Hello, and welcome to the Story Energies, a new way to talk about storytelling!
For those I haven’t met yet: My name’s Colin Corrigan (he/him), and I’m a writer and writing teacher from County Kildare in Ireland. After a decade working in Irish film and Television, and an MA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin, I moved to Michigan in 2013 to get my MFA in Fiction Writing at the Helen Zell Writer’s Program. While there I met the woman who is now my American wife, and so haven’t yet made it back to Ireland (except to visit, with my now two American children.) That’s also where I fell in love with teaching, and I’ve since taught all sorts of writing classes at the University of Michigan, University of Massachusetts Boston, Dean College, Northeastern University, and Boston-based GrubStreet, the U.S.’s largest creative writing centre.
I developed the Story Energies as a way to talk with my students about how to make stories feel vibrant and alive without relying on the overused, prescriptive commandments often handed down in workshops. While these Energies are not, in fact, rooted in actual science—they’re more of a convoluted metaphor!—they’ve been really popular with my students, and even I’ve been surprised by how helpful they have proved to be for illuminating and improving all sorts of stories. So now I’m launching this Substack to share this approach with anyone who might like to give it a try.
I am hoping you readers will also find it exceptionally, well, energising.
Today is what I’m calling the ‘Soft Launch’ of the Story Energies, and this is the first official post—but I have already published a couple other posts, to give you all a glimpse of what will be on offer. Take a look around, especially at:
… for a brief description of each form of Story Energy, and…
… where I talk about the Potential Energy pulsing through three stories that feature an in-some-way-notable limb: the HBO Original limited series The Penguin, Flannery O’Connor’s short story Good Country People, and Lincoln Michel’s novel The Body Scout.
Stay tuned for regular posts in each of these categories:
Witness: where I identify the Story Energies at work in fiction, movies, TV shows, Substack posts and elsewhere.
Harness: where I help you harness the Story Energies in your own storytelling.
Process: where I offer tips on incorporating the Story Energies into your writing process.
Progress: where I chart the Story Energies’ journey here on Substack, and beyond…
We’re just getting started here, but soon (I hope!) we’ll have a vibrant community of readers and writers, armed with this new vocabulary for thinking about and talking about storytelling. So sign up, comment on posts, contribute suggestions, and share your own work in a safe, creative space.
To discover and explore everything this new approach has to offer, sign up for 60 days of free, full access to all Story Energies content as we get up and running.
You can watch a longer (6m 44s) clip of the launch sequence from Apollo 13 (courtesy of Universal Pictures) here—it’s good cinema. (Lots of Kinetic Energy with all that button-pushing, and then Elastic Energy, when things start getting tense after Gary Sinise checks his watch…)