Looking Back, Looking Forward—to 2025!
A review of all that's happened since we launched in October, and a look ahead to what's coming next year...
A year is a story. One that starts on an arbitrary day1, and ends a somewhat arbitrary amount of time later2. And one that offers us an opportunity to arrange the events of the past (and our hopes for the future) into narratives, so we can feel in control of our lives.
This can have real benefits! We all already know that learning from the past can help us avoid repeating mistakes and come up with new ideas, but we also know that life can get busy, and we can get swept along on the current of our routines, and it can be rare enough that we get to get our heads above water, take a deep breath, and reflect upon what has happened to us, and how we have felt about it; upon what we have learned, and how we can apply that learning, as they say, going forward.
In every class I teach, I try to build in opportunities for reflection on what we are learning, particularly at the end—to look back at what we have learned during the course, and to think about how our writing process or our writing itself has changed, and about what lessons we can take forward into our future work.
In that spirit, I’m going to look back at our first few months here at the Story Energies, and look forward at what we can hope for next year.
To help with this, I’m going to use the descriptions of each form of Story Energy from my explainer—8 Forms: an Introduction to the Story Energies—as a spine, to which I’ll add some of the flesh, blood and muscle of what we’ve learned.
As I say in my introduction to my introduction:
Thinking about the material that makes up a story—characters, for example, or places, or objects—as Story Matter, and the work that turns that material into a story as Story Energy, can give us a new vocabulary to illuminate our favourite stories and the sparks that ignite them, and to help us add more life and depth to our own stories.
And so, without further ado…
Any form of matter (a person, a building, a tool) we introduce into our story has some built-in Potential Energy, and some have a lot more than others. Think of Chekhov’s famous gun—if there’s a rifle hanging on the wall in the first scene, the potential for story increases. A house can be charged with Potential Energy if it is haunted by its murdered former inhabitants, or if its gas main is held together by duct tape; a floorboard gains Potential if it creaks. Perhaps most importantly, if a character wants something really badly, they are charged with Potential Energy; if they need something, whether they know it or not, that’s more Potential; if they’re the kind of person who goes out and tries to get what they want, even better. Where there’s love, or desire, or ambition, there is potential for story—objects of desire can be striven for, or stolen away.
My early post Phantom Potential looked at three stories featuring a malformed or missing limb, to talk about the possibilities that open up for a story when a character has some specific lack or longing…
Whenever we give a character a particular trait, it becomes a question waiting to be answered. And when we try to answer that question, it can throw up lots more new questions about the character and the world they live in. Questions beget questions.
A week or so later, I looked at His Three Daughters as an example of how we can charge our stories with Potential Energy by making our characters very different from one another, in their temperaments and their histories; by trapping those characters in a horrible situation; and by making them share deep-rooted bonds, like Sisters!
Some characters have it in spades, because they are charismatic, or enigmatic, and when they walk into a room everyone feels drawn toward them. Sometimes attraction is more personal, when one character feels intensely pulled toward another. And then there’s that equal but opposite force, repulsion. Romantic or platonic, positive or negative, Magnetic Energy can make a story irresistibly compelling.
That post on His Three Daughters also looked at how the bonds between sisters charged that movie with a powerful Magnetic Energy, and how their fighting forms the story’s beating heart. And later I focused on how the relationship between the brothers in Intermezzo—as well as their bonds with their respective lovers—generated most of the plot of that novel. That same post looked at some of the ways in which a character—like Sally-Rooney-the-Author herself—can captivate their audience, particularly when their charm is laced with some deep-rooted pain or discontent.
Sally-Rooney-the-Author is enigmatic, in her reticence, and her apparently sincere disinterest in our interest in her as a person. And she’s also startlingly charismatic, when she does emerge—soft-spoken and withering; proud and modest; confident, somehow, in her own vulnerability. Crackling with contradiction, she gazes calmly at us (or perhaps over our shoulder) and suggests we just read her books.
If you’ve ever walked out onto a porch during a lightning storm, you know that feeling that electricity creates. And, of course, weather’s not the only way to charge an atmosphere. Love can be “in the air”, as can violence. Any setting—a war zone, a street protest, a department store—if vividly portrayed can make your story crackle and fizz. And just as a place can be imbued with atmosphere, a character can be filled with emotion, that electrical charge that makes our hearts pump faster, or skip beats.
If the bonds between characters in Intermezzo work both ways—not just attraction or repulsion, but attraction and repulsion—my post on Nobody Wants This looked at how straightforward that series’ central relationship is, and how those episodes generate lots of Electrical Energy in long scenes where the new lovers experience emotion—elation, or worry, or despondency, or overwhelming joy—in real time. Because when we recognise something in a character (such as that desire for a love that feels about perfect), and join them on an emotional journey, we’re more likely to care about what happens to them.
My follow-up post last week on the Christmas Spirit looked at how, even when Electrical Energy can seem to be crackling independently in the air, it is usually generated by the people moving through the space, and their passions and drives—even if they’re not aware of that themselves.
With a crowd, it’s easier for the atmosphere to at least seem like it is taking on a life of its own. And, in fact, in some strange, hard-to-define way, it really can—people together can create an atmosphere, which can then influence them and also other people who wander by. So a mob can get all riled up and end up doing terrible things. Or, in a nicer and more seasonable example, we can all decide to take some time off work, buy and wrap gifts, and be nice to one another.
I also offered some tips for how to generate compelling atmospheres in your own stories—particularly when a character can step forward and, with an act of remarkable resolve and courage, transform the atmosphere of a whole nation, and save Christmas.
Regardless of whether a story aims for conventional realism, or creates its own reality filled with unicorns, dragons and flying saucers, there should always be an earth to come crashing down to (even if it floats in space on the back of a turtle). Every story world must have its own logic, its own set of rules, its own natural and social forces to be resisted. Defying gravity—whether you’re Icarus with your dad’s miraculous wings, or Juliet with your dad’s sworn enemy—can be exhilarating, but the higher we fly...
Several of those tips on generating atmosphere involved drawing on the Gravitational Energy already generated by the setting of your story. Two earlier posts focused on this particular form of Potential Energy:
Mystery and Manners in Fallout explored the compelling backdrop to the novel Eleanor Anstruther has just finished serialising here on Substack, and borrowed terms from Flannery O’Connor to talk about how each story world we create has its Mysteries—its own questions about how things work—and its Manners—the pressures and expectations placed upon its groups and individuals, and the complicated roles which people are supposed to play.
Demand! then borrowed Junot Diaz’s idea that a setting should place specific Demands upon its characters—preferably two, conflicting, unequal demands, which he calls a Demand Duo.
When we work hard to pack our story worlds with vivid specificity and rich complexity, the possibilities for the story itself can seem endless. This presents us with all sorts of opportunities—roads down which we can guide our stories—but it can also create a paralysing challenge—how do we decide which of these roads to take? Focusing on one Demand Duo—in Díaz’s own fiction, that’s Be Dominican and Don’t Be Dominican, and for Frodo Baggins in the Shire, he tells us, it’s Be a Decent Respectable parochial Hobbit and Be Aware that the Shire is part of an apocalyptic multi-racial conflict zone called Middle-Earth—can help us decide what our story is really about, and add a clarity and cohesiveness to what we might call our creative vision.
Things tend to become more compelling when they move. If characters are going places, doing things, interacting with each other and the wider world, they are adding kinetic energy to your story. Even a one-on-one conversation feels more vibrant if the characters are driving in a car; wading across a river is more exciting if there’s a current to pull you under.
Kinetic Kamala, published a few days before the election, looked at how Harris’s striding forward to the front of the Democratic ticket reanimated her party with a surge of Kinetic Energy, and how this offers us a lesson:
Movement helps. We can energise even a dialogue scene by just having our characters get up and walk around, or, as I heard Quentin Tarantino say years ago, putting them on speakerphone while they’re driving too fast. But more than that, if we make our protagonists more active, that helps bring the world around them to life, and that movement can soon be converted into other forms of Story Energy.
As it turned out, that surge wasn’t enough to overcome her problems with Potential Energy (as essentially the same candidate who lost her primary race in 2016) and Gravitational Energy (perhaps especially the right-wing clamour of anti-immigrant, anti-‘woke’ scaremongering). But looking back at that post today, it seems worth repeating:
I hope we can all understand and remember that our vote shouldn’t be interpreted as a final verdict on our moral character. We just tune in to different stories, and these stories have helped shape our values, our priorities, our senses of humour, and ultimately the stories that we will tell ourselves about this election.
As well as posts about how to Witness the Story Energies at work, and Harness the Energies in your own storytelling, I’ve also shared advice on how to incorporate them into your writing Process.
Conflicting Values borrowed again from Flannery O’Connor to describe how, even if we’re not Planners but Pantsers, we can use the Story Energies to help develop our habit of art.
Harness the Story Energies: A Star-Crossed Case Study offered a rundown of how each form of Story Energy could help enliven a standard boy meets girl story. (What if their families hate each other?)
It Follows responded to Rayne Fisher-Quann’s captivating essay against narrative, and decided that even if we can declare ourselves against narrative, for cause, we just can’t help trying to scramble for meaning, and arranging our memories and hopes into stories.
If ChatGPT Trumps Shakespeare, Why Even Bother? insisted (with perhaps exaggerated confidence) that there’ll always be a place for human storytellers, because AI models seem unlikely to ever be able to satisfy our craving for novelty. Here I also described two approaches to teaching creative writing—one that equips students with a set of guidelines to follow, and another that focusses on the process of writing stories, and tries to help the student combine that knowledge with what they have learned from their own life, and what they can imagine and invent. I then concluded:
There are many useful approaches to teaching creative writing that don’t involve soullessly copying or reproducing existing stories, but instead equip a storyteller with tools to delve into their complex selves and come up with something fresh and original, that is personal to them, so that they can write the story that only they can write.
The Story Energies is one of these approaches. If you’re interested in learning more, subscribe today.
And people have been subscribing. And opening emails, and reading the posts. Even more than the writerly pleasure of articulating vague notions into sentences, paragraphs, and arguments, and even more than the nerdy satisfaction of creating gifs and graphics starring Natasha Lyonne and Christian Grey, what I’ve loved most about this whole project is looking at the lists of folks who have opened a post. And then opened the next post a week later. Particularly when I can remember their faces from GrubStreet classes, or their writing from their own Substacks.
What’s also great—and, to be honest (in the spirit of open reflection), what I’d love to have more of—is engagement with the posts, in the form of likes, shares, and comments. So if you do read a post here—such as this one!—and get all the way to the end without sighing or rolling your eyes, consider tapping the heart to like it, or even sharing it with someone else you think might find it useful or entertaining, or restacking it as a Note here on Substack. Doing so can help convince the algorithm of this ‘content’’s ‘quality’, and so in turn help me find new readers, and new members of this community…
A community which I’m hoping will become more vibrant in 2025. Look out for new discussions in the Story Energies Craft Cafe for all subscribers, and new opportunities for paid subscribers to share work with each other, and receive feedback from me.
I’m also looking forward to featuring more Substack original fiction. And indeed nonfiction. And podcasts.
I still haven’t written posts focused on Elastic Energy or Nuclear Energy. These are perhaps the two most important Energies!
And I’ve previously mentioned potential video content. And I’m currently on the lookout for a good white lab coat.
So stay tuned!
Speaking of paid subscribers, I’ve been slowly filtering in ‘paid content’ for those generous folks who will hopefully make this project sustainable for us all. This has included my first Story Energies Writing Exercise, and will include most future exercises. But considering the occasion, today, I’m going to leave this (short) exercise free for all.
And, in the spirit of open reflection, and of endings and new beginnings, I’d encourage you (yes, you!) to give it a try. (Those of you who are former students of mine will likely have already been assigned something similar.)
Looking Back, Looking Forward
This is a guided free writing exercise. So don’t stop to think. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling. Just let loose with your pen (/keyboard) and let your stream-of-consciousness carry you... as you reflect on the stories you have told over the past twelve months, and the stories you hope to tell next year.
These could be any kind of story, whether you’re trying to put your kids to sleep or write a bestselling novel.
Some questions that might help focus your attention:
What do you enjoy most about telling stories?
What’s your biggest challenge, when it comes to storytelling?
What’s one storytelling goal you have for 2025?
What aspect of your storytelling would you most like help with?
Set a timer for ten minutes, and begin.
Final note: note the comments section below! If you completed the exercise, share a goal or a challenge that emerged in your flow. If there’s a kind of post you’d like to see more of next year—Witness posts about a movie or a short story, Harness posts with tips for your own storytelling, Process posts on incorporating the Energies into your routine, Progress posts like this one!—let me know. If you’ve any questions, about the Story Energies, or writing generally, or anything else, ask!
The two faces of Janus are cropped from Will Barnet’s Janus and the White Vertebra.
Up until 1752, Britain and its American colonies celebrated the new year on March 25, and Ethiopia still throws its party on my September 11.
In which time we have, in fairness, together gone all the way around the sun.