Why every good story is actually two storiesIssue #270: revisiting the Palisades + hedgehogsPublished inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min readJust now--If you take an idea and hold it in your head, you unconsciously start to do things that advance you toward that goal. Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter and Medium, in his book Things a Little Bird Told MeOne of the keys to writing or creating anything meaningful is landing on an idea that interests you enough that youll want to hold it in your head for weeks (or months, or years). But where on Earth do these ideas come from? Its an age-old philosophical quandry (where do any of our thoughts come from?)Illustrator Tom Froese believes the best ideas arise organically through testing them out in rough drafts. Alison Gee notices memorable ideas come to her when shes distracted by something else (thats my experience too), even if the something shes doing is just showering or folding laundry. When our minds become quiet enough, our capacity to process information is temporarily expanded, allowing the spontaneous ideas to flow in.In a longread on Medium last fall, Doc Burford, a game designer who created Adios (2021) and Hardspace (2020) among other bestselling games, shared his idea generation secrets. One tip that stuck with me? You have to think about why someone will care. Not about you, but about the story. Designing a game essentially means creating a world that people care about enough to inhabit. We make stories to help process our emotions even Bambi is about human feelings, he writes, even if the characters themselves are deer.Its designed to be entertaining to the human mind; the deer arent really deer at all, you know?As Burford explains it, every good story is two stories: Theres the story on the surface (a young deer growing up in the forest) and the deeper universal story reaching deep into peoples psyches (growing up and confronting the cold, harsh world and becoming who you actually are). The interplay between them creates what Burford believes is real creativity instead of just copying. Harris Sockel Two more storiesPhil Schwarz revisits his house in the Palisades, which miraculously survived the fire, and posts raw original photos of the neighborhood as it exists today. He asks: In the case of the Palisades, what parts of the community can still exist when far fewer people now reside there?A lesser-known moment in Black History: After the Civil War, rural communities across the South funded their own school system, the Rosenwald Schools, in partnership with philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Alums of Rosenwald Schools include Maya Angelou and Pauli Murray, who organized the first sit-ins (in 1943) to protest segregated restaurant seating in Washington, DC. (William Spivey) Your daily dose of practical wisdomThe hedgehogs dilemma: Humans want to be close to each other, but we resist the urge because were scared of rejection. To overcome our innate hedgehog-esque tendencies, as Brenna Lee writes, assume everyone you like will like you back unless proven otherwise.