I’ve been thinking about the journey a story travels on its way to becoming a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. I’ve been thinking about all the changes it goes through before it gets to the point of being told on a stage with a roomful of people clapping as you finish telling it. I’ve been thinking about the journey traveled by one particular story of mine.
One afternoon in 2002 I was presented with the gift every storyteller hopes to receive: something extraordinary happened to break the pattern of my otherwise ordinary life. I got locked out on my second-floor balcony. There, within my very own life, was a story seed. It was the perfect invitation to create a future story, the story of how I got down from there. I knew it would be a story, even as I stood on the balcony, marooned and wondering what to do. But I did not know what would happen next, or how it would end. I most certainly would never have foreseen the story it would become over the next six years.
Two hours after the story began, I was telling it to John and Grace, though not the version of it I now tell. I told them everything that happened. At that time I was simply venting, pouring out a torrent of feelings, seeking their comforting soothing words. I was hoping their listening ears would help me learn to laugh about it.
Though many stories get lost in the rush of every day life, that story was a keeper. I told it to Ruth when she asked how my day had been. I wrote it in the letter I emailed to David. My colleagues listened to it when we shared Monday morning coffee. A new acquaintance heard it when she visited my office and said, “What a lovely balcony you have!”
Every time I told that story it seemed to change just a little bit. It all depended on who was listening. For John and Grace it was an explanation of why I was late. For the office visitor it was all about the things that can happen to you when you have a balcony just outside your office. It could pop up anywhere. I never knew when to expect it.
I first noticed a theme for the story when I heard myself telling it at the Alzheimer Society Caregiver Training Program. It came out spontaneously when the caregivers were talking about how difficult it is to ask for help. The balcony story was a story about something that happened to me when I tried to call for help. I presented it in that context. It was such a good fit that I told it again the next time I trained caregivers.
Though the ‘getting help’ version of the story had served me well on two occasions, I didn’t tell it at the third caregiver training session. I can’t say why I didn’t tell it. Maybe I was getting a little bored with it, or maybe I didn’t think there was enough time. Maybe I thought my colleague must be getting tired of hearing it. At any rate, I was ending my session, dismissing the caregivers, when my colleague interrupted me. She asked the group to stay for an extra few minutes. She made me tell the story. She said I must have forgotten to tell it.
That’s when I really began to appreciate the importance this story could have. It had been a venting vehicle for me. It had entertained my friends. Now—told in the context of learning to ask for help--it had become a vehicle for education. In the years that followed I told it many times, long versions and short. While preparing a carefully timed version to tell during a public lecture for McMaster University in 2007, I was struck by the degree to which it had changed. It was now the product of embellishment and pruning.
Embellishment had given it theme, language, characters and detail. The story had been taken over by the theme that presented itself at every opportunity. It had become a story about swallowing your pride and asking for help. Though the helping theme had emerged when I was telling it to caregivers, it stayed in the story for all audiences, not just for caregivers. Some language that was never used in the original tellings had taken a central position. Even the shortest versions now contained balcony words, unusual words like Juliet and Rapunzel. Characters had developed. I, the unfortunate heroine, had become a proud and independent sort, hampered by an inherent tendency to be flaky when faced with an emergency. The first responder on the scene, a man I never actually met, had become a reluctant and enormously relieved hero nearly undone by his fear of not being adequate for the job of rescuing a damsel in distress. Even the story itself had changed. It had yielded to storytelling artistry, had taken on repetitions that may or may not have actually occurred. . I was a little surprised when I realized that I would no longer be able to vouch for the truth of some of my favourite details if I was asked to tell the story under oath in a court of law.
Pruning had altered the story as drastically as embellishment. It built the narrative tension in the story, changed the ending, and banished the original hero. . The events that happened during my final half hour on the balcony had completely disappeared from the story. This was particularly perplexing, since those events had seemed so important, so central when I spilled them out to John and Grace in the first hour after the trauma. But they seemed to offer little value for the audience, and when I tried to include them, the story rose to a crescendo in the middle and tailed off disappointingly. It took a while for me to realize that they did not relate to the theme.
The human casualty of the pruning was the campus police officer who rescued me. I feel a bit sorry for him, since he should have been the hero. He was the one who got the phone call from the first responder. He was the one who brought the key and unlocked the front door. He was the one who climbed the stairs to my office. He was the one who unlocked my balcony door from the inside so that I could get back into the building. He was the one who tried to assess whether my trip to the balcony had been an accidental locking out or a potential suicide. He was the one who ultimately let me rush off to meet John and Grace instead of making me stay behind to fill out an official incident report. Had it not been for his key, I might still be out there on that balcony.
What a tragic hero he turned out to be! Poor fellow. He was the hero on the day when I was marooned on the balcony, but his involvement was ultimately condensed into one brief sentence. The story I tell to audiences ends about thirty minutes before he arrived. He was eliminated with all the other details from the last half hour of the balcony story. Like those other details he was pruned out because he didn’t add anything to the theme. Nevertheless, his last chance for fame has not been lost. For in this story, where pruning is a subject of great significance, that reliable campus cop with the master key has an important place. The very last sentence is about him.
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