Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer.

I'm your host Tim Graal and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works.

Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of Story Grid, the author of the book Story Grid, and an editor with over 25 years experience.

So normally Sean and I are recording episodes a couple weeks ahead of time.

And we have a couple of those done, but we decide to just stop this week and record one to address fear and COVID-19.

And what that means for us through the writing process and what it means for us

when we're crafting our own stories. So I feel like this is a really good episode. We dive into

what Sean understands about fear, which is pretty high based on the book Cognitive Dominance.

He helped write. So yeah, I think it's a really

helpful episode and I hope you enjoy it. So let's jump in and get started. So Sean, well, it's

normal for you to be at home and isolated, but it's a little different for me with everything going on with the COVID-19 and we're just

kind of stuck and waiting and I've been thinking like it's weird if when I've seen people

just putting out content like normal without talking about it. I've been feeling like it's a little off.

So I thought like we could just talk about it,

and I thought it would be an opportunity to visit some of the stuff you learned

writing the book Cognitive Dominance,

and some of the stuff that came out of that with the fear that we've talked about

on the podcast before and how we can start approaching this both just as people, but as

writers and storytellers too.

Yeah, I think it's, I was talking to Mark McLaughlin, the neurosurgeon that I wrote

Cognitive Dominance with last week.

And we were just sort of both kind of gobsmacked that the concept that we, we worked on in, in the book, is this, this idea of the fear, which is a P-H-E-R-E, as opposed to an

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