Write Your Story with Ally FallonIn the final episode of the season, I walk you through my process for writing a story and share why it’s so important to look for patterns, repetition and the meaning you make of what takes place. I’ll see you back in a few weeks for next season. Until then, if you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate and review.
Pick up the pieces of your life, pulled them back together with the word to write all the beauty and piece and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story.
You got the.
Words and said, don't you think it's time to let them out and write them down and cover what it's all about and write.
Your story.
Write you, write your story.
Hi there, write your story. Listeners, this is Ali fallon your host, and this is your final episode of season one of the Write Your Story Podcast. Season two is going to be coming at you in just a couple of weeks. But what I wanted to do with today's episode is offer a little bit of a recap of what we've talked about so far in the season and give you even more practical insight about how to take the formula that I've taught you so far, the elements of the framework, and to apply those elements to your ual real life to take that story and get it recorded on paper. And I do have another special guest in my studio today who you may or may not hear much from. My daughter Nella is in the studio with me and she's watching a show on her iPad right behind me. So if you hear any little mouse like noises, that's probably her. And also maybe we'll get her to say hi at some point in the show. This is hashtag mom life right here. Anyway, I wanted to start by saying that after my episode with my husband last week, where we shared some elements of the story that we've been living through for the last couple of years, I wanted to reiterate, or even say clearly for the first time that if I were going to sit down and write that story, or if I were going to coach Matt to sit down and write that story, because our stories would be a little different if I told it versus if he told it, the first thing that I would do is I would sit down and create a timeline of events. So I wanted this to be really clear, because what I want you to know is that if you want to sit down and write your story, the first thing that you need to do is write what happened. And I want to make this as simple for you as possible. By that, I mean like, peel back all the layers of you know why this is so complicated, or the story you tell yourself in your brain that you aren't a great writer, or you don't know where to start or whatever. This is just as simple as sitting down and creating a timeline of events. So in other words, if I were going to sit down and do this, I would just get out a sheet of paper and I would do this in bullet points. Or the other option would be to turn your paper sideways so that it's horizontal and draw a line down the center of the paper and literally create dates for a real life story. Sometimes this is really helpful for your brain to help you organize it. So I'm just going to kind of do this while I'm talking to you about it. But I take my piece of paper, I turn it sideways, and I put little slashes along the timeline, just as if you were creating a timeline events, Like you're a detective and you're trying to solve a mystery. So I would probably put the honeymoon story first. That happened in what would that have been, December of twenty nineteen. Then another plot point that I would put on here would be getting pregnant or finding out we were pregnant with my daughter, so that happened in also December of twenty nineteen. Maybe I would even go back a step further and put our wedding on here. We got married November eighth, twenty nineteen. So you get my point. I don't need to go through every single plot point, but maybe I'll keep drawing this out so that I can show you on Instagram. But I would literally list out all the things that took place, the things that we talked about in last week's episodes. So I would put on here July of twenty twenty, giving birth in LA and the height of the pandemic, I would put on here March twenty twenty. I remember so vividly Matt finding out about south By Southwest being canceled. So all of those plot points that you heard us talk about last week, I would put those on the timeline and I would put them in order. And this is going to be an evolving document for you, because what will happen as you begin to tell the story back to yourself is you're going to remember details that you had once forgotten. That's because you didn't actually forget the details. They're just filed away in a subconscious part of your brain that isn't in your short term memory, so you're not thinking about them every day, but they are filed away in your brain, and when you begin the writing process, you access that part of your brain that we don't access all the time. And as you access that part of your brain, these memories are going to bubble up to the surface. So for some of you, maybe you're writing about a very traumatic event that happened to you years and years ago, maybe it's several decades ago. As you begin to write about what took place, it's very likely that memories will come back to you that you haven't thought about out in a very long time. So expect that to happen. Know that it's going to happen. Allow this document to be an evolving document. And just like I did a second ago where I was like, actually, maybe I'll go back a step further and include our wedding in this timeline, feel free to do that. Feel free to include as much of the story or as little of the story as you.
Want to include.
I don't know yet, as I'm telling this story, what's the beginning of the story, And I don't know what's the end of the story. You don't need to know that. You just need to get all of the information on the paper so that you know exactly what you have to play with. I've used the analogy of putting together a jigsaw puzzle before, and I want you to think of this part of the process almost like dumping out the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle onto the table so that you can see everything and you have a clear picture of what you're working with. Once you've dumped the box out, the next step of putting together a jigsaw puzzle is finding those edge pieces or corner pieces and putting together the edge so now you know the boundaries that you're working inside of. And we're going to do something similar with your story. But the very first step is so simple, and do not overcomplicate this. It's just literally writing down the details of what took place. The second thing I would do if I was going to take this story from my life and turn it into a written piece of work is I would look at the plot points as I've laid them out, the moments in the story, and I would start to pay attention to If I see patterns, you're probably going to see more than one pattern show up. An example of a pattern would be something I touched on so briefly at the end of last week's episode, which is the pattern of water showing up again and again. I talked about the story on our honeymoon when Matt and I are on that hike and the guy who's hiking with us sees the waterfall and says, she just keeps on giving, doesn't she, And that really stuck out to us. And then later in the story, Matt meets a guide named Johan who's this expert on water and starts teaching Matt all about you know, how to recycle and reuse water and why water is so important and calls water the blood of the Earth and really changes our paradigm completely on how we see a resource like water, and beginning to see this water theme showing up again and again and again to teach us about living in a state of abundance. You know that resources, when we use them correctly, can replenish themselves. That pattern shows up again and again and again. If you listen to last week's episode two, you probably also saw the pattern of presence showing up more than one time. In our conversation. We kept coming back to that over and over again. You'll begin to see patterns like that show up in your story, and you might not fully understand what the pattern means. You might see a pattern like the water pattern and be like, huh, it's weird. I see that red hat showing up again and again, but I don't understand why that pattern would be significant. But I'm telling you that if you see a pattern showing up in your story, the pattern is significant, so pay cless attention to it. You may not know what the pattern means, but the pattern will show its meaning to you as you begin to write the story.
So first thing to do.
Is lay out the timeline and just get on the page what happened. You can do this in bullet points, you can do it in an actual time line fashion. Return your page sideways, and you know, create a physical timeline. Second thing to do is to notice and recognize the patterns that are showing up again and again. These patterns are beginning to show you what the story is about. So this would be maybe a third step I would take is to ask myself, do I have any insight on what this story is about? Your story is going to be about one hundred thousand different things. The same story the same details can be about so many different things. The story of the last three years of my life could be about learning presence. It could be about learning abundance. It could be about constructing spirituality and seeing the world in a different way. It could be about becoming a mother. It could be about so many different things. It could be about building a surf park. So as I think about what my story is about, remember that there are three elements to what a story is about. These are what I want to think about. I want to think about first the hero of my story. And if you go back to the episode where I teach about a hero who wants something, you know that the hero of a personal memoir, a personal.
Narrative is you. The hero has to be you.
So this is the first thing that your story is going to teach you is to center yourself as the hero of the story. To think of yourself as the protagonist who's going to move this plot forward. And that's the first element of what is this story about. That's the first clue that you have to answer that question, what is my story about? The second clue that you have about what your story is about is the one big problem that you're up against. And your one big problem show up in a handful of different ways. I know in the episode with Matt last week, I talk about his one big problem, or he shares that his one big problem is that he's getting in his own way. So that's definitely a really poignant problem that we could build a story around. If we're telling the story about building a surf park or about building a community around surfing in a landlocked state, then the one big problem may not be that he's getting in his own way. That may be a problem that he faces along the way. If the story is about a man who has zero development experience trying to bring a massive development surrounding surfing to a landlocked state, then the one big problem that matches that hero is really about water. We're trying to bring surfing to a landlocked state, but how do you do that when there's no ocean? You know, we're trying to bring enough water to the property that we can actually go surfing in the middle of Tennessee. So what you want is for each element of the controlling idea, the hero, the problem, and the resolution to match each other so that there's a feeling of cohesiveness around the story. And the way to get there is to play with this a little bit until the three of them match so that they have that cohesiveness. So as you're considering what insight do I have into what is this story about, one clue that you have is who is the hero? What does that person want? What is the one big problem that that hero's up against? See if you can get the hero and what they want to match the problem. And then the third piece of that controlling idea is the resolution. So ask yourself, how do I want this story to resolve. I'm presuming that, much like Matt and myself, that the story that you're writing doesn't already have a resolution, because you likely wouldn't be writing it if it had a perfect resolution. But maybe it does have a physical, tangible resolution. Maybe that part of the story is over, but you just haven't created a moral to the story yet to give it that full cohesiveness. So the hero, the problem, and the resolution all work together to create that controlling idea, and they all need to have a feeling like they match each other, like they fit together as one whole. So let's go back and review one more time. You've got this set of events that's happened to you. You turn those into a timeline. You literally list out, here's what happened. Then you pay attention to the events that took place, and you ask yourself what patterns are here. You could list out the patterns. You could say, Oh, I see a pattern of water showing up again and again. I see a pattern of presence or a lack of presence.
I see a.
Pattern of this same teaching that seems to be coming to me from multiple different sources, in multiple different places over the span of years, and I'm still not sure I fully understand what that teaching is about. You could see a pattern of like a physical object showing up again and again, or a person who keeps coming into your life, and that doesn't totally make sense to you. The patterns may or may not make sense to you, but just pay attention to where the patterns are in the story and what patterns exist. Then the third element of this is asking yourself, what clues do I have about what this story is about. The story could be about a thousand things, but we're going to talk about a hero who wants something, who overcomes some kind of big problem, and who finds a resolution at the end of the story. And you want all three of those things to match each other. If you can get through those three steps, the timeline, the patterns, and the controlling idea or what the story is about. You have come a really, really long way in terms of getting started writing your story. The only other thing I would add to that, simply because this is a question that trips people up, is I would talk about how to know where to enter the story and where to exit the story. So I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that you don't necessarily enter the story. For example, at our wedding on November eighth, twenty nineteen, that's not the beginning of our story. I would have to sit with the story and play with it a little bit to know whether the beginning of a story is in Patagonia.
That's not really where I would start it.
I don't think I think I would start our story on March ninth or whatever, twenty twenty, when Mac gets the call about south By Southwest and things shift for us pretty immediately. That's probably where I would start the story. And I'll talk in a minute about why I would start the story there. But there are all these details to the story that happened before that that don't get left out of the story. They now just become the backstory. The story, and the purpose of the backstory is only to give you insight about the hero of the story that you need in order to understand the hero, understand what they want, Understand why the problem they're up against it's such a big problem, and understand why the resolution is as big of a deal as it is. So I know that's a lot to digest, but my point is that if you're wondering to yourself, where do I enter into the story? What date does the story begin? What date does the story end? There are several different ways to approach this, but the way I typically do it is I enter the story at the point of the most tension, so that you've got a great hook to hook the reader from the very beginning, and then you just increase the tension, raise the stakes, raisis stakes, racist stakes all the way through the story until the story resolves. So the story begins at the point that the hero is facing his or her massive problem, and the story ends when that problem is resolved or when the hero has transformed, or both. At the same time, if for the context of your story, the story that you're living in your life that you want to turn into a piece of writing, if you have the timeline listed out, if you understand the patterns, if you know what the story is about, or at least you think you have a really good guess at it, If you can get a sense of where the story begins and where it ends. What you have is a really solid outline of the story that you're about to write. It's not the story in written form yet, but you have a really solid outline. And then what you begin to do is use these plot points that you listed out in your timeline as the pieces to the puzzle. So you've got the outline, which is the edge pieces all put together, and you have a sense of what the picture, the final picture, is going to look like, and then you begin to place those plot points in place based on the formula that I've taught you in the first season of this show. And then you can start to write little vin yetes and put them together into what will become a very cohesive piece of writing. Once you have that outline, the putting the vignettes together actually becomes quite easy. This process doesn't all happen in one single sitting. In fact, if you pulled out a piece of paper right now and decided to start creating your timeline of events. Here's what happened first, and then after that, here's what happened, and then after that, this happened next. More than likely you'd get a good bit of events on the page to start, But over the course of the next day or two or five, or few weeks or a few months, more and more of the experiences that you had are going to begin to come back to you, and you can continue to add them into that timeline. And as those experiences come back to you, it's going to clarify for you what the story is really about. So maybe your first draft at writing a controlling idea, who you think the hero is, what that person was after, what the problem was that they were trying to solve, what the resolution was. Maybe your first draft at that isn't the actual controlling idea, but it's a really good first shot at it, and what it gives you is something to edit. I always think that coming at the blank page is a lot more difficult than coming at a page with something on it, because at least if there's something on the page, maybe it's something that you go, no, no, no, that's not it, that's not the story, that's not how I want to tell it, but at least you have that clarity, at least you go process of elimination. That's not what the story is about. So if you could get a first draft at the controlling idea, even if you know it's not quite right, then you at least have something that you can begin to shape as you work with the story. So don't expect this to happen in a single sitting. You know, Matt and I had that conversation on the podcast that aired last week. We have conversations similar to that conversation in our life all the time. We go on walks with our kids and we talk about what's going on in our lives and talk to each other exactly the same as you heard us talk to each other in that episode. We talk because of this work that I do and because of the way that my brain works. We talk about our lives inside of a story structure a lot too. And so this is an evolving experience. It's an evolving document. Your timeline is an evolving document, Your story is an evolving document. Don't feel like you have to nail this down in a single sitting or even in a couple of sittings. You can give yourself space and time to let this percolate. But I would encourage you if you've been listening to the episodes in this season, and if you've felt intrigued and you've thought to yourself, oh, I think I have a story that I'd like to tell. But it feels a little complicated, and I'm confused by it still, and I'm not sure where to start. And you might even have a story that says I'm not a great writer and I'm not even really sure that I would ever show this to anyone. Don't worry about any of that. Just see if you can dip your toe in the water. See if you can just get a little bit of a start, See if you can just maybe sit down and start to create that timeline, and stand back and observe and watch what happens as you begin to let this thing percolate, because there is an element to which the story will sort of write itself. The story will begin to show itself to you. I said in the Bonus episode that I shared the interview with my friend Don Miller. I shared the insight that I had about how writing your story is like mining your story for the wisdom that it's trying to give you or the wisdom that you have to share with the world. It's like uncovering that wisdom inside of the story. So as you begin to put the words on the page, that wisdom is just going to show itself to you. You're not going to have to dig for it. It's not a ton of work. Just know, if you have this urge to write your story, it's almost like your story is kind of knocking on your door, going I have something to show you, I have something to teach you. Are you willing to listen in while I whisper to you the secrets that I've been trying to reveal to you. So I hope you'll give it a shot, is what I'm saying. I hope you'll give it a shot. I hope you'll give yourself the shot. I hope you'll give your story the shot. And if it still feels kind of elusive to you or a little too ethereal or philosophical for you to really grab onto it, just know that in season two, I have a whole list of interviews coming that are going to be really.
Really helpful for you.
The vision for season two is about talking with people who may or may not be in a process of publishing, who have a story that they know they need to tell and need some assistance in telling it. And so whatever problems you're facing as you sit down to write your story, these people are facing those same problems. I want to unpack the problems with them and help them unlock the secret of their story, so that hopefully you can unlock the secret of your story too. Thank you so much for following along with me in this journey. It is truly an honor to be doing this work. It's an honor that you're tuning in. It's an honor that you're trusting me with this story that you have inside of you that is so sacred and so special. And my intention for this is that that story could be unlocked so that you can share your brilliance with the world. I'm so grateful that we get to be doing this together. I'm so excited. There's so much more fun coming in season two and I can't wait to.
Share it with you.
So I hope you'll find us back here then in just a couple of weeks. Also, please, if you're liking the show, please subscribe to the show. Please download your episodes, Please like and rate us give us a five star review. That's all very helpful as it relates to sharing this message on a broader scale. I so appreciate you and I can't to see you next season. Okay, Nela would like to make her podcast debut. Okay, Nella, you asked me how to do a podcast.
Here is how we do it.
I'm gonna ask you some questions and you answer my questions. Okay, Okay. What is your favorite color? What is your teacher's name?
Say? What do you like to do with your brother Charlie Gray? Yeah? Where? What do you guys like to play? Upside? Yeah? What do you like to sing? Nela?
Doc? Make stuffs?
Doc mcsteffans, Mama? What you an me?
Nothing?
I love you, I love you too, I love you.
Gail's fine, all right, And that's rap.
