The Stories You Choose to Live, Read, and Write 📚

We are all living stories. Stories are all around us and working through us. We make stories. Our lives are stories. 

Paying attention to the stories we’re choosing to live can offer insights into the choices we’re making now or could make later.

When I say we’re living stories, I’m not referring to a solipsistic perspective that we’re always making up our own realities. Rather, I’m calling attention to the way we use stories to understand ourselves and the world.

We make up stories individually and collectively about our identities and beliefs. These stories drive our choices and actions. Consequences ensue. This is in large part what gives our lives a sense of meaning. Stories shape, inform, guide, and determine who we are.

And while all these stories matter, it can be helpful to remember that they are stories.

Thinking about our lives as stories is a useful practice (and one I’m exploring more and more). When you think of your life as a story, you might ask yourself: am I satisfied with the starring role in my own life as well as the bit parts I play in other peoples’ lives? Do I need or want to change anything? If so, why? To what purpose? Stepping back further, you might see patterns in your life that reveal deeper aspects of yourself you’ve forgotten or are just waking up to.

Yet, as interesting as it is to edit and improve the individual stories we’re currently living, there comes a time to step outside of the stories all together and have a good long look at what we’re doing with our powers of creation. We are capable of creating stories of love and peace yet the world continues to be full of pain and suffering. 

This year our individual and collective stories seem fraught with intensity, tension, and conflict. Outcomes are uncertain. I don't think we should give up on the potential for positive breakthroughs, but our future depends on the stories we’re living, listening to, and writing about right now.

What kinds of stories are you living? Reading? Writing? Are they contributing to your own growth and healing? How does the story you’re living impact the world? Are your stories calling you to grow and change?

Let’s write—and live—the kinds of individual and collective stories that can carry us through and beyond 2025. Let’s accept the call to venture out into the mystery of the stories and lives yet to be written and lived. Let’s use our powers of creation to pave the way for new, nourishing stories to be told.

In the words of my brilliant writer-friend, Paul Belserene: “Write as if you’re reading it; read as if you’re writing it. Write as if you’re living it; live as if you’re writing it.”

Write. Read. Live.

"After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world." 

~ Philip Pullman~

“You write your life story by the choices you make.”

~ Helen Mirren ~

What Stories Are & Why We Need to Write Them ✍️

For the past five years I’ve been working on a book about writing stories that will be published later this year. In it, I’ve included what I think writers need to know to tell powerful, deep, resonant stories. I’ve organized the material around the five aspects of writing that story-makers need to master: Structure, Character, Theme, Plot, and Scenes.

Here’s why:

Structure contains and organizes the story, and its limits ("freedom within limits") contribute to all the other elements.

Character is the enlivening heart of any story, its main focus, and this main character is the guide, avatar, and/or projected pseudo-self through whom the reader gets to live and learn vicariously.

Theme infuses the story with meaning—a resonant message—that’s conveyed through the character’s interactions with plot situations (including other characters).

Plot is what the character does and doesn’t do in the face of inner and outer conflict generated by an inciting incident that sets up a story problem and a story question.

Scenes express all of the above through “showing” the character in action: dealing with conflict, expressing/repressing feelings, making choices under pressure, trying/failing/getting to achieve a story-worthy goal.

What is a story-worthy goal?

I once heard this clear-eyed yet unusual definition of happiness: Happiness consists of the overcoming of obstacles on the way to a goal of one’s own choosing. Swap out happiness for story and you’ve a pretty good definition for a story arc. In stories, characters are faced with situations and must choose a way to respond. Their ultimate, unconscious desire always relates to happiness—their version of it—so how they choose to respond to the story problems will include a specific, concrete goal that represents their version of happiness. As they head toward that goal, obstacles ensue. That’s storytelling in a nutshell (easier said than done, I know).

I’ve spent a lifetime figuring this stuff out through trial and error an study and it’s still hard. But so worth it. Because stories carry us away, in the best sense. They reveal, inform, inspire, and delight. They help make life bearable, manageable, acceptable, and, when their alchemy is right, they can contribute to change and evolution on a personal level and even a societal scale.

Stories can: heal, guide, expose, educate, enlighten, encourage, aid, direct, repel, activate, support, comfort, motivate, and so much more. They help us overcome the obstacles on the way to the goals of our own choosing.

Stories help us navigate our life situations. They help us grow and evolve in a life, and world, full of change. A human lifetime is finite, and the world goes on without us after we’ve gone; we’re all too aware of this. Many stories deal directly and indirectly with the ramifications of this existential awareness.

At some point, most of us encounter an internal question: is such a life, with its accompanying awareness, a gift or a curse? Your thoughts and beliefs about this will affect how you behave and the choices you make in your life. Writers usually take their worries and questions to the page, and this is how stories are conceived.

The book I've written isn’t a story itself, rather it’s about how to write stories. It’s the guidebook I wish I’d had thirty years ago. Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I wrote my book because I believe stories—especially in the forms of novels, screenplays, and memoirs—are the biggest magic we have as humans.

When my book comes out, I hope it will be a useful companion to help you write the stories you care about. But in the meantime, keep doing just that. Write what you want to read. Teach what you want to learn. Tell the stories you wish someone had once told you.

“Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle.”

~Robert Olen Butler ~

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

~ Joan Didion ~

Your Character's Degree of Change: Evolution or Transformation?

Story is about change, be it big or small, and it’s usually the main character who embodies this change—she lives through it and dramatizes it by experiencing challenges and setbacks, successes and failures, blind spots and insights.

But how much will your character change? A little or a lot? Does she grow to such a degree that by the end of the story she has a completely different personality? Or has she expanded her perception in a minor way, yet remains essentially herself?

Change that occurs through learning and maturing unfolds as a progressive evolution—the character becomes a better version of herself. But sometimes the change is a transformation—the character appears to become a different version of herself.

Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird, grows in understanding of his peers, society, and justice, but he doesn’t fundamentally change his beliefs or modes of operating in the world. Scrooge, in A Christmas Carol, changes completely.

In Groundhog Day, Phil Connors is a different person at the end of the story compared to the beginning. Like Scrooge, he grows so much over the course of the story that, by the end, he is a changed man.

If your character’s degree of change is small or medium, think of your character being on a journey of evolution. If it’s a large change, which involves a fundamental shift in perspective, consider the character undergoing a journey of transformation.

Character arcs involving transformation usually deal with the uncovering and dealing with an old, deep wound. This healing often includes some kind of personal redemption for the character.

Most transformation stories bring up the past, but not all do. Scrooge and Phil Connors go through similar transformations in personality, but in A Christmas Carol, we gain insight into Scrooge’s deep wounds when the ghost of Christmas past visits, whereas we don’t go into Phil’s past at all.

Evolution arcs tend to address what appears to be a “lack of maturity.” It’s as if something is missing in the character’s awareness and the story encourages the kind of growth and change that can fulfill this lack, usually by learning new things, stretching beyond personal limitations, and confronting past mistakes.

In Casablanca, Ilsa learns to integrate the free spirit she was in Paris with the self who is both responsible for and devoted to revolutionary causes with her husband, Lazlo. When we first meet Isla she has separated these two aspects of self, and the story provides the opportunity to bring them together.

Rick’s arc involves a greater degree of change that leads to his transformation. He was heartbroken by Ilsa’s disappearance in Paris and he has held onto his anger and a belief that she’d never really loved him. This wound makes him callow and self serving, but when it’s healed—when he understands Ilsa really did love him—his personality and behavior change significantly. He seems like a different person at the end.

Transforming characters do evolve as they change in big ways, while evolving characters change in smaller yet important ways without undergoing a full transformation.

Each story, and each character, is unique, and so the degree of change will be particular to your character and story situation. Once you determine the degree of change your character undergoes, evolution or transformation, you will be clearer about your overall deep story design.

A character undergoing a personal change is what’s most satisfying to readers. It doesn’t always matter whether the change is small or large, so long as there is a shift of some kind.

Choice, Change, and Conflict

In the midst of all the changes in the world, we are invited to make some new choices—collectively and individually. Unexpected changes bring us face to face with unexpected choices—to let go of certain assumptions and plans, to reframe cultural beliefs and “norms,” to examine what really matters, and why.

Making choices and making changes are inherently anxiety provoking, and rarely occur without some degree of conflict. In the world at large we’re witnessing a lot of conflict, but many of us are dealing with it at a personal level too. We are each in our ways dealing with anxiety, worry, pain, and fear related to experiences or observations of inner and outer conflict. These are natural human responses to anticipating change and choice.

I think about choice, change, and conflict a lot because they are so much a part of the writing life and telling stories, even in small or subtle ways. Just think: without that bit of inner conflict that arises when we want to write a book but haven’t done it yet, we wouldn’t choose to change our habits to get up early or stay up late to fit our writing in. And if we didn’t throw conflict in our characters’ paths by forcing them to make choices that lead to personal evolution through change, our stories wouldn’t get very far.

As messy as conflict can be, I respect its energy to pressure us to choose and thereby provoke change. And I also respect—or better yet, trust—our human ability to adapt to changing circumstances as well as our ability choose and forge new paths. It’s not easy to change. Not for us or for our story characters. We resist it as much as we long for it. We fear what we may lose, and we don’t trust we can successfully create what we long for, so we often stay stuck.

In the book I’m writing, I tell writers that their story situations “…must be compelling enough to overcome the inertia of being human. The truth is, we’d all rather not change because change is uncomfortable, inconvenient, anxiety-provoking, and often leads to real or imagined loss or even death, as well as changes to beliefs and personal world order. Of course, deep down, we do want to change. We, and our characters, just need the right set of circumstances and enough motivation to do it.”

We seem to be living through such circumstances now, but it’s still hard to know exactly what to do. As our identities and belief systems are being challenged, we are called to examine our mental and moral natures, which are capable of change, but require will, determination, and trust in a vision for a new way of being. I don’t have any answers for rallying that will, focusing that determination, or expanding that trust, except to embrace the clumsy, vulnerable messiness that the choice to change entails—and to have the courage to face the inner and outer conflicts.

Another passage in the book, which is about story characters but also applies to ourselves, seems to fit here: “Change is inherently conflictual whether it occurs on the inside or outside, but without it, we would not grow. We are wired to change. We are wired to evolve. We are wired to heal. And life—in the real version or the story version—provides us with invitation after invitation to rise to those challenges.” Collectively and individually, let’s accept these invitations…and rise.

Story and the Pursuit of Transcendence

Why do we write? Why do we read? I ask these two questions often—in my courses, retreats, and even the book I’m working on right now.

With reading, answers come down to understanding ourselves and the world, as well as knowing more and feeling more, including feeling less alone. With writing, we seek to communicate, connect, and make meaning out of the seemingly random events that make up life experience.

This leads me to wonder if, through reading and writing, we are in some way attempting to transcend the problems of life and the angst of existence. If so, why? Maybe the better question is why not? It seems that to not try would be to curtail our own growth, as individuals and as a collective.

The pursuit of transcendence does not mean it’s ever achieved, mind you. In fact, every effort reveals it’s quite impossible, at least in a sustained way while we’re living and breathing. But reading and writing stories seem to be part of this pursuit.

Story recognizes the problems that living in the world brings and it deals with the human desire to transcend our inner and outer conflicts. But it knows, because the psyche knows, that such transcendence is only possible through immersion–through deep absorption of all that is, and a reconciliation with and acceptance of that “all.” This is what we use story for, to greater and lesser degrees, and it’s how story uses us.

The psyche is story. Life is story. The world is story. It’s the way we perceive, understand, and integrate the meaning that allows us to change. To evolve. When we engage with story, we are subconsciously opening ourselves up to this evolutionary possibility, again to greater or lesser degrees. And art, all great art, reveals a glimpse of this potential. We are more–and the world is more–than we perceive in any given moment. Story helps us expand our perception. Stories of ourselves and each other, and of the world around us—through an immersive experience—render us more expanded. It is psychic evolution and it impacts the world in powerful ways.

Did you realize, when you took up writing, that you had joined a revolution of psychic evolution? I’m pretty sure you sensed it, even if you wouldn’t necessarily put it into these words. Because at some level you believed that writing, as a process, vocation, or career, would improve your own life and your Self in some way. Regardless of upheavals, set backs, and complications, your urge to write is like a flower turning toward the sun. It rests on a belief that you are moving toward a greater life force rather than away from it. That’s what humans do. With the life we’re given we reach for that which is life-giving.

Unless something has gone awry—and plenty has, does, and will. But stories can help us find our way back to the original urge to live in the name of life. Not one story but zillions. Because there are as many ways to live as there are people living. Of course, stories themselves can become corrupt and dangerous too. They reflect who we are and how we’re evolving. But most stories, and most writers, turn their words toward the light. And that sustains us.