“Dad, Olivia was an accident, right?”
I’m in the kitchen when my daughters walk in and Alice, my oldest, asks me that.
“What do you mean, baby?”
“I told Olivia you wanted to have me, but she was born by accident because you didn’t want another kid.”
Hm. I’ve got a feeling I might have made a joke about that at same point. I really need to remember my kids actually pay attention to what I say…
“Alice, that’s not a nice thing to say. Are you trying to make your sister upset?”
Olivia actually looks more curious than upset—but I have a feeling that might not last.
“No, I’m just telling the truth! That’s true, right?”
“Well, I guess…” I consider lying, then decide against it. I never lie to my kids. “Yes. It’s true.”
“See, Olivia, I told you!”
Alice is not usually that mean, I think she’s just happy to be proven right. No idea where she got that from…
But now Olivia is looking upset, so I try to fix it:
“Do you know why we didn’t want another kid?”
They both look up. I better make this good.
“When we had Alice, we weren’t sure if we’d ever want another kid. But she was such a complete pain in the ass, we decided there was no way we could handle another one.”
“Hey!!”
“Then Olivia came, and we were very happy to have her.”
“I wasn’t a pain in the ass, Dad?” Olivia asks.
“No, monster, you were super easy when you were small…”
She turns to Alice to gloat, but I continue, “…but now you’re a pain in the ass too.”
A few minutes ago, one of my kids was close to being upset.
Now they both look unhappy.
It’s a gift, really 😅
Some truths are overrated…
I was speaking to a client last week, and she told me she was struggling to keep her stories short. I asked for an example, and she told me about this story she wanted to tell about her mom, which involved a bunch of separate episodes, with time jumps, and lots of added context.
I told her she could combine the episodes to make a single story, or drop some of them, and she said something like “I tried that, but it bothered me because it didn’t feel true.”
“I get that, but here’s the thing: what you’re doing is not journalism, it’s storytelling. Your obligation is not to tell people exactly what happened, especially because that would be pretty much impossible. Often there’s way too many details to cover, and you can’t be expected to remember perfectly what people said. So you’ll always be forced to make choices on what to include and what to cut.
“This is how I want you to think about it: your commitment is not to the literal truth, but to the truth of the story.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, I guess when you share a story about your mom, you want people to get what type of person she was, right?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Ok, so when you told the edited story, did that happen?”
“It did! I actually told it to my sisters, who know exactly what happened, and they said something like, ‘Yeah, that was mom.’”
“There you have it.”
…Except one
Most stories can’t be told exactly as they happened. So do your best to package your stories in a shape that delivers what really matters:
What it felt like. What you thought. What people meant to you. How they changed you.
In storytelling, that’s the truth that really matters 🤘
-Francisco
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