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.