Shelley Sperry – författare

What''s at the core of every great story that leads readers to rush breathlessly to the end and then share it with all their friends? 

At Story Grid, we believe great stories are built of four essential elements: Core Needs, Core Life Values, Core Emotions, and Core Events. Whether you''re writing an action adventure, a mystery, or a love story, these are the elements that spark the emotional connection and catharsis readers are looking for. 

Assembled into a Four Core Framework, the right need, life value, emotion, and event become the blueprint for a story that will satisfy readers and bring them back for more. 

In The Four Core Framework, Story Grid founder Shawn Coyne distills 30 years of experience in publishing into a compact guide for writers who want their novels, screenplays, and nonfiction to resonate and captivate. He dissects twelve kinds of stories and explains how to create the the ideal framework for each, including: 

In The Four Core Framework, you''ll learn to keep readers turning the pages and rushing to recommend your stories. Join Shawn to get down to the core of it all.

What are the first principles in writing a story that works?

At Story Grid, it''s easy to get distracted by the tools, spreadsheets, commandments, macro lense, micro lense, and on and on. However, all of this eventually comes back to five first principles.

In Story Grid 101, Story Grid founder Shawn Coyne distills 30 years of experience working with writers to build their stories into five principles:

Also inside of Story Grid 101, Shawn also introduces you to the fundamental tools:

Story Grid 101 is for anyone new to Story Grid who needs a primer on how we approach our craft.

Undertaking any big project, but especially a book is a daunting proposition. The way to make it less scary is to have a map for the journey, and ideally, some experienced fellow travelers to ride shotgun—friends who know the road well and can help you make it to your destination. That’s what we are aiming to provide.

We’re two editors with over twenty years of experience between us, writing and editing many types of nonfiction. In the pages that follow, we distill some of the lessons we’ve learned in the trenches applying Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid methodology to the work of our clients, all of whom are leveling up their skills as nonfiction writers.

We’ve chosen to use several masterworks—with the most considerable emphasis on The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan—as the maps to guide us throughout What’s the Big Idea?

Although Baldwin and Pollan write on different topics and in different styles over half a century apart, both men had an enormous cultural impact. They extended that influence to a broad popular audience with these works. We could have chosen many other titles, and we’ll include examples from some others where it’s helpful.

After reading this short, macro-principles primer, you may want to take a microscopic dive into Big Idea nonfiction by looking at The Story Grid Masterwork Guide to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, which provides a scene-by-scene analysis of another exemplary title. We hope you’ll be inspired to find your own favorite masterworks to learn from and apply Story Grid Methodology yourself. We’ll provide some tips on how to do that too.

With Baldwin and Pollan as our touchstones, we’ve organized this book around a series of questions and answers that will explain how and why Big Idea books work.