I never set out to discover a new way of finding stories.
In fact, I didn’t even know I was looking for one. Before publicly releasing my memoir, The Knock That Changed Everything, I had already written two draft memoirs, Selling Millions, Raising Millions and Finding My Power of Want. At the time, I thought I was simply trying to find the best way to tell the story of my life, and I used three editors to help me write it. Looking back, I realize something else was happening. With every attempt, I learned how to bring my memories back. When I finally wrote The Knock That Changed Everything, I noticed that I wasn’t remembering my life in sales and business in any particular order. One memory would lead somewhere else. A person would remind me of a place. A place would bring back something I hadn’t thought about in years. Sometimes a very ordinary childhood memory would suddenly connect with something that happened decades later. I didn’t have a name for what was happening. I was simply writing my story.
Only later did I realize that, without knowing it, I had built myself a bird feeder. Think about putting a bird feeder outside your window. You don’t go into the woods and chase the birds. You merely create the right conditions. One bird arrives, then perhaps another. Before long, you begin seeing birds you hadn’t noticed before. They were probably there all along. You simply gave them somewhere to land. I began to wonder if that was what had happened with my memories. But there was another part of the discovery. I wasn’t just building the bird feeder. I was also learning how to provide the seeds.
A photograph could be a seed: a short story from my youth, a song, the smell of fresh bread, the name of an old friend, a school desk, a bicycle, a first car, or the sound of a screen door closing. Each one could trigger a memory. And once one memory arrived, something remarkable often happened: it brought another. A song might bring back a school dance. The dance might remind you of the friend you went with. That friend might remind you of his father’s car. Suddenly you are remembering something that hasn’t crossed your mind in fifty years. The first memory wasn’t necessarily the story. Sometimes it was simply the first bird to arrive at the feeder. That fascinated me. One memory seemed to know where another memory was hiding.
Only later, when I began working with older adults and developing The One Memory at a Time Guided Storytelling Methodology© from this epiphany, did I begin to understand that what I had discovered while writing my own memoir might be useful to someone else. If I could help create the bird feeder and provide the seeds, perhaps I didn’t have to ask someone to search through eighty or ninety years of life and come up with a story. Perhaps we could simply put out the seed and see what landed. That experience also changed the way I think about writing. Writers can put enormous pressure on themselves to find the “important” story. We look for the dramatic event, the defining moment or the experience significant enough to deserve a page. Yet some of the best stories I have found began with something almost embarrassingly ordinary: a newspaper route, a pair of skates, a neighbour, a church pew, a first job or a car. The object isn’t necessarily the story. It is the seed. Stay with it for a while and see what arrives.
I also discovered something about writing memories later in life. We have an opportunity our younger selves never had. We can experience an event twice: first as the person who lived it and again as the person who now understands it. A childhood experience that once seemed unimportant may look very different fifty or sixty years later. We can see the people around us differently. We understand sacrifices we couldn’t possibly have understood as children. We recognize kindness we once took for granted. Sometimes we even understand ourselves a little better. I think that is one of the unexpected gifts of writing our own stories. We aren’t simply recording what happened. Sometimes we are finally discovering what it meant.
Those discoveries eventually led me to write How Stories Want to Be Found. The title describes something I had been learning long before I knew I was learning it. I am not promoting or selling the book. I give it away. Just email me at hello@onememoryatatime.org for your PDF copy.
What interests me far more is the possibility that the idea behind it might help someone else find a story they didn’t know was still there. As a result, my memory program, One Memory at a Time©, is now used in over 70 communities in Canada by thousands and soon in Alberta as a pilot for my Stories Across Generations©.
And I certainly don’t believe my bird feeder is the only one. Every writer may have a different one. For some, photographs may bring the memories. For others, it could be music, smells, old neighbourhoods, family conversations, recipes, letters, or something sitting forgotten in the back of a drawer. The seeds that work for me may not be the seeds that work for you.
Perhaps that is part of the adventure of writing our own stories. We have to discover our own bird feeder, then learn which seeds to put out. When the first bird arrives, don’t be too quick to decide whether it is important enough to become a story. Let it sit there for a while. Watch where it takes you. See what other birds follow. You may discover that your stories were never really lost. They were simply waiting for somewhere to land.
Tony Hebert
Author, Creator, One Memory at a Time
hello@onememoryatatime.org
www.onememoryatatime.org
www.tonyhebert.com
