Find the story in it

Why use it

Having nothing to write about is almost never true. It usually means nobody has asked the right question, and the questions people ask themselves are the ones least likely to produce an answer. This is an interview first and a draft second.

What it does

It asks for a specific occasion rather than a topic, because a summary is not a story. Then it checks whether there is a story at all, since a story needs a before, an after, and something that changed in between. It asks for the one detail that could not have been invented, and it refuses to supply that detail if you cannot remember it.

What you get

• Prompts that produce an answer, aimed at occasions rather than at lessons
• An honest call on whether you have a story or an anecdote, which are different posts
• The single unfakeable detail that carries the whole thing
• A draft that stops where the story stops

What it will not do

It will not invent a detail on your behalf, sharpen a quote into what somebody probably meant, or move two events closer together because it reads better. The value of a story post is that it happened.

What changes when VoiceMoat is connected

Story posts are where a general model is most obvious, because they get written in the register of every story post it has ever seen rather than in yours.

• get_voice_profile Gives how you tell things: sentence length, the words you reach for, whether you land jokes or avoid them.
• score_voice_match Flags the lines that came from story-post convention rather than from you, which in this format is most of the risk.
• get_post_ideas Finds the subjects worth interviewing about next, drawn from what you have already published.