These past few weeks, I have been working on doing the "full" "official" Story Grid process for my novella-in-short-story I wrote in 2020.
The Story Grid has evolved over the years from a book by Shawn Coyne to a podcast to a "universe" with multiple books, numerous podcasts, a blog, an editor certification course, a guild, and even a publishing house. Shawn Coyne, who created The Story Grid, is a fiction book editor who has been in the editing world for over two decades. The Story Grid started as the process he developed to evaluate submissions, determining whether or not they "worked."
The Story Grid was originally created as an editing tool: a way to determine what wasn't working in a story and pinpoint exactly what needed to be fixed. In the years since, numerous writers have used it for outlining, drafting, and editing.
Although I've been familiar with Story Grid concepts for over six years now, I've never sat down and completed the full process for a finished manuscript.
Well, until last week.
I honestly struggled to figure out what the definitive process for the Story Grid is. There are a lot of elements to the universe, it's constantly evolving, and not even the book has a step-by-step guide: do this, then this, then this.
After diving deep, deep into the website, I found a list of their submission requirements for the Story Grid publishing house. That seemed definitive enough to me.
So, in this series, I will be following this process:
The Editor's 6 Core Questions
Defining the genre with a genre positioning statement
Completing the foolscap global story grid
Completing the story grid spreadsheet
Creating the actual Story Grid grid
This will be done in a series of 5 videos over the next month. I will be sharing (somewhat redacted) versions of all the above materials on this blog (redacted to avoid blatant spoilers and the accidental publication of the entire novella on the internet :) ). As we get into the later videos, I will be sharing some more exclusive content through my website.
So! If this interests you, subscribe to the newsletter and head on down to my YouTube channel (Nicole Wilbur - YouTube) and subscribe over there too. Happy writing!
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