Unintentional Cruelty

I had a university degree and had sailed through English and literature classes my entire life. Teachers told me I was a good writer, and I agreed. It came easily to me. Later I built a whole career helping authors sell books and then even wrote a couple of how-to books on the subject. I read constantly, including books on narrative and good sentence style.

So when I decided I was going to write a novel, I assumed the main obstacle was figuring out a good story.

Turns out, I was wrong about that. I was wrong about almost everything.

But the thing I was most wrong about was this: I assumed that what I had been taught about writing was actually about writing.

It wasn’t.

What we learned in school wasn’t about the type of writing I was trying to do. Most of it was making and proving claims. The whole point of the exercises was to demonstrate mastery of whatever subject I had chosen or had been assigned. The better you do that, the higher the grade.

That’s a legitimate skill. When you know the answer with near 100 percent accuracy, being able to put that argument in writing matters. I wrote papers on the correct sorting algorithms for a low-memory UPC computing environment and made well-thought-out arguments for ethical morality in business.

If someone asks you to explain how a combustion engine works, or what the evidence is for a particular historical event, writing-as-certainty does the job.

But most of the questions that actually matter aren’t about mathematical certainty for making the perfectly formed argument of correctness.

How do I be a good father? How do I stay married when everything in me wants to run for the door? How do I keep going when I’ve failed so many times that I’ve stopped counting? These aren’t questions you answer once and move on. There’s no clear right or wrong answer to guide the path. These are the real questions we confront every day—the questions where no matter what you pick, there’s still uncertainty. These are the real problems in life, and the kind of writing I’d been taught in school didn’t help me, or anybody else, get closer to the answers.

The problem is, people don’t believe facts. They believe the stories they tell themselves about the facts. That’s why two people can look at the same set of facts and come to wildly different conclusions. When you attack someone’s beliefs with facts, all you do is run into their defenses.

But a story—a story is like a stealth missile that bypasses the mind’s defenses and helps people truly consider a new way to see the world. As my wife, a licensed therapist, says, “You can’t argue with someone’s story.”

But school never taught me this. Instead, they turned writing into some performance of certainty, as if the point of writing was to build some impenetrable wall of facts that no one can overcome. It sure made me feel good writing these papers, but they never went out into the world, actually touched people, and changed them.

So when I sat down to write a novel, I performed certainty. I wrote sentences that were grammatically correct. I followed all of the rules I found in books about how to construct the perfect story. I studied structure and plotting and character development. I checked all of the boxes as I carefully crafted my stories.

But at the end, I didn’t have real writing. I had empty stories that were unreadable. Readers could feel the performance from the first page. Even worse, I could feel it too. I just didn’t know what it was or what to do about it.

So I stuffed it down and kept working. I kept getting my thousand words a day done. I kept studying and hoping it would eventually come together.

It didn’t.

I did what the writing world tells you to do. I read all of the craft books—Stephen King’s On Writing, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Robert McKee’s Story, Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. I watched the masterclasses. I took the online courses. I drafted and revised and drafted again. I filled out the worksheets and joined writers’ groups. Every book and video reminded me I didn’t really know what to do, so I bought into what they were saying as if it would be the secret key to figuring it out.

It only got worse. It seemed like no matter how much I learned, I couldn’t ever get it into a book that actually worked—that readers would love.

Every draft had the same problem as the last one. Something was broken, but I couldn’t name what it was.

The feedback from my writing group didn’t help, because they were at the same level I was. They could feel that something was off. But they couldn’t tell me why, and they couldn’t tell me what to do about it. One person loved a scene. Another found it flat. I’d come away more confused than when I went in.

So I’d draft again. Move things around. Change some dialogue. Add a scene, cut a scene. Produce a different version of the same broken thing.

Draft, revise, fail. Draft, revise, fail.

I started to suspect the problem was me. I was broken in some specific way that kept me from doing what other writers seemed to do with ease. I lacked something fundamental—talent, maybe, or courage, or whatever special thing separated the real writers from the people who only thought they were writers.

What I didn’t understand yet was that the problem wasn’t me at all.

The traditional advice was never going to work. It had me attacking the problem in all the wrong ways. It only promised a continued future of wandering in circles lost in a forest.

The solutions offered to the “writing problem”—the King, Lamott, McKee, Snyder guides—assumed that writing was a problem to be solved. What I needed was a complete mind shift.

In 2015, I reached out to Shawn Coyne.

I’d read The Story Grid and thought, after fifteen years of trying to write on my own, I might have found something real. His book wasn’t a new set of tips or a vague amalgamation of thoughtful writing essays. It was a framework—a way of understanding what a working story was supposed to do and how to tell when it wasn’t doing it.

I made him an offer. If he would teach me to write—one hour a week, reading my work and telling me what was wrong with it—I’d build him a podcast. I’d do all the technical work. He’d own everything. All he had to do was teach me.

He agreed under one condition.

I had to do exactly what he told me to do. No half-measures. No arguing with concepts that had taken him twenty years to formalize.

I agreed. How hard could it be? I assumed my writing was pretty good. All I had to do was figure out a few things about story structure and plot, and then it would all fall together.

And then he read my work and told me the truth.

The first time he read my work, his notes were four times as long as the scene I had written. While he worked his way through them, I pushed back from my desk and buried my face in my hands.

I realized, for the first time, that I was truly a terrible writer. Everything I sent him was a noisy mess.

This wasn’t about polishing my draft or looking for some areas to improve—all the feedback I’d gotten from writing groups and editors I’d paid good money. Instead, he told me the truth. He was direct in the way that only someone who genuinely wants to help you can be direct.

The sentences were technically correct. But they were also excruciating to read—generic and lifeless. Reading them required effort that nothing on the page justified. I could tell he hated to read what I’d sent him. A lot of our listeners thought he was cruel telling me the truth. At times I did too, but I also knew I’d had enough of the bullshit out in the conventional writing space.

I had spent years believing I was a writer simply because I put words on the page. And no one disagreed with me. In fact, they encouraged me to keep going. Told me to keep writing and revising my novel, and I would eventually get there. I had a degree and a career in the publishing industry, and I’d published a popular book on marketing. I had the confidence that came from being told your whole life that you’re good with words. And the truth was I didn’t know how to write—not in the way that actually mattered.

It was hard to hear what Shawn had to say. For years, I didn’t truly acknowledge it. I just kept churning away, sending him lifeless drafts, which he would tear apart. I did this over and over again, and he never let me get away with it. He was relentless.

He kept telling me the truth about my writing. Not “you need more discipline” or “trust the process.” Instead, he identified the real problem: I did not yet have the skills.

But there was good news too.

He also said that skills, unlike talent, can be built. He said talent is a predisposition, not a final verdict. Some people are born with the physiology to become great athletes. Their bodies develop with predispositions to be efficient runners or swimmers or jumpers. But if they don’t develop those predispositions, they never expand their initial competence. They mistakenly believe that they are innately talented, and they can rely upon that talent to see them through no matter what. No professional athlete believes that. Every single one of them trains and develops their skills with precision and full-hearted devotion. Not one relies upon their “talent.” Writers must do the same thing.

Predispositions get confused with “talent.” But no matter who you are, you have to start with the basic skills and work your way up from there. Anyone who relies on “talent” alone gets left behind by those who work hard building the fundamental skills.

Shawn kept talking about learning writing as if you were learning to play the guitar or woodworking. He kept referring to the basic skills you had to learn from the bottom up. The only talent that truly matters is sticking with something long enough that these skills grow into true ability.

This went against everything I’d read and heard about the art of writing. Everything I’d heard from grade school to college graduation and my own adult education was nothing like what he was saying. Everybody spoke about writing as if it was magical and beautiful, and once you tapped into the creative mystical river, you’d be blessed with a great story. Shawn said that was absolute bullshit. I didn’t necessarily agree, but I didn’t have the guts to argue with him. After all, he was the expert in the room, and I had made the promise to follow his lead. So when he didn’t make any sense, I just kept my head down and did what he told me to do.

When what he told me to do didn’t work, he’d throw up his hands and say, “This isn’t working. Let’s try something else.” I stuck with it because I had nowhere else to go.

What Shawn eventually taught me—and what took me far too long to fully understand—is that two completely different kinds of work are involved in becoming a writer. And you cannot do the second kind until you have done the first.

The first kind is copy-work.

It seems like every other creative endeavor understands this. Painters copied the masters in the Louvre before they were permitted to create their own original work. Musicians drilled scales and memorized Bach before they were trusted to compose. The apprentice glassblower spent years watching and imitating before anyone handed them the pipe and said, “Now make something of your own.” They all learned the fundamentals first before trying to create their own work.

This isn’t a waste of time. It is the foundation without which the real work cannot happen.

In Story Grid, copy-work means learning the Five Commandments of Storytelling—the Inciting Incident, Turning Point, Crisis, Climax, and Resolution—and drilling them until they are not concepts you can recite but structures you can feel. It means learning the six core scene types and understanding what each one demands from both the writer and the reader. It means producing scenes that conform to these structures, over and over, until conformity is no longer an effort.

Anyone can learn these technical skills. Just like every guitarist has to learn the G, C and D chords and every woodworker has to learn how to plane, every writer has to learn the fundamental skills before they can progress to original work. All masterwork fiction has these fundamental building blocks in common at the foundation. The structural requirements are not subjective—a scene either has a Turning Point or it doesn’t, a scene either belongs to its declared genre or it doesn’t—and a trained editor can tell you precisely which problem you have as well as what to do about it.

I spent a long time doing copy-work. Longer than I expected. Longer than I wanted. And I chafed against it because I thought I already knew this stuff. I’d read the books. I understood the theory. It felt like I was wasting time. I wanted to write novels. I had stories I wanted to tell, but instead of working on them, Shawn had me plugging away one scene at a time drilling the fundamentals. I felt like Daniel LaRusso out waxing a car when I wanted to learn how to fight.

I’d been studying story structure for years by this time. But the deeper I went into this, the more I understood that knowing the theory and being able to execute it are two completely different things.

Shawn was patient with me on this in the way that only someone who has seen it many times can be patient. He had watched writers who understood the concepts fail to execute them over and over again. Knowing what a Turning Point is does not mean you can write one. You build that ability through repetition, through getting it wrong, through having someone who knows what right looks like tell you where you went wrong, and through trying again.

That is copy-work. It is not glamorous, but it’s the only way to learn.

Still, having been told all of that and agreeing with it, unconsciously I kept digging in my heels thinking that once I understood it completely, it would happen magically for me.

My shadow unconscious cost me at least three years of grief. Shawn explained it to me over and over in dozens of different ways. He used physics. He used psychology. He used philosophy. He used math. He used cognitive science. He used masterworks. He used Aristotle and Plato. He used information theory.

And I’ll tell you, I still don’t fully understand his physics, math, psychology, philosophy, or cognitive science explanations. I’m okay with that because of what happened next. Eventually, I decided to stop arguing, stop trying to fully wrap my head around it and, instead, simply trust. I had to put my trust in this man that he was looking out for my best interest and wanted good for me above all else. And that trust was necessary for what came next.

I’d done what he said. I did eventually write scenes with inciting incidents, turning points, crises, climaxes and resolutions. They generally, kind of, met the standards for the six scene types.

But they were still boring, cliché scenes that nobody would find compelling to read.

He kept prodding me to “map the personal to the universal,” and I kept trying. But I fundamentally had no clue what he was talking about.

So we tried something else.

He made me dig through my own experiences and tell a story about something true. I had to find those hard-won lessons and share the pain where they originated from. And I had to do this for someone else—someone who needed to learn this lesson themselves. This was the birth of his Single Audience Member—the SAM commitment—that is now a crucial tool we use when our students hit this same wall.

You have to think about someone who really needs to know the truth you’ve experienced and then write something for them. Your goal is for that SAM to finish the scene and feel: “Oh that’s true.” You want SAM to realize that all of the real choices in life require loss and pain. You want them to understand what it means to go through a traumatic loss and come out on the other side changed. To understand that you have to move through the impossible choices in life with anything but certainty.

At some point in the process—and Shawn knows when this moment has arrived better than the writer does—the work changes.

Copy-work gets you to the point where you understand structure. You can build a working scene. You understand what each scene type demands. Your drafts are no longer broken in the foundational ways.

But a scene that passes the structural tests is not yet a story.

A story requires something copy-work cannot give you. It requires that you bring yourself to the page in way you never have before. The way you were taught to write was about building defenses—impenetrable walls of facts that kept you safe. You have to lay down your defenses, open up your deepest, darkest places, and share the most vulnerable parts of yourself. Then, you have to raise those moments in your life up to the level of severity that your story demands. You have to do whatever it takes for your reader—your SAM—to experience it alongside you.

This is craft-work.

And craft-work requires something that no checklist can evaluate because it requires a human reader—one human reader—to determine whether the felt truth landed. This is the SAM: the Single Audience Member. Not a demographic. One person. The person whose own life has prepared them to receive the exact truth you are trying to transmit.

Our Writers’ Mentorship program plays this part. It serves as the stand-in for your SAM and lets you know if your message was received or not.

When I finally understood the SAM, I understood why my early drafts were lifeless.

I had been writing to no one.

Worse, I had been writing to prove myself. To show off. To have people tell me how cool and great I am as a wordsmith. To demonstrate that I understood the form. To produce pages that looked like writing. I was performing certainty again, just in a different register. I was bullshitting.

A story written to prove something is not a story. It is an argument dressed up in a narrative costume. And readers feel the difference immediately, even when they can’t name it.

Craft-work means writing to one person, telling them a truth you have actually lived. Trusting that if the truth is real and the scene is structurally sound, it will find its way to everyone whose life has prepared them to receive it.

That is a completely different act than anything I had done before.

Learning it took me a long time. We published my first novel The Threshing before I fully learned this. But the truth is that Shawn had to do the hard lifting to get that book to a publishable level. While I’m proud of it, it wasn’t entirely mine. I can’t truly say it clearly represents a lived truth I’ve had. It’s close—as close as Shawn could make it from what I had written—but it’s not what I’d set out to write when we began. It was what I said I wanted to write, but deep down something else was lurking, which was really what I wanted to say.

That something else nearly killed me.

I am not going to pretend the road to publishing something I was truly proud of was anything other than what it was—a long tear-stained road of suffering.

During some stretches, I was convinced I would never get there, that I was constitutionally incapable of writing a novel that worked, that I had made a decade-long mistake. Shawn was honest with me through all of it in ways that were hard to hear. I nearly lost my family and my own mental health writing it.

The good news is that I didn’t lose either of those things. In fact, both domains of my life after having written the book are better than I ever would have imagined before writing it.

The Shithead is the proof that this process works. To say it’s easy and that you won’t be disappointed, angry, and ready to throw in the towel over and over again would be a lie. But it is worth it. Ask Brent G. Spalding, who recently published The Trauma Machine with us. He’s an active member in our program and working on his next novel.

Not proof in the sense of sales numbers. We’ve sold fewer than five thousand copies of The Shithead since publication. By the metrics most people use to measure success, those numbers aren’t very impressive. In terms of standard publishing success, though, the book is profitable and contributes monthly revenue to The Story Grid Publishing company. Both Shawn and I contribute our royalties from our books to the company to ensure its stability.

The Shithead is not on the New York Times Bestseller list, like the scores of books I marketed, and it probably never will be. It isn’t in your local bookstore. It hasn’t sold anywhere near the fifty thousand copies that my marketing books have sold.

I could not care less about that.

What I care about is an email I received not long after the book came out, from a man I had never met.

He told me he had finished the novel around two in the morning. When he closed the book, he didn’t go to sleep. He got up and went to his two-year-old son’s room and stood in the doorway watching him breathe.

He stood there for a long time.

And then he made a vow. He was going to get help for the deep sadness he had been carrying—the sadness that had been keeping him from fully being present with his family. He had known for a while that something was wrong, but he had not been able to face it. That night, in his son’s room, he faced it.

He told me The Shithead had brought him to that moment.

I have read that email more times than I can count.

I had spent years chasing the idea of writing a book, the dream of it. I wanted the credential next to my name. I wanted to be someone who had written a novel. What I didn’t understand until that email arrived was what a novel actually was—what it was actually for.

It is not a demonstration of skill. It’s not to prove myself to anyone. It is not a performance of certainty. It is one person telling the truth, as completely as they can, to one other person whose life has prepared them to receive it. If that transmission reaches even one reader and moves them closer to a truth they couldn’t face alone, the book has done what it was made to do.

That man I’ll never meet went into his son’s room at two in the morning and made a vow.

That is the measure of fine fiction.

That is why I want Story Grid to grow. If a shithead like me can do something like that, anyone can.

If you are in the loop—if you recognize the cycle of drafting and revising and learning and failing and finding yourself years later no closer to a book that works—I want you to hear this clearly:

The problem is not you.

You were taught that writing is a performance of certainty. You were never taught what writing is actually for. You were never given a diagnostic framework precise enough to tell you what is broken in a specific scene and what to practice to fix it. You were never told that there are two entirely different kinds of work—copy-work and craft-work—and that you cannot do the second until you have done the first.

You were given a map that leads in circles and told the problem was your legs.

The problem was the map.

In future essays I’ll write about deliberate practice—what the research actually shows about how skill develops and why the standard timeline for becoming a working writer is so much longer than it needs to be. For now, the thing I want to leave you with is simpler than all of that.

You can learn to write—not because you have a gift and not despite the fact that you don’t. Because writing is a skill, and skills are built. Copy-work first. Craft-work second. Expert feedback, calibrated precisely to where you are, delivered on small units of work, frequently enough that the loop actually closes.

That is what Story Grid is. That is what I spent a decade learning.

And somewhere out there is a reader whose life has prepared them to receive the truth you are carrying.

They are waiting for you to figure out how to get it to them.