Why Story Theory Is Not Enough

Tim opens with a stat that frames the whole conversation: the average unpublished writer he surveyed has been at it for nearly 15 years. He puts the question to Shawn directly. What is Story Grid trying to do about that?

Shawn's answer starts with the mythic patterns that make stories like The Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings, and Pride and Prejudice last, and lands somewhere most writing advice doesn't: the sentence. His argument is that the same beginning, middle, and end that shapes a novel also shapes a scene and a sentence, and that the sentence is the smallest unit capable of carrying a transformation. Get that right and the larger structures follow.

Along the way, Tim and Shawn cover:

• Why reading Save the Cat, McKee, and MasterClass doesn't translate into being able to write a mythic story, and what Aristotle's subject-and-predicate has to do with it
• The chicken sexing model of learning: repetition plus feedback from someone who knows, instead of theory first
• What Shawn actually meant when he told Tim, after two full manuscripts, that he couldn't write a sentence
• The five commandments (inciting incident, turning point, crisis, climax, resolution) as five "criticalities" of everyday experience, and how each one can be written as one sentence
• Antagonism and protagonism as forces, not roles, and why antagonism isn't the bad guy
• Why Story Grid students are limited to one sentence per commandment
• Tim's guitar and jiu-jitsu comparisons, and why writing is harder to self-correct than either
• Flow state, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, and why feeling like you're taking dictation from the muse doesn't mean the writing works
• Journaling versus writing: the difference between monologue and a dialogue with a reader
• The Aunt Louise test for whether your five sentences are actually working

Also mentioned: Brent Spalding, a Story Grid student whose novel was published by Story Grid Publishing.

Books referenced

• Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• On Writing by Stephen King
• Story by Robert McKee
• Save the Cat by Blake Snyder