Story Grid Bonus Material

Bits and pieces that had to be cut from The Story Grid

The Five Commandments and Bruce Springsteen

Story Grid Bonus Material

The transcript for last week’s The Story Grid Podcast is running behind this week, so I thought I’d feature something I wrote for Steve Pressfield’s site, www.stevenpressfield.com way back in 2015. It concerns the Five Commandments of Storytelling and the making of Bruce Springsteen’s fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town. And I highly… Read more »

Art and Polarity

Story Grid Bonus Material

Tim and I are knee-deep in creating a bunch of podcasts to cover us through an upcoming hiatus. So this week’s transcript is a bit behind. As soon as it’s ready, I’ll post it straightaway. In the meantime, here’s a post I wrote for Steven Pressfield’s site (www.stevenpressfield.com) in the “What it Takes” column I… Read more »

Pondering Quirky Quandaries

Story Grid Bonus Material

The first thing I told Matthew Quirk was to throw away a novel he’d been working on for three years. Forget about it and start over are the last things a writer wants to hear. Even though other seriously high-powered literary agents in town thought his novel could be salvaged, Matt knew I was right. He… Read more »

Narrative Drive

Story Grid Bonus Material

So Steve Pressfield and I are beginning a project together that we’re both very excited about (and rather terrified by too). I’m sorry that I can’t tell you what it is yet. Simply because Steve and I aren’t really sure about what it is either. But what I can say is that it requires my… Read more »

Combining Peanut Butter and Chocolate

Story Grid Bonus Material

When we were shooting these videos, I kept using the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup as an analogy to explain how a combination of The Foolscap Global Story Grid and The Story Grid Spreadsheet comes together to create something unique. Jeff and Steve liked it at first, but after a while they tired of hearing me… Read more »

The Micro Story

Story Grid Bonus Material

With your Foolscap Global Story Grid road map and a thousand cups of coffee, you’ve reached THE END. Now what? Now is the time to send your writer half of the brain on a long vacation and hand over the Story keys to your inner editor. He’s going to create an indispensable spreadsheet that will… Read more »

The Macro Story

Story Grid Bonus Material

Editors (and Writers!) must master the Macro of Story. The Foolscap Global Story Grid is a simple one-page map to figure out your Story’s final destination are more importantly how to get there. Part 3 of 5: The Foolscap Global Story Grid Shawn Coyne: So now that we have a pretty clear understanding of what… Read more »

Genre Review

Story Grid Bonus Material

The first question we have to ask ourselves when we sit down to begin a new project is “What kind of Story do I want to tell?” The best way to answer is to begin with a review of Genre and what I call the Five-Leaf Genre Clover. For those of you who prefer to… Read more »

Story Grid Mini-Course

Story Grid Bonus Material

I’m very happy to introduce The Story Grid mini-course. Steve, Callie, Jeff and I sent it last week as a thank you to the more than 3,000 people who have bought the book directly from Black Irish Books and the response has been terrific. So we thought it would be cool to share it… Read more »

Mixing Genres

Story Grid Bonus Material

A friend of mine emailed me over the weekend asking about a coming of age/maturation story he’s working on. He’s read the recent posts about the redemption story and wanted more information about “mixing genres.” He knows for certain that his global story is driven by his lead character’s progression from naivete to worldliness but… Read more »

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