Are Your Stories Worth Telling?
If someone were to ask you about your life story, where would you start?
Would you start from today and look back? Or would you start at your beginning, from when you were born?
Would you begin explaining relationships? Your parents? The place where you grew up? Teachers? Friends?
Would you want to talk about your childhood and adolescence? Or have the years since high school and college proved more interesting?
Would adult years that perhaps include a spouse and children emerge as most significant? Or maybe you would want to tell about your career, or people you have met that have made a difference in your life?
What about your life makes your stories interesting to someone else?
Structure for Stories
The goal of storytelling is to enable people to see how pieces fit, to make sense of what happens. The storyteller cannot tell the whole story at once. He makes decisions about what to record first, then next, and after that.
A storyteller structures the story, creating a spine and then putting meat on the bones so that the message comes alive. If the story has heart and a soul, people can feel the insides, the gut, the blood stream pulsing and the lungs breathing so that readers or listeners engage and relate.
Stories make the world go round because we want to know how things turn out.
No matter where you start your story, every story is a story already in progress. Decisions made as to when and how to introduce characters as well as supply descriptions that enhance the narrative distinguish the best stories that keep a reader or a listener interested.
Story-Telling Arts and Craft
While stories that unfold chronologically are the easiest to follow, too many details and dates and names will bloat a story. Listeners and readers have a narrow bandwidth of interest. Tantalize rather than tire.
Try telling parts of your story and look for signs of disinterest. Eyes glaze or else the person you speak to starts looking past your shoulder. The listener begins to fidget, comes up with an excuse to leave, or else interrupts your story to tell his own.
If engaging someone to listen to your story when you have visual cues to gauge interest, think how much harder it is to write a story that will compel readers to follow that trail of breadcrumbs that leads to a satisfying ending.
Valuable Lessons from Life Experiences
A line from the movie Sabrina, “I’ve been taking pictures all my life, long before I had a camera” led me to take photography classes at a nearby college. I was at a point in my life where converging endings opened up space for something else. Only it occurred to me, I don’t want to start something from scratch. My husband pointed out that I had been taking pictures––valued pictures––longer than either of us could pinpoint. And yet I never imagined the possibility of photography as a career.
It took years for me to learn enough about photography to start a business.
But I was not good at business. Despite years of continued training with some of the best photographers in the country, late in the process, an instructor in a class I took told students that most photographers should take business classes first, before taking photography training. His advice came too little, too late for me.
Closing up shop after 10 years, I wound up in seminary, of all places. Uncertain why I was there, amidst all that happened during those 4 years, I learned how to become a better writer. Most of what I wrote for classes, I would say, wound up in the “dead letter office”––a postal term for undeliverable mail. One grader and sometimes one professor actually read what I wrote.
Yet in that context, my passion for writing ignited––for communicating through the written word. Like photography, it’s taken years of study, reading and writing, to combine craft with the art of storytelling.
Not that I have arrived, or already obtained, as the apostle Paul wrote in Philippians, but I press on.
Forward from Here
Which leads me to tell at least some of my story, which begins in my childhood. The work of owning my story has forced me to reframe my story in order to move toward healing and integration of traumatic events that occurred during the years (birth to age 18) when my brain was most malleable. [1]
“Whenever hard things activate us, our bodies are showing us they want to move toward healing and integration. . . [the] tendency to overaccommodate [sic] whenever someone has expectations of me . . . is because when I was a child, expectations were fraught with pain and shame.”
––Aundi Kohler, Try Softer
The above quote gives a clue to how and why I behaved as I behaved, because I believed as I believed at the time. As a child, my wounds were not validated by a caring adult when I most needed care.
What I believe now though, is that the traumas I experienced in childhood make my story unique. I am the only one who can tell my stories. I am not trying to reconfigure my story in order to find someone to blame.
Though often writers encounter protest or push-back from others in their story who say that’s not what happened or that’s not how things happened, writer Marion Roach (memoir coach) says, “That’s not how it happened for you, maybe. But this is how it happened to me.”[2]
“Memoir is about something you know after something you’ve been through.”
Marion Roach
Writing validates emotions and experiences. And also I have found from writing in journals for years, I would write it out, whatever was bothering me, and then suddenly think, that’s not it at all.
“That is not it at all,
––T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, [3]
That is not what I meant, at all.”
Relieved of the pressure and often the pain, a new perspective freed me from anger, fear, grief or guilt.
Again, I quote Aundi Kolber. “For years I didn’t believe my experiences were ‘bad enough’ to count, so I didn’t see myself as a survivor of trauma . . .[or understand] how significant it is to experience trauma in childhood––and how it can affect us long after.”
In the age of tell-all memoir, my story may not be “bad enough” and yet it was bad enough for me to realize that survival itself attests to the powerful hand that brought me through ordeals, experiences, and traumas that could have at any time marked the end of my story.
Our God is a God who saves; from the Sovereign LORD comes escape from death.
Psalm 68:20
As an adult, I can see choices I didn’t have as a child. That’s the main difference.
And the same applies now to any distressing situation or traumatic experience. I can see. I have choices.
Once a person understands the source of pain, recognizes what triggers physical and emotional response, they can navigate through difficulties, chart new courses rather than numb, deny, or try to escape personal responsibility.
So, did I set out to write this?
Not really. But that’s what writing does, or at least what writing has done for me. It takes me on a journey through story, noting signs and scenery, recalling conversations, and seeing the faces of those who populate my stories.
And I bet you could tell your own stories too, including scenes that would help you connect the dots to find meaning and purpose in your life story.
The value of story lies open for those willing to learn, especially from mistakes, and then do the work needed not only to survive but to thrive.
[1] Try Softer, A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival Mode––and into a Life of Connection and Joy, by Aundi Kolber
[2] https://marionroach.com
[3] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock