Story Rebel
Get actionable advice, frameworks, and how-tos from fiction author and professional ghostwriter Jessie Kwak about how to use your writing to grow your business and spread your message.
6 lessons from running the Story Finding Challenge
I’m very much a recovering perfectionist. I was one of those overachiever kids in school who was always praised for doing excellent work—and who therefore got a complex about delivering anything less than a perfect outcome. (Not realizing for far too many years that the effort was the important part, not the outcome.) So, yeah. I’ve spent a lot of energy over the years afraid to take action before I knew I was 100% prepared. Worried about making mistakes—especially in public. Terrified of...
Two Doors of No Return (and a gift for you)
A few weeks ago, I was trying to help a friend define the origin story of her business. She’s a coach, and she described how she guides women through periods of change. Career change, leaving a relationship, loss—basically any time in a woman’s life where she’s stepping through a door into something new. Because members of her target audience are all going through very different life experiences, she’s had trouble writing sales copy that really spoke to the transformation she offered. So I...
What's at stake?
A few weeks ago, I taught at the Cascade Writers Conference. The thing that makes that conference unique is that it is all critique-based. Basically, students are assigned to groups of five to eight, along with an instructor, and everyone participates in a critique workshop of each other’s work. This conference is primarily for fiction writers, and because everyone gets to rank their choice of instructors, the people who ended up in mine tended to be speculative fiction writers. There were...
The Selling Story Toolbox
I gotta admit something. When I launched the Story Finding Challenge two weeks ago, I thought it was going to be pretty simple: I'd write a quick daily 3-500 word post about storytelling, give a prompt, and folks would jot down their story ideas. In fact, I initially sold the course as a habit-building challenge, where I provided the structure and accountability for people to build the habit of collecting stories in their daily life, nothing more. Just a simple, 28-day thing. Turns out I...
The key ingredients of stories that sell
Whenever I’m ghostwriting a nonfiction book for a client, I always push for them to add more stories. Some of my authors are natural storytellers, and they have tons of examples in mind. Some would rather just talk about the meat of the content, and require a bit more prodding to come up with good illustrations for their points. And, yes, not every point needs a story to drive it home—but it definitely helps. So I keep pushing. The project I’m working on right now is chock full of great...
Storytelling is a joke
A month or so back, I went to see Patrick Hinds perform a chapter from his book, Failure is Not Not an Option. Patrick is a cohost of the True Crime Obsessed podcast which I am, yes, obsessed with. I started binge-listening to it while I was staying alone in my parents creepy farmhouse house with my dying grandfather and needed a distraction—but that’s a story for a different day. This is the second time that Patrick has come through Portland on his book tour, and I've seen him both times....
My challenge to you
I forgot to tell you something yesterday about the story finder system I’ve been using to create my story vault. (Did you create your Story Finder spreadsheet yesterday? How did it go?) Having a system for collecting stories won’t build you a story vault if you don’t also develop the habit of regularly logging stories. My mom, sister, and I recently did a book club study of James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and each of us came to it with concrete changes that we wanted to make in our lives....
Become a story finding machine
Re-reading Matthew Dicks’ Storyworthy is what convinced me to make this most recent attempt to create a story vault. (Which I wrote to you about yesterday.) If you’ve never read the book, I highly recommend picking it up. Matthew Dicks is a bestselling author, professional storyteller, and 50-time Moth StorySLAM champion—and he details his method for collecting, writing, polishing, and delivering his incredible stories in the book. Early on, he encourages readers to start a practice he calls...
How I banish the blank page scaries
You sit down to write a newsletter or social media post and…nothing. Somehow the very act of pulling up that empty page turns your mind completely blank. Surely something interesting happened recently you can write about, right? But suddenly you can’t even remember what you had for breakfast, let alone that valuable, insightful story you wanted to share. So how do you become one of those people who always has an effortless anecdote—the perfect story for every post, newsletter, webinar, or...
Storytelling that sells—the Magnetic Story Framework
I've been spending a ton of time doing research on social media lately, and I've noticed something. Everyone says storytelling sells, but nobody’s explaining how to actually write a good story. To be fair, it’s not easy to teach the art of telling a good story. That’s why you mostly see generic advice like: “Be vulnerable” “Have a good hook” “Use curiosity” But…how do you do those things? It’s not just that some entrepreneurs are natural-born storytellers and others aren’t. The ones who are...
Get actionable advice, frameworks, and how-tos from fiction author and professional ghostwriter Jessie Kwak about how to use your writing to grow your business and spread your message.