Oriah Mountain Dreamer recounts a sit-down with her father-in-law, and asking him about a trip he took recently. He says: "Well. It was April 12, and I got up at 6 in the morning. Then I drove to the station to take the train. It was dark. Then the train went for an hour, or maybe two, and then I got off at a station and transferred to another train. It was light by then." His story of the trip goes on like that - he's telling all the events, regardless of whether or not they make the story stronger.
If instead he had focused on a story that was going on, he might have reduced it to a sentence.
Q: "How did your trip go?"
A: "It confirmed my beliefs about the world."
OR
A: "It surprised me in every aspect."
OR
A: "It showed me how much I love my family and my home."
These are stories about what happened for him. He probably stitched them together from what happened, but they are true- more usefully real than the recitation of train schedules.
But oh! He has chopped out a great many events, with the ruthlessness of a samurai, with the practicality of a butcher, with the reasons of... a storyteller, of course!
It is a favourite maxim of many writers to "look at every line and word, and if it doesn't do anything for the story, chop it out."
This for me is the line between telling a story and basic self-expression. Self-expression, for example journalling, might go on turning over every event that happened, probably to get to the story, uncertain as yet of what touch, what sight, what smell, is important to the story. Telling a story is placing this and this and that in sequence, and leaning forward and saying, listen to this story I am about to tell you.
Q: "How was your trip?"
A: "On the waterfront in Victoria, there was a man handing out flyers to a show. My wife accepted one & I, out of politeness, was about to accept one, but he looked at me and said "you've already got one. I gave it to your wife." I was broken open by his thoughtfulness, that though he had been standing here all day passing flyers to the crowd, he cared enough to look and see that me and this other woman loved each other. It renewed my faith in people who live in the city."
So a story is a line of facts that click into each other, like atoms in a molecule, to create something new.
