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:
Let’s break this down. TELL STORIESThat’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 FUNInvesting 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.
Ready to learn how to tell a story that would win just about anyone over? Sign up below: 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:
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 |


