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.

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.

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.

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.