Storycatcher/ Making Sense of Our lives through the Power and Practice of Story

When writing a post recently for Visionary Fiction Alliance about the relevance of visionary fiction in today's world, I realized how important "story" is to our lives. 



+Freedomby ~myonlyexceptionisyou

I'm not just talking about the stories written by our favorite authors for our reading pleasure.  I'm talking about our life stories, the stories that begin on page one of a blank text on the day we are born and continue until the day - and sometimes even after - we die.

All the things we tell about ourselves, all the experiences we remember, the sights, the sounds, the feelings, are part of our story.  As Christina Baldwin says in her book, Story Catcher, "You are a book of bone and flesh."

What event, besides your birth, set your story's plot in motion?  What are its turning points?  What are you proud of?  What are you ashamed of?  What will you preserve.  What will you purposely omit?  What will you forget?  Who wrote your story?  From what point of view?  Yours?  Your parents'?  Your teachers'?  Society's?  What values shaped your life story?  How much of your story is real?  How much is fiction, created by distortions of the lens you're viewing it through.  The lens of judge, victim.

How did you come up with the lead characters and settings for your story's scenes? Who are the heroes, the villians, the bit-part players?  Who do you love? Who loves you? Who do you blame? Who do you judge?  Which characters do you bother to flesh out enough to know them enough to care for, understand, give a voice?

Life coach, Gary Van Warmerdam, talks about the different versions of stories we tell about ourselves in the fourth of his Pathway to Happiness Audio Sessions in Self Mastery called "Attention."


In Storycatcher, Christina Baldwin explores story as the core of life experience. Through stories, education, writing and oral prompts, the book illustrates how we use narrative to make sense out of what is happening to us and around us.

And here comes the big question.

How can your story still change?

The group, Rascal Flatts, sings about how "Life's like a novel with the end ripped out."

What can you change?

What will you change?

How will your life story end?

As always, thanks for stopping by. 

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Struggling to Break Free

A subject that fuels my writing is the universal struggle for spiritual and emotional freedom.

The struggle for freedom also inspires Zenos Frudakis's work. 

In a statement about his bronze sculpture, "Freedom," located at the GSK World Headquarters in Philadelphia, Zenos says:

"I wanted to create a sculpture almost anyone, regardless of their background, could look at and instantly recognize that it is about the idea of struggling to break free. This sculpture is about the struggle for achievement of freedom through the creative process."

Freedom: by Zenos Frudakis

Although for me this feeling sprang from a particular personal situation, I was conscious that it was a universal desire with almost everyone; that need to escape from some situation – be it an internal struggle or an adversarial circumstance, and to be free from it."

Who knows how long it took Zenos to create this magnificent sculpture, maybe as long as it takes me to write a novel.  Yet with just a glance, an observer can get the big picture, whereas it takes an 80,000 word reading to get mine. 

Then again...

On closer examination, there is much more to "Freedom" than meets the eye.  As with a novel, there are underlying themes that take a keen eye to uncover.  There's more the the story. 

We're two artists coming at freedom from different angles using different mediums.

I hope that someday my novels inspire others as Zenos Frudakis's work inspires me.