Story Grid Writing Podcast

Shawn Coyne spent three decades as a book editor before writing The Story Grid, a method for analyzing why stories work or fall apart. Tim Grahl was his student, a marketing guy who wanted to write fiction and kept getting stuck. The podcast captures their back-and-forth as Tim drafts novels and Shawn tears them apart scene by scene, with the same brutal honesty he would bring to a paid manuscript critique. If you have ever wondered what a professional editor actually sees when they read your pages, this show answers that question. Topics include the five commandments of every scene, genre conventions and obligatory scenes, the difference between a global story and a minor one, and how to diagnose why chapter three feels flat even when you cannot point to anything specific. They also run long-form analyses of films like John Wick and novels like The Silence of the Lambs, breaking them down beat by beat so you can see the skeleton underneath. The show wrapped in 2023 after 292 episodes, but the archive is essentially a free graduate-level course in story structure. New writers tend to binge it. Experienced ones come back to specific episodes when a draft is not working.