Stories Matter! (My Stories, but Also Yours!)
What follows is adapted from Episode 1 (“Stories Matter”) of my Stories & Reflections podcast. For the audio version, go to the embedded player on the podcast page of this site, where you’ll also find YouTube links to the two most recent video episodes.
I’m often asked if I’ve always wanted to be a writer. It’s a question writers get asked all the time. And a lot of writers say, “Oh, I’ve always known I wanted to be a writer.” Or, “I’ve always known I wanted to write books.” Or, “I started making books out of construction paper, even before I could write, before I could read.”
None of those writers was me.
I like to joke that my Muse tricked me into being a writer, to being a storyteller. And, believe me, tricks, deception and downright manipulation needed to happen if I was ever going to be any kind of writer.
You see, I hated writing.I hated anything creative. I never thought I was a good writer, and I never believed I was creative.
So what did my Muse have to do to change that? What tricks, what deceptions and what manipulations did it take to get me here, to the storyteller, to the writer I am?
A lot.
I’ll get back to that, but first let’s talk about school. Let’s talk about high school. Let’s talk about English class.
I was going to say that I hated English class, and maybe that’s true. But, really, I was terrified of English class. It’s kind of strange to say that, because I love to read. So it’s not that I didn’t love to read the books we had to read in English class.
What I hated and what terrified me was all the discussion about the books we had to read in English class…about the symbols, about the metaphors, about the meanings, about the interpretations.
The problem for me was that there were no simple right or wrong answers. It was all gray areas where it was just too easy to get it wrong…to be judged for getting it wrong. At least that was my perception.
So instead, throughout school, I gravitated toward math. I loved math because there was a clearly defined way to get the right answer…to get it right. I wouldn’t be judged. I couldn’t be judged. And so I became really good at math. I became really good at getting that right answer and avoiding the judgment that terrified me in English class.
So that’s kind of the background. But let’s get back to my Muse. What did my Muse do to change the story? To change my story?
When I started high school, my mother gave me my first typewriter. It wasn’t a Smith-Corona. It wasn’t a Royal. It wasn’t an Underwood. It wasn’t any of those well-known typewriter brands. It was a Hermes, a little-known Swiss brand.
My Muse definitely has a sense of humor, because Hermes is the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Mercury. And both Hermes and Mercury are gods of communication.
The gods of writing.
But I wasn’t a writer, of course. I used the typewriter for my essays. The essays that I hated to write.
A couple of years pass, and I’m now in my junior year of high school. One of my classmates has talked the school administration into letting him put on a production of a musical, the musical Mame.
Somehow, I get corralled into working on the publicity for the musical. And I have to start writing press releases. I have to write things that other people are going to read. I have to write things that could, in fact, appear in print.
Who I am today can’t even begin to imagine how or why who I was back then would have said yes. But I did.
I guess my Muse made me do it.
That was in my junior year.
The following year, in my senior year, there was another musical: Hello, Dolly! And I was asked to take charge of publicity.
More press releases. More writing. More visibility as someone who writes. Again, no idea why I said yes. I guess my Muse made me do it!
I did such a good job promoting those high school musicals that I continued to do theater publicity in college, then began to freelance on the side as a paid theater publicist. In fact, I did such a great job with all that theater publicity that I got hired at a PR startup in Montreal, an entertainment PR firm.
Again, suddenly I’m writing press releases…and guess what? I’m being paid to write!
Apparently, my Muse wasn’t satisfied, and when that job ended because the firm went under, I got an interview at my alma mater, Montreal’s Concordia University, for a job in the PR office, the public relations office.
As part of the application process, I had to write three feature articles in two days. Somehow, I did it. I got hired.
Again, I’m being paid as a writer and a publicist, as a PR guy.
Then, through my time at the university, through the writing and the PR that I was doing, I got a lot of media contacts and began to freelance on the side, writing book and theater reviews and magazine articles.
More writing!
After a few years, I quit that job. There’s a story there, and maybe I’ll tell it another time…but I quit that job to freelance. And suddenly, for the first time, I’m working full-time as a writer. Full-time, because at the PR firm and the university, I was doing other things besides writing.
I’m now working full time as a freelance writer and editor — a self-taught freelance writer and editor, because my college degree was in business. I took business because I didn’t know what else I wanted to do with myself, and business seemed to make sense at the time. (I sure as hell wasn’t going to take an English degree!)
After a year or so, I move from Montreal to Toronto, Canada’s communications and media capital, and — amazingly! — I’m succeeding as a freelancer in the most competitive market in Canada.
But my Muse still wasn’t done with me, not even remotely.
You see, as a freelancer, I was writing other people’s stories to other people’s deadlines. I wasn’t telling my stories.
I didn’t think I had any stories to tell.
And although I was making a living writing, I sure as hell wasn’t living my passion. How could I be living my passion when I didn’t really know what that passion was?
I was a good writer. But I wouldn’t have called myself a creative writer. A skilled wordsmith, yes. But not creative.
So let’s cut ahead a couple of years…
I’m now in Toronto, as I said, and I’m working in-house as a freelance magazine editor. It’s a Monday morning, and I’m corralled by one of the staff editors who comes up to me and says, “I took this amazing, amazing, amazing creative writing workshop at the University of Toronto this past weekend. You should take it.”
I tried to say no, repeatedly. But she kept at me. All day long.
This colleague wasn’t normally pushy. But on this, she was extraordinarily pushy…clearly channeling my Muse!
Again, just as the me I am now can’t figure out how the me I was then would have said yes to that high school publicity gig, the me I am today has no idea, why the me I was in that magazine office would have said yes to that writing workshop.
But he did. I did. And that workshop changed my life…revolutionized my life.
Of course, the revolution didn’t change things right away. Revolutions rarely do. But between that workshop and subsequent workshops — both writing workshops and meditation workshop, all taken with that same woman who became my mentor — that revolution kicked in. Big time.
My life really did change. Radically. And my Muse had finally had its way with me!
I stopped the freelance work I was doing. And I was soon writing from my heart, not my head. I was telling stories that mattered to me, not stories that mattered to the editors who’d assigned them to me. I was writing from deeper places than I’d ever even known how to touch before.
It was the beginning of the writer I now am. The writer I’d never thought I wanted to be. The writer I had never believed I could be. The writer I never thought I wanted to be.
And a year or so later in a writing workshop I was teaching, the guy who didn’t think he was creative, the guy who never wanted to be a writer, who never thought he could be a writer, who never thought he wanted to be a writer, unknowingly started writing his first book…a fantasy story I knew nothing about.
I continued working on that story over the next year, not knowing from one day to the next where the story was taking me or what it was about.
That book would become The MoonQuest, a book written by someone who never thought he was a writer, never thought he was creative…a book that went on to win 6 literary awards.
A lot of people, when they hear that I’m a writer, say, “Oh, I could never do that” or “I’m not creative” or “I don’t have any ideas or any stories.”
But you know what? You can do it. You are creative, and you have lots and lots of ideas.
Thing is, we’re all creative…innately creative.
As I said about that English class way back in high school, it wasn’t that I wasn’t creative. It wasn’t even that I was scared of my creativity. It was that I was scared of being judged.
I was terrified of expressing myself, of being judged for who I was, for what I thought, for what I felt.
I have a really good friend who insisted for years and years and years that she wasn’t a writer. Well, about a year and a half ago, I was setting up a coaching group for writers on Zoom, and I invited her to join.
To my amazement, she said yes…even as she continued to insist that she wasn’t a writer. Today, she has just published her first novel, is at work on two more, and has completed drafts of more than a dozen illustrated kids’ stories.
She sure as hell is a writer.
Why am I telling you her story and mine today? Because more often than we realize, our deepest heart’s desires and our greatest passions lie hidden beneath our conscious awareness…often crippled by trauma, often veiled by fear.
I don’t know what shut me down as a child, emotionally as well as creatively. I have a couple of suspicions, but you know what? It doesn’t really matter what shut me down back then, because what matters is not what happened then.
What matters is what’s happening now. What matters is not the choices I made when I was five. What matters is the choices I make today.
And perhaps the most important choice I make today is to not let myself continue to be held back by whatever happened in the past that caused or forced the child I was to make the decisions he made, whether those decisions had to do with writing, creativity, storytelling or something else.
It’s important to choose today’s passions, whatever they are, not yesterday’s fears, however they came to be.
This isn’t meant to minimize past trauma, because whatever we experienced, however we experienced it, was real.
But the key is to not let ourselves be defined by it, to not let ourselves be held back by it. The key is to embrace the fullness of who we are today, and to find ways to get past the fears that may be preventing us from accessing, acknowledging, experiencing and diving deeper into that fullness.
And that includes our passions…the ones we’re aware of, but also the ones we have yet to discover.
What can you do — now, today — to discover or rediscover those passions? What can you do to access them, to acknowledge them, to embrace them, to experience and express them, to dive deeply into them.
Step #3 in my book, The Way of the Abundant Fool is “Ignite and Excite Your Passion.” Here’s what I say about that step in the book: “Find your passion and embrace it, passionately. Then commit to your passion, unconditionally. That passion will always support you.”
So find your passion. Embrace your passion. Experience and express your passion. And commit to that passion. Unconditionally.
For more inspiring stories, subscribe to my weekly Stories & Reflections podcast on your favorite podcast app or YouTube, and pick up a copy of my Acts of Surrender memoir.