Welcome back to B is for Book Coach. Today, we’re making space for genre.
At roughly the midpoint shift of my career to this point, I made my way into the Story Grid universe.
I had already fallen in love with the Story Grid method and how accessible it made fiction feel.
So when the second class of editor certification opened up, I decided to dive in, hoping to serve my nonfiction clients better in the short-term and possibly pivot into fiction in the future.
If you’re not familiar, “the Story Grid” is a story nerd’s dream, plotting entire fiction works onto spreadsheets to see how the arcs take shape.
We spent endless hours analyzing scenes—from books, movies, and even songs—to name their underlying structures.
Then we learned how to turn those underlying structures into tools and services for authors at all stages of their work.
One of the structures that Story Grid thrives on is genre, but not the genres that you see in Amazon’s categories or on Query Tracker’s drop down menus.
When sales categories are a starting point, we risk shrinking people in the name of shaping books.
Even worse, we begin to believe the deep-seated, fear-shaped lie that our message has to become something else in order to be worth reading.
Content genres, on the other hand, are about the experience of the content itself.
Story Grid founder Shawn Coyne once compared them to the set up and pay off of a knock-knock joke.
The signal “knock knock” cues you to say “who’s there?” Then a good punchline either continues the structure that we expect or skillfully breaks the structure in a way that surprises us.
Either way, it’s the structure that sets the expectation and guides the experience.
One of the genre shapes I absolutely loved exploring in the fiction world? Performance.
The most obvious performance stories are of the “big game” variety.
You know the type. The David team has to overcome the Goliath team and spends most of the story convinced that they won’t make it…
But Performance is even better when it’s unexpected.
I call these “Performance of” stories. Maybe my favorite example is “Performance of Fun,” a la the movie Wine Country. A bunch of friends get together for a fiftieth birthday, determined to “win” their Performance of Fun at any cost.
I love this kind of story because we do it all the time.
By “we,” I might just mean those of us who are neurodivergent in some way and have spent years creating masks for the various performances that we believe our lives require.
I also see it in my clients and the role they think they have to play to “win” their Performance of Writer at any cost.
And holy wow, does it cost.
This is why I like to use the phrase “non-writer”—not to say you are any less than a “writer,” but to release the performance.
That mask that requires steps, tools, processes, and expectations? It might be fine for someone who is dedicated to the long-term pursuit of the craft of writing, but it can be deeply misaligned for someone who feels the pull to write for a specific purpose.
Kind of how an Olympic runner has a different process than a daily jogger.
The differences between craft-level training and purpose-level writing took me years to parse out.
And every one of those years, especially those in Story Grid, were everything that I needed them to be, short of shifting me into a fiction career.
That particular “fiction or nonfiction” question mark hung over my head until the spring of 2020—yes, that spring—when I attended the Big Idea conference in Nashville.
This was Story Grid’s first official foray into long-form nonfiction articulation, and I was completely hooked.
One moment in particular sealed the deal for me.
It was a session about the shape of nonfiction, and because Shawn is a wizard when it comes to contextual background, he naturally zoomed all the way out to the history of humanity.
I was rapt as he described story as our first technology, creating as much or more of a species-wide advantage as the ability to throw a spear.
Like throwing a spear, story requires enough heft, the right arc, and a specific target in order to land as intended.
Story is how we survived our first existential events, and it still is. (The weeks and months that followed that workshop proved it.)
And if all of that is true, then the storytelling instinct that helps us survive still lives in us. Deep in our bones. In the part of us that responds more than the part that reaches.
The word “story” here applies to both fiction and non-, of course, but as of that moment, I knew I wanted to help authors tap into that deep, human ability to tell stories through direct messages rather than the indirect nature of fiction.
And for a while, I was so excited about that possibility that I pursued it with every last tool and resource I could get my hands on.
I plotted nonfiction arcs using spreadsheets and quadrants and frameworks.
I taught story structure.
I made my people use wonky story-nerd language.
I was training my people to be Olympians when what they really needed was for me to sprint with them toward the person who most needed their help.
Eventually, I parted ways with Story Grid on the very best of terms, leaving them to their rigorous training while I moved on to run with my authors.
But before I did, I attended one more session that rocked my world yet again.
In this one, held virtually in the midst of our own existential event, I sat in the office I’d built into the corner of my bedroom, with my bright blue bullet journal and tin of Prismacolor pencils, and live-streamed our week-long recertification training.
In fact, the photo I use for B is for Book Coach was taken in that very corner. It’s a little old now, but that moment was so significant that I can’t let myself part with it just yet.
With more freedom to doodle my notes thanks to the love-streaming setup, I created two-page layouts for every session that week—one of which was on genre and the shapes of stories.
Hours later, I sat back in awe at the layers of story-shape insights that Shawn had identified.
I colored each genre note with its own piece of the rainbow—and then I did the same for each stage of Maslow’s hierarchy—and then again for the stack of core emotions—and then triple checked to verify that they all, in fact, intertwined.
They did.
Genre as Shawn saw it was not about the category above the shelf, but about the human experience that the underpinnings of a story both represent and create.
That’s how I began to see story shapes as well.
Not as boxes that confine a human experience, but as a focal point on the prism of colors that is life on this planet.
Every once in a while, I’d break out my blue notebook and show a client those doodles, and invariably they’d ask me to make a graphic out of it.
At some point, I stopped teaching the specifics of craft all together—at least in ways that required my people to become story nerds even if they weren’t ready to—and started trusting those human experiences to speak for themselves.
I started empowering my authors to write from intuition and intention.
I started naming the target of their spear-shaped stories not by market but by impact.
And my authors—writers and non-writers alike—found clarity.
Five years later, that Prismacolor bullet journal sketch is more than a two-page layout.
It’s a full-color spectrum of nonfiction story shapes.
Just like the story-first space where I learned to see genre, the Clarity Spectrum defines books by the authors who write them and readers who need them.
It’s another step away from the sales categories that box us in, and a leap toward the lenses that reflect and refract the stories that live in our bones.
Shawn, if you’re listening, thank you.
I’m deeply grateful for you and your commitment to show up so fully to everything you create. This is just one echo of the work you’ve brought into this world.
My decision to leave Story Grid was as difficult as the decision to join had been easy.
And I will still celebrate anyone who chooses to commit to Olympic-level story training.
But if that’s not you…
If you are done trying to Perform Writer when some other story is trying to make its way out of your marrow: we need to use a new lens.
One that brings your true target into focus and gives you the instinctual heft to get the story to them.
All the other tools and skills and resources and frameworks—
ones you’ve used
ones you’ve been told to use
ones you loved
ones you failed out of
ones you grieved when you left behind
—they’re all just bonus training levels.
You can take them or leave them as needed.
No guilt or shame required.
This is your cue to stop performing anything that isn’t genuinely yours.
After all, this is the human experience. A whole spectrum of needs that shift and change as we do, informed and shaped by every other experience we’ve grown through on our way to this vantage point.
And here’s the magic of it all:
When you tap into your experience—and trust the story in your bones to give it shape—the signal of that story becomes so clear that it hits its target.
Every time.
Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today. Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves, and for their readers.
Be sure to subscribe here on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts. And when more of your story is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.
And so will I.
P.S. The rainbow representation of story shapes that I talked about today is currently live in tester form on my website.
This is one of those raw, vulnerable, exciting moments where something new gets to find its place in the world.
I didn’t just repackage something old for a funnel or a gimmick.
This represents years spent in dialogue—with my own experience, with other coaches and trainers and experts, with the authors I’ve served, with AI models reflecting my thoughts back to me, and with my own insistence on clarity pushing back against it all—until something brand new emerged.
I also didn’t build the Spectrum to disrupt for the sake of disruption, just like you’re not writing for the sake of writing.
I articulated it because too many authors were suffering under systems that have never seen them clearly. Or are blaming themselves for not fitting into something that wasn’t built for them.
That’s not a negative against the systems or the individual. Sometimes, we just need a new lens.
If that’s you, go check it out.
Feel free to take that two-question quiz as often as you’d like. Let me know how it goes, what you got, and whether you want to dig in any further.
And know that these are living documents made from lived storytelling experience, so every interaction makes it better. I can’t wait to see what we come up with.
Thanks for showing up so fully, as always.
I’ll talk to you soon.
~B
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