Structuring Your Story

Now that you've spent some time thinking about your life and which experiences are important and would be part of the life story you'd like to tell, let's think about the best ways to put that story together. The first step is to take either a bunch of post-it notes or a piece of colored paper and write, chronologically, step by step, how your life and its important events happened. So my high school narrative, for example, would look like this:

* Parents emigrated from Germany to US
* I'm born two years after they immigrate
* My brother's born two years after me, which pisses me off for ten years.
* We move out of student housing into our own house
* We get a cat
* I get teased a lot in school.
* I have some amazing teachers.
* We see my grandparents and friends from Germany almost every year
* In high school I am very depressed.
* My friends sometimes turn on me for reasons I don't understand
* Sometimes I get bullied.
* Sometimes I help them bully other people, so that they won't pick on me. I feel like a coward, but at least they're not all picking on me.
* I throw myself into work so I don't need to think about friends.
* Sometimes I can't even motivate to do my work and then I think even the teachers don't respect me.
*I fight a lot with my mom
* Sometimes my cat is the only one I trust. Although most of the time I also trust my dad.
* I can't wait for college, because it has to be better than this.
* I play sports because everyone does, but I'm not very good at them. In 11th grade everyone else makes varsity volleyball except me, who's still on JV.
* In the summer after 11th grade I meet a bunch of kids from another high school. They are funny, kind of crazy, creative, exactly the kind of people I want to hang around with, and best of all they want to hang out with me, too!
* Senior year I mostly ditch my old friends, even though I still see them every day. But I don't really care much about them now, and I spend most of my weekends with the new friends. They accept me as I am.

So this is my narrative, point by point, in the order that it happened. Each separate point would be on a separate post-it note, or if I'd written on colored paper I'd cut between each point.

Why do this? Because the order that it happened isn't necessarily the best order for a story - a lot of movies start in the middle and make you figure out what happened before; Alice Sebold's brilliant book The Lovely Bones starts with the main character's murder and goes backward from there. So structure is something you can and should control.

Exchange your cut-up pile of events or your collected post-it notes with someone else you trust, someone you've worked with before. Each of you should try to assemble the other person's story in an interesting way, one that isn't the same as just chronological as it happened. When you're done, go over them with each other, make comments, discuss, give feedback, explain.