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Comment by raamdev | Hacker News Reader

If you're writing fiction (or doing any sort of storytelling for that matter), The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne is an absolute must-read. The podcast is amazing—it's the first podcast I've found worth listening to from the very beginning—and it has opened my eyes so much, helping me understand the fundamentals of story structure and how great novels "work".

I've read Stephen King's On Writing and several other books on novel writing and as a programmer what I really liked about The Story Grid was its analytical approach to storytelling, as opposed to a more emotional, intuitive, "just keep writing and eventually the good stuff will come" approach.

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There's a new awesome podcast called Rationally Writing made by Alexander Wales and Daystar Eld(http://alexanderwales.com/rationally-writing/). I highly recommend it, I'm sure HN crowd will love it.

Also I recommend a fantastic course "Writing about Dragons" by by Brandon Sanderson - https://youtube.com/channel/UCyUHzyUE31r16wUL4vEVRJA

"Write about Dragons" is a video recording of one of the writing classes titled "Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy" that Brandon Sanderson teaches at BYU. He teaches the class every year, and frequently updates it with new material, and most of the lectures are online (spread across myriad Youtube channels). Here are several of the others:

* 2014 class lectures (via BYU English dept): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRO9W1Nmh6clZP-IAhMeM...

* 2016 class lectures (via Camera Panda): http://brandonsanderson.com/2016-sanderson-lectures/

He also delivered lectures at JordanCon in 2010 and 2011. I frequently recommend his "description and viewpoint" lecture as the best tool for competent non-fiction writers to understand what separates the skill of fiction writing from non-fiction writing.

* JordanCon 2010: description and viewpoint https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A1F631BCD668EDF

* JordanCon 2010: plotting https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2AB4CCF96ECB552

* JordanCon 2011: sanderson's second law of magic systems https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF9F2E7291F6FBFEB

Brandon Sanderson is also one of the hosts on the weekly Writing Excuses podcast: http://writingexcuses.com/

Fantastic links, thank you very much!

Jim Butcher (one of my favorite authors) lands squarely in the planning camp.

http://jimbutcher.livejournal.com/

(Start at the bottom of that page and work your way up for Jim's "How to Write a Novel")

Speaking of Sanderson, the podcast he cohosts - Writing Excuses - is well worth a listen.

http://writingexcuses.com/

  > The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne is an absolute must-read

I just read it. Story, by Robert McKee, is much better. All the useful insights in The Story Grid are lifted from Story. To Shawn Coyne's credit, he credits McKee. But he lifts a lot and presents it less clearly.

The things that aren't lifted from Story, like the grid itself, are less useful. Some things, like the labyrinthine requirements he trots out for genres, are harmful.

I read Story by Robert McKee after I read The Story Grid and I found Shawn's explanations and descriptions more precise and to the point than Robert's. I also really like how Shawn, for the most part, uses a single story (The Silence of the Lambs) in his examples and how he keeps going back to it. Using a single story, I felt, helped me better grasp the context of each example and allowed me to 'grow' with the dissection of the entire story. The grid itself was also extremely useful as it provided me with a framework, a cheat sheet that I could reference at any time to understand where I was in his overall analysis of the story.

I just bought The Story Grid off the back of this recommendation. Thanks!

I also found Lisa Cron's book 'Wired for Story'[1] a great resource.

[1] http://wiredforstory.com/

I've subscribed!! Thanks for sharing.

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