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The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is one of my favorite places in the city, and the Alexander Calder gallery has been one of my favorite spots in the museum since it reopened a few years ago.The shapes move gently when they are caught in the air currents coming from the gallery doors leading outside, but the curved horizontal axis keeps the piece strong and steady.Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative because it makes a perfect visual metaphor for Wendig’s primary advice, which is to find the spine of your story and then experiment until you achieve balance.I can imagine Calder playing around with his shapes, moving them along the curved spine, seeing just how far out he could extend them without destroying the balance of the piece.Wendig, similarly, wants you to dive into your characters and setting and ask questions and mess around with answers until you find the shape of your story.You can’t plug a bunch of narrative components into an equation and spit out a perfect story.The truth is, most of what I’m telling you here is wildly imperfect.You don’t have the answers, either. But Wendig knows a good story when he sees it.More importantly, he believes that you know how to spot one too.We have this idea of plot as a big, explosive thing.When storytellers have an exterior framework into which they then plug the characters, the characters operate as secondary, as afterthoughts.And the audience has no one to ground them in the story.Characters are everything.We may think we are there for the fireworks, but we’re really there for the deep truths.Some characters in a story are on parallel paths, moving in the same direction.These characters are often allies, or become allies.Other characters are following paths that are perpendicular to one another.It’s at these intersections where paths cross that the plot really occurs.As Wendig points out, seeing every single character as the hero of their own story will automatically steer you away from missteps like creating strong female characters whose sole purpose is to leverage the dudes into action. Instead, give all of your characters agency.Wendig’s annotated list of twists, tweaks, and tickles you can use to juice up your plot will be helpful for anyone stuck in the long slog of the mushy middle, and his list of elements every scene needs to have would be a perfect checklist for a writer doing an initial revision pass on their first draft.He writes approachably and practically about abstract concepts like theme, trope, and metaphor, and his advice about transitions is the best I’ve seen.He combats it with a profound belief that storytelling is for all of us.Storytelling is a shared tradition, he declares.We all get to pass around the talking stick and the magic witch’s eye.It’s not just for the priests or the chosen few. So dive into that deep well of stories inside you and see what you’re able to bring to the surface.