Tell the Story Your Way!

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. 

Memoirs. Autobiographies. People telling stories of their lives, as they remember it. Think the "unreliable narrator." Because of course our "memories" are not infallible. Just because someone remembers something, doesn't prove it happened, or happened the way they remember it.

And story-telling is an art. Not a science. What makes a great story? Editing. What you leave in, what you leave out. So we tell a story based on our memories, and it's an act of recall, an act of creation, an act of imagination, an act of discipline.

What's true, what's not true? Who gets to decide? If you are the writer, you decide. Then the reader decides whether what they read sounds true, seems true, is a good story. If it's a really, really good story, you are carried along and go with it.

Is everything "literally" true? Or is a really great story, told with verve and gusto better than true? A really good story is art, poetry. It's own kind of truth.

I think of Nabokov, Keith Richards, Amanda Palmer, Elvis Costello, Mary Karr, Patti Smith, Helen MacDonald, David Carr - I read their stories, and decide to ride along with them. Their truths shine through. The way they choose to tell a story. The way they choose to believe it all happened the way they remember it happened.

And yes, we all tell our stories. We tell the stories of the lives we want to live, want to believe we lived. We tell the stories of who we want to be. We pick and choose from a universe of facts. We tell a good story that we think people will want to read. We all get to make history. We tell it our way.