4 tips from master writers that will 10x your stories

Adam Westbrook
4 min readApr 8, 2024

1. Short stories don’t need a beginning

About a year ago, I watched a great documentary about Hayao Miyazaki’s creative process and was stunned to discover he didn’t start his stories at the beginning. Instead, he began with an image and worked his way out.

Freed from finding a start for my stories, I immediately began drawing out moments and scenes that had been rattling around my brain for years, waiting for a beginning.

At first, I timidly drew the whole scene onto a single A5 page, eventually daring to take up two pages.

A photograph of a double-paged spread from a sketchbook, filled with several panels illustrating a short story, in blue colour pencil.
A short story drawn onto a double-paged spread

As I drew, the stories grew — in size and ambition.

By the end of the year, I had written and drawn more than a dozen of them, some stretching over 40 pages!

This was not an outcome I had expected at the beginning of the year.

A photo of a double-paged spread of a sketchbook filled with a single large panel. It shows a Parisian street in perspective filled with people, in graphite pencil.
Within a year, a double paged spread contained just one single panel!

2. Short stories help you experiment

Drawing fictional stories for a couple of hours in the early morning, I feel more connected with my creativity than I have felt in years; it’s opened a tap of ideas and stories…

--

--

Adam Westbrook

Video artist working at The New York Times. I write a newsletter about visual storytelling and creativity. https://adamwestbrook.co.uk/