Think of the stories that have stayed with you. The novels you pressed into someone else’s hands and said: “Read this!”

Were they the most dramatic books you’d ever read? The drama, if any, would have come from your own Aha! Moment when you read the story. I know mine always did.

The purpose of stories is to expand your vision and deepen your understanding—of yourself, of life, of the world, of yourself in the world. To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone With The Wind and Atlas Shrugged are my top three favorites—and have remained my favorites for decades.

Each of these works were a reflection of the author’s understanding of life and the nuggets she mined from her experiences. And those nuggets are as precious to me the reader as they were to her the author. Maybe not in the same way; maybe I got a nugget she had never considered one.

[All three written by extraordinary women, isn’t that wonderful?]

If Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind) were a European woman writing about the American civil war and how the values of the gracious South deteriorated as a result of that broken order, it would NOT have made the impact it made on her readers. She lived the civil war. It left wounds on the soul—maybe not the same ones that Scarlett suffered but similar.

If you want your story to live forever, stop trying to write the story you think people want to read. Write the story only you can tell—that’s when it comes alive.

The Confusion

We have been taught, mostly by accident, to equate interesting with extraordinary. Big events. High stakes. Dramatic reversals. We read bestseller lists and watch box office hits and absorb the message: this is what a story looks like.

But interesting and extraordinary are not the same.

The most extraordinary story in the world will amaze and excite a reader, not become a part of their inner world.

My theory about this is simple.

If you’re taking the trouble to write, why write something that fades by next month? All three of my favorite stories have stood the test of time. Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) and Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind) both only wrote that one story. Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged) wrote many, but this was her last work of fiction.

The Story You Should Write

I would rather write one story which lives forever than churn out one every three months—as many writers do.

If you are influenced by what you should write rather than the one which lives deep in your soul, you’ll be taking your story back, untold, to the other world when you go.

You might become popular and famous, make a lot of money, but fifty years later not many would say your story changed their life.

There’s nothing wrong with the first. But if you have the means to have the second, why wouldn’t you try?

What Writing from the Inside Out Actually Means

It doesn’t mean writing autobiography. Fiction is not memoir. You can write about experiences you’ve never had, characters nothing like yourself, worlds entirely invented.

But the emotional truth has to be yours.

When you write a character who is afraid of being left behind, you have to know what that fear feels like from the inside—the specific way it sits in the chest, the small irrational things it makes a person do, the particular shame of it. You don’t have to have lived that fear yourself. But you have to have felt something true enough that you can find your way into it honestly.

That is writing from the inside out. And it produces a completely different story than writing from the outside in—constructing what you think the fear should look like based on what you’ve seen in other books and films.

One version a reader recognises. The other they observe.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Most writers who come to me stuck are trying to write the wrong story. The one that sounds right. The one that fits the room. Not the one that lives in them, waiting.

That story—the one only you can tell—is worth finishing.

Mother of three adult, opinionated humans. An idealistic, outspoken woman of scrupulous integrity. Editor, coach, ghostwriter and storyteller. And a passionate bibliophile, of course.