Today, I have the privilege of sharing an excerpt from my friend Allison Fallon’s new book, Write Your Story. Allison is one of my favorite voices in the writing sphere. She is honest, vulnerable, and a natural teacher. You can order her new book here. Enjoy!
You don’t need fantastical details to write an interesting story. You just need a unique perspective. And the lens of storytelling can give you exactly that.
What you will find is that writing your story helps you become more interesting. When you write your story, you will become more interesting to the people around the dinner table, to your coworkers, to your spouse and your children and your friends. Most importantly, though, you will become more interesting to yourself. Writing your story is about changing your identity. It’s about changing how you see yourself, how you talk about yourself, and how you carry yourself.
The truth is, you are already interesting. You are endlessly fascinating, and in the course of this book I am going to help you pull the elements out of your story to prove to you that it’s true. When you put the events of your story in the right order and apply meaning to those events, others can learn from and be inspired by you.
Make Magic out of the Mundane
You might have an inherently fascinating story to tell. I once worked with a writer who was held hostage for twenty-four hours by her undiagnosed schizophrenic boyfriend. Her story reads like an episode of Law & Order. But if that’s not your experience, you’re not at a disadvantage. Even a seemingly “ordinary” life still holds magic inside of it.
I understand the feeling of an ordinary life. At the time I’m writing this, I have a one-year-old and a two-year-old at home. My two-year-old daughter is obsessed with PAW Patrol and walks around singing the theme song over and over, until it’s stuck in my head. Before I left the house this morning to write this chapter, my one-year-old son rubbed mashed bananas all over my coat. I cleaned up the mess as best I could with a baby wipe, but I’ll need to take the coat to the dry cleaner’s later.
Riveting, I know.
The shape of a story is not created from extravagant details. The shape of a story is created through conflict and resolution. Through passion and desire. Through wanting something you can’t yet have. Through believing something must be possible but not being able to make it happen (yet).
That is me, writing my newest book, Write Your Story. I believe it can be easy and fun to write your story, and I want to make that possible for as many people as I can. For whoever would like to give it a try. It’s what keeps me glued here to my seat, in the sea of other monotonous things that might occur around me. The buzz of the espresso machine. The meeting happening at the table next to me. The slime smeared down the right arm of my coat.
Right now, I’m singularly focused. I will finish writing my book before the year’s end. That’s the story I’m writing—both figuratively and literally, I suppose.
So take a minute and consider what story you might be writing.
- Where is the conflict in your life?
- What’s keeping you up at night?
- What drives you crazy?
- What makes you furious?
- What’s blocking you or getting in your way?
- What do you want that you don’t (yet) have?
Maybe for you, it’s obvious. Maybe there’s a big incident that happened earlier in your life that you’d like to write about. Losing a parent. Adopting your kids. Meeting your spouse. Leaving a toxic relationship. Growing a company. Suffering abuse.
Or perhaps you’re not as sure. You’d like to write an interesting story, but your life seems to be a little flat. Who would the hero be? you wonder as you sit at your computer screen for the fourth consecutive hour. What is the conflict? Does it count that the coffee shop was out of my favorite kind of milk?
It is in this way that storytelling invites us to do far more than commit our life to paper. It guides us to ask the big questions that stories answer.
What is this life I’m living all about?
Who is the hero?
What did she overcome?
How did that change her?
Years ago, as a brand-new writer, I quit my job and spent a year traveling across the country in my Subaru Outback with a friend as a way to “stir up” conflict in my very ordinary life. I knew I wanted to write something interesting, and I figured I need to “make something interesting happen” in order to do that. As it turns out, my life was more interesting than I’d predicted it to be—even without the stunt of the road trip (although the road trip turned out to be a fun adventure I’m glad I took).
One Thousand Stories
After college, my brother spent a decade in Hollywood working behind the scenes on movie and TV sets. One summer I went to visit him in LA while he was working on a popular reality TV show. He took me out to one of his favorite clubs, and a few cast members from a different reality show were playing pool there. I was barely twenty-one and starstruck.
On the drive home, I remember telling my brother how cool the night had been, how amazing it would be to live the life he was living, and how one day I wanted to be on TV too. I was young and naive, but I remember my notoriously laid-back brother getting stern with me and telling me that under no circumstances should I ever—EVER—agree to allow anyone to turn my life into a reality TV show.
“You probably won’t get the opportunity,” he said, “but if you do, promise me you’ll turn it down.” I didn’t say anything. “There are a thousand stories you could tell about any one person,” he said. “Don’t give someone else the power to choose which one gets shared.”
That conversation has never left me. Not because of reality TV. Because of what my brother said. There are a thousand stories you could tell about any one person. How you frame a life, how you choose to tell the stories of any one person, is what goes down in history. How you articulate a story is the way we all remember it.
Was your divorce the worst thing that ever happened to you, or the best? Was raising your children the hardest thing you’ve ever done, or the most joy-filled? The death of that loved one was tragic, absolutely, but wasn’t it also the portal that opened you up to miracles and magic? You get to decide how the story is told, and therefore how it is remembered—not just by you, but by anyone who reads it.
Whatever you do, don’t leave the telling of your story to someone else. You can use a tool like storytelling to magnify the brilliance of your own existence. In order to do that, you’ll need to know what your story is really about.
Taken from Write Your Story by Ally Fallon.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Allison Fallon is an author of Write Your Story and founder of Find Your Voice, a community that supports anyone who wants to write anything. In addition to her books The Power of Writing It Down, Packing Light and Indestructible, she has ghostwritten 11 books and has collaborated on countless others. Through Find Your Voice, she has helped leaders of multinational corporations, stay-at-home moms, Olympic gold medalists, recovering addicts, political figures, CEOs, and prison inmates use her methods as powerful tools to generate positive change in their lives. She has lived all over the country in the past decade but now lives in Nashville, Tenn., with her husband and two kids, Nella and Charlie.
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