Chase a Theme or Flow with the Times

We know a Life Story is about an individual’s life and we want to include certain key points but how do we go about tying all the other elements together, to flush out this life, to understand the points that need to be made?

Primarily a Life Story is made up of two key modalities that we’ll look at in this Episode 37 of Create Your Life Story – Themes and Chronology.

The themes are the events that weave through a person’s life, coming and going depending on the experiences. In the case of some people there could be a theme (service for example), that is the overarching influence within their whole life and throughout their Life Story, we may return time and again to that theme. Or for a period of time there may be a theme that is relevant, which due to some change morphs into some new theme, that is significant for another period of time. This is by far the most common type for most people as our lives change depending on the times.

Chronology is simply the idea of starting at the beginning and working your way through the eras of someone’s life looking at everything that happens as they mature. These are the, let’s start at the beginning and explore your life experience themes, relative to each time, as the years go by. Chronological is the easiest way to grasp and work through a Life Story as it creates the back story to the major events as they come along.

Thematic Storytelling

The advantage of creating a Life Story around a theme is the ability to build interest and manipulate the listener with many of the storytelling techniques. If a person has a single grand experience that everyone knows about there is no advantage of creating mystery in the revelation of that story, it’s already well known but we can start with it and create intrigue in how they happened to end up in that place. Then there is a whole new story of wonder about the journey in how they got to the major event. If there are other lesser known events in their life these can still be evolved towards in the storytelling, slowly allowed to unravel and helping the listen discover the other adventures they had along the way.

The great advantage of thematic storytelling is the creative aspect of jumping from subject to subject amongst different eras or whatever is necessary to create interest in the final revelations.

In Buzz Aldrin’s autobiography, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon, he starts with sitting on the launch pad about to travel to the moon in July 1969. Immediately we are thrust into the heady experience of travelling to, landing and returning from the moon. The story then evolves through the post landing era weaving in the back stories of his education, family and training ending with a reflective look back on his life and aspirations for the future. We know that Buzz went to the moon so there is no use hiding it, we might as well start with it and capture the reader from the get go and then reveal what makes up the man that could have achieved this main experience of his life.

If however there are lesser known adventures, the story could build from the obvious to reveal the unknown. Say a World War 2 veteran who we know served could reveal the unexpected story of capture and escape that no one had ever heard of before. There are multiple ways of developing thematic story-lines that can add a whole level of creativity to the way you build your Life Story project.

Chronological Storytelling

The most obvious way to tell a story is to start at the beginning. Who were your ancestors and what was it like when you were a kid.