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No one wants to read your victim story

Do you want to tell a hero story or a victim story?
You get to choose.

I’ve been writing a lot of memoir lately. Partly, this is because writing memoir seems to be an important piece of my journey to tackle my decades long habit of hiding and my soul-crushing fear of being seen. Partly, it’s because memoir fascinates me.

When I set out to tackle the genre of memoir, the first thing I found myself confronted with is the flimsiness of the truth. After all, truth is what separates memoir from fiction.

Or is it? Memory is tricky and truth may be unknowable. Do I really remember the time I explained how lightning works to my mom at age four? Or have I just heard the story so many times I’ve reconstructed the memory based on the details of the story?

As memoirists our job is twofold. On the one hand, we vow to tell the truth as best we know it. On the other hand, memoir is not so much about the simple facts, the truths of our lives — memoir is about how we come to make sense of those facts, those truths. And because of this, every memoirist is faced with a choice:

What kind of story do you want your memoir to tell?

I’ve been participating in Anna Kunnecke’s Queen Sweep program for the past few weeks, and she has participants start by “sweeping” their stories. She encourages participants to move “from victim to hero” in the story of their own lives. She invites us to reconsider the way we talk to ourselves about our lives, to make the shift from “poor-put-upon me” to “kicking-ass-and-taking-names me”.

For me, the shift looks something like this:

A girl grew up. She did all the things she was supposed to do and just about killed herself bending over backwards to achieve success. In the end, it won her nothing except crippling exhaustion, a deadened heart, and a desk job she came to loathe more and more every day.

Sad, whiny victim-me is full of pouting and sad-faces. But what about hero-me? How does she see my life?

A girl grew up. She had a series of wonderful opportunities/adventures which led her to one of the best colleges in the country. There she got to study the mysteries of the universe alongside some of the smartest people in the world. After she graduated, she landed a job in her field that paid better than she’d dared to dream — and when it turned out she still wasn’t happy, she took matters into her own hands and set off on an adventure to redefine her purpose and reconnect with joy.

So, here’s the real question — whose story would you rather read? Because if I could only buy one of these stories, I’d pick the brave story of hero-me over the whiny, self-absorbed story of victim-me in a heartbeat.

It occurs to me to wonder whether this is all writing memoir is — the opportunity to meet your victim story on the page and discover the ways in which it’s actually the story of a hero.

Right now, I’m thinking the answer is yes — but feel free to chime in with your thoughts in the comments below!

And I want to make something else very clear — victim-story, hero-story — they’re not about whether or not you were a victim. They’re about how you choose to respond in the aftermath of your victimhood. No one escapes life without some bad things happening, and some people encounter more than their share of unpleasantness. These generally aren’t things we have control over. What we get to decide is how do we want to respond to the unpleasantness in our life? By choosing the hero-story over the victim-story we have the opportunity to re-empower ourselves and make courageous choices in the face of our circumstances.

I don’t know for sure, but I think that shifting your perspective about your life from victim to hero might just be the kind of powerful magic that has the potential to change everything.

So, which story do you choose?

Let me know in the comments below! And if you’re interested in reading something more on this topic I highly recommend this article by Anna Kunnecke.

And, if you’re feeling victim-y about something that’s happening in your life I invite you to ask yourself this: What action could I take in this situation that would make me feel like a badass?

And then go do that — because you deserve to be (and feel) awesome! (Example here.)

 

Breaking the Habit of Hiding: Visibility on and off the page

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about bravery and courage and what those things mean for me. I’ve written in recent weeks about my fear of being seen, which has been showing up a lot as I’ve begun to submit my writing for publication and also to work on my very first book. (Well my first-and-a-half book if we’re counting the 100 pages of a YA fantasy story I wrote when I was 12…)

Breaking the habit of hiding is something I’ve been talking about for a couple of weeks in my email newsletter. And it’s a subject I’ve been thinking about for months as I’ve been working up the courage to start writing my book (and now I have!).

There’s a piece of writing advice that circulates and which I’ve seen most recently in the article Writing from a Place of Fear over at Writer Unboxed. The advice implores us writers to “write the stories that scare us” — and I don’t think it’s bad advice.

But here’s what I do think:

  • I think that writing is hard.
  • I think writing that scares us is harder.
  • I think that writing our scariest stories takes more courage than we may be capable of.

And so I don’t think it’s enough to suggest glibly that all we need to do is “write the stories that scare us”. Perhaps this is the destination, the goal.

But between here and there is a whole lot of scary ground to cover. Before we can contemplate the visibility “on the page” required to write our scariest stories we must first work on our fear of visibility “off the page” in our everyday lives.

We must get used to the terror of being seen.

Terror is frightening and recognizing that we’re afraid doesn’t do much to make the situation feel less scary. So in order to work through the fear of being seen “off the page” we must do more than just recognize the fear is present. We have to take action to adjust and adapt and to face our fear squarely in the arena.

And, I think there are a handful of concrete steps that we can take to make the process go a little easier:

  1. Start slowly. Start very, very slowly. It’s important not to start with steps that feel too big; it gets harder to start over every time fear beats us.
  2. Begin by releasing old attachments and beliefs. You have to make space for new beliefs and habits.
  3. Build trust step-by-step. There’s no shame in spending a while jumping off the low-dive before tackling the high-dive.
  4. Make sure you’re ready. You’ll know you’re ready when the fear is almost (but not quite) outweighed by your excitement for what might happen next.
  5. Jump a little before you’re ready. Don’t fall into the trap of waiting forever because you’re not “ready enough”.

I’ve done all these things in preparing to start writing my book.

  1. I started slowly by writing and publishing short stories and poems here on my blog.
  2. I done a lot of work on my limiting beliefs and developed strong habits around cultivating courage and supporting my writing practice.
  3. I built trust by putting my work out there and watching as my world did not in fact fall apart.
  4. I  made sure I was ready by starting slowly and building trust.
  5. And then I jumped before I was ready (when I still felt like screaming “aaaah!” even as I splashed the very first words across the page).

I’ll keep you posted on how it pays off! The hope is that if I grow my “off the page” courage by publishing here on the blog and submitting my work elsewhere for publication, I will simultaneously grow my courage “on the page” when I sit down at my desk to write.

So far it feels like the strategy is going to be a stunning success 🙂 (After all, I’ve just started writing a book! That’s a feat of tremendous “on the page” courage.)

If you’d like to read more about overcoming fear in your life, I highly recommend Lissa Rankin’s article, “Five Steps from Fear to Freedom”.

I’d love to know: How do you prepare when faced with something scary?

 

Facing the fear of being seen

The thing about fear is it rises up in your throat until you’re choking on it and you think you might be about to puke. Suddenly your hand isn’t your own anymore as you feel your way into the words, taste them on the tip of your tongue, and then can’t quite bring yourself to put them down on the page.

Fear is the nagging voice in the back of your head that says you can’t say that and warns that they might not like you if they really know who you are. And because you got used to hiding at an early age, you think it’s safest if no one ever knows the real you.

After all, even you aren’t sure about that person you fear you might be.

The thing about fear is that it’s staying home when you want to go out and not offering help when you see someone who is lost on a street you know like the lines on the palm of your own hand and you’re tempted to say hey, where are you trying to go and maybe I could help?

But you don’t because that’s not the sort of thing that people do and no one asked you and everything feels easier if you turn aside and look away and above all you don’t make eye contact.

Because if you meet their eyes they’ll speak up after all and say hey, I’m looking for this place

And even though that’s exactly what you wanted to offer a moment ago, now you’re choking on the thought of how you’re in a rush and it’s so inconvenient to stop and you don’t know the area as well as you thought and you wouldn’t be of any help anyways.

And this is why you mustn’t make eye contact.

Dodging gazes — it’s been the way you’ve lived your life since you were small and you learned that teachers wouldn’t call on you in class if you didn’t make eye contact. You learned that you wouldn’t have to raise your trembling voice and worry what the other kids would think. That maybe you were showing off because you always knew the answers. Even though you weren’t and you didn’t want them to think that. (School was always easy for you — but people not so much and this is where you stopped make eye contact.)

But the thing about the fear is that you’ve finally come head-to-heart with the fact that fear is the only thing that’s still holding you back.

That it’s the lump in your throat that’s growing like a cancer until it eats at your voice, until time after time at the very last moment you’re forever turning your head aside and averting your eyes because this is what you do:

You never, ever make eye contact.

And what you’ve only just begun to realize is that eye contact is the beginning of everything — a solitary moment that says I’m here and I see you and look, you see me!

And that for just an instant we see eye to eye, two as one, separate and together — and together has always been larger than I.

Which is how I know that, no matter how frightened I am, it’s time to start making eye contact again.

It’s finally time to be seen.

 

What fears are holding you back?

It’s a question I’ve been bumping up against all over the place lately as I struggle to find a way to grow as both a writer and as a promoter of my writing. Because as much as we like to pretend it’s a dirty word, writing without some self-promotion is an awful lot like shouting into the void.

And the truth I keep running up against is that I’ve built my life around a pattern of hiding. It’s a pattern that began in school when I was the smart kid, the one who always had the right answers but didn’t have the right friends, the one who always stuck out in the crowd. The older I got the more different I felt and the more isolating it became. 

As a defensive maneuver, I retreated into myself and in doing so I initiated a pattern of hiding. Of hiding me, not from myself, but from everyone else.

It’s a pattern that still haunts me today, even as I’m struggling to be a writer and it’s a pattern that I now recognize is holding me back.

Which is why I’d like to ask:

What patterns or fears might be holding you back from achieving your dreams?

 

Making room for the muse

A few weeks back I wrote a post on how I find time to write. Making time for your art is critically important — if you never sit down to write then at the end of the day you’ll have written nothing. The rules of art are simple like that. But there’s a second half to the story that isn’t as obvious and doesn’t get talked about as much: you need to find time to write, but you also need to make room for the muse.

This is an idea I first stumbled across when I was reading Danielle LaPorte’s book, The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms. In Session 10, “Make stuff that feels good to make”, she writes:

“Muses simply must be adored. They’re as grandiose as they are generous. They like to be respected. If you meet them halfway, they’ll give you the moon, the breakthrough concept, the stroke of genius. Dis your muse and she’s likely to stop dropping by. She righteous. She likes to be appreciated. Genius is like that.”

And I’d never thought about it that way, but immediately the idea struck me as so, so true.

Finding time is only half the battle

Don’t get me wrong — finding the time to write is a mission-critical priority. But it’s still only half the battle.

You have to show up at you computer, at your desk. You have to do it often (preferably every day). You have to do it habitually (preferably at the same time every day).

You have to do it. Period.

But the thing that happens when you start to show up is that you realize you get stuck. You show up and sit down and writer’s block creeps in and suddenly you don’t have any ideas to write about. And that can be endlessly frustrating, especially if you are like most writers and your writing time is pretty limited (maybe you, like me, still work a day job).

But here’s the thing, inspiration always strikes. Maybe she waits an hour, a day, a month, a year.

The only thing I know for sure is that she’ll always be back. Someday. Eventually.

And the question I’d like you to ask is this: what can you do to invite the muse into your life?

I think Danielle LaPorte’s point is the first step.

You have to honor inspiration when she shows up.

Inspiration isn’t always convenient. In fact, I’ll make that a stronger statement: inspiration is almost always inconvenient.

She shows up on the bus when you’re squashed in next to a stranger and can hardly fish your pen out of your pocket. She shows up at work when you’re busy and trying to focus on something else. She shows up when you’re still awake at midnight and counting off the minutes between you and 5:30 am when your alarm goes off and you’re supposed to get out of bed to write. She shows up in the shower. She shows up on your walk home from work when it’s so cold out you risk losing your fingers if you stop to make a note.

She shows up in the quiet moments when you’ve forgotten you’ve waiting, watching for her. The muse is fickle like that.

So first and most importantly, honor the muse when she shows up. Pull out your pen, risk the possibility for frostbite, make a note — do whatever you need to do to make sure that brilliant idea isn’t lost to the fleeting whims of thought. I like Evernote and Google Docs. Anne Lamott likes index cards. From her classic book, Bird by Bird:

“Whenever I am leaving the house without my purse—in which there are actual note pads, let alone index cards—I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple of words to remind me of it.”

I’ve been trying this out for a few weeks now — honoring the muse when and how she shows up.

I’ve drafted essays clutching my phone clumsily on the bus. I’ve furiously scribbled poetry over lunch. I’ve grudgingly turned the light back on at 12 AM and gotten back up to write.

And if I have anything to say on the matter at this point it’s this:

Something kind of magical is happening.

I’m writing more. I’m writing better. I’m taking advantage of inspiration when and where it shows up and the ripples of those moments are creeping out into the rest of my regular practice. I write more, more easily, and my work feels more inspired.

I started by trying to schedule writing like a job. Up at 5:30 for writing. Out of bed by 6:45 for work. And then just work, work, work until I was home again and too tired to feel much like writing. And that works — kind of. It works better than trying to schedule my writing time for after work when I’m tired and distractible.

But by honoring the muse, I’ve changed the rhythm of my writing practice. Instead of writing for an hour every day it’s more like I’m always writing. I’m writing in the back of my head, waiting for that magical connection between disparate things that will spark my next great thought.

 

I’d love to hear your thoughts! How do you make room for the muse in your life?

What’s worked for you in growing your creative practice (writing or otherwise)? What have you tried that hasn’t worked? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. 🙂

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.

How to turn an idea into a story

Story is something I struggle with as a writer. By nature I’m a poet rather than a story writer. I enjoy painting with words more than I like telling stories. And I have a hard time turning my creative ideas into stories. For poetry this isn’t necessary — a poem captures a moment, a thought, a feeling. A poem doesn’t have to be a whole story.

In practice, I find that for anything longer than a poem you can’t just have an idea. You really need a story and a character if you are to have a hope of making it all the way through to the end.

Your idea is just an idea, and isn’t a story (at least not yet)

I don’t know about you, but my ideas almost always start off as just little fragments of thought. Maybe I’ll stumble upon a great opening line, an intangible sort of feeling-thing, or an image that fascinates — but I never have a whole story plop down into my brain as if sent from the universe (or at least very, very rarely).

So it’s important that, as a writer, I learn how to fan the flames of these creative embers and turn your ideas into stories.

And, as far as I can see, there are really only two ways to do this: you can write like a “plotter” or a “pantser”. By which I mean you can sit down and think your idea through until you find the story in it, or you can just start writing by the seat of your pants — putting that little ember down on paper and hoping that it catches fire.

I’ve tried both, and they both work — but I think there are important advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.

Pantsing: It works better with ideas for beginnings

If you’re interested in just starting and seeing where you’ll end up, it helps to know where to start. What I mean is the seat-of-your-pants approach works best with ideas that are already interesting opening lines.

If you’ve got a good place to start then diving in may be a perfectly awesome thing to do. Yes, at some point your momentum will run out (probably within the hour if you’re me), but why not charge ahead while the brilliance of the idea is still gathered close around you? Write down as much as you can, as soon as you can. See where the pen takes you. If you don’t like where you end up, you can always go back and re-work things later.

Which is all well and good, but probably only 10% of my ideas come to me as fascinating opening lines.

So what do you do when you don’t have a clear notion of how your story starts?

Plotting: For when you really haven’t the foggiest

If you don’t know where to start then I don’t really recommend pantsing it. You could, but in my experience where you’ll end up is with a quagmire of vague descriptions and unresolved details that will require massive revision at some future date.

So instead, why not do yourself a favor and set things up for success by giving a bit of thought to turning your idea into a proper story?

Let’s consider an example

Recently I had an idea that came to me as an image: unusually colored eyes under a niqab-like veil. Now clearly that’s not a story. It’s really not even a scene. It’s basically nothing.

I could have taken the pantsing approach and written my vision down as a first line: “The first thing I noticed were her eyes….” or “I watch how his brow creases as he meets my gaze and I turn away — I hate they way they always stare whenever they catch sight of my eyes”.

But you can see the problem already, can’t you? These opening lines are crummy.

For one thing, I’ve not said anything about what makes the character’s eyes weird, for another we’ve got not setting, no scene. Instead we’re floating adrift with no purpose and no reason why the reader should care.

Pantsing isn’t really going to cut it with this one. Maybe I’d get to something resembling a decent story eventually, but not before generating tens of pages of useless floundering that would later need to be re-written — and I don’t have that kind of time to waste in my writing life. I’m guessing you don’t either.

So here’s what to do instead.

Plotting: Using interrogation to turn your idea into a story

Here’s an approximation of my thought process for this eyes-under-a-veil idea I’ve been chewing on the past few days:

  • What if it’s not just women who wear the veil, what if it’s everyone?
  • What if they’re worn all the time, even in the home?
  • If all you ever saw of people were there eyes what would be different about their culture?
    • I posit: you’d have 1000 words to describe the color, shape, and texture of eyes & eyebrows
    • And maybe: you’d have an elaborate verbal/gestural etiquette to make up for lack of visual cues
  • How would you be able to tell people apart? Maybe you wouldn’t? (But it seems like differentiation would be necessary for a functioning society)
    • Maybe your veil would be unique, an emphasis on different colors or different fabrics by which people could recognize you
    • What if you wore your life story embroidered on your veil?

Now we’ve found something interesting

What if there was a society in which everyone was covered head to toe by a veil, but their life stories were painted upon them for all the world to see? What if you embroidered your own veil as part of a coming-of-age ceremony? What if part of what you embroidered was your name?

It’s an intriguing idea. But you’ll no doubt agree it’s still not a story. For one thing I haven’t invented any characters yet, and you really can’t have a story without at least one character.

With the world is better-defined, we can start to see what kind of stories are a good fit

For example, what if the character was transgendered? First, we’d need to answer how gender plays out in a society in which everyone is always veiled — but assuming a gendered society, what if as a teenager/young adult you made your veil in secret, beginning the task of telling your life story in color and thread? What if you were transgendered and made your veil for the gender you identified with, not the gender you were assigned at birth? What would happen when you revealed your veil at your coming of age ceremony? How terrified would you feel?

That could be an interesting story with a scared and vulnerable and very human character at the center of it. There’s obviously a lot more detail that would need to be fleshed out, but at this point I think you could start writing, but I think at  this point we’re getting close. Most of the rest of the details could be made up or figured out as I go along.

As much as I like pantsing it, I think it’s important to start with a story — and not just with an idea.

Now I’d love to hear from you — turning ideas into stories is something I’m still figuring out for myself, so if you’ve got any tips or tricks I’d love it if you’d let me know in the comments!

How do you turn your ideas into stories?