When it’s looked at from a distance we can try to make a narrative out of it but they’re numbers, just statistics. Every half-time break in sports we witness talking heads trying to make sense out of statistics in order to give us a story of the game – some better than others.

These numbers don’t have meaning. But stories do.

There was a point while he was writing Fight Club where Chuck Palahniuk came to realise that the two characters – the narrator and Tyler – were the same. It wasn’t a twist he’d thought of before writing. It wasn’t a gimmick to string the reader along. He was writing a damning commentary on masculinity as he saw it in the mid-1990s.

The power of your story depends on clearly locating your inciting incident.

The fundamentals of this are often misunderstood.

Story is about transformation. A story is in how a character changes. This change does not come easily but there is something that pushes the character out of their comfort to begin the journey.

Collaboration is powerful because of these very reasons. Playing with ideas and perspective can be confronting, but going through that process can be exhilarating. It brings chills and goosebumps. It brings surprising results.

Writing is a process that uncovers what you’re saying. There are times to do it quickly but there must also be moments of revision, reflection, rewriting. And this is slow, sometimes painfully slow.

But that process is worth doing. It uncovers more layers of the beauty around your story, your concept, your idea.

Stories are about risk.

The world shifts. Something is changed – for good or bad. The character reacts to this to either try to make things go back to how they were, or to make things better.

Steve Albini – ““When I talk about recording an acoustic instrument, what I really mean is recreating the sense memory of having heard an acoustic instrument. I say that because acoustic instruments have an extremely long tradition. Every part of the world uses some form of acoustic stringed instruments, and we all have engrained in us personal and cultural memory of these instruments. So when I say I’m trying to make an accurate recording of an acoustic instrument, what I mean is I’m trying to evoke the sensation of having heard that instrument in life.””

Aristotle opens Poetics by describing poetry as a species of imitation. There are different ways to do that, different mediums and different ways. Painting, too, is imitation, Aristotle points out.

In our stories, that’s what we do. We imitate to recreate sense memory.

The ending of Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) is an amazing demonstration of rising emotion in film, and character shown through choice.

In the harsh conditions of Rome after WW2, Antonio finally lands a job. But he needs a bike and he already pawned his.

Blues music has been a part of popular song on radio and streaming for all our life. We’ve heard countless songs based on the structure. We instinctively know where it rises and falls, where it changes, and where the turn around is. Story structure is similar.

As in marking a character in stone. So, a face that shows character shows that which has been marked. Or deeply impressed.

The term didn’t come to mean a person in a story until the late 1660s – a good fifty years after Shakespeare had, as he put it, shuffled off this mortal coil.