Tell me a story…
And what a story actually is anyway
“Tell me a story”
This is my kid’s most popular request.
She was super specific today as we ate our left over spaghetti lunch with chicken nuggets. Tell me a story with that you know, that is real. Jordan Peterson views stories as fundamental frameworks that shape how people navigate and understand the world.
My 4 year old was asking me for my frameworks for life.
I think people don’t just want stories.
They want your stories.
Specific stories about things that happened to you. Now they don’t have to be told as autobiographical, you could for example make a movie like Gravity, which was a story about the feeling of being broke, packaged as a space thriller.
This weekend
and I are hosting a small virtual retreat for people we know to help us uncover and write stories.We’re making it fun, more like playing a game then actually doing work.
Creativity is after all the grownup word for play.
After taking what we learn from this retreat, we’ll package it into something you might be able to attend, get
for free, that’s the thing Jen and I are building together.SO when a kid is aking for a story, my understanding is that a kid is asking for examples of how we have experienced life, and wondering if they would experience it too, and if they did, what is the best way to act.
What are the options?
What are the consequences?
I want to tell stories. This retreat I’m doing is a turning point in that direction I’m authoring something. And I’m doing it with people who will help me and hold me accountable. It’s a commitment.
I have zero stories written down today.
I believe I will have more than a few not just written down, but published before this decade is through. This may or may not be true. Best the belief is important.
This ability to create belief is a uniques skill we have as humans. Belief produces actions which produce results. And where does belief come from?
Stories.
Your prompt for the day is to tell me a story in the comments.
PS: I hope you enjoyed this free sample
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When I was a little girl but 4 years older than my sister, I was asked the same thing every night - tell me a story Sandy. The lights were out and Mum and Dad were reading or watching the new contraption called a TV.
I would start "Once upon a time (this was in the 1950s) there was a very big hill (my knees were bent in bed and my fingers did the walking) and a little girl decided to climb it to see what was over the hill". My sister would start to ask questions. I continued, most likely remembering snippets from the fairy tales I had read in my Grandmother's children's books, selecting bits from so many stories.I still have one of those books today that I have always loved with the black and white illustrations of the beautiful girls, wild animals, handsome brave boys, spells, sadness, witches. All with a message to keep true to yourself and keep going. Yes Grim's fairytales - gee they are quite harsh but always about resilience, love, persistence. I still make up stories based around my grandchildren of possible adventures they could have. Now I illustrate them as well and send them as a letter. I wonder if my mind well ever stop making up stories of adventure and new places and people and animals.
Once upon a time, a short while ago, An aspiring storywriter and illustrator read an Adam Ming blog about drawing characters and objects using shape, and how to put them together into a finished drawing. One of the sample characters Adam showed his readers was a bear. She loved bears (one of her nicknames was Pooh-bear after all!) and after drawing all the samples and then some others of her own, decided to keep trying to draw a bear. When she came to the fourth lesson showing her how to fill in the character piece by piece with texture, she somehow decided to draw that little bear balancing on top of a ball! That little bear looked so surprised to finally have been able to do this, that it gave her an idea of a whole story to write and now, she is writing and drawing pictures about a little bear and a ball. She hoped that one of the next things she can learn is how to find people who might like to publish stories, but if not, she will have a fun home-made story book to read to all her little grand nieces who love doing fun things with their grand-auntie Pooh-bear! She was very grateful to have found this wonderful place to learn and grow as an artist and she is living happily ever after, drawing and making up all those new stories and illustrating all the stories she told her own daughter when she was growing up too.. ... the end (is not in sight .....yet)! ~;0)