About Nate

Career

Nate Listrom currently works as a user experience designer at Microsoft.

Over the course of his time there, he’s focused on building enterprise tools for developer teams. He’s contributed to tooling for version control, compliance, and, most recently, software security. He enjoys learning about new, complex spaces and applying knowledge about how humans perceive and interact with objects and systems to help Microsoft’s customers and users achieve their goals.

Before Microsoft, Nate worked in the nonprofit space doing print and web design, email marketing, and little bit of video.

Storytelling

Nate loves storytelling.

He grew up reading Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and Isaac Asimov and watching Disney films during the golden age with the greats like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King.

In high school, Nate dabbled around with writing his own fiction but never really took it anywhere.

Then, in 2013, he finally had a story idea that was small enough he thought he could manage it. He wrote a 13,000-word first draft, which eventually balooned into a 120,000-word, novel-length piece.

When he got to the end, he was so proud of himself. Moments later, he was horrified. He knew his work badly needed revision, and he had no idea how to do that.

That began a years-long journey of learning about what he would learn is called “story theory” — the study of story as a subject in itself.

Nate read popular works like Syd Field’s Screenplay, Truby’s Anatomy of Story, and Robert McKee’s Story. He turned back to earlier works that have had influence, like Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces and newer theories like Dramatica and Story Grid. He listened to podcasts (first dozen seasons of Writing Excuses are very good) and watched YouTube videos (Brandon Sanderson’s BYU lectures are excellent). He read blogs and realized that his own journey into story theory wasn’t unique. Many aspiring storytellers were on a similar arc.

Along the way, Nate fell in love with story theory as a pursuit in itself. The same part of him that loves to geek out about complex systems and design and human psychology loves to learn about storytelling.

He only half-jokingly tells his friends that he’s procrastinating from finishing his novel by writing a book about writing novels . . .

What he’s really trying to do is figure out what makes stories work. He explores and, like a mad scientist, attempts to recombine ideas about story in new and interesting ways — all with the aim of gaining a deeper understanding.

Hopefully, his work in these notes will be at least a little, tiny benefit to you on your own journey. If so, it’ll have been worthwhile.

Onward!