Hello and welcome to the Storygrid 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 a creator of Story Grid, the author of the

book Story Grid and an editor with over 25 years experience.

In this episode, we continue looking at the nonfiction big idea genre, and we start looking at how

Storygrid really applies to this genre. So a lot of times when you're thinking about StoryGrid,

of course, on this show,

especially we're talking about the fiction side, the telling a better, you know, made up story,

where in this case, I wanted to see how these same story grid principles of genres, values,

beginning, middle, and end, how these apply to the big idea genre when we're talking

about nonfiction. So that's what we get into in this episode. It's really great. It was really

eye-opening for me, so I think you'll enjoy it. So let's jump in and get started. So Sean, we've

spent the last couple weeks looking at nonfiction, the different subgenres of nonfiction,

then we looked really deep at the big idea genre last week. But now that we've kind of identified

that and we're talking about how story grid works with nonfiction, we have to start asking all the same questions that we

would normally ask about fiction about the big idea genre. And so to me, the first question

to think about is like, well, what's the value at stake? Because that's what defines a genre, right?

So action is life and death,

you know. And so when you're looking at the big idea genre, what makes it a genre, which is

what is the value at stake when we're looking at big idea? Okay. Yeah, that's really important.

So the big idea value is about ignorance and wisdom and knowledge. So I always like to think about value in terms of sort of like a gradient of value or a spectrum of value. So, you know, there's negative values and positive on one sort of a global

wisdom spectrum. So if wisdom is the thing at the very, very far right of our gradient

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