Story Grid and Non-fiction

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 Grall, 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 storygrid 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 Storygrid 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 asking how do you kind of section off nonfiction when it comes to, from this standpoint of how you structure the thing? Because you have books that 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 written 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 thunderstorm, you know where. Larson. Eric Larson. Yes, yes, that's his name. And so where his is like, obviously it reads like a novel almost. So how do you think through like the different types and like the different types of nonfiction?

Well, this is funny because in the car yesterday, my 12 year old son asked me the same question and it was kind of fun because I never, I never really think he's paying attention, but I think obviously he overhears some of the podcast material and he asked me, dad, you know, you write about, you talk about fiction all the time. Do you have any ideas about nonfiction? I'm like, well, let me tell you, son, you know, and I. And I bored the hell out of him on the whole way right home.

Yeah, like my son does. Like, he'll ask me a question and I'm like, I'm 10 minutes into response, he's like, dad, I don't care. Like, I didn't understand what I was committing to when I asked you this question.

And I'm like, no, no, now you have to listen.

As I finish, it's exactly true.

That's the role of the son. He has to listen to the father blather on. So after I finished the book, the story grid, and it was, it was my sort of methodology dealing with fiction. I said to myself, what's the next thing that people are going to want to know from me? And that is how I deal with nonfiction. Because in my career as an editor, I didn't just edit fiction, I edited a lot of nonfiction too. A lot of nonfiction that, you know, were best selling guides to how to's and things like that. So I thought to myself, you know, how do I divide all of nonfiction? So I have four categories and other people probably have their own methodology, but these work for me. And the first category is academic nonfiction, which is all the stuff that scientists write for each other. It assumes a real, you know, understanding of everything in a particular field. The writing isn't story driven. It's really just about laying out what happened in a particular experiment or a particular paper. It's testing data stuff. So the academic section is, you know, university presses, medical schools, all that kind of stuff. So that's one that doesn't really go into the trade, meaning the normal everyday reader. The second category I have is what I call the how to. And the how to book is exactly what you would think it is. How to hit a golf ball the right way, how to garden, how to cook, how to market your book to your first thousand readers. That kind of stuff.

So, and these are like all the four dummies books.

Yeah, exactly. They're very prescriptive. They're all about empowering the reader to learn a particular set of skills so that they can actually put those skills to work for themselves. So if you don't know how to bake a cake, you buy a cookbook that teaches you how to bake a cake. And if it's a good book and it's a good recipe, at the end of the process, you have a very nice cake to eat. Same thing with marketing or business strategies or anything like that. So these are really important books and that aren't necessarily story driven. They're not about. They do have beginning, middles and ends, but they're all process driven. They're prescriptive. And just as a tiny little aside here, this is kind of the arena that the major publishers have abandoned in a way. And if you have an expertise and a skill that you can write your own how to book, the last thing I recommend is that you sell it to a major publisher for a $5,000 advance. Instead, you should do what you recommend. And Jeff Goins and Steve Pressfield and Seth Godin and everybody else recommends today is to build your own tribe and build your own following and sell your book to that following. That's what I did with the Story Grid in no small amount to your efforts. And I read your book and I said, geez, this guy knows what he's talking about. And that's why I started the Story Grid website. So the third category I describe is narrative nonfiction. And narrative nonfiction is what will probably segue into in a minute. That is using the techniques of fiction to tell a true story. It doesn't mean making things up. What it does mean is collecting and gathering all of the data of a particular story, like Eric Larson did with Devil in the White City and a number of his other books. And also there's a great book on the real life, Moby Dick, it was called. The subtitle was Tales of the Whale Ship called Essex. I'll get the name of the writer. It's another great book that told the true story behind this whaling vessel that became the inspiration for Moby Dick. Great book. Nathaniel Philbrick is the author. So that narrative nonfiction is using the fictional techniques that I describe in the story grid and bringing to bear in nonfiction. And we'll talk about that more in a minute. The last category I have of nonfiction is called the Big Idea Book. And the Big Idea Book is sort of. It combines pretty much all three of the other categories. And this is something that has become more and more popular in major publishing. And Malcolm Gladwell was really the best example right now. Somebody who mastered the form and is able to repeat it over and over again. And what the Big Idea Book is, is it tells. Instead of taking the kind of pedantic I know everything approach of a scientist does in an academic paper. Gladwell, what he does is he tells story of the search for a truth. And you know, I've got a massive manuscript sitting in my computer that does for the Tipping Point what I did for the Silence of the Lambs that I really have to get off my bottom and finish editing and get out there. Because it explains what I mean by combining all three of the previous ones. But anyway, just to recap, here, I define nonfiction into four categories. Academic how to, narrative, nonfiction, and big idea. Now, I'm going to ask a question that my son asked me to explain my theory. And my son said, yeah, that's really interesting, dad, but how do you define a biography? You know, oh, where does that go? That's nonfiction, right? What about autobiography? And I'm like, very smart young man. Well, what I would say is that the approach of the authority writing a biography or autobiography, he or she is going to choose of the methodology of those four categories that I just described, they can approach the autobiography or the biography academically and report the new findings of the life of Benjamin Franklin to an academic audience. Or they could look at it as a how to like. And I mentioned this to my son. There was a very successful book, and it's still very successful, called how to think like Leonardo da Vinci, which takes the approach of telling an autobiography biography in the guise of a how to, which was a really interesting idea. The third way would be to do it as a narrative nonfiction, whereby you tell the story of a particular figure, but you use the notion of the fictional storytelling universe, and you pick a particular genre. For example, say you tell the story of Benjamin Franklin as a coming of age. Then you would sort of highlight a particular moment in Franklin's life when he became the person that we all think of as Benjamin Franklin. You know, if you were doing the research and you discovered this amazing idea that Benjamin Franklin as a young man was, you know, he had this epiphany that showed him the direction of his life and what he should dedicate himself to, and you chose to tell that story in terms of narrative nonfiction. You would focus on that one particular time of life, and you would use the rules of the coming of age story genre to tell that story. The fourth thing would be to use the life of Benjamin Franklin to present a big idea. And then you would probably approach the storytelling as almost in a meadow way. You would, you know, put yourself as almost in the third person, and you would say, sean Coyne decided to write a book about Benjamin Franklin, and this is what he discovered about Franklin's life and the times in which he lived and the things that he discovered have a lot of applications to what we know today, Et cetera, et cetera. So it's those four kind of major approaches. It's sort of picking a silo of grain that you want to jump into and feed yourself as you're writing your book.

So like the war of Art. Would that be a big idea book?

Yes.

Okay. And then trying to think and probably like this.

That's also a great example of a combo genre because. Okay, this is kind of interesting to explain this in this way. When Steve Pressfield sent me the original document that became the War of Art, it was an autobiography and it did not focus in one particular big Idea. But after we started working together on it, we edited it to a point where it became a big idea self help book for creative people. So it was a combination of the Big Idea with autobiography and narrative nonfiction in a way that created the War of Art. And I think that's why it has such resonance to so many different people, because you can read it from any number of points of view. If you are 16 years old and you want to be a writer and you want to know, you know, what kind of hurdles you're going to have to get over when you, when you begin work, you read the War of Art and you say, oh, I've got to steel myself against resistance. If you're reading it as a business person, you would say to yourself, I have to steel myself against being an amateur. I need to look at my world, you know, as a professional. So there's any number of things that you can pull out of the book that's a big idea. But the overarching big idea of the War of Art is, hey, guys, life is an internal struggle. It's a war inside yourself. And I think that resonates with everyone because once they hear that, they go, oh, my God, why didn't I think of that? That's absolutely true. I have a war with myself every time I wake up in the morning. You know, do I go down and skip the shower and go get some coffee, or do I do my usual route or as you do, Tim, you get up at 4 o' clock in the morning. I'm sure the last thing you want to do is get up at 4 o' clock in the morning.

So this is the really fun part of nonfiction. After, you know, you start thinking about it in creative terms. A lot of people think of nonfiction as, oh, I just blow out all my research and into some words and I've got a nonfiction book. And you know, our friend Jeff Goins, you know, he's sort of, he has learned the approach that, that we're talking about now in a way that is helping you in on nonfiction the same way I'm helping you with fiction. So I think that's kind of cool too.

Yeah. I found when I Wrote my first one, I thought just like, you know, I bring to every project, I think it'll be easy. And I remember, like, I knew everything that needed to go in the book, but I had never had to arrange it into a proper order. That brings people down a path without me explaining it. And they can stop me to ask questions. You know, that's how I'd always talked about it. And so it ended up being, you know, really a lot harder than I thought it would be. And then even now, as I'm working on another one, it's like, it's still. It's still harder. So with the how to book, when you approach that, do you still bring in some story grid principles to that? How do you kind of think through the middle, beginning and end for a book that's not narrative and as kind of its base?

That's a great question. And it's something that I did confront when I was writing the story grid, and not ironically, I think, with, you know, poetic justice. The person who told me that I was boring the shit out of them was Steven Pressfield.

Because I shared with him a draft of the story grid. And what he said to me was so important, and it's something that I forgot. And he said, look, you can't just drop your reader into the boiling water. You have to slowly bring them into the how to situation so that they are prepared for all of the, you know, deep work that they're going to have to do. So what he said to me is what you need to do at the very beginning of this book is explain who the hell you are, how you came up with this idea and why it's important. And once he told me that, he essentially gave me the storytelling tool to kind of nail the beginning hook of my book so that people. I could reach out to the people and I could explain to them what my problem was before I knew the story grid and how I solved it, and how I'm going to tell them all the things that I discovered and why it's important. So that's a way to approach how to. That I always recommend is that if you're just sort of jumping in, if you, you know, if you had begun your book, your how to book with just all the principles that you. You knew about marketing, without setting the context and the stage by using personal elements of your own life and how you discovered the things that you discovered, then people would be like, who's this guy? What does he know? I don't know this grawl guy, but when you, when you explain where you're coming from, then you bring the reader into your world, you explain your worldview. And then they're like, okay, this is somebody I can trust. This is somebody I can listen to. So using the technique of, you know, and some, what some people do, they present their bona fides, right? They'll say things like, I went to Cal Berkeley and I majored in microbiology and I got my PhD from Oxford and then I was given a Rhodes scholarship in this, in this arena, and therefore you should listen to me. So here we go. And then they launch into it and they speak as if they're giving the Sermon on the mount. And it's my personal opinion that that approach is antiquated. It's something that people aren't that enthralled by anymore. Because in our day and age, we all understand that, you know, the last thing any of us really fully trust are institutions. And just because somebody got a PhD from Oxford, they could be as big of a blowhard as anybody else. But if they explain the sort of the self taught element, I think that's what engages people. When somebody teaches themselves, they become their own autodidact and they teach themselves a particular skill that says to the reader, oh, if Koine taught himself how to, how this stuff works, I certainly can. He's going to teach me the way he taught himself. That way I can apply that in a way that is less likely to be applied if some blowhard from Oxford is like, well, we at Oxford learn this. And I think that's the approach I always recommend. Even if you did get a Nobel Prize and you did go to Oxford, show your humanity. Don't be a blowhard.

So, okay, because it was interesting because I was talking to Brian Holiday, who he mentioned a couple weeks ago. I was talking to him yesterday and he was that one of the exercises he gave me was to write a. Just write three descriptions of my book. A one sentence description, a one paragraph description, and a one page description. And he's like, that will help, you know, like that'll be kind of your center point of bringing everything back to that one thing. And it was funny because it made me think of two things. First, of course, it made me think of how much we've talked about theme and how, you know, theme becomes the guiding light of the book. And it also reminded me a couple weeks ago I was talking to a guy, Srini, who wrote this new book called Unmistakable. And he said every time he would turn in something to his editor, the editor would say, well, how does this make the reader unmistakable? Because if it's not doing that, it's going to get cut out. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting about how, like, every single idea in the book had to come back to this one main idea. And that became kind of the guiding light. And so it was just interesting how even though even in a modularized book where it's a set of, like, how tos to get you from point A to point point B, it still has to have this guiding theme that it always comes back to, even in something that's not narrative driven.

Well, I'd agree. And I also think that those three exercises that he gave you. The one sentence is your controlling idea theme of your book. The paragraph are your three sentences that define your beginning hook, middle build, and ending payoff. And the one pager is your foolscap global story grid. Just saying.

That's a great point. Oh, man. Okay, so I want to. I want to make sure we get into narrative nonfiction, have enough time to talk about it. So my first question is, what? Because on the face of it, I feel like having never done it before. My assumption would be it's basically the same as writing fiction. You're just editing the true story to fit a narrative. What are the differences between writing fiction and writing narrative nonfiction?

Well, it's probably best that I use a book that I worked on as an example to kind of explain this concept. So I'm going to talk about a book that I worked on with a wonderful journalist, just impeccably hardworking, amazing writer. She worked at the Wall Street Journal for years and Forbes. Her name is Anita Raghavan. And the book that I worked with her on was called the Billionaire's Apprentice. Now, this was a big, big story. And the story was this. There was a man named Raj Rajaratnam who was a big Sri Lankan hedge fund leader. And he had a hedge fund called the Galleon Hedge Fund, which was notorious, hugely successful. He was making billions of dollars. And guess what happened? It got in a lot of trouble. And he ended up being indicted for insider trading. And he was convicted, and he's now in prison. So Anita was born in India, and her parents are Indian Navy. Maybe she was. I don't think she was born in India, but it doesn't matter. She has she's Indian ancestry, and so a lot of her friends are Indians. And one of the things that was so interesting to them was that there was a very famous Indian businessman named Rajat Gupta, who was a friend of this character, Raj Rajaratnam, and Gupta was sort of. He was the Superman of India. He was a man who came from nothing. And his father was this great freedom fighter during, you know, the India's, you know, trying to become independent. And his father sacrificed, you know, day and night in order for the country to finally get its independence from the Great Britain in the 19, late 1940s or early 1950s. I forget the exact date. Anyway, so Rajat Gupta came from nothing and he got a scholarship to Harvard Business School, which was an amazing thing at the time because believe it or not, they had quotas back then on how many immigrants would come in. And if that sounds like what one of the presidential candidates wants to do, it's a terrible idea. Anyway, so Raja Gupta, he goes to Harvard Business School, he graduates the top of his class, and he ends up at McKinsey Consulting. And not only does he end up there, over a period of years, he rises to the top rank of McKinsey. He becomes the first Indian national born to run McKinsey and Company. He held the company for three terms, was hugely successful. And then, as they do at McKinsey, he left McKinsey. He sort of retired. And when he retired, he felt probably like, oh, man, my career is over. What am I going to do? So he kind of became friends with this Raja Rajaratnam who owned this hedge fund. And he thought, oh, maybe I'll end up being in the private sector on the hedge fund side, etc. Meanwhile, he was also appointed to major boards at major companies. And he sat on the board of Goldman Sachs. And what happened was. And what the government did is they got a phone call. They taped the phone calls of Rajaratnam. And what they discovered was Rajat Gupta was feeding him insider information. And Gupta was trading on that information and making millions of dollars on each of these trades. And the big smoking gun was Gupta about strangely, like three minutes after the Goldman Sachs board had met, saying during the financial crisis that they were going to get this big influx of money in to save them, Gupta called Rajaratnam. Rajaratnam bought a whole slew of Goldman Sachs stock. Of course, when the news broke the next day, the stock went through the roof. Rajaratnam made $80 million in one trade. And this is what sunk Rajaratnam. And it's eventually what sunk Rajat Gupta. And Gupta is now, I believe, serving time too. So Anita, who's this inveterate reporter, has all this stuff, right? She's got incredible information. She's interviewed everybody at the sec. She's got lists and lists of these really fascinating, compelling characters. She's got this, the biggest insider trading scandal of all time. And she's got the general bones of the story, but she was struggling with, how do I tell it in the right way? And so what we did is we looked at this in terms of narrative nonfiction. We said to ourselves, who is the hero of this story? And Anita suggested to me, and she was absolutely right. The hero of this story was Rajat Gupta, because Rajat Gupta, what he meant to his country and what he meant to people of Indian nationality, that they could come and they could take a bite of the Big Apple, and they could become very powerful figures in business. They're not like the jokey Indian guy in the Simpsons. These people are real bonafide geniuses who deserve their time in the limelight and should be taken seriously. Gupta was that character. He was the Superman that anybody had the greatest respect for. He's kind of the hero of our story and the villain of our story. We made Rajaratnam, and Rajaratnam was sort of a child of privilege who grew up quite wealthy and never sort of had to struggle all that much and cheated a little bit. He cheated his way through the University of Pennsylv. I'm sort of fudging the facts here, so I don't want to get indicted for the things that I'm saying. I'm just telling this in story concepts as opposed to direct investigative reporting. So when I say things he cheated along the way, that's a story point, not necessarily a legal point. So I don't want to get sued. I doubt anybody would sue me. He's in prison, but you never know. So anyway, Rajaratnam, I said, now he's kind of our villain of the story. So the story that we want to tell is a story. It's a punitive story. And what I mean by punitive story means somebody who's good, ends up morally compromised, trades their moral values for material gain, and is punished. This is a classic punitive tale. That's part of the internal genres that I talk about in the story grid. It's part of the morality genre of the internal genres. At story grid, it's one of the three or four. There's the redemption plot, there's the punitive plot, and then there's the education plot and the disillusionment plot. Those are all part of the morality section of the internal genres and storygrid. So I suggested to Anita, why don't we look at this? And all of this information that you have put together and structure it using the arc of a punitive plot. So we want to tell the story of Gupta. We want the reader to become really, really sympathetic to this guy. Because Rajat Gupta was a hero. There's no doubt about it. No matter what he did, the man was an extremely influential part of Indian society who should get his due. We should present the facts of what this man went through and how he grew to be such a powerful figure. So Anita did that. She did the work. She found out all the information that we could construct that showed how Raja Gupta rose from sort of a penniless intellectual in India to somebody at Harvard Business School, and how he parlayed that into running McKinsey and company, the world's most prestigious consulting firm. And so that's sort of the first big chunk of the Billionaire's Apprentice. And then we sort of, on top of that, we told the story of Raj Rajaratnam to present the hero and the villain. And then we had a confrontation in the middle of this. Of the book, where we showed how Rajaratnam seduced, intellectually seduced Gatta to sort of do his bidding. And then the final ending payoff of this story is the fallout of what happened to these two men and why things went downhill for them. Meanwhile, we did a crime story. On top of that, we used the SEC and the characters in the Security and Exchange Commission and also at the Attorney General's office, the Southern District, run by another Indian, which. Which brought so many sort of Indian flavors into this story that the subtitle is something like the Rise and Fall of the Intellectual Class and something of that sort. I forget the exact subtitle, but it has to. It positions the book as not just a book about the fall of the Galleon Hedge fund, but the rise of a particular intellectual culture from India. So narrative nonfiction is all about sort of collecting your stuff, right? You go out as an investigative journalist or somebody doing research, and you collect your stuff that surrounds the characters that you want to talk about, and you lay it all sort of metaphorically on a big table. And I often do it literally. So you see, oh, those are the depositions over there from the people from the Galleon Hedge fund that are 6ft high, showing all the bad stuff that they did. Over there is Rajagupta's, you know, curriculum vitae that shows all the amazing things that he did. Here are the SEC documents. Here's the Attorney General. Now, what does all this add up to? What is the story behind this story? What do we want the reader to take away at the end of this reading experience? And I'll answer that question right now. We wanted the reader to say to themselves, that is a tragedy. That is a tragedy that befell that man. And if we're me in the same circumstances, I could understand making that choice and I could understand how I could be seduced by wealth and power and fame to the point where I would disgrace myself and my family generations past. And I gotta tell you one little tidbit about this story that really, when Anita discovered it, we both sort of shook our heads like we couldn't believe it. And the tidbit is this. Rajid Gupta's father, his name was Anil Gupta, and he was a freedom fighter, he was a communist, and he was trying to help his country break away from the colonial rule of Great Britain, you know, in the 19th century. And, you know, he was a real hero. And he went to jail and he suffered terrible, terrible losses for his personal commitment to this particular cause. But what's really, really even more upsetting is that at one point in his life he was broke and he had a family he had to take care of. And he was offered money to go and take tests for people who couldn't pass particular board exams for Indian education. Now India is famous for its educational system and it's very compet. And only the smartest people who do the best on the tests rise in that society. So Gupta under, you know, he was wearing camouflage, was taking tests for other people and being paid and he got caught and he ended up going to prison for this. And this particular small little tidbit of information was buried in invest in reports, literal reports from, you know, Great Britain's legal system. And Anita's intrepid journalistic instincts. She found this information that had never been revealed about Rajat Gupta before. And Anita and I looked at ourselves and we said, holy cow. So Rajat disgraced himself in much the same way that his father disgraced himself and his father ended up, he ended up redeeming himself because nobody really blamed him, the, the guy for this. And it turned out that he actually gave the money to the Communist Party. He felt so guilty about it. So we found this sort of familial link that thematically was exactly the same story that we wanted to tell. So I'm like, Anita, this is the bookend of your story. You know, you have to present this information in such a way that it's a real body blow to the reader when they get to the end of the book. And they discover that Raja Gupta, you know, was a hero. And it was a tragedy, but it was almost genetic in a way.

Yeah. It was like pre written.

Yeah. And I don't think it's in his blood. This is what I think. I think stories are so influential in our lives that when our father does something, we almost. That story of what our father did, we love our father so much that subconsciously we bury that story. And without us even really knowing it, we make decisions based upon these stories that are buried in our subconscious that almost they bring us great pain. And I think Gupta, because there was something about his father that he adored and loved, but he also knew that his father made a mistake. It's not that he was given permission subconsciously to make a similar mistake, but it played out that way. And this is why I'm so committed to what we're doing, Tim, and to story grid stuff and all that. Because I think the more we understand about the power of stories in our own lives and our own narratives, the better we'll be able to avoid making, you know, painful mistakes. And we'll make choices that are our own. They're not somebody else's story that accidentally got stuck inside of us and we never looked at and we didn't process it, and therefore we're just going to play it out in our own life.

Okay, I want to back up and kind of pull out of this what I think you're saying, and then you can correct me. So it sounds like what happened was that you kind of looked at the material based on the material you developed kind of what the arc was going to be, who the protagonist, who the villain was, you know, what kind of genre it was going to be. And then you started editing down the material to fit that arc.

That's correct. We looked at the evidence on the table and we said, what is the arc of this story? And it's a punitive plot. When I was the agent for this book, too, and when I sold the book to a major publisher, there was no information about Raja Gupta being in on this problem. I sold it just purely based upon this sort of Wolf of Wall street baloney kind of story. Not that it's a baloney story, but you know what I mean? Like the degradation of Wall street and isn't it terrible how these people go and they manipulate the system for their own wealth and they're so. They do such ridiculous things. It worked on that level, but I. When. When Anita presented all this information and as she was doing her Research investigators at the SEC were like, you might want to hold off a little bit, because, you know, there's some things that are going to happen. And. And what we discovered was, you know, Gupta and I said to Anita early on, oh, man, wouldn't it be great if Gupta was involved in this? Then we'd have a real story. And she's like, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if he was. And I'm like, yeah, but we can't prove that. And it was just sort of not lucky. But what happened was the investigation by the SEC and the Attorney General's office brought to light all of this information that Anita and I sort of intuitively suspected. And so we used that information to tell the story that we intuitively thought was there, which was the punitive internal genre with a whole bunch of other stuff in there. The crime story was already there. Right. We already knew how to piece together the investigative story of the amazing Indian guy at the SEC who went through hundreds and hundreds of. And thousands of documents to find this evidence. So it was sort of like an all the President's Men kind of narrative there where you had this guy late at night, literally going through all these documents to find, you know, the. The smoking gun that made all this stuff happen. So. But, yes, you're correct. You're correct. So you lay out the evidence, and then you say to yourself, what is this evidence telling us? What is the theme? What is the story here? And a lot of people, a lot of journalists, in fact, are afraid of the story. They're afraid of making that decision of saying, the evidence here, based upon my investigative journalism, is that this is a story about. This is a tragic story about the fall of a very important, honorable man. And I'm going to tell that story using all of the facts that I have available to me. This fact fits in my beginning hook. This fact fits in my ending payoff. That fact is the perfect all is lost moment in the middle of my book. So it's not making up information. You do not make up information as a journalist. You use the facts to tell a story, a narrative arc, a narrative story that is absolutely in keeping with the facts of your investigation.

So, I mean, do you go as deep, like, do you think the genres you have inside of story grid, like, match what the narrative nonfiction genres, are they different?

Absolutely.

Okay. And then you're always like, you can't write one of these without a protagonist and antagonist, without a hero and a villain.

That's correct. Okay. What happens is that there are these really Scholarly and incredibly investigated works that come out that have no story to them and they're just a progression of facts with introductions of characters that don't seem to connect to anybody else. There doesn't seem to be any context. And what I said to Anita when we were working on this, I said, look, you got to give us the context. What was it like to be Rajat Gupta in India in 1946? Because we don't understand that world today. What was it like to have no food or running water? What was it like to have one pair of shoes if you were lucky? And so. Yeah, and that's. Yeah, go ahead. That's.

My next question is like, what do you see when people are writing fictions, particularly narrative nonfiction? What are the kind of common mistakes that people make when they're approaching this? Because to me, it is different because you want to. With fiction, you can just make up whatever the hell you want. Where with narrative nonfiction, you have to shoes. I almost see it as like, you have this, the whole like block of marble thing and you kind of have to like craft it into. Pull out the pieces that are this the story and make sure you edit out the boring parts even more.

Yes.

I don't know. What do you see?

Well, here are the problems that happen. Like that thing I just said about establishing the context. Journalists fall in love with their investigative work, right? Just like fiction writers fall in love with a particular sentence or amazing description. But what journalists do is they'll pile on fact after fact after fact because it took them seven days to track down that fact. And when you say to them, hey.

They don't want it to be wasted.

Exactly. So they'll pile on a fact that is the seventh supporting element to something that was firmly established with one fact. That's the problem with journalism. And you're absolutely right about you have to read the tea leaves of the story based upon the investigative information and then pick out the perfect stuff that tells the story that you want to tell. And you have to commit to that story. You can't abandon. Just like a fiction writer can't start a story as a coming of age story, end it as a thriller. It's got to be one thing. You can have thriller elements in a coming of age story, but you got to make a choice. It's either one or the other. And like you did in like, you're working on your story, you're dealing with a young protagonist. So when you're dealing with a young protagonist intuitively, your reader is going to say, oh, this is going to be a coming of age story. And so if you abandon the, you know, obligatory scenes and conventions of a coming of age story because you want it to be something else. And even if you hit all the other genres stuff, the reader's not going to react to it in the way that you wish them to because intuitively they're going to say, this is a 12 year old character. I want a coming of age story. And what he's given me is a legal thriller, and it's a good legal thriller, but I want a coming of age story. And he changed it after the beginning hook. And I'm not, I don't like this. And I'm never going to tell any of my friends about reading it again. And nobody knows that, you know, in, in their, at the top of their mind, they just say, ah, yeah, I didn't get it. I didn't, you know, it was, it was disappointing. And it's the same thing with narrative nonfiction. If Anita were to start this story as a punitive plot and featuring Rajat Gupta, and never went back to Gupta after the beginning hook, people would, I mean, this book was nominated for all kinds of awards. It was front page New York Times Book Review, incredible reviews. It was excerpted in New York Times Magazine. And the reason why is that was impeccable investigative journalism matched with a very sexy subject that had heart and soul of a story inside of it. And it's no coincidence that all those things happened for Anita. She spent two and a half years writing this book and every decision that she made, she debated. And I can, I can vouch for that because I talked to her over pretty much every decision that she made. So my point is that some say narrative nonfiction is easier to write than fiction. And I think if you were to ask Anita that, she would probably say that's true. That's because she's a journalist. But if you're, if you're a fiction writer and you think you can just walk into the park and write a narrative nonfiction without doing your, without learning the essential journalistic craft, you're sadly mistaken because what you'll end up doing is start fudging things. And there's a, there's a writer, I don't want to give his name, but he's kind of famous for fudging some of his narrative non fiction in such a way that nobody trusts it anymore. And even though his work is adapted for major movies and he makes a lot of money, you know, people in the industry are kind of like, oh, I Don't know if I want to do a book by him because he kind of fudges things at the end, you know, and they have to make an ethical decision. Do I publish the book that could be a million copy bestseller based upon suspect information, or do I not publish that book and maybe lose my job? And these are the ethical dilemmas that some editors have to face. And my point is that if you're a writer, try not to put him in an editor in that position. You know, do your job. And if you're writing narrative nonfiction, do the journalism, do the investigative work.

Yeah, it's interesting because it seems like, again, you know, if we're approaching fiction and once you've decided on a genre, you just have to kind of stick to that instead of like, it seems like the narrative nonfiction side is basically pulling together all of this research and then finding the thread. So there is a story in there. You've just got to find it in all of this stuff. I mean, would you say, like. Because I know a lot of people that listen are also writing memoirs. Would you say memoirs fall into the same category?

Oh, absolutely. Memoir. Here's the trick with memoir, and we should probably do an hour on memoir. But the trick with memoir is to think about the story. And a lot of people make the major mistake of doing things like, I was born at the muddy brooks of the Mississippi, and I remember mama used to bring the corn to us. And they get so sucked into this baloney story from cradle to grave that it bores the hell out of everybody. So my advice about memoir is find a pivotal moment in your life that changed your worldview and narrow down the story to that day, that week, that month, that, whatever. But please spare us the detail about your grandparents coming over from Ireland. We all had grandparents came over from Ireland or Germany or wherever. We all read that story before. What we want to know is what happened in your life that changed you from one person to another person? What was the crisis? What was the conflict? What were those things that drove you to change yourself? And so those are the questions you have to ask yourself if you were just writing a memoir to get out your whatever. It's not. Nobody cares. What we care about is a story that we can relate to. And the stories that we relate to are those stories that show somebody confronting information that makes them change their Weltenscharger, their worldview. It makes them change their very being. Those are what will suck us in every single time. Because all of us go through those moments in our lives and we're concerned and we're confused and we want to turn somewhere to learn how other people have confronted similar problems. So that's what a memoir is for. It's to explain and to show in story form how to overcome or how to be destroyed by whichever tragedy works, too.

How to deal with a particular conflict or problem. That's why we see a lot of memoirs about people who've lost their wife or their, you know, or death or alcoholism or some major conflict in their lives.

Yeah. And I mean, once again, we're kind of back to the similarities between fiction and nonfiction, which is, you know, we're telling stories to change the way people think.

Yes.

And, you know, you can do that. You know, we're back to talking about from a few weeks ago with George Orwell is he always started with a political injustice, and that's how he would find his books. And so whether it's nonfiction or fiction, it's still you have to have your theme and you have to have your genre, and you have to have your beginning, middle, and end. And you don't get to, like, not do that stuff because you're writing nonfiction.

Yeah, that's true. That is really true. You can't fudge it.

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