Why Not Make It Easier to Create Stories?

I remember being about 13, in junior high school (this was 1960)—and having to “write a story.” I was terrified.

I liked the teacher who had assigned this to our class. But to come up with something good enough to be shared with the whole class? All I could imagine was being mocked and humiliated by my fellow students, for telling whatever story I tried to tell.

I was sure I’d fail, so I put off thinking about it at all—for two weeks.

The closer the deadline came, the more scared I got. And more grumpy—I made the full move into surly.

My mom had started to avoid my unpleasant self. From time to time, she’d take the time to criticize me for being so irritable. (As you can imagine, that didn’t help me much.)

But then my Dad got a Saturday off.

The Short Time That Took Me a Long Way

You see, my dad worked a 5-day job with long hours and a long commute during the week. Then, on the weekends, if he had appointments to take people’s photographs, he went to their homes and took their photos on Saturday and Sunday.

So, as much as he loved me and believed in me, he would sometimes miss a life-or-death crisis—like my having to write a story for English class.

My Dad’s Saturday Off

But the Saturday before my story was due, my Dad didn’t have any customers to take photo portraits of, so he stayed home. That’s how it came about that he asked me what I was bothered about.

I can still remember him sitting me down across from him around our small, round, Formica table—where our whole family ate meals together, on the scarce days when Dad was home early enough.

From Breaking Bread to Breaking Open

I sat with my Dad as he ate his late dinner (the rest of the family and I had eaten hours earlier), but he didn’t let on that he’d noticed there was a problem—until the dishes were cleared and the two of us were alone at the table.

As soon as we heard the TV turn on in the next room, he said softly, “Something bothering you?”

After a while, I answered him: “I gotta write a story by Monday and read it to the whole class.”

The Story Turns….

Throughout my young years, my Dad had told me story after story—and had listened many stories out of me. But those were for fun, not for being graded in front of a room full of embarrassed adolescents. And by now I was lost in hopelessness: I would certainly never have a story to tell the class, and, if I did, it would certainly be stupid.

I was certain that I’d be humiliated in front of the whole class.

My Dad didn’t approach my problem with a solution. Instead, he asked, “If you were, someday, going to tell a story, what might it be about?”

Before I knew it, I was seeing something in my mind: a group of older teens—who, to my 11-year-old self, seemed far older than me.

“Well, I said, “maybe something about the “lunch counter sit-ins” for civil rights. Maybe I could write about a bunch of us joining a sit-in.”

In the Days of the Sit-In

As I spoke that, I suddenly imagined a lunch-counter protest like the ones I’d heard about in Alabama and Mississippi. Several of us sat down at the counter in a drugstore in the deep South, just like I’d seen in Life magazine. We talked each other into not getting up from the lunch counter until we had been hauled away and arrested for protesting the drug store’s “no black people allowed” policy.

Egged on by my Dad’s deep listening and obvious delight in everything I said, I found myself spinning the story. I had never dreamed of telling such a story aloud—or even dared to think of being part of a sit-in. Yet, here I was, telling it to my dad as I imagined it.

Some minutes later, my mood changed completely for the better. I knew I’d need to smooth out my spontaneous story and fill in some holes in it. But I had a story to tell!

To my utter amazement, a tolerable story—about a subject I cared bout—had flowed out of my mind with little effort, as a series of vivid images.

For a few moments, I was stunned. And my dad was smiling.

Seeing my burgeoning confidence, my Dad told me several particulars he liked about my story.

Without even noticing, I had moved from being terrified because I had no story to tell, to realizing there was something that I both cared about and could imagine—at least well enough to have something to go on as, over the next day or so, I prepared the story for English class.

What Happened?

There were so many things that happened in that time with my Dad. Having experienced some of this story-in-the-making in my own imagination as well as his positive response, I realized I was no longer in despair. And, though it didn’t occur to me then, I later realized some of how my dad had helped me to come up with a story out of thin air:

1. He had patiently listened and watched me as I put myself in an imagined situation that turned out to mean something to me;

2. I had been buoyed by having a great listener who listened intently—and who believed in my ability to stumble my way to a full story;

3. My Dad’s positive, receptive stance both encouraged and relaxed me—and left me in charge of what I decided to say;

4. My Dad didn’t focus primarily on whether I had a story; instead, he accepted—and was pleased by—whatever came out of my mouth. And that, in turn, freed my mind to imagine still more things I had never before imagined.

In just 15 minutes or so, my Dad had given me what I needed—not to "make a story”, but to enter the flow enough to allow a story to grow out of my previously unconscious imaginings.

As a result, I had gone from being obsessed with failure when I had no idea what to tell—to telling something I cared about and could talk about to a listener.

Once I had done that, I had developed enough interest and confidence, to dare to write down some of what I’d said—what my Dad had "listened out of me"—in time for my school assignment.

Many Years Later: Image Riding

Decades later during the 1980s—when I was co-leading a storytelling and creativity workshop with master teller Jay O’Callahan—I found myself relaxed enough to begin to follow a series of images, with no plan and no idea where they would lead. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but now I realize that I was building further on what my dad’s persistent listening had convinced me that I was capable of doing.

My experience in that workshop prompted me to “radically follow the images” as far as I could. In time, I came to call that process “Image Riding.”

I have relied on it to create many stories. And others have used the process, too. Steffani Raff, for example, has used Image Riding to create an award-winning full book of stories (The Ravenous Gown)—and also to discover images to help her solve problems in her life—both large and small.

The process is surprisingly simple—but it requires a different mindset from what you may have previously been taught.

The hardest part of learning it? Moving from “make a story” to “allow a story to flow into you.”

That’s only hard because you’ve been taught—and likely spent years pursuing—a method that over-relies on your conscious mind, but ignores your inherent creative imagination.

Give It a Try?

Even though the Image Riding process is easy and natural, you’ve very likely spent years using a quite different process that all too often feels plodding and exhausting.

Yes, it is reassuring, in a way, to believe in a linear approach to creativity. After all, if there are known steps to follow, you never need to open yourself to uncertainty.

But that reassurance can come at a high cost! Over-reliance on your methodical, conscious thinking processes can prevent you from accessing the glories of your rapid, unconscious thinking abilities.

You’ll probably need some help to regain the easy access to your imagination that you had as a young child,.

But the benefits are huge. You won’t lose anything easier: you’ll still know how to work linearly and analytically (which isn’t my first choice for the creation process, but can be very helpful for the revision process).

Let me know how this works for you!

Use the comment section, below, to let me know your thoughts and your experiences using this natural story-creation process.

Have you tried it? Have you always done it? Does it seem frightening? Freeing?

The step-by-step, analytical, assemble-the-parts method of creating stories is not wrong or bad. But it relies exclusively on what some call “slow thinking.” As useful as “slow thinking” is, it’s, well, slow. And linear. It requires conscious, plodding effort.

Best of all, you don’t have to give up your slow-thinking abilities. Instead, add to them the rapid, non-linear thinking built into your brain. Why not give conceptual thinking some time off, and explore image-thinking. It’s a gift you were born with!

What are your winter stories?

As I write this, we have just passed the longest night of the year (in the Northern hemisphere). This is the time of darkness and cold.

In the summer and spring, of course, we see life budding out around us. We like stories then that speak of action and growth.

What about the dark days of the year? In the dominant U.S. culture, we act as though nothing happens in winter. Of course, a perennial world – including crocuses, daffodils, lilies and much else – is growing and thriving beneath the surface.

To treat this time of quiet stillness as nothingness is to overlook half the cycle of life.

What Do We Need?

In the winter we need time to come into ourselves, to go down below the surface, to nourish the roots of our being. We need to tend to it, strengthen it, and establish our deep connections to it—so that, when the spring comes, we will be ready for the blooming-forth phase of the cycle.

Yes, we can comfort and console ourselves with stories during the long nights and the short days. But beyond that, let’s be thoughtful: what stories do we each need, to nourish our roots? To ground us in the cold but timeless parts of being human?

As you experience the longest nights of the year, try to notice: what stories are you hungry for?

Where Will You Find Those Stories?

We’re unlikely to find our root stories in the popular-culture mills that provide most TV and movie stories.

Instead, we’ll have to turn to books, to recordings, but most of all to each other and to our communities of storytellers. And even there, we may need persistence to uncover what we seek.

My wish to you during this winter season is that you find the stories that nurture your roots. Perhaps the stories you need are dark, or perhaps they are filled with light. Perhaps they are painful or perhaps hopeful.

By letting these stories do their work in you, you will be honoring that part of your life that our society tends to skip over.

What about you?

What’s your sense of your “winter stories”? Does that idea even make sense to you? Add a comment, below.