I Wonder Who I’ll Meet in Your Stories

My son has known me his entire life.

But he hasn't known me my entire life.

That distinction feels especially interesting right now because Bill and I just started a writing community together. We're going to write in it too, taking the same prompts as everyone else and following them wherever they happen to lead.

Which means my grown son may be about to meet some women he has never met before.

Me at seven. Me at sixteen. The young woman who made some spectacularly questionable decisions. The woman who stayed too long sometimes and left too soon others. The one who loved people she shouldn't have, got scared, got brave, changed her mind, and occasionally had no freaking idea what she was doing.

Bill knows whole stretches of my life mostly as information.

And information isn't story.

I know that because my daughter, Amy, recently wrote a story for Her Wings Appeared, the book Ali Benjamin and I have coming out soon. Amy wrote about something difficult and deeply personal. I knew what had happened. I'd lived close enough to some of it that I thought I understood.

Then I read her story and, for a few pages, I wasn't standing beside my daughter watching what happened to her. I was inside the experience with her.

There is a difference.

It makes me wonder how many people I believe I know because I know the broad strokes of their lives. Where they grew up. Who they married. What they do for work. Who their kids are. Maybe even what broke their heart once.

But the broad strokes leave a hell of a lot of blank canvas.

I've always been nosy about what lives underneath people. Not nosy in the tell-me-your-business-so-I-can-tell-everyone-else way. I'm interested in the stuff that makes a person that particular person. The contradictions. The strange connections. What you notice that I would walk right past. What you believe and why. What happened to you at nine that still makes you do something at sixty-nine.

Small talk and I do fine for a while. Eventually, though, I want to know something real.

And I love weird people. I mean that as a very high compliment, probably because I am one.

Years ago, I found Jacob Nordby's Blessed Are the Weird, and even the title felt like it gave me permission. Yes. These are my people. The creatives, questioners, misfits and people who have wandered down a few roads that weren't on the original itinerary.

The older I get, though, the more I suspect we're all weird once you know enough about us.

Some of us just hide the corroboration better.

And now Bill and I are about to sit down at a writing table with people whose stories we don't know yet.

That may be the part I'm looking forward to most.

Who is coming?

There will probably be someone who hasn't written anything beyond emails and grocery lists in thirty years sitting alongside someone who has filled notebooks since she was twelve. Someone may write every morning before the rest of the house wakes up and still wrestle a paragraph to the ground. Someone else may insist, "I'm not really a writer," and then casually drop a sentence that makes the rest of us stare at the screen.

I want to meet the person who can make three pages about a terrible haircut worth reading. The one who remembers the exact smell of her grandmother's kitchen forty years later. The man with the inexplicable collection in his basement. The person who starts writing about an old key and ends up somewhere she never intended to go.

I want the funny stories and the painful ones. The silly memories, questionable decisions, old loves, stubborn regrets, family legends, things we survived and things that, even now, we can't quite explain.

And some of what we write won't be very good.

Thank God.

Mine won't always be either.

Writing can get so damn serious. We talk about craft and structure and voice and publication and whether something is "good." I care about all of that. I want to become a better writer for as long as I'm capable of putting words together.

But I never want getting better at writing to cost me the pleasure of writing.

I want to play with a sentence until it finally says what I meant. I want to write something lousy and come back later able to see why. I want to read somebody else's story and think, How the hell did she do that? Then I want to figure it out and try something new in my own writing.

And every once in a while, I want to begin with one memory and discover that it was never really about what I thought it was about.

That's some of the magic for me.

There's another part of this I'm especially excited about: hearing some of these stories.

Maya Angelou said, "Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning."

I've loved those words for years because I've felt the truth of them. A story changes when the person who lived it reads it aloud. We hear where the writer slows down, where the laugh sneaks in before the funny part, where a familiar sentence suddenly becomes difficult to say.

So in our community, we'll have opportunities to voice our stories when we want to. Turn on the phone, read what you wrote, and let us hear it the way you hear it. No production and no performance. No need to make yourself camera-ready unless that makes you happy.

Just your story in your voice.

I have a feeling those readings may become some of my favorite moments.

Because the more I write, the more I'm struck by how much of one another remains undiscovered.

We can love someone for decades and still know almost nothing about the summer they were seventeen. We can raise children with someone and never hear about the teacher who changed the direction of their life. We can meet a friend for coffee every Thursday and have no idea what she once almost did, what she still wonders about, or why a certain song can wreck her in the grocery store.

There are entire worlds walking around inside people who look perfectly normal from the outside. Although, as we've already established, I'm suspicious of the normal ones.

Bill and I just opened the doors to Come Write With Us on Sunday, October 11.

I know some of the people who will be there. Most I don't.

I don't know what you've done or what you've lost. I don't know what makes you weird, what you've changed your mind about, what makes you laugh so hard you snort, or which memory will come charging back when you read a writing prompt on an otherwise ordinary morning.

I don't know what kind of writer you are. Maybe you don't either.

Mostly, I wonder who I'll meet in your stories.

And I'm pretty excited to find out.

Love is ALL there is,

Diana