writing & storytelling

Big stories are hard stories to tell, because the big parts of these stories are often singular in nature. Unusual. Unique. Hardly relatable. This holds true for all my big stories.

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

Those are the moments when I know that it’s time to tell myself a story so I can understand my behavior and solve the complex problem of my personal history. The solutions often make for great stories and provide us with opportunities to more fully understand ourselves. To make meaning out of who we are from the stories we have lived.

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

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. My number one criteria in evaluating a piece of writing is not whether it solved my problems, but whether it opened me up to dive deeper into the mystery.

Luke Burgis • Why I Write

If you’re not sure about the level of stakes in your story, simply ask yourself: • Would the audience want to hear my next sentence? • If I stopped speaking right now, would anyone care? • Am I more compelling than video games and pizza and sex at this moment?

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

We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more

Jake Orthwein • Why Frame Problems? — Frame Problems

FEH, my newest memoir (more details about that soon), began with my wanting to write about the rampant judgementalism and sneering contempt I was seeing all around me. It takes on God, Jesus, Paul Rudd, Nextdoor, social media, Schopenhauer, Wolf Blitzer and Yuval Noah Harari. And even with all those sacred cows, it felt bland... until I decided to ... See more

Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers

by gems I do NOT mean the author’s ideas or theories. Those are the last things we want. We want to form our own ideas. By gems I mean a little glimpse of something surprising and dissonant and mysterious – a person or a situation or a moment in history where you think, ‘I didn’t expect that ’ or ‘I don’t understand that , I’d like to go down a rab... See more

Jon Ronson • Jon Ronson | Substack

Joshua has written a memoir Down From the Mountain Top : He adds a note to readers: “altered minor details,” “changed or omitted names” and adds this wise advice: “To remember is to reconstruct and interpret and this is as truthful a story as my memory can tell.”

Joshua asks

—Joshua Dolezal

These five-second moments are the moments in your life when something fundamentally changes forever. You fall in love. You fall out of love. You discover something new about yourself or another person. Your opinion on a subject dramatically changes. You find forgiveness. You reach acceptance. You sink into despair. You grudgingly resign. You’re dro