You just got home from a long day at work, greeted your special someone, and began telling them about your day. You share the significant events and how you feel about them, and your listener responds with smiles, nods, scowls, headshakes, and the occasional "tsk" to show that they have heard and empathize. You have begun a transaction in which they reinforce your sense of self and worth, and in exchange, they vicariously receive the experience you shared as though part of them endured it with you. The two of you grow closer as a result, fulfilling a social need that all living things possess.

You conducted a narrative: set the stage, detailed the happenings, added your commentary, and constructed a picture with words intended to move your audience toward an emotional response. If you were ultimately successful, the response is one you not only anticipated but intentionally created.

You might not be thinking about all those things, but you're doing it; it's how the human brain is built. We talk in narratives, hear in narratives, and think in narratives. This book is a narrative. It's a clinical way of saying human communication is built on an infrastructure of stories.

Congratulations! As a writer, you're tapping into the lifeblood of the social consciousness. Please drive responsibly.

However, when you attempt to use words to connect with an audience, you have to do more than stream data into their brains. Brains are stupid and lazy, and if you don't prep the information for them, carefully package it, and wrap it up in a pretty box, they'll sit there, staring blankly at your hard work, only to be distracted by the next shiny object that passes by.

I might wander back to this subject later because it's endlessly fascinating, but here I only want to underscore how important this is to a writer in a specific series of contexts: voice, tense, and style.

I debated whether this belonged before or after discussing plot, but I'm going to take a chance and assume that before you begin writing you have some notion of what your story is trying to say and how you want your readers to feel about it. It doesn't have to be well defined. It could be a single inspiring image that manifested in passing, but it's already claimed you, forcing feelings that multiply as you explore it.

At that very early stage, you have several decisions to make, and what you decide will determine, and be determined by, the emotions you intend to shape within your readers. In the next few chapters I hope I can help you build a scaffolding beneath which will rise your masterpiece. Or a children's pop up book. Someone's got to write 'em.