Category: storytelling

• What Writers Do

  Imagine you’re holding a laser pointer. You can point it at anything you want: a potted cactus, the Diophantine Equation scrawled across a whiteboard, the steaming cross section of a fresh baked croissant, a malfunctioning karaoke machine, a whorled knob of lichen encrusted bark, a lopsided smile, the green flash of a Pacific sunset, a…

• Narrative as Crowbar

  Over in Future, I wrote about unlocking expertise through storytelling: People have wandered the intellectual garden of forking paths for thousands of generations, but the internet is a profound accelerant for such cultural exploration. It is a shadow city with billions of residents. Everyone has a voice, even if nobody listens. Yes, there are assholes…

• How I Write Books

  I want to read a book. That particular book doesn’t exist. I write it. Thankfully, most of the time I want to read a book, it already exists, so I read it. * Complement with A Recipe for Adventure, the story behind Borderless, and Five Lessons I Learned Writing Veil. Get new posts via email:…

• A Recipe for Adventure

  Welcome to my life/world which is stable until… …something disrupts it, launching me on… …a journey into the unknown where I’m beset by… …progressive complications that ultimately threaten what I care about most until… …all is lost and I must… …transform my life/world… …welcome to my new life/world. * Complement with A Brief Anatomy of…

• Ten popular Bandwidth highlights, annotated

  A while back, Goodreads asked me to annotate ten of the most popular Kindle highlights in Bandwidth. I love snatching glimpses into other people’s creative processes, and these notes give you a sneak peek into mine. Let’s dive right in. The highlights from the novel are indented and my notes follow. There was a deeper…

• Blake Crouch on writing Summer Frost

  Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost is a technothriller in miniature. Only 74 pages long, it conjures a complete, compelling narrative arc through a near-future where a non-player character in a computer game evolves into an autonomous AI. As thought-provoking as it is propulsive, this is a story that will suck you in and stick with you long after…

• Stories are Trojan Horses for ideas

  Stories are Trojan Horses for ideas, a metaphor that proves its own point. Composed thousands of years ago—initially in Homer’s Odyssey and later in Virgil’s Aeneid—Odysseus’s gambit still reverberates through our culture, evolving as it leaps from mind to mind, seeding generation after generation with images, archetypes, and ways of making sense of the world. You…

• Bridging the personal and the universal

  A key component in great writing is building bridges between the personal and the universal. Without specific incarnation, universals revert to truisms. The insight you’re trying to articulate may be foundational, but cliché drains it of color and weight. Aphorisms can blaze bright on social media because aspiration is a potent fuel for sharing, but…

• Narrative daisy-chains

  We all know that stories sometimes go viral, apotheosizing into memes. But much more interesting than a single story propagating itself through retelling is when stories inspire the telling of other stories in a cascading cultural daisy-chain. What anecdote can you share with a friend that inspires them to share an anecdote of their own,…

• The Path

  The girl entered the Dark Forest. Leaves whispered. Shadows swirled. Bright eyes gleamed. Mud sucked at her boots. She evaded the bandits, won over the fairies, escaped the quicksand, emasculated the creepy lumberjack, survived the poison thorns, defeated the monsters, fed wild carrots to the unicorn, slipped away from the strangling vines, and outsmarted the…