Finding your lens through story

Better Said Than Done StorytellerStorytelling is about finding your lens: figuring out how your way of looking at the world is unique. And while this may seem obvious, it is a tremendously challenging and time-consuming process! Finding your lens can be elusive, because it is really hard to know how your way of looking at the world is unique – after all, it is how you understand and experience the world!!! It is hard to hear yourself as others hear you – but have you ever felt yourself being utterly transported into someone else world when they tell you a story that is so richly infused with their ways of understanding? It is intoxicating, and this is one of the main reasons why I find storytelling to be so valuable.

“But this is just a funny story that I like to tell!”
When we first choose something to take the stage to tell, it is difficult to see that this series of events might “mean” anything or “say anything important.” After all, you experienced this as a series of “things that happened.” And I know that when I first started telling a few years ago, the first couple stories that suggested themselves to me to tell were of the genre “and this happened, and then this happened, and then this.” When pushed to say what the story was really about, I would say something like, “well, I have a lot of crazy things happen to me!” That was how it felt!

My earliest stories:

The Paris Story
(recently told on May 2014, first written in June 2010, according to my computer – wow, that seems like a long time ago!!)
Harry Ball (told March 2012)

These are both a bit zany and madcap, and it took a great deal of time and thinking and writing and feedback to sort through it all, but I did come to realize that there was a reason that I liked to tell these particular series of events. First of all, they didn’t just happen to me, they changed me in the process, they made me who I am changed the way that I understand the world in some small way – and there’s a tiny clue!!! Something called my attention about these crazy series of events that made me twenty years later – there is another one!! So, WHY? What is it about them? Well, in my case they I appreciate particular kinds of silliness or odd scenes in ways that say something about me. Then, once you have done some of the work of figuring out something about what this story means, you can also know a bit more about what this story does, and then you are in a much better position to know how to better craft the story.

Every story does something!
Some people say that every story should teach the audience something. And that is not a bad idea, but I think that first and foremost, a story should teach us something about what it looks like to see the world through your eyes. SHOW us something about what it means to be you.

Some ways to begin:

Who is your audience?
Maybe you want to start by thinking about the context in which you are going to be telling the story. What are members of your audience likely to value? What do they not know about you that they will need to in order to better understand your story?

Infuse some of your culture into the story.
My training in cross-cultural communication teaches me to pay attention to any interaction as a cross-cultural encounter. Where you grew up and how you grew up are both aspects of your culture that have likely shaped how you understand the world and they might be necessary in helping us fully appreciate you.

Get some feedback.
I like to have one or two story ideas kicking around in my head that I can trot out when I am chatting with people, like at a dinner party “has something like this ever happened to you?” “how would you have reacted in this situation?” their feedback on your take and on your reaction can help you understand something about your lens.

Coming back to thinking about my early stories now (Harry Ball and the Paris story), I can see that they do mean something, because they say something about me. And crazy things do happen to me, but they are crazy because that is how I understand and experience them. Someone else may not have even noticed, much less remembered these events, and certainly, they would not have storied them the way that I do. They mean something because they happened to me, and in revisiting them now, all these years later, I can appreciate just a little bit more!

What are the story ideas that are kicking around in your head right now? Jot a few of them down on paper and see if you can’t start getting some distance from them and perspective on them. And then find a place to share!!

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Anna’s next storytelling show is right here in Fairfax, VA, on the Better Said Than Done storytelling stage! Get details for the next storytelling show here.

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Anna Marie Trester has been telling stories with Better Said Than Done since 2012. Her storytelling is informed by more than ten years as an improviser, and by her professional identity as a sociolinguist. All of these interests come together in thinking about performing professional identity and the power of story in career contexts. She tweets @CareerLinguist and blogs at WaLK (What a Linguist Knows), which may be found at www.careerlinguist.com/blog. If you would like to read more about her approach to storytelling, check out www.thelanguageofstorytelling.com.

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