Tell Your Real Life Story

Memoir Writing, ,

Tell Your Real Life Story. There are many reasons to tell your story as you have lived it. All of those reasons are legitimate, as long as they are your reasons, and you are the center of your story. Which is definitely a story that deserves to be told.

You might want to make a gift to those close to you, especially your family. A gift portrait in words, and other materials too, created by you from the moments that make up your experience on this earth. Your story is a legacy after all, to be passed on to those you love.

Or, you might want a wider, less personal audience. An audience you reach by publication. I took that road once myself, with Lifted to the Light: A Story of Struggle and Kindness. Should I ever choose to explore another aspect of my story, I might possibly try a different route.

What are the challenges of publication as a personal storytelling goal? They have to do with the difficulty of actually reaching that wider audience. I base this opinion on my several decades in the publishing business, as book editor, literary agent, and teacher.

What does commercial success as a personal storyteller generally require? Either you are already well known in the world. Or, you possess the potential to become well known because your story is sensational. Meaning it has shock value. The more shocking the better, if you wish to capture attention in a world already bombarded by shocking stories.

I don’t discount this reason for telling and marketing your story. If you happen to have risen to fame or infamy, grab your flash of spotlight while it lasts. Grab that glory with all your might, and hold on tight.

On the other hand, many of us might seek a more intimate center stage. The family and friends focus is one of those venues. But even this personal circle audience may not reach as deeply into your heart as you can travel when you Tell Your Real Life Story.

Some of us are determined to tell our stories, first of all, for ourselves. We seek to define ourselves, and to represent ourselves, on our own terms. You want to tell your life story as you perceive yourself to have lived that story.

We have all heard ourselves defined by others in various ways. From glowing to despicable. Reality generally lies somewhere between those poles. Plus, the reality that truly matters to your story is your own. What you perceive, believe, and struggle to tell about yourself, as long as you struggle for truth.

You aim to tell your real life story from the center of yourself. Not the versions of your story told by the voices of other people. Though the most insistent critical voice in our heads is often our own.

Your challenge is to excavate your story below its surface. To Tell Your Real Life Story as it really happened, beyond the derisive voices, including your own. To undertake a personal archaeology that will discover, uncover, and recover the story of your life that is most true for you.

This is an expedition worth undertaking. Unearth the story in which you are the main character, the hero of the drama you have personally experienced. Yours is a story definitely deserving to be told. Have no doubt of that. I, personally, can’t wait to hear you Tell Your Real Life Story.

Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Lifted to the Light: A Story of Struggle and Kindness is Alice’s moving memoir of her battle against life or death odds and the good people who helped her triumph. Find Lifted to the Light HERE.

What Readers Say: “Couldn’t put it down.” “Juicy and truthful, straight from the heart.” “Too good to miss.” “Beautifully written.” “Funny and consoling.” “Alice Orr is an amazing author.”

All of Alice’s books are available HERE.

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Places Replenish Our Writer Souls

Personal Storytelling, , ,

Places Replenish our Writer Souls. Reading stories aloud was a big deal when our grandchildren were growing up. Some of my favorite storyteller moments happened under the storytelling tree.

Our front yard featured a particularly family-friendly place. A yellow Adirondack chair fitted into a notch at a fence corner between two trees. I would sit in that chair with one grandchild at my side and another at my feet, and I would tell stories.

The way those two trees grew made me think of them as one. At ground level, they were far enough apart to accommodate a seat and small table. Further up, at about towhead height, they began to grow toward each other.

One day my grandson asked me about that. “What’s the story with the trees, Grandma.” He was staring at the place where the trees came almost together over my head, and he’d asked for a story. I gave him a story. Because that’s what grandmas and writers do.

“These trees were born close to each other under the ground, and they fell in love. When they grew above the ground and saw each other’s beauty, they fell in love even more. So much so that they couldn’t stand being apart and grew toward each other. Until they were side-by-side, with their branches entwined, reaching for the sky.”

The grandkids appreciated a good yarn and let me think they believed my tale. As for me, I believed every word with all my heart. Especially the feeling of it, which perfectly suited my yellow chair and that enchanting place. Because Places Replenish Our Writer Souls, and I definitely have one of those.

Stories have power. They lift and transport us out of real-life time and space into another universe, separate and apart. John Gardner called that universe “the dream of the story.” I believe in this lifting and transporting, but I also believe in places like the storytelling tree.

Places have power. Wherever we may be, we can picture ourselves somewhere else, like that notch in the fence at the corner of our front yard. We can take ourselves there, into the feel of it. The green branches overhead, the smell of grass and a child’s hair, the sound of birdsong on the soft air of late spring. The taste of contentment on the tongue. A feast for all of our senses as Places Replenish Our Writer Souls.

At bedtime in those days, I sat in another storytelling chair. Bright red, with a comfortable back cushion to ease me after delightful, exhausting hours surrounded by youthful energy. This chair stood between the dormers of the children’s bedroom, where the angles of the ceiling leaned toward one another, like the trees in the fence corner.

When I need a spirit boost, I take myself back to Christmas Eve in that red chair. There is a  stack of books at my side. My deliberate singsong tone has droned two excited children almost to sleep. I reach the last book on the pile and begin. “Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house…” To this day, that line transports me to the red chair under the dormers. Places Replenish Our Writer Souls.

You must tell your re-spiriting stories as well. Stories of places that lift you out of the moment. Places that come alive for you in every detail, if only in your imagination. Your heart is opened there. You are moved to bring us there as well. Because Places Replenish Our Writer Souls, and we deserve to be replenished.

Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Speaking of Christmas, A Vacancy at the Inn is Book 3 of Alice’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series, and it is a holiday story. Find A Vacancy at the Inn HERE.  Find all of Alice’s books HERE.

Alice Orr A Vacancy at the Inn

What Readers Say: “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”  “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.”

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Write Your Stories of Summer Memories

Inspiration, ,

 Write Your Stories of Summer Memories. We each have a memory bank account of favorite summertime nostalgia. One of my favorite memory bank deposits is a story of a green island and a pink tractor.

Once upon a time, I bought my husband Jonathan a 1947 tractor. My goal was to see him drive in the annual Strawberry Festival Parade. I had no idea how much that would come to mean to our family, because I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with breast cancer.

We lived on Vashon Island in Puget Sound, a 20-minute ferry ride from Seattle. We had moved there from New York City to help raise our grandchildren. We were city slickers plunged into village life on a five-acre plot of land two miles from town.

The parade was a local treasure, and antique tractors were its crown jewel. Our first parade summer, the closer those old tractors rolled, the brighter my husband’s eyes shone. I made a promise to myself right then. Someday Jonathan would drive his own tractor in that parade.

Our dream vehicle turned up eventually in Eastern Washington. The intense sun over there, on the other side of the Cascade Mountains, had bleached her from orange to a lovely shade of pink. We decided to leave her that way, and our five acres became Pink Tractor Farm.

The next year, despite Jon’s best efforts, on parade day, Pink refused to run. The following year, I had cancer. The last thing we needed was another complication, but Jonathan knew what a boost it would be for all of us to see Pink in the parade.

Jon, and an old tractor hand named Milt, worked like crazy to make that happen. Parade day morning, Jon was still tinkering. He and Pink had to get to the tractor lineup on time or it would be no-go again this year.

They made it down our driveway to the road. Ahead lay a long, steep hill. The grandkids and I spotted Jonathan from my red jeep as he attempted the climb. Several times, Pink’s engine turned over then stalled before he pronounced the inevitable by cell phone. “She’s not going to make it.”

But the children weren’t ready to give up. “Grandpa can do it!” they cried out together. That hope and belief radiating out the jeep window to Jonathan and his pink charger may explain why he gave her one more try. She rumbled to life, and they began to ascend.

Not long later, I was propped in a camp chair beside the parade route. “Come on, Honey,” I whispered as the kids’ shouts continued. “Grandpa can do it,” It was nothing less than a family victory when Pink bumped past at three miles an hour, smack dab in the middle of it all.

A little ditty popped into my mind at that moment. It’s simple rhyme rings with resonance still. “Strawberries are red. Tractors are pink. There’s more triumph in us than we may think.”

 What are your favorite summer story memories? Go full-bore for nostalgia. Aim straight at our hearts. Write Your Stories of Summer Memories. Do not hesitate to bring tears to our eyes – and your own.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Summer is also the season in Alice’s novel The Wrong Way Home – the first book in her Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series. Sample this warm weather treat for free HERE. Take to your deck chair with the four Riverton Road story adventures that follow. Find them, with the rest of Alice’s books, HERE.

What  readers say about A Wrong Way Home: “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”  “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.”

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