The Story Grid
by Shawn Coyne, Steven Pressfield · first published 2015
13mentions
5recommended by
10HN commenters
2016–2024first – last mentioned
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Why HN recommends it
A practical editing framework for fiction writers, teaching you to diagnose and fix story structure yourself. It is well suited to revising drafts, especially for analytically minded writers.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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If you're writing fiction (or doing any sort of storytelling for that matter), The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne is an absolute must-read. The podcast is amazing—it's the first podcast I've found worth listening to from the very beginning—and it has opened my eyes so much, helping me understand the…
on “How to Write a Novel” ↗Awesome, thanks! For my major edit, I went through The Story Grid approach by Coyne. Very helpful and appealed to my techie brain.
on “How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017” ↗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.
on “Michael Chabon: How to Salvage a 'Wrecked' Novel (2010)” ↗…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…
on “How James Patterson became the world’s best-selling author” ↗I read Story by Robert McKee after I read The Story Grid and I found Shawn's explanations and descriptions more precise and to the point than Robert's. I also really like how Shawn, for the most part, uses a single story (The Silence of the Lambs) in his examples…
on “How to Write a Novel” ↗…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)
on “How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017” ↗…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…
on “Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around” ↗Have a look at Story Grid: https://storygrid.com 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…
on “Ask HN: I'd like to learn how to tell stories better to friends” ↗> The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne is an absolute must-read I just read it. Story, by Robert McKee, is much better. All the useful insights in The Story Grid are lifted from Story. To Shawn Coyne's credit, he credits McKee.…
on “How to Write a Novel” ↗Story by Robert McKee seems to be the classic. The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne looks promising as well, though I haven't finished it yet.
on “Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling” ↗…writers to put things into their novels even they don't see. Readers and editors note what's there, and the writers can be surprised that it happened. Sean Coyne talks about this several times on the Story Grid podcast, and it's on display in several of the episodes in which a writer's draft is examined. Maybe the real story here is how the process of creating art taps into a part of the mind that it keeps…
on “Paul McCartney's Freakish Memory” ↗…entire business around it. However, I can't recall the name of the framework or the author. When asking ChatGPT, the closest results I got were Larry Brooks - "Story Engineering" and Shawn Coyne - "The Story Grid," but I can't remember if they are the ones I'm thinking about. Can anyone suggest a few other names? Chatgpt gave me a few authors with books on Story telling but the one I'm thinking about was sold…
on “Ask HN: Storytelling Framework” ↗…increasingly surrounding ourselves with these uniform ways of doing things. The tension between creativity and conventions is fascinating. I recently read a book about writing (ostensibly editing) called The Story Grid: https://storygrid.com/ Here's a video summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3-dw9cIx2o It argues that the most important thing for an author to understand is the genre they're working in because…
on “On becoming a better developer (2015)” ↗