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What is TELLING YOUR STORY, INC.? 

Everyone has a story to tell, no matter how insignificant it may seem, or uneventful, or mediocre.

My doctor told me the other day, "I have had just a mediocre life, nothing special." Can you believe it?  A doctor? I can hardly imagine how many people he has nurtured back to good health, how many problems there have been that challenged him, how many lost causes there may have been. 

And the med school training. Just imagine how hard it was to attend classes and learn about, not only chemistry and biology, but nanotechnology and digital imaging and laser techniques and many exciting and unusual methods that save lives.

Everyone has had life experiences. Some have had amazing adventures, some close shaves, some found their way out of difficult situation, and some have had smooth going, a pleasant, fruitful life in a loving support atmosphere. Some folks have traveled, have invented, have created, have solved, have organized, have survived, sustained themselves or have inspired others. Some have had children and raised a family, have built a career, have worked in the community, have been dependable or heroic in a time of need. Some have made a fortune through hard work and persistence and good luck.

And the marvelous thing is that EVERYONE is unique, and therefore, EVERYONE'S  life experiences have been different from everyone else's. Even if two or three or more people have had the very same experiences, they will each tell about it in a different way. One's perspective differs from everyone else's.

Recently I sent my sister a memoir I had written about going to school in our little, tiny Long Island town, about the isolation of growing up there, and yet of the loving supportive we children felt from the folks who lived along the main road in big, white clapboard houses, who would buy magazine subscriptions from us when we knocked on their doors, during the annual school fund raising drive, and who kept track of our progress as we grew up.

Well, no, it wasn't like that," she told me. "I think they were really snoopy and watching every move we made. I don't remember it that way." And she wrote several paragraphs and showed me how different her view was from mine.

Perhaps most compelling of all is that everyone wants someone to listen to them. It is pleasant to recall adventures and experiences, to set them out and look at them, and pleasant to tell someone who is willing to listen, and pleasant to tell it the way it really was.  It is pleasant to tell the story the way it really happened.

Marjory Diane Lyons working with
local writers attending one of her
workshops sponsored by Florida
Center for the Book at BCC
Library – North Campus.

The goal of TELLING YOUR STORY, INC. is to help folks tell their own life stories, culminating in a book, for them to give to their family and friends, a gift of a lifetime.

Marjory Diane Lyons, President, Telling Your Story, Inc.