What story are you telling yourself?
How do we tell ourselves stories in our studies, dreams, waking, gaming, and entertainment?
Storytelling Thoughts
1. “Art is not equivalent to a momentary whim or caprice. And yet, contradictorily, you cannot have art without whimsy. You cannot dance without stumbling now and then. You cannot build the story without mastering the tools the way children learn to play and speak – by discovering the truth while telling it,” Walter Mosley, Elements of Fiction. This is a tiny book on the beauty, whimsy, and necessities of fiction. I found it at the library and now it’s on my wish list.
2. One night I had a strange dream which I remembered upon waking. Near the end of the dream, I was taking a photograph of fellow teachers in a narrow orange and brown auditorium – the oddest part of this dream was that all the teachers were holding purple delphinium in front of them, so I was taking a picture of a roomful of flower vases held by people. It was pretty strange, but I have been reading a great deal about flowers, their meanings, and the language of flowers so I am guessing that was an influence. Delphiniums mean “the ability to transcend the bounds of space and time… an open heart… and lightness,” among other things, according to The Complete Language of Flowers: A Definitive and Illustrative History by S. Theresa Dietz.
I find dreams to be interesting bits of things - some kind of working out of subconscious thoughts, maybe influenced by books or things, and sometimes these dreams influence my writing, and other times, I simply think, hmm, and let them slip back into the morass of my imagination.
3. I’ve been part of a reading intensive Bible study this year called Perspectives on Global Missions, and our two most recent guest speakers were from Namibia and Australia who both felt called to be missionaries to America from their home countries, which flips the script on what I imagine the stories we tell ourselves about missionaries.
4. What stories are you telling yourself? Are they accurate or do you need to flip the script? We’ve all seen some questions like this in the last decade or so, but I saw them in a movie script as I watched Your Place or Mine, a recent Netflix rom-com. (Yes, I do watch some of those.) Lines from the movie that stood out to me:
“It’s to teach you to tell a story to other people about you that’s better than you tell yourself cause the stories we tell ourselves are very limiting.”
And much later in the movie:
“Stop telling yourself that story.”
5. I have always prided myself on finishing semi-extended games, like Monopoly, Catan, Scrabble, and Dominion, but this week as I stared into my living room at an unfinished game that had been there since mid-January, I knew it was time to pack it away for a different season of life. In this season of life, as a family we are more likely to play Speed or Shed. This made me ask myself, what do the games we play say about us? or do they say anything?
5 Writing Prompts:
1. One night, I dreamed of…. (or she dreamed of, or he dreamed of)
2. Writing is ….
3. As he approached the roundabout, Henry’s jet-lagged exhaustion crumbled into dazed confusion. He had never seen so many roads coming into one intersection before. He…
4. As I (he, she, depending on your preferred writing pov), went to pick up the puzzle pieces, …
5. What stories are you telling yourself today?