Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. My name is Tim Graal. I'm your host and a struggling

writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me soon is Sean Coyne, the creator

of Story Grid, and an editor with 25 plus years experience. And I'm peppering him with all my

questions about how to become a better writer. In this episode, we talk about

how the story grid applies to nonfiction. I also write nonfiction and work with a lot of people

that write nonfiction. So I've been curious how the story grid can help us nonfiction writers

become better storytellers as well. So I think you'll learn a lot from this. Even if you're a fiction writer,

it's good to hear about this stuff from lots of different angles. So let's jump right in and get

started. So, Sean, I want to talk some through how the story grid applies in the nonfiction

world. Because I know Steve recently came out with the book, The American Jew,

and that's about writing nonfiction. Yes. And so I thought it would be good to talk about

the places that, like, how does the story grid apply to nonfiction? Because in some cases,

I see, I can see it like a memoir or telling a story that you're kind of

pulling ideas out of but then a lot of nonfiction and I'm probably leaning more towards

like business books because that's mostly what I read in the nonfiction world I struggle to

think like how the story grid would apply to something like that. So I'm just curious, you know,

we can just kind of start high level and drill down. Just how do you think through the story

grid when it comes to nonfiction? Well, the applications of the story grid, the nonfiction,

are just extraordinary. And if you think of nonfiction, the way I started to think about this is if I had to break down

what nonfiction is, what are like the big silos, the big genres of nonfiction, right?

So when I started thinking about this, and this is, you know, a good 20 years ago, because as an editor,

I had to juggle doing two things. I had to publish fiction, which I had to build writers into

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