The finale song of the 2015 musical Hamilton, based on the life of Alexander Hamilton, asks, “And when you're gone, who remembers your name? Who keeps your flame? Who tells your story?” Today, there are a number of new tools that you can use to tell the story yourself and help your friends and loved ones do the same.
But first, why bother? Isn’t the world awash in stories? Shouldn’t we have done something extraordinary to have anything worth telling; doesn’t the evidence on social media platforms suggest that millions of people are way too enamored with themselves?
Yes. But there are still compelling reasons to consider sharing your story or asking a loved one to do so.
Just as drawing an object helps us truly see it, writing or dictating our life stories is a means of examining and appreciating our lives. Rather than just “point and shoot” snapshots and videos that we vaguely intend to watch again “some day,” telling our stories and reflecting on our memories helps us to see connections, to see how we grew and evolved, and perhaps to recognize our admirable qualities.
Also, sharing a story that can be read or listened to by loved ones later is different than haranguing them as a captive audience at the holiday dinner table. When your audience can choose the time and place to receive the family anecdotes and history, they’ll likely pay more attention.
There’s some evidence, too, that children value receiving family stories more than money as a legacy. Perhaps they understand the limits of what money can buy; perhaps they know that the stories may help them understand more about themselves.
The writer Eudora Welty touched upon the fascination that children have with their parents’ stories:
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
Finally, telling your story can be fun. It's an excuse to recall forgotten details of past adventures and experiences. With the advantage of time, it’s easier to appreciate the benefits of earlier mishaps and misfortunes. You may even find yourself laughing out loud at events that were painful at the time.
The hardest part of sharing your story is getting started. Few people enjoy staring at the abyss of the blank page. Fortunately, there are several tools that can help.
StoryWorth
A client recently told us about StoryWorth. Created in 2012, Storyworth helps you compose the story of your life in weekly bites over the course of a year and then preserves them in a beautiful book that you can share.
Here’s how it works:
- You purchase a Storyworth subscription for yourself or as a gift for someone. (Currently $89 with the frequent discount)
- Each week, the account owner is emailed a question that they can choose to write about or replace with another topic, either that day or later.
- After answering all the questions, the account owner can “submit” their work to be published. They’ll have an opportunity to edit before finalizing their submission, and then, ten days after the book is published, StoryWorth can be shipped to anyone they like.
By using the familiar technology of email as the writing platform, StoryWorth makes it easy for non-tech-savvy people to use the service. They could also dictate their responses if typing is a challenge.
Here’s a sample of the questions that StoryWorth can send each week:
- Have you ever won anything?
- Did you ever get in trouble at school as a child?
- What inventions have had the biggest impact on your day-to-day life?
You can also edit these questions to customize them or substitute your own questions.
The resulting book is a beautiful hardcover edition that preserves your stories for years to come. You can intersperse the text with photos throughout - photos from vacations or graduations or a beautiful panorama that takes you back to the moment you snapped it. You could include favorite recipes, a snippet of a newspaper article, or a poem you wrote in third grade.
Most people learn about StoryWorth when receiving it as a gift, though it’s a great way to prompt yourself to begin jotting down ideas. Although it’s possible that your gift recipient will view answering the questions as unwanted “homework,” the reviews suggest most recipients simply start responding to the questions.
There seems little downside to giving it a try. If nothing else, you’ll be communicating to your recipient that you value their stories and would love to see what they have to say.
StoryCorps
StoryCorps focuses on the use of oral interviews to gather life stories, and one of their mottos is “listening is an act of love and respect.” The service was founded by McArthur “genius grant” recipient Dave Isay in 2003 and started as a recording site in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal to capture up to 40-minute interviews about people’s lives.
Today there’s an app that helps record and organize interviews with friends and loved ones. Once you’ve recorded your interview, you can choose to add it to the ever-growing reservoir of stories that StoryCorps has been collecting over the years, or you can choose to share the interview only with friends and family, or keep it private.
This video provides a brief overview of how the app works. The app is free to use, and during the pandemic, StoryCorps has also developed workflows for conducting interviews remotely with Zoom.
Lasting Letters
If composing a book or being interviewed isn’t appealing, you could simply write a letter. The Stanford Letter Project, founded in 2015 by palliative care physician Vj Periyakoil, provides templates can “can help people complete seven life review tasks: acknowledging important people in our lives; remembering treasured moments; apologizing to those we may have hurt; forgiving those who have hurt us; and saying “thank you,” “I love you” and “goodbye.” (Writing a ‘Last Letter’ When You’re Healthy)
There are templates for composing letters while you’re still healthy as well as ill. If the task seems too daunting, there are even people such as Frish Brandt, who calls herself a “letter midwife” and operates a service called Last[ing] Letters, who can help,
ScanMyPhotos
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, you could preserve your personal and family history by digitizing your photographs. There are a number of services that can help with this. One of the oldest is ScanMyPhotos, which has digitized more than 600 million pictures since it launched nearly 30 years ago.
Ordered online, its most popular service sends a box to your home – large enough to pack up 1,800 photos, say the company – and for $170 also includes delivery of your photos to and from its California facility. Turnaround time is two to three weeks.
However you choose to share your story, the odds are good that it will mean more than you can imagine to the people who receive it. You may inspire other people to share their stories as well, causing them to ripple forward and help the broader community. In a very real sense, then, sharing the details of your life, all the twists and turns and particularities that comprise the path leading to the present moment, is an act that concerns far more than yourself.