Creating a Story

In this week’s On Being email, Padráig Ó Tuama said, “Every story is both a revelation and a concealment,” an insight that can be applied to my own writing and to examples shared by members of my writing group. Several of us in the group are writing personal essays and memoirs. One member recently shared a touching story about the night his fiancé met his family for the first time. After we all said how much we loved the story, he admitted that the events he described had occurred on another night. “This was a better story,” he said. Each of us is trying to create a story that will engage the reader. We add, move or delete “facts” that might detract from the story.

My daughter gave me “Storyworth” as a birthday gift. Every week I receive a prompt to a question such as “What did you hide from your parents when you were a child?” or “What are your favorite recipes to cook or to eat?” At the end of a year, my responses will be collected and put into a book. I have tried to make my stories as detailed as possible, but, knowing that my children and grandchildren will be reading them, I am selective about which memories I share. I have definitely revealed a lot they don’t know about me, but sometimes the prompt evokes memories I choose to keep to myself.  I began the response to “What did you hide from your parents as a child?” by saying I was glad the question referred to childhood, because what I hid a teenager is better left unsaid. The recipe question led me to write not just about food, but  to reveal what life was like as a struggling single mother who worked and went to school full time.

Of course some of my memories may be faulty. My brother and I were recently talking about our old neighborhood. His memory of the local shopkeepers and mine were entirely different. The same is true of many of our experiences growing up. Some “concealments” are deliberate, others are simply due to the way we “misremember.”