“I love fiction,” Thomas French said during his remarkable keynote at #Story17. “If there’s fiction writers in the room, I salute you. But there’s no need for those of us who write nonfiction to invent anything. Life defies categorization, it obliterates ideology; day after day, life exceeds invention.”

Thomas went on to demonstrating how we can push stories forward, make them exciting and have the reader keep asking: what happens next?

Watch his full speech below:

A full transcript of the keynote is available here, thanks to Nieman Storyboard.