Hello and welcome to the Storygrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you level up your craft as a writer.

My name is Tim Graal and I'm a writer in the behind the scenes guy here at Storygrid. This podcast episode is hosted by StoryGrid certified editor Kimberly Kessler, alongside Sean Coyne, the founder of Storygridrid, and an editor with over 30 years of experience.

In this episode, Kim and Sean discuss backstory and a character's wants, needs, and desires.

Before we jump in, I want to recommend you pick up a copy of our book, What's the Big Idea, Nonfiction Condensed, by Leslie Watts and Shelley Speary. Inside this book,

you'll find a crash course explaining how to know what kind of nonfiction you're writing.

You'll discover which scenes, characters, and other elements you must include, and you'll learn

to shape a compelling beginning, middle, and end that will enlighten your readers with the revelation

they weren't expecting. You can get 20% off what's the big idea in all of our books at

storygrid.com slash books with the coupon code podcast. Okay, that's all in the announcement. So let

me turn it over to Kim and Sean. Okay, Sean, we are back and we're talking about wants and needs and desires.

And I can tell I was, you know, I've been thinking about it and it makes me really emotional

to talk about this stuff because it just feels so true and just true to life.

So I think the thing that I really wanted to ask you about is

kind of maybe a more practical matter, right? So what is the role of backstory and how it informs

our wants, needs, and desires of our protagonists and other characters, and also, how do you see using

it on the page in a story? Well, that's a great question. Okay, I'm going to have to walk through

sort of a generic example. Okay. So the way everyday experience works is that there's a stimulus.

So I'm walking down the street and let's say I see my old college roommate coming the other way. So that stimulus sort of penetrates my Markov blankets

of my perceptual perceptions, right? My perceiving. And what happens?

Well, that's a known stimulus to me.

And so as I see him, my agency, meaning sort of my mind, goes through a number of different

functional stages.

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