Or, how to always have a story idea at your fingertips so you never have to face the blank page alone again. This post was originally published as a series about finding stories on Substack.
You sit down to write a newsletter or social media post or book chapter and…nothing. Somehow the very act of pulling up that empty page turns your mind completely blank.
Surely something interesting happened recently you can write about, right?
But suddenly you can’t even remember what you had for breakfast, let alone that valuable, insightful story you wanted to share.
So how do you become one of those people who always has an effortless anecdote—the perfect story for every post, newsletter, webinar, or book section?
If you want to become a more prolific storyteller, you don’t need more discipline. You don’t need more creativity or a better memory to vanquish the blank page.
You just need a better starting point.
Here’s what I do.
I created a story vault
Instead of playing the writing game on hard mode, always trying to come up with something new in the moment, I’ve started developing a vault of stories, anecdotes, observations, quotes, and other useful story tidbits.
These are stories I can use:
- As hooks to introduce a newsletter
- To connect with a reader and explain concepts
- To spice up a speech or webinar
- As social media posts
Whenever my mind is blank, I just sift through this vault until I find a note that sparks my imagination and gets the creative juices flowing.
It may not always be the starting point of my piece, but it’s the starting point of my writing process—and that’s incredibly helpful!
Best of all, storing my ideas in this vault where I can sift through them regularly helps spark unique connections that make my writing even more creative and insightful. What thoughts have I been revisiting? What patterns have I been noticing? How are things trending in my life?
I love my story vault! But I struggled for years to build this habit.
I tried a bunch of different systems:
- Physical notebooks
- Evernote notebooks
- Voice memos
- A Google sheet
- A Notion sheet
But everything was either too hard to search through, or too cumbersome to make entries in. And let’s face it. The more friction there was in the system, the less likely I was to use it.
And so, for years, I didn’t collect stories—I just collected failed story-collecting systems. ;)
Building the story-collecting habit
I recently decided to try building this habit once more, and I was lamenting how cumbersome the process was. “Why can’t it be just as easy as texting a friend?” I asked my husband—and then I stopped in my tracks.
Why couldn’t creating a story vault be just as easy as texting a friend?
And thirty minutes later, I had a hack that fundamentally changed how I collected stories. (Don’t worry, I’ll tell you what it is—this isn’t one of those kinds of posts!)
So I figured out how to harvest stories more effortlessly throughout my day. But what about spotting those stories in the first place?
That required a bit more work—but, fortunately, our brains are designed for pattern-spotting. And stories are just another kind of pattern.
Remember when everyone got weird hobbies during the pandemic?
My husband wanted to hang out with friends outside, so he started getting into RC cars, then got his buddies into them. Then he and his grown male friends would go stand six feet apart in a park, racing toy cars around.
It was totally adorable.
(And yes, you guessed it, we are child free so we get to make our own silly fun—though we’re always vying for favorite auntie and uncle status with my sister’s kids, and these RC cars are a hit!)
I played along, too. But my favorite of the cars wasn’t one of the fast racers. I liked the crawler, which was designed to climb its way over tricky rock courses, like a Jeep.
I enjoyed the puzzle of it—how could you finesse the little truck up, over, and around all these different barriers? Nailing a tricky problem was exhilarating.
The crazy thing, though, was how I started seeing the world differently after driving my husband’s RC truck a handful of times.
I started seeing patterns
I’d be in a grocery store and see a display of boxes, and think: I could climb the truck up that!
I’d be walking through our neighborhood, scoping out yards for cool obstacles: I could climb the truck up that!
Suddenly, everything was a rock garden. Everything was an obstacle course.
That’s the cool (and terrifying) thing about the human brain.
You can prime it to see anything you want—sometimes on purpose, mostly not.
(I definitely wasn’t trying to prime my brain to see RC truck obstacle courses!)
This is why two people with two different outlooks (and thus two differently primed brains) will interpret the same scene so differently.
We see what we want to see.
Scientists call this “motivated perception,” and if you’re curious about the science behind it, I highly recommend checking out this Vox article, “How desire can warp our view of the world.”
My point is this:
This phenomenon happens to our brains constantly, often without our knowledge (or direction).
What if, instead, we primed our brains to see the thing we want to see?
Story collecting is a learnable skill
For years, I’ve admired prolific writers, bloggers, and storytellers. I believed that some people just have the ability to take any moment and turn it into a story—and that I lacked that ability.
But I’m coming to realize this is a completely learnable skill.
(Or, rather, a completely learnable way of looking at the world.)
People who can turn any moment into a story have a story finding bias—in other words, their brains are primed to hunt for stories.
Why couldn’t I train my brain that way, too?
We live in a world where the ability to tell a good story is a critical skill. They help us make our points and sell our products and services, yes. But more importantly, stories create connections—with family, friends, clients, customers. They build our empathy for one another.
But if you’ve ever felt like finding good stories was a skill other people have, believe me. You can learn it, too.
It just takes a bit of rewiring.
When you have an epic vault of story ideas, you’re never starting from a blank page! You can always dip into your vault and come out with the perfect, personal story to share.
It all starts with a low-stress plan to rewire your brain to be a story-finder, and an absolutely free hack to make growing your vault of stories super easy.
Further reading: How Much of Your Story Should You Share?
How to become a story-collecting machine
Re-reading Matthew Dicks’ Storyworthy is what convinced me to start this most recent attempt to create a story vault.
If you’ve never read the book, I highly recommend picking it up.
Matthew Dicks is a bestselling author, professional storyteller, and 50-time Moth StorySLAM champion—and he details his method for collecting, writing, polishing, and delivering his incredible stories in the book.
Early on, he encourages readers to start a practice he calls “Homework for Life.”
It’s simple.
Every day, Matthew asks himself:
“If I had to tell a story from today—something meaningful, or at least notable—what would it be?”
He writes down one moment from the day. He doesn’t do a whole journal entry, just a sentence or two to capture the memory, so he can develop it later.
This practice does three things.
First, it builds a massive bank of stories you can dip into for inspiration—like we talked about yesterday.
Second, it sharpens your storytelling instinct and trains your brain to look for those moments of story throughout the day.
Third, Dicks says, it invites you to live in the moment and pay more attention to the present. It slows down time, and creates more breathing room for you to savor the little things.
Matthew Dicks wrote that not every day contained a storyworthy moment for him, especially at first. But the more he did his Homework for Life, the more days did contain a storyworthy moment.
Other people in his life seem to think he can create a story out of anything, he wrote, but: “The truth is this: I simply see more storyworthy moments in the day than most people. They don’t go unnoticed, as they once did.”
Dicks keeps his entries in a spreadsheet, but his students often use apps, notebooks, voice memos—whatever works.
I loved the idea of a searchable spreadsheet, but it was a pain in the ass to scroll all the way to the bottom to add the date, and typing in a Google sheet is annoying—especially on your phone.
So, like I wrote earlier, I was lamenting to my husband that this practice should be as easy as texting a friend.
And then lightning struck.
Why couldn’t it be?
I started looking into my options:
You could get a Twilio number and use Zapier to integrate with Google Sheets. Or set up a WhatsApp or Telegram bot connecting the sheet with IFTTT. Or I could hire someone to develop an app! Or…
No.
Way too complicated.
In the end, the simplest solution turned out to be A) free and B) under ten minutes to set up.
Here’s what I did.
Your Story Finder “App”
(You can do the first part of this on either a desktop or your phone. For a more detailed tutorial including screenshots from my iPhone, head here.)
Step 1: Create a Google Form
Go to forms.google.com and create a new form. Call it Story Finder, and create a single “long form” type question. Label it whatever you want. (Mine says, “What happened today?”
Hit publish, then go to share settings and make sure it’s restricted just to you.
Step 2: Link a Google Sheet
Next, go into the Responses tab and hit the little Google Sheet icon to create a new linked spreadsheet.
This will dump every response to this form into an easy-to-search spreadsheet.
Step 3: Create a shortcut on your phone’s home screen
Finally, copy the link to the form, open it in your phone’s browser, and create a shortcut to that website on your phone’s home screen.
This should create an icon that looks just like an app, so you can add stories with the touch of a button.
Step 4: Collect stories
To enter a story, just click the shortcut icon to open the form. Enter your story in the field, then hit submit.
And there you go!
As easy as texting a friend.
Action: Go set up that Story Finder “App” now. Then, set an alarm on your phone and every day just jot down a story.
So, that’s it. That’s the system.
If you stick to it, you’ll be surprised how quickly it becomes addictive.
You’ll find yourself grabbing your phone throughout the day to jot down a quick story, which will magically pop straight into a searchable, sortable spreadsheet you can reference any time you need a dose of inspiration.
You’ve got everything you need to start collecting stories—and if you do, I’d love to hear how this system works for you!
And if you want a head start on building this into an unshakeable habit, here’s the next step.
Turning story collection into a habit
My mom, sister, and I recently did a book club study of James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and each of us came to it with concrete changes that we wanted to make in our lives: health habits, relationship habits, work habits.
Reading along with the book, we worked through each of the four laws that Clear sets out:
1. Make it obvious:
Out of sight is out of mind—especially when you’re trying to develop a new habit. Put whatever you want to do front and center.
2. Make it attractive:
Turn the new habit into something you want to do by infusing it with elements you already find attractive.
3. Make it easy:
Follow the Law of Least Effort and make it almost easier to do the habit than not.
4. Make it satisfying:
Build in a dopamine hit, so that you start to crave the satisfaction from completion.
This works really well with small, repetitive tasks. As an example, my sister wanted to build the simple habit of flossing each night.
- She made it obvious, by leaving her floss on the counter instead of hiding it in a drawer.
- She made it attractive by buying a type of floss with a flavor she actually enjoyed.
- She made it easy, by bundling it with her nightly tooth brushing.
- And she made it satisfying by queuing up a short video, which she only allowed herself to watch if she was flossing.
Once you build the habit, you don’t always need the bribe and the neon sign saying “FLOSS!” in your bathroom. But I’ve found it super helpful to consider these laws whenever I’m struggling to pick up a new habit.
Let’s look at the Story Finder app
We’ve addressed some of these laws already with the simple home screen shortcut to a Google Form. But we can do better.
1. Make it obvious: Make sure the shortcut is front and center on your home screen, and set a recurring alarm or reminder so you don’t forget.
2. Make it attractive: Customize your Google Form with a background image and color scheme you love.
3. Make it easy: Limit yourself to writing 3-5 sentences, tops.
4. Make it satisfying: Buy a bag of your favorite small candies, and treat yourself with one every time you log a story. Or, if you already have a habit of doing a pleasurable activity like checking social media or watching a show, log a story first and use that as a reward.
I want to zoom in on that third point for a minute.
Making it easy to log stories is fantastic—but it’s just one part of creating a habit, no the habit itself.
The other part is making the daily ask small enough that you actually do it.
When I say limiting yourself to writing 3-5 sentences, tops, I mean it.
If you go into this writing pages of story at the beginning, you’ll train your brain that this is a high-effort habit that takes a lot of time.
But if you strictly limit yourself to just a few sentences—especially at first—you’ll teach yourself that this is a quick process that only takes a minute or two. Which means you’ll be more likely to do it again later.
Designing habits so small they’re almost impossible to skip is one of Clear’s main things.
He calls this the “two-minute rule”: when building a new habit, scale it down to something you can do in two minutes or less.
By making your habit small and repeatable, you build momentum.
Further reading: Choose Your Storytelling Lens
You’re a storytelling machine!
That’s it! Go, be well, and collect all the stories you can.
And if you need help turning them into books that become the cornerstone of your business (and make an impact in the world!) get in touch.