Welcome to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast. I'm K.M. Wyland, and I am here to take you deep with story theory, writing techniques, and the incredible wisdom of story. I believe story is the greatest power on this earth, and that as writers, we carry the torch of wielding that power with responsibility, passion, and skill.

There is no such thing as just a story.

Today, it is my honor and my purpose to help you write your best story, astound the world, and maybe change your life.

Hello and welcome. You are listening to Season 17, Episode 21.

I've been feeling it for a while now. That dull, uninspired thud when the credits roll on modern storytelling.

More and more movies in particular leave me feeling unmoved and oddly detached.

Bored, really.

Once upon a time, I would walk out of the theater buzzing.

I'd carry that story around with me for days, sometimes weeks. I called

it a story high. Now, more often than not, I've forgotten the movie by the time I reached the

parking lot. Actually, most of the time I'm lucky to remember whatever it was I watched on Netflix

last night. And I keep asking myself, is it me who has changed? Because

God knows I have. This past decade has transformed almost everything about my life, including

my relationship to my own storytelling. So perhaps what I'm experiencing is just taste drift.

Or has something in the very DNA of our storytelling shifted.

Is the drift I'm feeling really that the tilt toward spectacle, franchise maintenance, and safe surface level beats, has taken all the magic with it.

So I've been pondering this for a long time now, and I've been dancing around this episode for a while, too,

wondering if it's too shaded by my own subjectivity, or perhaps more tellingly my own nostalgia and idealism.

But you know what? I'm just going to say it. I miss the way movies used to be.

I'm tired of feeling bored by something that used to delight me to no end. I'm sick of feeling a lack of engagement.

I'm exhausted by the magnetism movies fail to hold for me.

I used to get butterflies watching movie trailers.

...