"Even the greatest villain in your personal story has the right to evolve and become someone new... Remember, they are a hero in their own story even though they acted like a villain in yours. Perhaps you were the villain in someone else's story. You likely have been. How would you like that story to be told? Would you like the author to treat the telling of that story as their golden opportunity to air your dirty laundry and get revenge? Or would you rather they focus on what matters most - how your actions affected them?
It's my experience that writing our story helps us fall deeper in love with life itself, including the villains who helped us change. Writing demystifies the villains in our lives and helps us to see that they were actually vehicles for our own evolution.
From a narrative perspective, villains enter the story with one purpose and one purpose only: To facilitate and expedite the transformation of the hero. Not every story has a villain, but the ones that do have an added benefit... The greater the tension, the greater the arc - so if there's a villain in your story, congratulations. Share all the details about this person that help the reader understand how this frustrating character helped you to evolve. And then focus the narrative more on who you became because of how you were treated and less on how the villain acted. Don't include details for the sake of revenge or even self-proclaimed justice; those will only weaken the narrative. The tension villains provide is a great gift if you allow it to be -- tension is the X-factor that facilitates your growth, the resistance that produces your strength, and the very thing you needed in order to change!"
~Allison Fallon, Write Your Story
Chapter 12, Writing About Those Who Hurt You
This post needed a photo. Here's me 1.5 years ago, entering a transformative new decade! ❤
"Not all morals are created equal. Not all of them are helpful or supportive... The good news is you can always write or rewrite a new moral, even to a very old story. The morals I came up with back then were things like, "Men are such jerks" or "No one can be trusted" or "The world is an unsafe place." When you choose a moral, it becomes a filter for all future experiences. Instead of "Why is this happening to me?" I started asking myself, "Why am I telling this to a reader?" At the end of each little writing vignette, I would write the words: "The reason I'm telling you this is because..." then I'd picture my imaginary reader and write the next few sentences to her...
I'm convinced, although there's no definitive way to prove this, that the only reason I have the life I have today -- a very happy marriage, two happy and healthy children -- is because I changed the moral I was writing in that story. If I had continued forward with the "men are such jerks" moral after my divorce, I never would have even noticed my now husband, who is one of the kindest, gentlest, most sincere people I know. My brain would've glossed right over him or made up a story about how he must be faking it. The kinder he was to me, the more I would have dismissed it, thrown it out, pushed it away. This is how neural pathways work. There's no way for you to write a story in your life that veers from your morals too much. What might become possible when you write a better moral to your story??"
-Allison Fallon, Write Your Story
Chapter 10: The Reason I'm Telling You This (The Moral)
So gooood!! Re-listening to this book for my story-based presentation, and I LOVE and appreciate her perspective on the above topics. This book gives you a great framework for writing a memoir, and it makes me wish I had more time for writing in this season. In the meantime, I can build a gradual outline and rethink the underlying 'morals' guiding my story! (Which may be my next post here.) ❤
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