Structures to Use All Anecdotes from Your Life to Write More Stories

Shortcuts to mine, discover and edit your stories

The definitions below do not come from a textbook. They are the definitions of the types of stories I have developed for my craft. 

When I'm editing or even brainstorming, it helps me understand what kind of story I'm working with. 

Here are the four-story structures I think of when working on essays.

Contained

The first type of story is "contained." 

They are the type of stories we think about when we think of storytelling. They happen in a short period, in an afternoon, in one conversation, or over dinner. They have a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Background-Rich

Then we have most of our stories, and they happen in an undefined timeline. 

Before telling the main event, you need to give your audience some background. The story might revolve around one specific thing that happened, but for the audience to understand the events, they need the background.  

I wrote an essay about my mom having a rollerskating accident. 

But for the story to make sense and get to the point of the story, you need to know where the skates came from. 

Thematic

The first two categories are where people keep their stories. 

However, if you want to write and share more stories or do it as a hobby or even professionally, you must reach into what I like to call "thematic" stories. 

Thematic Prompted

If you are part of writing publications or like to visit your local storyslam, they often offer prompts to their audience so their writers can create something along those lines. 

It can help publications publish writing relevant to a content calendar they are following, a time of the year, or the central theme of the periodical. 

It is also the way most contests, anthologies, and slams work. They offer a theme and rate everybody's response based on that prompt.

Travel was the theme for the first storytelling circle I ever hosted in Petaluma. A friend of mine, a commercial airline pilot, collected tips, tricks, and hacks for traveling. He added a story or opinion to each one, making it a memorable and fun tale.

I was tagged once on a prompt about sand. The publication's editor loved an author who wrote a beautiful poem about sand. I don't have one particular memory of sand that would make for a compelling story, so I added snippets of how annoying sand can be in the context of having an incredible time. So, I developed a theme from the prompt, then matched snippets and anecdotes to complete an essay.

Thematic Discovered

Sometimes, you have one or two good moments you want to talk about but can't turn it into a story. Here, I like to use something called background processing. I write the snippets I know I have and are worth retelling, then I'll let it go. 

My brain will run like a computer, matching and discarding another snippet that could help me discover the theme of the essay itself, and then it is back to re-editing.

In a story about my wife, I recorded two conversations I had that were very closed to her birthday, and it related to some of the feelings she was experiencing around aging. I thought of three or four endings until I finally found the one that worked. It is one of my favorite essays and an ode to my love for my wife. The ending actually happened after I had written most of the essay.

As you become better at transitioning from one snippet to the next and fine-tuning the theme throughout the piece, the story will seem seamless, as it was always meant to be written this way.

This helps in editing and keeping the weight of each snippet somewhat similar. When such a physical outline is unavailable, certain points can be overdeveloped while others are underdeveloped. These structures can help you look at a developed point and think, "Can this stand on its own?" And look at the underdeveloped one and ask, "Is this even worth including here? Or is there more that I can add to keep this here?"

Telling a story does not require anyone to think about structure; you just tell a story. But it is a way to quickly increase your ability to put stories down, especially if you are working on a keepsake journal like Storyworth or a memoir or a monologue. It helps you understand what you have in a story, if it is even enough for a story, or if you need to keep working at it with one of the structures mentioned above.