The story actually starts way back when I learned to read, but I’m on the clock, so let’s flash forward.

I was sitting in The Last Word in Ann Arbor, drinking Rob Roys with a filmmaking acquaintance from out of town. This pal kept talking about the book, Wired for Story, which he was using for his film classes. I thought, cool, I’ll check it out. Then Cogdog came to visit and we went to Old Town and heard a band that we think was called Women’s Prison Triangle (the mic sucked), and I mentioned the book to him, and he seemed familiar but unimpressed (that was my impression, I never followed up).

Then, I bought the book from Amazon (sorry, small businesses!), which is headquartered in Seattle, WA. They sent it from whatever warehouse they sent it from and it landed at my house, in Ann Arbor.

I read it at my house, and at Mighty Good Coffee, in the study carrels at Hatcher Graduate Library, and on vacation in Asheville, NC.

Reading Wired for Story led me to The Storytelling Animal, which led me to other books on storytelling—The Naked Brain, On the Origins of Stories—and led me to the idea that I could teach a class on digital storytelling.

I taught the class at the Residential College at U-M, but East Quad was being renovated, so I taught in Dennison.

Teaching the class made me realize how much more I wanted to explore about storytelling, which led me to this Storytelling 101 project, and, inevitably, to this blog post.

So thanks Last Word and everywhere in between. ‘Preciate it.

I read Wired for Story before The Storytelling Animal, but it feels like it should come after (and it did, chronologically; I found TSA in WFS’s bibliography) in terms of its take on how we tell stories.

Wired is self-help for writers, and its prescriptiveness requires a faith in the outcomes of the neuroscience research studies that Gottschall rightly holds some skepticism for. Cron isn’t trying to get at what might be the truth about storytelling, though, she’s trying to enable a newer, neuroscience-flavored understanding of how to actually tell a dang story. In order to get to the advice, you have to have sound evidence. And all of it seems sound, even the stuff that disagrees with the other stuff.

What I really appreciate about Wired is how passionate it is about well-worn but still valuable writing advice. The links to neuroscientific research are alternately good or flimsy, but the advice—no extraneous details, make your readers feel something, you have to surprise them—feels as necessary as it always does.

Here’s the Google maps version of the story if you want it!