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The story archetype that will guide every story you write here, and anywhere else.
I pitched a story to a magazine editor yesterday that got a hard no. It surprised me, the swiftness of his response. I thought the general-interest magazine might go for the rag-to-riches story of an immigrant and refugee who made his name refuting what every other business did and now, deep in mid-life, must act like every other business leader around him to survive. Will he become the thing he despised? Will he find some alternate path?
The editor didn’t care.
“The stakes aren’t high enough,” he said.
At first I was all, Whaaa? But after the call I thought it through.
He was right.
A book that’s stayed with me over the years is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. It won a Pulitzer in the mid-70s but it’s a strange book, pulling from diffuse and often dense tomes to answer the question, Why do we exist? The answer according to Becker is complicated, but one facet of it is: To create something that will outlive us.
The deeper you go in the book the more you realize he’s not just talking about offspring. He’s talking about original work, work that springs from your deepest ambitions and most buck-assed-naked vulnerabilities. In…
