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People asked me over and over again how I got the people in my book
to open up and tell their stories so vividly
and so coherently. The first thing to say is that it wasn't always so coherent,
that's the job of the writer to sort through it and bring out that coherence.
-The editor. -Yes exactly. But I did think
that an awful lot of people wanted to tell their stories because they said
over and over again
"I felt so alone in the experiences that I'd had
and I thought that if telling my story could help someone else to feel less alone
then it would be well worth doing." But I also found that people really
wanted to be able to construct a coherent narrative out of their experience.
It gave them a feeling of
ownership of it. It gave them a sense that the dark arts were actually balanced by
whatever moments at light there were.
There was an urgency to that process for the people who were talking to me
and I found that if I sat and listened it would be possible
to get them to tell their stories. On and on people would say to me
I'm not sure about tell you the story and then we'd record 22 hours of interviews
and I would think "well I guess you did wanna tell that story after all."
So when I came my first story was like 30 minutes long.
The art was trying to find what the actual point was.
So what is your story? Say it in one sentence.
What are you trying to get at? And I did this story,
"Gramercy Park," and it was incredibly overwhelming and
so terrifying.
Afterwards, I had all of these these people come up to me
and tell me their stories. All these people came and hugged me
and cried and I hadn't expected that.
I had been prepared for my story
to mean that to other people, to strangers that I didn't know.
Stories are kind of our living history. Like everybody
in our life, everyone around us kinda shares a little piece of us
and they remember us.
In the introduction
to the book that I highly recommend everybody gets,
you quote a line that I love of George Orwell
where Orwell says "Autobiography
is only to be trusted when it reveals
something disgracegful. A man
who gives a good account of himself is probably
lying since any life when viewed
from the inside is simply
a series of defeats."
We have problems sometimes. Some of our celebrities are great but
sometimes we have celebrities
they want to tell the story of how they went into some situation
and everybody was *** up,
but they prevailed and the great raconteur tells the story the opposite.
The great raconteur says I went into the situation
and everybody was actually kind of sweet and good,
but I was *** up in the head and once you admit that,
once you say I'm a clown, you just admit to
everybody, I'm a clown, then the audience immediately
loves you.
Vulnerability we always say is the number one
mark of a great storyteller because it's in that vulnerability that were able to
connect with other people.
One of my favorite stories in the book is told by
Mike Massimino. He's an astronaut and
he gets into space. He's expensed millions of dollars of expense
to taxpayers and he's up there and he's literally spent three years preparing
for this mission which is to fix the Hubble Space Telescope
and when he gets there can't get the back off the telescope
because he can't get screw out and
very few of us in this room I think we'll ever travel outer space,
but who can't relate to study three years preparing for mission only be foiled
by a stripped screw.
I was in the same
moment when the astronaut told his story about fixing the Hubble Space Telescope
and I said to him "That is the most terrifying thing I've ever heard."
He described moving hand over hand, jumping across bits of space, so on and so forth.
And I said I don't know how anyone could ever do anything
that terrifying and he pointed to the stage we were about to get on and said
"Less scary than this."