What was your first car?
1981 Malibu Classic Station Wagon. Photo cred:
Mine was a 1981 Chevy Malibu “Classic,” V6 station wagon that I shared with my twin brother. The paint that remained on the vehicle hinted that at one time it was baby blue. We called it Boo Radley or Boo for short.
One day after school on one infernally hot August afternoon, 4–5 us high schoolers were circled around Boo, doors opened, paused in the ritual of airing out the car before we drove home. This rite served both to cool the molten-hot-baby-blue-faux-leather seats as to avoid melting the flesh off the backs of our pencil-y legs and, if I’m being honest here, also to exorcize the interior of the car from the unmistakable and unctuous stench of teenage boy. You know that smell.
As we stood there, hot, fetid air wafting out of the car like heat waves shimmering off a barbecue, my math teacher happened to walk by. Mr. Beverage—cool as a glass of water. He noticed our brooding gang hovering around our car like a halo of flies around a carcass. The scene gave him pause and he stopped for a moment to add up the variables:
The pedagog neatly summed up the equation and with the correct answer cradled squarely in his cranium, he didn’t need to say a word. He simply leaned his elbow against the hood, formed his mouth into a steep rising/falling graph curve, and nodded his head acknowledging a mathematical truth:
This car was hot shit.
Do you have a story about your first car?
I bet you do. I bet you have lots of stories, and not just about cars.
Stories captivate people. It’s in our DNA. But nowadays instead of sitting around the glowing campfire to share stories, we sit around our glowing boxes to share our stories.
Consider that your stories are among the most powerful tools you have to connect with people. That’s because it’s your sacred privilege and duty to share who you are with the world and your stories are perhaps the most powerful way of doing that. Plus stories are fun.
You don’t even have to be a good writer to share a great story. I once had a prof in college say, “Tell your story so well that I don’t notice the typos.” Boom!
I’m hosting an online writing workshop on April 1st where we are going to explore how to write your stories and share them to help you connect to other people.
Your stories are indispensable whether it’s connecting around the dinner table, an actual camp fire, in front of an audience (read: your impending TED Talk), writing your book, sharing with your students, or making content for your website.
What’s your story? Join me and let’s explore how to share it.
