Conversations over Coffee

Conversations with Writing My Story

Sitting in the audience and listening to Elizabeth Gilbert speak earlier this year was when the idea of each of us writing our own story first came to me. It is not a new idea, ground breaking or phenomenal. Just that I had never really thought about it in that way before. I knew I wrote stories. I wrote many things. I thought all those things together were my story. But they are not.

We each write our own story. Some of us luckier ones use a pen, write it down on paper, even get it published one day. But for the rest of us each new day is a clean fresh page and each moment of that day we write furiously away at the words that make up our own story.

“Write the most interesting person you can be,” Elizabeth Gilbert spoke quietly into the microphone. I wrote it down in my notebook, words to come back to. Words I have come back to today.

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What have I written this year? Now by all means I could be asking myself what have I written this lifetime. But that is when I would slip into summarising. I went to university, I got married, we built our dream house, we have two amazing boys, we travel, we love life. Boring. Boring in the sense that it is cliché Mills and Boon.

What have I written this year? That is worth paying attention to. I have had a year where I feel like I have been tested the most. I have had a year where the person I want to be and the person that I am have not always been the same thing. I have had a year where the things that I am doing and the things that I want to be doing have not always been the same. My story this year has been one of challenge, self-reflection and for most times – no words at all.

But I guess you need chapters like these in life to allow you to see life a little differently, maybe even realise what matters most.

Writing my story is all about edits and drafts. A flow that works and then when it doesn’t stepping away from the story and letting the process take over instead. I don’t know if this character is the most interesting person she can be, but I like her and that must count for something. Maybe it needs to count for everything.

Even throughout this year with all of its challenges, I like her. Writing my story has always been about the best mise en scene, but I think that is shifting. Shifting towards a protagonist starting to steal the heart of the audience. Maybe next year when the story continues, that is the place where I need to start.

 

What have you written this year? What is your story?

 

Conversations over Coffee returns Thursday November 26, 2015
Conversations with Letting Go ~ it will be the last #convocoffee for 2015


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