Your Life is a Story

So how do you write it? And what makes it worth reading?

Spoiler: You have all the ingredients to tell great stories. From You Are Fantastic! Abrams Appleseed, 2021

A few weeks ago, I began identifying as a Writer. Like really feeling it in my bones. After publishing, oh, about 25 books. We’ll get to why in a second, but suffice to say that “I’m not a writer,” was a deep cut from My Story.

Then something clicked (insofar as anything “clicks” after you’ve been chipping away at it for a thousand years). I finally realized that people are their stories. Stories are how we think, talk, and make sense of life, how we claim agency. Every choice is a catalyst.

So how do we tell good ones?

Observation

The first thing is to be a keen observer. As every writer knows, every dust moat creates a galaxy of sunshine and every overheard conversation is potential fodder for a great story.

The details of a good story are vibrant, unharnessing a chuckle or awe, a new way of seeing, a feeling of being seen, a nugget of wisdom, a little transformation. In This is Happiness, Niall Williams writes: “Once standing, any decent story has a life of its own and can run whichever way it wants.”  Crafting this type of story takes presence. Some call it mindfulness.

Your Story vs. Your Creative Voice

The second thing is learning to discern between Your Story and your Creative Voice. Your Story tells you who or how you should be. Typically, it’s old news (yawn!). Often, it’s a collection of asinine missives penned by a cacophony of witless carpetbaggers, including well-meaning parents, scolding teachers, school yard bullies, oblivious ex-boyfriends, and condescending colleagues.  As a professor friend recently lamented to me about trying to be creative: “It’s like there’s a peer review committee on my shoulder, waiting to point out all the flaws in my data, my methodology, and my existence."   

Your Creative Voice, on the other hand, is your wise friend. It’s a keen and impartial observer. Fresh, authentic, and incisively funny. It’s the real you. It might sound a lot like one of your favorite authors, depending on the day, and that’s fine. People are very interested in what it has to say.

Your Story is a mishmash. Sometimes it’s pitiful. Sometimes it’s grand. Occasionally, it’s mewling, conniving, and sneaky. All of it is useful creative fodder, since all stories are interconnected. Ruthlessly examining mine helps you see yours more clearly, and might help me see mine more clearly, too. Just watch what you share. Like checking for genital warts, some things are best done in private.

Dropping Your Story

To write good stories, you need to drop Your Story. You need to get it to ssssssshhhh! so you can hear your Creative Voice. This can be done in a number of ways, including therapy, journaling, meditation, reading, and learning about interpersonal dynamics (because a big part of Your Story was written by other people, so learning how to tactfully ask them to shove it is critical).

There is no need to be self-conscious about Your Story. Everyone has one. But you do need to be brutally honest in examining it. Bend over, this will be quick and painless…

Self-conscious people make poor story tellers, self-consciousness being the state of being so caught up in Your Story that you wrap yourself in it, take a bite, pulverize yourself with digestive enzymes, and suck out the resulting food, like a black widow.  No one wants to see that.

To be unselfconscious, make yourself into a blank page. It’s easier than you think. All your memories are gold if you don’t let them trap you. Same with your neuroticisms, disappointments, and grief, because people can relate (and will in fact be elated) if you are able to talk about them with clarity and humor.  So, just drop them. Drop into your true self, your beingness, that bold bright ball of awareness that entered this life with the wise eyes of a baby. Because if you’ve ever looked into a newborn baby’s eyes, you’ll see that they sparkle like fierce diamonds.

Only you get to write your stories. It helps to realize this. Writing is not about being in control, but rather about spinning events that are out of our control into a good yarn. We are all, as the saying goes, the heroes of our own story. We deserve this role. We’ve earned it.  No one else gets to tell our story.

Understanding Story Structure

I happen to be a fan of the Save the Cat storytelling structure, a series of beats that can be universally found in many great stories. I like to keep my worn copy of Save the Cat Writes a Novel in my back pocket to remind myself that stories – like life – are about transformation and change. Every word moves the plot forward, so you better buckle up. There will be cliffhangers. There will be crises. The boy will get the girl, then realize she’s sleeping with his best friend.  The kindly old neighbor will turn out to be a serial killer. There will be moments when the hero believes they’ve got it all, and moments when All is Lost.

This “All is Lost” part is crucial. It’s also known as the “Dark Night of the Soul.” In Save the Cat, there is no good story without it.  Think about this for a moment. There is no good story without the hero losing whatever they were clinging to like a life raft. I don’t know about you, but I find that incredibly reassuring, like all the times I feel hopeless and lost are exactly what makes life worth living, and my story worth telling.

Wants vs. Needs

Then there is the crucial fact of wants versus needs.  Every hero starts out with a want, something they feel must have. Something that compels them to action and starts what Save the Cat calls the “Fun and Games,” or cat and mouse, bulk of the story.  It turns out that what the hero wants, however, is not what they need.  The need is an inner transformation – to say, forgive their self-betrayal or to realize that life isn’t about who has the most gold teeth.

This is true of our lives. We often spend time chasing what we think we want, or what society tells us to want: a fancy car, a nice home, a degree from a particular institution, the right friends, a body that never ages and looks flawless in a thong (Hint: it’s just wrong to look good in a thong after a certain age, at which stage you will have a flat, wide dimpled butt that makes the thong look like it’s cutting into a wheel of brie.).

Stating Your Theme

To arrive at a satisfying conclusion, you need to realize the truth of your story, also known as the “Theme Stated” (which is why I love choosing a theme for each new year, rather than a resolution. Resolutions are the storytelling equivalent of a shrill finger-wagging nag starting the story with “I told you so!” No one wants to read that.). 

The first glimmer of the theme often comes from a minor character, or it can be personified in the setting, as in the coming of sunshine and electric light to the rain-soaked town of Faha in This is Happiness. The truth is typically some variation of: Everything is okay. You are okay. Just maybe not in the way you expected.

Editing

As Anne Lamott famously said, almost all writing starts with a sh*tty first draft. You can think of the stops and starts in your life that way, too — as rough stabs at, say, trying to find your calling, learning how to Zumba, or letting go of your deep fear that when you do Zumba, you look like a dyslexic giraffe. Just as we’re all constantly writing, sometimes our choices are rough. Especially if we have people-pleasing tendencies, editing is boundary-setting, a topic I wrote about recently here. Every life story needs editing.

Concluding Your Stories

At the end of a story, the hero begins where they started, but the story has changed them.  Similarly, our stories change us, if we’re keen observers and if we engage with them fully.  It all begins with paying attention, focusing on the page, and inviting the words to come out to play.

As the saying goes, sometimes the end is just the beginning.  The same is true for stories. With every story you write on the page and in life, a new story is just waiting to begin.

Hello!Lucky