We all have the power to create myth by weaving the ordinary events of life into the dramatic structure of story.

But is it that simple?

In writing courses, when students are asked to produce a story, one of the most common story themes turns out to be ‘not being able to write’.

Something like this:

‘I sat at my desk and stared at the garden and the butterflies on the rose bushes but nothing came to me …’ and so on for the required number of words.

Why does this happen?

As adults we are the keeper of thousands of stories, but when asked to write them down in a coherent form we can often hit a brick wall. It’s as if the idea of ‘story’ is a magical place where entry is allowed to only a select few.

It’s just not so

When you have a story to tell, imagine you are speaking to a friend. Sit at your desk and visualize the friend sitting opposite. Think of an incident in your life you want to discuss with your friend. Obviously that incident has a beginning, middle and ending.

If this is a dramatic incident, a holdup at the local pharmacy, say, you will want to start at the beginning, describe the dramatic sequence of events and finish with the arrival of the police. As you go along, you will probably digress into other stories, embroidering the tale with interesting details.

Or if it’s a story about someone else, the local football hero, you will want to describe the way he looked the day he turned up at school to coach the kids.

Start to write as you would tell your story out loud. If it helps, use a recording device and transcribe it later.

Story secret #4

If writing your life story feels like climbing a mountain, think of the incidents in your life as interesting anecdotes you are telling a sympathetic friend.

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Book Recommendation:
Your Life Story: How to Turn Life into Literature by Kay H. Rennie

It’s a secret every storyteller has known since people huddled in caves and around campfires to listen to others describing their adventures, such as what they did to trap that bear, how their neighbours attacked them with rocks, who turned out to be the hero and so on.

That same story would have been told again the next night, only this time with more detail. How Ogg stood up against the largest of the enemy, how he hit him between the eyes with a sharp rock, how the bad guys ran off when their leader went down.Perhaps the story was retold again and again, and each time more details were added. Now the gods might have come into it, helping Ogg pick just the right magical stone to fell the giant.

I’m sure you get the idea

By the time the story comes round again it has changed.Storyteller No.1 might have given a careful account, but storyteller No.10 lives in another valley. He heard it from storyteller No 9 and so he needs to make up a few details that were left out as the story spread through the communities.

And No.10 is not content with just telling what happened.He wants to reach out to his audience. He wants to really show them how it happened in a way that will keep them hanging on his every word until the end. Perhaps then he’ll get a reward – an extra share of food to take with him on his travels.

So the #1 secret here is this:

If you don’t know all the fine details, if you just can’t remember what Bobby said when he finally left, or those wise stories your grandmother told you as a child, or what you ate for lunch on the day President John Kennedy was shot, if you have the ‘feel’ of those words or events inside you but not the fact, it’s OK to make it up.

Yes, really.

Your readers will enjoy your ‘fictional’ stories far more than a bare, factual report of your life, and you will also get more pleasure from writing when you let go your fear of inaccuracy.

Your true story needs to be retold as entertainment that will appeal to your readers’ imagination and help them really ‘see’ your life as you want them to know it.

In the next post we’ll look at an exercise that will help you re-imagine the fine details of your life story.
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Book Recommendation:
Your Life Story: How to Turn Life into Literature by Kay H. Rennie

It seems that an enterprising customer visiting an Apple store was able to set up a web cam to record the faces of other customers as they peered at the computer on display. Needless to say these customers were unaware that they were being snapped, so when these shots later began playing back to other customers, who were surprised to see their own images morph into a running sequence of those who previously looked at the screen, there was at first an ugly moment of confusion followed by a quick decision to quit the screen.

No-one took it really seriously, it was after all a bit of a joke, except of course for Apple, who complained enough to get the Secret Service involved. The sad hacker, one Kyle McDonald, was rudely awakened one morning with a warrant to search his premises. After informing him that they had a warrant to search for evidence that he had violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act they promptly left with his laptop.

Now McDonald’s lawyer says:“There are no limitations or conditions when you use those computers. He was using that which was available to him or to anyone else. He didn’t violate the law, and he certainly had no intention to violate it.”

But the debate rages on about whether or not this was an invasion of privacy

A production with this magnitude of public interest was too hot to be ignored and it was, of course, displayed on various sites that were eventually told to cease and desist by Apple. The main host of the “Staring at Computers” project was the Web site of a group of artists, Free Art & Technology, and it, too, received the letter from Apple demanding that it be removed. “I don’t want to unduly put Kyle in any more trouble than he already is in, and it didn’t seem like the time to fight a free speech issue that we don’t have the money to fight anyway,” said Evan Roth, who administers the site.

Forced to censor the project, Mr. Roth came up with an ingenious response.

He kept the pictures from the stores on the Web site — but posted a mask on each one. The face on all the masks: Steve Jobs.

So there’s a lesson to be learned here for artist’s like yourself who are planning to write about personal experience or stories that involve others. If you can’t afford a really good lawyer either be careful what you say or mask the faces of your characters by changing their names and other relevant details.
Want to know more about writing Your Life Story?