Do you ever wish you could back through time and change things?
Whenever I teach a class in memoir writing, I'm struck by the high degree of emotional honesty of my students.
By that I mean they try very hard to tell their story as they think it occurred, regardless of whether it casts them in a good light or a less than flattering light.
I've often been struck by this -- that people are willing to try so hard to get it right.
What we have at least partially in common with others is our past together. The parts that overlapped between our lives and theirs is our shared history.
Each of us owns a share of that past, and to tell that story, we have to do it in our own way.
Because, of course, story-telling is generally a solitary art form.
There are new, collaborative story-telling models emerging, courtesy of technology, but these remain to be developed in robust enough ways that the traditional model gets broken.
For now, it is me telling our story my way and you telling it your way.
As a writer, I've always been very sensitive to the nuances of how the other person might choose to tell our story as opposed to how I do.
These are boundaries, creatively, that need to be preserved, IMHO.
Then again, when the other person absents herself entirely from the process, choosing silence, I suppose your only choice left is to reflect her POV best you can, as you truthfully try to tell the tale.
-30-
1 comment:
As you noted- each person has their point of view when telling the story. It is always amazing when I remember a story - and someone else remembers the SAME story- but it sounds ever so different- just little things that I might not have noticed- or I might have noticed that they didn't notice.
But...when we tell our own story- it is just that- it is the way WE saw it or experienced it.
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