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Story Grid Writing Podcast

Story Grid Trinity for Nonfiction

Story Grid Writing Podcast

Shawn Coyne

Books, Language Learning, Authors, Education, Story, Publishing, Arts, Creativity, Writing, Fiction Writing

4.8767 Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How does the Story Grid Trinity apply to Big Idea, How-to, Narrative nonfiction, and Memoir? Shawn dives into this question on this week's episode.

Transcript

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0:00.0

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

0:06.7

I'm your host, Tim Graal, and I'm a writer in the Storygrid universe. Joining me shortly as Sean Coyne.

0:12.2

He is the creator of Storygrid, the author of the book Story Grid, and an editor with over 30 years experience.

0:18.7

In this episode, we got a question in about how to apply the

0:23.2

StoryGrid Trinity to nonfiction works, specifically memoir. I know a lot of you listening,

0:29.2

write memoir or working on a memoir, because we often get questions around memoir. And so I think

0:34.8

you'll really enjoy this episode because we dive back into kind of the three

0:39.5

parts of the Storygrid Trinity and we look at how this affects nonfiction writing. So that's what

0:46.2

we're going to cover today. So let's jump in and get started. So Sean, we got a question in this

0:53.0

week from Consetta. Follow up on the episodes we did about

0:57.6

the Trinity, the StoryGro Trinity. And she asked, how does the Trinity apply to nonfiction, especially

1:05.5

memoir? Oh, well, I'll do a broad canvas survey here. I mean, that's like a three, four-day seminar. But let me just kind of break it down into the big abstract concept. So just to briefly outline my conception of nonfiction is I have four categories of genre of nonfiction,

1:29.4

right? So the first one I have is academic nonfiction, which is really for a very targeted

1:35.3

audience of specialists. And so you don't really have to worry so much about entertaining them.

1:41.1

You're just trying to get the logos out there. You're trying to get the new

1:45.0

information to those people out there in as efficient way as possible so that they can integrate

1:51.0

it into their thinking. So you have academic nonfiction. So it's very wonky, high resolution

1:57.5

stuff at very, very deep levels of analysis. The second is how to. How to is a broad

2:04.6

category where you're trying to engender a new skill in third parties that you're never going to

2:12.5

meet. So what you want to do is boil down formulaic procedures and protocols in order to learn a new skill.

2:20.8

So how to bake a cake, how to garden, right?

2:24.3

How to sell.

...

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