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 author of the book, The Story Grid, and he is an editor with over 25 years experience.

In this episode, we are diving into story grid and nonfiction.

Sean talks about the four categories of nonfiction and how story grid applies to each of them,

and we really dive into narrative nonfiction and how it is similar

and dissimilar to writing fiction. So if you've ever thought about writing nonfiction,

and you want to make sure that you tell a great story that works while doing that,

this is the episode for you. So let's jump in and get started. So Sean, as part of this kind of

hiatus as I struggle to get my beginning hook written, we've gotten, actually, you've gotten

an email. I've actually gotten a couple questions about this myself to talk some about

how story grid applies to nonfiction. And so I wanted to start out, because the

question you got was specifically about narrative nonfiction. And I want to just start by like

asking, how do you kind of section off nonfiction when it comes from this standpoint of how you structure this the thing.

Because you have, you know, books that are seem to be more like a collection of ideas,

like the 48 laws of power or something like that.

And then you have, of course, narrative non, like clearly narrative nonfiction, which is a lot of like,

oh, devil in the white city or something

like that who's the guy that wrote that oh he's great too yeah he's a lot of really good books

yeah that one i read the hitler one this is horrible i'll look it up here in a sec but thunderstruck

too yeah you know where larson, Eric Larson.

Yes, yes, that's his name.

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