🤖🎬 The clues to a great story

Saturday 14 June, the lamp fitted, the office finished, and the opening of 📝 Issue 42 - Your backlog is a stock, not a list still wrong after three attempts. Noor's question on the draft had been why do I care by line four. I went looking for somebody who makes a living from line four and found a film-maker's talk from 2012, nineteen minutes.

He wrote and directed animated films about a lost fish and a rubbish-collecting robot. Most of the talk is his own life told backwards, which I could have done without. Three things were worth the nineteen minutes:

• Know the ending before you start. A story is a joke told well: everything from the first line is aimed at the last one.
• Make me care. That is the only promise an opening has to keep, and it has to keep it quickly.
• Give the audience two and two, not four. People want to do the adding themselves. A well-arranged absence holds them better than an explanation.

The third one fixed the issue. My opening had been explaining what a stock is. The rewrite starts with a team that closed forty tickets in a sprint and ended it with a longer backlog, and does not say why until the third paragraph. The reader does the sum.

It is the opposite of how I write a spec, and I now think that is correct in both directions. For ♦️ Writing clearly.

What I distrust: the claim that every good story has one. He works in a form with a hero. A newsletter about queues has, at best, a queue.