What The A to Z Challenge Taught Me About Storytelling

When I started the A to Z Challenge this year, I chose Storytelling as my theme.

It sounded manageable at the time. Broad enough to sustain twenty-six posts, familiar enough that I wouldn’t run out of things to say. I have spent years in marketing, writing blogs, building campaigns, watching people, consuming stories, telling stories. I thought I knew the territory.

I was wrong about the familiar part.

Somewhere around the third or fourth post, I realised I was not writing about storytelling at all. I was writing about people. About the invisible narratives sitting underneath ordinary behaviour. The things we say when we mean something else. The identities we perform until they harden into personality. The explanations we construct after making emotional decisions and then convince ourselves we made rationally.

And once I started noticing those patterns, I could not stop.

The difficult thing about writing this series was that the posts refused to stay theoretical. The moment they became abstract, they lost something. The tension went out of them. They became essays about ideas rather than essays about people, and essays about ideas, however well organised, do not make anyone stop mid-scroll and think, oh, I do that.

So almost every piece had to begin somewhere real.

A kitchen being unpacked. A joke followed by “I’m just kidding”. A person saying let me check instead of no. A woman walking across a car park in the evening. A WhatsApp group where a conversation shifted so completely that by the end nobody could locate where it had started. A vivid memory of a colleague crying at her desk about a yes she had not chosen.

That became the structure of the series without my entirely planning it that way. Not essays about storytelling. Essays through storytelling. And that distinction changed the writing more than I expected.

Some posts arrived almost fully formed. Posture happened quickly because once I saw the idea I saw it everywhere. Just Kidding wrote itself because almost everyone instantly recognises that particular transfer of discomfort, the joke that lands wrong, the room that goes quiet, the face you make while you work out what to do with what just happened. Questions came with uncomfortable ease because I already knew the emotional terrain of it, had lived inside it, had been the person watching a conversation move away from the thing it was supposed to be about.

Other posts fought me for days.

The ideas weren’t weak as such. I had conviction in them. But I kept circling the idea instead of finding the pressure point underneath it. And that became the real lesson of the series. The theme was easy, the topics required some thinking, but finding that one moment where something human revealed itself was the most difficult. The place where the abstract became personal and the personal became, strangely, universal.

I learned very early on in blogging that readers do not connect to conclusions. They connect to recognition. The sentence that makes them feel the click of something landing, the “Oh God, I do that!”, or the “I have never named this, but I have lived it”. Which meant the writing had to resist becoming too neat. I had to teach myself to stop summarising before I had earned the summary. I had to let scenes breathe longer than felt comfortable. I had to trust that the reader would get there without me escorting them to the door and pointing.

That sounds obvious. It was surprisingly difficult.

I naturally like structure. I like clarity. I like organised thinking, but I also like contradictions, creativity, the stories and the messy motivations that drive humans. Which probably explains a career in marketing and operations. And many times during this series I caught myself trying to improve a piece by making it cleaner, but the messier version was emotionally truer. An observation that didn’t fully explain itself and a moment left to sit without conversion into a lesson felt right.

The posts I liked best came from observation layered with discomfort. The way women physically shrink themselves in certain rooms without noticing they are doing it. The way kindness is often used to avoid honesty. The way silence changes shape depending on who holds power in a room. The way morality gets deployed most confidently by the people least willing to examine their own.

The more specific the observation became, the more universal the response. That surprised me, but not really. I expected people to connect with the larger themes. Instead they connected to tiny details. Specific sentences. The soft no. The we’ll see that means no. The feeling of carrying old versions of yourself into new cities and being surprised, each time, when they unpack themselves. The unchosen Yes.

Here is the part I did not fully anticipate when I started.

Several of these posts required me to say things in public that are considerably easier to leave private. The workplace incident in Just Kidding, where something inappropriate was said and I was quietly asked to make it disappear. The colleague in Yes, crying at her desk over a choice that was never really hers. The parenting moments that revealed, more clearly than I would have liked, exactly which instincts had survived every good intention I had brought to the job. The admission in Outrage about the Honda post, and what watching it go viral taught me about what kind of writer I did not want to be.

Writing from inside experience rather than above it is a different thing entirely. You cannot control the distance. You cannot observe yourself from a safe remove and call it honesty. You have to actually be in the thing you are describing, which means the reader can see you in it too. I chose it, each time, because the alternative was a post that was technically correct and emotionally hollow. But the choice carries weight that doesn’t fully show up on the page.

What also surprised me was how many of these posts I did not know I was writing until I was already writing them.

I did not sit down with a fully formed idea and then find the words for it. I sat down with a pressure point, sometimes just a scene, sometimes just a feeling that something was worth looking at, and then I wrote toward the understanding rather than from it. Several times I finished a post and found myself thinking, oh, that is what I was trying to say. The writing was not recording a thought I had already completed. It was how the thought got completed. That distinction matters to me more than I expected it to, because it is the difference between writing as communication and writing as thinking, and this series was almost entirely the second thing.

Something else I noticed. People are hungry for reflection right now. Not productivity tips. Not optimism with a deadline. Not advice dressed as wisdom. Reflection. Writing that notices something human and sits beside it for a moment without immediately converting it into a lesson or a list or three things you can do differently starting Monday.

The internet has rewarded speed for so long that slowing down feels almost countercultural. But this series worked best when it slowed down. When it stayed inside an ordinary moment longer than felt strictly necessary.

By the end, I also understood something about the title that I had not fully understood at the start.

The stories we tell are not really about narrative. They are about survival. The stories we tell ourselves to begin again. The stories we tell to stay liked. The stories we tell to preserve a version of ourselves that the room will accept. The stories we inherit without noticing, perform without deciding, and pass on without meaning to.

Some protect us. Some limit us. Most do both at the same time, which is what makes them so difficult to examine and so necessary to keep examining.

And then there is this, which I only understood properly at the very end.

The series was always about me, even when it wasn’t. Every letter was, underneath the observation, a way of thinking through something I had lived or was still living. Bias, identity, silence, reputation, women, yes, zero. The external subject was always a way into the internal one. I write about the world to understand myself in it. Which is, I think, why the series had the consistency it did. It wasn’t held together by a theme. It was held together by a sensibility.

I started this challenge thinking I had chosen a writing theme. Somewhere along the way it be came something closer to a habit of attention.And I suspect, now that it is over, that I will not entirely be able to turn it off. Which is, I think, exactly as it should be.

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I am listing all the posts here. Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have enjoyed writing them.

• Average: The Stories That Don’t Get Told
• Bias: The Same Story, Told Differently
• Control: The Stories We Tell to Manipulate
• Daydream: The Stories We Tell Before Anyone Is Listening
• Emotion: The Stories That Change Without Changing
• Fredrik Backman: The Stories That Make You Sit With People
• Gossip: The Oldest Story Nobody Admits to Telling
• Harry Potter: The Stories That Built a World
• Jargon: The Stories We Tell to Belong
• Kidding, Just Kidding: The Stories We Tell Sideways
• Lies: The Stories We Tell Ourselves to Delay Ourselves
• Morality: The Stories We Use to Govern Behaviour
• No: The Stories We Tell to Avoid Saying No
• Outrage: The Stories That Distract Us From What Matters
• Posture: The Stories Our Bodies Tell
• Questions: The Stories We Ask Instead of Answering
• Reputation: The Stories That Arrive Before You Do
• Silence: The Stories We Don’t Tell Out Loud
• Taste: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About What We Like
• Urban: The Stories That Live in Cities
• Viewpoint: The Stories That Look Different From the Other Side
• Women: The Stories We Tell About Ourselves
• Xenial: The Stories We Tell Around Hospitality
• Yes: The Stories We Tell When We Have No Choice
• Zero: The Stories We Tell About Starting Over

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I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.