Storyworthy Read online

  But now I will own that moment for the rest of my life. I can close my eyes today and return to that room, with the morning light streaming through the windows, my daughter pressed close to me, whispering words that I will never forget.

  Someday that moment may find its way into a story.

  Nowadays, Homework for Life doesn’t even take me five minutes. Today I can see most of the moments while in the midst of them. I recognize them in real time. I have often inputted them into my spreadsheet long before the end of the day. This will eventually happen for you too. If you have commitment and faith.

  I give this to you: Homework for Life.

  Five minutes a day is all I’m asking. At the end of every day, take a moment and sit down. Reflect upon your day. Find your most storyworthy moment, even if it doesn’t feel very storyworthy. Write it down. Not the whole story, but a few sentences at most. Something that will keep you moving, and will make it feel doable. That will allow you to do it the next day. If you have commitment and faith, you will find stories. So many stories.

  There are meaningful, life-changing moments happening in your life all the time. That dander in the wind will blow by you for the rest of your life unless you learn to see it, capture it, hold on to it, and find a way to keep it in your heart forever.

  If you want to be a storyteller, this is your first step. Find your stories. Collect them. Save them forever.

  In addition to my many other jobs, I’m an elementary-school teacher, so I feel like I have the right to assign homework to anyone I choose.

  I choose you.

  STORY BREAK

  Naked in Brazil

  I’m telling stories to an audience of about seven hundred high-school students at an American school in São Paulo, Brazil, in the summer of 2015. When I finish performing, I open the session to questions. They come fast and furious.

  I love Q&A. Ask me a question, and I’ll tell you a story.

  I’ve been answering questions for about fifteen minutes, handing out prizes to students who ask me especially challenging questions, when a student asks me:

  “You write novels. You blog every day. You write musicals and magazine articles. You tell stories on stages. Why? Why do you share so much of yourself?”

  I stop. I think for a moment. I’ve never been asked this question before.

  An unexpected answer comes to mind. “I think . . .” I say slowly, wondering if the answer I’m about to give is correct. Trying it on for size. “I think,” I repeat, “that I’m trying to get the attention of a mother who never paid me any attention and is now dead and a father who left me as a boy and never came home.”

  It’s a remarkable thing. I have been writing every single day of my life since I was seventeen years old, without exception. I have been blogging every single day of my life since 2003, sharing my thoughts, ideas, complaints, and moments from my life with thousands of readers. I’ve been publishing novels since 2009. And I’ve been standing on stages since 2011, spilling my guts, sharing my deepest, darkest secrets and most embarrassing, hilarious moments, and not once did I ever ask myself, “Why?”

  “Why do you do it, Matt? Why do you share so much of yourself with the world?”

  Now I know. Standing in the carpeted aisle of an auditorium five thousand miles from home, I have stumbled upon the answer to a question I never asked.

  That is storytelling at its finest.

  The auditorium goes silent. I go silent. Seven hundred teenagers stare at me, waiting for my next move.

  After a moment, I say, “Okay, remember when we talked about finding those five-second moments in our lives? Those moments of transformation? Realization? I think I’m having one right now. Yup. I am. Definitely.”

  I still stand by that answer today. I have yet to craft or tell the story about the time I discovered my primary reason for writing and telling so many stories (in front of seven hundred Brazilian teenagers), but I will someday.

  The young lady who asked me that question received a prize that day.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dreaming at the End of Your Pen

  I don’t dream well.

  When I was twenty-two years old, I was robbed at gunpoint while managing a McDonald’s restaurant in Brockton, Massachusetts. Guns were pressed to my head and triggers pulled in an attempt to force me to open a lockbox at the bottom of the safe.

  I didn’t have the key to the lockbox, as a placard on the safe clearly indicated. The gunmen didn’t believe me or the placard and thought they could get me to open the lockbox by convincing me that I was about to die. Knowing that these men had killed a Taco Bell employee the week before, I was certain that they were serious. I was convinced that this was the end of my life.

  It’s one of my big stories.

  I first told this story at a Moth GrandSLAM in Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg in 2013, but I have no recollection of telling it. The performance isn’t a blur; it’s a perfect hole in my memory. A total loss of seven minutes of my life, even though those seven minutes were spent onstage in front of more than four hundred people.

  More on this in a later chapter.

  Two years later I told a more complete version of the story in a Moth Mainstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music under the brilliant direction of The Moth’s artistic director, Catherine Burns. You can find a recording of that performance on the “Storyworthy the Book” YouTube channel. We will be looking at this story more closely in a later chapter as well.

  As a result of the robbery and my failure to seek treatment, I suffered from untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for more than twenty years. When Elysha and I started dating in 2004, she asked me why I woke up every night screaming and crying and shaking like a leaf.

  I told her it was “my thing.”

  Some people collect stamps. Others ski. Some people like to bake cookies. I suffer from reoccurring dreams of a horrific robbery and the absolute certainty that I am about to die.

  “Relax,” I told her. “It’s just my thing.”

  Elysha told me that my nightmares did not qualify as a “thing” and sent me to a therapist. He discovered that in addition to my nightmares, I had lived a life of constant anxiety and meticulous precision in an effort to deal with my trauma.

  Among the many things that he discovered (that I already knew):

  •I create a mental map of the entrances and exits of every space that I enter.

  •I position myself so that I can monitor the primary entrance to any space that I occupy.

  •I constantly catalog potential threats as they enter and exit a space.

  •I keep a baseball bat under my bed and have escape plans from every room in my home in the event of a home invasion. When Elysha and I began living together, I reviewed these escape plans with her regularly.

  •What was most concerning to my therapist was that I would hear the click of the gun while wide awake. As I was walking down the street. Reading a book. Driving a car. Watching television.

  It turns out that Elysha was right. I was a bit of a mess. Two years and many therapy sessions later, I stopped hearing the click of the gun while walking down the street. I relaxed a bit. My need to constantly plan my every moment receded. My anxiety level decreased significantly.

  Best of all, my nightmares have become far less frequent. They aren’t gone by a long shot, and they probably never will be, but I can get through entire nights without seeing those three masked men and their guns in my dreams.

  Those are very good nights for me. On those nights, I dream the dreams of a normal person. Dreams that I adore. Loosely constructed narratives that often diverge and intersect along odd, incomprehensible, and incongruent routes, filled with overlapping ideas and images of every variety. Kind of like Alice in Wonderland on steroid-filled mushrooms.

  Even with a journal at my bedside, it’s almost impossible to remember any of these dreams, and rarely do I generate any useful ideas or content from them. But I have developed a
way of engaging in a version of this dreamlike state while I am awake that has been incredibly productive and has resulted in many ideas for stories, anecdotes for stories, and much more. It’s also damn good for your soul.

  Crash & Burn

  The exercise is called Crash & Burn. It’s a simple concept, and certainly not groundbreaking in any way, but it relies on adhering to a few simple rules that I have developed that are necessary to make the exercise work well.

  Essentially Crash & Burn is stream-of-consciousness writing. I like to think of it as dreaming on the end of your pen, because when it’s working well, it will mimic the free-associative thought patterns that so many of us experience while dreaming.

  Stream of consciousness is the act of speaking or writing down whatever thought that enters your mind, regardless of how strange, incongruous, or even embarrassing it may be. People have been utilizing stream-of-consciousness strategies for a long time, beginning first with psychologists in the late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, these strategies were adopted by writers and thinkers as a means of generating new ideas. Entire novels have been written to mimic stream-of-consciousness thinking.

  I hate those novels.

  But for our storytelling purposes, we will be utilizing stream-of-consciousness writing to generate new ideas and resurrect old memories, applying three important rules:

  Rule #1: You must not get attached to any one idea.

  The goal of Crash & Burn is to allow unexpected ideas to intersect and overrun current ones, just as that rain-drenched corner of Main Street with my dog produced an important revelation about my father and a memory of sex on a golf course. Two intersecting ideas crashed into and overran the meaningful moment that I was experiencing with Kaleigh.

  So, regardless of how intriguing or compelling your current idea may be, you must release it immediately when a new idea comes crashing in, even if your new idea seems decidedly less compelling than the original one. When Crash & Burn is at its best, ideas are constantly crashing the party, slashing and burning the previous ones. It’s in these intersections of ideas that new ideas and memories are unearthed.

  Rule #2: You must not judge any thought or idea that appears in your mind.

  Everything must land on the page, regardless of how ridiculous, nonsensical, absurd, or humiliating it may be. Similarly, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization are meaningless. Penmanship is irrelevant.

  This can be difficult for many people. For years, writing teachers have demanded that students think about grammar, spelling, and punctuation as they write. They have required students to outline their essays and stories before placing a single word on the page. They have handed their students archaic graphic organizers and insisted that they be completed prior to writing. They have ignored the reality of writing, which is this:

  Many writers have no idea what their next sentence or paragraph will be. Much of writing is done in the dark. The next sentence is often as much of a surprise to the writer as it is to the reader.

  The artificial demands of outlines, graphic organizers, and planning often subvert the creative process and force would-be writers to think about what they are writing before a word even hits the page rather than allowing them to spill their guts and evaluate the material later. This is because writing teachers often are not writers themselves and therefore never engage in the writing process in an authentic, honest way. Rather than teaching the writing process followed by actual writers, they speculate about strategies that might help a writer or follow the advice written in writing tomes by people who only write writing tomes, often doing more damage than good.

  When it comes to Crash & Burn, you must free yourself of this dreadful, hobbling, ingrained need to prepare and self-monitor. You must spill your guts on the page, free from judgment or worry about whether what you are writing is good or right. Just put the damn words on the page as they appear in your head and on your fingertips. Ignore your inner demons.

  Rule #3: You cannot allow the pen to stop moving.

  I say pen because, although I do almost all my writing on a keyboard, I have found that engaging in Crash & Burn with a pen tends to trigger greater creativity (and there is some science to support this claim). But if you must use a keyboard, go for it.

  Either way, your hand or fingers cannot stop moving. You must continue writing words even when your mind is empty. To make this happen, I use colors. When I have no other thought in my mind, I begin listing colors on the page until one of them triggers a thought or memory. For example:

  Red, green, blue, black, brown . . . I tell kids that brown is my favorite color, and it makes them all crazy, which makes no sense, but in truth, I have no favorite color, which makes them even crazier . . .

  Writing down numbers is also a popular strategy utilized by my workshop students, though I recommend that the numbers be listed in word form. For example:

  One, two, three, four, five . . . I have five fingers on each hand, and there are scars on five no six of them, which seems like a lot, but maybe not . . .

  I’ve known frequent travelers to list countries. I had a mechanic in one of my workshops list engine parts. I had a teenager in a workshop list the names of his previous girlfriends (and apparently had more than enough names to work with). It doesn’t matter what you choose. Your list of items simply needs to be long and familiar to you.

  That’s it. Set a timer for ten minutes, follow these three rules, and go.

  Here is an example of one of my Crash & Burn sessions from a recent workshop. When I’m teaching, I speak my Crash & Burn aloud as I write so my students can hear how my mind is working. Specifically, I want them to hear:

  •how new ideas come crashing in.

  •how I embrace these new ideas without hesitation or judgment.

  •how I am willing to leave a good idea behind in favor of a new one, regardless of how little promise the new idea seems to hold.

  •how I manage to keep my hand moving at all times.

  If you go to the StoryworthytheBook YouTube channel, you can see me engage in this process, speaking it aloud as I do in my workshops. But below is a Crash & Burn final product, transcribed from pen to digital text.

  I always launch my Crash & Burn sessions with an object in the room, but you can start any way you want. On this day, there was a bowl of grapes on a table, so I started with the word grape. Slash marks indicate the moments when new ideas or memories came crashing in.

  Grape. Grape juice. White grape juice / When I was a kid I stepped on a broken Mello Yello glass bottle and cut my foot — got infected — happened by a pond / oh, the pond, Yawgoog had three different waterfronts and Ashaway Aquatic Center — I never took / I was a lifeguard at Yawgoog — so boring so dumb to be a lifeguard at a Boy Scout camp — at least you give yourself a chance to look at girls but I saved that kid who couldn’t swim and didn’t want to tell anyone / when Eric and what’s his name? Rory yes Rory flipped their canoe adults facing away from pond and Jeff and I went to / a pirate is a criminal on the sea — I should commit a crime on the sea so I can be legally called a pirate / I was a criminal but if you’re found not guilty were you never a criminal or a former criminal? actually I was definitely a criminal: mailbox baseball and stealing the shoes lots of other crimes — isn’t everyone a criminal or am I just especially bad / list of crimes would be / story about a guy who commits a crime at sea just to be a pirate and wears an eye patch for effect / I used to walk the train tracks as a kid but I wouldn’t want my kids to walk the tracks even though it must be safe, right? how does a train sneak up on you? Not possible / nail polish for women has weird and crazy names maybe I could do something with it / green red yellow blue gray / The Confederates wore gray uniforms, right? Seems like the least inspiring color — British wore red to conceal blood and make fellow soldiers / I took that ASVAB test and would love to see the results — I had no idea what kind of job I might have landed in military — thank God I didn’t re-sign at 17 I wonder w
hat / I took the pledge at 17 in a fake way and then had to take it again at 18 and refused thinking I would but does that make me a bad guy of some kind? / bad guy the black and the white is inconvenient Stephen King says that the side of the good is the side of the white which I like but sort of places it in unintentionally racist terms similar to “forgot the face of your father” is great but / haven’t read Dad’s letter yet why am I so scared all I want is a relationship and /

  Once I’ve finished with a session, I look back and pull out threads that are worth saving. Story ideas. Anecdotes for future stories. Memories that I want to record. New ideas. Interesting thoughts.

  Here is an annotated look at what I produced in those ten minutes:

  Grape. Grape juice. White grape juice / When I was a kid I stepped on a broken Mello Yello glass bottle and cut my foot — got infected — happened by a pond /

  I have no idea how grape juice brought me to Mello Yello, but my mind somehow made the connection, and it brought me back to a day of swimming with my family at a water hole when I was five or six years old.

  I had forgotten about the Mello Yello bottle and the cut on my foot until this Crash & Burn session, but more importantly, it brought back another memory from that day, not recorded during my session, because a new idea came crashing in, a much more meaningful memory than the one about my infected foot.

  It was a memory of my father jumping in the pond from the edge of a large, flat rock and remaining underwater for so long that I was sure he was dead. I was absolutely certain that he had drowned before my eyes. I remember a wave of crushing sadness washing over me, overwhelming me. My father was gone. The only man I loved was lifeless on the bottom of the pond. I knew in that moment that my life had changed forever.

  As I opened my mouth to scream, my father’s head emerged amidst a patch of lily pads, and “forever” had miraculously come to an end. Life was instantaneously returned to normal. Rarely have I experienced such an emotional swing in my life.