I’m a liar. It started in my teens. I would tell the most outlandish lies and expect people to believe them. At one point I told my friends at school that my mother kept cyanide capsules in one of her rings and that we had a 50-metre pool in our backyard. Between the ages of 12 and 16 I had a terrible relationship with the truth. And the fact that I told these fabrications would stress me out. After each deceit passed my lips, I’d worry for days that people wouldn’t believe me and that they’d think I was just full of shit – which I was. And that is exactly what happened. When I was 13, I was labelled a compulsive liar and eventually nobody believed anything that came out of my mouth.
Fortunately for me this was a phase that I outgrew. I have learnt that nothing good can ever come from lying. And I recommend everyone read Sam Harris’ short book on the topic here.
Why I lied:
I lied for two reasons. Firstly, I lied because I wanted to impress people. I wanted to show people that I was interesting and that I’d be an exciting person to be friends with. And the second reason is inextricably linked to the first. I didn’t believe I was interesting enough to be likeable or impressive. For most of my life I have been surrounded by gregarious people who were able to tell amazing stories that captivated almost any audience. They were able to tell stories in such a way that people wanted to hear what they had to say. And I wanted to have that, I wanted to be interesting and exciting, and what was more interesting that cyanide pills and a backyard that could house a 50-metre pool?
And that was my issue. I believed what people would find interesting had to resemble the books I read or the shows I watched on TV. My life was dull in comparison. And through my teens and well into my twenties, I thought nothing I had done with my life was worth relating. I didn’t have dinner party anecdotes or amusing sketches to share over beers at the pub. Instead, I was always part of the audience, frantically racking my memory for anything that I believed was worthy of contributing and each time coming up short.
The realisation
I’m embarrassed by how long it took me to work this out. Almost all the stories I admired as an audience member, were very ordinary, everyday life reflections. It was rare that any of the stories I heard had someone doing something extraordinary. And nobody in any anecdote I’ve ever heard needed to access their mother’s cyanide stash.
Instead, people related things about their lives that made them feel something or that they were passionate about. The story of my friend who played rugby in New York and who decided to change clubs midway through the 1993/1994 season is still one of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard. And the part of the story that makes it so funny is his impersonation of the President of the rugby governing body spluttering over the phone, unable to comprehend how someone could change clubs just because they moved to another neighbourhood, especially in the middle of the season. Never, in the history of the tournament had this happened, ‘b…b…but Wayne, why… what do you mean, you can’t be serious?’
And that’s the nub of it. There are exceptional stories everywhere. The most seemingly mundane conversation can have the makings of a great story, if it has an emotional current running through it. What I was missing, and what many of us neglect to see is that every moment of every day has the potential to become a memorable moment. Something worthy of sharing with someone else.
How artists see the world
I have a printout of this painting in my study. It’s by Ben Quilty.
The reason I have this picture is to remind me to look at the world and to really see it in each moment. I have written about this before here, but half the reason we find our lives dull, or inconsequential is because we don’t see the richness of each moment. Most of us have become mere observers of our lives.
This painting reminds me to not make art the way I did in primary school. Do you remember having to draw a person and grabbing the beige pencil (or the ‘skin’ coloured pencil as we called it – which was also inadvertently racist) and just filling the face and the body in with the one colour, not understanding why it didn’t look like a face or a body? It is because when we drew as kids we didn’t see. We only looked. We assumed skin is a single colour. The same way we see the sky as blue, and clouds as white. But if you really see a cloud, you’d notice it has grey, white, some have a beige colour while others have hints of blue in their convolutions (I really like the word convolutions for some reason).
So, when I look at the print out of the painting I’m reminded that when Ben Quilty looks at a face, he sees yellows and reds, greys and blacks, oranges, and turquoise. It reminds me to not merely look at a situation, but to really see what is happening. To understand the emotions, the layers, the colour and the texture of that moment. And once you see the world in this way, everything becomes interesting. All of it becomes rich and dense with meaning.
Many of my favourite authors transform the mundane into a moving and sometimes amazing events. Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections, describes a man with dementia lowering himself into an armchair. Had we been in that room, watching this old man sitting down, most of us wouldn’t deem this as something worth remembering. We’d probably look away before his arse touched the seat. But Franzen describes this one moment as an ordeal, it becomes a metaphor for the old man’s life. Something so simple becomes so much more, because through observation the reality of what is happening appears. That is seeing.
How to find stories
The way we find stories is by training ourselves to look for them. I watched this talk by Matthew Dicks, a 50 time The Moth Story Slam winner. Dicks explains how at the end of each day he does ‘Homework for Life’. Each evening he sits down, and he captures a single event in his day that he saw as powerful, a worthy moment on which to build a story. He does this every day and through this process he is more present in every part of his life. And able to see the rich story veins that permeate his days.
My best stories are hidden in the moments that make me laugh, that confuse or intrigue me or those moments that make me cry. I often identify story windows in my day when I feel an emotion, such as heartache, loss, love, amazement or gratitude. And these moments are small and fleeting, like a whisper you can barely hear.
I dropped my four-year-old son off at day care a few weeks ago. When we arrived at the front door of his day care, he let go of my hand and walked off without saying goodbye or looking back. I remember thinking, with a touch of pride, how independent he is. And as I started walking back to the car, he turned, ran towards me and threw his arms around my thighs. Then he whispered so only I could hear, ‘love you dad’, before going back into class.
Two years ago, I would have been moved by my son’s love, but then the friction of life and a day’s work would have rubbed-out that moment from my memory. But I’m teaching myself to see, and I have started accumulating more stories than I know what to do with. I have a tome of treasures, some more valuable than others, that I can come back to at any moment to remind myself how full my life is.
And I now also have a dinner party anecdote for every occasion.
Write about what you know
If you ever did creative writing at school, it’s likely your teacher gave you the advice to write about what you know. Ricky Gervais tells the story of how he rebelled against the advice, but when he did eventually write about the mundane things that happened in his life, he started to understand something about telling stories. Listening to him tell his story reminded me of what I tried to do to impress my friends as a kid.
We don’t have to be James Bond or Steve McQueen to have good stories. In fact, the best stories are the one’s that we can all relate to. The ordinary moments that show or teach us something about our life. As Ricky says – ‘trying to make the ordinary extraordinary is so much better than starting with the extraordinary.’