A story’s primary intention is to move the audience emotionally. Story is the vehicle through which the movement occurs. Story is what stirs us, terrifies us, breaks our heart. A boring story fails because it doesn’t move us, doesn’t tap our capacity for empathy. Think of the very best stories you’ve ever seen or read or heard, and you remember the depth of your feeling for one or more of the characters.

I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father – Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill)

That’s what happens when we craft your new stories. These stories, finally, move their authors – and others, too – the way great movies do. We feel the potential for heroism in what the author/main character aspires to. If you’re seriously going to write a story powerful enough to get you to do great things, then you’ve got to create a quest and a story so compelling that you are moved to make those corrections in your life, and make them for good.

The only way a story can achieve that level of transformative power is when it supports an unassailable quest.

If I asked you what your quest was, how would you know you had got it right? First and last, does it move you? Really, really move you? Some quests are so obviously faulty that the individual can smoke it out by himself or herself. But other quests sound very, very good, so neat, so on message – and yet they’re not quite THE quest. That is why finding one’s true quest is an exercise that requires real commitment and the courage to be honest with oneself.

An ultimate quest is never small. It is never minor. it can’t be, by definition. It is grand, heroic, epic. You never put your life on the line for something not fully aligned with your Ultimate Quest.