The coffee stain on page 47 looks like Nebraska. I know because I stared at it for ten solid minutes last Saturday while a 14-pound Choice packer sat untrimmed in the fridge and I sat on the back steps, stuck. The notebook balanced on my knee, ballpoint uncapped, a cold beer sweating a ring onto the cover. I’d written three words: What goes wrong?

That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a prompt—one I stole from myself years ago and keep coming back to when I can’t find the thread. The notebook is a beat-up composition book, the kind you bought for a quarter at a drugstore back when a quarter meant something. The pages are warped from humidity and splattered with pork fat, cutting oil, and one time a surprising amount of transmission fluid. I don’t write recipes in it. I write stories. Or rather, I write the bones of stories—three or four lines that sketch a narrative I’ll live out over the next twelve hours. Before I light the firebox, before I sharpen a chisel, before I pull the carb off a reluctant Lawn-Boy, I sit down and ask: What’s the story here?

Last Saturday, the story was brisket. I’d been in a funk all week—work emails, a leaky sink trap I’d ignored, the kind of mental static that makes you scroll your phone instead of doing anything useful. I could have just gone out and cooked it. I know how. But I knew if I started without a reason—without a narrative—I’d hit the stall around 3 p.m., stare at the thermometer, and wonder why I bothered. That’s the moment that kills projects: not the hard part, but the long part. The part where nothing seems to be happening and your brain starts bargaining.

So I opened the notebook and wrote three story ideas.

One: The brisket that teaches humility. Everything goes sideways. I trim too much fat, the fire runs hot, I wrap too late, the flat dries out. I serve it anyway and tell the truth about it.

Two: The brisket as offering. I’m cooking for my neighbor Luis, whose dad died last month. I don’t say much. I just show up with a warm cambro and a loaf of white bread and let the meat do the talking.

Three: The brisket that remembers a place. I cook it exactly the way I learned from a pitmaster in Lockhart in 2008—post oak only, salt and pepper only, no crutch, no digital probe until the very end. I cook to honor a man whose name I can’t even remember but whose hands I can still see, blackened with soot, testing doneness by feel.

I circled number three. That was the story I wanted to live. And then I walked outside and did it.

Now, I realize this sounds a little woo-woo. A story generator for a brisket cook? Come on, Jimbo. But here’s the thing: I use this notebook the same way I use a torque wrench—not because I need it every time, but because when I’m off, it brings me back to spec. The prompts are simple because they have to be. If I’m too precious about them, I’ll spend an hour crafting beautiful sentences and never light a fire. I keep a short list taped inside the front cover, smudged and barely legible:

• What goes wrong?
• What does the meat (or the wood, or the bolt) teach me?
• Who am I feeding, and why?

That’s it. Three prompts. You could write them on a shop rag with a Sharpie. The point isn’t to write a novel. The point is to give yourself a reason to finish when the grease is cold and the sun is down and every bone in your body wants to quit.

This practice didn’t come from a book. It came from watching old-timers who never wrote a recipe down but could tell you exactly how their granddaddy smoked a hog in 1947—the pit he used, the wood he split, the way he knew it was done when the leg bone wiggled loose. Those stories were the recipe. Before thermometers and timers and YouTube videos, oral tradition carried the craft. Pitmasters told stories. Mechanics told stories. Carpenters told stories. The story held the technique, the warning, the triumph. Somewhere along the line, we traded story for instruction manual, and we lost something. We gained precision, sure, but we lost the thread that pulls you through.

I think about this every time I rebuild a carburetor. A carb is just a collection of tiny brass passages and a float that either works or doesn’t. The manual tells you to clean the jets, set the float height, check the needle valve. But the manual doesn’t tell you about the time I did it wrong on a ’78 Honda CB750 and the float stuck and raw gas poured out onto the exhaust header while I was kicking the starter. That story—the one where I almost set my leg on fire—lives in my head every time I touch a carb. It’s a prompt: What goes wrong? And it makes me check the float height twice.

The notebook is where I capture those prompts ahead of time, before the work starts, so the story is already in my head when I’m in the middle of it. For the brisket last Saturday, I knew the story I’d chosen: honor a Lockhart pitmaster whose name I can’t remember. That meant no shortcuts. No injection, no foil boat, no peeking every twenty minutes. I trimmed the fat cap to a quarter-inch, leaving the deckle intact. I seasoned with coarse black pepper and kosher salt—two parts pepper to one part salt, by weight, not volume, because volume is a liar. I lit a chimney of B&B post oak lump and let it burn down to coals while I drank the rest of my beer.

The firebox on my offset is an Old Country Brazos, a quarter-inch steel tank that’s heavy enough to make you grunt when you move it. It’s not a Cadillac pit. It leaks smoke around the door and the baffle is just a piece of angle iron I welded in myself, ugly but functional. I ran it at 275°F for the first three hours, spritzing the edges with apple cider vinegar when they looked dry, and I didn’t open the lid once. I just watched the thin blue smoke curl out of the stack and thought about the pitmaster in Lockhart. I can still see him: a tall man in a grease-stained apron, working a brick pit at Kreuz Market, his hands moving slow and deliberate, like he had all the time in the world. I asked him once how he knew when the brisket was done. He shrugged and said, “It’s done when it’s done.” At the time, I thought that was a non-answer. Now I know it was the whole answer—a story compressed into six words.

The brisket stalled at 165°F, right on schedule. I wrapped it in pink butcher paper and let it ride. I didn’t probe it. I didn’t panic. I just kept feeding small splits every forty-five minutes and let the story play out. At 9 p.m., I pulled it off the smoker when the probe slid into the flat like it was going into warm butter. I rested it in a cooler for two hours. When I sliced it, the bark was black and peppery, the flat was moist, the point was jiggling with rendered fat. I ate a slice standing at the counter at 11 p.m., alone in the kitchen, and I felt something I hadn’t felt all week: done. Not expert. Not Instagram-worthy. Just done, in the way that matters.

Here’s where I’ll make a brief aside, because I know someone reading this is thinking, “Jimbo, you’re just writing prompts. That’s not a story generator. That’s a to-do list with feelings.” Fair. But the impulse that makes me jot prompts in a notebook is the same impulse that drives people toward digital AI story ideas—not because the tool does the work, but because it kicks the brain into narrative mode. The Authors Guild, in their AI Best Practices for Authors, frame AI as a tool that assists human creativity rather than replacing it. That’s the right way to think about it: a digital version of my coffee-stained notebook, a way to generate a story when you’re too tired or too stuck to find one on your own. The tool doesn’t cook the brisket. It just gives you a reason to start.

I’ve used this notebook for more than barbecue. Two winters ago, I rebuilt the carburetor on a Stihl chainsaw that had been sitting in my shed since before my daughter was born. The saw belonged to my father-in-law, a man I never met, and the carb was gummed up with varnish so thick it looked like honey. Before I turned a single screw, I sat at the workbench and wrote: What does this saw teach me about a man I never knew? That prompt carried me through the frustration of losing the idle screw spring—it shot across the garage and rolled under the water heater, and I spent twenty minutes fishing it out with a telescoping magnet—and it carried me through the moment when the saw finally fired up, blue smoke puffing out of the muffler, and I thought about the hands that had held it before mine.

That’s the power of generating a story ahead of the work. It’s not about being literary. It’s about having a reason. Purdue’s Creative Writing Introduction talks about invention strategies—prompts, pre-writing, freewriting—as ways to overcome creative blocks. That’s exactly what my notebook does, except the block isn’t creative. It’s practical. The block is the voice in your head that says, “This is going to take all day and I’m tired and nobody cares.” The story answers that voice.

Here’s how you can do this yourself, tomorrow, with whatever project is staring at you. Take a notebook—any notebook, even a sheet of printer paper folded in half—and a pen that still has ink. Before you touch the project, write three answers to these three questions:

1. What could go wrong? Be specific. Not “the brisket might be dry.” Say “I’ll trim too much fat off the flat and the grain will run diagonal and I’ll slice it wrong and serve leather to people I love.” The specificity is what makes it stick.
2. What will this thing teach me? Even if it’s a toilet flapper. Especially if it’s a toilet flapper. “This flapper will teach me that the rubber degrades after five years and I should check it before it fails at 3 a.m. and floods the bathroom.”
3. Who am I doing this for, really? If the answer is “myself,” that’s fine. But push deeper. “Myself, because I need to know I can finish something this week.” Or “my kid, because she asked me why the lawn mower won’t start and I want to show her instead of telling her.”

That’s it. Three prompts. Write them down. Then start the work. The story is already in your head. The rest is just the doing.

I finished my brisket at 11 p.m., and I didn’t feed it to anyone that night. I ate a slice, wrapped the rest in foil, and went to bed. The next morning, I carried half of it over to Luis’s house. He was sitting on his porch, drinking coffee out of a chipped mug. I handed him the foil packet and said, “This is brisket, and it’s not perfect, but it’s done.” He opened it, tore off a piece of the point with his fingers, and ate it standing there. He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said, “My dad used to smoke brisket on a little Weber kettle.” And that was the whole thing, right there. The story I’d written in the notebook wasn’t the story that happened, but it got me close enough. The notebook gave me a reason to start, a reason to finish, and a reason to walk over to my neighbor’s porch with a foil packet the next morning. That’s not magic. It’s just a coffee-stained notebook and three prompts. But it works.

Next time you’re stuck—whether it’s a brisket, a carb rebuild, a wobbly bookshelf—try it. Write the story first. Then go make it true, or close enough. The doing is the point, but the story is what gets you there.