Story Laboratory: Getting Help

For this week's story assignment, I decided to do a story lab since I haven't done many of these. Of the listed options, I chose to read through some of the posts on the "Advice to Writers" site, and I was not disappointed! Some of them were funny, others were kind of abrasive but they all had a little nugget of wisdom to offer. Of the ones I read, I found a couple that I liked because they seemed like good writing advice, but I found more that I liked because they seemed like good life advice. Here are the two that I liked the most.

"Be a Good Steward of Your Gifts"

Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.

-Jane Kenyon

"The Useless Days Will Add Up to Something"

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

-Cheryl Strayed

I think the reason that these two stood out to me so much, is because they represent some ideas that have been floating around in my head recently.

The first one relates to all of these ideas presented by Brene Brown in a talk she gave related to her book, "Daring Greatly." In her talk, Brene covers a whole bunch of information and guidance around living a vulnerable and fulfilled life. I couldn't possibly explain it all, partially because I don't even understand it all myself, but this quote gave me the same feeling in my gut. So if you have time, I really recommend checking out her work. I was going to include a link to her website, but they are having domain issues at the moment.

As for the second quote, I have been thinking a lot recently about growing up and being an adult. Although I have felt more mature and capable than my age would suggest for just about my whole life, recently I have started to wonder if I will ever stop feeling like a thirteen year old pretending to be an adult. I have wondered when it will feel like real life has started, and whether marriage is a sham the patriarchy created to keep us down while simultaneously looking forward to getting engaged after graduation. It has all kind of been a whorl wind and it doesn't look like that will stop anytime soon. So, it was comforting to read the quote from Cheryl Strayed and think that maybe this is all going just according to plan.

The photo over there is from TheDigitalArtist via Pixabay.

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