How to Manufacture Unique and Gripping Stories From an Incredibly Boring Life
Storytelling techniques to spin straw into gold
- “It was so funny…”
- “You won’t believe what Lowri did today…”
- “I’m so annoyed right now…”
When I ask my wife “how was your day?” it’s like she can conjure up a Gillian Flynn thriller on the spot. She’ll say something that gets me instantly hooked.
I’m not a naturally gifted storyteller. I’m shy and introverted, so if you and I hung out in person, it’s likely I’d struggle to tell a story. Writing is my thing, and to grow as a writer I’ve had to teach myself how to build and structure stories. The good news is, there are plenty of techniques that are simple to learn but aren’t often talked about.
Learning how to tell stories is a lifetime’s work, and a journey I’m still walking. In this article I want to share some simple — but less commonly shared — techniques to start mining your life for the gold, to find the stories that lie hidden in your ordinary life.
And your life is full of stories, if only you know how to tell them. As Kelly Eden shared with me recently: “Virginia Woolf wrote about walking to the shop to buy a pencil!”
And Itxy Lopez shared this quote from The Girl in the Tree by Şebnem İşigüze:
“If your heart is beating in your chest, you have a story. Everything you feel, your life, hopes, dreams, and moments of darkness are all your stories.”
I met a writer with no story to tell — and learned the 2 ingredients you need to tell compelling stories
I was recently chatting online with an up-and-coming writer. This writer felt that his life is so boring, he’d never be able to build a following. He said he’s got: “no unique, grand story or super credibility.” He gave a lot of examples. He pointed out that he’s not:
- A former drug user who’s been to jail, like Ayodeji Awosika
- A precocious, high achieving entrepreneur like Sinem Günel
- A seasoned world-traveler like Amardeep Parmar
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, though in my gut I wanted to say “that’s not how it works”. Thankfully, Aaron Nichols was also taking part in this conversation. Aaron replied:
Sorry, but I’m calling bullshit on this!
There are so many people with unique stories and perspectives who started writing and didn’t follow through... Yes, the [writers above have] unique perspectives, but they also just kept posting stuff.
I don’t think unique perspective or a grand story is that important, because all of [us] have experienced human drama in a way that’s interesting to someone else. For example. I don’t know what dating culture is like in India. I don’t know what heartbreak is like in a country with completely different norms. I would love to read about that…
Most of us have experienced the death of someone in our lives. That’s a human pressure point, that’s relatable across all cultures. You don’t have to be some sort of expert on it or a unique person to write about that.
It’s not how unique your life is, it’s how powerful your writing is surrounding your own experiences. It’s how alive your writing is.
In summary, I’m saying that you don’t have to have a grand important story, you have to believe that you have a grand important story, and tell it in a way that is grand and important.
I will die on this hill.
Aaron’s saying there are two elements to great storytelling:
- Digging deep into your life for the human pressure points that are relatable across all cultures.
- Telling your stories in a way that’s engaging.
Ria Tagulinao — who was also in the online chat — then jumped in:
Something a college literature prof said [has] stuck with me (even if I was no writer then). She said that the best writers turn the ordinary into extraordinary. I truly believe that we’ve all got something special in our lives. No matter how “ordinary” you think you are. The challenge of writing is to make connections, to dig deeper, and make something people would otherwise overlook into something compelling. Whatever that something is.
It just takes a crazy level of introspection, the confidence to share your story, and the patience to tell it in the most powerful way possible.
Ria is making the same two points as Aaron about how to tell compelling stories:
- Dig deep into your life, with a “crazy level of introspection”.
- Use your writing magic to spin straw into gold. Turn the ordinary into the extraordinary.
So how can you learn these two skills, of digging deep, and turning the ordinary into the extraordinary, through storytelling?
1. Digging Deep
Your life is full of interesting stories. Here are three techniques to help you find them:
A. Moodling
Brenda Ueland was a writing tutor during the 1930s who had a special gift for helping her students unlock their stories. She found that:
“Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say”
Ueland encouraged her students to take up a process that she called “moodling”. More recently, this has come to be known as freewriting. Here’s how Ueland explains it in her book If You Want to Write:
This is what I want you to do… sit with pencil and paper or before a typewriter quietly putting down what you happen to be thinking.
In other words, you sit down — with a notebook, or at your laptop. And you write whatever is on your mind. You transcribe your thoughts. If no thoughts come, you sit and wait, until thoughts arise, then you write them down.
Ueland advised doing this process for an hour or longer. That sounds like heaven to me. I aim for 11-minutes of freewriting per day, which I find is plenty for mining my memories and inner life for ideas and stories.
It’s sometimes helpful to have a prompt for a freewriting session — a word or phrase around which to structure your thoughts. That’s where the next two techniques comes in.
B. Write Lists
Julia Cameron is another midwife of the creative spirit. In The Right to Write, Cameron gives a process for finding clues as to what you should write about. This starts with making lists.
As examples of lists to create, Cameron suggests writing lists of things:
- You are proud of
- You love
- You have a particular feeling about
Write a list of 50 items for each of these, and you’ll have 150 entry points into stories to tell. Each item on your list can be a prompt for a freewriting session.
C. The Disney Song Method
Every Disney song tells a story, and that’s why they make ideal prompts for digging up the story gold from your own life.
You can take any Disney song and use it to reflect on a similar time in your own life.
You might think about a time when:
- You were carefree and had no worries (Hakuna Matata, The Lion King)
- You got in touch with your past to rediscover your true identity (We Know the Way, Moana)
- You were enraptured by the dream of escaping to another world (Part of Your World, The Little Mermaid)
- You broke free from psychological chains (Let it Go, Frozen)
- The whole world became full of magic and light (I See the Light, Tangled)
Disney songs follow powerful story archetypes, so you’ll be digging into the areas of your life that are ripe for storytelling.
2. Make Your Stories Grand and Important
Once you’ve got the stories, a big part of what makes them interesting is how you construct them. Here are three techniques to help with that:
A. Lean into the tension
In our daily lives, our instinct as humans is to minimize tension and drama. We do this to preserve relationships, smooth over conflict and get along with the people around us. We don’t like living in the middle of conflict — it arouses stress hormones.
A key mistake I see many writers make — and I do this frequently in my own early drafts— is to resolve conflict too quickly. As a writer, it’s your job to build tension and raise the stakes. You want to keep your reader emotionally engaged, and wondering what happens next.
There are lots of ways to build tension. A good place to start is learning to use open loops in your writing.
B. Build drama with open loops
To create an open loop, tell part of your story, and start to build up the tension. Then, stop! Don’t finish the story.
There, you’ve created an open loop. When you do this, you establish a curiosity gap. Readers will want to keep reading to find out what happens next.
This gives you a chance to switch things up — you can introduce another story thread, share some backstory, or step back and write reflectively.
You’ll have seen open loops on TV. With many shows, at the end of each episode, there’s a cliffhanger, so you want to watch the next episode. Some cliffhangers are obvious — like characters literally hanging off cliffs. These days, most cliffhangers are more subtle. Next time you’re watching TV, look out for all the information gaps that keep the story moving forward. These are open loops.
What’s important with open loops is that you close them too. That’s the payoff for your reader continuing with your story.
C. Paint an atmosphere
When you create a world that people can feel, smell, see or touch, they’ll feel more immersed and invested in your story.
As you tell stories from your life, think about the small details. What was the weather like? Was there music playing? Bread baking? The sound of a car engine humming?
All it takes is a few subtle details to give readers something sensory to connect with. This pulls them into the atmosphere of your story.
Your Life is Full of Stories — Go Tell Them
Every day is full of moments of tension and drama. Once you know how to turn these into stories, you’ll never run out of material for writing.
So go on, dig deep into your life for stories, then tell them in a way that engages your readers. You’ll never look back.