Tag: everyday stories

10 Tips on finding stories in everyday life

Neera

For the last two weeks, I have been talking about everyday stories. Here are my tips on finding stories in your daily lives.

1. Become a collector of stories. You will not only find enjoyment every time you read them but also will learn how to write them. Stories are all around you, in newspapers, magazines, books, TV, internet. Austin Kleon wittily points out that you might be able to write a popular brain book with them.

“Here is a recipe for writing a hit popular brain book. You start each chapter with a pet anecdote about an individual’s professional or entrepreneurial success, or a narrow escape from peril. You then mine the neuroscientific research for an apparently relevant specific result and narrate the experiment, perhaps interviewing the scientist involved and describing his hair. You then climax in a fit of premature extrapolation, inferring from the scientific result a calming bromide about what it is to function optimally as a modern human being. Voilà, a laboratory-sanctioned Big Idea in digestible narrative form. This is what psychologist Christopher Chabris has named the “story-study-lesson” model, perhaps first perfected by Malcolm Gladwell. A series of these threesomes may be packaged into a book, and then resold again and again as a stand-up act on the wonderfully lucrative corporate lecture circuit.”

2. Learn to observe like Martha Sweeny or Jean Georges in my earlier posts: A story that will touch your heart and Evoke the senses with your writing. Both stories are about life’s little moments captured by writers’ keen observations.

3. Talk to people. In shops, at community places, in libraries, or wherever you can find them. Ask specific questions and you will find they are more than willing to tell their stories.

4. Go looking for them, like the one below, which I wrote about once walking through the woods.

“At about two-thirds of the hill, I had a perfect view of the dried Lake George, now covered with brown grass. The tall windmills on the surrounding hills stood as sentries as if guarding the lake’s treasure now that it was bare.  The slop at the back of the hill, from where I was standing, was covered with trees and broken branches. It was new terrain, quite unfamiliar.

The path I was following was covered by yellow leaves shed by nearby trees. A butterfly came and sat on my cheek. I jerked, and it flew away. I should have stood still and felt the touch of its tiny legs. Moments later, a tiny lizard blocked my way. This time, I stood still. It stood there for a moment, looking at me. I held my breath and waited. This was her domain. I was an intruder. I had no right to be there uninvited. She moved her head at an angle, had a final look, and then disappeared under a nearby log. I took it as a sign of acceptance. From that point on, I felt I was part of the landscape, as much as that tiny lizard was.” 

5. Use triggers to access stories in your memory bank. Like the story, my father’s hands triggered.

6. Look for a change in your life—wherever there was a change, there is a story waiting to be told.

7. Interview interesting people. A blogger made a very interesting blog by interviewing women she met in her local shopping center.

8. Talk to old people, they are walking repositories of stories.

A grandchild playing with his nana pointed at her wrinkles and said, ‘They are ugly.’ Nana laughed and said, “Oh no! Each one has a story.” The child hesitated and then shyly pointed at one of them. ‘Tell me about that one.’

9.  Listen to TED talks, subscribe to sites, and read about men and women who inspire you.

“Michelle Obama, a symbol for women, has successfully balanced the needs of her family and herself. Sky-high popularity, comfortable in her skin, now struggling against, not caved into the nation’s expectations. Smart as Eleanor Roosevelt, glamorous as Jacqueline Kennedy and devoted as Nancy Reagan, with pitch-perfect fashion sense, genuine smile, and fierce intelligence, not striving for perfection but by embracing her own authenticity. Every bit of her is saying, I am going to try to be honest, hopefully, funny and open, and share important parts of me with people.“

10. Research them. Every achievement, every invention, and every successful event has a story behind them.

Why simple words are the best?

Neera

Everyday stories should be written in the simple everyday language that we all use. As Philip Berry Osborne puts it:

“Among most writers, there’s a natural tendency to get too exquisite and ornamental in their prose. Such writers spend all their time trying to pound the pig iron of language into the bright toys and gleaming blades of literature. They ignore the fact that the best stories deal with the small corners and verities of life—and you don’t need fancy words for that.”

Think more in terms of creating a small, delicate watercolor, rather than a giant oil painting.

You want sentiments that stop short of sentimentality—simple words and simple construction for what should basically be a simple theme.

You want the reader to taste, touch, smell, and feel the very experience you’re sharing.”

Ernest Hemingway, once replying to criticism by William Faulkner that his word choice was limited, wrote,:

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

Everyday Stories

Neera

In the last few posts, I have been sharing everyday stories with you. Ordinary stories from ordinary lives.

Yet they are compelling and stay with us forever.

Some of the best writing—the kind that the readers readily identify with—comes out of all the little happenings in our daily lives.

How little snippets from our daily lives get stored in our memories, percolate there, and then turn into stories, have fascinated me.

A few weeks ago, when I sat down to write my father’s eulogy, the first thing that came to my mind was his hands.

My father had big, soft, and caring hands. The kind of hands a father should have. I started writing about them and out came to a story that I didn’t know existed in my memory vaults.

When I was a little girl, on one hot summer day while playing in a park, I got thirsty. My father led me to a water tap where I tried to drink water with my hand. My tiny hands couldn’t hold much water. Watching me struggle, he cupped his hands, filled them with water, and let me drink from it. My thirst was quenched with just one handful.

Out of millions of such snippets, I was surprised that this one surfaced.

I wondered why. Why didn’t I recall so many other things we did together? Why was nostalgia didn’t take me to the jokes he cracked or the poetry he recited?

Following that, another snippet of memory surfaced. This time he was putting five-years-old-me to sleep by patting my forehead.

Then another one. A photo from my wedding day. He had his hand over my head in the form of a blessing.

It made sense. My father was the symbolic protective hand over me all my life.

But that was not the reason for these memories to come flooding on the morning of his cremation.

It was because he held my hand briefly when he took his last breath, as if reassuring me one last time that everything was fine. He was fine. I will be fine.

The memory of his touch conjured other similar memories.

That is perhaps how everyday stories are formed. One memory recalls another one until they all get interconnected.

Stories are all around us. The trick is developing an active curiosity about them – the way a child does.

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”- Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginning.

Better than anything else, that probably summarizes what these personal stories are all about and what they tell us about the diversity and story worthiness of ordinary people.

They speak to our sense of closeness.

Columnist George Will once put it so succinctly:

“It is extraordinary how extraordinary an ordinary person is.”

And even more extraordinary is the number of stories they’re carrying around—waiting to be written.