Season as Story

"Write the book you want to read." - Austin Kleon in Steal Like an Artist

Every season a story unfolds - the evaluation phase, the major plot, and the ending, ideally with a lengthy playoff run.

"The Director is the keeper of the story." - Ron Howard

Coach Scott Celli organizes and edits big parts. A story has plot, characters, and dialogue. We're still in the evaluation phase, entering the second week of the season. 

Amidst injuries, the lineup is anything but carved in stone. Nobody has played their way out of the lineup. Some players have helped themselves with aggressiveness, consistency, and production.

Advance the story. 

A variety of authors emphasize plot structure. David Mamet explains that plot is the structure that reveals character.

He respects and revisits Greek tradition, especially Aristotle’s Poetics: a drama should have a single unified action, organized around what the protagonist wants. Mamet says the central question is, “What does the protagonist want?” Every year teams chase the brass ring. 

Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code, emphasizes "the ticking clock." Raising the stakes heightens tension for the reader. 

In the Bosch novels, Michael Connelly explains that murder investigations are living organisms, requiring continual progress. Volleyball seasons are similar; setbacks occur but progress must occur. 

"The players are the product."

Players like Jen Cain (left) and Sarah McGowen were part of the greatest run of MVB success, 2009-2012 with four sectional titles, two finals, and a state championship. 

Within the team stories, players write individual stories - excellence, uniqueness, probability. 

There's some irony here (without further comment)

• The 2012 team won 26 games.
• Dr. Victoria Crovo might be the best player not to have been on a sectional title team. 
• The 2012 team had five southpaws 

Dialogue

Here's a ChatGPT Plus consult:

Three of King’s strongest points in On Writing about dialogue are these:

1. Dialogue should sound like people, not writing. King emphasizes listening to how people actually speak—the rhythms, omissions, fragments, evasions, slang, and occasional bad grammar. Good dialogue is rarely polished in the way formal prose is polished. Its job is to feel lived-in and believable.
2. Dialogue reveals character. King treats speech as one of the fastest ways to show who someone is. Vocabulary, sentence length, bluntness, humor, hesitation, profanity, and what a character refuses to say all tell the reader something. Two characters should not sound interchangeable.
3. Avoid explaining dialogue with fancy tags. King strongly prefers the plain “said” over tags like “exclaimed,” “snapped,” “gasped,” or “remarked,” and he especially dislikes adverbs attached to dialogue tags. 

What's the most important in-game dialogue in many volleyball sets? "Mine." Don't let balls hit the floor. 

Concerning MVB 26? Write a great story. Start today. 

Lagniappe. Finding joy. 

I’m in love with this sentence:

“If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life but still the same amount of snow.”

— Reads with Ravi (@readswithravi) September 12, 2026