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Football = Conflict, #365StrongStories 16
When you're committed to writing a story a day but mothering and football occupy the day, you're in luck.
Conflict makes a story and football is nothing but conflict. (So is motherhood, but that story takes more nuance to tell).
So, the story of the day is simple: football.
And, the good news is, this conflict had a happy ending.
That's One Sick Story, #365StrongStories 15
The flu’s plot line is straight from the storytelling textbook. (Note: not all stories that fit the form are inherently interesting. That's your job.)
The mundane world (health) is jeopardized. The hero must quest for the remedy (chicken soup, time, drugs). A mentor is consulted (mom, healer, doctor). Either order is restored or catastrophe strikes.
If you’re writing a comedy, be sure to describe the fever dreams, the crazy clerk at the pharmacy, and the sheet volume of tissues and Friends reruns.
If this is a tragedy, you must explore “I never thought this could happen to us,” and perhaps sum it all up with a meditation on the flu vaccine, the limits of modern medicine, and God’s will or the complete absence of the divine.
But, when you’re in the midst of it - or, in my case, holding a two-year-old whose new mantra is “No fun. Tummy hurts” - there’s no comedy yet and you wouldn’t even entertain a tearjerker ending.
One of the toughest truths of writing about real life events: you can’t tell a satisfying story until the major conflict is resolved or the hero realizes something new.
And it’s damn hard to write much of anything when you’ve got a thermometer sticking out of your mouth or you're trying to stick one into a squirming toddler.
A Modern Entrepreneurial Hero's Journey, #365StrongStories 14
Last fall, I wrote my way to the edges of my own mastery when I realized I couldn’t confidently complete the sentence “a good story is…”
As a lover of both fiction and creative non-fiction, this was disconcerting. For a writing coach, this was terrifying.
For months, I turned inward.
I was writing more than ever, but I wasn’t producing many full sentences. There were lists and notes and lots of arrows slicing across the page.
This was the stuff of discovery, not publication. And yet, something magical was happening.
The hero's quest is realized when she brings home the healing elixir to serve the greater good. And so, it was my mission to understand and then teach what makes a strong story.
First, I had to understand why I cared so much. Only then would I know how to help anyone else understand why stories and storytelling matter.
Stories are how we understand the world.
Stories are how we transmit ideas.
Stories are the building blocks of consciousness.
In compelling stories of growth and transformation, the hero may be may start the story as an innocent, but she is not without skills. (Rey flew the Millennium Falcon, didn’t she?) Instead, the journey is an awakening of latent powers and wisdom.
That’s what this journey into “what makes a strong story?” was for me - a chance to realize that I’d been a storyteller all along.
Ultimately, what I gained, in addition to confidence, was the ability to be a guide. And so, as I did what all modern entrepreneurial heroes do: I created an ebook.
(Do I see the irony that my heroes are Jedis and my great quest involves a subscription to LeadPages. Yes, but that’s a whole other story).
I wrote this guide for you, dear reader, and I would like you to read it. I want you to read it because I know you're a storyteller too (even if you haven't discovered your powers yet) and because I want you to tell your own Strong Stories too.
After the Fire and Fight, #365StrongStories 13
She still had the scars on her hands. The sensation in her fingertips would never be what it was. That was alright. She wanted to remember. She still burned with shame for what she’d done to set that fire. Even worse, she mourned that she’d fed the flames and brought the whole place down.
If only they’d understood what she was really trying to do. Yes, it was destructive and foolish and horrifically self-righteous. But she could see the future laid before them. Why was it that no one else was driven mad by the thought that they’d committed to living a life in the shadows?
Yes, she had burned downed the barn. Truly, she had done it because everyone needed a chance to see the moon.
But she’d given up all radical action. She was a mother now, not an arsonist. She had her own home now - but she’d never have a barn. And she had taught her children that it was perfectly alright to interrupt dinner and run to the window if someone spotted a waxing crescent in the wide evening sky.
Trading fire and fight for endurance and patience had been exactly what she needed to do. It was her penance and it was her obligation to the passage of time. And yet, her daughters would always wonder why the moon made their mother smile but she left any room that danced with candle flame.
How to #KissAGinger, #365StrongStories 12
A couch in a basement.
Two couples. (Well, “couples” feels like a particularly weighty word since all four were seventh graders).
And two pieces of licorice.
It was the gross shoelace kind of licorice that you only eat because there’s no chocolate around. It’s the kind of “food” wise people avoid.
I was not wise. I was twelve. And I would take any pathway available to get to my first kiss - even a long red strand of gummy sugar.
Enough with childhood. Enough with the wondering about what it would be like. Enough with the fear that no one would ever pick me.
Mission accomplished. And the next day I called the kid’s best friend to deliver the “can you tell him I don’t want to go out with him anymore?” news. (Because that is what you did when you were twelve in 1991).
Did I mention that the whole reason we found ourselves on this basement couch was because we both had red hair? Apparently, “making a cute couple” was more important than actually liking a person. Granted, being freed of the the terror that I would die without being kissed was even more important than our friends’ idea of “cute.”
It’s #KissAGinger day, so I salute the young man on the other end of that strand of licorice. I do hope that the next ginger you kissed gave you a better time.
As Jonathan Swift wrote in In Gulliver's Travels:
It is observed that the red-haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom yet they much exceed in strength and activity.
Indeed. But you have to get me tipsy before I’ll tell you the story of what it’s like when gingers meet over pints in Dublin, not candy on Cape Cod!