The Never-Far-Away Telling of Story

AwesomeAuthorQuoteThis weekend I was far away from writing stories on my computer (something that doesn’t happen very often!), staying in the beautiful southern highlands. There were trees as far as the eye could see, and not one building interrupted the view. Parrots squawked. Mist hazed. There was little traffic. We saw only a handful of people…

Yet I told more stories than ever.

You see, we were staying with old friends whom we hadn’t seen for a while, so quickly found ourselves comparing stories about our children’s schools and teachers, about all the rain lately and how difficult laundry has been to dry, about fence lines and what the neighbours said about our various planned home improvements… all somewhat basic stories, but how better to reconnect with old friends than by bonding over shared experiences?

Reconnection stories.

It was also a fairly traumatic weekend, with my seven-year-old daughter snapping both bones in the wrist of her dominant hand. The poor thing was in tears for hours, her fingers went cold and she couldn’t move them – so I had worried tears too. Hours were spent in three different medical facilities, resulting in an operation and a heavy cast. So hours of stories were also shared as Hubbie and I worked to reassure and distract her. We told her about when she was little and used to throw her favourite fluffy toy out of her pram, so poor Mummy often had to retrace steps until it was retrieved. Eventually I tied the toy to her pram so it only trialled behind us rather than get lost. We laughed about how silly she’d been to throw the toy out of her pram in the first place when it meant so much to her, when here she was years later still clutching it tight.

Distraction stories.

Of course we didn’t want her brother to feel left out, so we told him about when he was a toddler and left his favourite fluffy toy in the oven of an apartment we were viewing to buy. We only realised he’d left it there when, just before bedtime, he decided he wanted his toy and hoped it wasn’t ‘getting too hot’. We eventually figured out what he meant and got the real estate agent to let us back into the apartment.

Inclusive stories.

We even told my daughter’s doctors and nurses stories about our family and how over the years we’ve had little external help, so are really close as families go. It was important for them to understand why we all wanted to accompany my daughter down to the operating theatre and why I wanted to wait outside the recovery room for the duration of the operation and not ‘go get a coffee’.

Communication stories.

So in a way, being far away from stories actually brought me closer to ‘story’. Story is everywhere and anywhere. We collect stories and share them, we use and retell them until our goals are achieved. Stories can mend and heal, connect and bridge, help us to know where people are coming from and how best to treat them and their families. Stories are a part of our culture. Stories create our culture. They solidify memories, and help us understand that we are not alone in the world.

So whether you’re telling a story about something that happened to you ten minutes ago or ten years ago – enjoy telling your stories, because every story is rich in importance and meaning, for you as well as others. Storytelling is fun too!

In fact, why not swing by the comments section below and share a story with me? When do you most like to tell stories and why…

Zena Shapter

Zena Shapter writes from a castle in a flying city hidden by a thundercloud, reaching across age and genre into the heart of storytelling. A multi-award-winning author of speculative and contemporary fiction, she teaches writing at festivals, libraries and schools, judges various literary awards, mentors and edits other writers, and encourages everyone to value the importance of creativity. She loves movies, frogs, chocolate, and potatoes, though not at the same time!

4 Comments:

  1. Zena

    A timely reminder of how we pass on our “history”. We have just spent a week in London with our boys (young men of 30/28/26 years). One flew in from New York and two, plus daughter-in-law, from Sydney. My husband and I met in London and we walked the streets – showing and telling – with great hilarity and regaled them with tales from the 70s. My husband passed on the Friday night tradition of a pint in The Swan pub on Bayswater Road and, glassy-eyed with memories he let them glimpse at his younger self.

    Thankfully he no longer hopped into the car and drove us home… That one we kept to ourselves!

    • I’m sure you took your sons back in time with your wonderful stories, Ruth!! Keep sharing them with each other and you’ll only enrich them 🙂

      PS. my Hubbie and I met in London too!

  2. First up- that was a magnificent piece of writing.

    I remember a story one of my chiefs told me before our first jumpoff. He had been detailed to deliver a packet of papers to an american installation in Da Nang. His ship (Hobart) had dropped him off on some anonymous jungle shore with an M16 and a handful of field dressings and he was, in his words, ‘totally packing it’. So he had dropped down into the undergrowth and basically leopard-crawled for about two miles and,when he finally plucked up the courage to stand up, he found himself in a clear field surrounded by pinball machines and NY style whiskey bars. What his boarding team had failed to tell him was that his drop zone had been two miles inside the installation’s fence line.

    This tale of meaninglessly unnecessary fear has always stuck with me as a story that made us all feel better about being unreasonably piss-scared at any given time. A sort of sharing of corporate knowledge that enabled us to feel that we were playing the part despite our own abject and somewhat comic terror.

    Story telling, eh?

    • Perspective stories. These are among the most important stories of all – the ones that enable us to assess our experiences and order the emotion we feel for them. They teach us which instincts will help us survive and which might not. Thanks for stopping by, Chris 🙂

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