Where origin stories go wrong

You have a built story and three working versions. Before you deploy them, run your draft against the five ways origin stories go wrong. Almost every weak origin I have ever heard fails in one of these five ways, and every one of them is fixable in an afternoon once you can see it.

Five ways origin stories go wrong

It is unexcavated

And the worry underneath most of these, the one I hear more than any other: my origin is boring. It is not. It is unexcavated. Boring is a property of summaries, not of lives. Nobody’s actual Tuesday, rendered in its real specifics, is boring. What is boring is the sentence that compresses four years into a job title. If your origin reads as dull, you are reading the summary. Go back to the deep version and write what actually happened, in order, in detail. The material is there. It always is.

Two quick proofs, from founders in the book. One built her origin on a crisis that was not even hers: sixteen years old, sitting on a staircase, watching her father rehearse the sentence he would use to ask his brother for a loan. The wound belonged to someone else. The witnessing belonged to her. Proximity is enough, provided it is specific. Another took three generations to arrive at his origin, an inheritance rather than a lightning bolt, until it produced its one scene: a man standing in front of a skip of broken furniture, some of it younger than his phone. Slow origins are real origins. Somewhere inside the long arc there is a moment where the work stopped being optional, and your job is to find it and stand the listener inside it.