The Story of My Stories
I’ve always loved stories. Breaking Bad, Love Medicine, American Gods, BoJack Horseman, and Fargo (the movie) are some of my absolute favorites across the genres.
Given my love of stories, and my love of writing, I’m incredibly bothered that I’m not very good at writing stories. My laptop screen is cluttered with TextEdit files of half-baked story ideas, from novels to television shows. I keep the ideas in TextEdit because they’re not good enough to deserve so much as a Word doc, let alone a place in my neat and official Google Drive.
My storytelling ability took a step forward when I started writing for The Michigan Daily, where I was surprised to learn that articles are called “stories” by journalists. I’m glad they are, because this nickname gave me a better idea of how to write pieces I like.
Because I knew that I was writing a “story” first and foremost, I knew it needed to have a beginning, middle, and end, a logical flow from one paragraph to the next, and some change in the person or group I was covering due to the events of the story. Those are characteristics of most stories, but my favorite stories have more qualities in common: they take creative risks, and are extremely cohesive and cogent. So I tried to imbue my journalism with those qualities, too. If I had never heard the word “story” uttered in the newsroom, and just written “articles” instead, they would have been dry accounts of events with no intrinsic value. But that didn’t happen, so they’re not. See for yourself.
While I had made improvements in my storytelling while covering the Michigan baseball team and writing for the newspaper on Mackinac Island this summer, they are nonfiction, about events or other people’s lives. I still wanted to write a fictional story. Enter the Minor in Writing.
I wasn’t sure what the Minor in Writing would consist of, but given the other writing-focused classes I’ve taken at Michigan, I assumed we’d be reading and writing long essays, which was more than fine with me. What has happened in the Gateway class has been much more different and much more fun than I imagined. We’ve read crazy genres like Zines and creative nonfiction, and analyzed pieces from rhetorical and content perspectives. On the writing side, we had incredible creative freedom in choosing any piece of writing we’d done before and mutating it into something different. I chose a Tweet pointing out some ways that politician Brad Stevens and basketball coach Pete Buttegieg — damn it, I mean politician Pete Buttegieg and basketball coach Brad Stevens — look alike and share some other features.
First, I chose to flesh out a movie plot in which Pete and Brad were twins born to famous parents in another galaxy, and chased to Earth by rivals in their respective fields. It flopped. I tried to combine many genres, including sci-fi, action-adventure, and comedy, into one confusing premise, and mistakenly thought it would be more effective if it was satire, even though it had no commentary to offer and none of the requisite biting humor. Ultimately, it was the latest in my long list of storytelling failures, but I wasn’t discouraged, because I heard it was common for students in this class to swing and miss on the first experiment.
In the next experiment, I was inspired by a recent The West Wing binge, speeches I read in a political theory class, and a love of rhetorical devices commonly present in speechwriting to create a speech that I thought Buttegieg would deliver if he was discovered to be leading a double life as President and coach of the Boston Celtics. I was much happier with this experiment than the first one. The tone and writing style were more appropriate to the rhetorical situation, and I didn’t play around with any satire this time — instead, I opted for some “quietly funny” moments embedded in a very serious speech.
I’m incredibly lucky that a classmate suggested I build off this speech for the final project, and that two years ago, I stumbled upon this, the story of the 2007 college football season told with articles, videos, and podcasts, which served as my main genre inspiration. It’s a rare form of storytelling, and hard to label — the SBNation site calls itself a “package.” Despite obvious differences in content, writing style, tone, and genres of individual pieces inside the package, my project and the SBNation project share nearly the exact same rhetorical situation. They both try to cover a series of events comprehensively through a series of pieces. They are aimed at a fairly obsessive audience that wants to know everything and then some on the chosen topic. They are constrained by reader expectations of the pieces of journalism they consist of, and by the world they take place in — facts must be consistent throughout the package, which was harder for me because I built a fictional world.
The creation of this website marks the closing in another chapter of the story of my ability to tell stories. What you’re about to read is certainly my best attempt in 20 years. It’s not told in beautiful, meandering prose, but mostly the utilitarian language present in speeches and newspapers. I’m not sad about it, because I love that kind of writing and I’m good at it, but I hope to be able to write the former some day.
With this project complete, do I feel comfortable borrowing Aaron Paul’s former Twitter bio, which simply read “storyteller,” for my own? Absolutely not; with his portrayal of Jesse Pinkman, Paul set the bar for that distinction astronomically high. But I’m happy that I have one complete story, one built world, under my belt, even if that story is delivered in a very strange way.
As you step into the world of winter 2025, I hope you think critically about the situation, and come to your own conclusion about Pete’s innocence or guilt. I encourage you to read the pages in order. See you at the end.