Posts Tagged ‘Toastmasters’

The Birth of an Adult Storyteller

Friday, April 17th, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

When I see wrinkles, around my own eyes or someone else’s, I think of all the experiences hidden behind them, decades of life now strewn throughout the vast tundra of the mind. If only I could know those memories, they might teach me important lessons and they certainly would bring deeper appreciation for the journey. What had those eyes seen? But memories are unknowable in their scattered and disorganized state, and until recently, I was one of the multitudes who had no inkling of how to convert a lifetime of memories into a story. Now, as I scan my life, I think I see the reason.

During my childhood, every Wednesday my dad came home from his drugstore to join us for dinner. Using the table as a pulpit, Dad’s voice swelled with excitement. “This guy walked in and showed me a half empty tube of ointment. He said it wasn’t working.” Then Dad laughed. “He wanted to return it. Can you believe it?” He slapped the table. My mother, sister, and I ate quietly, and when Dad paused we said “Umm,” giving him the desired reassurance that it was the other guy who was crazy. Then he plowed on to another story and another. I barely thought about those dinners for most of my life. But now that I’m writing a memoir, I replay the scenes, and learn about my family and myself.

If Dad had been a real storyteller, he would have been attentive to his audience’s reaction, providing us with enough information to enter the scene. As a storyteller Dad would have been tuning into our response, watching our body language, and steering his story in a way that would capture and move our imagination. But Dad’s anecdotes lacked detail. And even more important, he dominated the room with his feelings, rather than giving us the psychic space to get in touch with our own. The narratives had a few elements of storytelling, but not enough to be entertaining.

Of course, I can’t just blame Dad. Storytelling is not taken very seriously in our culture, and I doubt he was taught much about it. I know I wasn’t. After 18 years of education, I can’t remember a single course about how to shape a story of myself. As a result, whenever I tried to tell about my experiences, memories tumbled and tangled and I grew accustomed to evading the subject altogether.

In my forties, I began to wish I had grown up learning this skill. At first, it was just a sadness, a gripe. I complained to the Fates, “Why didn’t I learn?” And then, when no good answer followed, I shrugged, unable to see a path beyond my limited ability.

An adult can learn to tell stories

Finally, after years of whining about not being a born story teller, I began to read books about it. For example, I read Robert McKee’s book called “Story,” and Chris Vogler’s book, “The Writer’s Journey.” Gradually I gained confidence that storytelling can be learned, and like Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, I was prepared to demand it as my inalienable right.

But I found a new problem. Trying to improve my ability to construct a story made me feel vulnerable. What if my initial attempts were laughable, amateurish, and made me look stupid? The thought of being criticized actually frightened me. Fortunately, I had already experienced and conquered a similar fear. A few years earlier, I wanted to speak in public. My initial attempts indeed made me feel stupid, moronic, and incompetent. I kept pushing. I joined Toastmasters International, attended their meetings and followed their system. After a couple of years, I was no longer afraid, and could speak in front of an audience.

I wanted to repeat this learning process, finding groups to help me overcome my fear of writing. Writing groups are harder to find than Toastmasters was, but gradually, through persistent networking and internet research, I located and joined a variety of writing groups… Some at my local library… some listed on the internet… Some monthly meetings and some annual conferences.

The more I connected with other writers, the more I realized writing was not that much different from public speaking. In both media, it was up to me to tune into the audience and make sure they were with me. Gradually, I was able to increase my confidence and improve my skill.

Pass it on

Later in his life, my father worked on his skills, too. He attended a public speaking class and I suspect one of the lessons he learned was to speak with greater awareness of his audience. It would be wonderful to talk it all over with him, but that won’t be possible. He’s moved on. And I can’t teach this information to my kids, since I don’t have any.

And that raises another challenge. Without an audience, my story does not exist, like a tree unheard, falling in a forest. So now I research further and find memoir, senior, and other groups where people share their lives. The effort has ignited my imagination, and propelled me on a fascinating journey. Speaking and writing with them opens me to a new way of relating to people. Now, I can reveal the stories behind my own wrinkles. And by listening and reading, I am discovering how other people earned theirs.

Notes:

Online critique groups: Internet Writers Workshop,
National Association of Memoir Writers, NAMW,

Toastmasters International

Ronni Bennett’s elder story telling site
Sharon Lippincott’s Memory Writing Blog

Yahoo group discussion for aspiring memoir writers. To subscribe send an empty email to:

lifewritersforum-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

 
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Afraid to write your memoir? Read this book!

Monday, October 13th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

Jamie Blyth was one of the 25 hot bachelors competing on the Reality Television show, the Bachelorette. While all the contestants were anxious to win the girl, Jamie faced an additional challenge. He had been fighting for years to overcome frightening bouts of anxiety. Appearing on the show was his way of proving to himself he could stare into the jaws of his worst fears and survive. Even though he didn’t win the contest, he did succeed in appearing in embarrassing situations on national television. Oprah Winfry saw his victory as an inspiring example of overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. She invited him onto her show where he shared his story with millions of viewers.

Just a few years earlier, Jamie was so terrified to talk to girls, his heart raced and he couldn’t breathe. He thought he was going to die. First, he tried the obvious defense. He stopped dating, and became increasingly isolated and lonely, a common problem for people with social phobia. He took a job as a sales person and to his horror felt the same anxiety flooding him during important sales calls. Unwilling to give in to these limitations, he kept looking for solutions. Finally, with therapy, self-help books, and relentless effort he reduced his anxiety enough to confront his two worst fears in one crazy act – selling himself to a girl, in front of a national audience.

With co-author Jenna Glatzer he shared the details of his story in “Fear is no longer my reality,” a combination memoir and self-help book. The book is a wonderful resource for anyone suffering from social anxiety. It also contains interesting lessons for memoir writers.

Click here for the Amazon page for Fear is No Longer My Reality
Click here for Jenna Glatzer’s Home Page

A growing interest in the inner workings of other people
Many people think that Reality Television is a sign the world is falling apart. I have a different perspective. I think shows about real people indicate the world is falling together. We’re getting more interested in each other. This is an exciting development for memoir writers. In these more curious times, people are more likely than ever to want to know what goes on in your mind, what choices you have made, hardships you have suffered and overcome. But are you ready to satisfy their curiosity?

To write your memoir, you sit alone, turning inward, coaxing memories from your mind out your fingers and onto a page, where they sit silently, patiently, waiting for readers. Finding readers requires action. You must leave your desks and reach out to the public. This intimidates most writers, who don’t feel comfortable persuading anyone of anything. We ask ourselves, “Why should they be interested in me? Who are they anyway? And why should I care what they think?”

The commonly quoted statistic is that more people are afraid of public speaking than of dying. (A good joke about this is that most people at a funeral would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.) Public speaking is only one manifestation of a broader problem. People are nervous about exposing themselves to strangers. For example, we fear that by talking about ourselves online we are opening ourselves to danger. Such misgivings about your relationship to the public can stifle your writing. Why bother to write what you’re unwilling to share?

Fear of the public certainly contains valid concerns, which the anxious mind then amplifies into predictions of catastrophe. Once formed, such predictions are hard to ignore. Following this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you would naturally want to stay as isolated as possible. And that becomes a pattern which increases loneliness and reduces options. To tell people your story, take a page from Jamie Blyth’s book. He learned to fight back against these energy-draining thoughts and emotions, and thereby expanded his options in the world.

While I’ve read a number of self-help books about social anxiety, “Fear Is No Longer My Reality” by Jamie Blyth and Jenna Glatzer is the first memoir I’ve read on the subject. It lets me feel Jamie’s frustration and panic, and then lets me share his efforts to move beyond these limitations.

Things to learn from the style of the book
Jamie’s story was co-written by Jenna Glatzer, a founder of the online writing community AbsoluteWrite.com. It turns out that ghost written memoirs are fairly common, since many people would like to have their story told, without necessarily going through the skill building required to write it themselves. I belong to an organization dedicated to this craft, the Association of Personal Historians, and understanding how someone can help someone else tell their story is one of the things about memoirs that I continue to research.

From the structure of the book, I learned several nonfiction techniques. For example, Jenna included interviews with Jamie’s friends and coworkers, as well as interview snips from experts on social anxiety.

Jenna Glatzer’s other book on Social Anxiety

To learn more about social anxiety, I looked up Jenna Glatzer’s other book on this subject, co-written with psychologist Paul Foxman. “Conquering Panic and Anxiety Disorders: Success Stories, Strategies, and Other Good News.” It’s a compilation of first-person stories about facing and overcoming social anxiety. Reading this series of two or three page accounts of individual battles with social anxiety gave me an overview of the way this fear of the public can affect a variety of people, and also gave me an example of an anthology approach, another format that can work well for some types of lifestory telling.

Jenna herself has suffered from this debilitating anxiety, which makes her an expert in her own right, struggling along with the people she is writing about. By writing these two books about social anxiety she followed the classic advice, “write what you know”, turning a problem into an opportunity, thinking about the problem in far greater detail and more personally than most people who are not similarly obsessed with the issues. Her personal experience increases the level of intimacy and personal connection between the author and the reader, making the book more valuable as a resource to someone who wants to push through fear of the public, and open themselves up to the risks and the pleasures of people seeking to know each other in new, more imaginative, and more intimate ways than ever before.

Note
I couldn’t find any books specifically oriented to helping writers overcome social anxiety, and so I wrote onne, based on my reading and research, and then my work with other writers, and I added a chapter to my self-help book for writers, Four Elements for Writers, by Jerry Waxler, M.S. available from my website. http://www.jerrywaxler.com/four_elements.html

Note
I am one of the many people who have been through Toastmasters, International, an almost magical program which allowed me to work through my fears of public speaking in a safe environment, complete with gentle helpful tips from peers, and a method that worked for tens of thousands of people.

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