If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here.

My roommate when I lived in New York was (and is!) one of my closest friends, and one of the great things about living together was that at the end of every day we’d meet up in the kitchen or living room or just hang out in one of our bedrooms and Rich would regale me with hilarious stories about what had happened to him that day.

When we hung out with friends (and cocktails), he’d recount stories from his past. Dating stories, work stories, anecdotes about growing up in his very personality-filled Italian family in Leominster, Massachusetts–it didn’t matter what he was talking about, Rich could take the most seemingly ordinary event and make it absolutely riveting and screamingly funny.

My family and those friends who know him still recall and often ask for retellings of some of his anecdotes as if they’re well-loved bedtime stories—like the one about his answering an ad for a roommate that specified “practitioners of the craft.”

Rich thought it meant creative types, but in a round-robin interview of all the applicants one of them said they thought it referred to Wicca, “You know, pagan witches,” they said. “Aren’t we all pagan witches?” Rich riffed, working the room. Only to find out that yes, in fact, they all were—except him.

It’s not that especially crazy things happen to him (although they often do). It’s that Rich knows how to spin a tale. He knows how to take the ordinary and find the unique in it. He knows how to hook his listeners, lead them along, and keep them engaged till the payoff.

As I’ve often written about in this blog, it’s storytelling that makes the story. The chances of an author inventing an utterly original story to tell are vanishingly small. Humans have been on the planet so long that there is likely not an event or an experience or an emotion someone hasn’t already encountered and written about.

But what you bring to story that makes it original and engaging is the way you tell it. That’s why authors work so hard to master craft elements. They’re not some arbitrary set of rules put in place that writers have been exhorted to follow. It’s the other way around: These craft guidelines result from analysis of what makes effective story effective.

What you bring to story that makes it original and engaging is the way you tell it.

Read more: “Story versus Storyteller (Or Why I’m Mad at Gus Van Zant)”

That’s why I’m such a big proponent of analyzing all the story you take in—and everything is story. It helps authors figure out how the sausage is made, what makes it work and not work, so you can internalize those storytelling concepts and incorporate them into your own.

Regular readers know how much I love doing this, so when I recently read this seemingly pedestrian feature article (gift link so you can read without a sub) about a small town’s first Pride parade, and then found myself glued to it with my heart fibrillating in my chest throughout, I couldn’t wait to break it down. I wanted to dissect exactly what affected me and kept me fully engaged for what might, in a lesser writer’s hands, have been a simple throwaway item about a minor local event.

Analyzing Effective Story

The article creates great conflict and tension even from the headline: “He wanted to throw an Idaho town’s first Pride. Angry residents had other ideas.”

Immediately readers see a clash to come, creating the suspense of wanting to know what happened. Yet it leaves us wondering too: What does that mean, “other ideas”? What did the residents do? It sounds a bit foreboding, heightening the suspense and tension.

Casey Parks, the writer, continues the tension with her opening sentence: “In the beginning, Tom Wheeler didn’t expect he would need a fence.” This accomplishes two efficient, impactful things: It suggests the organizer of the festival expected a peaceful and/or modest event, and it implies that things went otherwise.

From this very first line, readers may be a bit worried about the outcome.

But that first paragraph also invests us in the “protagonist,” Tom. He didn’t think a fence would be needed because “he pictured a park without barriers, an open space where everyone was welcome.” Immediately readers may feel sympathetic to him and his goal: to bring the community together.

Then comes the story’s opposition: The mayor said the festival conflicted with her beliefs. Some townspeople called for a protest. Tom wasn’t “one of them”—he was from big-city Boise, not small Canyon County, and, as the article says, “worse, gay.”

Parks jacks up stakes even higher in paragraph three, paving in more context: Far-right extremists previously targeted another Pride event nearby. Wheeler’s mother “begged him to stay home.” Local police suggested a barricade, and an uncle urged him to wear a bulletproof vest.

By this point, my heart was hammering.

Now Parks brilliantly shifts to Wheeler, painting a picture of him that shows his courage and determination, but also his playfulness and humor. We see how he first came out as gay, the love and support his family offered, and the people helping him launch the festival despite the warnings and their fears.

Wheeler keeps juxtaposing those warm, relatable, sympathetic images against the opposing forces that are massed against Wheeler and his team: the state’s recent legislation targeting the LGBTQ community; vandalism, threats, and violence against previous gay-themed events.

Then a new element of tension is introduced: a pickup truck cruising slowly around the park, its cowboy-hatted driver scoping things out as the team sets up the event. The police aren’t there with the protective barricades yet. The truck keeps cruising by.

By this point readers may be gnawing their knuckles with dread over what’s to come. So Parks shifts the vibe, offering backstory on the small town of Nampa where the festival is being held and Wheeler’s experience there; sharing his modest hopes for the festival: that it might draw 50 or so members of an underserved community within this conservative stronghold and offer them some validation and joy. His efforts to assuage local lawmakers’ fears by assuring them that the event would be family-friendly, wholesome: musicians and pink T-shirts, rainbow stickers and some PG-rated drag entertainers.

Parks keeps weaving the threads together throughout the story: offering readers reasons to keep investing in the “main characters,” upping the stakes, building tension and suspense elements with growing opposition and threats, all against the ticking clock of waiting for the protective police barricades the organizers were promised on the day of the event, and the anticipation of whether anyone would actually attend amid all this conflict.

And then she turns it all on its ear.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I highly recommend reading the full piece. It’s a fantastic example of how the author can turn what might have been an ordinary and even familiar story into something fresh, new, and engaging. How she can use reader assumptions and stereotypes to create suspense and tension and stakes without telegraphing (for instance with the pickup truck casing the park)—and then upend them to amplify the impact of the story’s climax.

Read more: “How to Read Like an Editor”

Parks shows how to bring to life a story’s characters and its setting with well-chosen, vivid, visual details. She’s expert at the benign manipulation of the reader: never spoon-feeding or soapboxing her opinions, but leading readers to draw the conclusions she wants them to through her deft framing of the story through the characters’ perspectives, eliciting and building reader empathy and investment.

She doesn’t rush the story, but rather peels the onion little by little, revealing new layers with every paragraph, every section, drawing the reader ever more deeply in—and turning up the heat on the stakes throughout.

It’s Not Just the Story, but How You Tell It

When I was a features journalist, many years ago, one of the frequent challenges of the job was to find a way to tell what might feel like potentially dull stories—pieces about cabinet handles, Christmas trees, dragonflies, chandeliers, community events like this one—and make them engaging enough to draw readers in even if they thought the subject matter wasn’t among their interests.

I’m still fascinated by good journalism, and I follow writers I like the way some people follow their favorite musicians. When I read a piece that elevates its subject matter through its storytelling, I often write fan mail to its author telling them what I liked about the article (as in fact I did with Parks).

Dissecting and analyzing story is your writing residency. You are learning how to diagnose a story based on what “symptoms” are presented.

Analyzing story—and everything is story—to dissect what makes it work or not is the best way I know of by far to improve your own writing skills, because you have objectivity in assessing other people’s stories that you don’t have with your own, when you know it so well you’re “filling in the blanks” in your head. It teaches you storytelling skill, writing craft, and self-editing.

Dissecting and analyzing story is your writing residency. You are learning how to diagnose a story based on what “symptoms” are presented.

You don’t have to analyze this minutely with every single story, or pick out every single craft element one by one (although you can, and it’s a wonderful teaching tool). But you can train yourself to notice what jumps out at you—not just when you’re reading a book, but with TV shows and movies, songs and poems, advertisements and political propaganda…and newspaper and magazine articles like this one.  

Read more: “The Giddy Delight—and Incalculable Value—of Analyzing Masterful Work”

Almost all writing is designed to elicit a reaction in readers. Learning how authors do it is the best way I know to master and internalize story craft to your bones—so that when you’re creating your own, you aren’t trapped in left-brain thoughts of what you “should” do to structure an effective story. Rather, solid storycraft becomes a part of you, almost instinctive—intuitive.

You may have a rock-solid plot and story premise—but often it’s not so much the story itself but how it’s told that lets it really pack a punch.

How about you, authors—are there stories (not just books but any storytelling medium) that really affected you because of the storytelling, as much as or more than the story? What were they? How do you bring your own fresh storytelling approach into your own writing?

If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here.