Storytelling

It’s so difficult to tell a story.

The blank canvas is the most liberating thing, but also the most terrifying. What picture will I draw, what argument will I articulate? Finding what to say, and how to say it, can be so difficult.

How will I connect the dots? How can I catch the eye, inflame the imagination? Do I start with the cat, the man, or the world?

You know this every time you’re bored: It’s not enough to say something; it must be said well too.

And so we cannot escape stories, these strange vehicles of information, of time, of ideologies, arranging past, present and future into shapes we understand.

We cannot escape how they sit in our heads, expand/shrink our imaginations; how they shape our realities, our lives, and then our nations, our planet.

I know on this continent we loudly celebrate our lawyers, businessmen, engineers, doctors, statesmen, soldiers. But even that reality grew from a story, a narrative about necessity, prosperity.

We rarely remember our storytellers. The writers, the poets, the bards, the historians. We rarely remember we live in stories; how they make us in such fundamental ways.

How difficult it is, to write a good story, to plant such potent seed. Stories can give birth galaxies, and un/make worlds.

How will I close these dots? How will I inflame the imagination? Do I end with the world, the man, or the cat? How will I finish this post?

I marvel at the infinity of options a blank page brings, this craft of poets, bards and dreamers. I wonder who, and how, we will tell our next new Stories.