WRITING PRACTICE: NEWS!

WRITING PRACTICE: NEWS!

We are made of stories. We are always creating ‘news’ in our lives. Some stories happen in a blink. Others can play out over weeks, and some stories scroll out for years.  We each live our personal stories within the surround of larger stories, and within a great Universe Story that we are only dimly beginning to glimpse and understand.  But each life is a story writing itself out.  Your story. My story. Writing Practice helps open our eyes to not only the stories happening all around us all the time, but most importantly, to the humble stories that make up our lives.  When we begin to see how our lives are made up of “news” stories, we get a new perspective on our place in the scheme of things, and we are empowered to gather material for poems, plays, short stories, movies and novels.  Just as a first class journalist has a keen sense of a “story,” and goes after it, we can become reporters and journalists for our own stories. The Poet Robert Bly points out that a “story” is where we “store” our important events, memories and history.

PRACTICE:  Writing in the third person, tell a short short story about an event in your life that took place during the past week. A paragraph is enough, but make it a story that tells us some ‘news’ from your life through the third person narrative, not as “I.” Do this in any form that feels right: poem, prose, stream of consciousness.  An important part of this exercise is to choose well: choose a news event from your life that has special meaning for you, and write from that sense of personal “newsworthiness.”  You can do one of these daily, or weekly, and collect them into a little book. Your news. Your stories. Go!

EXAMPLE:

She called such moments “Border Crossings.”  She knew when she was crossing a border in her life, and often looked back on those times of transition into a new place. A Border Crossing, when it was taking place, had form, mass, shape, texture, even though it all happened in her imagination. A Border Crossing was tangible for her, and when a threshold had been crossed, there was no going back. There was a sense of graduating from a curriculum, waking up, passing a test, or slaying a dragon.  And so this bright spring morning, she knew she had crossed a border of some significance. There was no actual moment she could point to, and say “That is when it happened,” but all at once, she felt that a significant sea-change had taken place in her soul.  And she wondered why it had taken so long to see the obvious, to feel the deep, dull pain that had been hidden for months. She wondered exactly what it was that woke her up, and simply dragged her across the border of an old chapter into the new.  All of a sudden, she felt the anger, so long suppressed. All of a sudden, she saw the path she must take, and she knew there was no return to her old behavior of not standing up for herself, not asking for what was hers, not acting in her best interests.  And then at some unknown moment, she crossed a border.  She made some notes on a legal pad,  looked up her lawyer’s number, and dialed.