People like to tell stories. Or at least people who like to talk and share things do. I like to talk and share things and I do like to tell a good story. My story telling has evolved over the years, hopefully for the better. When I was younger, my stories could take far, far to long to finish. On recent reflection I realize several things have changed over my story telling years.
The first thing I didn’t do well was with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the absolute truth. Explaining exactly which toe on which foot was stubbed and on which tile in the bathroom and the specifics of the lighting at the time just doesn’t make for an interesting tale. I didn’t do well at differentiating between unimportant (read “uninteresting”) details and those that made the overall story interesting. Today, I like to make a good story march and like nothing more than a quick summary of the situation so I can get to the funny, interesting, painful or important part.
Secondly, I had a branching problem. I mentioned I like to tell stories, but back “in the day” I would sidetrack on branch stories dragging out the main story to unreasonable (and boring) lengths. I was told I always circled back to the originating story, but that didn’t make it more enjoyable to the listener.
Third, I liked to tell the exact story as it truly happened. In good story telling, you don’t have to tell things exactly the way they happened. That’s not the same thing as lying, it’s just emphasizing the good parts and not worrying too much about the accuracy of the details. Were I in court testifying, it would be different but for the purposes of conveying something interesting enough to take up someone’s time expecting them to listen, sometimes being one-hundred percent accurate can lead to a less interesting story. Not exaggeration, I dislike exaggeration for the sake of making a boring story interesting, more leaving out the boring parts.
With my daughter’s eyes, I’ve found I can do a pretty succinct elevator speech when necessary. I can tell an update fairly quickly to friends who haven’t heard the latest and I can start from the beginning and get to now with reasonable word count to someone who hasn’t heard.
It’s more about economy of story telling with an emphasis on making things compelling and interesting to me. For those of you who’ve known me for a long time, hopefully I’m getting better as a story teller as I grow older.
The Big Boy Update: We decided to help my son focus on things other than weapons and fighting today. That makes it sound like he has an issue, but his therapist said that no, he needs that physical outlet and as long as he’s doing so in a safe way that his peers are okay with, we need to give him that opportunity. We’re working on other things to help him on the focusing side as well such as putting a puzzle together with his father tonight.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My son found my daughter’s balloon from the other day behind something in the bathroom. When he gave it to her she was initially sad because it wasn’t floating anymore. We explained how helium balloons only floated for a short while. A few minutes later she was holding the end of the string with the balloon dangling below and said, “hey daddy, it’s flying upside down!”
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