Trying to find a content format led me into storytelling, school, structure, instinct, and the realization that the struggle to find a story was already a story.
For the past year, maybe longer, I’ve been trying to figure out my content.
Not just what to post. I’ve been trying to find a format that actually feels like me. Something I could keep making without slowly turning into a person who points at floating text and says, “Here are three things nobody tells you about hand soap.”
I think I finally have the beginnings of that format.
But then I ran into another problem.
I needed stories.
That sounds obvious. If I want to become a storyteller, I should probably have something to tell. But I started wondering whether I was actually any good at it.
When I’m with my friends, chopping it up, I know I can tell a story. I know how to make them wait for the next part. I know which details to exaggerate, which parts to skip, and when to interrupt myself because another story somehow explains the first story better.
But I don’t know how I do it.
At work, I’m completely different.
Business trains you to remove everything that appears unnecessary. What happened? What is the problem? Who is responsible? What are we doing next?
My family is like that too. Mostly men, mostly facts. Nobody describes the weather unless the weather damaged something.
You get to the point.
That is useful when you’re running a company. It is less useful when you’re trying to make another human being feel something.
So I started trying to learn storytelling properly.
Hooks. Conflict. Stakes. Structure. Payoffs. All the pieces people break a story into when they’re teaching it.
And while I was listening to Vin explain these foundations, I realized this was strangely familiar.
It reminded me of why I never understood school.
When I was younger, school always felt stupid to me. A teacher would explain something by breaking it into steps:
A. B. C. D.
And I would think, “That’s it?”
A business class might teach you how to manage people, but the real world is never that clean. Sometimes you skip a step. Sometimes you repeat one. Sometimes the person you are managing is angry because of something that has nothing to do with work. Sometimes the correct professional decision is technically wrong for the human being standing in front of you.
The classroom version felt too simple, so I dismissed it.
I thought that because the map wasn’t the territory, the map was useless.
I understand it differently now.
Those steps were never supposed to contain the whole answer. They were the foundation. The alphabet is not a novel, but you still need the alphabet before you can write one.
School gives you the basic structure. Life distorts it, complicates it, and occasionally throws it out of a moving vehicle.
Maybe storytelling works the same way.
The structure doesn’t make someone a good storyteller. It gives them something solid enough to depart from.
A good storyteller probably knows when a detail matters, even when it does not advance the plot. They know that the way someone looked at you might be more important than what they said. They understand that sometimes the detour is the story.
I think I already knew some of that instinctively when I was talking to my friends.
But instinct is difficult to repeat on command.
That is what I am trying to learn now. Not how to manufacture stories from a formula, but how to recognize what I naturally do when a story is working.
And somewhere in the process, I realized something mildly ridiculous:
My struggle to find a story was already a story.
I spent months searching for the right content format. Then I searched for a system to tell stories. Then that system reminded me of school, which reminded me of why I didn’t appreciate school, which leads into the story of how I eventually got kicked out.
One story opens a door, and behind it is another door, followed by a badly labelled hallway full of doors.
Maybe that is my format.
Not pretending I already know the answer.
Following the thought until it leads somewhere I didn’t expect.