Five simple reasons to write your life stories.
1. Organize Our Thoughts
The thing about writing life stories is how we can take the time in telling. No one rushing our narratives. And when you’re not rushed, you’ll organize stories differently. Tie up loose ends. You can tell a story in context, fill in details, use accuracy and a plot in your story will emerge, become more clear.
Writing turns the unassembled story running loose in our head into a tamed, developed story in text.
2. Prompt Our Memory
When you witness or experience a set of circumstances then arrange the details in some sort of story form, your memory connects the details to another story. It’s like pulling up a trotline. It prompts your memory to think along theme lines such as location, items, people and events.
3. Sort Emotions
Writing gives us time to gain emotional clarity as we arrange and think through the content of our story. And people understand us better because we understand ourselves. Very often we have more than one emotion tied up in a story.
I experienced a few emotions during a drive through the Apache National Forest and Mogollon Rim. I was surprised and awed by the massive eight thousand foot sandstone and limestone cliffs. We stopped and took a walk for photos. A paved path wound us around the cliffs. But then the wind began to howl. We’d recently driven in a sand storm that ripped a mirror from our car. I could hear the wind move sand across the cliffs above our heads. And I began to be afraid.
4. Earn Perspective of Conflict
Because we ponder over and arrange the sequence of a story, we get a better look at the struggle or conflict in our story. When we breeze over difficult problems and situations by simply saying we’re grateful, we miss an opportunity to write the fuller story.
5. Lead Others to Understand Us
Telling a story is better than saying something about yourself. What’s best? Saying – I love chocolate or telling a story about where you’d be willing to go to find the best chocolate.
On a search to find which chocolate turtles I favored, I turtle-tasted at three stores in our city. The most expensive chocolatier deviated from the original ingredients to make theirs more special and turned out not to be the chocolate turtle I was looking for.
Photo by Bart Zimny on Unsplash