Catalytic Prompt: The Opening Story for Your Book
The new technology for your writing. Intentional skill-building + clear vision = your book gets done, gets published, impacts readers, changes the world. Group coaching launches Aug. 13. Sign up now!
The opening story
When you find the right opening story, it illustrates your main point perfectly. It names a problem we are all experiencing but haven’t seen or identified yet.
That’s what Susan David does in the opening of Emotional Agility. She shows us the problem we are having: emotional rigidity.
This technique is: This is a story about X, and that’s illustrated by Y.
Plug in her opening story to this formula, and you get:
This is a story about emotional rigidity, and that’s illustrated by the stubborn captain nearly steering his ship into a lighthouse.
Notice on the first page, she’s simply telling the story. That’s because she knows this story is powerful. All she has to do is show us.
She is using setting, tone and dialogue. She delivers the story in 208 words, less than one page.
Stepping in with authority
On the second page, she steps in with authority as the narrator of this book. She has the antidote, and she’s qualified to give us the solution. She’s earned our attention and our trust.
She’s also given us a sturdy metaphor—the lighthouse. Our emotions are the lighthouses that keep us on track. With authority, she defines emotions as our internal navigation system.
“We don't have lighthouses to keep us away from rocky relationships. We don't have lookouts on the bow or radar on the tower, watching for submerged dangers that could sink our career plans. Instead, we have our emotions—sensations like fear, anxiety, joy, and exhilaration—our internal system that evolved to help us navigate life's complex currents.”
With authority, she returns us to the story and lands on her great insight that will guide this book:
“As with Seaman O'Reilly's lighthouse, our natural guidance system, which developed through evolutionary trial and error over millions of years, is at greatest risk of being more useful when we don't try to fight it.”
This narrated section is 211 words.
Right now, in fewer than 500 words, only two pages in, she has established her authority. Now, we want to know: How can we stop trying to fight this natural guidance system?
CATALYTIC PROMPT
Find your opening story. It’s usually a big a-ha moment about a problem you’re experiencing or observing that is profoundly painful. Once you see it, you see it’s a problem people are experiencing everywhere.
Use the formula: This is a book about X, and that’s illustrated by Y. Narrow in on the problem. In David’s book, it’s emotional rigidity.
Tell your story, using fiction techniques. Tell it in 200-250 words.
Make sure it has a punch line. David’s is: “We’re a lighthouse, sir.”
Pause. You’re good for the day.
What are catalytic prompts?
Intentional skill-building + vision = Your book
What’s in short supply is intentional skill-building prompts with a vision aligned to YOUR book—the book you are meant to write and only you can write.
What’s in short supply is prompts that make you smarter -- not work harder. Prompts that help you right-size your book from the get-go.
Call these prompts nuclear. Call them cataclysmic.
Because they are precise. And they are aimed at honing YOUR voice for YOUR book.
They train you in how to make the magic happen on the page.
The secret to my catalytic prompts is this: Fuse vision with skill.
Your Guide to Catalytic Prompts
How this will work
I’ll post Catalytic Prompts in several topic areas, all of which are crucial for intentional skill-building, whether you’re writing self-help/transformational nonfiction, fiction or memoir.
How to tell good stories
How to speak to your ideal reader
How to engage the reader emotionally
How to use literary techniques such as dialogue, setting and plot
How to use embodied storytelling to make your reader feel like she’s right there with you
How to write with authority
How to master the art of the little story (an anecdote or parable)
How to write stellar sentences
To get the most out of this, join my new group coaching cohort, starting August 2025
Writers you may see here
SELF-HELP/TRANSFORMATIONAL NONFICTION
Peter Attia, Outlive
Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made
David Brooks, The Second Mountain
Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection and Daring Greatly
Susan David, Emotional Agility
Richard Davidson, Altered Traits
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap and Conscious Luck
Tara Mohr, Playing Big
Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul
FICTION
K.L. Cook, Last Call
Percival Everett, Erasure and James
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead and The Poisonwood Bible
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin and Transatlanti c
Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
Sena Jeter-Naslund, Four Spirits
Arthur Phillips, The Song Is You
Richard Powers, The Overstory
Joan Silber, Ideas of Heaven
MEMOIR
Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason
Mary Gauthier, Saved by a Song
Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club
Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves
Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful
Patti Smith, Just Kids
Jeannette Wall, The Glass Castle
Alice Waters, Coming to My Senses
Tara Westover, Educated
NARRATIVE NONFICTION
Timothy Egan, The Immortal Irishman
Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing
Erik Larsen, Isaac’s Storm
Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams and Horizon
Robert McFarlane, Underland
Elizabeth Rush, Rising and Quickening
Terry Tempest Williams, Red and The Hour of Land