writing 101

once felt this, but now I feel this. Stories must reflect change of some kind. It need not always be positive change, and the change need not be monumental. In fact, stories about failure, embarrassment, and shame are fantastic. Stories about trying desperately to achieve a goal and failing spectacularly are beloved. Even when progress is made, the

Remember: First identify a good story, and only then see what problems it might help solve.

There are endless riffs on story shape – sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal explorations and excavations of an original tune. Often you may have to search long and hard to find it, but the tune – even in its absence – will be there. In music, poetry, film – arguably all art – digression merely confirms the archetype’s importance.

That’s how we find what we need: We start with ourselves. Our personal experiences. Our observations of the world. Our successes and failures and everything in between. From there, we find stories, and from those stories, we can find the content we need to connect, communicate, and convince. Almost all my metaphors are personal stories or

Let me say it again: Every great story ever told is essentially about a five-second moment of transformation or realization, and the purpose of the story is to bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible.

The world or the wood can be as detailed and rich as we like. But the path, which is Cinderella’s own story, goes from here to there, going through this part and that part. Always. And the business of the storyteller, or the novelist, it seems to me, is with the path and not the wood.