
Storytelling
Crafting a compelling personal story requires time and care plus a healthy dose of inspiration. Writing may just as well as be an art — something to be sculpted, refined, and polished.
While words may come easier to some than others, I believe that good writing is something accessible to everyone. To tell one’s own story is not simply for those who possess a prowess in prose.
To start a piece of writing, I always ask myself: what is the point of the story I want to tell?
Is it to memorialize a loved one who has passed away? Or is it to describe the internal conflict of the child of immigrants? Or am I expressing the difficulties in saying goodbyes to friends faraway? It is this fine line of purpose that marks the difference between a meaningful story and a meandering stream of consciousness.
Afterwards, I think of how best to bridge the understanding between the reader and myself.
When writing a personal account, the writer must find ways to help the reader understand his own experience. Given how difficult this task may be, I enjoy constructing metaphors that serve as frameworks for understanding my story. For example, music symbolized my own grieving process for my father, and a tree ravaged by torrential rains represented my identity as a Chinese-Canadian. Not only do metaphors present a novel way of viewing one’s experience, they help the reader to fully comprehend the experience.
Of course, metaphor is simply one technique. Good writing abounds with literary devices used in the perfect place. There’s imagery, alliteration, varied sentence lengths, and the list goes on. What better way to learn than to read good literature?
A good rule of thumb when writing is to imagine paying money for each word used. Get the bang for your buck when choosing your words.
In other words, good writers choose the fewest amount of words with the greatest impact on the reader. Wordy, drawn out sentences frustrate the reader, altogether extinguishing their motivation to continue reading. Short and simple sentences, one after another, speak louder than rambling phrase.
At times, a writer may choose to add more words in order to maximize their effect on the reader.
For instance, I can write the dull, sterile sentence:
He practiced the piano.
But I would rather pay more to come up with a much more interesting sentence:
He urged his fingers to dance from ebony to ivory, again and again.
Consider the cost and the emotional impact of your words, and your writing will have just the right amount of detail for the most amount of effect.
Knowing yourself is the prerequisite to knowing what to write.
At the end of the day, being attuned with one’s own thoughts and feelings is the first step in knowing what to write. As frightening as self-examination may be, it is through this vulnerability that a truly personal story can come alive.
After all, as Stephen King reminds us, we take an enormous risk in letting words capture our experience:
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemy would love to steal away.
Words never seem to capture our most precious ideas and memories perfectly. Yet when we know ourselves and we wholeheartedly believe in the importance of our story, perseverance — writing, revising, rewriting — allows us to succeed. We find the words and in doing so, we find our voice.
