Your feelings about your story, and the character’s you’ve created, can get in the way of your story being accessible and interesting to others.  

Keep in mind, your story is interesting to you, because you’re the one who wrote it. You understand the deeper relationships and meanings, because you are the one who toiled over them. In some sense, you lived them, so they are important to you. But, that doesn’t make them interesting and important to a potential listener. Unfortunately, you don’t have minutes to explain why a listener should care about your story. You have mere seconds.

Therefore, If you can’t sell your story in a single sentence, you can’t sell your story.  It’s not a bad quote, if you put it on a t-shirt or something let me know.

Sure, this is binary sounding advice, and, of course, there are exceptions to this rule. But, assume you are not the exception. Assume you will have to put the feelings you developed for your story and characters aside and try to understand the very core thing that makes it interesting.  You are looking for the thing that is interesting about your story without all the context. 

In short, if a listener has to get to episode 12 to really understand why your story is so amazing, or they have to read to page 500 to understand what’s really at stake, you have to ask yourself how many people, that are not your friends, are willing to do that. The answer is so close to zero, it might as well be a big ol' goose egg.

Put your feelings aside and focus on the singular reason your story exists. Then, be able to say that singular reason in a sentence or less. If you would like my thoughts on how to uncover this listen to episode 2 of Audiodromeda.  If you want to know what to do after you have uncovered it, listen to episode 3.