I’ve been telling stories since I learned to talk, and I have learned in that time that no matter how good a story might be I cannot tell it compellingly or authoritatively until I’m lined up with it.

Whether you call yourself a writer or not, you’re a storyteller. Stories are how we communicate with each other, and how we understand the world and ourselves. And perhaps more importantly, we are also all living in a kind of storybook of our own creation, filled with our own villains and heroes, our own monsters and saints, and our own idea of whether this story can end happily or not.

I studied philosophy for the first time when I was a freshman in college. Before then, the most I knew about philosophers was from the Monty Python’s Philosopher’s Song. After a few months of study I had an epiphany. “All philosophers do,” I realized, “is look around at the world and then write down what they think about it. Why read what other people think? Why not write down what I think?”

Michelangelo supposedly said of his sculpture “David” that he did not carve the figure but released it from the marble. I’ve heard a number of writers quote this when talking about finding their stories – specifically fiction. It is a helpful way to look at writing, I think: the view that the stories we want to tell already exist, and we just need to put them into a form that everyone can see.

I’ve noticed that if I’m flipping through television channels looking for something to watch, and I happen on a scene where a man has a gun pointed at someone’s face, I usually pause in my flipping. The same is true if I land on a scene of a man and woman in the act. In both cases I know absolutely nothing about the context for what I am seeing. I don’t know if the man with the gun is a villain or a hero, if he’s crazed or courageous; I also don’t if the man and the woman are in love or if they’ve just met at a bus stop. All I know is that someone might die, or that two people are having sex.

My younger brother and I were both interested as boys in the arts, but whereas I was drawn to the page he was drawn to the stage and eventually the screen. We were talking about our separate choices one day, and he admitted he was somewhat puzzled by mine. “I don’t get it, Bill,” he said. “With books all you get are words.”