 It is now the 1st of March which means it has been about six weeks since I started working on the story grid. Admittedly, I haven't been doing it the entire time, but I have attempted to do this process probably on four or five separate occasions now, and I've really been struggling. However, it is March which means I am a good two months behind on my New Year's resolution to write two new books this year which means I am determined to get this done. Originally, I thought I would get it done today, however, I've been working on it for what, three and a half, four and a half hours now? I can't remember exactly when I started. Because of that, it means my mind is getting a little bit worn out, so I don't know if I'll get to the end. If I do get to the end, I might not be able to film the outro of this video today, but I have made progress which is something. As you know, the story grid method has a few different steps. The first is the six different questions that editors ask themselves, which I did back at the beginning of the process. After that, there is then the one-page fullscat method, which is basically a one-page outline of your book, and then there is the actual story grid spreadsheet. Now, today I've been working on the one-page outline. The reason it's taken me so long to do this one-page outline is because the book lacks information on how to fill it out, to be completely honest. It has a lot of examples based on Silence of the Lambs. It talks a bit about the thriller genre, but if you're not writing in the thriller genre, it's a little bit difficult. So what I then did was I went to the story grid website to see if I could find any more information on the blog, and it turns out I did. So there are a number of really helpful articles which take deep dives into different genres. So the ones that were helpful for me are the action genre and the love genre. I've actually, since the last time I filmed, I've actually decided to stop focusing on the Cannibal Superhuman book, which would have been thriller. The reason for that is because even though I've started with Snowflake Method and Story Grid, neither of the methods have sparked new ideas. So I think that one just needs to marinate for a bit longer. So I'm focusing on two ideas now. One is the dream spy, which is action, and one is the reciprocal stalking, which is love slash obsession. Now these blog posts are really helpful because one, they outline the obligatory scenes of the genre, which the book does not. Two, they talk about the 3x structure and what needs to happen in each of the acts. They talk about the emotional journey a protagonist should take based on the five stages of grieving. And those are the three main things they add to what is covered in the book. Now this makes things a little bit confusing because what it means is there are three different outlining methods you need to follow. So the first one is what's covered in the Foolscap method. The one page Foolscap is divided into three different acts, and each act has an inciting incident, a complication, a crisis, a climax, and a resolution. So if you times that by three, that's 15 different scenes. Then you have the obligatory scenes for the genre. For the love genre, it was one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 scenes. And for action, it was three, seven, eight, nine. So then you've got another 10-ish scenes to look at. Then there's the three acts structure. And the way this was outlined in the blog posts, it lists another one, two, well, 17 scenes, 17 beats. So I saw this and then I just decided to cut out the stages of grief part of it because it wasn't adding anything for me, which means I had three different scene types I needed to brainstorm. So what I did then was I did a list of ideas for the obligatory scenes that I needed to hit in each of my books. I then looked at the three act structure. Now when I was looking at the three act structure, there were a couple of references to the hero's journey. And I did some googling to get some more clarity around the different scenes because even though I'm familiar with the hero's journey in an abstract sense, so I'm aware of how it works. I know some of the major beats. I haven't actually read Joseph Campbell's work. So I'm by no means well versed. And there were a couple of scenes where I wasn't 100% sure what was required. So one of them was the ordeal. And another one was the apotheosis or crisis. When I was googling this, I actually came across a guy who's done, I assume it's a guy, might be a girl. I came across someone who has lined up the hero's journey with the story grid, which I thought was excellent and so much more helpful than anything I found via Sean and the story grid stuff. So I will include links to those blog posts in the description below. But basically he had his list of I think at 17 different steps or beats from the hero's journey. And then he lined up where basically what matched the required inciting incident complication crisis climax and resolution for each of the acts in the story grid framework. Now what was interesting then was when I started addressing the points from the three X structure slash hero's journey, I found that really helpful. But when I then started transferring that into the full scam, I found that I didn't get any extra value from doing the full scam method. So for me, story grid has not been that helpful. It would have been far easier just to go straight to Joseph Campbell and do that way. What I have now is an A three piece of paper for each of these books, which I divided into columns. One column was hero's journey. Next column was the full scap points. So those five scenes that happen in each act. Then there was the three X structure points that were covered in the story grid blog posts, which pretty much aligned with the hero's journey. And then there was a column for obligatory scenes. Once I'd done this for each of the ideas, I then wanted to see if I could link them up into a single narrative and put them into my one page summary as per the story grid method. Now, I did this. I actually don't feel like the one page overview is that helpful, though. And the reason I think this is because when I look at an inciting incident complication crisis climax and resolution, I see that as a sequence of scenes and it by no means covers all of the scenes I need in the book. And because of the relationship those scenes or beats need to each other or need to have with each other, I don't even think this covers the most important things that happen in the book. It just happens to cover things that happen at the right point and fit the criteria of an inciting incident and so on. So I didn't love the full scat method, even though I'm very happy I've done it and I've taken a step forward. However, I do like the idea of grouping these five stages. So and I like the idea of grouping them almost on a scene by scene basis. So you could almost say every scene has an inciting incident that sets a scene in motion. Every scene should have a complication. So something goes wrong or something gets more complex or something unexpected happens that raises the stakes. There should be a crisis and the crisis is actually what will the character do now. So if I look at the example in Story Grid, this example is for Silence of the Lambs and in each of the three parts, the crisis is actually a question about what will Starling do next. So in Act 1 we've got crisis, does Starling re-engage Lecter after discovering the head in the storage unit? Should Starling rebel and investigate by herself or should she listen to the FBI? And in Act 3 it does Starling quit her investigation or does she continue? So I really like that approach because I don't think any of the other plotting methods I've looked at have looked at the choices. The protagonist needs to make it each stage of the journey. So I see value in it from that perspective. As an overall plotting method, I don't really like these five beats or scenes but as an approach to looking at individual scenes I think it could be really helpful. So I might try to integrate this when I get to a scene by scene overview of my book. So now I've got my A3 bit of paper for each of the books which was not actually part of the Story Grid process, it's just something I thought I had to do in order to do the Story Grid process because the Story Grid process it's sort of like you're going straight to step five and you haven't taken the steps. So you have step one which is the six questions which I think is good and then this is like step five and it doesn't cover the two, three and four in between. So A3 bit of paper was my steps two, three and four. This is my one page full scap and the next stage is doing the Story Grid spreadsheet. The Story Grid spreadsheet is predominantly an editing tool and I'm not sure how useful it's going to be as a plodding outlining tool but I'm committed to the process so we'll see. So to create the Story Grid spreadsheet open a blank spreadsheet and you'll need to add the following labels to the columns scene, word count, story events, value shift, polarity shift, turning point, point of view, period slash time, duration, location, on-stage characters and off-stage characters. So scene is actually the scene number so scene one, scene two, scene three, scene four, word count is the word count of the scene. Now because this is an editing tool this is generally used once you've already written the book and it's a tool that helps you see how balanced your book is. So if you have some scenes or chapters that are 800 words and some that are 5000 words, if that's not intentional it probably means there's something off with the balance of your book. Story event is the main event that happens in a scene so it's summing up the scene in a phrase or sentence. Now value shift refers to the main values of the story. This is something Sean is quite big on in the podcast I've heard him speak in as well as in the book and in the blog. He basically says there is a value spectrum for every book in every genre so for the thriller which I'm using as an example because it's the only one he really talks about in the book, the value is life or death or he says life death or damnation so damnation is a fate worse than death and when he talks about the value shift in this spreadsheet it's how does the value change? Does it move towards the positive end of the spectrum which is life? Does it move towards the negative end of the spectrum which is towards death and damnation? Polarity shift is how much the value shifts and in which direction so plus would be towards life minus would be towards death plus plus would be significantly towards life minus minus would be significantly towards death and so on. Turning point is when a scene shifts from positive to negative or vice versa. Point of view is self-explanatory whose point of view is this scene from period or time is when does this take place so is it day time, night time, weekend, weekday etc. Duration is about how long this event takes in the world of the story. Our location is where the scene takes place. On stage characters are characters who are featured in the scene and then off stage characters are characters that you don't see but who have some input or may be affected in some way by what happens in the scene. So I don't actually know how I'm going to jump from the full scope to this. The big challenge is that there's a whole lot of theory in the book between the introduction of the full scope and the introduction of this spreadsheet but it isn't practical stuff like there aren't exercises to help you develop things further. It's like no you've got this summary and now complete a full spreadsheet for a book basically as if it's already been written. I am aware this is an editing tool rather than a brainstorming tool. I might have shot myself in the foot with this exercise but I'll brainstorm and see how I go. I think the fact that I've already done more than the full scope the fact that I've also looked at the hero's journey and the obligatory scenes might help here. I'm not going to have a complete outline for the book like I don't expect to jump back on camera in half an hour and have a list of 40 scenes and know exactly what's happening but it'll be interesting to see how far I get with this. So I will check back soon. So I just spent the last half hour talking to the camera only to realize that for some reason it wasn't recording. So that's a little bit annoying but the good news for you is that hopefully it means I will be more efficient this time in my rant about Story Grid. So I have done my Story Grid spreadsheet for the Dream Spy story and I found it I actually found it useful because it got me thinking about scenes in a way I hadn't thought about them yet. So in terms of like the story event which is the one sentence summary of what the scene's about I had already written that down but I hadn't thought about things like the value shift the polarity shift or the turning point for each of these scenes. So some of the examples of value shifts I have are from progress to failure from triumph to unease from fear to determination from hopelessness to hope the polarity shift is basically from negative to positive or positive to more positive and negative to more negative and then the turning point I was a little bit confused about how this differed from the value shift so I looked at the Story Grid book where Sean has actually done his completely mapped out the silence of the lambs and he said that the turning point he divides into action or revelations so the protagonist takes an action that changes the course of the scene or the protagonist has a protagonist has a revelation that changes the course of the scene. So some of the things I've got here are action hides package or revelation starts to see the links between the real world and the dream world. So it was interesting to have the opportunity to think about my scenes in that way. What else is interesting is that Save the Cat actually has a similar method so when you do the storyboard exercise in Save the Cat which is you have a board and you need to write each scene on a card and organize them to your liking on each card you're supposed to do the emotional change as well as whether it's from negative to positive or positive to negative. So what's interesting is even though I have essentially done this in the past I wouldn't have done it of my own accord if I hadn't been asked to so the good thing about doing this exercise at this stage in the process is it was forcing me to think a little bit more deeply about the scenes I had in mind. Now the downside of doing this now is that there is this is really just a documentation tool it is ultimately an editing tool so it's something you can use to map out a book like in a sort of bird's eye view and get a sense for how it works and given that I don't have a book yet I don't have that much to put in here so at the moment I've only got 14 scenes listed and there was no guidance for how to think of other scenes that I hadn't already thought of so not the best exercise to do now however I do think it has merits from an editing standpoint and I would like to try using this when I'm revising my next project. So this actually brings me to the end of the story grid process there is actually one final thing in the book which is also called the story grid but it's basically the same information that's included here just in a different format so I'm I'm going to call it quits plus it's also getting dark I'm ready for dinner so I'm done it's been six weeks I'm done with this process so how did I find the story grid this probably isn't going to be a surprise to anyone watching this video given how much I have complained about the process so far but I did not enjoy it I found it incredibly frustrating I admit that because I have followed it I do have more now than I had at the beginning of the process at the beginning of the process I had sort of a one sentence idea now I've got 14 scenes so it has helped me make progress however I think I could have made that progress much more quickly if I had used a different method rather than trying to push ahead with this one so what didn't work about it there are a few different things the first one is that the book so this book right here it's not very well organized and I think the main reason for this is that the bulk of the content has come from Sean's story grid blog I don't think there's anything wrong with repurposing content from your blog for a book especially if you're a nonfiction writer and you're already writing a blog on the topic that your book will be on then absolutely you should make the most of the resources you already have however that doesn't mean you just copy and paste all of your blog posts into a book and put a cover on it and print it I mean you can do that and some people do but in my experience that approach does not create the best books and the reason for that is because blog posts and books work differently so a blog post is supposed to be this standalone resource which might range from a few hundred to a few thousand words a book is supposed to be a much longer resource that goes into much more depth and if you're just copying blog posts you have a couple of issues one is that you will never go into depth because you're not adding anything all you have is essentially a collection of high-level essays and the second thing is it does tend to lead to a lot of repetition simply because because every blog post is a standalone piece of work it needs to be introduced it needs to be concluded and it's probably going to cover content that you've covered another blog post just because it's standalone in your book if you're putting it all together you want to cut a lot of that fat because you want to respect your reader's time basically and give them what you want I think the first issue with this book was that it was a collection of blog posts it didn't go into as much depth as it could have and that meant it didn't deliver the value it could have delivered to the reader one of the symptoms of that was that there was simply missing information so Sean had quite a good in-depth discussion on genres which I covered earlier in this video and he has this five-petal approach to genres so there's a lot there then one of the things he says is that every genre has obligatory scenes and conventions he also talks about how different genres have different controlling themes and different values that they address the problem is he doesn't cover this for any of the genres he listed and the main problem here is that if you're introducing a bunch of genres you're setting the expectation that you are going to be discussing these in your book if you just say oh romance is a genre and then just say nothing else about romance what's the point so I would have been I would have thought much more highly of this book if it had just been positioned as a book on how to write a thriller rather than this ultimate guide on how to write a great book because it wasn't an ultimate guide on how to write a great book and admittedly I was able to go to his website and get more information on the genres I was writing but I shouldn't have had to have gone to his website to get that information because the book is supposed to be a standalone in-depth resource now if you want to offer me a bonus resource as a reader so perhaps you've mapped out a story grid for a book that I've read and I really want to get it then that's absolutely fine and I'm very happy to go to your website and sign up for that extra resource but to introduce a topic in your book and then not cover it at all I mean that's um disrespectful of my time and my investment in your book especially since this was not a cheap book it was recommended retail price was 33 euros which is fairly high at least in this part of the world the other thing that made this book a little bit difficult was that it was so academic and theoretical and I think that Sean is an enthusiast when it comes to books and literature and writing theories and as a fellow enthusiast I can understand you know how exciting it is to see like to understand the hero's journey for instance and then see how it applies to all of these different stories and to come up with all of these different theories and see how they apply the problem is that although that is interesting to discuss from an academic perspective and interesting to discuss with other editors and writers from a theoretical perspective when you're offering someone a practical guide for how they can write a good book you don't need to cover all of these different angles I mean honestly simple is often best and if you can have like one list of scenes that someone should hit that's far easier than what I had earlier which was I had three separate lists of scenes that had all come from him and I was the one I was the one who had to figure out how they all went together whereas the book should have been teaching me like one it either should have put them all together for me and just given me one comprehensive list that I should look at or it should have told me how to put them together myself but it didn't so there was a big gap between the theoretical academic discussion and how to use it practically linked to that criticism is the fact that there was very little in this book that was practical at all so of this 330 ish page book there were let's say four exercises one was the six questions one was the full scout method one was the story grid like spreadsheet and one was the story grid spreadsheet but basically formatted in a different way you know that's not a lot considering the amount of information that was there and when it comes to how it was structured so I'm going to open up the table of contents so you can see how few and far between these these practical pieces were so we have part one which is 38 pages and that's an introduction it's basically about Sean and his background now I think introductions are fine yes introduce yourself demonstrate your credibility and tell your readers what they are going to get 38 pages is a bit long and if after this video you are still determined to read this book I would skip straight to part two part two is genre and genre he begins a section with there are six questions that editors ask about any book that you should be able to answer the section itself is quite long he introduces all of the different types of genres he says they have obligatory scenes and conventions he basically breaks down each of the five genre petals so that is what 45 pages of the book I remember reading this thinking like it's quite long and I would like to have something to do but honestly this was probably one of the better parts of the book like I had my six questions at the end of this section I could answer the six questions from here it gets a bit messy so we have part three which is when he introduces the full scalp global story grid method so he introduces the one page outline at the beginning of this and then for the rest of this part he has this is where it gets really bloggy he has a bunch of chapters which are basically essays on different thoughts so some examples are the universal appeal of the thriller the power of negative thinking free and direct style point of view controlling idea slash theme and so on so you know all of it's interesting in an academic sense but I'm not reading this book as an academic study on fiction writing I'm writing this book to teach me how to do something I want to know how to do it so we get to the end of this section and he gives an example of the full scalp in action using silence of the lambs still nothing on how to fill it out though then we get to part four which is story form and these are the five commandments of storytelling and these are those five points you need to hit in each of the acts of your story so the inciting incident the now i've got to remember it complication crisis climax and resolution so each of those gets a chapter some of them get more than one chapter because he wants to talk about them in more detail then we get to part five which is the units of story so he talks about the beat the scene the sequence the act the subplot and the global story then we get to part six which is when he introduces the story grid spreadsheet so this is the spreadsheet with one scene for each row and then columns about value point of view polarity shift and so on all of that from when he first introduced the full scout method is 100 almost 150 pages so it's from page 107 to page 254 then we get into part seven which is building the full scope global story grid and here first he revisits genre so the six questions all good then he talks about filling in the full scum this is page 262 and this was my this was the highest moment for me my high point in reading this book because i went oh yes this is this is it now he's going to bring everything together and all of the previous stuff is going to make sense and it'll work and yes this might not be how i personally would have structured this book but now it's going to be usable yeah it it wasn't great so i had about four pages of feeling like yes i'm going to get this and then he went back to silence of the lambs and just showed how it worked there now if it had been me writing this book or if i had been his editor the way i would have structured this was i mean i would have cut out maybe a third of the content in this 150 pages but in each section i would have had small exercises for the reader to start working on so for the five commandments for incidents in the inciting incident i would have explained what an inciting incident is i would have given examples for more stories than just the silence of the lambs and i would have had an exercise around thinking of the inciting incident for each of the three acts in the book and i would have also discussed how these incidents vary for each of the acts of the book so then at the end of that chapter so then at the end of that chapter the reader would have had an inciting incident for all three parts of their book and the same thing with the other four events and what that means and this is just one example i would have done the same thing with like genre and controlling theme and external value and internal value so that when we get to this piece at the end where they need to fill out their full one page sheet they would have actually already had all of the information and it was just a matter of putting it into the template instead what happened in this book is i got to part seven so 255 pages into the book and it was time for me to do the exercise and all of the stuff that had come before was a bit fuzzy because i hadn't had to do anything to like make it concrete to make it stick in my head it's sort of all just merged into i don't know a blob of writing academia but anyway so we have part seven which is the full scope and um he gives the examples of silence of the lambs and then part eight we have the story grid which is putting it all together here he does not discuss the story grid spreadsheet which is how he introduced the stories grid in part six here he has the story grid as a list of scenes and zigzags going across the top of it to demonstrate the change in the external and the internal value of the protagonist in the book i suppose if you like zigzags it looks nice but it doesn't actually have any new information that wasn't already in the spreadsheet all in all reading this was a very frustrating experience i would have written it very differently i would have included a lot more um when it came to different genres or i would have marketed it as just a book on how to write a thriller that my general feedback is it was poorly organized it was highly theoretical and academic there was very little practical information and there was very little guidance when it came to the practical exercises um and because there was so much space between the practical stuff and all of the theory it was hard to remember the theory you needed by the time you were asked to put it into action and the final challenge i had was that i felt like there were three main exercises so the six questions the fullscap and the spreadsheet not including the last story grid because it's the spreadsheet in a different format there were very big leaps that needed to take place between each of those so the six questions were fairly easy once you'd been through that part of the book to get from the six questions to the full page fullscap though there was like it was a really big leap to go from one to the next and you can see that because there was 150 pages between them and i think that having smaller exercises throughout would have helped bridge that gap and then to go from the fullscap to the story grid spreadsheet there was also a very big gap because the fullscap ultimately only has 15 scenes because you've got your five key scenes for each of the three acts so to go from that to having a complete book outlined in the spreadsheet is a really big gap and this one did not have like the defense of having covered it all in theory and maybe i just didn't pick it up like there was nothing in between covering all of the information i needed to do the one pager and then covering all of the information i needed to go from 15 scenes to 40 50 60 scenes having said that the story grid spreadsheet is predominantly an editing method rather than a plotting method however he did position it as it was possible to use it for plotting as well which it might be but i don't think it was presented in a way where it's usable for people who just have an idea so ultimately i found the story grid to be a very frustrating process i wish i had never picked up this book to be completely honest the truth is that i have made some progress using it i have a list of 14 scenes now whereas when i first picked this up i had a one sentence idea so and it'll be similar when i do the spreadsheet for the reciprocal stalking book as well so there has been some value however i think i could have gotten that value a lot faster and with a lot less frustration if i'd used a different method and the only reason i persisted for so long was because i had this video and honestly and i did consider not doing it but i already had quite a bit of footage and so i was determined to see it through if i could having said that maybe you're different maybe you'll find value in this process so if you are someone who has used the story grid for plotting or even for revising and editing a book please let me know in the comments below and let me know let me know what you like about it and also whether you found any hacks to make it easier to use or whether you combine the story grid with another method to fill in the gaps i mentioned other than that if you like this video please give me a big thumbs up i did really suffer for it if you like the idea of plotting and different plotting experiments please subscribe and hit the notification bell because i am trying two more plotting methods before i get started on my next project i also have a plotting playlist so if you're interested in learning about story engineering or take off your pants or save the cat please check that out i've got the link in the description and now it has been almost another half hour so i am signing off i am having a bath because i have earned it goodbye for now