The front door lurks in a recess. Its ancient black paintwork is spattered with road splash, and the shallow pane of glass above its jamb betrays no light within. An empty milk bottle has stood in its shadow so long, city lichen has bonded it…
(Or, how marketers and nonfiction authors can use the curiosity gap to hook readers and draw them into your world.) I recently critiqued the first twenty-ish pages of a new writer’s thriller. The character intrigued me. The setup was solid. The premise was compelling. But…
My husband and I were wandering around New York City for ThrillerFest—and we were starving. We’d been meandering through the streets for hours, as we tend to do in cities, and we hadn’t brought any snacks. We were in luck, though—because if you throw a…
A few months ago at the gym, my weight lifting trainer asked me what I was up to that weekend. I told her I was teaching at a writing conference, and that I was worried about a presentation I’m supposed to give on how to…
Writing customer stories was my bread and butter for many years as a freelance copywriter. They’re super popular in B2B (business-to-business) marketing because B2B buyers are looking for a product’s tangible value—they want to see exactly how you solved similar problems for someone else, and…
My client Erin Weed is a master of collecting stories that drive her point home. She’s got this great one in her TEDx Talk, “Dare to be authentic,” about being dressed as Wonder Woman to cheer up a friend going through chemo, and being unexpectedly…
I’m helping a book coaching client outline her nonfiction book this week (we’re smack in the middle of the Story Map Intensive part of the book coaching engagement), so my mind is buzzing with ways to organize a book. I’ll be doing a deep dive…
After almost every storytelling workshop I teach, someone asks a version of the same question: “That’s all great, but… how much of my story am I supposed to share?” There are usually a few reasons that people ask this question. Any of those reasons are…
Earlier this month, I attended one of the biggest indie author conferences in the world. While this conference was geared toward authors and book-based storytellers, there were a ton of high-level takeaways about the future of storytelling for anyone who’s trying to tell their story…