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 …

• 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

  …

• How I Write Books

  1. I want to read a book.
  2. That particular book doesn’t exist.
  3. 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, …

• A Recipe for Adventure

  1. Welcome to my life/world which is stable until…
  2. …something disrupts it, launching me on…
  3. …a journey into the unknown where I’m beset by…
  4. …progressive complications that ultimately threaten what I care about most until…
  5. …all is lost and I must…

  …

• 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 …

• 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 …

• 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 …

• 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 …

• 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 …

• 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, …