Stories We Tell

            When I was six or so, my family was sitting around the breakfast table telling stories of the dreams we’d had. This wasn’t an irregular occurrence, but something different happened this time: my dad had a dream to share. Normally he only commented on how he didn’t dream, so when he commented that last night, he had a dream, he had our rapt attention.

            It was an extraordinary and hilarious tale about his encounter with an aggressive pink rhino, which he had eventually befriended. To this day I don’t know for sure if he made it up on the spot and wrote it down later, or if he’d prepared it in advance. It doesn’t really matter – what matters is that it was the start of something wonderful.

            I honestly don’t know how it happened, but it led to my dad coming into the grades 1-3 my brother and I both were in to tell the story of the Pink Rhino again, and the story was loved by the whole class – so much so that it became a regular thing. My dad began producing more Robert Munch-esque stories and telling them for my class. It wasn’t just the incredible stories themselves – it was the way he told them, which I would love to describe to you, but in truth it’s something you’d have to experience.

Some of the stories involved members of the class, like Pictures, a story about a talented artist in the class named Mallory whose pictures came to life when put on the refrigerator (causing no end of problems), or The Scratch – a story about the fight I had with Rotten Rosco, the most fearsome pirate to sail the Canadian highways, that he wrote over the weekend as an explanation for a huge scratch I’d gotten on my face from running into a tree. Others grew into massive class projects, like the Ordinary Story, a rhyming story about a boy and a girl who wander into the woods and befriend a troll – after this story, our class worked together to create an enchanted forest from plasticine.

            Looking back on that time, I find it incredible how many engaging and humorous stories he wrote, memorized, and told over the short three years I was in that classroom. It led to him joining the local storytellers’ guild and telling stories at a number of other venues as well – including an event for my wife’s homeschool group, before I even met her.

            Looking back on that, it’s no wonder that, with that in my background, I grew up with a passion for telling stories. However, there’s one conversation I had with my dad several years ago that has stuck with me ever since – it was the day he told me how impressed he was that I could write full length books. I looked at him in astonishment and told him that he could easily write a novel as well. I, myself, was (and am) still impressed with all his shorter stories. I’ve only written a few short stories in my time, and almost all of them leave an opening for more to happen – making them more like first chapters than short stories. Writing something novel-length is far easier to me.

            I think that was the first day I came to appreciate a key element of human nature: our tendency to be blind to that which makes us extraordinary because it comes easily to us. We think that, because we find it easy, everyone must find it easy, and that the things we find hard and that other people find easy means that those people are more extraordinary than us.

            We teach kids that everyone is unique and special, but we don’t go on to tell them what that actually means. It means that everyone has their own skills and talents, and those are what make them extraordinary. If something comes easily to you, that’s probably one of the things that makes you special. And those things you wish you could do that other people seem so good at, but that they seem to think it’s no big deal that they can do it? That’s what makes them special, and they just might admire you for the things you find to be easy.

            Sure, I’ll never be able to sit at the front of a room and captivate an audience with the way I tell a story – at least, not like my dad can – but I have my own ways of telling stories that are just as good. Not to mention, requiring far less energy to present. And quieter. Much quieter.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.