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:
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 |


