Anecdote or Story?

Mike Cooper – September 2026

There is an old rule in writing: “Write what you know.”

Whether you’re writing fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, you’re writing based on experience and observation. Bear in mind, though, that “what you know” includes everything you can possibly imagine. Look at the work of Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft, for example.

Regardless of whether you’re reporting or inventing, if you want to publish (make public) your work, you’ll want it to come out in the form of a story. We expect story. We learn from story.

We share what we call “stories” with friends and family all day long, which is great—it’s how we communicate and bond—though a lot of the things we tell each other aren’t full-on stories:

·      My teacher brought a snake into class today and Alex Johnson fainted!

·      I opened the cupboard and your favorite wine glass fell out, but I caught it just before it hit the counter! My heart was racing.

·      They didn’t have any ramen in the pasta section, but then I was walking through the Asian aisle, really by accident, and lo and behold, there was an entire section of it.

·      I met your mother when we were at school: she was going up the stairway and I was going down. Our eyes met and we both smiled at each other. The rest is history.

An anecdote (from the Greek anekdotos, meaning “unpublished”) is “short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident.” An anecdote is something that happens.

Stories, on the other hand, have structure: beginnings, middles, ends—inciting incidents, complications, climaxes, resolutions, meaning, and significance.

Often, anecdotes lead us to stories. Our memoir about a challenging time, or a thinly disguised short story written by a narrator that is really us but younger and with two different colored eyes and possibly set in a place we’ve only researched on Google (still “what you know”) often starts out as anecdote or “plot”: i.e., this happened and then this happened and then this happened.

That’s a great way to start. It’s what some folks call the “triggering subject,” or the thing that gets you wondering about the human condition—the thing you want to share with others. So we write that, and when we’re done writing it—if we want to “publish,” or make available to a wider audience—we try to figure out what it’s all about and how best to share it with others. That’s what some folks call the “generated” or “real” subject. In The Forge, we call it “aboutness.”

Now our job is to look at what we’ve written and become the editor, or as Zadie Smith says: the reader. And we make it into story.

That’s what we teach in The Forge. We’d love to have you join us and go through that journey with you. Fall classes start September 26^th. Send us an email at theforgewriting@gmail.com and we’ll be happy to get you started.