The Stories I Hear

Posted on | May 26, 2010 | 4 Comments

“If you’re not writing your own story, you’re a character in someone else’s.” – Chris Brogan

I keep finding the most interesting coincidences popping up in my life lately. This quote from Chris, originally found as a Tweet, came just a few days after a big event at work that, in many ways, revolves around the idea of stories.

Chris is right, of course – so many of us choose to start blogs or journals in some form because we want to be able to write our own stories. We don’t want other people to speak for us. And it’s not just adults who should be or are writing the stories. Part of my job involves reading, editing and publishing the stories of students in Boston, young writers who work extraordinarily hard to write stark, honest and deeply personal stories.

But while I agree with Chris that you need to be writing your own story, I would offer my own addendum: it’s just as important to hear the stories of other people around you.

Storytelling as we know it originally started both as an oral tradition and as a way of ensuring that lives and legacies of people lived on through their stories. The point of storytelling wasn’t just to tell the story; it was also to keep the stories alive for future generations by making sure other people heard the stories and then turned around and told them again.

It’s kind of like the old “if a tree falls in a forest” question: if someone tells a story, but there’s no one around to hear, was the story actually told?

The stories I hear and read from the students at work aren’t flashy or neatly packaged. These kids don’t have fancy blogs or Twitter accounts with thousands of followers. What they do have is an innate need for someone to hear what they are saying. I think kids often feel like no one hears them. I had three attentive parents and a bunch of older siblings and yet I still felt like no one heard me or understood. It’s probably why I gravitated towards writing in the first place.

Those of us who write blogs, knowing that we’re putting parts of ourselves on display for the world, don’t do so because we think no one will read our blog. It’s exactly the opposite – we put what we have to say in a public place precisely because we’re hoping that someone will hear us, even if that someone is only one person.

Like Chris’ quote implies, we write our own stories to ensure that others don’t write it for us, but the stories we hear and read are just as important. In hearing those stories, and passing them along, we keep those stories alive and we give the authors – young, old and in-between – the satisfying sense that someone out there is, in fact, listening.

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