Steve Almond Tells Us

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At present, we seem to be suffering from a widespread failure of literary imagination. We have become worse at imagining the experiences of other people, less inclined to credit these experiences as being as valid and real as our own. Why is this? In part, I think, because of the methods by, and pace at which, we acquire our stories. After all, eve... See more

sari and added

He taught me that trying to get better at storytelling also meant trying to get better at being a friend, or a son, a boyfriend, a brother, or just a better person.

Dan Kennedy • Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling

Kaustubh Sule added

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I’m a big believer in the words of novelist Anne Lamott: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

Dan Kennedy • Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling

Someone has to tell these kids, “wherever you go, you’ll find yourself there, and you have to start to do the work of accepting who you are, as much as you may not like yourself.” The stakes are high.

Freddie DeBoer • You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.

and added

for most of us, our work would benefit from reaching out to others more, trusting more in our readers. I have seen, in many of my students, that the first proof of progress is that their stories become more cognizant of the existence of the reader – more fun, less unnecessarily dense, truer to life, fairer, warmer; they start engaging with issues t... See more

George Saunders • Art vs. Commerce

Keely Adler added

I didn’t know that all the therapy and journaling and meditation and “work on myself” I did would eventually start to pay off, and that after a lifetime of worrying that people might not like me, I would learn to love and trust myself enough that it would finally stop mattering so much what strangers thought and I could FREAKING RELAX.

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I didn’t kn... See more

Substack • Notes | Substack

Tara McMullin added

sometimes the answer to the question reveals something much deeper — a hidden truth that often makes for a great story. Bruce Springsteen once said in an interview: “Most people’s stage personas are created out of the flotsam and jetsam of their internal geography and they’re trying to create something that solves a series of very complex problems

Dan Kennedy • Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling

added

"‘Well it so happens that you of all people know almost exactly what it’s like – to be a writer. You’re in your early-middle teens. The age when you come into a new level of self-awareness. Or a new level of self-communion. It’s as if you hear a voice, which is you but doesn’t sound like you. Not quite – it isn’t what you’ve been used to, it sounds... See more

Jake added

Inside Story: A Novel