sorting Hat.
My discovery of Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid brought sanity to my writing process and allowed me to organize my thoughts in a way that made sense for the first time.
It was as if my book was put under a Sorting Hat, and because of it, for the first time, I could see clearly where it belonged.
The basic first question an editor will ask is — what’s your genre?
That’s a great place to begin.
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This post contains an affiliate link for the Story Grid Book. If you use this link to buy the book, I may earn a commission. Thanks.
