Story Finding
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Try your own spin on Matthew Dicks’ “Homework for Life,” logging one story/memory/anecdote a day
Keep updating your list of stories (and don’t forget to bring this to class!)
Offer your reflections to this week’s Book Club in the comments
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Quotes on Journaling
“Journal writing, when it becomes a ritual for transformation, is not only life-changing but life-expanding.” – Jennifer Williamson
“The journal is the ideal place of refuge for the inner self because it constitutes a counterworld: a world to balance the other.” – Joyce Carol Oates
“Having the courage to reckon with our emotions and to rumble with our stories is the path to writing our brave new ending.” – Brene Brown
“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” – Mary Oliver
“We begin to sort through the differences between our real feelings, which are often secret, and our official feelings, those on the record for public display.” – Julia Cameron
“There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.” – William Makepeace Thackeray
“Sitting for even five minutes with a journal offers a rare cease-fire in the battle of daily life.” – Alexandra Johnson
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” – Joan Didion
“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” – Flannery O’Connor
“The pages aren’t intended for anyone but me. It’s the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found.” – Tim Ferriss
“Journaling is like whispering to one’s self and listening at the same time.” – Mina Murray
“Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter. And lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.” – Jack London
“In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.” – Susan Sontag
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This American Life – One of the most well-known narrative storytelling podcasts, featuring personal stories and journalistic pieces.
🔗 Listen hereThe Moth – Features real people telling their own stories, often in front of a live audience, with themes of humor, vulnerability, and transformation.
🔗 Listen hereHeavyweight – Hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, this podcast revisits pivotal moments in people’s lives to uncover unresolved emotions and lost opportunities.
🔗 Listen hereSnap Judgment – A mix of real-life storytelling and immersive sound design, focusing on high-stakes, dramatic narratives.
🔗 Listen hereRisk! – A podcast where people tell true stories they never thought they’d share publicly—often funny, shocking, or deeply personal.
🔗 Listen hereStrangers – Peabody Award-winning producer Lea Thau brings intimate, deeply personal narratives exploring the complexities of human relationships.
🔗 Listen hereLove and Radio – An innovative and artfully produced podcast that shares unusual and surprising personal stories.
🔗 Listen hereFamily Ghosts – Examines the real-life mysteries and personal legends that shape families and their identities.
🔗 Listen hereSpooked – From the creators of Snap Judgment, this show features true-life supernatural stories told by the people who experienced them.
🔗 Listen hereModern Love – A podcast inspired by the New York Times’ popular column, sharing deeply personal stories about love, relationships, and human connection.
🔗 Listen here
For an even broader selection, check out this Spotify playlist featuring top narrative nonfiction and personal storytelling podcasts:
🔗 Spotify Playlist -
Recommend Readings
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Excerpt from Storyworthy
By Matthew Dicks...There was a point at which I realized that I'd need to start finding more stories to tell. I couldn't wait for the next time my heart stopped beating or the next time I was arrested for a crime I didn't commit. I needed to find these little moments, I needed to hunt them down. My goal was to identify the small stories that existed in my life already.
I've been a schoolteacher for almost twenty years, so it was only natural that I assign myself homework. I assigned myself Homework for Life. This is what I did:
I decided at the end of every day, I'd reflect upon my day and ask myself one simple question:
If I had a story from today—a five minute story onstage about something that took place over the course of this day—what would it be? As benign and boring and inconsequential as it might seem, what was the most storyworthy moment from my day?
I decided not to write the entire story down, because to do so would require too much time and effort. As desperate as I was for stories, even I wouldn't be able to commit to writing a full story every day, especially if it wasn't all that compelling. Instead I would write a snippet. A sentence or two that captured the moment from the day. Just enough for me to remember the moment and recall it clearly on a later date.
I also allowed myself to record any meaningful memories that came to mind over the course of the day, in response to either something I [had already added] or something that came to mind organically. Oftentimes these were recovered memories: moments from my past that had been forgotten for years but had returned to my mind through the process of doing Homework for Life.
To do this work, I decided to use an Excel spreadsheet. It works well for several reasons. First, it forced me to capture these moments in just a few words. ...My spreadsheet is broken into two columns: the date and the story. That's it. As a result, I don't allow myself to write more than the story cell allows. For a novelist who is accustomed to writing hundreds and sometimes thousands of words per day, the temptation to write was more great, but I believe in simplicity. I believe in strategies that are easy to apply and maintain even on our busiest days. This is the best way to develop a habit.
...When I started Homework for Life, I didn't know what the results would be. At best, I hoped to find a handful of stories that I might be able to tell onstage someday.
Instead, something amazing happened. As I reflected on each day of my life and identified the most storyworthy moments, I began to develop a storytelling lens—one that is now sharp and clear. With this lens I began to see that my life is filled with stories. Moments of real meaning that I had never noticed before were suddenly staring me in the face. You won't believe how plentiful they are.
There are moments when you connect with someone in a new and unexpected way. Moments when your heart fills with joy or breaks into tiny pieces. Moments when your position on an issue suddenly shifts or your opinion of a person changes forever. Moments when you discover something new about yourself or the world for the first time. Moments when a person says something you never want to forget or desperately wish you could forget.
Not every day contains a storyworthy moment for me, but I found that the longer I did my homework, the more days did contain one. My wife likes to say that I can turn any moment into a good story, and my friend Pablo has said that I can turn the act of picking up a pebble from the ground into a great story. Neither of these statements is true. The truth is this: I simply see more storyworthy moments in the day than most people. They don't go unnoticed, as they once did.
I discovered that there is beauty and import in my life that I never would have imagined before doing my homework, and that these small, unexpected moments of beauty are oftentimes some of my most compelling stories.
...All of this happens because I sit down every evening and ask myself: What is my story from today? What is the thing about today that has made it different from any previous day? Then I write my answer down.
That's it. That's all I do. If you do it, before long you will have more stories than you could ever imagine.
I know many professional storytellers, including some of my favorites, who only have a handful of stories to share. I ask them to perform in shows that I produce, and they tell me they can't. They don't have any more good stories.
I tell these storytellers that my current list of untold story ideas is more than five hundred items long. They think this number is crazy. They say it's impossible. I think it's crazy that they don't do Homework for Life.
But even if you're not in the story-collecting business, other remarkable things will begin to happen when you do Homework for Life.
I received one of the best phone calls of my life from a Homework for Life convert. When I answered the phone, there was a woman on the other end, and she was crying. My initial thought: Oh, no. Who is this? What terrible thing has happened?
The woman doesn't tell me her name. She's just crying. A second later she starts talking. She tells me that she took a storytelling workshop with me six months before. She had listened closely as I assigned her Homework for Life, and she started doing it that night. She's calling to tell me that she's fifty-two years old, and for her entire life, she'd never felt like an important person in this world. She'd always thought that she was just life everyone else—simply another face in the crowd—and that one day in the future, she was going to die and go out quietly. Unnoticed.
Then she started doing my Homework for Life, and within three months, it had changed her life. She says searching for stories in her everyday life and recording them has made her feel like an important person for the first time. She tells me that she has real stories—important and significant moments in her life that she had never seen before—and that she feels that they are part of a much larger story. She says she feels like a critical cog in the gears of the universe. Her life matters. She tells me that she can't wait to get out of bed every morning and find out what will be the thing that makes that day different than the last.
It's probably the best phone call I've ever received, and I never got the woman's name. She thanked me and hung up while she was still crying.
But it's true. As you start to see importance and meaning in each day, you suddenly understand your importance to this world. You start to see how the meaningful moments that we experience every day contribute to the lives of others and to the world. You start to sense the critical nature of your very existence. There are no more throwaway days. Every day can change the world in some small way. In fact, every day has been changing the world for as long as you've been alive.
You just haven't noticed yet.
[pp 41-42; 46-47; 52-53]
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Excerpt from Your Mythic Journey By Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox
“I hadn’t seen Jane for years but her occasional letters were filled with echoes of darkness. I thought about her often. So when I was in California on business I planned to visit her but I didn’t call ahead of time. The day before I returned home I was driving through town where she lived and stopped at a roadside phone booth to call her. There was no answer. I left the booth and walked to a nearby gas station to use the men’s room. And there was Jane with a flat tire. A coincidence? What does that mean? Though we didn’t know what to name the forces that brought us together, we both knew the meeting had been arranged.”
Whether the world is intimate or impersonal, lawful or magical depends on your perspective. World views are like glasses: they can be steel gray, rosy, or black and white. In the matter of cosmic sight we all wear some kind of lenses.
Children and primitive people live in a personalized universe. They experience events as tailor made to match their needs. Omens, signs, and miracles flash forth from every tree and hilltop: bushes burn and are not consumed; birds bring messages from the gods; among the Bushmen of Africa, the stars (kinfolks of an earlier race now dwelling in the sky) guide the aim of the hunter; the Hopi snake dance brings summer rains. In childhood we all live at the enchanted center of things. We know that chairs trip us when we’re angry; we move through the forest and the thicket opens automatically. The world is a conspiracy contrived to delight us.
But once we become mature we put away childish notions of magic, abandon the egocentric perspective, and learn to observe the world with neutral eyes. We are encouraged to filter out the voices that address us in the wind and rain, close off supernatural whisperings in dreams, and become citizens of a universe that is unresponsive to intuitions. We adopt a skepticism that becomes the fountain of what we narrowly identify as reason.
Fortunately, our sophistication does not prevent the world from going its magical way. Things keep happening that jolt our minds; events bend themselves to fit our private needs; hunches pan out; clairvoyant moments burst into daylight consciousness; prophetic dreams visit us in spite of our skepticism; happy accidents, coincidences, or synchronicities are common as breath.
[pp 111-112]
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Excerpt from Bird by Bird
By Anne LamottI like to think that Henry James said his classic line, “A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost,” while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head. We have so much to remember these days. So we make all these lists, filled with hope that they will remind us of all the important things to do and buy and mail, all the important calls we need to make, all the ideas we have for short stories or articles. And yet by the time you get around to everything on any one list, you’re already behind on another. Still, I believe in lists and I believe in taking notes, and I believe in index cards for doing both.
I have index cards and pens all over the house—by the bed, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, by the phones, and I have them in the glove compartment of my car. I carry one with me in my back pocket when I take my dog for a walk. In fact, I carry it folded lengthwise, if you need to know, so that, God forbid, I won’t look bulky. You may want to consider doing the same. I don’t even know you, but I bet you have enough on your mind without having to worry about whether or not you look bulky. So whenever I am leaving the house without my purse—in which there are actual notepads, let alone index cards—I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket along with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple words to remind me of it. Sometimes, if I overhear or think of an exact line of dialogue or a transition, I write it down verbatim. I stick the card back in my pocket. I might be walking along the salt marsh, or out at Phoenix Lake, or in the express line at Safeway, and suddenly I hear something wonderful that makes me want to smile or snap my fingers—as if it has just come back to me— and I take out my index card and scribble it down.
...Now, I have a number of friends who do not take notes out there in the world, who say it’s like not taking notes in class but listening instead. I think that if you have the kind of mind that retains important and creative thoughts—that is, if your mind still works—you’re very lucky and you should not be surprised if the rest of us do not want to be around you. I actually have one writer friend—whom I think I will probably be getting rid of soon—who said to me recently that if you don’t remember it when you get home, it probably wasn’t that important. And I felt eight years old again, with something important to say that had suddenly hopped down one of the rabbit holes in my mind, while an adult nearby was saying priggishly, “Well! It must not have been very important then.”
So you have to decide how you feel about this. You may have a perfectly good memory and be able to remember three hours later what you came up with while walking on the mountain or waiting at the dentist’s. And then again, you may not. If it feels natural, if it helps you to remember it, take notes. It’s not cheating. It doesn’t say anything about your character. If your mind is perhaps the merest bit disorganized, it probably just means that you’ve lost a little ground. It may be all those drugs you took when you were younger, all that nonhabit-forming marijuana that you smoked on a daily basis for twenty years. It may be that you’ve had children. When a child comes out of your body, it arrives with about a fifth of your brain clutched in its little hand, like those babies born clutching IUDs. So for any number of reasons, it’s only fair to let yourself take notes.
My index-card life is not efficient or well organized. Hostile, aggressive students insist on asking what I do with all my index cards. And all I can say is that I have them, I took notes on them, and the act of having written something down gives me a fifty-fifty shot at having it filed away now in my memory. If I’m working on a book or an article, and I’ve taken some notes on index cards, I keep them with that material, paperclip them to a page of rough draft where that idea or image might bring things to life. Or I stack them on my desk along with the pages for the particular chapter or article I’m working on, so I can look at them. When I get stuck or lost or
the jungle drums start beating in my head, proclaiming that the jig is about to be up and I don’t know what I’m doing and the well has run dry, I’ll look through my index cards. I try to see if there’s a short assignment on any of them that will get me writing again, give me a small sense of confidence, help me put down one damn word after another, which is, let’s face it, what writing finally boils down to.
[pp 133-138]
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Excerpt from The Creative Habit By Twyla Tharp
The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight. There is nothing yet to research. For me, these moments are not pretty. I look like a desperate woman, tortured by the simple message thumping away in my head: “You need an idea.” It’s not enough for me to walk into a studio and start dancing, hoping that something good will come of my aimless cavorting on the studio floor. Creativity doesn’t generally work that way for me. (The rare times when it has stand out like April blizzards.) You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun – paint into a painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance.
Even though I look desperate, I don’t feel desperate, because I have a habitual routine to keep me going.
I call it scratching. You know how you scratch away at a lottery ticket to see if you’ve won? That’s what I’m doing when I begin a piece. I’m digging through everything to find something. It’s like clawing at the side of a mountain to get a toehold, a grip, some sort of traction to keep moving upward and onward.
Scratching takes many shapes. A fashion designer is scratching when he visits vintage clothing stores, studies music videos, and parks himself at a sidewalk café to see what the pedestrians are wearing.
A film director is scratching when she grabs a flight to Rome, trusting that she will get her next big idea in that inspiring city. The act of changing your environment is the scratch.
An architect is scratching when he walks through a rock quarry, studying the algebraic connecting of fallen rocks or the surface of a rock wall, or the sweeping space of the quarry itself. We see rocks; the architect sees space and feels texture and assesses building materials. All this sensory input may yield an idea.
Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it’s an essential part of creativity. It’s primal, and very private. It’s a way of saying to the gods, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just wander around in these back hallways...” and then grabbing that piece of fire and running like hell.
I’m often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” This happens to anyone who is willing to stand in front of an audience and talk about his or her work. The short answer is: everywhere. It’s like asking “Where do you find the air you breathe?” Ideas are all around you.
I hesitate to wax eloquent about the omnipresence of ideas and how everything we need to make something out of nothing – tell a story, design a building, hum a melody – already resides within us in our experience, memories, taste, judgment, critical demeanor, humanity, purpose, and humor. I hesitate because it is so blindingly obvious. If I’m going to be a cheerleader for creative urge, let it be for something other than the oft-repeated notion that ideas are everywhere.
[pp 94-96]
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Excerpt from Big Magic By Elizabeth Gilbert
The most important thing to understand about eudaimonia – about that exhilarating encounter between a human being and divine creative inspiration – is that you cannot expect it to be there for you all the time.
It will come and go, and you must let it come and go.
I know this personally, because my genius – whatever it comes from – does not keep regular hours. My genius, for what he is worth, does not work on human time and he certainly doesn’t arrange his schedule around my convenience. Sometimes I suspect that my genius might be moonlighting on the side as someone else’s genius – maybe even working for a bunch of different artists, like some kind of freelance creative contractor. Sometimes I grope around in the dark, desperately looking for magical creative stimulus, and all I come up with is something that feels like a damp washcloth.
And then suddenly – whoosh! – inspiration arrives, out of the clear blue sky. And then – whoosh! – it is gone again.
…What I’m saying is this: If my plan is to sit around waiting for [an] unadulterated and impassioned creative visitation, I may be waiting for a very long time. So I don’t sit around waiting to write until my genius decides to pay me a visit. If anything, I have come to believe that my genius spends a lot of time waiting around for me – waiting to see if I’m truly serious about this line of work. I feel sometimes like my genius sits in the corner and watches me at my desk, day after day, week after week, month after month, just to be sure I really mean it, just to be sure I’m really giving this creative endeavor my whole-hearted effort. When my genius is convinced that I’m not just messing around here, he may show up and offer assistance. Sometimes that assistance will not arrive until two years into a project. Sometimes that assistance will not last for more than ten minutes.
When that assistance does arrive – that sense of the moving sidewalk beneath my feet, the moving sidewalk beneath my words – I am delighted, and I go along for the ride. In such instances, I write like I am not quite myself. I lose track of time and space and self. While it’s happening, I thank the mystery for its help. And when it departs, I let the mystery go, and I keep on working diligently anyhow, hoping that someday my genius will reappear.
I work either way, you see – assisted or unassisted – because that is what you must do in order to live a fully creative life. I work steadily, and I always thank the process. Whether I am touched by grace or not, I thank creativity for allowing me to engage with it at all.
Because either way, it’s all kind of amazing – what we get to do, what we get to attempt, what we sometimes get to commune with.
Gratitude, always.
Always, gratitude.
[pp 72-75]
Sources
Dicks, Matthew. Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling. New World Library, 2018.
Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. National Geographic Books, 2016. Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Shambhala Publications, 1986.
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Shambhala Publications, 1986.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. National Geographic Books, 1995.
Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it For Life. Simon & Schuster, 2003.