Guest Post: Pete Shelly // @peteshelly

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Stories come in all shapes and sizes, they cover the x, y, and z planes, and they're told with varying frequency, but mostly, they're pretty familiar to us. And it's good that they're familiar, because stories were created to provide accounts of our origins, and they were created to teach lessons, and they were created to simply entertain. They've been told in books and on movie screens and at bedtime and around campfires. They're told over beers and after funerals and during baseball broadcasts.

We all know what a story looks like: it's got a beginning, a middle, and an end. It generally teaches some sort of moral lesson or haa a "purpose." There's usually buildup and then a climax where everything comes together (and in some cases breaks completely apart).

Because stories are so familiar, we can generally tell where they're going long before we get there. We know how a fairy tale is going to end or that the guy and the girl are going to get together at the end of the movie. We know that the underdogs are probably going to win, that the bad guys are probably going to lose. And despite that, I'm inspired by storytellers. I'm inspired by craftsmen and craftswomen who continually weave new tales and tell stories in ways that feel refreshing and new.

I'm inspired by songwriters who put their stories to music and filmmakers who create worlds out of their stories, authors who put their stories into words on a page and speakers who keep our attention without a script.

I'm inspired by Austin Kleon, who creates stories by blacking out extraneous words, and Jonathan Safran Foer, who weaves parallel storylines together. I'm inspired by Reif Larsen, whose chronicle of TS Spivet was made vibrant by his illustrated parenthetical asides. I'm inspired by Borbay, whose "headline paintings" tell a much more detailed story from up close than they do from across the gallery.

Stories come in all shapes and sizes, and they have for a long time. But every day, we're coming up with new shapes and new sizes, new stories that have never been told.

That inspires me.

Images via Austin Kleon and Borbay