In 2011, Emma Coats—a storyboard artist at Pixar—tweeted twenty-two guidelines to make anyone a better storyteller. Although the whole list went viral and was a hot topic in the professional writing community for months, the part that has received the most sustained attention is her fourth point about creating a “story spine” to provide narrative structure.

Given that the human brain is wired to learn and retain information through stories, turning your quest for progress into a story is an effective way to get noticed and be understood. The story spine will help you create and tell this story well.

Just as you will continue to hone your career narrative, Pixar spends years writing, rewriting, and then writing again each story it tells in its films. And each time, its writers use the following Mad Libs–like template, which captures the seven core “frames” of a story spine:

Once upon a time, _________.
Every day, __________.
One day __________.
Because of that, __________.
Because of that, __________.
Until finally __________.
And ever since that day __________.