Why we need to tell our stories

Narrative theory is based on the assumption that “narrative is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with fundamental elements of our experience, such as time, process, and change”. (Project Narrative). Simply: we create stories out of life experiences as a way of making sense of what has happened to us.

Breaking this down a little further, Baumeister and Newman  suggest that micronarratives, people’s narrative accounts of single experiences or events, conform to the four needs for meaning;

• purpose – goals and fulfilment;
• value and justification;
• efficacy – autonomy and control;
• self-worth.

In re-telling an experience, in writing out our stories, we become our own heroes.

We need to tell stories of our own experiences. In The Life Story Interview, Robert Atkinson writes, “Storytelling is a fundamental form of human communication.” He continues, we, “bring meaning to our lives through story … When we tell a story from our own life we increase our working knowledge of ourselves because we discover deeper meaning in our lives through the process of reflecting and putting the events, experiences and feelings that we have lived into oral expression.” (Atkinson 1998) Telling one’s story seems to be a way of saying, ‘this is who I am now’. I’m new, I’m better, this is my reformed identity and everything I have been through has a purpose.

The Wounded Storyteller  looks at illness as a ‘call for stories’. (Frank 1995) Arthur Frank writes that, beyond the everyday need to tell your story to friends, family, your doctor,  “Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going. Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations.” Frank breaks illness stories into three types of narrative: the restitution narrative, the chaos narrative and the quest narrative. These three types can be enmeshed in a single person’s story, or one can dominate for a moment of retelling.

• The restitution narrative. This, Frank says, dominates, particularly in those who are recently ill. It’s about wanting to be healthy again. It furthers mortality by rendering the illness transitory. Medicine triumphs.
• The chaos narrative. In this, which imagines life never getting better, the suffering is to great for a self to emerge from the story. There is a loss of structure and this may not even be recognised as a story. “The voice of the teller has been lost as a result of the chaos, and this loss then perpetuates that chaos.”
• The quest narrative. This type of story accepts illness, which then becomes a quest: something is gained through experience. Most published illness stories are quest stories, according to Frank.

There is more to this and I’ll be coming back to this topic. For now, we know that there is something in telling a story, writing it, blogging it, sharing it with a journalist, with the nation, online or in print, that is about the need to be seen, acknowledged. Who am I through your eyes, through the eyes of the world, who am I since I have had this experience, who am I now?

Refs:

1. Baumeister Roy F. and Wilson, Brenda Life Stories and the Four Needs for Meaning Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1996), pp. 322-32
2. Atkinson, Robert The Life Story Interview, (1998, 1^st edn)  London: SAGE
3. Frank, Arthur The Wounded Storyteller, 1995, Chicago Press

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Exploring the transition from experience to story

I struggled to walk during my third pregnancy because my pelvis separated too far, too soon. At the age of 39, I became reliant on a mobility scooter. Pregnancy hormones helped me cope, the nine months during and after the pregnancy where I could only walk a few feet with crutches are a blur. Despite that, I finished a book and won an award for it in the 6 months after K’s birth. And while promoting the book, I told my story. I spoke it, I wrote it, I turned it into a press release, articles, blog posts. And what happened to me ceased to be simply my experience, it became a story, a thing itself, seen on paper, online. I no longer needed to be there for it to exist. In print, replicated, communicated, my story became something else.

This research project examines the transition, the leap, the moment where experience becomes something separate from the person, a story.

Exploring the transition from experience to story is important because we live in an age where our lives are not private in the way that they used to be. There is a compulsion to share, to have our fifteen minutes of fame, or simply to update our status on Facebook. Whether it is writing a blog, or appearing in a tabloid, or self-publishing a book, publication is now accessible in a way it has never been.

People who have life changing experiences feel compelled to share, but rarely understand fully what will happen once they have shared. In sharing, you become vulnerable as you expose key parts of what makes up your life, your story, your self. Once your story is out there, you have limited control over the results.

This study will help increase our understanding of the act of sharing a story in the 21^st century. In particular, it will focus on the moment when the person’s life experience separates from them, of the feeling it has become something else, a fiction, a story.

Through this study I will interview people to explore the transition from experience to story. Beyond that, the approach will be cross-disciplinary, bringing in my experience in creative writing, journalism and healthcare. I will use autoethnography, writing my own ‘experience to story’, and as I interview people I will write an online journal of response to the experiences / stories. I intend to publish all the material on a blog, provoking the feeling of an experience, a verbal description, a retelling, becoming something else.

Every day, hundreds of journalists interview case studies. Thousands of people write and share their own stories on blogs and in memoirs. This study will help the journalists, case studies, bloggers and writers understand more about what they are doing. On a secondary level it may help health and social care professionals advise those who want to share their story.

Authenticity vs Truth in your story

I was talking to a friend about her poetry class the other day. Someone read out a poem, and a lady in the class got upset: she thought that it was about a true experience and was angry when the person who wrote it said that it was fictional.

When you’re writing something based on your own experience, the line between truth and fiction is a fine one. You can choose to base a fictional story on a real life experience or feeling: everything in the story may spun off from a single truth, while you change the characters involved, their setting, their responses … where is the truth in that? The story may be emotionally true and coherent while the facts are totally fictional.

As a reader, can you make assumptions about an author when you read their work? On one level, yes, but it is wrong to assume that everyone is writing ‘life as it happened’. Someone who is explicitly writing a true story may only be giving their own views on what happened: how many different views might you need to find ‘the truth’?

Writing about being a hostage #whatimwriting

I’ve been side-tracked! An idea for a novel bit me while I was in the middle of the final term of the MA. I wrote 25-30,000 words, then finished the first draft last November. This all took me away from working on first person experiences for a while … but now I’m back, although mainly as part of the research for the second draft.

Spinning off the Blindsided work I created last year, the novel addresses sight loss and disability, aid to the third world, and issues of empowerment and control, self and identity. Adam, an ophthalmologist, goes to West Africa thinking he can make a difference, but struggles as he is overwhelmed by the extent of the need for eye care. Mid way through his time in West Africa he is taken hostage … so I’ve been reading ‘hostage literature’ and checking out information from organisations that specialise in the field too.

In this post I list the books I’ve found, and I’ll add thoughts as I read them. If you spot anything relevant that I’ve missed, let me know.

Middle East – Beirut

• Terry Waite, Archbishop’s envoy Taken on Trust

Long, meditative writing where Waite looks back on his past, interspersed with details of the kidnapping.

• John McCarthy, journalist, and Jill Morrell Some Other Rainbow
• Brian Keenan, journalist: An Evil Cradling

Africa – Somali Pirates

• Colin Freeman, journalist: Kidnapped

A well written account, mainly focussed on the day to day life as a hostage, with a  couple of diversions looking at Somali politics, as well as the story of a sea captain also captured by pirates. A good quick read – you can tell it is written by a journalist. Freeman draws out key issues for hostages, looking at Stockholm syndrome, the issue of boredom on one hand while being on edge on the other, the way he began to appreciate it when nothing changed from day to day.

• Judith Tebbutt, on holiday,  A Long Walk Home: One Woman’s Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss – and Survival- and Survival
• Amanda Lindhout A House in the Sky: A Memoir of a Kidnapping That Changed Everything
• Paul and Rachel Chandler, sailers, Hostage: A Year at Gunpoint with Somali Gangsters

 

 

This is what I’m on about! ‘It Happened to Me’

I always read the Guardian’s Experience page. Thousands, maybe millions of people buy real life story magazines each week, and internet publications are filled with first person stories.

But there’s a cost.

There’s a cost to the person who exposes their self to the media, and in this article, Mandy Stadtmiller, a ‘former first-person human trafficker‘ – also known as an online journalist for website xoJane –  talks about how easily it all gets out of control.

Mandy’s conclusion is that first person pieces have helped: “These squirmy, awful, brilliant pieces have encouraged us all to be a lot more honest about the human experience. A lot less afraid to be honest.” My feeling after reading her article is still shaped by some of the experiences she explores, where people have been attacked online, have had to withdraw from the online world altogether after sharing their story. Mandy explained her pitch to people: “I ran into Sonja Morgan from Real Housewives at a party the other day, and she reminded me of what I told her before I profiled her in the New YorkPost. I told her that the headline would likely humiliate her and she would be positioned in a way that was making fun of her, but that it would be terrific, wide-ranging, must-see press. So — was she in? ” This rings of a world where we have becomes so sucked in by the desire to be seen that we will accept being made fun of, accept humiliation, just for the clicks, for the exposure. Thinking about exposure in another context, who wants to be exposed? There’s something out of balance in these real life stories, whether you are hungry for exposure of self, or whether you are the editor, feeding your ravening audience a diet that has to be ever more shocking.

We no longer know what is normal, what is private. ‘It Happened to Me’ stories do play an essential role in helping people process their own experiences, but they also chew people up and spit them out in pieces.

In another piece, I write, as writer, as story teller: “I am hungry: tell me a story. I am never satisfied.” Do you want to be fed to the beast?

Grief, loss and writing for strangers

I was talking to a friend last night, and we moved from real life trauma that seems like it is something out of a movie, to why people write to process grief. Today I came across an article from Kristi DiLallo who runs a site called The Grief Diaries,  which shows that the need to write and create to process feelings of loss and grief is common to many of us. She says, “I started The Grief Diaries because there is no “right” way to lose someone, and grieving through art means there are no rules or restrictions.” In the article for Guernica she details her own journey of loss and grief, and her struggles to communicate an experience that often leaves people feeling that no-one hears what they are saying, no-one wants to listen. She also looks at how it is sometimes easier to share this sort of therapeutic writing and art with strangers.

Workshop: How to Tell Your Story, 10am Saturday 12th September

If you have a story to tell, life experiences to share, but have said, ‘I’m not a writer’, come to this introductory workshop with Antonia Chitty and learn ‘How to tell Your Story’.

Antonia will show you different ways people tell their story, you can try out different exercises to help you put pen to paper, and come away with ideas for different outlets to help you tell your tale.

10am, The Hastings Engine Room, St Leonards-on-Sea. Part of Belles Lettres
and Coastal Currents.

Your life, my life, story

I haven’t worked on this much recently, I’ve been writing a dissertation instead! If you’re looking for some great reading on life stories, a friend sent me this, which is all about how you arrange your life as a narrative.

My dissertation is about writing trauma. Right from when I worked at RNIB and had to carry out focus groups with people taking about sight loss, I have been inviting people to tell me their trauma. Examining this in detail makes me think about how I tell my own story. I think a lot of the time, I don’t. When I told my story as a child it was rejected too often, and in becoming an author I have the perfect excuse to listen rather than tell. I’ll be working on this… My life’s work is my story.

Using real people’s stories in PR

This is adapted from a piece I wrote for Dispensing Optics

 

If you are thinking about how to raise the profile of your practice, your charity, you may want to use real people’s stories. In this article you can learn more about how and when to use case studies.

 

A case study is a story, and people love to read stories about other people’s real life experiences. If you look at newspapers, magazines and websites, they are full of true life stories. The reader may feel empathy, ‘That’s just like what happened to me,’ and that their own experience is validated by reading the story. Alternatively, they may feel shock and horror: ‘How awful, I’m glad that didn’t happen to me,’ and although those sound like negative feelings, they can in fact reinforce a sense of well-being and ‘I’m all right’. People’s true stories and experiences are a powerful way to get others to take action. While it is easy to say ‘an eye test can save your sight’, it is far more powerful to read a headline in a newspaper about a specific event happening to a real person, such as: ‘Eye test saved Jane’s sight’ or ‘The Optician discovered my brain tumour!’ People reading any newspaper, magazine or website have a degree of trust in the publication. Readers usually regard journalists as independent which is another reason why this type of story can have added weight.  And again, there is an ‘it could happen to me’ factor. A story about a young woman who has a brain tumour detected at an eye test makes compelling reading for other young women, for example.

 

Beyond the media, real life stories can be valuable additions to your print literature – leaflets, magazines –  and websites. Whether it is a short quote as a testimonial, or a full page story, true stories can help you communicate important messages. The fact that the person in the story is independent adds weight to their words in a way that it wouldn’t if you told the story yourself as the practice owner or manager, practitioner or member of the charity’s staff.

 

Using case studies isn’t always straightforward, however, which is probably why we don’t take action even when someone has a life changing experience in the practice/as a result of the work of the charity. Read on to find out some more of the issues and how to address them.

 

One of the first issues about using someone’s real experience is that you need to ask their permission. This can seem awkward at the time: if an optometrist has detected signs that might indicate a brain tumour, the last things a patient needs is for you to appear with a consent form and ask them if they would mind appearing in the local paper. If your charity is working with someone on a complex personal issue on an ongoing basis, it may not be the right time to discuss PR. At this point, just note what has happened. Often patients return after a hospital visit and are keen to update practice staff on what has happened to them: they have returned because in some way they want to tell you their story. People who have worked with your charity may want to express gratitude. This is a better time to discuss whether they might be interested in being a case study. Alternatively, after time, you could phone up to find out how the person is getting on. Some people won’t be interested in being a case study at all, which must be respected. For many, though, talking about their own experience can be a positive thing. They may be motivated by the thought of seeing their story in the newspaper, or perhaps they may want to help other people who could be going through the same experience. Someone who has had their life or sight saved by an eye test may feel that telling their story and helping others gives them a reason for having gone through trauma.  Understanding more about what motivates people to tell their stories can help you to ask for their consent in a sensitive way.

It can help if you prepare consent forms in advance. You need to have space to write the person’s details, and how their story might be used. Would you use it only on a practice publication, on the website, in advertising, on social media? A written consent form with a list of possible outlets can help the person think about where they might be happy to see their story, and what might make them feel uncomfortable. Allow them time to read the form and discuss how they feel. You could also discuss and list on the form whether the person is happy to speak to a journalist, whether they would appear on TV or have their photo taken.

 

You need to keep the consent forms and any details of the person’s story, remembering your data protection responsibilities. A consent form doesn’t give you carte blanche to share the person’s details. If, for example, they have had a story in the local newspaper and then the local TV new show wants to cover it too, call them and check they are still happy to speak if. A consent form is also necessary if you want to use shorter quotes, perhaps alongside an image, as testimonials on your website or leaflet.

 

Images are a key element to any story. A picture of the person is a great start. It can also be good to have a picture that shows how their issue was detected: the doctor and patient in consultation, for example. People always like to see action shots, and it can be good to show the person doing their favourite activity, something they might have struggled with if their problem hadn’t been detected and treated, if the charity hadn’t helped them.

 

If you are using the story for your website or magazine, you may need to interview the person yourself. Here are a few tips. First, think about recording your discussion. Ask the person if they mind it being recorded so that you can check facts and quotes. Explain that you won’t share the recording with anyone else. Set up a quiet room where the person feels comfortable: ask if they would prefer to speak to you in practice or in their home. Provide a drink and tissues: retelling a story can sometimes be traumatic. Have a notebook and pen with you to jot down key parts of the story. Remember that people don’t always tell a story in a logical order so you may need to piece the story together afterwards. When writing up the story check back using the notes and your recording to make sure it is accurate. After that, it can be good to read the story back to the person to check that it sounds correct to them before you use it.

 

If you are hoping to get some media coverage for the story you will need a different type of write up. Journalists will want to see a few short facts about the story: what happened, and why is it compelling and unique? Real life magazines are often looking for stories that focus on ‘triumph over tragedy’ so emphasise the strongest points of the story, the real highs and lows for the person. Remember that it may help make a compelling case for the story if you tie your case study into an event like National Eye Health Week, or a relevant disease focussed day/week. Draft an email to the journalist, and then check back and make sure that you have covered the ‘who, when, what, why and how’ of the story too. Remember that you always need the person’s permission before passing the story on. If the journalist feels that the person’s story is a good fit for their programme or publication, they are likely to want to interview the person concerned as well as the practitioner who made the discovery or the charity worker who helped them. They may want to take photos or film in practice and/or in the person’s home.

 

Once you have generated some coverage for your practice using a case study, remember to follow up. You may want to thank the person, either in person or by sending a small gift. You should also make sure that patients and the wider public know about the coverage: you could mention that you have been part of the person’s story in the local media on your blog and in the newsletter, with a link to the article. Finally, always stay on the lookout for compelling stories taking place as they are a great way to communicate about issues that might not get raised otherwise, and reach new media.

Resources

• To find out more about the ethics of journalism you can read the IPSO Code of practice https://www.ipso.co.uk/IPSO/cop.html
• Charity Comms has created a great report which discusses this in more detail: Show and tell: a Best Practice Guide to portraying beneficiaries and service users which you can find at http://www.bfunded.org.uk/uploads/files/charitycomms.pdf

 

Become the Best You: Author Interview

I’ve just read a great interview in which Maddy at Writing Bubble interviews Renee Davies who has written and published her first book, Become The Best You. which uses Renee’s own experiences to help others break a cycle of self destruction. Looks like it will be well worth a read.

Review: Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig #reasonstostayalive

How do you write a traumatic life experience like depression? In the midst of it, picking up a pen and exploring your feelings is impossible.

Why do you write about depression? Because when you are deep within depression, it feels like no-one else in the history of time has ever felt like you … and once you have reached a place beyond depression, maybe you want to let others know about that elusive thing called hope.

When do you write about depression? When the drugs have started to work? When you feel like you’re living again? When there’s something new to say, or something only you can say, or the impulse to write it is too great and none of what you have written so far quite deals with the itch, the need, to stop other people hurting in the same way that you hurt?

I don’t think I’ve every written properly about being depressed. Much of it is a blur: the parts I remember will be hard to write and painful to share. Maybe, 13 years down the line, I haven’t yet reached that point.

Matt Haig experienced depression in his twenties, and now, around 15 years later, he had finally addressed it head on in Reasons to Stay Alive. It’s a beautiful book, pocket sized, white binding, orange inner covers, rainbows dancing across the paper outer. And inside, it’s beautiful too.

The writing takes the form of scattered pieces, part memoir, part lists, a few selected tweets, and the story builds between the short chapters and sections. I don’t always finish every book I start, for a range of reasons, but I finished this one. It’s honest. It’s compelling. And it doesn’t tell you not to be depressed.

Haig skilfully avoids the ‘them and us’ of most self help style books: he’s there, deep in the depression, he’s there again as his current self, offering help, proof of a future, and most importantly, hope. He does end with 40 bits of advice on ‘How to live’, but none of it is preachy, it’s all tempered by the fact that he admits he doesn’t always follow his own advice.

And to finish, here’s one bit from the book that I love …

Self-help

How to stop time: kiss.

How to travel in time: read.

How to escape time: music.

How to feel time: write.

How to release time: breathe.

 

Reasons to Stay Alive is an incredibly low priced £6.99 at time of writing. Well worth a read whether you have been depressed, or want to understand someone else a little bit better.

Blogs, diaries, stories and a sense of self

This week I’ve started to read Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography) by Kylie Cardell.

She writes, “in this study I argue that diary is the genre Smilinked intimately to the representation and construction of self and that it crystallises a certain set of these ideas of self: confession/privacy, surveillance/public presence.”

I’m interested in how this relates to blogging, which Cardell goes on to address in relation in particular to two British bloggers, Belle Du Jour and Abby Lee. I’m not covering sex bloggers in this study, but I think Cardell raises some relevant points about diarying and blogging in general.

For me, blogging feels like an essential part of this study. This blog is a place where I can gather and categorise thoughts that may or may not later make it into the dissertation, thoughts on books that I have read and lists of books I need to read. It is a public blog: if you are considering taking part in the study, the blog makes it possible for you to get an insight into all aspects that I have written about, from a simple call out to more in depth academic pieces. It is somewhere that you can find out about me, prior to letting me find out more about you. And, as the project progresses, this blog will be somewhere to hold interviews with people who contribute their experiences, it will be a place to tell stories.

I’ve just added links to my other sites, so alongside this research project you can have a look at

• the flexible work blog that I’ve run for the last seven years: Family Friendly Working,
• my professional site: Antonia Chitty: author and journalist
• and the site where I keep my creative writing, works in progress in fiction and poetry, part of a MA in Critical and Creative Writing: 38to39.

Enough about me, although perhaps this brings up a useful further point. In this blog I feel I can write academicaly, but I can also write informally. This blog is a space between academia and real life, between academics and people who write their life experiences.

So, back to the project, blogging and diaries …

Cardell quotes Frank Furedi: “Contemporary society transmits the belief that problems of emotion ought not to be faced by people on their own.”  She also touches on writing a diary as a confession, something I want to touch on in a separate post. Do you feel that in current society there is a need for transparency, a requirement to confess? Does writing your story, blogging about your experience, fill this function in some way?

Cardell also addresses, “The shifting boundary between public and private life.” In sharing a story that is based on life experience we open up our inner selves to scrutiny. There is, in that act, a hope that by sharing we will become better, more authentic, healed perhaps. Blogging, promoting a book, sharing your thoughts and experiences via social media smashes all ideas of ‘private’ that might in previous decades and centuries have been a fundamental part of a diary. Cardell highlights the Big Brother diary room as an example of the new norm about privacy of the confessional. This leads us back to ideas of self: self as a reflection of others opinions and views. Blogging creates a new self, a self on the screen. In writing a blog one can choose which parts of life experience to expose, and in that choosing, once can create a new self.

Authenticity is an important word in business, in blogging, in the world of social media promotion. Be authentic, be yourself, business gurus exhort. But which self are you true to when you blog? I’d like to suggest that blogging, a true blank page, allows anyone to create a new true self, find new virtual friends, and therefore the question of authenticity is warped. Being an authentic blogger means being true to something, perhaps to one aspect of the whole self, to the self that appears when writing life onto a blog.

In any writing, blog, diary or book, one gets the chance to become the hero of one’s own story. Philippe Lejeune writes, “Autobiography is a human right. Become the owner of your life!”

Bibliography:

Furedi, Frank Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age Routledge 2003

Gilmore, Leigh The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma, Testimony, Theory (Cornell paperbacks) Cornell University Press 2001

Lejeune, Phillippe On Autobiography (Theory & History of Literature) University of Minnesota 1989

Smith, Sidonie Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-representationBloomington: Indiana University Press 1987

Smith, Sidonie and Watson, Julia Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography University of Minnesota 1996