The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne

The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne

Author:Shawn Coyne [Coyne, Shawn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Published: 2015-04-26T19:00:00+00:00


41

COMMANDMENT NUMBER TWO

How does one know when a Story isn’t working?

After more than ten thousand hours of publishing books, reading submissions and being pitched both fiction and nonfiction, here is just one of the criteria I use to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I simply track the Story’s progressive complications…the escalating degrees of conflict that face the protagonist.

How do you do that?

Take this pitch as an example:

An ambitious actor/lawyer/chef/programmer graduates from Julliard/Harvard/Culinary Institute of America/MIT and looks for meaningful work. After months of rejections, the actor/ lawyer/chef/programmer decides to take a side job while continuing to look for what will ultimately make him happy.

The Inciting Incident of the Story arrives (at long last) when he gets a part time job as assistant to a casting director/ judge/Michelin star restaurateur/editor in chief of Wired magazine. As he works for the casting director/judge/ Michelin star restaurateur/editor in chief of Wired magazine, he is exposed to all of the best new projects in Hollywood/ Washington/New York/Silicon Valley and even gets to help out by being a reader during auditions/doing paralegal work/sous cheffing/writing code. The casting director/judge/ Michelin star restaurateur/editor in chief of Wired magazine notices his talent and decides to promote him.

By dint of hard work the actor/lawyer/chef/programmer gets the big job and the rewards that come with it—status and money. But after a while, the actor/lawyer/chef/programmer grows weary of the big Hollywood grind/legal profession/ food work/writing code and decides to go back to his first love, the theater/pro bono work/artisanal cheese making/ new app innovation. He then auditions/takes up a cause/makes cheese/devises a new app that no one takes seriously let alone buys into. Until, at last, he gets a small time director/not for profit/cheese monger/software company to take on his life’s work. The performance/cause/cheese debut/app launches, but to little acclaim. The actor/lawyer/chef/programmer loses his shirt on the project, but learns a lot about himself. He decides that his happiness is dependent on his relationships and not the fantasies of finding meaning through work. The End.

And yes, the above is indicative of the kind of material that floods literary agencies and publishing houses. A very talented prose stylist could actually make the above rather entertaining too. And he’d also be able to hide behind a pseudo-Genre like “literary slice of life” to boot. But no matter the writerly artifice, this Story doesn’t work. It may prove commercially viable depending upon the tenor of the times, but it will never last as a work of art. Let’s assume the writer is not a celebrity or the hottest young thing to come out of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. So extenuating commercial potentialities are not in play here. That is, the literary agent can’t sell the Story based on just the identity of the writer. She has to sell it on its Story.

Beyond the fact that there is no clear antagonist in the above, other than some vague hinted sense that the lead character is having “inner turmoil.” Not to mention the fact that the execution of the Inciting Incident—getting a job—is a flaccid cliché.



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