You might think you need to perfect your story before sharing it with anyone. Respectfully, you would be wrong. Today we're exploring the power of "social drafting" – and I'm taking you behind the scenes of my memoir-writing process, with a story that didn't make the final cut of my 2024 Audible Original.
You might think you need to perfect your story before sharing it with anyone. Respectfully, you would be wrong. Today we're exploring the power of "social drafting" – and I'm taking you behind the scenes of my memoir-writing process, with a story that didn't make the final cut of my 2024 Audible Original.
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(00:01):
Okay, here's a pro tip. You can use a bad blind date to try out a new story. So if you're half a beer in and you're not feeling it, just launch into your idea. If they don't like it, okay, too bad. But if they do like it, you know you have a good idea. So win-Win. I'm Micaela Blei and welcome to the Story Letter, the podcast about telling better stories. I'm so glad you're here. Okay, so in episode four, we talked about going from idea to story, and I talked you through my very vulnerable tango story, not vulnerable that it was the most personal story of my life, but vulnerable because I was sharing something that wasn't done and I am a little bit of a perfectionist. So there's that. But now let's talk about what comes next. Once you've got your idea, you've thought about your context, you've thought about your stakes and your theme, and you kind of know what you want to talk about, maybe you've even taken some notes.
(00:56):
What happens now? There's a few things you can do. You could write it out as a monologue or a short story and perform it word for word. You could do a really detailed outline and then sort of speak from that, almost like there are speaker notes at a presentation, or you could just try it out loud before it's done. I happen to really believe that storytelling, and this is going to sound so silly because it's self-evident as soon as I say it, but storytelling is social, so why not be social when you're making a story? If you're going to share it with people, I recommend that you try telling your story out loud to someone else without notes as soon as possible. You might not remember everything. It won't come out perfect, and that's okay. This is going to show you a lot about your story.
(01:42):
I mean, listen, think about what you do when you tell a story in the wild in life. You do change it on the fly. So if your date looks bored, you speed it up, unless you're trying to bore them and get out of the date. But mostly we try to be responsive to the people who are listening to us, and the next time we tell that same story, it's going to be better. You'll skip the part that felt boring the last time. You'll speed up or slow down, and you don't necessarily do this on purpose. It's just our brilliant brains doing the editing for us. I call this process social drafting. This can sound kind of scary depending on your personality, but think about it this way. The first time you try out a story, you're not performing, you're just collecting information. You'll find out what they thought was funny, what they thought was sad, what they seemed confused by, and that can help you decide how you might want to change your story next time and make it clearer.
(02:43):
And it's not just about them. Maybe more importantly, you're going to find out which parts you liked talking about and which parts you don't. So you're going to realize that in your head when you were planning it felt like, well, I have to explain all of the building code violations that happened to justify. I mean, I don't know what that story is. That's a strange example. But let's say you're thinking, obviously I have to go through all of the building code violations, and then you're telling your story out loud to someone and you're going, oh, actually I'm boring myself with these building code violations. I don't want to talk about them. I want to get to the guy on the roof. And what happened. I believe you wouldn't necessarily know that unless you were in front of people trying it out. And you might also find new things you want to include.
(03:22):
You might think of them while you're talking. We do that all the time, or the story might land differently than you think it will, and that's great. That's information. A sad story might turn out to be kind of hilarious. Or a story you thought was a romp gets very sympathetic looks and you have to figure out do you want those looks? How is that going to feel? All of that will come up when you do this. And there's a final part of knowing yourself because you might try out a pretty vulnerable story and afterwards realize you want to keep it private a little longer. It didn't feel good. If you've tried it out with someone you trust or a smaller group, you can feel that and decide before you're at the front of a high stakes conference room or behind a microphone. So let's talk about the logistics of this social drafting idea.
(04:04):
Sometimes storytellers who tell stories a lot, they have a couple of trusted friends, and they try out stories with each other. I have a storyteller friend who almost every week we meet on a bench overlooking the ocean, and mostly we're either just ranting or talking about movies, but if one of us is working on a story, the other one will shut up and let them try something out. By the way, see you on Saturday, Sam. It could be a family member who's a captive audience on a car trip, or a friend you FaceTime while you're doing dishes. You should get their permission first, because my producer Laura hates it when people FaceTime her while she's doing the dishes. The idea though is to say it out loud as soon as possible to someone else so you can experience actually telling the story and not just imagining what the story might be like.
(04:47):
And by the way, when you share it, you don't have to ask for feedback. I mean, you can ask very specific things like “was anything confusing?” or “was there something you wanted to know more about?” But you don't have to ask for critique. And if they offer it anyway, which a lot of people like to do, I'm telling you right now, you are allowed to disregard it. Because you're not asking them for a grade, you're not asking them for approval of your story. They might not understand you're sharing just an early idea, not a whole story. And this isn't about quality. Remember, it's about collecting information. So to illustrate this, I'm going to tell you about a time when I social-drafted and I was really surprised about what I learned based on the listeners’ feedback. This is also, by the way, a little bit behind the scenes of my new memoir project, which is an Audible Original that just came out this winter. It's called You Will Not Recognize Your Life, and I would call it a cozy memoir about how I joined a very immersive women's course in my twenties that was not a cult, but definitely sometimes felt like a cult. This story actually did not make it into the Audible Original. So this is a director's cut story. This is an exclusive, you heard it here.
(06:03):
When I started working on this memoir a few years ago, I was terrified. It felt very high stakes. And I wanted to not feel quite so alone and vulnerable working on it. So this might one day be a physical book you can read, but I always understood it was going to be audio first. So I decided I'm going to take my own medicine, and I'm going to social draft my memoir. And writers do this all the time with beta readers, but I decided to really talk through my early drafts instead of giving written drafts to readers, so that I could feel what it felt like to tell it. So I collected a group of very brilliant people that I trusted. It was former storytelling students and colleagues, mentors, dear friends, we all got on this Zoom together, and I saw all their faces in the little boxes and I already felt a little better.
(06:52):
And it was a big range of ages, by the way, from early twenties to sixties. So I was really in the beginning stages of planning the memoir. And my plan was to tell a couple of stories that I was thinking might go into the book and then we would just have a conversation about it. And in this memoir, I wanted to talk about college, and I needed to figure out which parts of college were going to make it into the story. I think now is a good time to tell you that the original title of You Will Not Recognize Your Life was Times I Have Been Naked in Public because in this memoir, I'm really telling stories about my body and my relationship with my body and women's relationships with their bodies in general, chronic illness, desire, love, all of that. So that was the working title of this memoir, because perhaps surprisingly, if you know me right now, there are a lot of times I have been naked in public, and the first time I was ever naked in public was in college.
(07:50):
So I figured I have to talk about the naked parties. When I was in college, I did go to a lot of naked parties. I'm not the only person to have done this obviously, and my college is not the only college to have had them. But the first naked party I went to was my sophomore year of college. I had just gotten cast in a play that was a stage adaptation of a lesbian pulp novel called The Adventures of Beebo Brinker. I was cast by this very sophisticated student director who was a junior, who smoked clove cigarettes and just seemed horribly cool to me, and she sort of adopted me and she invited me to the naked party. I was thrilled. I mean, I think I imagined an orgy with a lot of banter. I'd seen a movie about Rome, and I figured that must be what it's like.
(08:37):
So I'm on this Zoom call and I'm telling my social drafting team, as I called them, about the lead up to this naked party, and I'm describing how I was so nervous. What's it going to be like? Will I be cool enough? Will I be awkward? I mean, I am so awkward at other parties and I've also spent my whole life up to this point trying to ignore my own body as much as possible. Also, I was pretty sure that at this party I would see this senior boy that I had a crush on and he would see that I was very sophisticated and he would want to be my hookup or boyfriend. And as I'm telling this story, I'm watching the faces of some of the people in this Zoom looking kind of worried.
(09:20):
And by the way, I'm going to give you the spoiler. Nothing scary happens at this naked party. The whole point of the story is that I showed up and it was very uneventful. So I tell everyone on the Zoom, I get to this party and everyone is making a ton of eye contact. It was just all people super weirded out that they were naked, and it was almost like a theater cast party. People were wearing top hats and doing nervous bits. And I had this one friend who was very concerned that everyone was smoking because we were going to get ash on each other's genitals. And so I had gone very, very nervous about how sexy and uninhibited it would be, and it just wasn't, all the flirting was hands off flirting. No one got near each other as far as I saw. And the senior boy ended up not showing up. So I just hung out with my best girlfriend and we did bits with our clothes off and had a wonderful time, so wholesome.
(10:13):
And after that, it became part of my personality at school that I'm okay with being naked in public. I liked it. I was very proud of this. I was probably pretty insufferable about it actually. And back then, I didn't really make the connection that I was still ignoring my body. I wasn't all of a sudden cool with it. I was just ignoring it in a more daring way and daring everyone else to ignore it too. And I thought that was the point of the story. But then once I was done telling it, I asked people about their experience listening, and someone said: “It was really hard. I was just waiting for something horrible to happen.” And a few people were nodding at this, and then someone else says, “Yeah, the buildup, the more you built up wondering what was going to happen or wanting to not feel awkward, the more I assumed that something terrible was going to go down.
(11:04):
So I couldn't enjoy the story because I was really scared for 18-year-old Micaela the whole time.” I should say I don't remember being worried about any creepiness at all back then. It didn't occur to me to worry. Partly that's my personality. I'm kind of oblivious. But also, this was the nineties. It just felt like everyone I knew smoked parliaments and sexually harassed each other. I mean, that's a terrible thing to say, but that's really how I feel. And I don't know if in my social drafting team, there was a generational split of people who were worried and people who weren't. People who saw what I was going through as containing a threat and people who didn't. But there has been a huge change in social consciousness about consent and all these things since the nineties. So their reaction raised a couple things. First, it helped me understand what might be happening in my listener's heads that I genuinely hadn't expected.
(12:02):
So the next time I told that story, I could figure out ways to signal to people what kind of story we're listening to. I mean, I even gave YOU the spoiler so you wouldn't be worried about me while you listened, in case you found it worrisome. But also, this isn't entirely the story I thought it was. It didn't register to me until I shared it out loud with other people who were scared for me. But I should have been concerned back then. It should have been something that I had a lot of questions about and advocated for myself about, and I didn't know to do that. I would do that now. And so I needed that reminder. Not only that I'm telling the story in a different context now than the one in which it happened, but also that I can see the story differently now. Those conversations with my social drafting team didn't just change the way I tell the story. They changed my perspective on the actual experience.
(13:01):
In the end, I realized I didn't actually need this story for my larger memoir project. Telling it out loud also helped me see that enough other stuff happened in college having to do with my body that it didn't need to be there, and I needed the story to meet the air to figure all that out. So you can probably guess what my prompt is for you. Try a story idea out loud. You don't have to gather a Zoom conference call. You can tell anyone. And if you're telling a story to a friend in a conversation or on an internet date or something, just make sure they know you're trying out a story, because otherwise they will jump in and ask you questions or tell you about a time something similar happened to them. But try it even before you're totally ready. You might learn something that you never expected. Or you could just book a half hour with me. I'm around and I really do want to hear your story. If you want to hear which parts of college did make it into my memoir, you can listen to it right now on Audible. There is a link in the show notes. Also, did you leave me a review on Apple Podcasts yet? You should do that. Everyone else in your group chat has already left me a review. And tune In next week, we're going to talk about finding themes in our stories and how recognizing patterns can help us tell better stories.
(14:18):
This episode was written and hosted by me, Micaela Blei. It was produced by Laura Boach and theme music was the Duke of New York by Adrian D. Walther. I'm Micaela Blei, and this has been the Story Letter Podcast. I'm so glad we're doing this.
OUTTAKES: Yeah, beginning of sophomore year, I was 18. I skipped kindergarten because my parents didn't want to pay for childcare. Listen, if you weren't being sexually harassed in the nineties, were you even alive? Come for the story tips. Stay for the bloopers.