The Four Core Fiction

Shawn Coyne, Leslie Watts, Shelley Sperry

• Publisher: Story Grid Publishing LLC
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645010173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

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:

• A Core Need that will make your story an all-night read;
• A Core Life Value that will guide your characters' evolution;
• A Core Emotion that will enthrall your audience;
• and A Core Event that will provide the final payoff readers are waiting for.

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.

1

CONTENT GENRES IN THE STORY GRID UNIVERSE

We see Story as a metaphysical phenomenon as expansive and explosive as our physical universe. Like the universe, Story is organized into patterns with specific structures and functions. Instead of constellations and galaxies, stories are organized into units called content genres. We can trace some of those content genres back to the very emergence of human cognition and creativity.

About two hundred thousand years ago, as our Homo sapiens ancestors’ cognitive powers evolved, stories became integral to our survival. Naturally, the first stories concerned fundamental human needs: where to find food, how to build shelter, how to identify a mate, how to defend territory. We know about these early narratives because they are the stuff of our first cave paintings, sculptures, and other symbolic representations. 

We think human communication gradually evolved from the simplest practical stories about physical survival into the primal content genre, Action Story. The War, Horror, and Crime genres probably followed as nomadic tribes learned to adapt to threats from others and supernatural forces they perceived working against them. Our ever-present Core Needs for physical survival and safety define these genres.

As human civilization grew more complex, so did our stories. We moved from small hunter-gatherer bands to larger, sedentary cultures cultivating the land and building cities. New story structures evolved to hold knowledge about how individuals fit into a group and how people conform to or rebel against others. The need to find meaningful ways to spend time on Earth and to chronicle how we relate to others produced more new story genres.

The bottom line is that content genres are categories, based on human needs, that divide the massive Story universe into twelve manageable constellations that we can observe and study. They are Action, War, Horror, Crime, Thriller, Western, Love, Performance, Society, Status, Morality and Worldview. For more information on all of the content genres, we recommend a deep dive into www.storygrid.com and a review of our genre-themed titles from Story Grid Publishing.

2

UNIFYING THREADS IN THE STORY GRID UNIVERSE

What if we want to view all kinds of stories through a unifying theory that shows us the boundaries of Story? What if we want a lens that helps us understand what Story is and does in our brains?

We’re working on that.

As Story Grid methodology evolves, we apply new levels of resolution to our analysis of the structure and function of stories and gain new insights. One such insight has revealed that Worldview and Action are not only singular genres on their own but also form the boundaries of the universe of Story, encompassing all twelve genres.

This is what we see through our telescope at the moment, even as we reach for higher-resolution technologies all the time.

Every story poses a problem. The solution to that problem, revealed over the course of the story, is embedded in the story’s universal takeaway or controlling idea. The protagonist or luminary agent tries to solve the problem presented by the inciting incident by relying on existing knowledge and practices designed to produce consistent results. This is the “on-the-ground” Action component of all stories.

When that knowledge and those practices break down as a result of a little ball of chaos we call the phere thrown into the narrative like a spanner in the works, the luminary agent must accept failure or transform their worldview. Such a transformation requires that they break their cognitive frame.

What do we mean by “breaking your cognitive frame”?

Breaking your frame goes beyond just “thinking outside the box” or seeing a problem from a new angle. Instead, the luminary agent must realize that the frame through which they interpret the world is not capable of seeing the solution to the particular problem they face. Using that awareness, they break, or dismantle, their current cognitive frame and assemble a new, more integrative one to replace it. This is the “in the clouds” Worldview component of all stories.

We believe the process of breaking and remaking our cognitive frames is the essence of Story, the way stories interact with our brains to produce knowledge and ultimately cultivate individual and collective wisdom.

Every story’s controlling idea, or theme, communicates a lesson to readers who apply that knowledge to their own lives. That application breaks our frames and expands our ability to experience and conform to reality. As you read any story, no matter how simple or complex, you experience a shift from ignorance to knowledge linked to an emotional catharsis. Catharsis is the frame break, the insightful eureka moment that expands our cognitive framing. Readers crave that catharsis, and it helps us makes sense of our life experience.

And we read masterworks over and over again because, building upon the Four Core Framework, they strike at the heart of our most important problems as humans. They constantly break our framing, opening it up wider and wider, allowing us to make better sense of the world.

We’ll have more to say about the boundaries and laws of the Story Grid universe in the work to come. For now, you need to know that breaking the cognitive frame is critical to delivering on your readers’ expectations.

3

WHAT READERS WANT AND NEED

Every great story arises, at the atomic level, from a question about the human condition. How do I save myself and others from death? How do I find and sustain a loving connection with another person? How do I achieve esteem and respect in my community? These fundamental questions and others are answered in your story’s controlling idea or theme, which is the bit of knowledge your readers are seeking when they choose a particular genre of story.

Story Grid can help you answer questions about reader expectations by bringing the core of your story into focus. The core makes a story irresistible, memorable, and worth sharing by providing readers with a cathartic emotional moment. We’ll look at how each of the elements that make up the Four Core Framework supports the others and how they work together to determine whether readers walk away fully satisfied after turning the final page of your story.

The elements of our Four Core Framework are:

• The Core Need (survival or esteem, for example)
• The Core Life Values (a range from life to death or impotence to power, for example)
• The Core Emotion (excitement or admiration, for example)
• The Core Event (a scene demonstrating proof of love or a showdown between the protagonist and antagonist, for example)

When we’re deep in a book that captivates us, we feel ourselves living through our favorite characters and experiencing strong emotions because of that connection. Let’s look at how the Four Core Framework can help you create that experience and the ultimate goal of an emotional catharsis for your readers.

The Core Need is the first of our four essentials. Your protagonist’s Core Need is the spinal cord of your story, often obscured by a lot of “wants” that are more obvious to readers at first. Put another way, the Core Need is an electric current of Truth that both the protagonist and antagonist spend a lot of time ignoring, hiding from, or running away from. This power source makes your book an all-night read. We sometimes say the Core Need is the subconscious object of desire shared by the protagonist and antagonist.

Your characters’ success in fulfilling their Core Need creates a catharsis for your reader. It contributes, along with the Core Life Value and the Core Emotion, to defining your story’s controlling idea or theme. The Core Need is most in jeopardy during the Core Event.

Core Needs are universal, shared by all humans. At Story Grid, we find psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs to be a useful representation, and you’ll find the Story Grid version—the Gas Gauge of Human Needs—at www.storygrid.com.

Core Needs include survival, safety, individual sovereignty, connection, esteem, recognition, self-actualization, and self-transcendence.

The Core Life Value is the next element of our Four Core Framework. Every story has a yardstick that measures where the characters’ actions are along a spectrum or range of life values specific to that story. For example, an action story follows changes on a spectrum of life to death; a crime story, on a spectrum of injustice to justice; and a love story, on a spectrum of hate to love.

Deeply satisfying stories will include more than one Life Value spectrum because characters’ actions will create change t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• THE TRUTH IS
• WELCOME TO THE STORY GRID UNIVERSE
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About This Book
• 1. CONTENT GENRES IN THE STORY GRID UNIVERSE
• 2. UNIFYING THREADS IN THE STORY GRID UNIVERSE
• 3. WHAT READERS WANT AND NEED
• 4. ACTION STORY
• 5. WAR STORY
• 6. HORROR STORY
• 7. CRIME STORY
• 8. THRILLER STORY
• 9. WESTERN STORY
• 10. LOVE STORY
• 11. PERFORMANCE STORY
• 12. SOCIETY STORY
• 13. STATUS STORY
• 14. MORALITY STORY
• 15. WORLDVIEW STORY
• THE FOUR CORE CONCLUSION
• About the Author