In this episode of The Writing Coach Podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns says goodbye to The Story Grid podcast, which published its final episode last week. Kevin discusses the importance of the podcast, and his admiration for its hosts Shawn Coyne and Tim Grahl, and explains how their podcast was a profound act of generosity for both writing coaches and students of writer’s craft.
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The Writing Coach Episode #161 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #161 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners. And welcome back to the Writing Coach Podcast. It is your host, as always writing coach Kevin T. John’s here.
If you’d like a free copy of my book, Novel Advice: Motivation, Inspiration and Creative Writing Tips for Aspiring Authors, just head over to www.kevintjohns.com. There’s a tab at the top that says “free book,” click there, put your email address in, and I’ll get you a copy of Novel Advice.
Now in this week’s episode, I want to talk about The Story Grid podcast. I was a little bit surprised the other day; I put on Story Grid to listen to the latest episode only to hear its host Tim Grahl come on and say “Well, folks, this is it. This is the last episode.”
I think it was episode 290 or something like that. Really impressive stuff. And a really important show put together by two incredible people. So in this episode of my show, I just want to pay tribute to the incredible show that was The Story Grid podcast.
I’ll tell you a bit about my experience with the podcast, but also with Shawn and Tim because my relationship with them actually precedes their podcast. When I first published my first novel, I was learning how to be an independent author, and ultimately how to build an independent business and all of these things, and that was how Tim and Shawn first got on my radar.
In terms of Shawn Coyne, I was in a small business group coaching community program called Fizzle.co. And within Fizzle at the time, this is either nine or ten years ago, everyone was talking about this book, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. This is the book where Steven Pressfield coined the phrase “resistance.” And it’s been used quite a bit in the world of writing, resistance is that thing, standing in the way of us doing what we know we need to do of the art we need to create. But in the small business world, the exact same thing happens. There’s so much resistance to trying things or to doing the work you need to do or to marketing or to putting yourself out there. And so in the Fizzle world, everyone was really into The War of Art. So I read it, I loved it.
And then one day in Fizzle someone posted a message saying, “Hey, folks, Steven Pressfield’s editor has started this blog.” That’s how I knew Shawn Coyne, originally, as Steven Pressfield’s editor. I was like, “Wow, the guy who edited The War of Art has a blog. I have to check this out!” What it actually ended up being was Shawn Coyne was basically blogging the entire Story Grid book before it was being published.
For those of you who have read the book, you know what incredible ideas are contained within that book, and what Shawn’s continued to build on over the years now, but at the time for a young writing coach, for someone still a young author, seeing Shawn’s Story Grid blog was really kind of mind-blowing stuff.
Now, I’d been in the writing podcast world for a while I had a podcast called Ottawa Writes, I’m from Ottawa, then that kind of evolved into Write Along Radio. And around this time, I decided I wanted to start this podcast, the one that you’re now listening to The Writing Coach podcast. And so when I was thinking about launching this podcast, I had a list of people that I wanted to reach out to try to get as guests on the show that I could interview, and number one on that list was Shawn Coyne. I reached out to him and asked if he would be a guest on this show. Remember, the show wasn’t even launched yet, I was just prepping it. And yet he said, “Yes.” And that kind of doing so blew my mind.
I was so excited for that conversation. And I remember the interview. I was at my day job. The only time I could get him on the call was at noon on a workday. And so I was at my day job. And I mean, this was still somewhat early days of my podcasting career, and I didn’t have everything locked down. And I think how that podcast interview ended up being recorded was Shawn was calling in via telephone and then I had him playing on a speakerphone. And then I had my telephones audio recorder turned on sitting next to the speakerphone. Needless to say, it’s probably not the best quality audio of all time, but the stuff Shawn was saying was amazing. He was really blowing me away.
And, you know, for 161 episodes of this show, I’ve had a quote from that interview in the opening credits to this show, that line where Shawn says, “When you’re an expert on something, it’s kind of your responsibility to share it with others.” I think that’s the whole idea of coaching, it’s not just a fun thing to do, or it’s not just a job, it’s a responsibility. If you have the ability to help others, via your knowledge and your wisdom and your expertise, you have a duty to do it so that the art form can improve. It blew my mind when Shawn said that and so I put it in the opening and it’s been there ever since.
Eventually, The Story Grid book came out. He finished blogging it, and the hard copy was released. Of course, I grabbed that book, and I devoured it, and I just loved it. I started implementing some of the methodologies and my own coaching. I definitely ran my third novel M School through the story grid spreadsheet, and I started using it with some clients of mine as well.
I don’t quite remember how many times I touched base with Shawn after that initial interview, but I do remember just one day, a package arrived on my doorstep, from Black Irish Publishing. And that is Shawn Coyne and Steven Pressfield, his publishing company, and it was just a box full of Steven Pressfield books. And so The War of Art, Turning Pro, The Authentic Swing, there might have been a couple of copies of each and so this was completely unsolicited. This was just Shawn being Shawn and sending me a bunch of their books. And I was able to give those way to some of my clients and it just like, that’s the type of amazing thing that these people do. Part of what makes Shawn Coyne very, very special that that he would do something like that.
And I mean, he just continued to do special things for me. I had a writer’s craft book club with a bunch of my writing clients many years back in one month, we read The Story Grid, and Shawn came on our book club call me there it is the author of story grid, answering questions with my writer’s craft book club, I mean, amazing stuff.
And then, in 2019, when I wanted to host a Writer’s Craft Summit, again the first person I reached out to be on the summit was Shawn, and again he said yes. And he didn’t even want to be an affiliate. He didn’t want any payment. He was happy to just come on and be my special guest. Just so cool.
I think I might have told the story on the podcast before at some point about my experiences with meeting heroes when I was younger, but I had two diametrically opposite experiences.
One, I was working for a magazine as an entertainment journalist. And my favorite comic book artist at the time was this guy, Alex Maleev, who was working with Brian Michael Bendis on Daredevil at the time, and I absolutely loved his work. And over the years, I’d been reporting on the big comic book convention in Toronto, Comicon. But I was kind of getting tired. It’s a lot of work to drive five hours from Ottawa, to Toronto and to deal with the crowds and everything that a big giant convention like that, that comes with that I you know, in the early years of being a journalist, I was like, “Oh, my God, I don’t have to wait in lines. This is amazing. I could go around.” But in this case, the novelty had kind of run out. But in my communications with the convention, they assured me they would get me an interview with Alex Maleev. And I was like, oh my god, okay, I’m in.
I got in my car, and I drove five hours to Toronto. And I get there. I’m like, “Okay, folks. Have you set up my interview with Alex Maleev?” And they were like, “Actually, no. Just go talk to him. He’s in the artists’ row there. Just go ask him for an interview. It’s all good.” I was like, “Oh, God. Okay. I was hoping this would be more scheduled. But okay.” And so I approach Alex Maleev and I was like, I don’t even know what I said, “Hey, Alex, like, you know, I’m here for the interview,” or “I’d love to interview you” or something. And he just instantly shot me down. He was like, “I’m not doing interviews. I don’t want to talk to you.” I drove five hours to meet him and he just . . . I don’t know if he was having a bad day or what, but he just had zero interest in engaging me in discussion at all, and even less than zero interest in doing an interview despite the fact that the Convention had told me they would set up an interview.
I had driven all this way to meet this hero of mine and he just 100% gave me the cold shoulder. So that was one experience of mine of ‘meeting your heroes.’ You know where they say, “Don’t meet your heroes.” Yeah. Alex Maleev, you know, broke my heart a little bit that day.
But the opposite end of that is in the late 90s I was a huge punk rock fan. And again I drove not to Toronto but to outside of Toronto to attend Lollapalooza because my favourite punk band Rancid was playing. I had to see them.
We drove up a day early, and we went to see a movie that evening. It was Independence Day with Will Smith. In the movie theater, I saw some punk rock girls buying popcorn. I was like, “Nice, punk rockers. We’re not alone.” I was like, they’re probably here for the Rancid too. And then we went into the theater and there was more punk rockers in the movie theater watching the movie. We’re like, “Ah, this is great. This is our people.”
Then we walked out of the theater after the movie . . I remember the theater exited like right out of the theater onto the street. The punk rockers exit in front of us and we realize this is not just some punk rock fans, this is Rancid. We just watched Independence Day with the band Rancid! Lars Frederickson was there, and Matt Freeman. I don’t think that the drummer was there, but man was Tim Armstrong. The punk rock God, Tim Armstrong, was right there on the street. And he’s engaging us. He’s talking to us. He offers us backstage passes so we can meet up with him the next day. He is just the coolest human being you could ever imagine. And, you know, for to punk rock kids who had driven for hours to see his band on stage, to have him talk to us and invite us backstage and treat us with so much kindness was just unbelievable. One of the greatest experiences of my life.
And that’s what it was like every single time I got to talk to Shawn Coyne. You know, sometimes you meet your heroes, and they’re not at all what you’d hope they would be. But the half dozen times, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Shawn or interact with Shawn, it has been nothing but a delight and a pleasure. I just think he’s one of the coolest guys out there teaching writing. That’s kind of my experience with Shawn Coyne.
Now Tim Grahl on the other hand, I think most people know him these days as the Story Grid CEO, but where I first came into contact with Tim Grahl was on Creative Live, this incredible website that offers free training you can just watch for free live. And then you’re given the opportunity to buy courses afterwards. And it’s kind of that jab, jab, jab, punch marketing technique of like, give, give, give, and then ask for a sale. Here it is for free and then maybe if you like it, you’ll buy it. with my Story Plan program, that’s what I’m doing. I’m giving away a month of training in hopes that people are going love it so much that maybe they’ll buy something else from me. But anyway, that’s the Creative Live approach. And Tim Grahl had a course on that website called How to Sell Your First 1000 Books. And so when I was a recently published author trying to learn about book marketing, absolutely, I found my way to that course. And I took it and it was actually based on a book of his and so I read the book, and it was probably my introduction to email marketing and the whole idea of building an email list and giving people cool content, and then letting them know when you have stuff for sale.
I really liked his approach to marketing. He had a definition of marketing, that was something like connecting with people and then being relentlessly helpful, which I thought was a really cool way to think about marketing.
So again, when I was putting together The Writing Coach podcast, he was one of the first people I wanted to interview. I asked him to be on and again, just like Shawn, he said, “Yes.” He came on the show and he was a great guest. And again, I was nobody, the podcasts hadn’t even launched. I’d been coaching for maybe a couple of years. But I mean, at that point, Tim had no idea who I was. So he came on and did a great interview and just again, seemed like a really gracious, cool guy.
A few years later, he released an online course called Launch a Bestseller. I bought that for sure. I wanted to check out that kind of building on his first 1000 copies theory and his specific approach to book launches. And while I was taking the course he put a word out there that he wanted somebody to kind of go through the course and just watch every single video, click on every single link, read every little description or wherever and just make sure everything was good. He was looking to hire someone to do that. And I said to him made him like, I’d love to do that for free. Just seemed like an amazing opportunity to force myself to go over his material with super, super attention, you know, with that editorial mindset. And so, you know, I went through it, and hopefully I helped him out a bit in that process. And he certainly helped me by, you know, creating that course. And so going over it in such detail and you know, multiple times was really helpful for me to get my mind wrapped my wrapped around that book launch methodology.
And so yeah, eventually, you know, after being guests on my podcast (Shawn was episode two, and Tim was episode three) those two got together and created their own podcast and that’s The Story Grid podcast. And on that show, it was really about Shawn Coyne coaching Tim Grahl through the process of creating and writing a book and really learning story craft learning writer’s craft.
This is something I often stress with my clients who are working on their first book, you need to understand writing a first book, you’re not just creating and writing a book, you’re also learning how to write a book at the same time. And that’s a really challenging and difficult process. And that’s what they were doing week after week on this podcast.
The other thing I really liked about the podcast was, as much as I believe, you know, there’s magic and creativity involved in the act of art and the act of storytelling, like, obviously, it’s a creative act. But at the same time, I’ve never been a very woo-woo type guy, if you know what I mean, in terms of the metaphysical aspect of creating art. I’ve always really much more been a fundamentals of the art form kind of guy. My master’s degree is in English literature, so maybe I am used to kind of looking at art in a more analytical way or something. But something that I really liked about The Story Grid podcast, and of course, book was that they were really approaching creativity and writing from this nuts and bolts perspective, not so much a let’s go into that meditative space and wait for the lightning bolt of creativity to strike. They were doing it in a much more almost like mathematical approach, which I thought was really interesting. And something I really resonated with because I think of writing a novel much more like building a brick wall than some sort of creative act of genius. You get to work every day, and you lay another brick, and you write another scene. You put some, you know, stuff in between the two scenes and some connective tissue and you move on to the next brick. And it felt like that’s what they were doing on the show.
Something else I want to mention in it was two men doing it. In the publishing space, in the editing space, in the writing space, the writing coach space, it’s largely dominated by women. Most of the big names are women. And most of the editors and coaches are women, which makes perfect sense because women are by far the biggest audience for literature. That said, as a man myself and as a man, teaching writing, and writing myself, it was just really nice to hear two men talking about art and talking about the emotions related to creating art. And I think that’s one of the things that made that show somewhat unique — it was two grown men saying, “Hey, let’s create some art together.” And what does that involve?
As much as this whole podcast episode, I’ve been talking here about how much I respect Shawn Coyne and how cool he and Tim are, I think now, what we really want to turn my attention to is really, the courage Tim Grahl had to create that podcast and to release it publicly.
Getting coached is not always an easy experience. Sometimes your coach has something to say that you don’t want to hear. Working really, really hard on something and then having to have someone tell you that it’s still not right or that it needs to be improved is not easy, and having to learn and grow and develop and experiment as an artist and as a writer, it takes time and there’s a lot of potential embarrassment along the way because there’s a lot of opportunities to get things wrong.
And that’s why it’s really important that writing coaches create a safe private space for their clients. When I’m working with my clients, what we talk about is 100% confidential. It is never going anywhere. My clients need to know that what they’re saying to me, what they’re giving me to read, is between me and them and no one else and that they have a space created for them to make mistakes and to get things wrong and to not have to feel embarrassed by that, because they know I’m on their side and they know that I’m helping them through this process.
But that’s not what Tim and Shawn did. You know, Tim Grahl turned on a microphone every week for years, and allowed himself to publicly go through the process of learning writer’s craft, and he did it for years. And the strength of character that takes is unbelievable. The fact that Tim was willing to put himself out there in such a public manner was just so unbelievable. And it goes back to that whole thing where he said his definition of marketing is being relentlessly helpful. Well, I think he proved himself relentlessly helpful when he got on The Story Grid podcast week after week, year after year, and struggled and struggled through the process of creativity.
Writing a book is hard. And The Story Grid podcasted demonstrated that. It didn’t sugarcoat the process, it didn’t hype things up, and it didn’t get lost in woo-woo land. It just demonstrated a writer and an editor going to work week after week and putting their snose to the grindstone and doing the hard work that is learning to write a book.
To see the podcast come to the end, it’s bittersweet. The way Tim Grahl framed it in that final episode was that all the way through he had said, this is a podcast about someone struggling to learn how to write, and he feels like he’s reached the place where he can do it now. And, again, just the fact that he did that, publicly is amazing, because now, so many people can learn from it for years to come and for the years that have already gone by.
Writers and coaches are able to listen to The Story Grid podcast,and see both what it’s like to coach someone through the writing process and how challenging that can be, as well as how truly difficult learning to create a great book that works can be.
I just wanted to send a tribute out to Shawn and Tim and everyone involved in creating The Story Grid podcast. I think it was an incredible gift to writers and coaches out there. And I know myself, and I know for your thousands of listeners, we are going to be forever grateful. So here’s to the The Story Grid for years of incredible content for writers, for years of demonstrating what it’s like to be in the trenches and getting things wrong and getting knocked down and getting back up and trying it all over again. It was an incredible run. And I tip my hat to Tim and to Shawn. You guys are incredible teachers and artists and creatives, and I thank you for 290 episodes or whatever it was episodes. Great work, gentlemen.
All right, that is it for this episode. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button and head on over to www.kevintjohbs.com to pick up your copy of Novel Advice. Thank you for listening and I will see you on the next episode of the writing coach.
