Story Grid Writing Podcast

Continuing our 624 analysis of Ed McBain's short story EYE WITNESS, we are talking through the Five Commandments of Storytelling.

This is a three part episode as we deep dive through each commandment. In this episode, we go through the Inciting Incident and the Turning Point Progressive Complication.

There are four story analysis questions you must answer for every scene in your story:

1. What are the Avatars literally doing?

2. What are the essential tactics of the Avatars?

3. What universal human value has changed for one or more Avatars in the scene?

4. What Story Event sums up the scene’s global value change?

In this episode we make it to the final one! Last week we covered the first three.

There are four story analysis questions you must answer for every scene in your story:

1. What are the Avatars literally doing?

2. What are the essential tactics of the Avatars?

3. What universal human value has changed for one or more Avatars in the scene?

4. What Story Event sums up the scene’s global value change?

In this episode we make it through the first three! Next week is a whole episode on the fourth question.

Is it first or third person? Past or present tense?

As you'll see in this week's podcast episode, Point of View is about way more than this.

See more here:
https://storygrid.com/point-of-view/

A story’s global Point of View includes the technical choices writers make to deliver the story to the reader. The POP premise and Narrative Device suggest Point of View combinations that create the effect of the story told by the Author to the single Audience member.

Person refers to the vantage point from which the written story is presented the reader.

• First Person: I (or we) wrote a story.
• Second Person: You wrote a story.
• Third Person: Alex (or she or he or they) wrote a story.

Tense distinguishes the timeframe of the story.

• Past: I wrote a scene.
• Present: You write (or are writing) a scene.
• Future: Alex will write a scene.

Mode: The final technical choice focuses on how the information is presented. This is the storytelling Mode.

Showing is an objective and immediate mode that creates the effect of being present and observing the events of the story. Here are some examples.

• First Person: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• Second Person: Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
• Third Person: A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín, or “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway

Telling is a subjective mode that readers experience as if someone or something is collecting, collating, and sharing the events and circumstances of the story.

• First Person: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, or Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
• Second Person: “How to Be an Other Woman” by Lorrie Moore.
• Third Person: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, Animal Farm by George Orwell, or Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Listen as Shawn Coyne, Tim Grahl, Leslie Watts, and Danielle Kiowski work through the Point of View for the the short story EYE WITNESS by Ed McBain: https://www.amazon.com/McBain-Brief-Ed-ebook/dp/B01KFBQEY4/

This is a Episode 254 of the Story Grid Podcast - https://storygrid.com/podcast

Figuring out the Narrative Device for your story will unlock your writing in ways you never thought possible. 

There are three questions you must answer: 

- Who is the Author of the story? (Hint... it's not you, the writer) 

- Who is the Single Audience Member? 

- What is the Problem? 

See more here: https://storygrid.com/point-of-view/

How do you boil your story down into one "What If" statement? There are four parts to building out the answer to this question and Shawn, Leslie, Danielle, and Tim walk through it together in this week's episode.

The genre of your story is way more than one thing. In this episode of the Story Grid Podcast, learn the five important pieces of understanding your genre — Time, Style, Structure, Reality, and Content.

Shawn discusses the two sides  to every story.

Shawn and Kim go back to the beginning and discuss the origins of Story Grid. 

Shawn Coyne walks through the role you, as the Artist, plays in getting your own wants, needs and desires into your story.