If you’ve been following my work for a while and you’re familiar with my series, The Ever Afters, you may remember that I often used this phrase: “Believe in your own story.” If I was signing a book for a reader who told me that they wanted to be a writer someday, I used to write this: “Believe in your own story—the one you’re writing and the one you’re living.”
Beyond just a phrase, I intentionally developed a world in the Ever Afters where the Characters live a once-familiar story, which changes based on their actions. The novels are set in an afterschool program that trains young fairy tale characters, and they all explore the same theme: the characters begin living a story you think you know, like “Cinderella” or “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and then those stories shift under your feet until you’re in new territory—a whole new plot line. Each Character learns to hold the old pattern and the new developments in their mind, and they make a choice about how they want the story to turn out.
I understood this approach intimately, because that is how I live my life.
In other words, Characters are stories-in-progress, a story that they write with their choices and actions. That’s true in the novels, only because in my own life, people are stories-in-progress too.
I can’t separate them, because this is quite simply how I see and understand the world. (It’s actually an example of a “foundational lens.”)
This is an excerpt taken from People Are Stories-in-Progress, which is a summer-long exploration of the intersection between story structure and character development, both in fiction and in individuals. This is one of my favorites from the first week, probably because it reminds me of The Ever Afters!
Here's the link if you want to read it all in context.
