We needed to add user to story.rb attr_accessible because we're assigning it here. If you were using user_id here to assign the user, your original story.rb code would have been fine. They are both basically doing the same. We added user_id to story to link the databases, and since we have ```belongs_to :user``` in story.rb we can use ```story.user``` to link them in our rails code and it just looks a little cleaner and nicer than throwing around ```user_id``` instead.