Writing Advice is GARBAGE: Tim Grahl (Storygrid) Gets His Say
What is means to "learn to write"
Back in April, I made a video about Worldbuilding that heavily featured some Twitter drama between Tim Grahl, author and CEO of Storygrid, and two big YouTubers: KrimsonRogue and Hello Future Me.
I had nothing bad to say about Tim, but used his take as a kickoff point to talk about Worldbuilding and how much is too much. The video did pretty well, but honestly, I didn’t give much thought about how Tim would feel when he saw it.
Ya’ll he was MAD.
Even though I’ve been making YouTube videos for years now, it’s only recently that I started talking about DISCOURSE in my videos. I actually express my opinions. I mention people by name. This is all new.
So I didn’t know that devoting a video to someone’s internet drama without tagging them in the description or sending a DM with a heads-up was bad form.
Lucky for me, Tim is a professional and a good guy, so he reached out and let me know he would have liked to have been tagged (sorry, Tim) and that he was available for an interview if I wanted a better understanding of how Storygrid operates and his personal insight into learning how to tell stories.
I was absolutely down for it and as it turns out, we have pretty similar views on what it means to be an author (vs a hobby writer), “writers” communities, and the challenge of getting better at writing.
That interview is now LIVE. I had a great time with this one and learned a lot. I think you’ll enjoy it too:
World building is the single most important element to Fantasy writing. Without world-building nobody cares about Frodo, Sam, Conan and all other characters. Even with Sci-Fi, Horror, and so on it is absolute. The reason being that as far as I've learnt from writing my own stories is that people want to care about and immerse themselves in the world you write and the only way to do that is with prose, descriptions and lore. World-building involves imagination and prose, so eliminate prose and you don't have a novel.
But enough of that, interesting videos I greatly enjoyed this essay madame. Well done.
Loved this convo with Tim. Writing for yourself is called journaling. 🎤 drop.