The Story Grid
During his years as an editor at the Big Five publishing houses, as an independent publisher, as a literary agent both at a major Hollywood talent agency and as head of Genre Management Inc., and as a bestselling co-writer and ghostwriter, Shawn Coyne created a methodology called "The Story Grid" to teach the editing craft.--Cover, page 4.
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2016–2024years
62% recommend31% neutral8% critical
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- Have a look at Story Grid:
There's a book. There's a free podcast with an extensive catalog. There are paid courses.
I suggest reading the book first to get the gist. The team behind Story Grid has really taken the original concept into some highly technical and fascinating directions. You can go as deep as you want, but they take it very deep.
Most importantly, there's a system for thinking about stories. What makes them work (or flop). What makes people pay attention (or tune out). The underlying conventions and structure all good stories share. How to learn from master works.
These lessons work not just for fiction, but non-fiction as well. It's a powerful mix of theory and practice that hash changed how I look at movies, TV series, fiction, and even news articles.
- To be fair, most crime/thrillers are formulaic and if you don't follow the standard structure it won't exactly be easy to get published. There's the basic structure, usually three acts and certain expectations the audience has (fake ending/final twist, speech praising the villain, visit to the villains lair etc).
A pretty good book that covers this is: "The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know" where the author goes through Silence of the Lambs. I think he also has a similar book for a romance novel. After reading that book (or similar books by other authors) you'll be pretty confident in forecasting what happens in most movies, you watch, too. Self-reflection at the midpoint for example. It's a pretty interesting exercise to scroll to the 33% mark in any given ebook and search for the typical act 1 -> act 2 transition etc.
- My advice might be a bit odd but... Find a hobby and get obsessed with it. Let that obsession cut into your work time until you reach a normal level (closer to 40 hours). Ideally, it's a hobby where you can "advance".
If you are in reasonable (not necessarily great) physical shape I suggest going to a bouldering gym (assuming there's one nearby). It's a fairly addictive sport that's easy to get into and easy to do on your own. A nice bonus is that there's built in gamification. Each session you can work on a single route or you can set a goal to do all routes of level X in the gym and work towards that over a period of time. As long as you just do it, you'll improve until you plateau eventually and by that time you'll be able to grind hard/train well and get better on your own.
If sport isn't your thing, maybe try writing. Pick any genre you like but thriller works quite well and almost everyone likes thrillers at least a bit. Obsess over "how to write" and how a thriller is structured. Reads books about that, start structuring a story, watch movies in "analysis mode" (a good starting point for analytical people is reading "The Story Grid").
Or maybe branch out into a slightly different area still related to your job. Maybe turn infosec into your new obsessive hobby. Sign up to hackthebox.io or something similar and try to get really good at breaking into boxes (or play CTFs).
As long as there's a way to get better at the hobby (climb harder routes, write more pages of your book, be able to break into harder boxes) and a reasonably easy way of understanding how to get there and a way to obsess over it and pour countless hours into it, the hobby qualifies. Even something like playing online chess could qualify. The main idea is to shift time from work towards this hobby and wanting to do it. Ideally the hobby rewards you regularly along the way (some measurable level of success).
- Everyone's novel draft is broken in a different way, though some advice can be better than others. Have you ever read Story Grid by Coyne? He's someone who edited at a major publisher before going out on his own, and he wrote a book about his tools for editing novels. Might be worth a look if you're deep down an editing pit.
- Awesome, thanks! For my major edit, I went through The Story Grid approach by Coyne. Very helpful and appealed to my techie brain.
- I think there's a dividing line between plot-driven and character-development driven works for lack of a better word. I think plot driven stuff should pretty much follow very common heuristics (the horror story, the heist, the serial killer novel...look at 20ish from each genre and you'll see very common structure) and only deviate ever so slightly. King follows this and an excellent book that goes into more detail on it is "The Story Grid" (teaches you to become your own editor, uses Silence of the Lambs as a running example)
