Other People's Stories, and the One I Keep Not Writing
There's a specific kind of moment I've chased for most of my career. It usually happens late in a project, after multiple rounds of editing, when someone brilliant — an engineer, a scientist, a founder, an executive who's spent thirty years building something real — stops explaining their work like they always have, turns to me, and says, "Huh. I've never thought about it that way."
That sentence is the whole job, as far as I'm concerned. Getting there means sitting across from people who are smarter than me about their subject and asking the questions that make them see their own work sideways — not the résumé version, not the version optimized for a board deck, but the true one, the one with the actual stakes in it. I've spent years inside large organizations doing exactly that: helping people who build extraordinary things find the story buried under the process that produced them. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most rewarding things I know how to do. Watching a brilliant, exhausted expert rediscover why their work matters is not a small thing, and I don't say that lightly after watching it happen again and again.
But I'd be lying if I said the arrangement was uncomplicated.
Here is the tension I've never fully resolved: I love pulling great stories out of other people. I miss, with an intensity that surprises me sometimes, writing my own. There's a version of this work where you become extremely good at sharpening someone else's thinking and only occasionally get to put your own hand on the page. Over enough years, that trade adds up. I didn't set out to become a translator between smart people and the audiences who need to understand them. I set out to write. Somewhere along the way, helping others tell their stories became the day job, and telling my own slipped into the thing I did in the margins, or didn't do at all.
Part of that is the nature of working inside big organizations, which I say with affection for the people in them and real frustration with the machine around them. Large companies are, structurally, built to reduce risk, and stories are one of the riskiest things a company produces. They're opinionated, they're specific, and they can be quoted back at you. So the process closes in. A sharp, true sentence goes through legal, then brand, then three layers of stakeholder review, and comes out the other side rounded off at every edge that made it interesting in the first place. I understand why the checkboxes exist. I've watched them prevent real problems. But I've also watched a genuinely great story get sanded down into a forgettable one, one approval cycle at a time, and there's a particular kind of grief in watching that happen to something you helped build.
What I've learned from being on the inside of that machine, rather than complaining about it from outside, is where the actual leverage is. It's not in fighting the process — that's a losing, exhausting fight, and usually the wrong one. It's in getting into the room early enough that the story is strong before the process ever touches it, and in being stubborn about protecting the one or two sentences that make the whole thing true. You can't save every edit. You can decide which hill is the one worth dying on, and I've gotten quite good at knowing which hill that is.
Still — the yearning hasn't gone away, and I've stopped pretending it will. I want to write more of my own sentences again, not just sharpen other people's. I want to be back in the room where the story is being discovered for the first time, not the room where it's being defended for the fourth. That's not a rejection of the last several years; it's the reason I'm good at this. You get better at recognizing a story worth telling when you've felt, firsthand, what it costs to lose one to the process.
I've spent years learning exactly how that machine works from the inside — where a good sentence gets protected, where it gets sanded down, and which hill is actually worth defending. I don't regret the education. But I notice, more and more, that what I want isn't distance from the machine. It's to move closer to the source, and to keep enough of the pen in my own hand that the next story worth telling doesn't have to wait for someone else to write it first.