Welcome to People Are Stories-in-Progress, the first Season of the Journeypen Project.

A Season is a container that allows us to take a deep dive into a specific topic in the craft of writing. (A container is a type of tool, which we’ll discuss in detail a bit deeper in this introduction.) This one is an exploration of the intersection between story structure and character development, both in fiction and in life.

Why do I teach these together?

Why am I sharing this now?

And why have I titled this offering People Are Stories-in-Progress?

And to answer these questions, I’d like to begin this Season with a story.

Where This Approach Came From

Once upon a time, I moved into my new college. The school was known for many things, but the reason I’d chosen it was for writerly reasons. Great writers had attended that institution. Some of them were poets I’d studied in AP English.

I wasn’t the only student who’d chosen this college for that reason.

In that first week, I met a bunch of freshmen who also planned on becoming English majors. Later on, we discovered that English majors made up a significant portion of our graduating class. Many of us even planned to become writers.

Gathering with other writers wasn’t completely new to me. In high school, several of my friends wrote and exchanged stories. I’d also gone to two summer writers’ workshops for high schoolers. 

But at my college, for the first time, I felt like an oddball among the other writers—a complete and total weirdo.

For one thing, my college had a true writer aesthetic. I’d literally never heard the world “hipster” before, but they were all over the place, jotting down their notes in fancy journals, wearing arty scarves and scuffed boots. Many of them were slender with elegant eyeliner, which I had no idea how to apply, or they were tiny enough to fit into cute dresses they’d found in vintage shops. Or they had a familial pain they infused in their short stories and maybe, eventually, their memoirs.

In other words, these other writers had…mystique. They were cool.

I did not have mystique. As a student-athlete from North Carolina, I lived in spandex, polo shirts, and jeans. My floormates lovingly teased me for being preppy, and I disagreed. If I were truly preppy, I told them, I would have everything monogrammed.  

Despite the lack of mystique, no one could deny that I was definitely a writer—not even me. I started writing at ten, and by the time I arrived at my college freshman year, I’d finished five novels. I would finish two more by the time I turned twenty, right before junior year.

I had just as much as actual practice as more established writers, including our writing professors, who had published short stories or even a few novels.

So, though I didn’t fit the mold of the other writers around me, no one doubted that I was a writer. I was writing.

But that feeling of difference, feeling like such a weirdo, it clung to me. It also touched on something deeper than the writer aesthetic and my writing practice.

I didn’t yet have the words to articulate what it was—or even the experience to understand it fully.

My dad once told me, “It’s always shocking to find out that others don’t see the world the way you do. You do what feels normal to you, and later on, you realize that not everybody thinks that way.”

He was talking about personal integrity, but the concept works just as well for an individual’s writing craft.

Specifically, I’m talking about my approach to writing. I use so many of my own terms I created my own Shelbish glossary, and I’ll refer to some of my own definitions throughout People Are Stories-in-Progress. Here’s the first one: I define creativity as “the practice of making meaning.” Because I started writing so young, I could not—and still cannot—separate my understanding of the world from the way I craft my writing.  

Others at school looked the part, matching the writer aesthetic. They oozed mystique which seemed to say, “I’m incredibly cool. Please leave me alone with my pretty, pretty words.”

Instead, I moved through the world like a writer trying to find the thread of the main plot. With that attitude, I met each person as if they were the main character of their own story, and I was genuinely and incredibly curious to find out what their story was. In fact, because of this attitude, most people eventually opened up to me, and I discovered that the don’t-talk-to-me writer mystique was often a façade, an act to cover up some anxiety in the individual. Looking cool on the outside was a shield for what they were trying not to feel on the inside. 

As we grew older, I leaned harder on the tools of the writing craft to make sense of my life—many of which I’ll share with you later in the Season. I couldn’t separate my craft from my understanding of the world, and the practice enriched my life.

But my classmates felt like they had to halt their life to do some writing. Best case scenario, making something was an interruption to whatever they had going on that week. Worst case scenario, their writing became one more thing they used to torture themselves. Sometimes, they asked themselves deeply unhelpful questions, such as Am I writing enough? Or is it any good at all? Or even Am I any good? In other words, writing took my classmates away from their life, and this still saddens me, especially they may have never learned another approach.  

You can approach any practice in a way that takes something from your life, or you can approach the same practice in a way that adds something to your life. That includes writing in particular and creativity in general. Learning one approach over the other is a decision you eventually make for yourself, but there may be some learning and/or unlearning in involved.

I want to be clear it’s not my college’s fault. My school, my classmates, and my professors aren’t unique in the way they approach writing. Instead, they exemplify what we expect from writing, writers, and the writing craft in modern times.  

Though I went to college with a different approach, I didn’t graduate completely unscathed from the writing culture around me. I also picked up some of these habits, especially through my writing classes, but those tendencies never reached deep enough to stop me from writing. I always had a creative project of my own, a novel, a story, or something—some place where my creativity belonged completely to me.

So, my writing craft continued to deepen my ability to make meaning—inside my stories and inside my own life. Again, I couldn’t separate one from the other.

It was the same skillset, the same tools, in two distinct arenas.