Your Story Page 5
My novel Things without a Name begins like this:
Nonna taught me how to read. My first book was made of cardboard and had pictures with words next to them. Nonna pointed at the letters next to a picture of a house. H-OU-Z. She pointed at the letters alongside a bird. B-I-R-T. Because she has a thick Italian accent, I learned to read English with an Italian accent. “NONNA—is me. FAITH—is you. Everywhere you look, up, down, here, there, things have a name.”
“Why must things have names?” I asked.
“Otherwise how must we know what it is? Things need names for onderstanding. So if you ask for fiore, a flower, I don’t bring you ragno, a spider.” And she wiggled her nine fingers like a spider’s legs.
“But I like spiders,” I told Nonna.
“Yes, but a spider is not a flower.”
“What about things that don’t have names?” I asked. “Like the colour of yesterday and the things we forget.”
Nonna lifted her four-fingered hand to her mouth like she was holding a truth from slipping out. She smiled briefly before she answered me:
“They don’t exist. And if they do, they are dimenticato. Lost.”
That book was about finding names for things inside ourselves so we can claim our power and love ourselves back into being.
When we write our own story and name things for ourselves, we find moments of our strength, when the narrative we’ve inherited has been that we were weak. We describe the exact textures of our suffering when we’ve been labeled a troublemaker or a loser. In writing, we get to choose our words. We get to name ourselves.
We literally get to rewrite history.
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Write to make meaning
The past is often a chaotic fog of events we never fully understood or processed. When we write a story, we create an ordered pattern out of those events, and so structure meaning.
Stories follow a deep structure that is almost encoded in the human brain—or maybe the heart. When we start to put the puzzle together, we begin to see the way in which it all holds itself together.
As humans, we’re hardwired to make meaning out of things. Meaning is not inherent in an experience, as Viktor Frankl taught in logotherapy, a psychotherapeutic approach based on the belief that human nature is motivated by the search for a life purpose. The pursuit of meaning is an act of creativity on our part, in each moment of our lives.
Isn’t that an exciting thought?
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Write to heal
One of the questions Native Americans ask sick people is “When last did you tell your story?”
Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona (a wonderful physician and author of Narrative Medicine) uses storytelling to help people heal from physical and mental illness. He asks them to tell the story of their illness and to claim a different narrative: “Change the story and the illness may change.”
Sometimes words are our only freedom. They liberate us from ourselves. From past painful experience. From numbness. From wounds that have no names.
The writer Maxine Hong Kingston helps Vietnam veterans write their stories, which in turn helps them heal from the trauma. Stories work in mysterious ways on the brain and engage the mind, heart, and spirit in a mystical conversation that can bring peace to injured places.
It took me two years to write When Hungry, Eat. There were times when writing was so painful, I literally couldn’t see the screen in front of me for my tears. In one particular scene, I am trying to say goodbye to my friend Ilze. I wrote and rewrote that passage maybe a hundred times, until I could write it without crying. By the time I finished it, all my grief at our good-bye was stitched into a few short, unsentimental sentences. Writing that book helped me to hold my loss.
In owning our stories, we magically, paradoxically, are able to let them go. That’s the deal the Muse has struck with Life. Own it. Really own it. And it will let you leave without the pain.
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Write to bear witness
Anne Frank wrote in her diaries:
Unless you write yourself, you can’t know how wonderful it is. . . . And if I don’t have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. . . . When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! . . . Writing allows me to record everything, all my thoughts, ideals and fantasies.
For those of us who have never been listened to or had anyone bear witness to our suffering, writing our story can be a beautiful experience of self-acknowledgment.
It is our way of saying, “I was here.”
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Write to remember
You may not think you remember much about your childhood. But when you start to write, doors open where before there were just long corridors of time that had passed. You begin to remember more. You locate the joy, the grief, the abandonment, the emotional experience that defined you. But how do you know if a memory is worth writing about? As the wonderful writing teacher Julia Cameron puts it, “If a memory is strong for you, trust it . . . If an incident has weight for you, then it is significant. Trust yourself in this. . . . The audience we require is our own loving attention.”
When we write, our brains (or hearts or heart-minds) efficiently cluster information together so that our consciousness can access larger chunks, and we’re able to more easily recall details and store our memories. We collect bits of ourselves we have left behind, we become more integrated and whole as we make peace with our shadow energies and lost stories.
Memoir is as much about the nature of memory as it is about “what happened to me.” In fact, memoir is an investigation of the way in which memory works: memory is unreliable, powerful, and can confuse and conflate events.
Memory is a foundation of our identity. When we remember things that have happened, we own our histories.
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Write to meet yourself . . . again
Our lives come at us with vicious speed. We’re endlessly “doing” and “keeping up,” which is why many of us feel like we’re always lagging behind. One day we may wonder, Is this it? and What’s it all about?
In the rush, we’ve lost an intimacy with and curiosity about ourselves. This breakdown of self-worth is evident when we feel no passion or sense of purpose about anything. So the very act of writing our story is welcoming self-compassion and curiosity back into our lives. We cannot help but grow and transform through this slow, patient, probing engagement with our inner world. Writing is a profound act of intimacy and curiosity with our own consciousness.
In re-meeting ourselves on the page over and over again, we learn to love this broken, stumbling self. We learn to have compassion. And thus we embody the exquisite line from Galway Kinnell’s poem “Saint Francis and the Sow”: “Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.”
Write to reteach yourself whatever it is you need to know.
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Write to tell the truth
Julia Cameron writes in her book The Right to Write that honesty is an important aspect of the writing process. “Faced on the page, a difficult truth becomes a doorway.”
We often choose not to know what we know, but when we write, the truth offers itself to us. We cannot pretend I am happy, or This is enough of a life for me. When we write, we enter the darkness of our deepest selves, and as we write, our words become eyes that adjust, making out the shapes in the shadows—the armchair of our self-loathing, the piano of our pain. We stumble over the litter of our grief.
We get better at seeing into these unlit places.
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Write to connect
Though we might write for ourselves, a story implies that there is a teller and a listener—it is created for the purpose of sharing meaning. Stories help us connect with others and create relationships. Words rescue us from catastrophic loneliness and remind us that we are part of the great family of humanity.
For those of us who feel alone, our stories act as bridges to others and build community.
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Your book could change someone’s life
We have all read books that have shifted our emotions or thoughts so much that we were altered when we finished them.
Not all books that change our lives deal with dramatic events. Sometimes it’s the author’s ability to find humor in difficulty that moves us. Or the depiction of a kind interaction that inspires us to think about how we speak to our partners. Or a tale of a trip undertaken that motivates us to get off our arses and go someplace new.
As readers, we’re inspired by true stories where authors share their experiences and reflect on what they’ve been through. Because of their struggle, we’re able to look at our own lives in a different way.
So here is another clue: in order for our story to reach others, we’re not just recording the events of our life and obsessively recalling the details about where our mother was born, what trade our great-grandfather was involved in, and what town our grandmother came from.
We’re taking readers on an emotional journey. Feelings matter more than facts.
Here are some of the books that have changed my life (many of which are memoirs):
How to Be Sick, by Toni Bernhard, is a book by an author with such a severe chronic illness that she cannot sit or speak for long periods. Written from a Buddhist perspective, she shows how even in the bleakest of circumstances we can redeem our experiences by seeing them as teaching moments. It has transformed how I think of my own frailties and given me patience with slipped disks, back pain, and plantar fasciitis. It is one of the most profound ruminations on impermanence and mortality.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. This gave me a completely new framework for experiencing the world. I used to believe I had to “find” meaning. Now I approach life as a creator—I make meaning.
Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can by Caroline Myss. This helped me understand the connections between the body, mind, and spirit. When I had a cancer scare some years ago, this book became my guide and companion and allowed me to let go of the emotional pain I was holding. I refer to it whenever I have a physical symptom and am trying to understand its emotional counterpart.
Teach Us to Sit Still by Tim Parks. This inspired me to think beyond conventional Western medicine when it comes to finding cures for physical conditions and not to trust my own skepticism. It has opened me to the mysteries of healing.
Boy, by Kate Shand, tells of Kate’s attempt to understand why her 14-year-old son, JP, committed suicide. She examines her own parenting unflinchingly to find out how she failed and where, if anywhere, her guilt lies. This book made me think more carefully about how I parent my children. I began to pay attention to their emotional worlds. I came away from reading it with a deep understanding that our job as parents is to stay connected to our kids, and to accept that, no matter what we do, they have their sovereign paths to live. Loving a child is about letting them go.
The Still Point of the Turning World by Emily Rapp. Emily learns when her son Ronan is just nine months old that he has Tay-Sachs disease, a degenerative condition that claims the lives of all those who have it by the age of three. This book is Emily’s attempt to come to terms with loving a child who has no future. It is a deep and searing examination of love and grief. I read it after my friend Emma died suddenly at the age of 35. I cannot tell you what comfort this book gave me, just to be in the company of someone who was holding raw grief in such a conscious, meaningful way.
Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala. This is one of the hardest books I’ve ever read. It’s about the author’s unimaginable experience of losing both of her young sons, her husband, and her parents in the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004. She writes without sentimentality or self-pity, but simply to come to terms with who she is now. I always imagined a human being would literally die in the face of such loss. And Sonali nearly did. She was on suicide watch for a long time. But she gasped her way through to write this book. She battles with coming to terms with her lone survival and how she will continue to be a human being. I came away overwhelmed with gratitude for the simple wholeness of my family and the domestic intactness of my own life.
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. This is a joyous, honest, self-deprecating book about writing. I read it when I was a young writer, and it gave me such comfort to know that my own fears and anxieties were shared by someone as accomplished as the author. It is a book I still refer to 20 years later, and it has formed the foundation of how I think about and teach others how to write.
I could go on and on . . . but you get my point.
So, think about which books have changed your life and the gratitude you feel to their authors for writing them.
Someday, someone could feel just that way about yours.
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What’s a story?
Astory is not just about what happened when and to whom. To make a reader care, we have to create an emotional connection. This is the essence of storytelling.
So what, then, is a story?
These are some of the elements:
Once upon a time there was a fascinating, sympathetic character
who lived in a particular world (a time and a place)
and this character wanted something
that she or he could not have because of all kinds of conflicts and obstacles
but she or he overcame them
and was transformed in the process.
Ultimately, a story has to move us from point A to point B—and something has to change in either the character or the reader.
Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of writing that lacks “story.” The characters are passive or uninteresting and I find myself not caring one way or the other whether they survive or die a horrible death. The story is suspended in a timeless place, unanchored and without context, so I don’t know where it takes place or why. The character doesn’t transform but is exactly the same at the end, and so . . . why did I bother?
A story is not a collection of beautiful descriptions. Or a series of internal ruminations, even if you have 100,000 words. A story is shaped by a series of decisions the author makes around a few key factors:
a WHO (character or characters);
a WHAT (theme);
a WHEN (setting in time and space);
a WHY (plot); and
a HOW (structure that supports the story).
Without this invisible architecture holding up the narrative, what you have is some writing, but you do not have a story.
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Think of your life as a story
If you’ve never thought of your life as a story, think about it now. Figure out how your story fits in this glass slipper of a structure. Because getting these elements right is what will make the difference between a boring rendition of all the stuff that happened to you and a story other readers will connect with and care about.
Think of the qualities of all the books and stories in the world that you love. Romeo and Juliet. Catcher in the Rye. Moby-Dick. Great Expectations. Pride and Prejudice. To Kill a Mockingbird. Beloved. Wuthering Heights.
What are they about? Forget the facts, give me the guts:
tragedy
romance
comedy
heroes
villains
epic battles of the spirit
Now think of your life. Make columns and list the moments in your life that qualify as:
Tragic Romantic Comedic
All you’ve lost, all you regret All those you’ve loved All those funny stories
Heroic Villainous Epic battles
All those times when you rose to the occasion and surprised yourself with strength you never knew you had All those frenemies, the people who hurt you, tried to screw you over, made you suffer All those times when you didn’t know how you’d make it through, but you did
Once you’ve figured out what your story is about, you can work out what facts are important to illustrate it for your reader.
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> Survivor
Another way to think about your life is in terms of what you’ve survived.
Make a list of all the things you’ve survived.
Accidents
Losses
Failures
Disappointments
Regrets
Having too much of a good time
Losing your way in life
Loving the wrong person
Miscarriages, stillbirths (literal or metaphoric)
Keep going . . .
PART II
Trust
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Say yes
Writing your story begins with you saying YES to yourself.
Yes, writing is worth my time.
Yes, I have something worth saying.
Yes, I will fight for my voice.
Yes, I will work through the doubts.
Yes, I want to understand who I am.
Yes, I trust myself.
Yes, yes, yes.
Writing your story is about developing trust. Trust in yourself, your story, and the process of writing.
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Only you can believe in you
Even if you do land a publishing deal with a traditional publisher, advance ’n’ all, indicating that at least a publisher believes in you, it still doesn’t change the fact that only you can believe in you.