“I feel like I haven’t seen you in a little while. What’s been new with you?”
I was with some friends at a bar. For reasons I didn’t understand, my mind went completely blank with that question.
“Woah…” I admitted. “I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time remembering anything I did this week.”
It was a bit out of character for me. I typically have a good memory. Maybe not so much for tasks, but when it comes to things I did and actual experiences, I tend to remember things in pretty rich detail. But that wasn’t happening on this night.
I returned the question, letting her recount some of her week, all while wondering why my memory was off it’s usual game. A little bit after the moment had already passed, I remembered the concert I went to a few nights before. One of the first live music shows I’d been to in a really long time. One where the artist crossed between rap and soul and funk and spoken word over some futuristic instrumentals. It was a powerful performance, and to top it off, that night was a little bit rainy, adding to its magic.
I had a lot to say about this concert, except for when I actually had the chance. Ironically, the friend I was talking to was a musician, meaning that conversation could’ve gone in so many interesting directions.
That experience led me to resolve to always have a pretty good answer to the simple question, “what’s going on?”
It feels like a low bar to clear, but having an answer that can effectively springboard into a rich conversation is extremely useful. It’s like having a ladder that goes right over small talk and into actually connecting with somebody.
Our lives are millions and millions of stories put together.
Funny enough, being an “interesting person” is only a part of the equation. Being able to reflect on your life and make connections is perhaps more important than the things you do.
You’ve probably encountered somebody who does a lot of exciting, adventurous things, but whenever they talk about it, they just sound like they’re showing off. Then you have the opposite of that. People who seem to live rather ordinary lives, but have such an unconventional way of looking at things that their experiences take on a whole new life.
Having the space and habit of reflecting on your experiences is important for many more reasons beyond having good stories to tell, but that’ll be a nice side benefit.
I’ve learned that being a storyteller requires me to regularly mine my life for those moments.
Finding stories takes sifting through all the things that you go through–the work calls, alarms, emails, injuries, and side quests and identifying the ones that mean something.
Some of the easier ways to figure out where those good stories:
• Were you in a location this week where you don’t find yourself too often? How did you get there?
• What was the thing you felt the most resistant towards doing all week? Did you do it?
• Did anything push or pull you in a different direction than you originally anticipated?
Ultimately, when I’m asking myself these sorts of questions, I’m trying to look for pattern breakers. People talk about inciting incidents when it comes to stories. This can be any disruption to our sense of normal. It can be as large scale as being drafted for war, or as small as trying to get over your fear of bugs.
Being a daredevil and living a wild and exotic life doesn’t make one a good storyteller. Its advantage is that it opens up more opportunities for very obvious pattern-breakers. But to the well-trained eye, these pattern-breakers are all over the place.
The whole point is connection
I’ve got to admit, it feels weird taking this more “artistic approach” to telling stories in a casual conversation. I do a lot of storytelling for work, as well as for performance. And I don’t want my natural conversations with friends to turn into performances.
Thankfully, that’s not the goal.
There’s a time for performance. There’s a time for crafting and wordsmithing stories, for practicing their delivery, and for going live. But a casual chat with a friend at a bar is not that time. Go too far with that and there won’t be too many friends willing to indulge those casual chats anymore.
You just want to have a few moments in your back pocket. A few memories you know were important, and the ability to note what was important about them.
The actual practice is the discipline of noticing. Of paying attention to your own life. Of seeing when one thing leads to the next. One thing that amazes me about life is how it can be pretty forgettable if we allow it to be. Literally. If we commit to simply doing the same thing every day without pausing, taking mental snapshots or notes, it doesn’t take very long at all for entire days to be forgotten. And so then, what was the point? That question used to always freak me out.
Thankfully, the opposite of that is true. When you open yourself up to the possibility that any day contains a world of meaningful experiences, pattern breaks, and connections, you start to notice them everywhere. More importantly, you notice where things in your story intersect with the stories of other people, and that’s the point where stories help us in our cosmic quest to connect with each other.
This week hasn’t been especially full of stories.
At least not for me.
I’ve been getting over some cold that’s taken an obnoxiously long time to totally get over. And while I’m mostly better, I’m still finding myself lower on energy and facing down a bunch of tasks I let pile up while under the weather.
It’s the perfect example of one of those types of weeks where finding the stories in my life takes a lot more work. Because looking for stories is a discipline, the process matters more than the results.
Once you start mining your memories for stories and meaning on a regular basis, you realize that our stories aren’t evenly distributed throughout life.
Some weeks will be concentrated with so many happenings that it’s tough to keep track of, and other times you’ll spend week after week doing pretty much the same thing. Storytelling might make you more motivated to break out of the latter, though!
At the very least, I can say that the most surprising place I found myself this week was at our local pier. It was a spot I used to frequent when I lived closer to the ocean, but now it’s just out of the way enough for me to neglect. Upon coming back, I bumped into an old friend. I got a good look in several different tide pools, each one being its own little microcosm. It was a guilty reminder to me of how easy it gets to take one’s environment for granted once it gets a little too familiar. Being there made me want to renew my relationship with the ocean, the ocean that I’ve now lived next to for the majority of my life but that I haven’t really paid proper attention to.
Isn’t it always about learning how to pay better attention?
I remember when taking improv classes, I once did a scene set in an escape room.
My coach encouraged me to not make it a scene about an escape room.
Why not? It felt like an escape room was a great premise. It’s familiar enough, but not something you see done in improv excessively, and they’re kinda naturally quirky. There are enough escape room conventions to have fun with.
Turns out, the problem wasn’t with having a scene set in an escape room. The problem was with making it a scene about an escape room. The stronger scene is always about the relationship.
That’s why one of the hardest stories to tell well are stories of accomplishment or success. Running an ultramarathon. Receiving an award. It’s easy for these to feel self-indulgent or show-offy. The key is to realize that the achievements aren’t the story, but the setting of the story.
The real story is the risk you took to get to that feat. The choices you had to make. The people who showed up to help you. The renegotiation of how you see yourself.
Similarly, our struggles and traumas are also so much the story, but the setting.
Stories are incomplete if we just say “a bad thing happened to me,” or “I did a cool thing,” and leave it there.
Explore the risks. The decisions. The relationships.
And when you mine your life for stories, don’t forget to put on that lens.
Our jobs, our projects, our trips, are always just settings for our relationships–with God, self, others, or the planet–and that’s where the good stuff awaits. It’s easy to mistake the setting for the story.