INTRODUCTORY ARTICLE TWO OF THE SEVEN PART SERIES: THE STORIES BEHIND MEMORIES ARE MADE OF THIS
When people think about stories, they often imagine something extraordinary. An adventurous journey, a dramatic event, an unusual encounter or perhaps something that has never happened to anyone else. We tend to associate a good story with something out of the ordinary.
But I have come to realise that some of the best stories come from much simpler experiences. They are the everyday moments that happen while we are getting on with life. At the time, we might not think very much of them. It is only later, when we look back, that we realise there was a story worth telling.
That is certainly true of many of the experiences I have collected in my book, Memories Are Made of This.
Not every story begins with an adventure
Over the years, I have lived in three countries: Australia, South Africa and Britain. I have travelled, met people from different backgrounds, experienced unfamiliar places and found myself involved in situations that I could never have planned.
Some of those experiences were quite remarkable. Others were not.
In fact, some of the memories that have stayed with me most strongly began with something fairly ordinary. A conversation, a chance meeting, an unexpected turn of events or simply being in the right place at the wrong time.
There is often no particular reason to think that something interesting is about to happen. You might be going about your normal business when an unexpected event changes the course of the afternoon. Sometimes it is amusing. Sometimes it is embarrassing. Occasionally, it leaves you wondering how on earth you managed to get yourself into that situation.
That is part of the attraction of real-life stories. You do not need to invent a plot. Life has a habit of providing one.
The things we remember are not always the important things
If someone asked me to list the most important events in my life, I would probably come up with the obvious milestones. Moving from one country to another, changing jobs, meeting important people and making decisions that influenced what happened afterwards.
But those are not necessarily the memories that come to mind when I sit down and think about the stories I want to tell.
Quite often, it is something much smaller.
It might be a conversation that took an unexpected direction, an encounter with someone I had never met before, or an incident that seemed unimportant at the time but became amusing when I thought about it afterwards.
These moments have a way of staying with us. They may not have changed our lives, but they have become part of the way we remember them.
I suspect most people have similar experiences. We all have memories that make us smile when something reminds us of them. We might not have thought about them for years, but a particular smell, photograph, place or conversation can bring them back surprisingly quickly.
And sometimes, once we start telling someone about one of those memories, we discover that there is rather more to it than we first thought.
Finding the story in an everyday experience
One of the interesting things about writing true stories is deciding where the story actually begins.
An experience might have lasted only a few minutes, but the circumstances leading up to it could be just as important. There may have been something that happened earlier in the day, a decision that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, or a small detail that only made sense afterwards.
The challenge is to recognise which parts matter.
When I write about an experience, I try to take the reader through what happened in a straightforward way. I want them to understand where I was, what I was doing and how events unfolded. I do not want to make something sound more dramatic than it really was.
Sometimes the humour comes from the situation itself. On other occasions, it comes from the way I reacted to it, or from the fact that I failed to appreciate what was happening until it was too late.
There is also something rather enjoyable about looking back at an experience and recognising that, although it might have been awkward or inconvenient at the time, it has since become a good story.
Hindsight can be a useful thing. It does not necessarily make us look any more sensible, but it does give us a different perspective.
A story does not have to have a grand lesson
I do not believe that every story needs to teach us something profound.
Some experiences are simply funny. Others remind us of people we have known, places we have visited or things we have done. Some leave us thinking about how differently people approach the same situation. And occasionally, a memory brings back someone or something that we have not thought about for a long time.
There are stories that make us laugh, stories that make us reflect and stories that touch us in a more personal way.
The important thing is that they mean something to someone.
A story about an everyday incident might remind a reader of something similar that happened to them. They may have found themselves in almost the same situation, made the same mistake or had a conversation that took a similarly unexpected turn.
That is when storytelling becomes more than simply recounting what happened to one person. It becomes a way of connecting experiences.
The details may be different, and the people involved may be strangers to one another, but the feelings and reactions are often familiar.
Why I think these memories are worth recording
One of the reasons I decided to write Memories Are Made of This was that I recognised how easily experiences disappear from our recollection.
We remember some things clearly, while others become blurred. Photographs can help, but they do not always explain what was happening or why a particular moment mattered. A photograph might show where we were, but it cannot necessarily tell the story behind it.
Writing something down gives us an opportunity to preserve more than just the basic facts. We can record the circumstances, the people involved, the conversations and the details that might otherwise be lost.
It also gives us the chance to share those experiences with other people.
I have always thought that there is something rather satisfying about telling someone a story and discovering that they have a similar one of their own. The conversation often moves away from the original experience, and before long both people are remembering things that have not been mentioned for years.
That is one of the pleasures of storytelling. It can bring memories back to life, not just for the person telling the story but for the person listening to it.
The value of looking back
Looking back over a lifetime, I can see that many of the experiences I remember most fondly were not necessarily the ones I would have predicted.
Some were planned. Others happened by chance. Some involved places and people that were completely unfamiliar to me, while others took place during quite ordinary days.
What they have in common is that, for one reason or another, they stayed with me.
I do not think we should underestimate the value of those everyday experiences. They are part of our personal history, and they help make up the stories we tell about our lives.
We do not all need to climb mountains, travel across continents or find ourselves in extraordinary circumstances to have something worth talking about. Sometimes, all we need to do is pay a little more attention to what is happening around us.
Because the next good story might not begin with an adventure. It might begin with an ordinary day, an unexpected conversation or something that makes us laugh.
And it might be a story we are still telling many years later.
About the author
Gregory Mark Haynes
Author | Storyteller | Speaker
Real stories. Real people. Real life.
#GregoryMarkHaynesAuthor
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