{"id":411,"date":"2009-06-14T23:47:15","date_gmt":"2009-06-15T06:47:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewkirby.com\/kirbside\/?p=411"},"modified":"2009-06-14T23:47:15","modified_gmt":"2009-06-15T06:47:15","slug":"who-can-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/?p=411","title":{"rendered":"Who Can Write?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A little while ago, a friend of mine emailed me with this question about\u00a0 the ability to write stories:<\/p>\n

Don’t you think one is born with it, or not born with it?\u00a0 It probably wouldn’t appear magically at the age of 45, right?<\/em><\/p>\n

I actually think the capacity to tell stories is there in everybody.\u00a0 We are all telling stories, all the time, but don’t realize it.\u00a0 We’re wired that way, because the human mind is a meaning-making machine.\u00a0 Whenever we encounter something new, our brains immediately set about trying to make sense of it.\u00a0 We really can’t help it.\u00a0 Take for example, this image:<\/p>\n

\"giant<\/a><\/p>\n

Chances are, your brain went straight to task of figuring out just what the heck you’re seeing.\u00a0 In fact, you probably saw the picture and started doing that before you even began reading this blog entry.\u00a0 (If you don’t already know about this image, click on the picture to find out more about it.\u00a0 Go ahead.\u00a0 There’s probably a part of you that really wants to know, and that’s kind of the point.)\u00a0 We figure out our world by categorizing and organizing, by asking questions of ourselves and hypothesizing answers, but it happens so fast we often aren’t aware that it’s taking place.\u00a0 The process has<\/em> to be fast, even unconscious, or we wouldn’t get anything else done.\u00a0 We’d spend all our time and resources just trying to sort out the world, because life is full of new situations.<\/p>\n

When writers\u00a0 are telling stories, most of us are doing the same thing, only we’re doing it more consciously, slowly enough to direct the outcome.\u00a0 We see something, hear something, or think of something that starts us asking questions.\u00a0 And the answers to those questions become a story.\u00a0 It could be a character, a situation, an idea.\u00a0 My stories, and I think most stories, have their roots in the answers to the classic who?\u00a0 what?\u00a0 when?\u00a0 where?\u00a0 why? and often in the big “What if?”\u00a0 Most of us writers are using our stories to make sense of the world for ourselves as much as our readers.<\/p>\n

For example, the novel I’m currently writing came to me as a scene in a dream.\u00a0 One scene that by itself was not a complete story.\u00a0 It’s too early to go into details about the novel, but based on that scene I started asking myself questions when I woke up.\u00a0 I had to make sense of it.\u00a0 What were those characters doing there?\u00a0 Where was that place?\u00a0 Why did everyone look so frightened?\u00a0 As I answered those questions, the scene took on meaning and the story emerged from there.<\/p>\n

But there’s another way that everyone is engaged in the story process, and that is memory.\u00a0 When we remember a life event, we often think in terms of recollection, of retrieving the memory from someplace in our brain where we’ve stored it.\u00a0 Well, there is no hard-drive in our brain, no filing cabinet where we keep our memories.\u00a0 It is actually more accurate to say that remembering is an act of reconstruction.\u00a0 And as we remember our experiences, that same meaning-making drive exerts its influence automatically on the memory we rebuild.<\/p>\n

When we look back over the events and experiences of our lives, we cannot help but try and make sense of them, to order them, to find purpose in the way things have happened.\u00a0 We look for the reasons<\/em> why things happened the way they did, and often that reason only becomes clear in retrospect.\u00a0 We seldom know the reason in the moment, but that’s because the story isn’t finished yet.\u00a0 Aesop knew that you have to reach the end of the fable before you find the moral.<\/p>\n

Remembering is essentially an act of telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves, to find the meaning in our lives.\u00a0 And when we relate our memories to others, we are telling our story for the benefit of our audience, and we usually have a point we are trying to make, or a purpose in sharing the memory.\u00a0 So we impose some kind of structure and meaning on the memory to achieve the purpose in telling it.<\/p>\n

So to answer my friend’s question, I would say that yes, you are born with it.\u00a0 Everyone<\/em> is born with it.\u00a0 The only difference between writers and everyone else is that we’ve practiced and learned how to use the process creatively.\u00a0 And I believe that anyone can learn to do it.\u00a0 45 is not too late.\u00a0 95 is not too late.<\/p>\n

Everyone is a storyteller.\u00a0 We are all actively and constantly engaged in making meaning out of our lives, sharing the story of our lives with others, and dreaming about our futures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A little while ago, a friend of mine emailed me with this question about\u00a0 the ability to write stories:
\nDon’t you think one is born with it, or not born with it?\u00a0 It probably wouldn’t appear magically at the age of 45, right?
\nI actually think the capacity to tell stories is there in everybody.\u00a0 We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1mtjQ-6D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}