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What Makes for a Gripping Story?

What Makes For A Gripping Story?

It’s been an honor to work with Colin Egglesfield on his book, “Agile Artist.” Colin has used his book as a powerful platform to launch a vibrant career as a creative coach. He has been building his platform for the last year, moving toward two years, since I published his book. But to pull you into this compelling book, I’ll show instead of tell you about what makes this book special by providing you with an excerpt. From here, you be the judge: 

Not even an hour earlier, it was a picturesque morning. The sun sprayed bright beams of light into my studio apartment, beckoning me to begin a new day of big promise and hustle. Because I lived on the eighteenth floor of a building in New York City that faced the World Trade Center towers, it was normal for me to wake up to the muffled sounds of horns honking, people yelling, and cars whizzing by on the West Side Highway that separated us below. Today, however, was different.h my God! It’s another one!” I yelled into the phone. A flash of light and a descending spray of metal and glass exploded out the back of the South Tower just a few hundred feet in front of me as a narrow and high-pitched bang reverberated through the columns of buildings forever into eternity.

As I lay in bed negotiating with my alarm clock to let me sleep for a few more minutes, I started to notice the whirps of police cars along with fire trucks and ambulance sirens echoing between the buildings outside. The urgent sounds of emergency vehicles en route to someplace nearby kept getting louder and more frequent. I got out of bed and groggily walked to my windows to see what was happening. What was normally six lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic below my window was now devoid of cars. This was the first thing that seemed off. As I watched, more and more fire engines, police cars, and ambulances arrived, and I started to notice the steady smacking of debris onto the street. The firetrucks and police cars weren’t just on their way to an accident or fire. They were grouped below me, and in front of the Twin Towers.

I then looked up from my window and noticed a gaping hole about a quarter of the way down from the top of the North Tower, as flames licked out of the void. The damage didn’t look that bad at first. However, it didn’t take long to notice people with their heads poking out of the windows above it, indicating that this might be worse than what the hole belied. I stood there in awe, trying to comprehend what I was seeing. Black smoke steadily wisped out of the hole, then grew stronger and thicker. After watching the scene in front of me for a few moments, my confusion prompted me to turn on my television. I couldn’t figure out what was happening, but I thought maybe the local news had an explanation for what was going on. When I flipped to NY1, I only remember the broadcaster saying something about a plane having hit the World Trade Center.

My first thought was that a Cessna had accidentally run into the tower because from my perspective, the damage didn’t look that substantial. Little did I know what I was looking at was the less invasive, residual blast from the remnants of the plane being shot out the back side. The north side of the tower had taken the brunt of the carnage, but I couldn’t see that from my apartment.

As a side note, during this time in New York, I always had my Sony video recorder with me. I loved to make short movies while running around the city, so when I realized what was happening, my natural reaction was to grab my camera and hit record. After pushing that little red button, what I witnessed next was something that will haunt me until the day I die: people leaping out of the windows from the top floors of the towers.

Looking back now, I realize this was one of the most defining moments of my life. To watch someone decide that jumping out of a window from a thousand feet in the air was a better option than remaining trapped in a scorching inferno is to this day, something still incomprehensible to me. I remember starting to shake and my knees getting so weak that I had to kneel down on the floor of my apartment. I was literally getting nauseous. Partially startled out of my paralysis by the ringing of my phone, I answered, “Hello?”

It was my best friend, Lisa, my New York partner in crime. To this day I share an incredibly special bond with her. “Are you okay!?” she asked with pointed concern. After a brief pause to collect myself, I told her I was fine, but that what I was seeing was horrendous. I huddled in the corner of my apartment with my back against one wall, looking out of my window, horrified by what I was seeing, but unable to look away. I remember eventually sliding the window open a bit which allowed me to actually hear the voices of the first responders and the cacophony below. This only made the scenario more intense. As I continued to stare at the flames and the thickening smoke, the clear blue sky and warm sun seemed to disguise the terror that was unfolding.

As I knelt there, I described to her what I was seeing… people hanging half of their bodies out of the tower above the smoke and flames. Horrified, my voice would crack as I would intermittently say to her, “Oh my God, Lisa! Another person just jumped!” I remember being so angry from experiencing such helplessness. I felt lame, unable to do anything except watch as countless people decided to take fate into their own hands and free themselves from Hell. At a certain point I couldn’t keep watching. I mustered the nerve to get up and move to the middle of my apartment. Only a few feet from the windows, I continued watching while listening intently to see if the news had any more information about what had happened.

I just remember standing there, looking at the TV with my phone in one hand and my video camera in the other. At the time I didn’t realize the camera was still recording. What happened next nearly knocked me off my feet and forever seared another horrific image into my brain.

The flash bang from the second plane hitting the south tower jerked my head from the TV, back to my window. The tempered concern I experienced up until that point had now escalated to panic. When I re-watch the video recording of everything that transpired that morning, it’s almost as though I’m hearing another person on the camcorder. “Oh my God! It’s another one!” The next moment, I responded to Lisa in an eerily subdued voice, saying, “I’m okay, I’m okay. I’ve gotta go.” What I didn’t realize at the time was that my body was starting to slip into the dulling effects of full-blown shock.

I hung up the phone, threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and ran down eighteen flights of stairs in a few seconds. I was literally jumping down five stairs at a time for fear the ceiling was going to collapse on top of me.

When I got down to the lobby level, I burst outside to the front of my building to find a large group of people standing there, moving their gaze up to the sky. From street level, the towers seemed so massive, so broad, so solid, even with cragged holes and black smoke billowing out. I think, collectively, this huddled group of strangers felt a sense of safety even though we were only roughly five hundred feet away from impending chaos.

At a certain point, I noticed my modeling agent, Roger, standing among this throng of people, wearing an expression of awe. When he saw me, we walked toward each other, both of us at least somewhat comforted in recognizing someone familiar. I remember standing there together, looking up in horror as more and more people inside the tower could be seen sticking their heads out of the windows, trapped by the melting metal below them. We stood there as a steady stream of people migrated toward my building, only to be occasionally halted by the screaming of people as another poor soul leapt from one of the floors above the flames.

The police then started yelling at us to move back, and a real sense of fear began to take hold. I don’t think we really knew what to do as we witnessed person after person leaping to their death. The real breaking point seemed to be when, what we thought was another person falling, turned out to be two people who were actually holding hands, tumbling together. At this moment, I remember Roger saying he couldn’t watch anymore. He suggested we walk up the sidewalk to get away from the mass of people steadily getting larger.

As we made our way toward Chambers Street, the sun began its late summer blaze. I quickly dipped into a deli to grab some water as a relief from the heat and to quell my nerves. I made my way into the middle of the store that, for any other random Tuesday September morning, seemed completely normal. It was normal except for the moment I reached into a large display bucket to grab a bottle of water. I remember that the instant my fingers wrapped around the ice cold plastic, the ground began to violently shift and shake. The lights flickered then went out, followed by a low rumble that quickly escalated to the point of a deafening roar.

I immediately ran to the front of the deli and out the front door where I was met with the sight of men and women in full business attire, running and screaming. Roger was nowhere to be seen. Because my view of the towers was blocked by the close proximity to the buildings next to me, I didn’t really know what was happening. I guess my instincts kicked in because I found myself running up the street with everyone else.

Now, for anyone who has never had the chance to see the original Twin Towers in person, the idea that anything could happen to these behemoth, 1,368-foot-tall structures that spanned over sixteen acres was just unfathomable. When I heard a woman scream, “The tower just fell!” I thought she was referring to the antenna spire on the top of the North Tower, but as I sprinted farther up the West Side Highway, I got to a clearing in between buildings where I could actually see toward the towers again. Except this time, when I looked, something seemed oddly wrong. It was almost like a visual effect or a trick, because only one tower was visible. In the place of the other was a giant, mushrooming cloud of debris and dust headed our way.

To say this was surreal is a gross understatement. I just knew that I had to keep heading north to keep far enough ahead of the swiftly moving cloud of churning darkness. As we trudged up the highway, I heard someone yell out that a plane had hit the Pentagon as well. Then a lady shouted that Los Angeles had been bombed and that America was under attack. It was hard to know what to believe at the time because in the moment, my immediate focus was getting to someplace safe. The idea of all of this happening at once was too much to comprehend. In the meantime, all the cell phone coverage was down, so every time I tried to call my parents and let them know I was still safe, my call wouldn’t go through.

As we approached Houston Street, about a mile north of Ground Zero, the sound of a faint crack and dull rumble prompted us to turn around. When I looked back toward where we had come from, the second tower began to crumble right in front of my eyes. I remember people shrieking and crying, but for some reason I just stood there, paralyzed. I don’t remember being able to feel anything. The only thing I remember was how oddly similar it looked to so many films I had seen where New York City gets destroyed by some sort of natural disaster or robots or Godzilla. The only difference was, this was terribly real. There was no walking out of any movie theatre back to the way things were.

***

Want more? I thought you might. The good news is that I like to make all the books I publish very accessible to all who want to get their hands on books that make a difference in the world. This one surely will. To this end, if you are an Amazon Prime member, you can get the eBook for free by clicking here. And if you want to learn more about the good work of Colin Egglesfield who is not only a movie star but a humanitarian, a true giver, a wonderful human being, visit his website here. 

p.s. He loves dogs!

 

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