Storytelling from My Angle

(Part 1)

One year ago today I started this blog. I realize what I've been doing with “The Angle” this past year doesn't make me a writer, but it has taught me a lot about writing, or at least, about my own writing style and what writing means to me.

I think I've always been a writer at heart, but for many years I was afraid I was one of those people who liked the idea of writing more than I liked writing. For me, it's always been about telling the story, having been an avid reader long before I thought much about writing. It's why I love to read great novels as well as good nonfiction. They both contain “true” stories, even if, as in the case of novels, they never really happened quite that way. I read a quote on writing many years ago that went something like this - “If you want to tell the truth about something, make up a story about it.” I've been unable to track down who said it, but if J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis did not say it, they clearly understood the concept. The Lord of the Rings' long-term popularity and faithful fans are a testament to timeless truths expressed by Tolkien in tales of a mythical Middle Earth. Lewis also wrote straight up non-fiction essays as well as brilliant fiction, both full of profound truths.

I have concluded from my years of reading and listening and seeing what is going on in the world around me that there is really only one Story out there to tell. It is an ancient massive Story of an all encompassing Truth, and every word of writing done since the beginning of time, both fiction and non-fiction, has been to support some part of that Story or explain it or or try to refute it or try to re-express it. And because we are all part of this massive Story, we are free to speak into it. As we write, with pen or computer or our lives, we just look around from our place in the Story and comment on it. And that's what I have attempted to do here, to take the stories of my life - true stories - and comment on them, muse about how I perceive their place in the big Story, and present it from my angle...

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. -C. S. Lewis

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. -Benjamin Franklin

Tomorrow: How I Tell My Story