I’m snoozing for ten minutes before my alarm is set to go off when I hear my wife fall.

Lesson 1: A story begins with an inciting incident. Said incident is the beginning of a chain of events, none of which can happen without something to put the narrative into motion. So I begin with the moment when I hear my wife fall. Yes, this is a true story.

I find her on our kitchen floor. “I passed out,” she says. Then she passes out again, and I’m unable to revive her.

Lesson 2: Stories rely on complications. One thing follows another along a line of rising tension. Resolution can’t come early in a story. We must struggle to get to the end.

She’s receiving chemotherapy for her breast cancer. She passed out on a Thursday following her third treatment on Tuesday. Usually the first few days following an infusion are good ones. Her losing consciousness was never in the plan.

 Lesson 3: All stories have back stories. We need to sketch in the information that’s pertinent to the dramatic present of the story.

 I call 911. The EMTs come, and Cathy’s blood pressure is very low. They take her to the hospital where they run a battery of tests and give her IV fluids to raise her blood pressure. She sleeps a good deal. I sit and read, anxious each time an aide takes her vitals, hoping her blood pressure will be normal.

 Lesson 4: A story comes to a climactic moment that will give the narrative some sort of resolution. A good writer takes the readers up to the edge of a cliff and leaves them there a few beats before plunging to the resolution. Will Cathy’s blood pressure eventually normalize? Will she come home? Will she be all right? I’ll tell you in due time.

 I was terrified when I couldn’t revive Cathy.

 Lesson 5: I owe you a look at my interior. You deserve to know what I was feeling that morning, what I still feel, what I carry with me. You also deserve to know more of my story with Cathy. We fell in love in 1974 when I was eighteen and she was sixteen. We dated for four months, and then she broke up with me. We went our separate ways. Thirty-four years later, we found our way back to each other. We’ve been married now nearly ten years. It’s been blissful. We try not to think about all the years we wasted, and we try not to think about how many years we may have left. We do our very best to live in the moment. I should also give you more details about the moment when Cathy passed out and I failed to revive her.

I remember. . .

I should describe that moment in detail, but to do that requires me to relive it, and it’s too soon for me to do that. I can tell you this, though: the large moments are best approached through the small details. A coffee cup on a kitchen counter. A milk jug that didn’t make it back to the refrigerator. A white baseball cap with a pink breast cancer awareness ribbon pinned just above the bill. Start small. Let the details usher you into the material that threatens to overwhelm you.

Finally, Cathy’s blood pressure was 115/68. She came home. Our journey through her cancer treatments will continue.

 Lesson 6: A good story ends with one foot in the present and one in the future. The events of the dramatic present can be resolved while at the same time inviting readers into a future they can imagine.