Most days don’t feel like part of a larger story while you’re living them.

They feel like Tuesday.

There’s an email you forgot to answer, a bill that arrived too early and a project that seemed brilliant three weeks ago but now looks like it was assembled by Jawas. You do the work. You take care of people. You cross things off the list. Then you wake up and do it again.

A life can get very small that way. Not because the life is ordinary. Because the days stop adding up to anything.

Years ago, after I was promoted to manage a Blockbuster store, I used Who Moved My Cheese? as a customer-service training tool.

Yes, I once tried to teach customer service with a parable about mice, tiny people and disappearing dairy products. Management has produced stranger ideas.

But the book worked because it gave change a shape. Instead of treating every new expectation as one more irritation handed down from somewhere above, it asked us to recognize the maze, notice that the cheese had moved and decide what to do next.

A policy could tell us what had changed. A story helped us decide who we wanted to be inside the change.

A larger story is not a grander life

When I say ordinary people need larger stories, I don’t mean everyone needs to believe they are the secretly chosen hero of an epic franchise.

Most of us are not waiting for John Williams to score the moment we carry the groceries in from the car. Although I do sometimes hum the Indiana Jones theme while mowing the lawn.

A larger story does not make your life more important than somebody else’s. It changes what the work means and gives the life you already have a direction.

At Blockbuster, the assistant manager and I decided we were not there merely to upsell memberships or hand over the title somebody had planned to rent. People came in because they wanted a night of entertainment. If that movie was gone—and on a Friday or Saturday, it often was—Elisha, Jessie, Tommy, Chris and the rest of us recommended something we loved rather than let them leave empty-handed. Soon customers were recommending movies back to us. The store that had been treated as overflow went from roughly $250,000 to $1.5 million in business in about a year, and the company began sending us more and better inventory. We moved the cheese by changing what we believed the job was.

The larger story might be raising a decent human being. Rebuilding a career. Keeping a promise. Making art after work when nobody is asking for it. Helping people whose names will never appear in a press release.

The work can still be hard. The ending can still be uncertain. Meaning is not the same thing as reassurance. It simply tells you what the hard part belongs to.

The books that handed me a map

Certain books have found me when the plot of my own life was getting difficult to follow.

Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson taught me that change becomes less frightening when you can see yourself moving through it. It is a very simple parable. That is part of its usefulness. When you’re lost, you don’t always need a 400-page strategic plan. Sometimes you need two mice and a wall with writing on it.

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird gave me a different kind of map. It reminded me that a book, a screenplay or a life does not have to be solved all at once. You deal with what is in front of you. One scene. One page. One bird.

That idea has probably saved more unfinished work than all the lectures about discipline ever delivered. It lowers the drama without shrinking the dream.

When my life has felt especially short on meaning, I have returned to Og Mandino. The Greatest Salesman in the World. The University of Success. Especially The Twelfth Angel, a story I have long wanted to adapt into a movie.

Mandino’s books can be sentimental. I don’t mean that as an insult. Sometimes sentiment is exactly what gets through the armor. His stories insist that defeat is a chapter, not a permanent address.

Apparently I’m not alone. Drew Carey once said he kept a dog-eared copy of The University of Success and read it often because it taught him to believe in himself. That may be the most Ohio sentence ever written: Og Mandino, Drew Carey and a battered self-help book refusing to give up.

Then there is Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner, assembled by Francis L. Fugate and Roberta B. Fugate from Gardner’s notebooks, letters and working material.

Gardner created Perry Mason and wrote at a pace that makes the rest of us look like we have stopped for lunch. What helped me was seeing how deliberately he thought about character, conflict, plot and resolution. He did not wait for a mystery to arrive in a puff of inspiration. He built a system for finding and shaping one.

Ray Kroc saw the same power in the fast-food system Dick and Mac McDonald had built. He recognized that their method for getting food out quickly and consistently could be repeated far beyond one restaurant. A system does not drain the meaning from a story. Sometimes it is how we find the meaning buried under everything that happened—and make the useful part repeatable.

The danger of borrowing the wrong story

Of course, people can live inside stories that make their lives smaller too.

I’m too old to start again. I’m only useful when somebody needs help. If this job ends, everything I built disappears. Everybody else has figured it out. I missed my chance.

Those are stories. They have characters, conflict and an ending we keep rehearsing. They just happen to be lousy ones.

The answer is not to trade one limiting story for a more flattering one. A useful larger story has to tell the truth. It must have room for failure, contradiction, grief and the possibility that you were wrong about where the road was leading.

If the story only works when you ignore the facts, it is not helping you understand your life. It is helping you avoid it.

The thread I can finally see

For a long time, I looked at my own work as a collection of separate lives.

Blockbuster. Teaching. Communications work. Nonprofits. Screenwriting. Filmmaking. Copywriting. Theater. Consulting. A rather impressive number of folders containing unfinished ideas.

Each new chapter seemed to replace the one before it instead of continuing the story. When a job ended or a project stalled, it felt as if that part of the story had simply been dropped.

I’m beginning to see a different story now.

The same strand has been running through all of it: I notice the human thing buried under the information, the institutional language or the creative mess. Then I try to help someone else see why it matters.

That larger story does not erase the detours. It gives them somewhere to belong. What looked like separate knots may turn out to be one strand. Sometimes the story was there all along. I just could not see it while the lights were tangled.

Maybe that is what a good story does for an ordinary life. It does not turn us into somebody else. It helps us recognize the person who has been there through every chapter.

Find the story you are already carrying

You may not need a new purpose. You may need a better way to see the material already in front of you.

What keeps repeating? Who is at the center? What are they trying to change? What does the hard part belong to? What thread connects the work, losses, interests and unfinished ideas you have been treating as separate?

I built the free Story Finder Worksheet for exactly that kind of mess. It won’t hand you a grand destiny before lunch. It will help you slow down, sort through what you are carrying and begin naming the story that may already be there.

Try the Free Story Finder Worksheet

What larger story are you living inside right now?

I’d genuinely like to hear your answer. It may be clearer than you think. Or it may still be hiding under a few boxes.

Thanks for reading. This essay is part of Finding the Story Inside the Mess, a 12-week series about creativity, reinvention, movies, nonprofit communications and the strange process of discovering that the scattered pieces may not be wasted after all.

A box of tangled holiday lights is a special kind of insult.

You open the box expecting a string of lights.

Instead, you find a fistfight.

Green wire wrapped around green wire. One strand somehow tied to another strand that wasn’t even in the same box last year. A plug buried somewhere near the center. One red bulb blinking from deep inside the knot like it’s enjoying this.

The reasonable response is to close the box and go to Lowe’s.

The creative response is to sit on the floor and find an end.

I first wrote about tangled Christmas lights earlier this year while trying to explain the kind of work I do. People bring me too many ideas, too much information, too many half-finished pieces. They see the knots. I start looking for the strand.

But finding the strand is only the beginning.

Then you have to untangle it.

That’s where creativity gets less romantic.

The knot usually existed before you started

We like to imagine creativity beginning with a clean surface.

A blank page. A fresh document. A whiteboard with nothing on it except possibility—and the intoxicating smell of a dry-erase marker.

My creative life rarely looks like that.

It looks more like a hard drive full of drafts, a desk covered with Post-It notes, a phone holding photographs I meant to use, and a few hundred Apple Notes asking whether I remember starting them.

There are screenplays. Essays. Workshop ideas. Client interviews. Pieces of dialogue. Notes about old movies. Business offers. Half-built systems. A play beginning to make noise in the back of my head when I already have enough work sitting in the front.

This is not the clean white room where creativity supposedly happens.

It is the box.

The mistake is believing I need to add something new before I understand what is already there.

Another idea feels productive. So does another notebook, another course, another app, another clever name for a project that still doesn’t know what it wants to become.

Sometimes those things help.

Sometimes they are the creative equivalent of buying another string of lights because we don’t want to deal with the ones we own.

The new strand looks wonderful until we put it in the box with everything else.

Pulling harder makes the knot tighter

Anyone who has untangled lights, extension cords, or necklaces knows the first rule.

Don’t yank.

Yanking feels like action. That’s what makes it dangerous.

You find one end, give it a good pull, and expect the whole mess to surrender. Instead, three loose loops become one hard knot. Now the wire is stretched, your patience is gone, and the strand may be damaged.

Creative work behaves the same way.

When an essay won’t come together, I sometimes try to force the conclusion before I understand the question.

When a screenplay stalls, I may start rearranging scenes when the real problem is that the character has no difficult choice to make. (Darn you, Syd Field. With love, of course!)

When a client has too much information, the temptation is to squeeze all of it into the message. Nobody wants to leave out the program, the history, the statistics, the sponsors, the board members, or the paragraph somebody fought to get approved three years ago.

So everything stays.

The message becomes a knot no reader wants to untangle.

Slow down, and you can begin to see what’s actually connected.

That doesn’t mean sitting around waiting for the elves, the Muse, or whoever else is on duty to show up and wave a wand.

It means handling one piece at a time.

Where does this strand begin?

What am I trying to shine a light on?

And what am I finally willing to throw away?

Those questions are less exciting than “What should I create?”

They are also more useful.

Some things in the box need to go

The tangled-lights theory sounds as if everything in the box can be saved.

It can’t.

Some bulbs are dead.

Some wires are frayed.

One strand has been dark in the middle since the first Star Wars movie, but every year we plug it in again—just in case.

Creative work requires the same honesty.

Not every note belongs in the essay.

Not every scene belongs in the screenplay.

And not every idea is an unfinished masterpiece—or a business waiting to happen. Sometimes it’s just old wire.

The hard part is knowing the difference between material that needs more patience and material that belongs on the cutting-room floor.

I don’t have a perfect test for that. I’m suspicious of people who claim they do.

But the ideas worth keeping have a way of following me around. They show up in something else I’m writing, a conversation I’m having, or a movie I’m watching. Months or even years later, I can open the old file and see it differently because I’m different. There’s still something there I haven’t figured out.

Other ideas don’t follow me around. They just sit in a folder making me feel guilty because I never finished them.

That’s a poor reason to spend another six months on something.

The goal isn’t to save everything in the box. The goal is to find what still carries electricity.

Test a small section

There is another mistake I make when I’m overwhelmed by a creative project.

I try to solve the whole thing at once.

I don’t want to write one useful scene. I want to know whether the screenplay works.

I don’t want to test one workshop. I want to map the workbook, the course, the video series, the speaking offer, and the tasteful line of Story Finder oven mitts.

I don’t want to record one honest YouTube video. I want to understand the channel, the audience, the visual identity, and how the whole thing supports everything else I’m building.

That sounds like planning.

Sometimes I’m just avoiding the smaller, scarier job of making one piece and seeing whether it works.

Write the scene.

Send the worksheet to three people.

Teach the workshop to a room small enough that everyone can tell you where they got confused.

The mess is not separate from the work

We tend to talk about creative mess as though it’s the unfortunate condition surrounding the real work.

We tell ourselves we’ll organize the files, settle the schedule, understand the market, and finally get our act together.

Then the work can begin.

I’ve rearranged enough files to know I can fool myself into calling it work.

Organization helps. I need it. Otherwise, I would spend half my life searching for a document I distinctly remember putting somewhere sensible.

But the mess is not always keeping us from the work.

Sometimes untangling the mess is the work.

Twelve minutes into a rambling client interview comes the sentence that makes the whole campaign human.

An abandoned screenplay may contain a character who belongs in another story.

A career that looks scattered from the outside may reveal the question you’ve been answering all along.

Creative work isn’t always about making something new.

Sometimes it’s seeing what belongs together, what no longer works, and where the strand begins.

Patience is part of the craft

Inspiration gets better publicity.

Patience looks like sitting on the floor with a knot in your lap.

It’s reading the paragraph again and admitting the third sentence is the problem. Cutting the scene you spent six days writing. Asking one more question because the real answer hasn’t arrived yet.

We’re good at seeing possibilities. They show up during walks, movies, conversations, and moments when we’re supposed to be finishing something else.

The harder part is staying with one strand long enough to understand it.

Don’t yank because you’re tired. Don’t buy another string because this one is difficult. Just find the next loose loop.

Eventually, the strand stretches across the floor. You test the bulbs, replace what’s broken, and plug it in.

The lights come on.

Nobody sees the box, the knots, or the time you spent sitting on the floor.

They just see the lights.

Thanks for reading. This essay is part of Finding the Story Inside the Mess, my 12-week series about creativity, reinvention, movies, and the stubborn work of discovering that the scattered pieces may not be wasted after all.

What are you trying to untangle right now—and what might happen if you stopped pulling so hard?

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Last week, the power went out.

Then the internet went out.

Then, large parts of the carefully planned week I had built went out with them.

There were emails I couldn’t send. Work I couldn’t finish. Follow-ups that slipped. Client work that needed attention. A job application. A screenplay. This essay.

My calendar continued to sit there looking very confident about all of it.

The grass kept growing, too, because apparently lawns do not recognize infrastructure failures.

None of this was tragic.

That’s worth saying.

We had storms. We lost power and internet. People elsewhere had worse damage. Eventually, the lights came back on. The router started blinking again. Life resumed.

Except work doesn’t resume as neatly as electricity.

You don’t flip a switch and suddenly recover your momentum.

That’s the part I’ve been thinking about.

Because reinvention gets talked about a lot.

Starting over.

Building the second act.

Launching the business.

Changing careers.

Writing the book.

Finally making the thing you’ve talked about making for years.

From the outside, reinvention can look almost Christopher Nolan cinematic.

New notebook.

Fresh website.

Coffee shop.

Inspirational music.

A few determined walks at sunrise.

Maybe somebody staring thoughtfully out a window.

Then the LinkedIn announcement:

Excited to share what I’ve been working on...

And apparently we have reinvented ourselves.

I would like to speak with whoever edited that version.

Because they cut out most of the movie.

The part between the before and after

Social media is very good at showing us the reveal.

The finished video.

The polished website.

The launch.

The book in somebody’s hands.

The revenue screenshot.

The person telling you how they built their first $50,000 month.

What we rarely see is what happened before the screenshot.

How many takes did it take to get the video that looked effortless?

How long did they fight with the edit before CapCut finally made them look like they knew what they were doing?

How many posts disappeared into the internet with almost nobody watching?

How many offers didn’t sell?

How many months came before the $50,000 month?

How many times did they change direction, get discouraged, lose momentum, start doubting the whole thing, and wonder whether everybody else had received an instruction manual they somehow missed?

I’m not saying those success stories are fake.

I’m saying they’re edited.

Of course they are.

That’s what we do with stories. We find the parts that matter and cut the rest.

The trouble begins when we compare somebody else’s edited story to our unedited life.

Their breakthrough takes ninety seconds.

Ours takes two years.

Their business appears fully formed in a carousel post.

Ours has invoices, software problems, awkward prospecting emails, offers we’re still trying to explain, and Tuesday afternoons when we’d really rather mow the lawn.

Then something breaks.

The power goes out.

The client disappears.

You get sick.

The schedule collapses.

The thing you thought was working stops working.

And suddenly you aren’t reinventing anymore.

You’re repairing.

Nobody puts that part on the coffee mug.

Second acts are not cute

I keep coming back to the original title I gave this essay:

Second Acts Are Not Cute. They Are War.

That sounds more dramatic than I mean it.

I’m not talking about a war against the world.

I’m talking about the small private wars that determine whether the work continues.

War against drift.

Against discouragement.

Against unfinished work.

Against throwing the strand back in the box because one knot got ugly.

Against buying a brand-new box of lights because starting over feels easier than fixing what you’ve already built.

Against adding more tinsel and calling it progress.

I know that last one because I’m very good at it.

My version of tinsel can be another course.

Another system.

Another book.

Another app.

Another clever framework.

Another exciting project that arrives at exactly the moment the current project becomes difficult.

The new thing feels wonderful because the new thing has no knots yet.

It is all possibility.

No frustrating history.

No stalled progress.

No evidence that you might not know exactly what you’re doing.

Just a clean box.

That’s seductive.

Especially when you’ve spent months trying to untangle the old one.

The knot inside the knot

Finding the story inside the mess isn’t always about beginning with a hopeless box of tangled Christmas lights.

Sometimes you’ve already done a lot of the work.

You’ve found the end of the strand.

You’ve loosened knots.

You’ve figured out which bulbs work.

You’ve stretched part of the strand cleanly across the floor.

You can finally see where this thing might be going.

Then you hit another knot.

Fine.

You’ve untangled knots before.

So you start working on this one.

And discover three smaller knots buried inside it.

That’s the moment nobody photographs.

Because progress hasn’t disappeared.

But progress has slowed down enough that it can feel like failure.

That’s an important distinction.

Something getting harder doesn’t mean you chose the wrong thing.

Something needing repair doesn’t mean you need to replace it.

You don’t necessarily need a new dream.

Sometimes you need to find the strand again.

I’m going to stop the Christmas-light metaphor there because I have an entire essay about that coming next week, and I don’t want to use up all my bulbs.

But that image has been useful to me lately.

Especially after the outage.

Because when the power and internet came back, I had to figure out where the strand was.

Not metaphorically at first.

Literally.

What email hadn’t been answered?

What follow-up had been interrupted?

Which project needed to move?

Where had I stopped in the screenplay?

What was I supposed to be writing?

Which task was actually important, and which one was simply shouting the loudest?

Getting power back was easy.

Getting momentum back took work.

A line I didn’t expect to write about myself

A while back, I worked through the Self-Made Writer Inventory from AWAI.

Sandy Franks and the Self-Made Writer material had me looking less at the things I wanted to create and more at the patterns underneath the things I had already created.

That’s a harder exercise than it sounds.

Because it’s easy to write:

I want to write screenplays.

I want to write essays.

I want to make films.

I want to build a business.

Those are containers.

The more interesting question is:

Why do I keep returning to these things?

One line that emerged from my inventory has stayed with me.

I seem to be drawn to: people, organizations, and dreams that are not dead, but not yet fully formed.

Especially the older creative person who still has something to say.

Well.

That’s mildly uncomfortable when you realize you’ve also just described yourself.

But that’s what good questions are supposed to do.

The exercise helped me see something I hadn’t fully named before.

Maybe my fascination with reinvention isn’t really about becoming somebody else.

Maybe it’s about unfinished things.

Things that still have life in them.

Things that need another draft.

Another structure.

Another attempt.

Another way in.

That includes businesses.

Stories.

Careers.

Dreams.

People.

Maybe especially people.

We know how to start. We don’t know how to return.

There’s no shortage of advice about beginnings.

Make the leap.

Start before you’re ready.

Take massive action.

Build the habit.

Do the work.

All useful.

But I’ve noticed something now that I’m farther into this second act.

Beginning isn’t the hardest part.

Returning may be harder.

What do you do after the habit breaks?

What do you do after you lose the week?

What do you do after the launch disappoints you?

What do you do when the business isn’t growing as quickly as you expected?

What do you do when the screenplay still doesn’t work after the revision?

What do you do when the system you carefully built develops a hole somewhere in the plumbing?

What do you do when you’re making progress and then suddenly you’re not?

That’s where I think a lot of reinvention advice goes quiet.

We get instructions for construction.

Very few instructions for reconstruction.

But reconstruction is most of the work.

Life is going to interrupt the plan.

Aging is going to interrupt the plan.

Money will interrupt it.

Family will.

Health will.

(Weather apparently would like a vote.)

Technology certainly will.

And sometimes we will interrupt it ourselves.

We’ll get distracted.

We’ll become discouraged.

We’ll chase something shiny because the thing in front of us stopped being fun.

The goal cannot be building a life that never gets knocked out of rhythm.

That’s fantasy.

The better skill may be learning how to return.

Don’t catch up

My first instinct after a disruption is to catch up.

This is almost always a terrible idea.

“Catch up” means looking at everything that didn’t happen, imagining that all of it has equal importance, then trying to squeeze four days into Tuesday morning.

That’s how you turn a temporary interruption into a fresh crisis.

I’m trying something different.

Instead of asking:

How do I catch up?

I’m asking:

What was moving before things got scrambled?

Then:

What still matters?

Then:

What’s the smallest thing I can put back into motion?

Sometimes that’s one email.

One conversation.

One page.

One paragraph.

One piece of work moving again.

That’s enough.

Because once something moves, you have the strand in your hand again.

Then you can find the next piece.

And the next.

That’s not very cinematic.

Nobody is going to make a motivational Reel of me updating a CRM note.

Although if they do, I hope they at least use dramatic music. (Cue: “The Asteroid Field” from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back”

But that may be what reinvention actually looks like from the inside.

Not constant transformation.

Maintenance.

Repair.

Returning.

The work that survives tells you something

There’s another thing the outage showed me.

When everything gets scrambled, pay attention to what you return to.

Not what you say matters.

What you actually pick back up.

The work you reopen.

The person you call.

The story you keep thinking about.

The idea you can’t quite leave alone.

Those things tell you something about the life you’re actually building.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering whether the scattered things I’ve done belong together.

Communications.

Screenwriting.

Teaching.

Copywriting.

Nonprofit work.

Film.

Essays.

Business.

Maybe the answer doesn’t come from creating one more plan explaining how they fit.

Maybe the answer comes from noticing what I keep returning to after the plans fall apart.

Stories.

People.

Making complicated things understandable.

Helping unfinished things find their shape.

Trying to make something that matters.

There it is again.

The strand.

The return is the work

I don’t want to romanticize any of this.

Sometimes a project really should end.

Sometimes the lights are shot.

Sometimes the course was bad.

Sometimes the business idea doesn’t work.

Sometimes persistence becomes stubbornness wearing nicer clothes.

Part of finding the story is knowing what to cut.

But there’s a difference between making a clear decision to stop and quietly putting something back on the shelf because it became difficult.

I know that shelf.

I’ve put things there.

Some deserved it.

Some probably didn’t.

That’s why I’m becoming less interested in the inspirational part of second acts.

I’m interested in the repair manual.

How do we come back after losing momentum?

How do we find the work again after life gets noisy?

How do we tell the difference between something that’s finished and something that’s merely stuck?

How do we resist the brand-new box when the old strand still has light in it?

I don’t have all of those answers.

I’m still figuring them out.

But I know this much now:

Reinvention isn’t proving that nothing can knock you off course.

Plenty of things can.

Life will.

The test of the second act isn’t whether disruption stops happening.

It’s whether you know how to return.

Sometimes returning means rebuilding the whole thing.

Usually, it means something smaller.

Find the strand.

Put one part of the work back in motion.

Then another.

And see if the lights come back on.

Thanks for reading. This essay is part of Finding the Story Inside the Mess, my 12-week series about creativity, reinvention, movies, communication and the strange process of discovering that the scattered pieces may not be wasted after all.

What are you rebuilding that nobody sees yet?

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There are certain things we all do because somebody, somewhere, decided this is how things are done.

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For months, people I trusted kept asking me a very simple question.

“What do you do?”

You would think a man building a communications business could answer that.

You would be wrong.

I had answers. Lots of answers.

Marketing. Communications. Copywriting. Public relations. Nonprofit messaging. Content creation. Video. Screenwriting. Story development. Websites. Campaigns. Authors. Organizations. Consulting.

All of it was true.

That was part of the problem.

I was doing what I have sometimes called puking on the customer.

Someone would ask one reasonable question, and I would empty the entire toolbox onto the table.

I wasn’t lying about what I could do.

I was committing the more dangerous sin of telling people everything that was true at once.

There’s a scene in Tommy Boy where Chris Farley is trying desperately to make a sale with a desktop demonstration. The harder he tries to explain what he means, the worse the demonstration gets. Things break. Things catch fire. The point disappears underneath the performance.

When “What do you do?” somehow turns into a full desktop demonstration.

That was me occasionally explaining Mighty Maus.

No flames.

But give me another thirty seconds.

Sometimes you’re inside the box

One of the people who kept pushing me was my friend Jeff Robison.

Jeff has known me for decades. I first met him when he was a teenager in a theater production I directed. He’s now a business owner himself, and over the years the mentoring has gone both directions more than either of us probably expected.

We had lunch for about three hours this summer.

Part of it was friends catching up. Part of it was business.

By then, I had started to recognize that I had positioned Mighty Maus too narrowly around nonprofits. The work I was doing stretched across organizations, experts, authors, small businesses, and creative people.

So I tried to explain the bigger idea.

I help people clarify their story.

I turn that into websites, campaigns, PR, donor messaging, articles, video, and public-facing communications.

Again, none of it was wrong.

But you can almost hear the desktop beginning to smoke.

Jeff was trying to help me answer a much simpler question:

Where are you most useful?

That question followed me.

So did questions from mentors like EG Orren, who kept forcing me to look harder at what I was building instead of what I could theoretically offer.

Eventually, I started asking a different question:

What problem keeps showing up in front of me, no matter who’s sitting across the table?

That changed things.

The answer wasn’t copywriting.

It wasn’t PR.

It wasn’t video.

It wasn’t nonprofits.

It was the box of tangled Christmas lights.

People came to me with too much.

Too many ideas.

Too many messages.

Too many programs.

Too many drafts.

Too much information.

Too much they wanted everybody to understand at the same time.

And somewhere inside that knot was the strand.

I had spent months trying to describe every tool I could use.

The more useful answer was the problem I kept helping people solve.

Sometimes, though, you’re not standing outside the box looking for the strand.

Sometimes you’re inside the box.

That’s much harder.

Familiarity can hide a good story

I learned this years ago at Finneytown. One of our chemistry teachers, Dr. Liveroni, used an M&M lesson that connected chemistry to the real-world story behind the candy.

When I heard about it, I thought, That’s a story.

Her reaction was basically: “I do this lesson all the time. Who cares?”

That was the point.

She had done it so often that it no longer looked interesting from inside the classroom. To somebody outside it, it was fresh.

Familiarity can make a good story disappear in plain sight.

We fill in what isn’t there

I ran into another version of this recently while reading a screenplay.

Someone discussing the script knew exactly what movie was supposed to be there.

The tone.

The mystery.

The emotional turns.

The payoff.

He could see the movie in his head.

I was reading the first half of the pages.

I couldn’t see that movie yet.

That doesn’t mean the movie wasn’t in the writer’s imagination.

It means the information hadn’t made the trip from imagination to page.

Writers do this constantly.

We know the character’s childhood.

We know why she hesitates before answering.

We know what happened three years ago.

We know what the look across the room means.

And because we know it, we supply it while reading our own work.

The reader can’t.

The reader only gets what made it onto the page.

Businesses do the same thing.

Organizations do it.

Nonprofits definitely do it.

A staff member writes something like: “Our comprehensive programs help strengthen families.”

Inside the organization, that sentence may carry years of meaning.

They know the families.

They know the calls.

They know the staff member who stayed late.

They know the kid who finally came back.

The reader doesn’t.

What the reader is left with is three abstractions.

Comprehensive.

Programs.

Families.

Everything else was supplied by the person writing it.

That’s why good work can be surprisingly hard to explain from the inside.

You know too much.

It’s hard to find the strand when you’re tangled in it

When we are close to our own work, we tend to make one of two mistakes.

We explain too much.

Or we explain too little.

I did the first with Mighty Maus.

Dr. Liveroni did the second with her chemistry lesson.

Different ways of getting tangled.

Same knot.

The closer we are to something, the harder it becomes to judge what another person needs to see.

That’s why an outside question can be irritating.

“What do you do?”

“What is this story really about?”

“Why does this matter?”

“What happens if nobody acts?”

“What makes this different?”

We sometimes hear those questions as criticism.

They may be gifts.

Because the person asking isn’t carrying all the information we’re carrying.

They haven’t been sitting in the meetings.

They didn’t write the earlier drafts.

They don’t know the backstory.

They weren’t there when the program started.

They haven’t heard the explanation twenty-seven times.

They’re standing where the audience stands.

Outside the box.

The Story Finder started with my own mess

I wish I could say I calmly designed the Story Finder System™ on a whiteboard after years of careful market analysis.

That would make a cleaner origin story.

It would also be nonsense.

I found it by trying to untangle my own business.

I had screenwriting experience.

Communications experience.

Teaching.

PR.

Copywriting.

Nonprofit work.

Video.

Creative direction.

Years of working with people who knew what they wanted to say but couldn’t quite get the words, structure, or story to cooperate.

I kept trying to turn those experiences into a neat list.

The list kept getting longer.

Eventually, I stopped asking, “What services do I offer?”

I started asking:

What keeps happening when people bring me their mess?

I listen.

I ask questions.

I notice what they skip over.

I notice what they assume everybody understands.

I listen for the moment one bulb lights up.

Somebody pauses.

“Wait. Say that again.”

That’s usually the clue.

Find that bulb, and you can start tracing the strand.

That’s the work.

Find the story.

Clarify the message.

Then decide what needs to happen next.

The framework didn’t begin because I needed another branded system.

It began because I needed to understand my own work.

I had figured out how I wanted people to picture the company before I had figured out how to tell them what the company actually did.

Even the name Mighty Maus came first.

My last name is spelled M-A-U-S. Somewhere along the family line, the pronunciation became Americanized into “Moss.”

But visually, M-A-U-S makes people think of “mouse.”

Mighty Maus.

Mighty Mouse.

Someone coming to the rescue.

I liked the image immediately.

What took considerably longer was answering:

Rescue people from what?

Turns out, often from the pile.

The pile of information.

The pile of ideas.

The pile of half-finished messages.

The box of tangled lights.

What if…?

Sometimes, finding the strand starts with a question screenwriters use all the time:

What if…?

What if the thing you keep skipping over is the story?

What if the part you think everybody knows is the part nobody understands?

What if the thing you do every week and barely notice is the thing somebody else would find remarkable?

What if you’re not missing the story at all?

What if you’re just too tangled up in it to see where the strand begins?

What do you know so well about your work that you’ve forgotten somebody else may need help seeing it?

Because the story may not be missing.

You may simply be too tangled up in it to see where the strand begins.

Thanks for reading. This essay is part of Finding the Story Inside the Mess, my 12-week series about creativity, reinvention, movies, story, and the strange process of discovering the thread inside all the scattered pieces.

Question for readers: What do you know so well about your work that you’ve forgotten somebody else may need help seeing it?

Leave a comment

My earliest memory of being emotionally overwhelmed by a movie happened in a basement my father and his buddies had paneled themselves.

It was the 1970s. We lived in a Cape Cod, and the basement had started as the kind of unfinished space families used for laundry, storage, tools, and things nobody quite knew where else to put.

Then Dad and his friends covered the concrete walls with paneling and turned it into our family room.

Once a year, my parents, my brother, my sister, and I gathered around the television to watch The Wizard of Oz.

This was before streaming. Before DVDs. Before you could summon nearly any movie ever made with a remote and then spend twenty minutes complaining there was nothing to watch.

When The Wizard of Oz came on, you watched it.

My sister was terrified of the flying monkeys.

I was fascinated by Ray Bolger.

I didn’t think I was watching an actor play the Scarecrow. I believed a scarecrow had somehow come to life. The way Bolger bent, stumbled, folded, and moved seemed impossible. His body didn’t behave like the bodies of the adults around me.

He was funny.

He was lonely.

He wanted something he believed he lacked.

So did the Tin Man.

So did the Cowardly Lion.

So did Dorothy.

I loved that each of them eventually received what they had been searching for. But the moment that stayed with me was the balloon flying away without Dorothy.

Even after the witch was defeated, the friends had been rewarded, and the Wizard’s machinery had been exposed, something could still go wrong.

Dorothy could still be left behind.

I didn’t have language for disappointment, ambiguity, or the ache of almost getting home.

I only knew the scene hurt.

The movie story was teaching me feelings before I knew their names.

Stories in the dark

Movies have always been complicated for me.

In a good way.

They can be shared rituals in a paneled basement. They can bring friends together. They can send you alone into a dark theater and still make you feel connected to someone you’ve never met.

They can be escape, education, warning, comfort, and invitation.

I think that is true of all good writing.

A story can entertain you while quietly preparing you for something.

It can let you practice fear before real danger arrives.

It can introduce you to grief before you lose someone.

It can show you loneliness without making loneliness shameful.

It can allow you to recognize courage in an ordinary person before life asks you to find some of your own.

No single movie rescued me in one grand cinematic flash.

The stories accumulated.

A little wonder from one.

A little courage from another.

Compassion here.

Fear there.

An uncomfortable truth I wasn’t hearing from the adults around me.

A question that followed me home.

By the time life asked me to understand another person, face disappointment, or keep going after a plan fell apart, some of those stories were already in the room.

The question Mr. Acito taught me to ask

In high school, I took a film study class with Mr. Joe Acito.

Mr. Joe Acito, the Elder High School teacher who taught me to ask what a movie was trying to say.

Before that class, I loved going to the movies.

Mr. Acito taught me to study what happened inside them.

He taught me to stop watching only for entertainment and start asking what a movie was trying to say.

That sounds like a small shift.

It wasn’t.

“Did I like it?” is a perfectly fair question. Sometimes it is the only question you need. I don’t require every movie to improve my character or explain the human condition.

Sometimes I want Indiana Jones to outrun a boulder.

That is enough.

But Mr. Acito gave me another way of watching.

Why was this story told?

Why was it told this way?

Who made it?

What did they believe?

What did the movie understand about its time?

What did it misunderstand?

Whose pain did it see?

Whose pain did it ignore?

What was happening beneath the plot?

He helped fan the flames of a fire inside me that I didn’t yet understand was trying to come to light in a darkened theater.

That fire never went out.

Mr. Acito was remembered at Elder High School as the teacher who made Shakespeare popular among teenage boys. That alone should qualify a man for some sort of educational sainthood. He taught for more than four decades, and former students remembered the excitement he brought to literature, film, and the classroom.

What he gave me was larger than film appreciation.

He taught me that stories deserve attention.

They are made by people.

They carry assumptions.

They reveal the culture that produced them.

They can awaken compassion.

They can also spread lies.

To understand a story, you have to look at what it says, what it leaves out, and what it asks an audience to feel.

Those questions changed movies for me.

They also changed the way I approached nearly every kind of writing that came later.

A screenplay.

A classroom lesson.

A presentation.

A press release.

A gala script.

A marketing campaign.

The form changes, but the deeper question remains:

What is this story trying to tell us?

When movie stories became the work

Star Wars made me want to make movies.

George Lucas created a world that felt mythic, funny, dangerous, and completely alive. It became part of the language of everyday life. Decades later, we still joke about going to the dark side when the copier jams, the software crashes, or someone brings doughnuts into a meeting.

But Raiders of the Lost Ark made me want to understand how movie stories were built.

I knew George Lucas. I knew what Star Wars had become.

What I couldn’t understand was why someone as successful as Lucas would team up with Steven Spielberg, a director whose Close Encounters of the Third Kind I had not liked when I first saw it.

Then I watched Raiders.

And I understood the partnership.

More important, I wanted to know how they had done it.

How did this story come together?

How did they decide what Indiana Jones wanted?

How did they build suspense?

Why did one sequence make me laugh while another made me lean forward?

How did the filmmakers make something so carefully constructed feel as though it were racing out of control?

Curiosity became study.

Study became the belief that perhaps I could learn to do this too.

And if I could teach myself, maybe I could teach others.

That impulse eventually followed me into screenwriting, teaching, Blockbuster Video, film school, and the work I still do today.

But the movie story sitting at the center of all of it is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

The story that contained everything

E.T. taught me that emotion could be built visually.

It didn’t simply tell us Elliott was lonely. It gave us a suburban house with something missing inside it (like my own, and yours maybe).

It didn’t deliver a speech about childhood fear. It let children move through a world where adults were often seen from the waist down, as though they belonged to another species.

It didn’t explain wonder.

It gave us flashlights in the woods, Reese’s Pieces on the floor, a glowing finger, and a bicycle rising into the night (even though the bike was a 1981 Kuwahara BMX and not one with a banana seat!).

It didn’t treat Elliott’s ordinary life as small.

That ordinary life became the doorway to something extraordinary.

The story helped me think about life differently.

Students differently.

Adults differently.

People whose behavior may be carrying pain underneath it.

Elliott is not simply the child who finds an alien. He is lonely. His family has been broken open. His father is gone. His teacher sees a distracted, difficult kid, but not the child struggling underneath. I wish I could say I always saw that difference when I was teaching. I didn’t.

Then E.T. arrives, and Elliott’s feelings suddenly have a physical form.

He has someone else to protect.

Someone else to miss.

Someone else who understands what it means to be far from home.

That is one of the gifts a story can give us.

It makes an internal feeling visible.

It gives loneliness a face.

Fear a sound.

Grief a room to occupy.

Hope a bicycle.

Watching E.T. did not hand me a tidy lesson I could write in the margin of a notebook.

It trained my emotional imagination.

It taught me to pause before deciding I understood another person.

Movies taught my emotional imagination to interrupt my first judgment.

Logic might say, “This student is difficult.”

Emotional imagination asks, “What might this student be carrying?”

Logic might say, “That person is angry.”

Emotional imagination asks, “What pain is underneath the anger?”

Logic might say, “That life looks ordinary.”

Emotional imagination asks, “What wonder might be hiding there?”

Logic might say, “The past ruined everything.”

Story asks, “What does the character do next?”

We sometimes grow into the story

My relationship with Close Encounters of the Third Kind changed as I got older.

When I first saw it, I didn’t get it.

It arrived after Star Wars, and I wanted another sweeping adventure with clear heroes and villains.

Instead, Spielberg gave me Roy Neary, an ordinary man who sees something he cannot explain and becomes consumed by it.

Roy is frightened, fascinated, selfish, confused, and difficult.

He is not Luke Skywalker.

As a younger viewer, I thought the movie was slow and strange. I didn’t understand why the hero behaved the way he did.

Now it is one of my favorite films.

I understand the shaving scene.

I understand the mashed-potato obsession.

I understand the terror and wonder inside Barry’s house.

I understand why a child might run toward the mystery while the adults are trying to lock every door.

Sometimes we do not reject a movie (marketing piece, donor or sponsorship letter) because it failed.

Sometimes we reject it because we have not lived enough to understand the story it is telling.

Then life catches up.

A character who once seemed foolish begins to look wounded.

A parent we judged begins to look frightened.

A choice that once seemed simple becomes complicated.

The movie has not changed.

We have.

Stories can teach compassion—or its opposite

Mr. Acito also taught me to think about context.

One of the films we studied was D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

It remains a deeply racist film. Its technical influence does not erase the damage of its story or the lies it helped turn into spectacle.

But studying it taught me something necessary.

Stories are not automatically good because they are powerful.

Images can awaken compassion.

They can also train prejudice.

A story can make cruelty look heroic. It can make a lie feel emotionally true. It can teach an audience whom to fear, whom to dismiss, and whose suffering does not count.

That is why context matters.

Context is not an excuse.

It is a way of understanding how a story gained power, what it revealed about the people who made it, and why we must pay attention to what stories ask us to feel.

Emotional imagination needs judgment.

Otherwise, it can be used against us.

Escape is not a dirty word

I don’t believe every story needs to be heavy.

We need stories that disturb us, challenge us, and force us to see lives beyond our own.

We also need stories that let us breathe.

Escapism is not automatically shallow.

Sometimes the outside world is loud, cruel, exhausting, or simply too much.

There is nothing wrong with sitting in the dark for two hours while Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance their way around every problem, the cast of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World tears across the country looking for buried money, or Spider-Man swings across Manhattan.

Laughter matters.

Adventure matters.

Fun matters.

Sometimes a movie should simply be a movie.

Sometimes joy is enough.

But even escape can leave something behind.

We may enter the theater trying to forget our lives and leave carrying someone else’s courage, loneliness, foolishness, or hope.

The boulder is still rolling.

The shark is still in the water.

The balloon has still left without Dorothy.

But we are not exactly the same people who sat down.

The story after the story

I used to describe what I wanted from a story as “maximizing the positive emotional experience.”

That sounds like something written on a whiteboard during a meeting nobody wanted to attend.

What I mean is simpler.

I want to tell stories that do not end when the credits roll.

I want the real event to begin in the conversation afterward.

I want someone to leave the story and talk differently.

Think differently.

See a student differently.

See a parent differently.

See pain underneath behavior.

Maybe even believe that an ordinary life still has room for something extraordinary.

That thread runs through all my writing.

It is there when I write a screenplay.

It is there when I help an organization find the human being buried beneath institutional language.

It is there when I write a gala script and try to introduce someone through the one human truth that explains why that person matters.

It is there in presentations, press releases, essays, and marketing.

The container changes.

The hope does not.

And maybe that is a useful question for any of us trying to tell a story:

You want someone to understand what they missed the first time.

You want them to pause before judging.

You want them to recognize themselves in a person they thought was nothing like them.

You want them to feel less alone.

You want them to laugh, breathe, remember, or act.

You may even want them to believe that the scattered parts of their own life are not meaningless after all.

That is how you begin finding the story inside the mess.

You stop asking only, “What happened?”

You ask, “What does this help someone see?”

I want the story to interrupt a judgment.

Start a conversation.

Create a little more compassion.

Offer an hour or two of escape.

Make something impossible feel real.

That is what Ray Bolger did for me in a paneled basement all those years ago. Mr. Acito taught me to ask what a story was trying to say. I suppose I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to answer him.

I believed the Scarecrow had come to life.

In a way, he had.

And if someone someday watches one of my stories and says it helped them become a writer, a filmmaker, a teacher—or even an employee at the last surviving Blockbuster—I’ll take it.

Because movie stories did more than teach me how writing works.

They taught me how to feel.

And then they taught me to ask what those feelings might be asking me to do next.

Thanks for reading. This is part of my 12-week series, Finding the Story Inside the Mess, about creativity, reinvention, movies, nonprofit communication, and the strange process of discovering that the scattered pieces may not be wasted after all.

Reader question: What movie story taught you something before you had the words to explain it?

This week, more than a dozen people downloaded my Story Finder Worksheet after I mentioned it during an online interview.

That was good news.

The less-good news was that I had recently discovered a hole in the system.

The worksheet delivery worked. The follow-up emails worked. The tags worked. People moved through the sequence exactly as they were supposed to.

Then they reached the end.

And sat there.

No task reminded me to follow up. No notification said, “Shawn, this person has heard enough from the machinery. It’s your turn to become a human being.” (Yeah, I had become Spock for a moment!)

The system had produced activity.

It had not produced a conversation.

That’s a pretty good description of what happens inside a lot of organizations.

They post.

They email.

They make graphics.

They schedule campaigns.

They build content calendars with enough colored boxes to resemble the seating chart for a royal wedding. (You should see my wall calendar and the sticky notes I use!)

Everything appears busy.

But the message still isn’t moving anyone.

Because the problem was never a lack of content.

The problem was that nobody had decided what the content needed to do.

Activity feels safer than choosing

One of the easiest traps in modern marketing and communications in general is believing the answer is more.

More posts.

More emails.

More video.

More platforms.

More newsletters.

More campaigns.

More little red dots demanding attention.

More talking in an interview.

Sometimes more is necessary. Silence isn’t a strategy.

But more content won’t fix a message nobody understands.

It usually makes the confusion louder.

This is especially true for nonprofits and organizations, even authors and creators carrying work that matters.

They aren’t short on material. They have programs, events, volunteers, donors, photographs, reports, testimonials, statistics, board updates, press releases, client stories, manuscript pages, interview notes, research, half-finished drafts, old ideas, unused footage, and years of experience nobody has stopped long enough to shape.

The material is everywhere.

So is the pressure to use all of it.

That’s where the trouble starts.

Everything begins competing to be the point.

The event date wants attention.

The program description wants attention.

The sponsor logo wants attention.

The statistic wants attention.

The executive director wants attention.

For authors and creators, it may be the backstory, the research, the clever line, the favorite scene, the side project, or the idea they’ve been trying to squeeze in for three years.

The board member who suggested the campaign slogan probably wants quite a bit of attention.

By the time the message reaches the public, it may be accurate.

It may also be impossible to remember.

Turning up the volume won’t fix the station

You can usually spot the problem in the language.

“Providing comprehensive services.”

“Meeting the needs of the community.”

“Supporting vulnerable populations.”

“Raising awareness.”

“Making a difference.”

For authors and creators, it sounds a little different:

“A story about the human condition.”

“A powerful journey of transformation.”

“Content that inspires people.”

“A project for everyone.”

“Something unlike anything you’ve seen before.”

None of those phrases is technically wrong.

They’re just too vague to carry much weight.

They describe activity without helping us see the person affected, the problem being faced, or what changes because the organization showed up.

Then, because the message isn’t landing, the organization publishes it again.

Or the author explains the book again.

Or the creator makes another version of the same thing and hopes this one finally connects.

A new graphic.

A different photograph.

A shorter caption.

A revised book description.

Another trailer.

A reel with inspirational music.

That’s like turning up the volume on a radio station that isn’t tuned correctly.

Louder static is still static.

Three questions before you create anything

Before deciding what to post next, ask:

What do people need to understand?

What do people need to feel?

What do people need to do?

Those questions look almost insultingly simple.

They aren’t.

They force choices.

What do people need to understand?

Could someone outside the organization explain the point after reading the message once?

Not repeat the mission statement. (Oh, Sam, this one is for you because you helped me discover this!)

Explain the point.

What is happening?

Who is affected?

Why does it matter now?

A message isn’t clear simply because the people closest to it understand it.

Organizations have lived with their language for years. They know what every program name, acronym, and funding category means.

Authors know the backstory, the character history, and the themes beneath the book.

Creators know why the project matters because they’ve been living inside it.

The audience hasn’t.

The public doesn’t.

Confusion usually begins when insiders forget what it was like not to know.

What do people need to feel?

This doesn’t mean every message needs to leave someone weeping over the breakfast table.

Emotion doesn’t require melodrama.

It requires human stakes.

A parent is worried the groceries won’t last until Friday.

A veteran keeps saying he is fine because explaining the truth feels harder.

A student enters the school year without the supplies the teacher expects everyone to have.

A volunteer realizes the person standing at the door isn’t asking for something complicated. He simply doesn’t want to be forgotten.

For an author, the stakes may live in the character who wants something badly enough to risk losing what he already has.

For a creator, they may live in the person behind the project—the fear, need, question, or unfinished struggle that made the work necessary in the first place.

The facts tell us what happened.

The human moment tells us why it matters.

What do people need to do?

This is where a surprising amount of communication falls apart.

The organization gets someone’s attention and leaves that person standing there.

The author gets a reader curious about the book but never gives them a reason to buy it now.

The creator earns a few seconds of attention, then ends with a vague invitation and hopes people figure out the rest.

“Learn more.”

“Support our work.”

“Get involved.”

“Join us.”

“Check out my book.”

“Follow for more.”

Fine. How?

Give what amount?

Attend when?

Register where?

Buy the book where?

Watch what next?

Choose which volunteer shift?

Call whom?

A vague invitation creates vague intentions. And vague intentions are usually defeated by lunch, email, the dog, the laundry, or whatever else walks into the room five minutes later.

People don’t always need harder persuasion.

Sometimes they need a clearer next step.

A story is not decoration

This is where story matters.

A story isn’t the heartwarming paragraph added after the campaign strategy is finished.

It isn’t a testimonial box, a clever book blurb, or an emotional clip dropped into a content plan.

It isn’t garnish.

Story is how people understand what’s at stake.

A mission statement may tell us what an organization does.

A book description may tell us what the story is about.

A creator’s bio may explain what kind of work they make.

But a story lets us see the difference between the world before the work and the world after something changed. In Star Wars (the original movie) Luke is just a farm boy dreaming of becoming a pilot. Then something changes. He becomes more than a pilot, defeating the Death Star.

That doesn’t mean inventing drama (yes, even screenwriters and authors need to understand this).

It doesn’t mean exploiting the person being helped.

It doesn’t mean forcing a character into pain just to make the plot feel important.

It doesn’t mean sanding away every complication so the organization, author, or creator can arrive wearing a cape.

The goal is to tell the truth with enough humanity that someone on the outside can recognize what the facts, the work, or the idea mean in an actual life.

That requires judgment.

What is the lead?

What should be cut?

Which detail makes the situation real?

What proof belongs here?

What sounds impressive inside the conference room but means nothing outside it?

What claim still needs confirmation?

Those aren’t small editorial questions.

They are the work.

A good message chooses

Most communication messes aren’t empty.

They’re crowded.

They contain six decent messages fighting for the same doorway.

A good message chooses.

It chooses who needs to hear it.

It chooses the human stakes.

It chooses what the audience should understand.

It chooses the next action.

It chooses the proof.

It chooses what doesn’t need to be said yet.

That last choice may be the hardest.

Organizations worry about leaving something out because every program matters and every person has worked hard.

Authors worry the reader won’t understand the book unless they explain the backstory, the themes, the world, and the reason they wrote it.

Creators worry that cutting one idea means losing part of what makes the work theirs.

But when everything receives equal weight, nothing leads.

Choosing one message doesn’t make the rest unimportant.

It simply gives the audience a door they can actually walk through

Choosing one story doesn’t mean the other work is unimportant.

It means this message has a job.

The handoff to a human being

When I repaired my Story Finder workflow, I didn’t add another email.

There were already enough emails.

I added a task that reminds me when it’s my turn to follow up personally.

That was the missing handoff.

The system can deliver the worksheet. It can send useful prompts. It can remember the timing better than I can.

But eventually, somebody has to notice the person on the other side.

That’s true of automation.

It’s true of marketing.

It’s true of stories.

Content can carry a message.

It can’t decide what matters.

That part still belongs to us.

So the next time you’re staring at an empty content calendar, a book description that still feels flat, or a project you can’t explain without wandering into five other ideas, ask a different question:

What do people need to finally understand about this work?

Then ask what they need to feel.

Then give that feeling somewhere to go.

You may still need the email, the social post, the photograph, the video, the campaign, the book page, or the trailer.

But now they won’t be random pieces of activity.

They’ll be parts of a clearer story, each doing a specific job.

A story with a person inside it.

A story with stakes.

A story with a job.

Thanks for reading. This is part of my 12-week series, Finding the Story Inside the Mess, about creativity, reinvention, movies, nonprofit communication, second acts, and the strange process of discovering that the scattered pieces may not be wasted after all.

Reader question

Where are you producing more content when the real problem may be an unclear story?

I’d love to hear what you’re trying to help people understand—and where the message keeps getting lost.

Leave a comment

This week, more than a dozen people downloaded my Story Finder Worksheet after I mentioned it during an online interview.

That was good news.

The less-good news was that I had recently discovered a hole in the system.

The worksheet delivery worked. The follow-up emails worked. The tags worked. People moved through the sequence exactly as they were supposed to.

Then they reached the end.

And sat there.

No task reminded me to follow up. No notification said, “Shawn, this person has heard enough from the machinery. It’s your turn to become a human being.”

Apparently, I had become Spock for a moment.

The system had produced activity.

It had not produced a conversation.

That’s a pretty good description of what happens inside a lot of organizations.

They post.

They email.

They make graphics.

They schedule campaigns.

They build content calendars with enough colored boxes to resemble the seating chart for a royal wedding.

Everything appears busy.

But the message still isn’t moving anyone.

Because the problem was never a lack of content.

The problem was that nobody had decided what the content needed to do.

Activity feels safer than choosing

One of the easiest traps in modern marketing and communication is believing the answer is more.

More posts.

More emails.

More video.

More platforms.

More newsletters.

More campaigns.

More little red dots demanding attention.

Sometimes more is necessary. Silence isn’t a strategy.

But more content won’t fix a message nobody understands.

It usually makes the confusion louder.

This is especially true for nonprofits, organizations, authors, and creators carrying work that matters.

They aren’t short on material. They have programs, events, volunteers, donors, photographs, reports, testimonials, statistics, board updates, press releases, client stories, manuscript pages, interview notes, research, half-finished drafts, old ideas, unused footage, and years of experience nobody has stopped long enough to shape.

The material is everywhere.

So is the pressure to use all of it.

That’s where the trouble starts.

Everything begins competing to be the point.

The event date wants attention.

The program description wants attention.

The sponsor logo wants attention.

The statistic wants attention.

The executive director wants attention.

For authors and creators, it may be the backstory, the research, the clever line, the favorite scene, the side project, or the idea they’ve been trying to squeeze in for three years.

The board member who suggested the campaign slogan probably wants quite a bit of attention.

By the time the message reaches the public, it may be accurate.

It may also be impossible to remember.

Turning up the volume won’t fix the station

You can usually spot the problem in the language.

For organizations, it sounds like this:

“Providing comprehensive services.”

“Meeting the needs of the community.”

“Supporting vulnerable populations.”

“Raising awareness.”

“Making a difference.”

For authors and creators, it sounds a little different:

“A story about the human condition.”

“A powerful journey of transformation.”

“Content that inspires people.”

“A project for everyone.”

“Something unlike anything you’ve seen before.”

None of those phrases is technically wrong.

They’re just too vague to carry much weight.

They describe activity without helping us see the person affected, the problem being faced, or what changes because the work exists.

Then, because the message isn’t landing, the organization publishes it again.

Or the author explains the book again.

Or the creator makes another version of the same thing and hopes this one finally connects.

A new graphic.

A different photograph.

A shorter caption.

A revised book description.

Another trailer.

A reel with inspirational music.

That’s like turning up the volume on a radio station that isn’t tuned correctly.

Louder static is still static.

Three questions before you create anything

Before deciding what to post next, ask:

Those questions look almost insultingly simple.

They aren’t.

They force choices.

What do people need to understand?

Could someone outside the organization explain the point after reading the message once?

A message isn’t clear simply because the people closest to it understand it.

Organizations have lived with their language for years. They know what every program name, acronym, and funding category means.

Authors know the backstory, the character history, and the themes beneath the book.

Creators know why the project matters because they’ve been living inside it.

The audience hasn’t.

Confusion usually begins when insiders forget what it was like not to know.

What do people need to feel?

This doesn’t mean every message needs to leave someone weeping over the breakfast table.

Emotion doesn’t require melodrama.

It requires human stakes.

A parent is worried the groceries won’t last until Friday.

A veteran keeps saying he is fine because explaining the truth feels harder.

A student enters the school year without the supplies the teacher expects everyone to have.

A volunteer realizes the person standing at the door isn’t asking for something complicated. He simply doesn’t want to be forgotten.

For an author, the stakes may live in the character who wants something badly enough to risk losing what he already has.

For a creator, they may live in the person behind the project—the fear, need, question, or unfinished struggle that made the work necessary in the first place.

The facts tell us what happened.

The human moment tells us why it matters.

What do people need to do?

This is where a surprising amount of communication falls apart.

The organization gets someone’s attention and leaves that person standing there.

The author gets a reader curious about the book but never gives them a reason to buy it now.

The creator earns a few seconds of attention, then ends with a vague invitation and hopes people figure out the rest.

“Learn more.”

“Support our work.”

“Get involved.”

“Join us.”

“Check out my book.”

“Follow for more.”

Fine. How?

Give what amount?

Attend when?

Register where?

Buy the book where?

Watch what next?

Choose which volunteer shift?

Call whom?

A vague invitation creates vague intentions. And vague intentions are usually defeated by lunch, email, the dog, the laundry, or whatever else walks into the room five minutes later.

People don’t always need harder persuasion.

Sometimes they need a clearer next step.

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A story is not decoration

This is where story matters.

A story isn’t the heartwarming paragraph added after the campaign strategy is finished.

It isn’t a testimonial box, a clever book blurb, or an emotional clip dropped into a content plan.

It isn’t garnish.

Story is how people understand what’s at stake.

A mission statement may tell us what an organization does.

A book description may tell us what the story is about.

A creator’s bio may explain what kind of work they make.

But a story lets us see the difference between the world before the work and the world after something changes.

In the original Star Wars, Luke begins as a farm boy staring toward the horizon and dreaming of becoming a pilot. By the end, he has helped destroy the Death Star. The plot matters, but the change in Luke is what gives the plot meaning.

That doesn’t mean inventing drama. Yes, even screenwriters and authors need to understand this.

It doesn’t mean exploiting the person being helped.

It doesn’t mean forcing a character into pain just to make the plot feel important.

It doesn’t mean sanding away every complication so the organization, author, or creator can arrive wearing a cape.

The goal is to tell the truth with enough humanity that someone on the outside can recognize what the facts, the work, or the idea mean in an actual life.

That requires judgment.

What is the lead?

What should be cut?

Which detail makes the situation real?

What proof belongs here?

What sounds impressive inside the conference room but means nothing outside it?

What claim still needs confirmation?

Those aren’t small editorial questions.

They are the work.

A good message chooses

Most communication messes aren’t empty.

They’re crowded.

They contain six decent messages fighting for the same doorway.

A good message chooses.

It chooses who needs to hear it.

It chooses the human stakes.

It chooses what the audience should understand.

It chooses the next action.

It chooses the proof.

It chooses what doesn’t need to be said yet.

That last choice may be the hardest.

Organizations worry about leaving something out because every program matters and every person has worked hard.

Authors worry the reader won’t understand the book unless they explain the backstory, the themes, the world, and the reason they wrote it.

Creators worry that cutting one idea means losing part of what makes the work theirs.

But when everything receives equal weight, nothing leads.

Choosing one message doesn’t make the rest unimportant.

It gives the audience a door they can actually walk through.

This message has a job. Let it do that job before asking it to carry everything else.

The handoff to a human being

When I repaired my Story Finder workflow, I didn’t add another email.

There were already enough emails.

I added a task that reminds me when it’s my turn to follow up personally.

That was the missing handoff.

The system can deliver the worksheet. It can send useful prompts. It can remember the timing better than I can.

But eventually, somebody has to notice the person on the other side.

That’s true of automation.

It’s true of marketing.

It’s true of stories.

Content can carry a message.

It can’t decide what matters.

That part still belongs to us.

So the next time you’re staring at an empty content calendar, a book description that still feels flat, or a project you can’t explain without wandering into five other ideas, ask a different question:

What do people need to finally understand about this work?

Then ask what they need to feel.

Then give that feeling somewhere to go.

You may still need the email, the social post, the photograph, the video, the campaign, the book page, or the trailer.

But now they won’t be random pieces of activity.

They’ll be parts of a clearer story, each doing a specific job.

A person we can recognize.

Stakes we can feel.

A next step we can take.

Thanks for reading. This is part of my 12-week series, Finding the Story Inside the Mess, about creativity, reinvention, movies, nonprofit communication, second acts, and the strange process of discovering that the scattered pieces may not be wasted after all.

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Reader question

Where are you producing more content when the real problem may be an unclear story?

I’d love to hear what you’re trying to help people understand—and where the message keeps getting lost.

Leave a comment

I recently discovered that I had already written an essay called “Revision Is Not Failure.”

That was awkward.

Here I was, planning the second essay in a 12-week series, feeling pretty good about the title, when I realized an earlier version was already sitting on Substack.

Apparently, I needed the reminder badly enough to write it twice.

My first reaction was embarrassment.

Had I run out of ideas by Week Two?

Was I repeating myself?

Had the new series wandered into reruns before the opening credits were finished?

Then the better answer arrived.

Revise it.

The earlier essay wasn’t proof that the idea had been used up. It was raw material. I had reached for the subject once. I understood part of it.

Now life had given me more to say.

That is what revision does.

It lets us return to something we thought we understood and discover that we didn’t understand all of it yet.

The pressure we put on first drafts

For years, I treated revision like proof that I had missed something the first time.

If a scene didn’t work, maybe I wasn’t as good a screenwriter as I hoped.

If an essay wandered, maybe the idea wasn’t strong enough.

If a client message needed another pass, maybe I had failed to find the right words quickly enough.

If a business offer confused people, maybe the business itself was a mistake.

We put a ridiculous amount of pressure on first drafts.

We want the screenplay to arrive with its structure intact.

We want the business offer to make instant sense.

We want the career decision to prove itself immediately.

We want the next version of our life to walk through the door fully dressed and ready for its close-up.

That would be convenient.

It is also not how most worthwhile things are made.

A first draft is not the promise.

It is the raw material.

It tells you what you were trying to say before you knew how to say it. It exposes the vague parts, the borrowed language, the false confidence, and the places where you hoped enthusiasm could do the work of structure.

The first version shows you the shape of the problem.

That isn’t failure.

That is where the real work becomes visible.

The brave thing is letting people see it

This past weekend, I watched several new plays presented through Cincinnati LAB Theatre as staged workshops and readings.

A workshop production is a strange act of courage.

The playwright knows the work may not be finished.

The actors know they are helping discover the play, not presenting some perfect version delivered from the mountaintop.

The audience knows—or should know—that what they are seeing is part performance and part investigation.

Does the scene hold?

Does the joke land?

Do we understand what the character wants?

Does the ending feel earned?

Where does the audience lean forward?

Where do people start shifting in their seats?

Those are not signs that the play has failed.

They are questions the playwright could not fully answer while sitting alone with the script.

In Waiting for Fair, I could see the shape of a romantic comedy and the possibilities inside its workshop form.

Sing For Me arrived with sharper questions about identity, art, and who gets to control a person’s voice.

My Dinner with Carly had an engaging setup but needed more friction underneath the conversation.

S.A.G. was funny and alive, but I wanted more time with those ghosts and the world the play was beginning to build.

None of that means the writers should abandon their work.

It means the plays have started talking back.

That is what happens when words leave the laptop and enter a room.

An actor finds a laugh the writer didn’t know was there.

A pause reveals more than a paragraph of dialogue.

A scene that looked perfectly clear on the page becomes muddy under the lights.

A supporting character walks onto the stage and quietly steals the play.

That isn’t humiliation.

That is information.

And information gives the writer something real to revise.

Revision is where the lie gets exposed

I see this in screenwriting too.

A script can have a strong premise, characters you care about, and emotional territory worth exploring—and still not work yet.

The opening may take too long.

The hero may not be under enough pressure.

The secret that seems obvious in your head may be invisible on the page.

The scene you love may be protecting the story from the harder scene it actually needs.

Sometimes the dialogue sounds emotional, but nobody is making a difficult choice.

Sometimes the plot is busy, but nothing is changing.

Sometimes the writer keeps explaining the stakes because the characters are not living them.

Revision is where that lie gets exposed.

The same thing happens in business.

A service can have a clever name, a long list of deliverables, and a polished sales page and still leave people wondering what they are actually buying.

That isn’t an offer.

It is a pile of tasks wearing a nice jacket.

I have been learning this while building Mighty Maus Media and The Story Finder System.

I can explain everything I know how to do. Writing. Messaging. Public relations. Video. Strategy. Websites. Donor communication. Story development.

The problem is that the client should not have to sort through my toolbox.

The client needs to understand the problem I solve.

That has required revision.

Cutting things.

Renaming things.

Testing questions.

Building a survey, watching someone use it, and realizing which parts made sense only because I already knew what I meant.

The work wasn’t wrong.

It simply wasn’t finished telling me what it needed to become.

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You can only revise alone for so long

Putting unfinished work in front of people is frightening because the work still feels connected to your worth.

When a scene falls flat, it does not feel like the scene failed.

It feels like you failed.

Many of us carry a childish bargain into creative work:

If I am truly talented, the first version will prove it.

But the workshop room exposes that bargain as nonsense.

The playwright is not promising that every choice is final.

The playwright is saying:

This is what I have discovered so far. Now let me see what happens when other people encounter it.

There is humility in that.

There is also confidence.

You have to believe the unfinished work is worth testing before you can discover whether it is worth finishing.

Writers sometimes say they are revising when they are really protecting the work from contact with reality.

They move scenes around.

They polish sentences.

They rename files.

They keep the work safely inside a world where no audience can misunderstand it because no audience has seen it.

But eventually, revision requires witnesses.

A play needs a room.

A screenplay needs readers.

A business offer needs a buyer.

An essay needs someone other than the writer nodding at it.

Until then, you may only be improving the version that exists in your imagination.

A life can need another draft

Revision is not only for pages, websites, and business offers.

Sometimes the thing being revised is the story you thought your life was going to follow.

I had a career story.

It changed.

I had a timeline.

It didn’t hold.

I had creative dreams that I assumed would look different by now. They didn’t disappear, but they became tangled with less cinematic matters: income, age, energy, clients, health, family responsibilities, and the stubborn need to keep the lights on.

Nobody puts those details in the inspirational montage.

The montage shows the person reopening the laptop.

It skips the invoice that hasn’t been paid.

It shows the fresh notebook.

It skips the afternoon spent fixing a form field that refuses to store the answer in the right place.

It shows the triumphant second act.

It skips the part where you are unsure whether anyone will buy a ticket.

That is the real version of reinvention.

It does not feel like becoming someone new.

It feels like going back through the pages of who you have already been and asking what still belongs.

What should be cut?

What was never true?

What has been here all along?

What part of the old dream needs a different form?

Revision asks us to release the version we were attached to without assuming the whole story is dead.

A job ends. That does not mean the work was meaningless.

A screenplay stalls. That does not mean the emotional truth inside it has disappeared.

A business offer misses. That does not mean you have nothing useful to sell.

A life changes shape. That does not mean the life has lost its point.

Sometimes the original form was simply too small, too vague, or built for conditions that no longer exist.

Revision can be an act of mercy

There is something merciful about revision.

It says the first version does not have to carry the full weight of the final meaning.

The early attempt can be awkward and still be necessary.

You can misunderstand the work before you understand it.

You can build the wrong container around the right idea.

You can take a detour and still bring something useful home.

You can write an essay called “Revision Is Not Failure,” forget you wrote it, and discover that the next version begins with forgetting you wrote it.

Nothing is wasted automatically.

But nothing is rescued automatically either.

That is where judgment enters.

Some scenes need to go.

Some projects should end.

Some business ideas are complicated because they are not good.

Some relationships do not need another draft.

Revision is not an excuse to drag everything forward forever.

It is a way to look honestly at what remains alive.

Revision and avoidance are not the same thing

This is the part writers do not enjoy hearing.

Revision can become a hiding place.

Revision sharpens the work.

Avoidance keeps reopening the work so you never have to release it.

Revision cuts.

Avoidance decorates.

Revision makes the promise clearer.

Avoidance changes the font.

I know that trap.

A person can spend a heroic amount of time organizing drafts, renaming folders, adjusting frameworks, testing software, changing headings, and making sure the file marked FINAL is replaced by the more accurate FINAL_v7_REVISED_REALFINAL.

It feels productive.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it is fear with excellent file management.

I do not want to become a man with beautifully organized drafts and no public body of work.

That is not craft.

That is a storage problem.

The rule I am trying to live by is this:

Revise until the work is clear enough to be useful. Then publish it, send it, pitch it, test it, or put it in someone’s hands.

The response may lead to another revision.

Good.

Now the work is meeting reality instead of hiding from it.

Let the work enter the room

We tend to think abandoning something is brave because the decision feels clean.

Sometimes it is brave.

Sometimes it is relief disguised as wisdom.

Revision asks a harder question:

Is this truly dead, or am I disappointed that it did not arrive fully formed?

A first attempt can fail without making the larger effort a failure.

The website may need a clearer message.

The offer may need a sharper outcome.

The screenplay may need a stronger opening.

The career may need another route.

The dream may need to surrender its old costume.

The life may need a new draft.

That does not mean you were foolish to begin.

It means beginning gave you something to revise.

The writers whose work I saw this weekend did something braver than pretending their plays were finished.

They let the work enter the room.

They let actors test it.

They let audiences feel it.

They let laughter, silence, confusion, and attention reveal what still needed work.

That was not failure.

That was the next draft arriving in public.

And maybe that is the real lesson.

Revision is not proof that the work was wrong.

It is how the work becomes more honest.

It is how the promise becomes clearer.

Sometimes, it is how we discover the story was still alive.

It just needed another draft.

Thanks for reading. This is part of my 12-week series, Finding the Story Inside the Mess, about creativity, reinvention, movies, nonprofit communication, and the strange process of discovering that the scattered pieces may not be wasted after all.

What in your life needs revision—not abandonment?

A few nights ago, I sat at my computer and watched years of my creative life disappear into folders.

Not disappear in the bad way.

For once, the screenplays went into a screenplay folder. The essays went into the essay folder. LinkedIn posts, consulting material, client work, podcast ideas and half-built projects finally got their own places.

I even used a Terminal command to create part of the filing system because there are certain moments in life when handing the job to the computer feels safer than trusting yourself with another round of clicking and dragging.

For years, my files had lived under names like:

Final Draft

New Final Draft

Final Draft Revised

Final Draft Revised 2

And, somewhere in the digital wilderness, the traditional writer’s cry for help:

Final Final

The mess wasn’t limited to my computer.

I had screenplays I still believed in. Essays about movies, creativity, faith, disappointment and getting older. Notes for a podcast. Nonprofit messaging frameworks. Client proposals. Story ideas. Journals. Workshops. Half-built guides. Business offers. Pieces of speeches.

Some of it was finished.

Some of it was almost finished.

Some of it had been almost finished for so long it should have qualified for Social Security.

Looking at all of it together, I felt the familiar embarrassment.

Why hadn’t I done more with this?

Why couldn’t I pick one thing?

Why did every interest seem to produce another folder, another notebook or another promise to myself?

The easy conclusion was that I lacked focus.

That may be partly true. I’m not going to turn every abandoned document into a sacred artifact. Some ideas died because they weren’t good. Some projects should remain buried beneath six outdated versions of Microsoft Word.

But that wasn’t the whole story.

The longer I looked at the pile, the more I began to notice that the pieces weren’t as unrelated as they seemed.

They kept returning to the same territory.

People trying again.

Organizations struggling to explain why their work matters.

Writers searching for the emotional truth underneath the plot.

Movies that make ordinary life feel larger.

Dreams that didn’t happen on schedule but refused to go away.

The material had been changing costumes, but the question underneath it kept returning:

How do we take scattered experience and shape it into a story that matters?

That question shows up when I revise a screenplay and realize the plot is working, but the human reason for watching it is still buried.

It shows up when a nonprofit gives me pages of program information, but cannot explain what changes for one person because the organization exists.

It shows up when I write about old movies and try to understand why a scene made decades ago can still reach across the room and grab me.

And it shows up in the strange business of rebuilding a creative life at 61.

For a long time, I thought I needed a cleaner résumé.

Then I thought I needed a sharper niche.

Then a better website. A new offer. A new system. A more organized calendar. Possibly a larger coffee cup.

Some of those things helped.

But none of them answered the deeper question.

What was all this work trying to become?

The problem wasn’t a lack of material

Most people who want to write, build a business or communicate meaningful work assume they need more.

More ideas.

More content.

More time.

More credentials.

More proof that they’re finally ready.

Organizations do the same thing.

They collect more statistics, testimonials, program descriptions, reports, photographs and talking points. Then they bury the audience beneath the pile and wonder why nobody feels the urgency of the work.

The problem is often not missing information.

It’s that everything is competing to be the point.

A folder full of material is not a body of work.

A page full of facts is not a message.

A life full of experiences is not automatically a story.

The thread has to be found.

That requires choices.

And choices are where this gets uncomfortable.

Once you admit the material is already there, you lose the excuse of waiting for the perfect idea.

You have to decide what belongs.

You have to cut what doesn’t.

You have to choose the essay instead of continuing to dream vaguely about the book.

You have to finish the screenplay page instead of enjoying the identity of being someone who is “working on a screenplay.”

You have to publish something before you fully understand what the larger body of work will become.

That last part is difficult for me.

I like understanding the whole map before taking the next step. My friend, Mike, calls it the “30,000-foot view.”

Life has not been especially cooperative with that preference!

Some of the mess is evidence

We usually treat unfinished work as evidence against ourselves.

The abandoned draft proves we lack discipline.

The business idea that changed proves we didn’t know what we were doing.

The career that ended differently than expected proves we took a wrong turn.

Maybe.

But sometimes the unfinished material is evidence that we’ve been circling something important before we had the language to name it. David Lynch told me it was “gathering the evidence of experience.”

That doesn’t mean every scrap must be saved.

It means we should look before we throw everything away.

• What keeps returning?

• What question appears in different forms?

• What kind of person, problem or moment keeps catching your attention?

• What do people repeatedly ask you to help them understand?

Those questions matter more than the labels on the folders.

My labels include screenwriter, copywriter, teacher, communications director, consultant, filmmaker, essayist and occasionally the helpful creative guy who says yes before asking enough questions.

The titles changed.

The work underneath them didn’t change as much as I thought.

I keep walking into complexity and looking for the human thread.

• Who is this about?

• What happened?

• Why does it matter?

• What is at stake?

• What should someone understand, feel or do next?

That is true whether the material is a screenplay, a donor appeal, a business offer or a life that no longer resembles the original outline.

The work needs a container

Finding the thread does not mean throwing every interest into one giant personal-brand stew.

That would create a new mess and give it a logo.

Different work still needs different homes.

My consulting business has a job. It helps people and organizations find the story they’re trying to tell, clarify the message and turn it into communication people can understand and act on.

My creative work has another job. It gives me a place to explore movies, reinvention, ambition, disappointment, faith, aging and the stubborn desire to keep making something.

The thread connects them.

The containers keep them from becoming mush.

That may be the part I was missing.

I didn’t need to force every piece into one project.

I needed to understand what connected the projects, then give each one a proper place to live.

That is what the folder cleanup meant.

It wasn’t glamorous. Nobody is going to make a sports movie about a man reorganizing his iCloud Drive.

But it was a small declaration.

This screenplay belongs somewhere.

This essay belongs somewhere.

This business idea has a job.

This unfinished project needs a decision.

And this pile of work is no longer allowed to sit there silently accusing me.

This series is the next decision

For the next 12 weeks, I’m going to explore the thread in public.

I’ll write about revision, movies, nonprofit stories, second acts, tangled creativity, mission statements, helpful creative people with bad boundaries, and the work we fear may have been wasted.

I don’t know whether these essays will eventually become a book, a workshop, a speech or something I haven’t named yet.

That is no longer a requirement for beginning.

The job is to write the next honest piece.

Then the next one.

To let the body of work become visible through finished work instead of private intention.

I have spent enough time treating my scattered pieces as evidence that I was behind. (David Lynch, you would be proud. Although it took me six years to really have your words to me sink in!)

I’m beginning to see them differently.

They are raw material.

They still need judgment. Structure. Revision. A few merciful deletions.

But they are here.

And somewhere inside them is the story I have been trying to tell.

Maybe you have a version of that pile, too.

A notebook full of fragments.

A hard drive full of drafts.

A career that wandered.

A project that keeps returning after you’ve tried to become sensible.

Before you call it failure, look again.

The story may already be there.

It may simply be waiting for you to find the thread.

Thanks for reading. This is the first essay in my 12-week series, Finding the Story Inside the Mess, about creativity, reinvention, movies, meaningful communication and the strange process of discovering that the scattered pieces may not have been wasted after all.

Reader question: What unfinished idea, project or dream keeps following you around?

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The tiny promotion that caught my attention

A few days ago, I saw a Lowe’s promotion for a free beach bucket giveaway.

Nothing earth-shattering.

A bucket. A shovel. A little summer freebie.

The kind of thing a parent might grab on the way to buying mulch, charcoal, patio lights or whatever else we convince ourselves we need before a holiday weekend.

But the marketing move behind it stopped me.

Because Lowe’s didn’t just say, “Hey, come get a free beach bucket.”

They made it easy to remember.

They gave people a way to add the event to their calendar.

And when I did, the reminder automatically connected to my local Lowe’s location.

That is not an accident.

That is smart marketing.

Not flashy. Not complicated. Not some overcooked brand campaign with a 47-slide deck and a slogan nobody will remember.

Just a simple invitation paired with a frictionless action.

That’s the lesson.

Where most marketing falls apart

Most marketing dies in the gap between interest and action.

Someone sees your event.

They think, “That sounds nice.”

They scroll.

They forget.

Not because they are lazy. Not because they don’t care. Not because your message was worthless.

Because life is loud.

The dog needs to go out. The kid needs to be picked up. The grass needs cut. The email comes in. The text pings. The algorithm moves on.

And your audience’s good intention disappears into the swamp of daily life.

Lowe’s understood something a lot of organizations miss:

Attention is not commitment.

A like is not attendance.

A view is not a visit.

A “That sounds great” is not a person walking through the door.

The genius of a calendar button

So Lowe’s gave the customer a next step.

Not a vague one.

Not “Learn more.”

Not “Stay tuned.”

Not “Check back later.”

They offered a tiny piece of commitment:

Put this on your calendar.

That one move changes the relationship.

Now the event has a place in the customer’s day.

Now it has a time.

Now it has a location.

Now the promotion isn’t just floating in the feed.

It’s sitting beside the dentist appointment, the soccer practice, the grocery run and the Fourth of July cookout.

That matters.

The lesson for nonprofits and small businesses

This is where nonprofits, small businesses, churches, schools, theaters and community organizations should be paying attention.

How many times do we promote something and then wonder why people didn’t show up?

We posted it.

We emailed it.

We made the flyer.

We boosted the event.

We said it was important.

Then the room is half full, the fundraiser underperforms, the volunteer shift doesn’t fill, or the community event feels thinner than it should.

And we blame the audience.

But maybe the audience didn’t need more information.

Maybe they needed a clearer next step.

Maybe they needed less friction.

Maybe they needed the invitation to move from “interesting” to “scheduled.”

That is the difference between awareness and action.

Awareness says, “Here’s something happening.”

Action says, “Here’s exactly what to do next.”

The bucket was never really the point

Lowe’s gave away a beach bucket.

But the real offer was not the bucket.

The real offer was a reason to visit the store.

A reason to open the app.

A reason to use the rewards account.

A reason to walk into a specific location at a specific time.

That is the hidden genius of small promotions.

The object is not always the point.

The bucket is the doorway.

Specific beats vague

The same principle applies almost everywhere.

A nonprofit does not just need to say, “Support our summer campaign.”

It needs to say, “Give $25 by Friday to help provide meals for local families.”

A theater does not just need to say, “Come see our show.”

It needs to say, “Pick your seats before opening weekend sells out.”

A school does not just need to say, “Volunteer opportunities are available.”

It needs to say, “Choose one two-hour shift for Saturday’s event.”

A small business does not just need to say, “Stop by sometime.”

It needs to say, “Join us Saturday morning, add it to your calendar, and bring a friend.”

Specific beats vague.

Scheduled beats someday.

Action beats awareness.

Don’t just persuade. Guide.

The best marketing does not merely create interest.

It helps people act on the interest they already have.

That is the part we often miss.

We think our audience needs to be persuaded harder.

Sometimes they just need to be guided better.

There is a difference.

Persuasion tries to convince someone to care.

Guidance helps someone who already cares take the next step.

That is why the calendar button matters.

It is not just a tech feature.

It is a behavioral bridge.

It moves the person from passive attention to active intention.

And in a world where everyone is fighting for attention, intention is gold.

What is your beach bucket?

So here is the question I keep coming back to:

Where are we making people remember too much?

Where are we assuming they will come back later?

Where are we asking them to care, but not giving them a simple way to act?

Because “come support us” is not a strategy.

“Don’t forget” is not a follow-up plan.

“Hope to see you there” is not enough.

Give people the next step.

Make it obvious.

Make it easy.

Make it calendar-worthy.

Lowe’s understood that a beach bucket could become a store visit.

The rest of us should be asking what our version of the beach bucket is.

Not because we need gimmicks.

Because we need better bridges between the people who care and the action we hope they’ll take.

If this piece helped you think differently about marketing, messaging or the small steps that move people from interest to action, I’d be grateful if you subscribed.

Next week, I’m beginning a 12-week essay series on work, hope, reinvention and building a more honest creative life — one piece at a time.

The anniversary behind the reflection

I’ve been thinking a lot about the founding of the country this week.

Part of that is timing. On July 4, 2026, America marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That’s a big number. A national milestone. The kind of anniversary that invites fireworks, speeches, documentaries, commemorative coins, and probably more patriotic branding than any of us know what to do with.

But I’ve found myself less interested in the celebration and more interested in the struggle.

Watching, reading, and reconsidering

I’ve been watching The American Experiment on Netflix, the documentary series produced by Tom Hanks that looks at the American Revolution, the drafting of the Constitution, and the early presidency of George Washington. What I appreciate about it is the range of voices. Republicans. Democrats. Professors. Historians. Authors. People who don’t all seem to be trying to flatten the story into one clean point of view.

That matters to me.

Because the founding of this country should not be treated like a greeting card.

It was not simple.

It was not clean.

It was not painless.

And it certainly was not equally experienced by everyone.

The human beings under pressure

I also challenged myself to read David McCullough’s 1776 by July Fourth. I picked up my copy at the Friends of the Cincinnati Public Library, which feels like exactly the kind of place where a person should stumble into a book like that.

I’m almost at the end now, and what has stayed with me is not some polished mythology of inevitable victory.

It’s the uncertainty.

The exhaustion.

The bad weather.

The disease.

The hunger.

The fear.

The miscalculations.

The number of moments when the whole thing could have collapsed.

McCullough’s book is not about marble statues. It is about human beings under pressure.

That is what I keep coming back to.

The people who helped create this country were not walking through history with a guarantee in their pocket. They were improvising, arguing, doubting, risking, failing, and trying again. George Washington was not inevitable. The Revolution was not inevitable. The survival of the experiment was not inevitable.

And while we remember the Founding Fathers, we should not forget the Founding Mothers.

Martha Washington and Abigail Adams were not decorative figures standing politely in the background of history. They carried fear, separation, uncertainty, and sacrifice. They supported men whose choices could have cost them everything. The Revolution did not happen only in halls of debate or on battlefields. It also happened in homes, letters, farms, kitchens, and long seasons of waiting.

That part matters too.

The wound closer to home

But there is another part I do not want to lose.

Earlier this year, I read Peter Cozzens’ Tecumseh and the Prophet, which tells the story of the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa and their resistance to the expansion of the young United States into the Midwest. That history runs directly through the region I call home.

Ohio is not just a place on a map in that story.

It is part of the wound.

And we should be honest about that.

The American story includes courage, sacrifice, and imagination.

It also includes removal, broken promises, violence, and theft.

Both things are true.

If we only tell the noble version, we lie.

If we only tell the shameful version, we flatten the people who struggled, sacrificed, and built something that has still allowed generations to argue, reform, dissent, worship, publish, vote, assemble, and demand better.

The truth is harder.

The truth asks more of us.

The book that widened the wound

I’ve also been reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and I plan to visit the Harriet Beecher Stowe House here in Cincinnati. That feels important too, because any honest reflection on American liberty has to confront slavery and the long, brutal delay between the ideals written on paper and the rights actually granted to human beings.

The book has often been called “the book that started the Civil War.” Whether that phrase is legend, shorthand, or something close to truth, the point still matters: stories can disturb a nation’s conscience. They can force people to see what comfort, politics, and distance have allowed them to ignore.

I’ve also been reading Toni Morrison — Beloved and Song of Solomon — and her work reminds me that history does not stay trapped in the past. It lives in bodies, families, names, silences, songs, and ghosts. Morrison understood that liberty is not only a legal condition. It is also a question of memory, identity, and whether a person is allowed to fully belong to themselves.

And slavery is not a side chapter in the American story.

It is central to it.

So is abolition. The Civil War. Reconstruction. Jim Crow. The civil rights movement. The long, unfinished struggle to make liberty more than a founding word.

That does not cancel the promise of America.

It exposes the cost of failing to honor it.

Not freedom. Liberty.

That may be why I’ve been thinking about one word in particular:

Liberty.

Not freedom.

Liberty.

We use the word “freedom” so often that it sometimes feels like marketing copy. Freedom sales. Freedom weekends. Freedom as a slogan. Freedom as a bumper sticker. Freedom as a mood.

But the Declaration of Independence does not say “life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness.”

It says “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That distinction feels important.

Freedom can sound like doing whatever I want.

Liberty asks a harder question:

What rights do we share, protect, and preserve so that people can live with dignity under law?

Freedom can become personal preference.

Liberty requires civic responsibility.

Freedom can become a brand.

Liberty has to become a practice.

I don’t think we are “free” in the loose, careless way we often use that word. We live in a republic. We live under laws. We live with obligations, limits, courts, elections, neighbors, consequences, and disagreements.

What we have are liberties.

And liberties can be protected.

Liberties can be expanded.

Liberties can be denied.

Liberties can be taken for granted.

That last one worries me.

A decent respect

I’ve traveled enough to know that I should not take these liberties lightly. I’ve been in places where speech, movement, dissent, religion, opportunity, or even basic expectations of daily life feel different from what I have known here.

I’ve also traveled enough within the United States to know that liberty is not experienced the same way in every state, every community, or every body.

That is uncomfortable.

It should be.

A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires us to be honest about what we have inherited.

That phrase from the Declaration has been ringing in my ears: “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

What a remarkable idea.

Before making the case for independence, the founders believed they owed the world an explanation.

Not just a complaint.

Not just a tantrum.

An argument.

A reasoned case.

A public accounting.

That feels painfully relevant right now.

We live in a time when everyone has opinions, but fewer people seem interested in decent respect. We perform outrage. We sort ourselves into camps. We turn history into ammunition. We confuse volume with conviction and contempt with courage.

But the Declaration begins from a different posture.

It says, in effect: If we are going to take this step, we need to explain why.

That is not weakness.

That is moral seriousness.

Gratitude without blindness

Maybe that is one of the lessons worth carrying into America’s 250th year.

Not that the founders were perfect.

They were not.

Not that the country has always lived up to its ideals.

It has not.

Not that we should ignore the suffering of Native Americans, enslaved people, women, immigrants, the poor, or anyone else whose experience complicates the celebration.

We should not.

But maybe we can still honor the struggle without pretending it was pure.

Maybe we can still be grateful for our liberties without turning gratitude into blindness.

Maybe we can still love a country enough to tell the truth about it.

That, to me, feels more patriotic than pretending the story is simple.

The experiment is still asking something of us

The early American experiment was harrowing. The Revolution was harrowing. The frontier was harrowing. The Lewis and Clark expedition was harrowing. Native resistance to expansion was harrowing. The creation of this country was not a clean march toward destiny.

It was a struggle.

And we are still struggling.

That does not mean the experiment failed.

It means the experiment is still asking something of us.

It asks whether we can hold liberty with humility.

Whether we can disagree without dehumanizing.

Whether we can remember the people who sacrificed without erasing the people who suffered.

Whether we can tell the truth and still build.

Whether “We the People” is a phrase we admire from a distance or a responsibility we are willing to carry.

So this July Fourth, I’m not thinking only about freedom.

I’m thinking about liberty.

The liberties named, argued for, fought over, denied, expanded, and inherited.

The liberties I have too often taken for granted.

The liberties others had to demand when the country refused to recognize them.

The liberties that still require care.

Fireworks are fine.

Parades are fine.

Cookouts are fine.

I’ll enjoy the holiday too.

But beneath all of that, I hope we remember this:

The American story was never simple.

Liberty was never cheap.

And if we are going to inherit the promise, we also have to inherit the responsibility.

God Bless, America!

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For most of my life, I rented my hope.

I didn’t realize I was doing it.

At the time, it felt like ambition. It felt like purpose. It felt like chasing opportunities.

But looking back, I can see the pattern.

When I worked at Blockbuster Video, my hope wasn’t really in the paycheck. It was in the movies. Every shift felt like I was one step closer to the world I wanted to be part of.

When I became a teacher and later a communications director, hope attached itself to the title. To the idea that I was making a difference. To the belief that the work mattered.

At Children’s Home, the hope was tied to helping people.

At REALTOR® Alliance, it was tied to creativity, opportunity, and a leader who appreciated what I brought to the table.

More recently, I’ve caught myself doing the same thing with mentors, creative projects, and industry connections.

Every time, I attached part of my future to someone else’s vehicle.

And every time that vehicle changed direction, stalled out, or disappeared altogether, I felt like I had lost something much bigger than a job.

The Pattern I Couldn’t See

The jobs weren’t the problem.

The organizations weren’t the problem.

The mentors weren’t the problem.

The problem was that I kept confusing the vehicle with the destination.

I wasn’t just working for a company.

I was investing that company with my hopes.

I wasn’t just helping someone else’s project.

I was quietly hoping it might become the bridge to my own future.

When those opportunities didn’t lead where I imagined, the disappointment felt personal.

Not because my value had changed.

Because my hope was riding in the passenger seat of someone else’s car.

The Hardest Lesson

Rebuilding a career in your sixties forces you to confront some uncomfortable truths.

One of them is this:

Nobody is coming to carry your hope for you.

Not an employer.

Not a mentor.

Not a client.

Not an industry contact.

Not even a dream project.

For a long time, that realization felt terrifying.

Lately, I’m beginning to see it differently.

It’s freedom.

What Nobody Can Take Away

If your hope belongs to a company, they can lay it off.

If your hope belongs to a title, they can take it away.

If your hope belongs to a mentor, they can disappoint you.

If your hope belongs to someone else’s project, they can decide not to call.

But if your hope belongs to you?

Nobody can fire it.

Nobody can lay it off.

Nobody can fail to pitch it.

Nobody can decide whether it gets a chance.

That’s your responsibility.

And your privilege.

The Observer Remains

The more I reflect on my life, the more I realize there has been one constant through every chapter.

Not the job.

Not the title.

Not the organization.

Me.

The observer is still here.

The storyteller is still here.

The person who notices things other people miss is still here.

The person who helps others see why those things matter is still here.

That’s who I’ve always been.

The jobs changed.

The organizations changed.

The opportunities came and went.

The observer remained.

The Work In Front Of Me

For years, I attached my future to someone else’s vehicle.

Now I’m learning to build my own.

That’s not easy.

There are days when it feels uncertain. Days when I wonder if I’ve waited too long. Days when I question whether I’m heading in the right direction.

But I know this much:

My hope no longer belongs to a company.

Or a title.

Or a mentor.

Or a gatekeeper.

It belongs to me.

And maybe that’s what rebuilding a career is really about.

Not finding a new vehicle.

Learning to drive your own.

Shawn Say

Don’t rent your hope to someone else’s future.

Build a life where your hope belongs to you.

If you're rebuilding something—a career, a dream, a business, or yourself—I hope you'll stick around. These essays are my attempt to make sense of the journey and share what I'm learning along the way.

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Most nonprofit stories don’t fail because the mission is weak.

They fail because the emotional center is buried.

That’s the thing I keep noticing.

A nonprofit does meaningful work. Real people are helped. Lives are changed. Families are supported. Communities are strengthened. Volunteers show up. Donors give. Staff members carry more than most people ever see.

And then, when it is time to tell the story, the human part gets buried under the safest possible language.

Programs.

Services.

Outcomes.

Initiatives.

Community impact.

Collaborative partnerships.

All of those things may be true. Some of them may even be important.

But they are not usually where the story lives.

The story usually lives in the moment before the outcome.

The story lives in the mother sitting in her car for three minutes before walking into the food pantry because asking for help still feels like failure.

The story lives in the veteran who says he is fine because he has said it so many times he almost believes it.

The story lives in the teenager who finally looks an adult in the eye because somebody kept showing up.

The story lives in the volunteer who thought she was dropping off a meal and ended up hearing a life story.

That is where people feel something.

And if people don’t feel something, they rarely do something.

The problem with “impact language”

Nonprofits are under pressure to sound credible.

I understand that. Credibility matters.

You need to report outcomes. You need to explain programs. You need to satisfy funders, boards, partners and community stakeholders. You need to prove the work happened.

But too often, the language of credibility becomes the language of distance.

It starts sounding like this:

Our organization provides emergency food assistance to families experiencing hardship through a network of community-based support services.

That sentence is not wrong.

It is also not alive.

It tells me what happened, but it does not help me feel why it matters.

And that is the gap.

The facts prove the work happened.

The story helps people feel why it matters.

Introducing The HEART Story Framework™

This is why I created The HEART Story Framework™ as part of my upcoming guide, Stories That Move Donors: How to find, shape, and write nonprofit stories people actually feel.

The framework is simple on purpose.

Because most nonprofit teams do not need another complicated marketing theory.

They need a way to find the real story inside the work they are already doing.

HEART stands for:

H — Human moment
E — Emotional truth
A — Action
R — Resonance
T — Turn toward response

It is not a formula for making stories manipulative.

It is a way to stop flattening human experiences into institutional updates.

H — Human moment

Every good nonprofit story starts with a person in a specific moment.

Not a demographic.

Not a category.

Not “families in need.”

A person.

A parent opening an empty refrigerator.

A child walking into an after-school program for the first time.

A senior sitting alone at a kitchen table.

A volunteer knocking on a door.

A caseworker realizing this call is not routine.

The human moment gives the reader somewhere to stand.

Without that moment, the story floats above the ground.

E — Emotional truth

The emotional truth is what is really happening beneath the surface.

It might be fear.

Relief.

Embarrassment.

Hope.

Exhaustion.

Loneliness.

Dignity.

The emotional truth is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is quiet.

A person does not have to be sobbing in a hallway for the story to matter.

Sometimes the emotional truth is as simple as this:

“I did not want anyone to know I needed help.”

That one sentence has more power than three paragraphs of organizational language.

A — Action

This is where the organization enters the story.

But notice the order.

The organization does not come first.

The person does.

Then the action.

What changed because someone stepped in?

A meal was delivered.

A ride was provided.

A mentor showed up.

A legal question was answered.

A safe place was offered.

A phone call was returned.

A child was seen.

The action should be concrete. The more specific it is, the more believable it becomes.

“Provided support” is vague.

“Brought groceries to her apartment before the weekend” is a story.

R — Resonance

Resonance is the bridge between the person in the story and the person reading it.

This is where the reader quietly thinks:

That could be my neighbor.

That could be my parent.

That could be me.

That could be someone I pass every day and never notice.

Resonance is not created by lecturing the reader.

It is created by helping them recognize something human.

The best nonprofit stories do not say, “You should care.”

They make caring feel natural.

T — Turn toward response

A story should move somewhere.

Not always to a donation ask.

Sometimes the response is volunteering.

Sometimes it is sharing the story.

Sometimes it is attending an event.

Sometimes it is simply seeing the issue differently.

But if the story creates feeling and never gives that feeling a direction, the energy fades.

That is why the turn matters.

It gives the reader a next step.

Not with guilt.

Not with pressure.

With clarity.

Here is what happened.

Here is why it matters.

Here is how you can be part of what happens next.

A quick before and after

Here is the kind of shift I mean.

Before:

Our organization provides emergency food assistance to families experiencing hardship through a network of community-based support services.

Again, that is not wrong.

But it is buried.

Now let’s look for the heartbeat.

After:

By Thursday morning, Maria had stretched the last box of cereal as far as it could go.

She was not looking for a handout.

She was trying to make it to Friday.

That version does not ignore the program.

It gives the program a human reason to matter.

Now the food pantry is not an abstract service.

It is the difference between a mother feeling alone and a mother knowing somebody saw her.

That is the story.

The story is usually already there

This is the part I want nonprofit leaders and communicators to hear:

You probably do not need to invent better stories.

You need to notice the ones already happening.

They are in the thank-you notes.

They are in the volunteer conversations.

They are in the hallway after the event.

They are in the case notes, the phone calls, the intake forms, the follow-up emails and the quiet moments your staff carries home with them.

The problem is not that you lack stories.

The problem is that the stories are often buried under the language you think you are supposed to use.

Professional language has its place.

But when it strips the heartbeat out of the work, it costs you connection.

And connection is what moves people.

A simple question to start with

The next time you sit down to write a donor email, newsletter article, social post, annual appeal or event recap, do not start with:

“What do we need to announce?”

Start with:

“Where is the human moment?”

That one question can change the whole piece.

Because once you find the human moment, the rest of the story has somewhere to breathe.

The mission is not weak.

The work is not empty.

The impact is not missing.

The story is usually there.

You just have to dig it out.

I’m building Stories That Move Donors as a practical guide for nonprofit leaders, communicators and development teams who want to tell better stories without turning their mission into marketing noise.

The HEART Story Framework™ is one piece of that guide.

More to come soon.

It had gilded edges.

That caught my eye because I’ve noticed publishers doing more of that lately — colored edges, sprayed edges, books designed to look like objects again instead of just containers for words.

This one was a collection of four novels by H. Rider Haggard.

I knew the title King Solomon’s Mines, mostly because I had seen the 1985 movie years ago and remember not being particularly impressed. It had that mid-’80s adventure-movie energy where everything felt like it was trying to draft behind Raiders of the Lost Ark without quite knowing why Raiders worked.

So I bought the book more out of curiosity than excitement.

A dollar seemed like a fair wager.

Then I started reading.

And that’s when the old machine began to work.

Not because the book is flawless. It isn’t. It carries the weight of its time. The language, worldview and casual brutality of Victorian adventure fiction are all there. I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.

But I also don’t want to write a review of King Solomon’s Mines.

What interested me was something more useful to anyone who cares about writing:

The book knows how to pull you forward.

The page can make the body react

There is a desert crossing in King Solomon’s Mines that made me get up and refill my water bottle.

That sounds ridiculous.

I was sitting in a comfortable room. I was not in the African interior. I was not rationing water. I was not measuring distance by exhaustion, heat and the fading possibility of survival.

But the writing worked on me anyway.

That is the trick.

Good writing does not merely tell you the characters are thirsty, cold, afraid, hungry or desperate.

It arranges the experience so you start reacting to it yourself.

You do not simply understand that the desert is dangerous.

You feel the dryness of it.

You do not simply understand that the characters are in trouble.

You begin measuring the next paragraph against their chance of survival.

That is storytelling doing its job.

John Williams did the same thing with cold

I felt something similar when I read John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing.

There is a section where the characters are trying to survive the winter, and Williams does not rush it. He lets the cold take up space.

The weather is not background.

It becomes pressure.

It wears the men down. It narrows their world. It turns ambition into survival. What begins as a journey becomes a test of endurance, and the reader feels that slow reduction.

Again, it is not because Williams keeps announcing how miserable everyone is.

That would be weak writing.

He makes the conditions specific enough that the reader starts carrying them.

The cold is not an idea.

It is a force.

That’s the difference.

Weak writing tells us the situation is hard.

Strong writing makes us participate in the difficulty.

The best writers don’t explain the feeling first

This is where a lot of writing falls apart.

The writer wants the reader to feel something, so the writer names the feeling too early.

He was terrified.

She was exhausted.

They were desperate.

There is nothing wrong with those sentences in the right place, but they are often shortcuts. They ask the reader to accept an emotion instead of giving the reader an experience.

Haggard and Williams both understand something important:

The reader does not become emotionally involved because the writer explains the emotion.

The reader becomes emotionally involved because the writer builds the pressure around the character.

Distance matters.

Weather matters.

Water matters.

Time matters.

The body matters.

A reader can ignore an abstract emotion.

A reader cannot ignore thirst.

A reader cannot ignore cold.

A reader cannot ignore the slow realization that the characters may have gone too far to turn back.

Story structure is not just plot

This is what I mean when I talk about structure.

Structure is not just the order of events.

Structure is the arrangement of pressure.

What does the character need?

What is being taken away?

What happens if they stop?

What happens if they keep going?

What does each page remove from their options?

That is why these sections work.

In King Solomon’s Mines, the desert crossing is not just a travel sequence. It is a narrowing corridor. The farther the characters go, the fewer choices they have. Water becomes time. Time becomes danger. Danger becomes momentum.

In Butcher’s Crossing, winter works the same way. The cold does not simply create atmosphere. It traps the characters inside the consequences of their own decisions.

That is what keeps the pages turning.

Not noise.

Not constant action.

Not clever dialogue.

Pressure.

The reader keeps going because the characters must

That may be the clearest lesson.

A story becomes hard to put down when the reader understands that the characters cannot easily escape the situation.

They are committed.

They have gone too far.

They have misjudged something.

They have entered a world that does not care what they intended.

That is true in adventure stories. It is true in Westerns. It is true in thrillers, family dramas, memoirs, essays and even good marketing stories, though I promised myself I was not going to turn this into another marketing lesson.

So I won’t.

I’ll keep it where it belongs.

Writing.

The kind that makes you thirsty.

The kind that makes you cold.

The kind that makes you look up from the page and remember that you are safe, warm, hydrated and lucky.

The kind that pulls you so deeply into someone else’s struggle that your own body briefly joins the story.

That is not an accident.

That is craft.

And when it works, even a $1 book from a library sale can remind you why storytelling still matters.

This morning, I found myself sitting in the garage.

Sixty-six degrees. Crystal blue sky. A cup of coffee nearby.

Winston the pug was busy playing with his friends, which meant I had a rare gift: a few quiet minutes to think.

I’ve spent most of this week helping a client prepare for National Donut Day.

That meant early mornings. Donut deliveries. Community partners. Media outreach. Photos. Stories.

On the surface, it doesn’t have much to do with screenwriting, copywriting, teaching, podcasting, or any of the other things I’ve done throughout my career.

But sitting there this morning, I realized something.

Maybe it has everything to do with them.

Eighteen months ago, I set out to build my own business.

Since then, I’ve worked with nonprofits, authors, filmmakers, educators, entrepreneurs, and community organizations.

Different industries.

Different challenges.

Different goals.

Yet they all seem to come to me with the same problem.

They have too much.

Too many ideas.

Too many priorities.

Too much information.

Too much complexity.

And somewhere inside all that complexity is a story trying to get out.

A Box of Tangled Christmas Lights

The best way I can describe it is this:

Imagine a box of tangled Christmas lights dumped on a table.

Everyone else sees the knots.

I start looking for the strand.

Not because I’m smarter.

Not because I have some secret framework.

I just start asking questions.

Where does this begin?

Why does this matter?

Who does it affect?

What’s really at stake?

Eventually, a shape starts to emerge.

The confusion begins to organize itself.

The noise starts becoming a signal.

The facts start becoming a story.

That’s true whether I’m helping a nonprofit explain its mission, helping an author connect with readers, helping a filmmaker strengthen a screenplay, or helping a business clarify its message.

The challenge is rarely a lack of information.

The challenge is knowing which information matters.

The Moment Someone Finally Gets It

The moment I love most is surprisingly small.

It isn’t the launch.

It isn’t the applause.

It isn’t the finished product.

It’s the moment someone stops looking confused.

The moment they lean back in their chair and say:

“Oh.”

Then a pause.

“I get it now.”

A donor understands why a program matters.

A student finally grasps a difficult concept.

A client sees the heart of their message.

A writer discovers what their story is really about.

That moment never gets old.

Because clarity creates movement.

People can act once they understand.

People can support a cause once they see why it matters.

People can move forward once they know where they’re going.

Translating Chaos Into Clarity

I’ve come to realize that’s what I’ve been doing my entire career.

As a screenwriter.

As a teacher.

As a public relations professional.

As a copywriter.

As a consultant.

The job title changes.

The work stays remarkably similar.

I’m a translator.

On one side is complexity.

On the other side is clarity.

In between sits a story waiting to be discovered.

Not invented.

Discovered.

The facts are already there.

The emotions are already there.

The stakes are already there.

The story simply helps people see them.

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The Human Thread

The older I get, the less interested I am in sounding impressive.

I’m more interested in helping people see clearly.

Maybe storytelling isn’t creating something that wasn’t there.

Maybe it’s finding the thread that was there all along.

The one hidden beneath the noise.

The one buried underneath the competing priorities, the data, the confusion, and the complexity.

The one that helps people understand what matters.

And once you find that thread, everything else begins to make sense.

Even a box of tangled Christmas lights.

Even eighteen months of entrepreneurship.

Even a week spent delivering donuts before sunrise.

Sometimes the story was there all along.

It just needed someone to untangle it.

Back in grade school, when my language arts teachers handed papers back covered in red ink, it felt less like guidance and more like proof.

Proof that I wasn’t really a writer.
Proof that I wasn’t getting it.

And honestly?

A lot of us carry that feeling longer than we realize.

We start seeing revision as embarrassment instead of process.

The Red Pen

Then college changed that for me.

One of my professors, James Francis Patrick O’Neill — JFPO to everyone who knew him — taught broadcast writing.

He also marked up my work in red pen.

But the feeling was different.

Because this time, the corrections weren’t about punishment.

They were about clarity.

JFPO came out of radio. Real radio. The kind where words had to do the heavy lifting because there weren’t visuals to hide behind.

He taught us that good writing wasn’t about sounding smart.

It was about helping people:

• see something

• feel something

• understand something

And he taught me something else too:

I was long-winded.

Painfully long-winded.

What we now call “smart brevity,” he was teaching decades before the phrase existed.

Not because shorter automatically meant better.

But because clarity matters.

Every extra sentence either sharpens the picture…
or muddies it.

Slowing Down Enough To See It

I’ve been thinking about that again this week while revising a pilot episode I’m rewriting for a streaming project.

What surprised me wasn’t that the script needed work.

It was how much clearer the emotional logic became once I slowed down enough to really see it.

Scenes were out of sequence.
Character reactions landed too early.
Story turns that technically worked… emotionally didn’t.

And none of that became obvious while I was trying to “finish.”

It became obvious during revision.

That’s the part younger writers — and honestly, younger versions of ourselves in general — often misunderstand.

Revision isn’t proof that you failed.

Revision is often where the real work finally begins.

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Distance Creates Clarity

Stephen King famously talks about putting a manuscript in a drawer for a while before returning to it.

Distance changes perspective.

You stop seeing what you intended.

You start seeing what’s actually there.

And that applies far beyond writing.

This week, I revised:

• a script

• proposals

• client communication

• positioning language

And every single one became stronger because I stopped resisting the process.

That resistance usually comes from ego.

We want it finished.
We want it approved.
We want to move on.

But revision is practice.

No different than:

• a baseball player taking batting reps

• a gymnast repeating routines

• a musician rehearsing scales

The repetition isn’t failure.

It’s training.

The Real Work

Most communication problems aren’t caused by lack of effort.

They’re caused by people not slowing down long enough to clarify what they actually mean.

And honestly?

That may be true far beyond communication.

Sometimes revision is really about learning how to see more clearly.

Bottom Line

Revision isn’t the moment you discover you’re bad.

It’s the moment you start getting better.

Where storytelling meets business, belief & real life.

The final full Sears catalog arrived in American mailboxes in 1993.

For more than a century, it had been one of the most powerful communication tools in the country.

Not just because it sold products.

Because it sold access.

For millions of Americans — especially rural families — the Sears catalog was often the first glimpse of a larger world.

A different kind of kitchen.

A different kind of home.

A different kind of life.

And then, slowly, the system changed.

Cable television expanded choice.

Big box retail reshaped convenience.

The internet collapsed distance entirely.

And eventually, the revolutionary became ordinary.

Not because people stopped wanting possibility.

Because they found new ways to receive it.

Every Era Builds a New Delivery System

That pattern keeps repeating.

Every generation creates a new way to deliver possibility.

The Sears catalog showed rural America that a different life was within reach.

Radio brought voices from places most people would never visit and made the world feel smaller and more connected than ever before.

Television carried images of other lives, other cities, and other ways of being human directly into living rooms across the country.

Then the internet collapsed distance entirely. A kid in rural Kentucky could suddenly access the same information as a kid in Manhattan.

And now AI is collapsing another barrier entirely.

For the first time in history, the ability to create, produce, and communicate at scale is no longer limited to large organizations, expensive equipment, or specialized training.

The tools changed.

The platforms changed.

The speed changed.

But the job never did.

What Marketing Actually Does

It still comes down to one thing:

Helping people picture a different version of their life.

That’s the job.

Help people see a future they can actually imagine themselves living in.

Because when communication works, something happens internally before anything happens externally.

Someone sees a possibility they couldn’t clearly see before.

That’s why the best marketing rarely feels like marketing.

It feels like recognition.

Like clarity.

Like someone finally putting language around a future you already hoped might exist.

I’ve started thinking about all of this a little differently lately.

Marketing isn’t really a persuasion machine.

It’s a possibility delivery system.

A way of placing believable pictures of a different future into the hands of people ready to imagine one.

The Sears catalog understood that long before we had modern language for it.

The Question That Matters

So maybe the real question for organizations, leaders, nonprofits, creators, and communicators isn’t:

“What are we selling?”

Maybe the better question is:

What possibility are we delivering?

Not what product.

Not what program.

Not what service.

What picture of a different life are we placing in someone’s hands?

Because from the beginning, that’s the thing that has always moved people.

Not information.

Not noise.

Possibility.

If this made you think differently about marketing, storytelling, or communication, share it with someone who’d appreciate the conversation.

Shawn Maus writes about storytelling, communication, and the systems that shape what people believe is possible.

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