Shared Stories
Want to share a story with me?
My FAVORITEST thing in the WHOLE WORLD is to share stories, like you and me, we sit on the dock with the geese squawking and the alligator circling while the citronella candle loses its war with the mosquitoes. Or in the back sticky booth of a McDonald’s, eating crappy food in greasy wrappers. Or in a noisy bar where we’ve had one more than we should have, and we have to lean in close to hear over the screaming crowd. And we tell each other stories.
Made up stories.
We jointly make up backstories for each person who comes in to order a cafe latte and happy meals. Or we agree to create fictional pasts that brought us to those bar stools. Or dream of impossible futures while swatting mosquitoes.
Or the real stories.
Our own funniest moments. Our most gut-wrenching ones. Or the times that both were true at once. We laugh, we cry, we get snotty, and no longer look like we got ourselves made up to come visit. We’re two soul-friends suddenly, because we each hold a piece of the other’s story.
But I usually sit at home and make up my own stories, and I’ve recently started throwing them out into the world like confetti, hoping to spread a little sparkle around.
Today, though, I thought of a new way for you and me to share stories, and I thought you might want to hear it.
CREATING A SHARED STORY
We gather a couple more wayward souls and convince them it would be fun. We decide on a well-known story, like a fairy tale, with a known structure and familiar parts. Then we divide the story into the number of parts that there are people. And we each write our own version.
We DO NOT agree on time frame (contemporary, historic, futuristic) or setting (original, new, pretend). We just write our part without consulting the others.
Then we put it together as if we meant it.
This big, bold retelling of Snow White, set in Paris in 3037 and on Pluto in 005 and today in my backyard down by the blue heron who definitely does not want to share its space with our story.
And we gather back in our secret place, and we share them in order of the parts.
That’s all.
It’s just a game I made up right now, like the house full of children that moved in next door, who spontaneously make up games like Ultimate Tag, or the way we used to when we were small, and the loam cliffs beside the Mississippi River had worn away to make perfect crevices we used as fairy forts. Or that time in the future when our kids take our keys away and have to drop us off at the McDonald’s and want to know why we still go there when we’ve never really liked the food. Why can’t we choose a new place, a cleaner place, a hipper place? And you and me and our motley crew make up rules for our own spontaneous game.
Anyway . . .
That’s what occurred to me today while thinking about you.
