Story Grid - am I certifiable or just certified?
Becoming a Story Grid Certified Editor
Mad? Some will think so. Certainly, a certified nerd when it comes to story analysis.
In February 2019, I went to Nashville, Tennessee for a Story Grid Workshop run by Shawn Coyne and Tim Grahl. I stayed here.
Shawn Coyne and Tim Grahl
Shawn is a twenty-five year book publishing veteran and wrote the book - The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know. http://www.storygrid.com
He and Tim put together a regular Story Grid podcast where, according to Tim, he's the, "struggling writer learning how to write a book that works." http://www.storygrid.com/podcast
Tim's expertise is in marketing and in the post lunch sessions at the week-long workshop he shared that expertise and addressed what it takes to market an online editing business.
The workshop
We got to analyse dozens of scenes, songs, and movies for the various components that constitute scenes that work . Do you remember the song Copacabana sung by Barry Manilow and written by Manilow, Bruce Sussman and Jack Feldman? That was one of the cold scene/song analyses we had to do each day: see it, hear, it, analyse it to answer these questions:
1) What are the characters literally doing? - Attending the Copacabana.
2) What is the essential action of what the characters are doing in this scene? Lola is a seducer - she titilates to earn her living.
3) What life value has changed for one or more of the characters in this scene? (Life value is an essential component in all stories and is typically dependent on genre so different genre have different life values). In this case, for Tony it is the value of Life-Death. For Lola it is Hope - Despair. All scenes need to 'turn' on some emotional value for them to 'work'.
4) What is the inciting incident of the scene? Lola does the merengue and the cha-cha.
5) What is a progressive complication in the scene? (something that happens following the inciting incident - may be positive or negative). Tony and Lola fall in love.
6) What is the progressive complication that causes a character to address a crisis question? (Also known as the progressive complication turning point). When Lola finished, Rico called her over and went 'a bit far.'
7) What is the crisis of the scene? Does Lola run from Rico and risk losing her job? If she stays she gets paid but manhandled. A crisis is a question for the character to answer. It's is called that because the character isn't choosing between tea or coffee, or between vanilla and chocolate. They are faced with choosing between 2 bad options or irreconcilable goods. They can have the good of one thing but not the other. It's a question where the character does not immediately know what to do because there's no single obvious answer.
8) What is the climax of the scene? (the answer to the crisis question) 'Tony sailed across the bar' (to intervene), there's a fight between him and Rico.
9) What is the resolution of the scene? There's a shot and Tony dies and Lola, thirty years on, never recovers.
It was a hell of a week. I went to Thrillerfest 3 years ago, attended great classes and I still have contact with a couple of people. This was different. Yes, it was smaller (about 30 of us) and more intimate and participative. We had pre course work, and new analysis work to do every day so our work was well structured, unlike Thrillerfest where we could choose what we wanted and attend passively.
Story Grid Questions
In Nashville, we had a common belief - that we wanted to know for ourselves, or to help others, how a story is organised across multiple levels. The answer to this question helps answer another question: How do you mesmerize a reader/viewer/listener - to transport them into another realm of consciousness from their everyday existence? In simple terms, how do we manipulate the pieces of a story to deliver the most potent form of that story. Become the shaman's shaman.
Core Story Grid Premise
Although there are twelve forms of global genre that guide the writer to meet a reader's needs, marketing classifications, i.e. what bookshelf labels might say, are not genre. If you say you write science fiction, epic fantasy, historical fiction, and other words that attempt to describe the nature of the fiction, Story Grid editors will work with that setting. But they will help writers identify what is needed to translate from marketing to story genre. For example, sci-fi is often an Action or a Society global genre. Each of those, like all genre, have elements of story that are unique to contributing whether a story works or not. Genre requirements help writers move from stuck to unstuck, move from big picture requirements to scene requirements and vice versa.
Is Story Grid just a new formula - i.e. if you do this, then you'll get that?
No. Not even close.
Is it a pathway to master the form of storytelling? Absolutely.
Is it a variation on the old 3 Act structure? You can have as many acts as you want. But all stories that work have a beginning hook, a middle build and an ending payoff. Each of those structures has its own set of requirements to meet before a story will work.
How do I start thinking like a Story Grid editor?
Have a look at questions, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9 above. These questions are applied to every unit of the story from scene, sequence (of scenes), act and the whole story itself.
Can you be a great editor without Story Grid?
Of course. I have a great editor not versed in Story Grid. Anna Rogers is one of NZ's best. She has taught me a huge amount about writing. I know of others too who are highly regarded. What makes Story Grid so good, is it makes the implicit learning of skilled editors who've built their craft over decades, explicit to others who haven't. Once you know how something works, you can work with it and innovate.
In the next post, I'm going to show you a core deliverable of the Story Grid Editor's work that I've completed for certification and apply it to two different masterworks and a lesser known, but superbly written work of a New Zealand literary writer.