I’ve Written and Edited Stories for 30 Years. Most People Get This Wrong.

Hi friends,

Welcome back. This is a space for people who feel like there’s a story in their life and want to understand what to do with it.

I’ve spent most of my adult life working with story: as a senior editor and longtime contributing editor at Outsidemagazine, a journalist for The New York Times, GQ, Wired, and National Geographic, and for nearly twenty years as a teacher of nonfiction writing.

Most people already have the material. The experiences are there. The ability to make meaning of a life is there, too. The challenge is knowing how to shape them—how to find the thread and stay with it.

That’s what this space is for. You’ll find writing about memoir and storytelling, along with essays from my own life—travel, experience, and the way I see the wild, often mysterious nature of being here. You don’t have to be writing a memoir. You just have to care about stories.

It feels good to be back in conversation with you.

If this work speaks to you, you can like or comment, subscribe or upgrade, share it with someone who might need it, or pick up a copy of Into the Soul of the World in print or audio.

I’m glad you’re here.

You might have a place like this near you, or maybe it’s a stretch of road or a body of water or a memory you return to when something in you wants to feel more alive. I didn’t know that’s what this was going to be when we left Boulder last month, just a drive with a friend, coffee in Lyons, a morning like many others, and then something in it began to feel wide open.

We took 36 out of town, stopped in Lyons, sat with coffee long for an hour, long enough to settle into the spirit of an adventure. Then we turned onto Highway 7, following the South St. Vrain into the mountains. The road tightens quickly. In places, there’s barely a shoulder. The asphalt runs close to rock on one side and the river on the other. The water comes down out of the Indian Peaks, fast and cold over chunky granite. You hear it—the river—the whole way. That steady rush fills the canyon.

We rolled the windows down and let the air move through the car. It smelled like wet stone and ponderosa pine . Every so often there’s a gravel turnout or a truck pulled over or someone standing near the water. We pulled into one of those spots and climbed down the bank, sliding with arms falling over loose rock until we reached the riverbank. And then we stepped into it. The water was snowmelt cold. It felt sharp and painful at first, then my nervous system relaxed. The current pressed against our legs and eddied around us.

We stood there for a while, and then started talking about moments that have stayed with us.

“You know the memories that stick, that come back without any effort?” she said.

Do I? I said. I laughed.

I told her about a night in college in eastern Kansas. We camped by a pond and caught catfish, laughing the day away. That evening, we cooked them over a fire. Ted was there, laughing, and that pig of his kept moving through the edge of the firelight, snout down, cleaning up whatever we left behind. Ted died a few years ago. I can still see the way the fire lit his face, with the dark woods just beyond him. I remember exactly how it felt to be there with him.

She told me about a night driving alone in Utah. She pulled off the road somewhere without marking the place. She climbed onto the warm hood of her car as the sun went down. She lay there as the sky went blue. The stars arrived slowly at first, and then all at once. She stayed there, feeling the air against her skin. She was wearing t-shirt, but within minutes she donned her down jacket. She said it was one of the few times in her life she wasn’t trying to get anywhere or figure anything out. She was under it all.

Standing there in the river, feeling the cold against my feet, Greenland came back for me. I had hired a local man with a Boston Whaler to take me out along the coast while I was working on a story about two explorers. The sea was filled with pack ice, broken into slabs that pressed together and drifted apart. The only way through was along narrow openings that kept shifting. The boat tipped hard as we moved through them, and he stood at the front with a long metal pole, prying the ice apart.

He told me to keep the boat balanced, so I moved constantly, reading the angle, shifting my weigh. My whole body was alert. At one point he handed me a piece of whale blubber and told me this was what I would eat for the day. I stood there under the midnight sun chewing it while we moved through that field of ice and cold. We camped on a

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rocky beach that night and pushed further the next day. We did not find the explorers.

What stayed was the nature and the adventure. There was no path laid out and no promise of an outcome. The work was to keep going and respond to what was in front of me. I have always had a hard time with that and I keep choosing it anyway. I’ve done it in the backcountry, far from help, and I’ve done it in my own life, following something I couldn’t fully explain and stepping into situations that didn’t come with clarity. I keep going. Sometimes it works. Other times, not so much. But in the end, once the present is past and an experience lives in memory, we can work with it. Eventually, it begins to make sense. Ah, yes, that’s why I did that. I understand. Or, hell, no, never again!

My friend and I got back in the car and continued up the canyon. The river fell away as we climbed, the space opened, and then we joined the Peak to Peak Highway and headed toward Allenspark and on toward Estes. There is a moment on that road where you crest a rise and Mount Meeker appears all at once. It rises up over the edge of the landscape, over thirteen thousand feet of rock and snow. It feels as close as your hood ornament. Your body reacts. And then your mind does. Your stomach drops, and your chest widens. You are still in your car, still moving along a paved road, and at the same time you are in front of something that carries a scale you cannot take in all at once.

Rudolf Otto called this type of experience the mysterium tremendum. The terrifying mystery.

The river, that night in Kansas, the sky in Utah, the ice in Greenland, the sudden rise of Meeker.

After thirty years as a writer and editor, I see the same pattern again and again. People have these moments. They feel them clearly. Then they try to write and everything gets diffuse. The pages fill with scenes and memory, but the story has no center.

A memoir needs a center. It needs a clear desire that drives the story forward, a real struggle that creates pressure, and a shift in understanding that comes from living through it. Desire, struggle, meaning. That is the structure I work from every time.

Most drafts fall apart because nothing has truly been chosen. Everything is included. The writer moves from one memory to another without deciding what the story is really about. What’s the story’s North Star? The result can feel scattered and unfinished.

The work is choosing what matters and building around it. That means leaving material out. That means committing to one throughline and staying with it from beginning to end.

I’m teaching a course next month. It’s called Map Your Memoir: A Five-Week Intensive.

And that is exactly what we do. We find the desire that is actually driving your story. We define the struggle that gives it shape. We identify the moments that belong to that arc and remove the ones that don’t. Then we build a structure that carries the reader all the way through.

You leave with a clear story. A reliable road map. You know what you are writing and why each piece is there. You stop second-guessing every page.

If you’ve been circling your story or starting drafts that never quite come together, this is where the work shifts. You already have the material. You need a way to shape it and someone who knows how to guide that process.

That’s the work I’m doing in this class. If you’re ready for that level of clarity, you can join me.

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If you haven’t bought my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, yet, I hope you will.

Here’s what author Hampton Sides wrote about it:

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”