Your Stories Are Fading. Preserve Them in 4 Days (Not 4 Years)
Over the past couple of years, whenever someone I know comes across a good article on the power of storytelling, they forward it to me.
I really enjoy receiving these because they confirm what I have long witnessed when I produce storytelling circles or help people with their memoirs.
I am noticing the same trend in my community as in the country.
Community organizations are producing events to combat social isolation among our elderly population. Kids are finding ways to preserve their parents' stories and their families' histories.
Our elders are holding on to amazing stories, and the next generation is now ready and hungry to receive them.
There is a reason why so many people are finding ways to preserve their memoirs and record their stories.
It is because those stories matter to us.
They are how we make sense of who we are, how we hand ourselves to the people who come after us. How we say, to the people we love most: this is where I came from, this is what it cost me, this is what I learned.
It isn't a trend. We are experiencing a collective realization that these stories will play an important role in how we move forward.
The reason I started writing about this is that I noticed all the amazing stories people were approaching to tell me after story slams or storytelling circles.
Honestly, they put my stories to shame.
But it is a shame those same tellers don't feel confident enough to share them. It makes sense to me. I had to battle my own resistance to write for more than two decades.
Only until I had my first daughter did I put a rocket in writing butt (pardon the French) and started jotting down any little story, thought, or lesson, I believed could benefit my daughters' lives.
But I notice others struggle to sit down and write them, or to find meaningful ways to share them.
The traditional approach to memoir writing—journal every day, find your voice, read widely, write badly before you write well, trust the process — works eventually.
For some people.
If they have years to give it.
Most people don't have years.
They have a parent getting older.
Their childhood starts getting blurry. A version of themselves from thirty years ago that their kids have never met.
They need one story. One structure. Four days.
That's why I rebuilt everything around The Story Frame Sprint.
Not a writing practice. Not a yearlong commitment. A sprint — four days, one hour each — that takes you from blank page to a complete, polished memoir story and a full 30-chapter outline before we're done.
The sprint starts next Monday, March 9th at 9 am PST.
Twelve spots.
Happy telling!
-Carlos
P.S. There's an optional Day 5 — Memoir Café — where you read your completed story aloud to your cohort. Included free. The people who show up for that session are never the same writers who registered on Day 1. In the best way.
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