How to Spin a Story Out of Your Everyday Life...Or How to Spin Gold Out of Memes

Okay, I've been doing a bit of reading on this blog tagging stuff and I think Liz Strauss has a way cool idea about how to deal with tags or memes. She decided to write her five things as a story, a Once Upon a Time of Her...and it just sings with energy.

It makes the reader hungry to know more about the writer and her story and isn't that our job as writers? Now, I am by no means a professional blogger. In fact, I am mainly clueless, but this will help me approach my novel and short story writing.

And you can bet I'll go back and read every other tidbit Liz has to offer, too.

It makes me wonder how my 6 Weird Things About Me would've gone in story form. Maybe something like this...

Once upon a time a little girl refused to take her nap. Instead she slipped out of her bed on her grandmother's sleeping porch and spied on her older, way cooler cousin. There the older girl sat, directly across the room from the little girl's hiding spot. She was tying the white laces of her bright red sneakers. The little girl watched closely, memorizing her cousin's every move. And that is how she learned to tie her shoes...backward.

Later, in college, this ability to learn backwards came in handy. All of her friends already knew how to shuffle a deck of cards, but our heroine was too shy and too ashamed to admit there was something she didn't know how to do. So she watched very carefully, taking small sips of her beer as she studied her roommates card game. And this is how she learned to shuffle cards backward.

It was, of course, all her mother's fault.

She carefully trained the little girl not to "get above her raisin's"...the family background, that is, not the dried fruit...So the little girl learned not to brag about her accomplishments. Because she was raised in the late 60s and early 70s the little girl learned not to have an "ego" as it results in "bad karma." So, in a vain attempt to pass these slightly skewed values on to her children, the little girl never bragged about beating her two hooligan teenagers at cards...

However today when the Eldest Unnamed One was a bit churlish, the Little Girl did find a Planned Parenthood sticker that advocated the use of "protection" and, while the poor child was otherwise occupied on the phone, managed to affix it to the hood of his sweatshirt. I suppose that means I got him coming and going...

Anyway, it was her mother's fault again when the little girl ran away to live in the land of her mother's kinfolk and thus became a transplanted, yellow dog, redneck. Because the girl also inherited a lack of coordination from somebody, she could never dance...but how she longed to!

One day, because her husband-at-the-time was driving her crazy, the little girl decided to take a risk. She would try to learn to dance. Because her husband was an infamous miser, the little girl took the cheapest dance lessons she could find...Clogging at the Rec Center.

Fortunately they had a class for the spastically challenged and the instructor was patient. Eventually the little girl learned to dance like the wind...although she did at times lose her balance, or dance in the opposite direction of the rest of the team...but that was only to keep herself humble. If she'd really busted loose and put the other ladies to shame, her karma would have been ruined.

Because she was also a non-believer in things like hand cream only belonging on hands...the little girl used body scrub on her face every morning in the shower. Perhaps this is why the Handsome Prince turned out to be a toad afterall...but I digress.

The little girl grew up to be a spastic, divorced mother of two hooligan teenagers but she never lost that shy streak. To this day she refuses to answer the phone...unless the caller I.D says North Carolina State Lottery Commission or Publishers Clearinghouse Winners Hotline...and even then she tries to get one of the boys to screen the call for her.

After all, it could always be a wrong number.



Yeah, Liz, I think you're on to something here! Good idea!