I'm Daniel David Wallace, an award-winning writer and teacher. I spent four years of a PhD researching new ways to help writers like you tell a great story.

My stories, reviews, and essays have been published in great magazines like Tampa Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Air Schooner, and my writing won me awards like the Toni Brown scholarship and the Hodges prizes.

But when I sent my first novel to the big publishing houses, it was rejected. This was a tough experience! And so I designed a way of teaching storytelling that the younger me would have wanted to find, the "character-first" approach.

I'm grateful that this approach has resonated with so many people: 12,000 writers read my newsletter each week and every year I host three conferences on the craft of writing.