Tell Me a Story

I teach a class on memoir. It’s one of my favorite writing classes to teach. People unwrap these amazing events from their lives and share them, sometimes for the first time. The guts of the stories--the drama and epiphanies and emotional impact--are already there. My job is just to help give them form, and shape them into stories.

The basic structure of stories is almost universal. It crosses all cultures, and appears in storytelling of every kind—from books to songs to movies to epic poems. In its simplest form, it goes like this:

• Someone has a desire or a need

• There are obstacles that keep them from satisfying that need

• They are forced to make choices and to act as they try to overcome those obstacles

• They either succeed or fail, and as a result, something has changed.

The reason this structure keeps coming up is that it helps us satisfy one of our own deepest longings: the longing for meaning. Stories, by their very nature, take the events of our lives and make them less arbitrary, less random, and less senseless. Perhaps that means that story is just an invention of our minds, meant to paste meaning onto otherwise meaningless churn. Or maybe story is a precious tool to extract the meaning from life that we need, where before it was hidden from us.

I don’t know the answer. All I know is that exploring and telling one’s story often brings people peace and understanding and closure when they need it most.

So what’s your story? How did the crucible of desire and obstacles force you to act, and make you and your world what they are today? Sure, maybe underneath it all, life is just a series of random events. But maybe, just maybe, it’s full of meaning. Maybe we get to choose.