When people learn that I have facilitated life writers' groups and edited life stories for authors, they often tell me they have great stories and ask me if I would write their stories for them. In my younger years, when I believed I would live a lifetime that would last into eternity, I consented to the hours of painstaking listening required to glean from the client those hundreds of tiny sensory details that make a story rich and real, and I spent unpaid months putting the story together in a way that fulfilled the client's expectations.
You already have at least one, and maybe dozens of great unwritten stories waiting their turn to adorn the pages of a book. In this context, you know that the abstract adjective great that appears in the title means that your life events and experiences are interesting, unique, and even unbelievable, and you know that everyone else would agree with you, if you could only write your stories down.
It's the second use of the word great in the title that I want to address in this post. "Write a great story" implies a finished written piece that meets not only the expectations of your inner critic but the high standard of quality literature that a book publisher or magazine editor would demand before consenting to publish it. And, of course, you have to give your readers a great read! That concept has choked my recent writing attempts and made me wonder if fear of failure to reach my expectations is the main culprit that spawns the dreaded writer's block in other writers, too.
This morning I started again to write down my great story of my years as a singer with a band on the road. It will accompany my collection of already-published-and-deemed-worthy humorous stories of my life (on that same road) with my husband. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't meet my expectations for writing this story in a great way.
You see, I care about the final written version of this story, in the same way I cared about becoming a great nightclub singer. That had been my dream ever since 5th grade when I saw the movie, Pete Kelly's Blues in Dover, Delaware, when I watched Peggy Lee bulging out of her slinky black dress, leaning against the piano in an inebriated glaze-eyed swoon, singing the blues, or rather, slurring the blues. I wanted to be a singer like her.
I was already 28 years old when I finally won the audition to sing with a working lounge trio in Akron, Ohio. I had three weeks to not only learn 28 songs, but to completely change from my operatic style of singing in my lyric soprano head voice to a pop style of singing in my chest voice. I'd never sung in that voice before, but the leader of the band (who later became my husband) had helped two other operatic females morph into pop singers and knew he could teach me, too.
In the first two weeks, my chest voice sounded thin and weak and truthfully terrible. I couldn't hit high notes without going into my operatic head voice, and in those years of pop music, that was unacceptable. I was certain I would fail in achieving the end result of ever being a great singer. After all, I already knew what great female pop singers sounded like: Diana Ross, Dolly Parton, Karen Carpenter, Barbra Streisand, and Olivia Newton-John.
In hindsight, in those early beginnings of my music career, what I didn't and couldn't know--and this is key to our discussion of writing a great story--was how I would sound as a great singer. I could not then know the meaning of the word great as it pertained to my vocal abilities yet to be developed. My inner critic was incapable of judging my potential and my performance, because it didn't have a defined standard for me. I had to stop criticizing myself and crying (!) before I could embark on the learner's journey of finding my voice.
By now, you've probably guessed where this discussion is going. I called my creative partner Terry this morning and told her about my failed attempts to write. She told me she was having the same doubts and fears about her ability to get her stories written. She said that I was shutting down my creative process by my stubborn insistence of being critic and editor before I could write down the first sentence.
Her solution was simple. We both have to let go of our preconceived expectations and outcomes. Specifically, I must take off the editing, critic, and English teacher hats and simply write the images, feelings, and sensory descriptions within the events--like Julia Cameron's "morning pages," like the way I tell other writers to write, like the way my song lyrics pour out all over the page before I know their rhythms and melodies. As always, I will write with pen on paper. Terry writes with a pencil because she loves the smell of lead dust. Writing by hand forces my thinking to slow down and breathe.
When fear of failure prevails, letting go of control is counter-intuitive but necessary if we're going to be writers. This word great, as in "writing a great story," must remain an abstract word, always reminding me that I won't have a vision of a final outcome or meaning for that word, ever. There is a point in the process when I will my put on my organizer/assembler's hat and try to make sense out of those scribbled words, but the initial flow-out has to be unfettered by judgment.
I don't know what the final story will look like, and that's okay. It will have its own rhythm and style, its own expression, its own arrangement of words on the page, its own voice. The process and the outcome will surprise me. They always do!
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