DRMacIver's Notebook
Building a library of stories
Building a library of stories
One comment I got on Behaving as if you were trying to succeed was that the chicken thing was a great anecdote. I liked getting this comment, and it made me think: “Huh, yeah. It is a great anecdote. I don’t have many of those.”
I think this is sortof weird. It’s not exactly like I haven’t had plenty of things happen to me that could take the form of great anecdotes. When I try to think of examples, I do worry that the rate of anecdotes per year has gone down a bit. I don’t know that this is actually true. e.g. Using what you’re given is basically me telling a bunch of recent anecdotes.Also my current life events are a rollercoaster of between two and five very dramatic storylines right now, it’s just that I’m in the middle of them and they involve other people’s privacy so I can’t exactly share them easily in public.
Certainly a lot of historic anecdotes feel… wackier. For example, there was that time that I went to work in my pajamas. Or the time I brought a giant frog to a wedding. More recently, I do get a lot of mileage out of telling the story of my first date with my partners.It took me about halfway through the date to figure out that I was on a date and until our second date to realise that neither I nor they were poly prior to that point. I brought notes.
But… I don’t know, I’m not sure it ever occurred to me to tell the chicken anecdote before, and it’s not exactly a big event.
I think part of what’s going on is that I simply don’t think of my life in terms of well packaged stories to tell, so anecdotes come up when I’m talking or writing about something and I pull on the thread of something and the next thing that comes out in the chain is something that actually happened to me. The anecdote, in this context, serves as a tool to solve a problem, but isn’t something I necessarily experience as a primary thing in its own right.
Not, I think, unrelatedly, I have very poor narrative memory. There are whole swathes of my life that feel just… gone. I bet they’re not though. I bet they’re just somewhere I’m not looking. Generally I find when I pull on a thread of thought or memory there’s quite a lot there, it’s just not indexed in a way that I easily have access to, but if I actually go digging I recall quite a lot.
For example (look, an anecdote!) Dave and I were talking about our seemingly-abandoned family D&D game the other day. We were vaguely talking about resuming it, and he said something like “The first challenge is anyone remembering what even happened in the last session”, to which I said “God even I don’t remember”.I am normally the one who remembers perfectly what happened in the previous session and tells everyone about it at the beginning of the session. No, I don’t know how this squares with my belief that I have poor narrative memory either. I think it’s because I’m using a different skill, the one where I just unwind the stack of the conversation and perfectly tell you the thread of what we’ve been talking about so far. It’s a weird superpower, but one I’m grateful to have. Then I said “hmmm… actually I do remember a bit, right. Jess joined us for that one, right? She was a monk. We’d just finished making friends with the flesh eating monster… Oh! And we fought the wizard we were ostensibly there to rescue.” and then went on filling in more and more details, each one becoming accessible as I remembered the bits adjacent to it.
So I think this claim that I don’t have a lot of anecdotes I can tell is just a skill issue. Or, not even really a skill issue, a habit issue. All the raw material is there, and I can forge it into anecdotes if I want to, I just don’t. I’m not really sure why not.
Some of “why not?” is of course that not doing things is the default, but there’s a sort of half formed feeling that this would be a good thing to do, therapeutically speaking, and also just useful as a way of improving my understanding of myself and my ability to communicate with others.
I think just starting to tell more anecdotes will probably just result in being much better at remembering and telling stories from my life in general. Talking about my dreams almost immediately started causing me to remember my dreams better, and I suspect this is similar - once you direct yourself towards some external goal, the internal experiences that you’ve been ignoring and need for this goal suddenly rise to the occasion.
I think there’s also a sort of… fluency issue here. There’s a book by Boris Shekhtman called “How to improve your foreign language immediately” that I think about a lot despite not really working much on speaking any foreign languages.Technically, I speak Spanish, French, and German as well as being a native English speaker. In practice, I speak all of these at such a bad level that I’d be unable to claim with a straight face that I really spoke them. I have been able to hold very basic conversations in German in the past, did get an A at French GCSE, and have been the least bad person at communicating with a waitress in Spanish in Mexico, but that was more because I was able to speak Spanish badly with confidence where everyone else around me was too shy. Oh, look, another anecdote. In particular one of the things he recommends is developing “islands of competence” - areas where you’ve gamed out a lot of the conversation in advance, where you’ve memorised certain set phrases, filled in gaps of your vocabulary, etc.
Practicing telling specific anecdotes feels like it’s adopting this strategy more broadly, because it helps you find interesting talking points about your life, and helps connect you up to a kind of fluency in living that feels hard to access sometimes.
I’m not quite sure how this will works. Consider this post more a declaration to experiment than a well articulated thesis.