Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back together with the word you write all the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start too fun When you write your story, you get the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down and cover what it's all about and write your story. Write, Write your story. Hi, and welcome to the Write Your Story Podcast. My name is Ali Fallon. If you don't already know me, you will get the chance to get to know me a little bit over the course of the next several episodes. But I just want to welcome you to the first season of this podcast, which is, like the title suggests, a place where you can come to learn how to write your story. And this is not just for people who consider themselves writers and who may or may not be on a publishing track. Maybe you do have an idea for a book that you'd like to write, or maybe you I don't have an idea for a book that you'd like to write, but you get told a lot you know you have such an interesting story you've got to write it down. Or maybe it's more internal for you that you have the sense that you have a story that needs to get told, and you just don't know where to start as it relates to telling it either way, whether you're you have you know, aspirations of being a published author, or whether you would just want to tell the story for the sake of yourself or maybe for your family. I want this podcast to be a place where you can learn how to do it, and where the process can become so simple that it's absolutely impossible to mess up. I am an author and a book coach. I've been working in publishing for the last fifteen years of my career, and I've got a lot of experience helping people write and edit, and publish and even market books. I also have my own experience. I've written three books that have my own name on them and have another one coming down the pipeline. But I think the most powerful part of my experience that applies to what we'll talk about here on the podcast is the experience that I've just had with writing my own story. So I'd worked in publishing for quite a long time at the point when my personal life took a massive left turn, and not only was this really unsettling for me in my personal life, but also I started to realize that because as an author, I was telling stories from my personal life. My personal life taking a left turn also affected my career as a published author. So, for example, during that time, I was going through a divorce and I was working on a book that was supposed to be my next book with my agent and my publisher, and that book started to feel to me like it just couldn't possibly be written. It didn't make sense anymore. I didn't really believe what I was writing about. I couldn't stand behind the concepts anymore. And yet there was this other story that was trying to be told. I would wake up in the morning and I would feel like I just got to get to the coffee and get in front of my computer and start writing down the things that are happening to me, and my publishing brain would be like, wait a second, that doesn't make any sense. You're never going to be able to publish this story. This is not something that you want to tell publicly. You know, this is a really personal thing that's going on to you. This is not going to move your career forward. And yet there was another voice that was like and not even a voice, it was like a force that couldn't be reckoned with a force that kept saying to me, you got to write down what's happening to you. And I couldn't not do it. I couldn't stop myself from doing it. So I spent every morning for at least two hours during that time, going to my favorite coffee shop and sitting down and just writing what was taking place in my life, writing what was happening, writing how I felt about it, writing what I thought about it. And in my mind, I thought that piece of work was going to live on my computer screen forever. I was never going to necessarily share it with anyone, or if I did, it would be with a couple of people really close to me. Happening through that experience is the experience of writing down that story revolutionized my life. It changed me irrevocably. It was the most powerful thing I've ever done for myself. And a lot of times now people will say something to me like, Wow, you're a different person now than you were back then, and that's so true, And I think a big piece of that is that I sat down to write the story. There's something so beautiful that happens when you learn to step outside of your story and see it as an onlooker instead of seeing it from the inside. There's an old adage, and I don't know who started this, that says, you can't read the label from the inside of the bottle. And that's so important to think about as it relates to telling your story. You know, when you're living your story, you're living inside of it and it's happening to you, and it might feel like the events that are coming at you or chaotic or random, or they don't make sense, they don't have a thread, don't they don't have a moral, they don't make sense, they don't have a cohesive way of being held together. But when you sit down and write your story, you begin to see yourself as the hero of a story. You begin to see that when you act and when you move, that you are the one who's moving the story forward. When you write your story, you start to see that there is a thread that holds the story together and that you were the one who got to decide what that thread was. So you suddenly begin to experience this agency over your life that you couldn't access before. I call this the narrator voice. It's like I start to see myself as the narrator of my own story. And if you think about a narrator, the narrator has access to insight and wisdom and intelligence that the hero of the story doesn't necessarily have access to. The narrator of the story sees the story from thirty thousand feet and is able to understand where the story is headed, even if the hero doesn't know that yet. So this experience of writing down the story was incredibly powerful for me. It shifted my life and transformed me forever. And also, unexpectedly, maybe two years after I wrote that story, I was able to share that story more publicly and it became my second book. It's called Indestructible. You can buy that wherever books are sold. But that experience of sharing the story more broadly was also really impactful for me. I also was able to connect to other women and people who had been through something similar to what I had been through, who had felt powerless, and who were able to step into a new kind of power in their life and recreate the ending of their own story. And I just started to wonder, I wonder what would happen if everyone had access to this tool. I wonder what would happen if other people who didn't work in publishing, could somehow understand how a story worked easily enough that they could turn their life into a story too. I wonder what would happen if I pulled back the curtain on how that works and gave people access to this really powerful tool. And as I was going through this process, I also uncovered a huge body of data that shows just how powerful writing can be to transform every aspect of your life. I mean, writing can transform your mood, it can change the way you feel about yourself. It can improve your mental health, it can improve your emotional health, it can improve your emotional intelligence. The data shows that writing can improve your relationships, it can improve your confidence. So it's just such a no brainer. If you have the impulse to write, that you follow that impulse, that you chase it down. And I hope what this podcast does is it just makes it so easy for you to do that that you can't possibly not do it. Now. Oddly, what I find happens with people who have a story they want to write is they also have a whole long list of yeah butts. So they have the I want to write my story, but I couldn't do it because I'm not a writer, or I couldn't do it because you know, I don't know anything about the world of publishing, or I couldn't do it because I wouldn't know where to start, or I don't have the time, or whatever. There's a whole long list of reasons why we tell ourselves that we couldn't possibly write our story. So what I want to talk about in this episode, in particular, is the why to write your story. I want to talk about why you can write your story, why you should write your story, why you're absolutely invited into this process, and why it can be such a no brainer to sit down and finally do it. The biggest reason that I want to focus on for why to write your story is simply because you want to. I think this is maybe one of the most underestimated reasons for why to do literally anything in our lives. But just because you want to, because you feel the impulse to write your story is enough for you to do it. In fact, I'm a believer that it's human impulse to write your story, that the desire to write your story is really the desire to understand yourself. It's the desire to share your life with other people. And what could be more human than that. In fact, the other day, I was driving the car and I've got a one year old in the two year old and my two and a half year old was in her car seat behind me, and I could hear her narrating her experience out loud. She was saying, we're going to the park. Daddy is at work, Mommy's driving the car. Charlie's sitting next to me in the seat, and it was so cute, and I just was soaking in the moment for a second, and then I realized, oh, my goodness, she is telling her story to herself, because this is human instinct. It is a natural human instinct to want to share the details of your life to yourself, if to no one beyond yourself, just to yourself, but even to her brother, and even to her mom, and even to her dad, and even to whoever's listening, just into the ether. It was instinct for her to just tell her story back to herself. It's her way of orienting herself inside of her life and understanding her place. It's her way of understanding her relationships to the other people around her. And this is as much a human instinct as it is for you. To sit down and write your story. So just because you want to can be absolutely enough reason for you to do it. The second reason I think to write your story is because it's fun. And I don't think we consider this a lot. We think of it like work. A lot of times when I hear writers talk about something they're working on, they talk about, you know, their piece of work or whatever, and I get, you know, the concept there. But my advice for writers is to think of your writing less like work and more like fun. Think of this like a jigsaw puzzle. Recently, I was on vacation and I was doing a jigsaw puzzle with my brother in law and my husband and my mother in law, and we laid off this huge, five thousand piece jigsaw puzzle on the table and we'd get the kids to bed, and we'd all, you know, drink a beer or drink a soda or whatever at night and sit at the table for hours and talk to each other and put this jigsaw puzzle together. And I was thinking about how much this is like putting your story together. It's a way to unwind, it's a way to enjoy connection to other people. It's a way to enjoy connection to yourself. It's a way to exercise your brain, it's a way to just enjoy yourself. So if you can think of writing your story like this, you're going to bring so much longevity to the writing process that wouldn't be there if it feels like work to you, and if it feels like a task that you need to get right, you need to get it perfect, or it's going to be wrong. Nobody's gonna like it, nobody's gonna read it. So instead, see if you can flip that on its head and think of this as something fun that you get to do at the beginning of the day or the end of the day, to unwind, to enjoy yourself, to connect other people, to connect to yourself, and see how much more longevity that brings to your writing. Writing also changes the way you see yourself. Remember I talked about a minute ago that when I sat down to write my story, I stopped seeing myself inside of my story and started seeing myself almost as an onlooker. I was watching myself inside of my story make choices that we're moving the story forward. And that's one of the great gifts of becoming the narrator of your story is that you start to see the story from the outside. Right, because it can heal you. Because the data literally shows that people who write regularly visit the doctor fifty percent less often for upper respiratory infections and flu. This is insane to me. This tells me that the writing process is actually shifting the way that your cells operate with one another. It's shifting your physical health. So if that's the case, think of how this can shift your mental health, your emotional health, and everything else in your life. Right, because it can inspire others, right, because it can inspire you, Right because you feel called to it, Right because you feel like you can't not do it. There are so many more reasons, but this is enough. Just know that the reasons that you already have to write your story is plenty, and hopefully I can make the process really simple and easy for you. One other thing to note is that this podcast is really designed for people who are writing personal narratives, which just means that this is a story about you from your life. But the principles of storytelling are so universal that you could also use this podcast to write a fictional story if you wanted. Maybe your fictional story is based on reality or you could use the concepts that I teach here to write a story about someone else. But just know that because this podcast is centered around someone who's writing a personal narrative, I'm going to be speaking directly to those folks here, and if you want to use this for fiction or for another kind of story, then feel free. What I'm going to do over the course of the next twelve weeks is I'm going to walk you through a tried and true process to choose the story from your life that you want to write, to outline the story, and to actually get the thing written. We are also going to talk about sharing your story, whether for you that means publishing or whether for you it means taking the brave step to share it with your therapist, or with your spouse, or with your best friend, or with your sister or someone in your life who you think would really get it. Either way, whether that's publishing or sharing individually, there's some different pieces of advice that I'll give, But whatever sharing means for you, I want you to be able to choose the story from your life, outline the story, write the story, and then share it intentionally. You're going to be able to do all that here. In the next twelve weeks, we'll get to know each other a little bit better, and I'm so excited to get started. I can't wait. I hope you're excited to learn how to write your story.

Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back together with the word you write all the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start too fun When you write your story, you get the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down and cover what it's all about and write your story. Write, Write your story. Hi, and welcome to the Write Your Story Podcast. My name is Ali Fallon. If you don't already know me, you will get the chance to get to know me a little bit over the course of the next several episodes. But I just want to welcome you to the first season of this podcast, which is, like the title suggests, a place where you can come to learn how to write your story. And this is not just for people who consider themselves writers and who may or may not be on a publishing track. Maybe you do have an idea for a book that you'd like to write, or maybe you I don't have an idea for a book that you'd like to write, but you get told a lot you know you have such an interesting story you've got to write it down. Or maybe it's more internal for you that you have the sense that you have a story that needs to get told, and you just don't know where to start as it relates to telling it either way, whether you're you have you know, aspirations of being a published author, or whether you would just want to tell the story for the sake of yourself or maybe for your family. I want this podcast to be a place where you can learn how to do it, and where the process can become so simple that it's absolutely impossible to mess up. I am an author and a book coach. I've been working in publishing for the last fifteen years of my career, and I've got a lot of experience helping people write and edit, and publish and even market books. I also have my own experience. I've written three books that have my own name on them and have another one coming down the pipeline. But I think the most powerful part of my experience that applies to what we'll talk about here on the podcast is the experience that I've just had with writing my own story. So I'd worked in publishing for quite a long time at the point when my personal life took a massive left turn, and not only was this really unsettling for me in my personal life, but also I started to realize that because as an author, I was telling stories from my personal life. My personal life taking a left turn also affected my career as a published author. So, for example, during that time, I was going through a divorce and I was working on a book that was supposed to be my next book with my agent and my publisher, and that book started to feel to me like it just couldn't possibly be written. It didn't make sense anymore. I didn't really believe what I was writing about. I couldn't stand behind the concepts anymore. And yet there was this other story that was trying to be told. I would wake up in the morning and I would feel like I just got to get to the coffee and get in front of my computer and start writing down the things that are happening to me, and my publishing brain would be like, wait a second, that doesn't make any sense. You're never going to be able to publish this story. This is not something that you want to tell publicly. You know, this is a really personal thing that's going on to you. This is not going to move your career forward. And yet there was another voice that was like and not even a voice, it was like a force that couldn't be reckoned with a force that kept saying to me, you got to write down what's happening to you. And I couldn't not do it. I couldn't stop myself from doing it. So I spent every morning for at least two hours during that time, going to my favorite coffee shop and sitting down and just writing what was taking place in my life, writing what was happening, writing how I felt about it, writing what I thought about it. And in my mind, I thought that piece of work was going to live on my computer screen forever. I was never going to necessarily share it with anyone, or if I did, it would be with a couple of people really close to me. Happening through that experience is the experience of writing down that story revolutionized my life. It changed me irrevocably. It was the most powerful thing I've ever done for myself. And a lot of times now people will say something to me like, Wow, you're a different person now than you were back then, and that's so true, And I think a big piece of that is that I sat down to write the story. There's something so beautiful that happens when you learn to step outside of your story and see it as an onlooker instead of seeing it from the inside. There's an old adage, and I don't know who started this, that says, you can't read the label from the inside of the bottle. And that's so important to think about as it relates to telling your story. You know, when you're living your story, you're living inside of it and it's happening to you, and it might feel like the events that are coming at you or chaotic or random, or they don't make sense, they don't have a thread, don't they don't have a moral, they don't make sense, they don't have a cohesive way of being held together. But when you sit down and write your story, you begin to see yourself as the hero of a story. You begin to see that when you act and when you move, that you are the one who's moving the story forward. When you write your story, you start to see that there is a thread that holds the story together and that you were the one who got to decide what that thread was. So you suddenly begin to experience this agency over your life that you couldn't access before. I call this the narrator voice. It's like I start to see myself as the narrator of my own story. And if you think about a narrator, the narrator has access to insight and wisdom and intelligence that the hero of the story doesn't necessarily have access to. The narrator of the story sees the story from thirty thousand feet and is able to understand where the story is headed, even if the hero doesn't know that yet. So this experience of writing down the story was incredibly powerful for me. It shifted my life and transformed me forever. And also, unexpectedly, maybe two years after I wrote that story, I was able to share that story more publicly and it became my second book. It's called Indestructible. You can buy that wherever books are sold. But that experience of sharing the story more broadly was also really impactful for me. I also was able to connect to other women and people who had been through something similar to what I had been through, who had felt powerless, and who were able to step into a new kind of power in their life and recreate the ending of their own story. And I just started to wonder, I wonder what would happen if everyone had access to this tool. I wonder what would happen if other people who didn't work in publishing, could somehow understand how a story worked easily enough that they could turn their life into a story too. I wonder what would happen if I pulled back the curtain on how that works and gave people access to this really powerful tool. And as I was going through this process, I also uncovered a huge body of data that shows just how powerful writing can be to transform every aspect of your life. I mean, writing can transform your mood, it can change the way you feel about yourself. It can improve your mental health, it can improve your emotional health, it can improve your emotional intelligence. The data shows that writing can improve your relationships, it can improve your confidence. So it's just such a no brainer. If you have the impulse to write, that you follow that impulse, that you chase it down. And I hope what this podcast does is it just makes it so easy for you to do that that you can't possibly not do it. Now. Oddly, what I find happens with people who have a story they want to write is they also have a whole long list of yeah butts. So they have the I want to write my story, but I couldn't do it because I'm not a writer, or I couldn't do it because you know, I don't know anything about the world of publishing, or I couldn't do it because I wouldn't know where to start, or I don't have the time, or whatever. There's a whole long list of reasons why we tell ourselves that we couldn't possibly write our story. So what I want to talk about in this episode, in particular, is the why to write your story. I want to talk about why you can write your story, why you should write your story, why you're absolutely invited into this process, and why it can be such a no brainer to sit down and finally do it. The biggest reason that I want to focus on for why to write your story is simply because you want to. I think this is maybe one of the most underestimated reasons for why to do literally anything in our lives. But just because you want to, because you feel the impulse to write your story is enough for you to do it. In fact, I'm a believer that it's human impulse to write your story, that the desire to write your story is really the desire to understand yourself. It's the desire to share your life with other people. And what could be more human than that. In fact, the other day, I was driving the car and I've got a one year old in the two year old and my two and a half year old was in her car seat behind me, and I could hear her narrating her experience out loud. She was saying, we're going to the park. Daddy is at work, Mommy's driving the car. Charlie's sitting next to me in the seat, and it was so cute, and I just was soaking in the moment for a second, and then I realized, oh, my goodness, she is telling her story to herself, because this is human instinct. It is a natural human instinct to want to share the details of your life to yourself, if to no one beyond yourself, just to yourself, but even to her brother, and even to her mom, and even to her dad, and even to whoever's listening, just into the ether. It was instinct for her to just tell her story back to herself. It's her way of orienting herself inside of her life and understanding her place. It's her way of understanding her relationships to the other people around her. And this is as much a human instinct as it is for you. To sit down and write your story. So just because you want to can be absolutely enough reason for you to do it. The second reason I think to write your story is because it's fun. And I don't think we consider this a lot. We think of it like work. A lot of times when I hear writers talk about something they're working on, they talk about, you know, their piece of work or whatever, and I get, you know, the concept there. But my advice for writers is to think of your writing less like work and more like fun. Think of this like a jigsaw puzzle. Recently, I was on vacation and I was doing a jigsaw puzzle with my brother in law and my husband and my mother in law, and we laid off this huge, five thousand piece jigsaw puzzle on the table and we'd get the kids to bed, and we'd all, you know, drink a beer or drink a soda or whatever at night and sit at the table for hours and talk to each other and put this jigsaw puzzle together. And I was thinking about how much this is like putting your story together. It's a way to unwind, it's a way to enjoy connection to other people. It's a way to enjoy connection to yourself. It's a way to exercise your brain, it's a way to just enjoy yourself. So if you can think of writing your story like this, you're going to bring so much longevity to the writing process that wouldn't be there if it feels like work to you, and if it feels like a task that you need to get right, you need to get it perfect, or it's going to be wrong. Nobody's gonna like it, nobody's gonna read it. So instead, see if you can flip that on its head and think of this as something fun that you get to do at the beginning of the day or the end of the day, to unwind, to enjoy yourself, to connect other people, to connect to yourself, and see how much more longevity that brings to your writing. Writing also changes the way you see yourself. Remember I talked about a minute ago that when I sat down to write my story, I stopped seeing myself inside of my story and started seeing myself almost as an onlooker. I was watching myself inside of my story make choices that we're moving the story forward. And that's one of the great gifts of becoming the narrator of your story is that you start to see the story from the outside. Right, because it can heal you. Because the data literally shows that people who write regularly visit the doctor fifty percent less often for upper respiratory infections and flu. This is insane to me. This tells me that the writing process is actually shifting the way that your cells operate with one another. It's shifting your physical health. So if that's the case, think of how this can shift your mental health, your emotional health, and everything else in your life. Right, because it can inspire others, right, because it can inspire you, Right because you feel called to it, Right because you feel like you can't not do it. There are so many more reasons, but this is enough. Just know that the reasons that you already have to write your story is plenty, and hopefully I can make the process really simple and easy for you. One other thing to note is that this podcast is really designed for people who are writing personal narratives, which just means that this is a story about you from your life. But the principles of storytelling are so universal that you could also use this podcast to write a fictional story if you wanted. Maybe your fictional story is based on reality or you could use the concepts that I teach here to write a story about someone else. But just know that because this podcast is centered around someone who's writing a personal narrative, I'm going to be speaking directly to those folks here, and if you want to use this for fiction or for another kind of story, then feel free. What I'm going to do over the course of the next twelve weeks is I'm going to walk you through a tried and true process to choose the story from your life that you want to write, to outline the story, and to actually get the thing written. We are also going to talk about sharing your story, whether for you that means publishing or whether for you it means taking the brave step to share it with your therapist, or with your spouse, or with your best friend, or with your sister or someone in your life who you think would really get it. Either way, whether that's publishing or sharing individually, there's some different pieces of advice that I'll give, But whatever sharing means for you, I want you to be able to choose the story from your life, outline the story, write the story, and then share it intentionally. You're going to be able to do all that here. In the next twelve weeks, we'll get to know each other a little bit better, and I'm so excited to get started. I can't wait. I hope you're excited to learn how to write your story.