A little over a decade ago, I pitched my very first story to a newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, about getting lost in the North York Moors (above).

I was feeling pretty confident about the story outline I sent them. After all, hadn’t the version I posted on my personal travel blog been read literally dozens of times? Hadn’t one random commenter said it was “the best thing he’d read all week”?

No doubt about it: I was a MASTER STORYTELLER, and now was my time to shine.

A few days later, the newspaper’s travel editor replied.

(I was inexperienced enough that I didn’t know how lucky I was. Responses to unsolicited pitches like mine usually take weeks, sometimes months.)

The award-winning editor’s response was more or less the following:

Thanks for sending this over, Mike!

Okay, hmm - let’s do a little work here. The beginning isn’t anywhere near strong enough. The middle loses focus in a big way. And there’s no ending whatsoever. I’m not getting much of a sense of rising tension, and there’s no wider commentary on what this story might mean to anyone who doesn’t already know you.

Please add an ending, build up the middle, tighten the beginning, fix the rest, and remove 500 words. Many thanks!

I felt awful. Truly wretched.

But the most humiliating thing? I could now see how right he was.

The beginning was lazy. The middle was all over the place. The ending was...an ending-shaped hole!

I was clearly no master storyteller, but I knew enough about stories that I could now see how utterly lacking mine was.

So I swallowed my self-disgust, I sat down, and I spent a few days rewriting it. Then I sent it back in - and it was pushed back to me again, with a bunch of suggestions about problems I hadn’t spotted until the editor pointed them out.

After some great editing and some highly embarrassing rewriting - I finally landed my first travel story in a major newspaper, both online & on paper, on the same glorious day.

Thankfully, I’ve spent the last decade learning a lot more about how to tell a good story, which is why it’s now my fulltime job - and I’ve put pretty much everything I know into my non-fiction storytelling course, Get Your Story Straight, which just opened its doors to new students for the next week with a $50 discount off the normal price.

(If you like how I write Everything Is Amazing and want to learn how to write or tell stories in a similar way, this should give you everything you need to get started!)

Click here for the details.

But if you want a little taste of what this course offers - why not try my free 4-day introduction to good storytelling instead?

It’s totally free to sign up, with no obligation to do anything else.

Want in? I’m ready to help.

Mike