Sam Feldstein's Notebook

Storytelling

Storytelling is a kind of entertainment. Entertainment is the art of emotional manipulation. Emotions are levers. Your job is to know how to pull them, which ones to pull, and when.

Process

Stories are organic. They grow. Your job is to tend them. Paul Graham:

In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of it. Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just try to preserve certain invariants.

The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal, but you can't discover natural selection that way.

Don't try to boss the story around. Work with it. Embrace it. Let it take you someplace new.

[Henrik Karlsson](Everything That Turned Out Well in My Life Followed the Same Design Process) puts it another way:

To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this.” That would be starting in the wrong end. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive.”

The best way to make peace with a story is to get out of the way. Sit back, reserve judgement, and observe with amusement (or interest, or horror) at what comes out of your head. From there, it's just a matter of writing down what you see. If introspection is self-reporting your reactions to external stimuli, the storytelling (all writing?) might be the opposite: Self-reporting your reactions to internal stimuli.

Structure

Stories have macro-beats and micro-beats. Macro-beats are like a skeleton. They lend a story shape and structure. Micro-beats are everything that covers the skeleton: muscles, ligaments, blood. They are what make the skeleton interesting. As Stephen Sondheim says, "God is in the details."

Think of music. Think of the first notes of the Lord of the Rings theme. The skeleton of the measure is: D C D. (The notes could be wrong. I don't play music.) On its own, not unpleasant, but a little boring. Now add the staccato notes: D C DD C. Open GarageBand and try it. Instantly more interesting. The three notes on their own show potential, but don't have the sound of a finished thing. They are the bones. Adding the second D brings the piece to life.

So with story. Many short stories feel like summaries of longer stories because the author tried to cram a novel into ten pages. Only the bones would fit, and so the piece feels lifeless.

Story tropes