#storytellimg

Editing Life & Editing Story!

It’s amazing how writing a book offers similar strategies for living and writing or sharing your life stories. It is essential to reread and go over the life process or manuscript building over and over again until it is a creative cohesion that can explodes and implodes that hearts that read them..

Stepping back from time to time, I get to allow the book to breathe and not choke to death. It gets weird when I get to picking it here and there and sometimes pulling it apart. But when I return, we are both refreshed. I add things I learn and find points i missed; I catch typos i overlooked and get to correct those grammatical or pesky autocorrect errors.

When you put your story down for a while and return to it, you gain new perspective, you come up with new ways to let words frame a moment or animate a feeling. You might decide to extract a certain part or add a new chapter. I uncover old hidden treasures and begin to see the amazing rhythm of my spirit’s unique language. I follow the music.

I’ve been writing chunks and pieces of my life’s story all my life. Little did I know that it was a slow prep and cook of my life’s sweet and sour, hot and spicy, pungent and insipid tastes and experiences. My love for writing and my writing love is a mysterious romance. Sometimes i do it to empty my mind or words become my dance partners, other times it’s my escape from a boring place. I may have taken it for granted, at times, because it comes naturally. Yet it’s really medicine for me, it’s deeply self therapeutic.

I used to love listening to folklore stories of my West African homeland from wise elder storytellers and even a Haitian man I met during my life travels that I will never forget. His name is Dugan. He was short in body but never short on stories that came through his tall persona. I was always fascinated as the characters came alive and entered my world way after the story ended, always when I least expected. There were the in between thrills and anticipations, the suspense or the horror as I listened. My body still while the rest of me take flight to a new land, hanging on the tail of the images. To me it was magic!

Editing our lives is equally necessary as picking and choosing the contents of our manuscripts and deciding on its title. The colors and illustrations of my life are instinctively chosen to echo my soul’s voice. The process of capturing your life story or that of writing a book is one to savor and be present with because it allows the soul to take over and the ego to step back for a moment. For me it’s a journey, not a goal.

I find they both require rereading, proofreading, editing scenes, turning pages, keeping parts in while deleting some; I find it takes dancing with the letters and fighting with the characters, playing with colors as you neatly arrange or make a flop. But they all somehow come together to compose the valuable master pieces that give an account of the journey of your creative LIFE! I