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.

Brian Eno has a card in his Oblique Strategies set suggesting: Whatever worked last time, never do it again.

That might be more extreme than we always need but the sentiment is a good one. Just because it worked last time doesn’t mean it would work again. And just because a client has one idea in mind with their story, it doesn’t mean that’s the best way to narrate their own journey.

The architecture and design of the building was held together in a particular way. The pressure and tension was held in places that you might not first assume. The architects knew this. A fractured window in one place meant the tension was wrong somewhere else. This is like a manuscript.

Haruki Murakami describes how he takes feedback from his first reader – his wife – and his editors over the years.