There’s a Story in Everything

From the moment you wake up each day to the moment you go to sleep that night, each waking moment is filled with a series of events that you refer to as “Today”.  And tomorrow, you’ll refer to them as “Yesterday”.  Weeks, months & years down the road, you’ll find yourself saying “I remember that day when …”. 

And along the way, your memories of that one day will become so finely tuned and so reminiscent of the details that mattered to you that you’ll be able to tell people about that one day, how it affected you in the long term, what you were thinking about on that day and what happened.

In essence, what you have done is just written a story in your mind.  And that’s where every story begins. So long as you live and breathe, you’ll always have memories and from those memories, you’ll always have stories to tell.

Tell these stories often enough and you’ll soon find yourself like me – standing in a ridiculously long, seemingly backwards-moving, supposedly “express” checkout line at 3am at a Wal-Mart.  This could become wasted time if I didn’t stand there and imagine the stories that could unfold.

Or walking through a mall and instead of hitting up the usual stores, going into a few you normally wouldn’t.  By doing that, you take yourself out of your comfort zone and can imagine the stories that could unfold at the food court or so many other places that you would normally walk by without a second thought.

My point is: There’s an endless supply of story lines about. I think if more people realized how many stories unfolded around them, they’d start remembering and writing them down.  And suddenly the world would be filled with authors.

It’s because there is a story in everything, in every moment, in every situation, in every single instance of life.  And our minds are drawn to stories that are compelling and interesting to us or stories that, in some way, we relate to.

Enter our personal interests.  Insert your specifics here, but if you’re reading this blog entry, you likely know what the letters ABDL stand for.  Though ABDL is only a small portion of our lives, it can be a large portion of our hearts and an even bigger portion still of the stories we read.

Mark Twain was once quoted in saying: “You write what you know.”

Tennessee Williams once said: “If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.”

Virginia Woolf once said: ““Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”

But the one quote that I always remember first is …

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” – Allen Ginsberg, a poet.

It’s easy to think of a story.  There is inspiration waiting on the front side of closed eyelids. And it’s easy to tell a story. People love to hear the thoughts of others.  But to get people to relate to your story, to draw them into the storyline and to keep them wanting to turn to the next page (or flick to the next e-reader screen), what you need are characters as compelling as real people – flawed, fabled, determined and as individual as each & every person you run into in life.

So now, I give you a bit of a fun-loving homework assignment:

Think back on the events of the past day of your life and ask yourself what one memory you will retain from them.  Then, tomorrow, be mindful of the plethora of stories going on all around you.  Perhaps you’ll find the story of your life, when you least expect it.  Whether you write that story down or not, remember what David Brin once said:

“If you have other things in your life — family, friends, good productive day work — these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.”