Hello and welcome to the Storygrid podcast. My name is Tim Graal. I'm the CEO of StoryGrid Universe,

and I'm a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. This episode is a little

different. One is it's coming out on a Tuesday instead of a Thursday. The other is Sean's not going to

join me, Danielle, Leslie, and they're not going to join me. Instead, I did an interview with Randall

Searles and Scott Mann. So Scott Mann is the author of a book that just came out called Operation Pineapple Express.

And it's all about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the role that Scott played in trying to get people out of Afghanistan safely.

Randall Searles is a Story Grid certified editor.

We've had them on before to talk about projects.

And he was one of the editors on this particular project and worked really closely with Scott on writing the book,

doing all of the interviews, pulling it together, and getting it ready because they had a

really short timeline, which we talk about in the interview.

This was actually really interesting to me because one is, of course, Randy's involved. They're using story grid.

They're using it on a project with a traditional publisher, Simon & Schuster. And I was really

interested in that side of things. But I was also interested in how they dug in to find the

story theme, the controlling idea, and how that helped them craft this story. I think a lot of times when people are writing books, I think this idea of telling a true story is often harder because in fiction you can make up whatever you want to make up but in uh when

you're telling a story that actually happened it's an editing job you have to figure out how to

take this giant thing all these different things that happen you know it's it's a word that

or a phrase that sean likes to use a lot, combatorially explosive, right?

There's so many different things you could put in the book.

How do you decide what to cut out and how do you decide what to actually put in the book

and how do you make sure it all hangs together?

And of course, it comes to this idea of a controlling idea.

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