Book: The Story Grid (Shawn Coyne)
These are the literature notes for The Story Grid.1
Foolscap method:
- What’s the Genre?
- What are the conventions and obligatory scenes for that Genre?
- What’s the point of view?
- What are the protagonist’s objects of desire?
- What’s the controlling idea/theme?
- What is the Beginning Hook, the Middle Build, and Ending Payoff?
Genre
What is a genre?
A Genre is a label that tells the reader/audience what to expect. Genres simply manage audience expectations.
Genre defines five primary expectations:
- We expect to know how long the Story will last.
- We expect to know how far we’ll need to suspend our disbelief.
- We expect to know the style, the particular experience of the Story.
- We expect to know how the Story will be structured.
- We expect to know what the general content of the Story will be.
Five genre categories, with incomplete list of genres filled in:
-
Time genres
- short
- medium
- long
-
Reality genres
- factualism (really happened)
- realism (could really happen)
- absurdism (not remotely real)
- fantasy (need comprehensive suspension of disbelief)
- human: contemporary, historical
- magical
- science fiction
- alternate history
- cyberpunk
- hard science
- military
- post-apocalyptic/dystopian
- romantic
- soft science
- space opera
-
Style genres2
- drama
- comedy
- documentary
- musical
- dance
- literary
- poetry
- minimalism
- meta
- postmodern
- theatrical
- cinematic
- epistolary
- cartoons
-
Structure genres
- arch-plot
- mini-plot
- anti-plot
-
Content genres (what people think about when they hear “genre”)
- external3
- action
- horror
- crime
- western
- war
- thriller
- society
- love
- performance
- internal
- status
- worldview
- morality
- external3
External content genres:
- action4
- action adventure/man against nature
- labyrinth
- monster
- environment
- doomsday
- action epic/man against the state
- rebellion
- conspiracy
- vigilante
- savior
- action duel/man against man
- revenge
- hunted
- machiavellian
- collision
- action clock/man against time
- ransom
- countdown
- holdout
- fate
- action adventure/man against nature
- horror
- uncanny
- supernatural
- ambiguous
- crime
- murder mystery
- master detective
- cozy
- historical
- noir/hard-boiled
- paranormal
- police procedural
- organized crime
- caper
- courtroom
- newsroom
- espionage
- prison
- murder mystery
- western
- classical
- vengeance
- transition
- professional
- classical
- thriller
- serial killer
- legal
- medical
- military
- political
- journalism
- psychological
- financial
- espionage
- woman in jeopardy
- child in jeopardy
- Hitchcock
- war
- society
- domestic
- woman’s
- political
- biographical
- historical
- love
- courtship
- marriage
- obsession
- performance
- sports
- music
- business
- art
Internal content genres:
- worldview
- education
- maturation
- revelation
- disillusionment
- morality
- punitive
- redemption
- testing
- status
- pathetic
- sentimental
- tragic
- admiration
Recommended reading:
- Genre (Robert McKee, Basim El-Wakil)
Story form
Five commandments:
- inciting incident
- causal
- coincidental
- turning point / progressive complication
- active turning point
- revelatory turning point
- crisis
- best bad choice
- irreconcilable goods
- climax
- resolution
Story units
Six types of units:
-
Shawn Coyne, The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know (New York, NY: Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2015). ↩︎
-
To me it seems that the medium (novel, film, theatre, comic book, …) could also be seen as a genre, but it looks like in this classification that is part of the style genre. ↩︎
-
This list in particular is quite incomplete. The list given in Robert McKee’s Story is much more extensive, but probably also covers not just content genres. ↩︎
-
All sixteen plot devices are applicable to other genres as well. ↩︎