Why every good story is actually two stories
Issue #270: revisiting the Palisades + hedgehogs
“If you take an idea and hold it in your head, you unconsciously start to do things that advance you toward that goal.” — Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter and Medium, in his book Things a Little Bird Told Me
One of the keys to writing — or creating anything meaningful — is landing on an idea that interests you enough that you’ll want to hold it in your head for weeks (or months, or years). But where on Earth do these ideas come from? It’s an age-old philosophical quandry (where do any of our thoughts come from?)
Illustrator Tom Froese believes the best ideas arise organically through testing them out in rough drafts. Alison Gee notices memorable ideas come to her when she’s distracted by something else (that’s my experience too), even if the “something” she’s doing is just showering or folding laundry. “When our minds become quiet enough, our capacity to process… information is temporarily expanded, allowing the spontaneous ideas to flow in.”
In a longread on Medium last fall, Doc Burford, a game designer who created Adios (2021) and Hardspace (2020) among other bestselling games, shared his idea generation “secrets.” One tip that stuck with me? You have to think about why someone will care. “Not about you, but about the story.” Designing a game essentially means creating a world that people care about enough to inhabit. “We make stories to help process our emotions — even Bambi is about human feelings,” he writes, “even if the characters themselves are deer.”
“It’s designed to be entertaining to the human mind; the deer aren’t really deer at all, you know?”
As Burford explains it, every good story is two stories: There’s the story on the surface (a young deer growing up in the forest) and the deeper universal story reaching deep into people’s psyches (growing up and confronting the cold, harsh world… and becoming who you actually are). The interplay between them creates what Burford believes is real creativity — instead of just copying.
📖 Two more stories…
- Phil Schwarz revisits his house in the Palisades, which miraculously survived the fire, and posts raw original photos of the neighborhood as it exists today. He asks: “In the case of the Palisades, what parts of the community can still exist when far fewer people now reside there?”
- A lesser-known moment in Black History: After the Civil War, rural communities across the South funded their own school system, the Rosenwald Schools, in partnership with philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Alums of Rosenwald Schools include Maya Angelou and Pauli Murray, who organized the first sit-ins (in 1943) to protest segregated restaurant seating in Washington, DC. (William Spivey)
🦔 Your daily dose of practical wisdom
The “hedgehog’s dilemma”: Humans want to be close to each other, but we resist the urge because we’re scared of rejection. To overcome our innate hedgehog-esque tendencies, as Brenna Lee writes, assume everyone you like will like you back unless proven otherwise.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com
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