Hi. It’s Mike from Everything Is Amazing, or “that guy with the deep-frozen jeans”. 🥶

As I announced a few days back, today is the last day you can sign up to my writing course, Get Your Story Straight - so here’s a quick tip for dealing with people like me who are trying to sell courses like this.

The first thing you should always ask is: “is this person selling something they’ve actually done themselves?”

This is a great way to weed out the worst of ‘em. If they’re selling a course titled “How To Become A Bestselling Author” - go check if they’re a bestselling author! Same goes if they’re promising to make you rich (you know one thing rich people can definitely afford? A decent-looking website!). And so on.

I don’t make any of these big, fecklessly unrealistic promises in my course, and I never will.

Instead, it’s about three simple things:

1. Tell Great Stories.

2. Have Fun.

3. (Get Paid.)

Let’s break this down.

TELL STORIES

That’s what the course is all about. We all know a good story when we see it - you’re immediately hooked, you remain gripped, and you stay until the very end - but knowing how good stories work so you have the same impact with the ones you tell? That’s a skill worth mastering, and I couldn’t see many people teaching it for the kind of non-fiction writing I do.

Hence, this course.

HAVE FUN

Investing time in telling good stories is only a worthy pursuit if it’s fun. I could give you a million reasons for this - including the special magic we bring to creative work when we really, truly care about it - but as a fairly lazy person, here’s my favourite: if you’re not having fun, your brain will fight what you’re trying to get it to do, and you will soon give up. Fun is stamina - and it’ll get you over any finish-line you set for yourself.

This is very much a course about rediscovering the fun in your writing, powered by all the other storytelling you’re already enjoying in your life, and channelling that enthusiasm in a whole new way.

(GET PAID)

This one is in parenthesis because you might have zero interest in making money from telling a good story! You might just want to win over your grandkids at Christmas, or give an absolutely killer presentation at work - or you may dream of standing in front of a microphone at The Moth. As a toolkit, good storytelling can be used in all sorts of ways, and only a fraction of them involve getting paid for it.

Nevertheless - I tell stories for a living. I have done it as a freelance writer and story consultant for over ten years, and now, with Everything Is Amazing, I do it through a science newsletter. This is my own path using storytelling, and I spend a few lessons of the course explaining what I’ve done and how it’s built my audience to over 31,000 readers and over 800 paid supporters.

It’s definitely not a get-rich-quick scheme (see disclaimer above) - but if you are looking for tips on making enough money to support telling more of your stories in your own special way, I think this course can help.

• It’s 6 weeks of email lessons - which means you’d be all finished before the New Year, ready to put all of it into practice.

• You’ll get Lifetime Access - so all future updates (including extra modules on specialised forms of non-fiction stories like memoir and science writing) will be totally free.

• It’s currently discounted by $50.

• The doors close at the end of today (Monday 10th November).

Ready to learn how to tell a story that would win just about anyone over?

Sign up below:

Join "Get Your Story Straight"

Cheers,

- Mike

Original email:

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