Creativity: Bringing People Together

People are easily led. Let’s lead them to joy, through sharing things they can love.

Last night I got to be part of the audience, doing something like this

Jacob Collier is an extraordinary musician who does not do what he is told, or what others before him have done1.

A few years ago he started experimenting with asking his audience to sing a note, then conducting them in a multi-part harmony, just by pointing at them. It’s quite something2.

Bringing People Together

When so much about our public life is awful, and terrifying, and despair-inducing, it can be tempting to think that taking time out for moments of joy is somehow trivial or disrespectful.

It’s not. It’s essential.

Bringing people from all walks of life together to experience something—collectively, as at a concert or asynchronously, as with reading a good story—is important work.

It’s important that you write your stories.

It’s important that you make them good enough to share. 

Because sometimes, when people come together and share a moment of joy—singing in unexpected harmony or sharing their love of a sarcastic security cyborg—it reminds them of how alike we all are.

Bad actors try to assemble their followers into a scared, exclusionary huddle.

It only takes one courageous person’s vision to bring people together for good.

Art matters. 

Stories matter.

Your voice matters.

Keep writing,

Julie

P. S. It can be hard to gather the motivation to do the work in the face of, well, everything. Here’s a brand-new workbook to help you reconnect to your practice or your project. Download it now, as a thank you for following along on this writing journey with me!

  1. Which doesn’t mean he’s a contrarian. His commitment to doing what he does, how he likes it, has led him to friendship with Quincy Jones, and a deal with Martin guitars where they produced a 5-string guitar for him, because he thought ‘why does a guitar have to have six strings?” ↩︎
  2. I’ve been in choirs where we could not sing acapella and stay in tune. Last night, he led thousands of people through a long improvised harmonic thing and then brought back in an actual orchestra…and we were still on pitch! ↩︎

Set Up Your Log & Workspace

There are two halves to today’s tiny challenge, both designed to make it easier for you to get to work–and feel good about it–every day.

  1. Create a log to capture whatever you decided to track, yesterday
  2. Set up your workspace for the challenge

Create a Log

Depending on what you chose, and how your brain works, your log might look fancy or plain (it might even be a simple notebook page with a heading and a bunch of tally marks).

I created a new bundle of productivity logs and checklists for StoryADay May 2025. Download for free here.

checklists download image

Set Up Your Workspace

Take a moment to set up a digital folder or a notebook (physical or digital), or a three-ring binder, where you can keep all your materials related to StoryADay.

It might not seem important now, but a month from  now, when you are in a completely different place as a writer, you are going to thank Past-You for being kind and making it easy for you to find all the moments of brilliance and insight you racked up.

It doesn’t matter if you choose to write in Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, a notes app in your phone, or a specific notebook. Just choose.

Some days it may not be convenient to write in your preferred way. On those days, I recommend going to your ‘master file’ later, and writing yourself a note (e.g. “Wrote today’s story in my phone notes”). (You can find a sample master file in the downloadable bundle.)

Note: Last month I used a notation like that to find drafts from last May to revise for a contest!

What’s important is that you create easy access to writing time and writing records.

This tiny task helps you:

  • Remove barriers to getting started
  • Build your identity as a writer who shows up

Discussion: What’s your writing space like? Are you using a fancy journal, a Google Doc, a spreadsheet? Leave a comment and let us know!

The Superstars Advantage
The fastest way to get better at writing stories is to write more stories — and reflect on them with other writers. That’s what the StoryADay Superstars group was built for.
You could do it alone, but why make it harder than it needs to be?
Find out more

Superstars Strategy: You wouldn’t train for a marathon without a coach and a team. Superstars gives you the structure and encouragement that make showing up easier — and more joyful.

Creating Compelling Characters

Plot happens outside, but story happens inside

Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction

For people to love your story, they need to love (or love to hate) your character.

The most beautiful writing in the world, the most exciting action sequence in history, neither of these will make people love your story.

But a compelling character will steal their heart, sneak into their memory, and make them come back to your writing over and over again.

Wouldn’t it be great to have raving fans?

How do you make your character compelling without spending too many words tracing their inner thoughts? How do you balance character growth with action?

Step 1: Know Your Character

None of us step out into the world in the morning as a fresh new creation.

We walk out of the door with hang ups and passions and prejudices and ingrained behaviors, all of which come from a lifetime of having experiences and reacting to them.

Lisa Cron, in her excellent book Story Genius, talks about this brilliantly:

You have to know your character’s childhood damage, she says, and the protective behaviors they created. If you can set your story at a point in their life when those behaviors no longer serve your character, you have automatic conflict built into your story (and conflict makes stuff happen!)

Top Tip: do some ‘discovery writing’ about your character before you ever try to write the actual story. It will make your first draft go soooo much faster.

Resources:

Step 2: Nobody’s Perfect

In our quest to make readers love our protagonist, we can forget to give them flaws.

But how do you give them a flaw, without making them unlikeable?

The best resource I’ve come across came from the podcast Writing Excuses, where they talk about playing with three different characteristics as if they were sliders on a mixing board. Your character can be competent, proactive, and sympathetic, but they can’t be 100% (or 0%) of all three at the same time.

Contractors say, “You have have a job done well, fast, or cheap. Pick two.”

At any one moment in a story, a character can be extremely competent, extremely proactive, or extremely sympathetic. Pick two.

And then play with those levels throughout the story. (Think about how Hermoine Grainger changes over the course of the first Harry Potter book. At the start she is the most competent and proactive of the three friends, but nobody likes her. By the end, she has given up some of that proactivity and learned to lean on her friends. She acknowledges that Ron is more competent at wizard chess, and lets Harry be the one to face the last big challenge…and we like her a lot more, for it.)

Top Tip: Playing with character competencies is a great way to make them more or less sympathetic without having to give them a ‘tragic flaw’.

Resources:

Step 3: Show Their Inner Conflict In Action

In critique groups I usually hear two opposing critiques of character, depending on the writer’s natural tendencies:

  • The writing’s beautiful but it’s a little…slow (translation: nothing happens!!) OR
  • It was very exciting…but I’m not sure why I’m supposed to care (translation: explosions and chases are great, but your character has no inner depth)

Whether you naturally write lots of action, or spend a lot of time dwelling on inner feelings, a good writer needs to be able to balance action and inner conflict, to create compelling characters.

One of the best ways to do this is to turn off the inner dialogue and show your character taking actions or interacting with physical objects that

  • Are symbolic of their inner struggle
  • Matter to this character for a specific reason (which you know, and can reveal to the reader)
  • Remind the reader of the stakes, without you having to spell it out.

For example, in the beginning of the movie Die Hard, a watch-word for action-based storytelling, John McClane picks up a picture of his happy family from a desk in his wife’s office…and winces.

In that moment (right before he gets embroiled in the explosions and flying bullets) the viewer remembers that this is not just a wise-cracking action hero. He’s a man who is losing his family and isn’t sure how far he’s willing to go, to put it back together.

That’s the question the rest of the film answers.

And it’s the reason we, as viewers, care.

Top Tip: Turn off the inner dialogue and give us a moment, filled with all five senses, where your character demonstrates their emotions, on the outside.

Resources

Big Final Caveat

All of this kind of craft-based instruction is useful for developing your writing…but only if it doesn’t slow you down while you’re creating first drafts.

If you’re writing the first version of a story do not stop to worry about ‘showing not telling’ or whether your character is sufficiently proactive in this moment.

All of this can be fixed in the rewrite.

And one of the best ways to figure out what’s working and what still needs work in your story, is to show it to other readers.

Perhaps the idea of a critique group terrifies you. Or maybe you’ve been in groups in the past that were frustrating, or just ‘meh’.

If that’s you, I have a gift for you: a free guide to critique groups, including:

  • All the personality types you’ll encounter in a group
  • How best to interact with each
  • What you need to know to to give and receive great feedback

Don’t waste time being afraid of feedback, any longer. It’s the single most important thing you can do to get your writing closer to the point where you can really begin to delight readers and build a raving fanbase.

Download the Critique Primer Now