Sunday mornings used to be about sleeping late, catching up, or feeling guilty about everything still left undone. These days, they’re quieter. Coffee in the kitchen. Music playing softly. Conversations that drift between the new, the familiar, and the things you somehow keep revisiting after decades together. Outside, twenty raised garden beds wait for spring planting, which may be ambition or madness. Possibly both.
Some writing books give you tools. Others give you theory. The Writer’s Journey gives you something far more powerful: a map. Not a rigid formula, but a way to understand the emotional rhythms readers instinctively respond to—change, challenge, sacrifice, and transformation. When a story feels off, this framework can help you see what’s missing and why.
Mark didn’t expect Shrinking to hit quite so hard—but somewhere between the laughs and the quiet gut-punch moments, it did. A show about grief, friendship, and trying to do better while carrying everything life hands you, it’s exactly the kind of story that lingers—and the kind he’d love to write someday.
Why do some stories grip you from the first page while others feel oddly lifeless, no matter how much “happens”? Robert McKee’s Story digs beneath surface action to the real engine of narrative—where pressure, choice, and consequence reveal character and create momentum that readers can feel, even if they can’t name it.
Books are usually better—at least, that’s the pattern Mark keeps coming back to after years of reading first and watching later. But every now and then, a film breaks the rule…
Writers collect craft books the way other people collect unread classics and half-finished notebooks: with tremendous optimism and the vague sense that owning them counts as progress. But a few books earn their place beside the desk because they’re not just inspiring—they’re useful. In the first of this series, Mark looks at why The Story Grid has become one of the writing books he returns to again and again: because when a manuscript goes sideways, this is the book that explains why.
This weekend, Mark is trading the keyboard for lumber, screws, and soil as he builds twenty raised beds in the backyard. There’s a quiet satisfaction in work you can see at the end of the day—and a surprising connection between gardening and writing. Both are acts of optimism: you do the work now, trust the process, and hope something good will grow.
There’s a point in many manuscripts where the story quietly pulls back. The conflict softens, the dialogue becomes safer, and characters make the reasonable choice instead of the revealing one. The result is a manuscript that is technically good—but often forgettable. The moments readers remember are rarely the comfortable ones.
Lately, Tracy and I have been watching The Americans, and it has completely hooked us. Not because of the spy story—although that’s excellent—but because everything about it feels real. The relationships are messy, the choices are complicated, and the 1980s setting feels lived in instead of staged. It’s the kind of show that doesn’t just entertain you for an hour. It lingers afterward and leaves you wondering what you would have done in the same situation.
The most common problem I see in manuscripts right now isn’t bad prose or weak dialogue. It’s stories where the protagonist could simply walk away—and nothing meaningful would happen. If your character can shrug and go home, they probably should. So why don’t they?
