What closet organizing can teach you about story organization

My daughter is 13 and as neat as any teenager can be, but she does love an organized closet. Periodically, she will toss every piece of clothing on the floor and separate the ones she plans to keep from those she has outgrown or no longer wears. As I watched her the other day, it occurred to me that her process is very similar to the process of organizing a story¹.

Organizing is one of the most challenging elements of storytelling. After accumulating loads of information through reporting and researching, how do I decide what to use? How can I avoid feeling completely overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge I’ve gathered? How do I find the connections that will tie everything together? In this video, we’ll talk about that.