Introduction

This guide will have a very different structure from any other guide you’ve ever followed. After years of writing and teaching, I’ve learned a simple truth. The best way to learn something, is by doing it, a lot, and regularly challenging yourself or experimenting. In fact, it’s the only way to really learn something.

As such, to improve at the craft of storytelling, you should at least be reading and writing as much as you can. Quality doesn’t really matter. Read books you know are bad, so you can learn from their flaws. Write books you know will never sell, just to get more writing done.

This guide will help you with that.

You don’t want to hear this, I know. I was in the same boat for years. High school killed my love for books, so I didn’t read a single one for ten years. Once I picked up reading again, every day with no exception, my writing automatically improved.

Similarly, your first 5 books will just … suck, no matter how hard you try. You’ll think each of them can become a bestseller. You’ll think that, surely, you worked so hard on your current novel, it has to end up being professional, right? It rarely will. Most authors write around 10–15 books before they get their first success.

Even with that knowledge, you still have to write those books that suck first, before the good ones can come out. It’s like you have to unclog your brain, first throwing out all the bad stuff, so the good stuff can flow :)

What’s the idea?

The first few chapters talk about why we tell stories. They define what “storytelling” is, and ask you to figure out what you want to achieve with your stories, and explain some good places to start.

From that point, each chapter gives one possible approach to writing a book. One technique, framework, set of rules, whatever. These are taken from famous books on writing, author’s recommendations, or my own experience.

For each chapter, write one story using this approach. The length and format of that story can be anything, although I’d recommend keeping it short and contained. The only rules are that you …

• Stick with the approach and apply it as fully as possible.
• Don’t continue to another chapter until that one story is done.

The hardest part of any project … is finishing. So I’m serious about this. Finish that story before going to a new chapter or starting a new one. Get into the habit of finishing stuff, whatever it takes, before moving on some shiny new idea.

The final chapters will congratulate you on doing a good job. They’ll also talk more about what to do once the book is finished (such as publishing).

Let’s tell some great stories!

Alternate names for this course were “How to write a book/novel” or “How to tell a story”. But as you see now, these were too narrow.

This course really views storytelling as a complex craft and tries to view it in every possible light. The ideas here are valid for novels, film, theatre, games, wherever you want to tell a story.

I’ll give some examples of my own work as a writer throughout this course. You can find my work under the name Tiamo Pastoor (my real name). Until ~2023 the books were mostly Dutch, since then I’ve switched to English.

Let’s get started!