All our lives are a story. In fact, they’re full of stories. Perhaps we don’t realise that when we’re younger and nothing much seems to have happened, when in practice it has. And then as we take on more responsibilities, we barely get a chance to reflect on what has occurred to date.
How we tell those stories to one another and to the wider world is a difficult juggling act. I said in week 1 of this blog that my intention was to take a risk and put myself out there a bit more, in a way that hitherto I’d been rather reticent to do. Perhaps because of my (continuing) wariness of social media. I suppose writing a blog gives you a little more control of your output.
One of the other reasons for doing it was to challenge myself. To see whether I could do it. So far, with just eight weeks to go to the end of the year, I have kept it going. But I also wanted to challenge myself as a writer. I never harboured any illusions that I’d become some modern-day Samuel Pepys but it’s also good to test yourself sometimes. Life’s too short not to.
Looking back some of the columns have been a bit rushed and quite possibly too personal at times, but others don’t look too bad reading them again. My intention was to incorporate a bit of my personal story into what I see in our local community and the history of this organisation and what we do here and have been doing since Jackie Chapman and I first got involved in 2012.
I was taught when writing professional reports and doing work presentations to always think of your audience, but I suppose with this it was different. Ideally, I wanted to make it accessible to anyone – not an easy task in hindsight. How we tell out stories when we’re chatting to people in a social setting depends on how much you know about the person or people you’re talking to.
We have to gauge how the audience might respond. How do we want them to respond? Why are we telling them in particular? Are we seeking to educate, entertain, titillate even? I guess we might all been guilty of oversharing sometimes – or providing ‘too much information’.
How to tell a story well is a real art form in itself, whether it’s based on fact or pure fiction. Even the most apparently mundane material can be turned into a fascinating narrative at the hands of a good story-teller. Equally an extraordinary adventure can become bland if not delivered in the right way or filled with unnecessary detail. There are many different forms, short and long.
I watched Kenneth Branagh’s film ‘Belfast’ when it came out a few years ago based as it was substantially on his childhood years at the start of ‘The Troubles’ in 1969. It was well told and well performed as he is an accomplished professional in the filmmaking and theatre industry, but it did make me think why should he have the luxury to do that when so many other people have even more eventful and compelling stories to tell.
Of course, as I hinted last week, some people don’t want their histories raked over, perhaps for good reason – and there continue to be unscrupulous people who will exploit that knowledge – but as I get older, I find myself getting ever more curious about how things happened, not only in my own life but those of my family, friends and other acquaintances.
The annual Wimbledon Bookfest came to an end this week. Sadly, I wasn’t able to make any of the events this year. The published word remains a fabulous way of drawing an audience into the world of the writer and sparking the readers imagination. With the screen, the editing and images gives less scope for that flight of fantasy in your head. I’ve always thought of theatre as somewhere between the two: engagement with the written word but spoken live in the moment and hopefully with feeling. If you had the option, how would you want your story to be told?