Before I took the course on personal storytelling, I had no idea how to begin to create a story. My method was to wait until a story that sounded entertaining occurred to me and then I would tell it to someone. This happened very rarely. Throughout the course, I learned strategies and techniques for crafting stories, and over time I developed a useful process of my own.
To develop a story, I begin by looking at my idea log. I comb through my idea log for events, not philosophical ideas. I want happenings that I can describe with rich imagery. Sometimes there is one idea in there that lends itself to a complete story. But more often, I find only fragments of stories and I feel that I need to see if there are perhaps three story ideas that I might cull together. For my story, “electric fence,” I started out with a desire to tell a story about getting electrocuted, but I worried that this would not be enough of a story to stand on its own. I searched my idea log for other stories that had to do with danger, such as the time I nearly burned down a building and the time I got lost in the woods. I thought that if I could compile these ideas together, then I would have enough material for a story.
Next, I work on identifying a theme and some sense of how I might conclude the story. I do this very early on, before I have so much as written a word, because if I cannot come up with a unifying theme and a compelling conclusion then I have nothing with which to organize my story. For me, coming up with a theme and a conclusion is the most challenging part. Often I want to tell a story about something exciting or funny that happened, but I have no idea why it is significant. I ponder for a while, “How do I justify telling this story? What is my purpose in telling it?” This is where I must reach as far as my imagination will allow until I come up with some universal theme that grants me license to tell the story. In the case of the story about the “electric fence,” I decided that my theme was “near death experiences” and I would conclude by saying something about human fragility and the preciousness of life.
The theme of a story is nothing more than a universal truth. For example, it could be “the kindness of strangers” or it could be “love is worth fighting for” or any phrase that expresses a big idea. Once I have identified a suitable theme, I can use my stories to illustrate it. In my conclusion, I can restate my theme more explicitly, “No, really, love is worth fighting for, and the examples I just told you prove my point!” Or I can use the conclusion to explain how this realization changed me or my life. The conclusion is an essential element, because it is a way of imbuing the story with meaning or communicating a change or a transformation.
After I identify my theme and have an idea of how I will conclude, I then break up the main action of the story into three or four parts, which I think of as stepping stones. Breaking up the story into chunks makes it easier for me to remember the events I want to present and their order.
The next step in my process is to perform my story out loud and elicit feedback. I performed the “electric fence” story before a small audience (my partner and two of our cats). The feedback I received was that the story felt rushed and that the listeners wanted to know more about each of the near-death incidents. My partner encouraged me to pick one of the three experiences and focus the story on that one event.
I realized that there was in fact much more I could say about getting electrocuted. I fleshed out the story about getting zapped by an electric fence while maintaining the same theme and conclusion about the fragility of life. The story became fuller and richer with specific details about the whole experience of going to the farm, working on the farm, and surviving a close call. Sometimes a story idea that I did not think would be enough turns out to be much more robust than I imagined initially. This is often discovered in the process of telling the story out loud several times.
Following these steps has allowed me to become proactive about crafting new stories. Rather than waiting for a story to descend upon me, I can now sit down with my idea log and begin to play with the possibilities, which, it turns out, are restricted only by the limits of my imagination.
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