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Step Out of Your Story

Writing Exercises to Reframe and Transform Your Life

New World Library

EMBRACING THE STORY LENS ON LIFE

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Every life is an unfolding story, a dynamic, unique, purposeful, and potentially heroic story with bright spots, turning points, and abounding opportunities for personal growth and transformation. From the day we're born, we become the star and spin doctor of our own work in progress, with the power to tell our stories as triumphs, tragedies, or something in between. Our story has supporting characters who provide love and assistance and antagonists who cause us to realize the substance we're made of and what's really important. Like stories, our lives are filled with suspense. Our personal decisions, both big and small, affect our storyline — the relationships we choose, how we spend our day, and how we nourish ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Yet few of us take time to explore the character we're playing. We don't stop to discover what our story is about, who's writing our script, and how the challenges we face can help us develop the insights and skills we need to move to the next chapter.

Stuck in the same old story, many of us remain so entrenched in tales of victimization and martyrdom that we can scarcely imagine an alternate, positive, or redemptive reading of the text of our lives. Perhaps because we have been taught to view life through one particular lens, we simply don't see other, more inspiring versions of our tale that could liberate us.

Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly sifting through various competing narratives to make sense of our world for ourselves and others — whether it's describing our day to a loved one, explaining why we didn't get promoted, sharing our political perspective, or justifying why we spend a fortune on organic produce. We may struggle with many contradictory stories to explain our biggest decisions: why we got divorced, or never had children, or changed careers, or never pursued our dreams. Our perspective can change from day to day, and even moment to moment, depending on our mood and where exactly we are situated in the timeline of a problematic chapter. For example, the bitter tale we tell a month after ending a failed romance is probably not the sentimental story we will tell twenty years later after we are happily married to someone else. And neither of these stories will be the same as our former romantic partner's, even though it's the story of the same relationship.

You can see this for yourself. Think of something funny, touching, interesting, or meaningful that has happened to you in the past few months. Now imagine telling this story to your spouse or your best friend. When you're done, imagine describing the same story to a parent or a boss. What about to a stranger in a café? What about five years from now, or twenty years? How might it be different?

While some details might remain the same, you might, depending on your audience, emphasize certain aspects of the story over others, or omit certain details that seem irrelevant, inappropriate, or too complicated to explain. As you tell it over and over, you might remember certain parts you had forgotten initially, or new insights might lead you to spin the story in a totally different direction. Over time, your values might change, and so you would revise your story accordingly, or hindsight might connect once-disparate episodes of your life.

Following a loss or a tragedy, many people engage in a prolonged period of story-wrestling in an attempt to make meaning of events that are hard to digest or that seem to defy explanation. Whether you consider yourself a heroic figure overcoming obstacles or a tragic victim of destiny often depends on how you choose to read the text of your life and the way that you tell your story. Take Milo's story, for instance.

Milo's story: superstar or Glorified Hack?

Milo, a thirty-one-year-old political reporter, had recently begun working at a fledgling online news magazine when an editor from another major newspaper invited him for coffee. He met the editor in her office, where she peppered him with questions about his new employer and complimented him on his increasingly visible body of work. On the way out, Milo shared an elevator with his hero and mentor, who had helped him break into the industry ten years earlier. Milo, who often second-guessed his abilities, felt reassured. This seemed like a sign that he was on a right path.

However, following the meeting, Milo attended a press conference with a local politician, who scoffed at one of his questions. Suddenly, all the good feelings from the morning evaporated, and he felt like a glorified hack.

Later that evening during our psychotherapy session together, Milo recounted the chain of events. He said he regretted his choice of questions at the press conference; they were an embarrassing error. Consequently, he wondered if the positive meaning he had read into the morning meeting at the daily newspaper had been "a lie."

As a psychotherapist with a background in journalism, I gave the matter some thought and framed my answer as a metaphor: "It's like writing an inspirational chapter of a story and erasing it because of a typo."

Reclaiming and Reframing Your Personal Narrative

Milo's story raises an important question. If there are a variety of ways to view our story, how do we choose the best version of our narrative so that the telling leaves us feeling inspired and hopeful? How do we find the redemptive storyline without whitewashing over unpleasant circumstances, repressing feelings, or discounting important life lessons?

For starters, you need a framework for understanding your story so you can explore what's positive, redemptive, and possibly inspirational about it. Ideally, this framework would be something simple and relatively familiar that would help you take charge of the narration of your story adventure. Additionally, it would place importance on character development, reframing any disappointments or losses as stepping-stones to a more open-hearted or broad-minded experience of life and a richer understanding of yourself. It would measure your worth — not based on the number of zeros in your salary, on your job title, or on your marital status — but rather, on the extent to which you, in the starring role, could grow in compassion, wisdom, depth, and responsibility regardless of circumstances. Finally, when you stepped outside your story to look at the full picture of your life, you would discover that no matter what was happening in your plotline, you held the power to be cocreator of your story by reframing how you perceived and shared it.

Next, you need a new lens on life, one that elevates your perspective, frees your imagination, and overrides your inner critic. This new and improved prescription, so to speak, would help you view "the same old story" from new vistas and through kinder, more empathetic eyes.

Thankfully, you don't have to reinvent the wheel — both the lens and the frames already exist. And you're probably familiar with both of them — it just never occurred to apply these lessons to your own life. The lens I'm referring to is the third-person voice and the framework, the elements of a story. Not what you were expecting? Let me explain.

Putting On Your Story Glasses

Perhaps you recall learning the elements of a story in school. I can still picture my grade-school teacher drawing the curve on the chalkboard as she explained that every story has a hero who is working toward a goal or a dream, an antagonist who gets in the way, and a conflict between two forces that builds to a climax and leads to a resolution, transforming the protagonist for better or worse.

Even if you slept through this particular class, the format should seem familiar. For all of us, the narrative arc is imprinted into our developing brains from the moment we hear our first bedtime story and watch our first cartoon on television, following a favorite character through some madcap or fearsome adventure while hoping for a happy outcome. We become conditioned to this simple story arc, which emerges whenever we, ourselves, tell a story. We might tell slightly different versions of the same story — whether we are speaking to our friends, our shrink, or the passenger sitting next to us on an overseas flight. But whether we are explaining how we overcame shyness to become a newscaster, or found love again after a horrible divorce, we typically cast ourselves as a protagonist who has overcome obstacles and grown through challenges.

These plot elements are like the architecture of a story. Just as architects need to know structural design, we need to understand the specific ways that each of these elements directs and supports our growth as an ever-evolving protagonist so that we can reconstruct a strong and powerful new narrative from the raw materials of our one precious life.

Chances are you've had a graduation, a wedding, or maybe even a kid or two since your last English class. If you need to get acquainted, or reacquainted, with the elements of storytelling, don't worry; the next chapter will teach you all about them. The diagram below gives you some of the key elements you'll be working with. For now, keep these general descriptions in mind:

EXPOSITION: Introduces characters, setting, and background information, usually at the beginning of a story.

PROTAGONIST: The main character of the story. In most storylines, the protagonist is trying to accomplish something, win something, find something, or defeat something.

SETTING: The time and place where a story is situated.

PLOT: The sequence of events that make up a story. This includes the outer story, or what actually happened, and the inner story, or how the character experienced it.

ANTAGONIST: Usually the protagonist's nemesis. The antagonist might be a person (boss, parent, ex-spouse) or an obstacle that must be overcome or reconciled with (prejudice, poverty, aging, addiction).

CONFLICT: The central problem in a story, usually between the protagonist and antagonist. Stories can have multiple conflicts (and multiple antagonists), but one typically plays itself out through rising action that leads to the story's climax.

CLIMAX: The turning point of the story, when suspense over how the conflict will be resolved reaches its peak.

FALLING ACTION: The events that transpire following the climax as the story winds down, approaching resolution.

RESOLUTION: The conclusion of the conflict, when stock is taken and the story ends.

MORAL OR THEME: The underlying message of a story.

EPILOGUE: After the resolution of the conflict, a description of following events that often ties up loose ends.

Applying the Novel Perspective

When you superimpose this "novel perspective" onto the story of your life, you change the way you value and find meaning in experiences.

After all, the human mind is wired to search for patterns, to organize what it notices in its environment into a digestible coherent form. This is how we extract meaning from what could seem like random events. Our minds can be like messy desks, and we may struggle to process all the information we absorb — to know which fragments are worth holding on to and how to properly file them so that the categories make intuitive sense and help us flourish. While there are as many organizing systems as there are frameworks for understanding the world, few are as familiar or ingrained as the story structure. The story is "a natural package for many different kinds of information," explains Dr. Daniel P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and the director of the Foley Center for the Study of Lives. "When we comprehend our actions over time, we see what we do in terms of a story. We see obstacles confronted, and intentions realized and frustrated over time. As we move forward from yesterday to tomorrow, we move through tensions building to climaxes, climaxes giving way to denouements, and tensions building again as we continue to move and change. Human time is a storied affair."

We might even say that suffering can sometimes partly be due to a storytelling deficit, a failure to find a good filing system that organizes the details of one's life into a meaningful cause-and-effect narrative, which results in an incoherent or distorted story.

For example, let's say you're unemployed, and you tell yourself the story that this is just another crappy situation that defines your very difficult life. You ask yourself, "Why does this always happen to me?" Then you finally land a job interview. What happens? This negative story may lead you to wonder, "What's the point?" And this negative vibe may lead you to botch the job interview, which causes more suffering and only confirms your negative story.

However, what if you saw the antagonist (in this case, unemployment) of the current chapter in your life (a chapter you might entitle "A Thousand Resumes") as the necessary force that is pushing you to resolve your main conflict: perhaps that you are in fact ambivalent about this career path or that you tend to get easily discouraged. In a way, this antagonist is like a personal trainer, and this conflict is the force challenging you to develop your confidence or to become clear about your career direction. Suddenly, as you exercise control over how you view your situation, the time between jobs becomes an invitation to work on yourself and build your muscles. Through this lens, you might say to yourself, "If I were reading this chapter in a book about the story of my life, I might appreciate that unemployment is nudging me — the protagonist — to get more organized and keep persevering in the face of adversity. I can choose to embrace that challenge, and forge ahead, or drain myself of valuable energy by sinking into discouragement."

Cast in this light, the power of interpretation via the story lens on life offers a powerful elixir for heartbreaks, disappointments, and existential angst.

Jill's Story: Defining Happily Ever After

Take Jill's story. From the time Jill met Tom in her senior year of college, they were practically inseparable. The native New Englanders seemed like the perfect match — they were both politically active and shared many interests, including the outdoors, vegan cooking, science fiction, and a dream of living out west. Following graduation, they moved to San Francisco, where they landed decent entry-level jobs in their respective fields. Three years later, as their friends began getting engaged, Jill broached the subject of marriage and children with Tom. While Tom seemed receptive to marriage, he told Jill that he didn't want to have children.

Jill, who always dreamed of being a mother, was devastated. She had sensed a certain apprehension from Tom whenever she mentioned children, but she had never pushed him, partly because she feared confirming her suspicions. They tried counseling, but Tom, who had been somewhat neglected as a child and had strong political views about global overpopulation, was adamant about his position.

Jill was in crisis and confused. Her parents and friends were pressuring her to break up with him and move on. She had never lived entirely on her own, and the thought of being alone, without Tom, so far from her close-knit family, scared her. Should she stay with Tom, the man she loved and considered her soul mate, and give up her lifelong dream of having children?

How can embracing the story lens on life help Jill? Well, it won't prevent her from experiencing sadness, anger, guilt, confusion, and fear — or all the natural, understandable human emotions that arise during difficult times. Nor should it. From a psychological perspective, feeling our feelings is an important part of emotional maturation, as well as a prerequisite for intimacy.

Yet thoroughly considering each of the story elements in her life's current chapter can help her figure out the best way to move forward. All the story elements — San Francisco (the setting), their childhood dreams and experiences (exposition), the plot (the love story), and the conflict (the disagreement about having children) — are interacting with one another to create a crisis that is pushing for a resolution. In the world of stories, that's a good thing. The conflict between the protagonist (Jill) and the antagonist (Tom) has led to tension that must be resolved to move Jill's story forward. To move forward, Jill is compelled to look within and make courageous choices informed by a deeper understanding of her needs and values.

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Excerpted from Step Out of Your Story by Kim Schneiderman. Copyright © 2015 Kim Schneiderman. Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
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